A Post for Weather Geeks

Especially lightning geeks. 

For some time, I've been aware that there's a group of radio experimenters who listen to low frequency signals for the strange sounds the atmosphere makes.  They call the things they hear "sferics", which at least sounds like it could be a shortened form of "atmospherics".  There are things that sound like whistles, things that sound like bird chirps, and other odd sounds produced by natural phenomena. 

This morning, while listening to the sound of south pole auroras on Jupiter on Spaceweather.com, conversation turned to what the auroras on Earth sound like and then to the sferics hobbyists.  That led to this:

What you're seeing here is the last hour's worth of lightning strikes over the CONUS (and surrounding areas) as of about 5PM EDT. Color code is that the hottest color, red, is the most recent while the yellower fading to dark orange spots are older.  LightningMaps.org is the top level and moving the map around rapidly changes the URL.  You can zoom in and out, or watch lightning strikes all over the world.  The claimed delay from the strike until you see it has been between 2 and 3 seconds all day. 

The raw data comes from sferics.us.  Unlike Lightning Maps, sferics will only plot lightning if it's the open window on your desktop.  Lightning Maps keeps that last hour's worth of data compiling if you look away.  And where does that data come from?  A completely volunteer network of interested folks.  I can't say they're all hobbyists, but I believe many are.  If you contribute data, you can download data.  The amount you can do, therefore, depends on your level of interest. 

Just a pretty cool example of what some dedicated hobbyists can do these days.

Economics Thoughts and Misgivings

There's an old joke that goes if you laid all the economists in the United States end to end, they wouldn't reach a conclusion.  It seems that any set of numbers is rife for re-interpretation (if not re-imagination) to fit any particular theorist's beliefs.

Bayou Renaissance Man got my thoughts flowing on this yesterday.  His piece is called, "The economy: If you're not worried yet, you should be!" and it's a bit long but worth reading.  For new readers, I come down on the side that the numbers we see that showed a recovery back around 2009 are all lies.  To borrow and paraphrase something "Captain Capitalism" says, all those GDP figures have been "violently raped by Washington DC economists."  (Last sentence, second to last paragraph).

We all know something is rotten economically.  At a minimum we feel it every time we go shopping.   Obama is the first president in US History to preside over eight consecutive years in which GDP growth has not exceeded 3% once.  And that's with those numbers being "violently raped by Washington DC economists."  The Federal Reserve is causing this with all their manipulations of the currency, done entirely to make some numbers on a balance sheet somewhere work out.  They claim inflation is less than 2%.  The fact is that inflation is roaring, with an overall rate close to 8-10% per year since the late '90s, 18 years ago, if the method used to calculate inflation during the Carter years is still used.  That's the blue curve in this plot from Shadowstats.

On top of prices going up, we've seen the phenomenon of "shrinkflation" where the price goes up while the size of the package goes down, giving the illusion that prices aren't going up as much.  

A note on methods: if we want to compare current inflation (or anything!) to the past, we should use the same method to calculate it.  Anything else is fraud and deception, but since the Fed.gov tied some outgoing payments to the Consumer Price Index, they've been lying about that number to reduce it!.

The other trend that everyone feels in their wallet is that by several measures, the buying power of the average worker hasn't gone up since about 1970.  It's driving the sense that we have growing "income inequality" in the country.  Now, I hate that term.  For one, there ought to be "income inequality" in any normal, functional economy; the phrase is nonsense.  Who could possibly insist that every job should pay the same amount, except the most devoted communists?  The big problem is that the "inequality" is also calculated using those numbers that have been "violently raped by Washington DC economists."  Right away, I don't believe it.  Is it better than they say or worse?  I don't know.  I redirect you to the opening sentence of this piece.  But I know it's being used to sow the seeds of discord in people.  Remember the Occupy Wall Street idiots with their "eat the rich" signs?  The left has been trying to pit people against each other at least since Cloward and Piven in the 60s; the current "income inequality" stuff reeks of that to me. 

Given that income inequality is inevitable, the two important questions become how big and how come? The second is easier to answer: the decrease in buying power in the last 40 years is from the actions of the Federal Reserve and the fake currency they pass off as money. The Fed relies on those violently raped statistics to do what they do. They're the ones who create the 8 to 10% inflation every year while saying it's under 2%; they're the ones who engineered the system to benefit the bankers, stockbrokers and other portions of the "elite ruling class" at the expense of wage earners and savers.  It's a brutal truth that the dollar has lost the vast majority of its value since the Fed was formed and even using the artificial, "violently raped" CPI inflation numbers, the dollar is worth 1/6 of what it was worth in 1971 when we abandoned the gold standard.  It has lost a staggering 83% of its buying power since 1971. 

A commenter to that piece by BRM said:

40 years ago I was doing exactly what I am doing today: pushing a broom on the night shift for a local school.  On that wage in 1976 I was renting a nice house in a good neighborhood. I was buying a new car ('74 VW). I had money for food, car insurance, surfboards, wetsuits, restaurants, weed, and beer. I was even building a modest savings account.

Today I make roughly three times as much money. Obamacare takes away over a thousand a month. My net paycheck, just over 2K, would barely cover rent on a shitty apartment. I would have less than a thousand dollars left to make a car payment, pay for insurance, and buy food. In other words, I couldn't make it without working a second job.

Note that he's making three times the number of dollars, not three times as much money, but each one of those dollars buys 1/6 of what the 1976 dollars bought.  He's falling behind and knows it. 

This is the fault of our central banking system, and manipulation of the currency.  The Federal Reserve  couldn't do it without the knowing cooperation of the government, and they basically do it to keep the free sh*t flowing for the parasitic class. That nest of vipers (the Fed and the Fed.Gov) has to be cleaned out somehow.  While from what I read here, it seems to be an overstatement, one of Trump's economic advisors is being reported to be recommending we return to a gold standard. We can only hope. 

This chart is a little dated, but it has a lot of information in it.  I found it in a Bing Images search, and the source website appears to be gone.

This Is Not a Toy

We opened the front door to go out to the car and found several of these things in the grass.

Looks like a plastic toy, doesn't it?  Following my usual rule of thumb that any unknown object in Florida could turn out to be an alien egg that will launch a face hugger on me and lay an egg in my chest, I left it alone.  We all know how that turned out, now, don't we? 

It clearly wasn't plastic; it was rather red/orange and had stinky liquid on it that attracted flies.  A little searching revealed a fungus that looks quite a bit like these little things:  Clathrus crispus, commonly called stinkhorn.  There's a lot of fungi in this group, many of them singularly creepy looking, with many having bright colors like this, and there are many videos and photos online.  Do an image search for one called "Devil's Fingers" if you want to see some bizarre looking examples.  I've never seen one of these things in my 60+ years in Florida.

Probably Would Be an Improvement

Another one of those cartoons I grabbed somewhere, but didn't take a note of where.  If it's yours or from your page, I'll gladly give a credit. 

And a happy Labor Day to all!

Shop Update

It has been two weeks since my last update to my shop project.  The work slowed for a couple of reasons, not the least of which was that I decided to implement an idea in the comments from Raven.   Raven said:

I built a very heavy duty pallet for my mill (2000lbs) and use a pallet jack to move it around when I need to. I don't worry about level on it at all. A real machinist would, probably, if the level plane was going to be used as a set up aid. But for a garage shop it seems to work. The problem with designing for the maximum space needed is that 95% of the time the mill will be working on a 6" piece,4% of the time on a 12" piece, and only 1% of the time on anything longer. Think about putting it on some heavy duty locking castors, so it can live in the 99% space and be pulled out for the long stock. 300lbs is not that much.

Voila.

You can see the mill is on a rolling base, the one Grizzly sells for it.  You'll note the new wood drip pan is over against the left wall, and the lathe is rotated like in the shop layout in that last update.  While I was figuring out how to lift the 350lb lathe and base cabinets with the shop crane (those red legs on the left), the diminutive Mrs. Graybeard got behind it and found she could push it on the smooth floor.  Between the two of us we pretty effortlessly rotated the lathe 90 degrees to the direction it was, and slid it toward the right.  Guess that means I don't really need the mobile stand I bought for the lathe but hadn't put together. 

The lathe is 30 inches from that window on the back wall, which should be ample room to put a barrel in the lathe should I need to do some sort of barrel work.  While there's enough room to get between the lathe and the mill with the drip pan in place, once the CNC build out is done, the mill will be pushed farther into that corner except for those times that I need to get behind it.    

You'll note that there's a lot more detail in this view than there was in the previous post. I've spent much more time, perhaps too much time, playing with 3D modeling than I had before.  I found models of the Sherline lathe and mill online, then modified them to look more like mine, adding blocks to look like stepper motors where appropriate.  These models didn't have the Sherline motor and its control box.  Likewise the big lathe from Little Machine Shop is now more detailed.  I found a model of a "7 or 8 by" lathe online and stretched it until it was the dimensions I need.  This is not the kind of accuracy you need to make parts for the lathe, just show something other than the large yellowish box I had last time.  The bandsaw (front left) doesn't really look like a 4x6 bandsaw; it just looks more like one than it did last time.

The plan now is to go ahead and take the mill apart, then start swapping out the parts I made for the ones that are there.  This is where the adventure really starts, because if I did something wrong and need the mill to fix it, I'm SOL.  My big remaining jobs are:

• Fix/build/buy a computer to control this CNC mill.  I'm almost definitely switching over to LinuxCNC for this from Mach3, which says the computer will be Linux instead of another XP box like I have.  (I use Mach3 to run my Sherline CNC mill and lathe).  This needs to be a priority now, because I'm going to need the CNC controller to control the next part:
• Build the box to hold the hardware for motion control.  I think I have all this hardware, mainly the stepper motors and their controllers from Automation Technologies.  I have an emergency stop switch, limit switches, connectors for cables, and all those niceties.  The limit switches get built into the next part:
• Do the CNC conversion to the mill.  That's replacing leadscrews with ballscrews on all three axes and adding their stepper motors.  This is where all the metal parts I built go.  I'll need to take the mill apart to the subassembly level for this - maybe not to individual pieces of hardware.  I'll need to modify the base of the machine with a drill and angle grinder. 
• While the system is apart, I need to add the oiling system, which will pump light oil onto the leadscrews and a few other places.  I have the oil fittings, but not everything, just most.
• When the system is back together and cutting metal, that's the time to build the enclosure and cooling fluid system.   I have most of those parts, too. 

Whew.  I wonder if I can get it done before my one year anniversary of retirement?

Hillary Aide Broke Her Phones

Several people have commented on the FBI's Hillary document dump.  With this administration you know any incriminating documents are going to be released on the Friday before a holiday weekend, when they figure no one is paying attention, and they were true to form yesterday.  Tam sums it up well.

This is about as plausible as "the dog ate my homework". She claimed she didn't know that the "c" meant "confidential", that nobody told her that she should retain work emails as they are part of the public record. Further along in the article, she throws her staff under the bus, in effect claiming that her underlings and minions told the dog to eat her homework.

For the uninitiated, "Confidential" is fully classified, it's just the lowest rung on the ladder of Confidential, Secret and Top Secret.  Anything that is classified has to be handled according to procedure.  At the very least, anyone of the rest of us who handled classified material like this would have been fired, or moved out of a position that involved classified information.  I still believe we'd be in jail.  None of those explanations, of not remembering her training or of having difficulty since her stroke would matter. 

Over the last month, we've been getting dribs and drabs implying that there's no freaking way that Comey should have thought there was "no evidence of intent".  Hillary used BleachBit for cryin' out loud!  BleachBit is designed to make it hard for anyone to figure what was on a hard drive.  BleachBit is advertising they stifled the FBI investigation.  One doesn't need a tool like BleachBit to delete yoga-related emails.  This is "no evidence of criminal intent"?

Then we learned that the story of using a single email account for convenience, and a single device (Blackberry) was a lie and there were 13 different devices, several of which the FBI has not be able to get their hands on to search.  In yesterday's document dump we learn that an aide admits to destroying a couple of those devices with a hammer, or by breaking them in half.

It used to be a regular policy that the only way to declassify a hard drive was with a hammer, but it's not clear that protecting classified data is what was going on here.  It could simply be hiding evidence from the FBI - obstruction of justice. 

There's no way that Comey could have not known these things were going on - this document dump is from the July 2nd FBI interview with Hillary - and yet he said there was nothing there to prosecute.  As the little cartoon in the right panel says, anyone else would be in jail.  To be, perhaps, redundantly clear, Comey himself said anyone else would be in jail.  From his final statement: 

“To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now. As a result, although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.”

Thanks, Director Comey, you little chickenshit.  You've discredited the FBI and sealed our fate as nation of privileged men, not a nation of laws.

Engineering Professor Includes Trigger Warnings

Auburn University professor Peter Schwartz included a trigger warning on the syllabus for his class this fall, ENGR 2100 — Fundamentals of Engineering Mechanics.

TRIGGER WARNING: physics, trigonometry, sine, cosine, tangent, vector, force, work, energy, stress, quiz, grade

The red text and bold font for "work" are used on the syllabus.

It's an attempt at humor from a man who on Monday told AL.com that he considers trigger warnings to be "a joke" and he would never issue a serious trigger warning.  

"I think trigger warnings are a joke to begin with and I wanted to see what one might look like in an engineering course. Looks kind of silly, doesn't it? That (sic) because it is," he said via email.

Which is why I'm blogging this:  it strikes me funny, too.  With the University of Chicago issuing a statement that they expect students to be mature enough to not need trigger warnings and safe spaces, this may be an idea whose time has come.  I come from a time and place where there was no such thing as a trigger warning.  Although this picture is from a much more recent time than I was in school, this was more like the reality in the world I come from:

If something made you uncomfortable, well, too bad.  It's the material we're studying; if you can't bear to hear it or read it, you won't be able to learn it and you'll flunk out.  Nobody would rewrite the requirements of a class because a student was uncomfortable in it. 

Assassination Attempt on Julian Assange

I haven't seen this reported in my usual reads, but there apparently was an attempt to get at Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he's being guarded.  It occurred at almost 3:00 AM on the morning of August 21.  In Assange's own words, he live-tweeted:

Assassination attempt?  It's a safe bet that someone climbing walls at 2:47 AM, dressed completely in black and on the dark side of the building, isn't the welcome wagon bringing cookies; whether or not they had tools of some sort and were intending to kill Assange or not must remain speculative since the wall climber got away.  And "fled after being caught by security" sounds like either a professional or a pretty good amateur.  If it was your family, would you assume that was an attempt to murder them?  Yeah, me too.

In April, Assange's lawyer, John Jones, was killed by being hit by a train.  Although police originally said, "nothing suspicious here" and ruled it a suicide, eye-witnesses indicated that they saw two men talking that night by the train tracks and then after the accident, the second man went missing.  An investigation followed and it was ruled to not be a suicide.  He was "suicided": murdered.

I think everybody knows that Assange has said several times that he has a document dump that will destroy Hillary and is waiting for October to release it, right?  Let's hope he has backups in places that will automatically dump those documents should someone get to him. 

It's widely believed that Assange's lawyer had access to all of the Wikileaks documents that have been gathered about the DNC, although since his death was four months ago, it couldn't have been the most recent documents.  If you combine his lawyer's murder, the coming Wikileaks "October Surprise", and read this wall climbing as an attempt on Assange's life, it's not unreasonable to assume someone is trying to clean up the Wikileaks "problem".  It seems like ample motivation for someone on the Hillary campaign who's already unbalanced to eliminate Assange.  Add to this the interview Megyn Kelly did with Assange where he implies (a few times) that murdered democrat staffer Seth Rich was a Wikileaks source and had already taken the unprecedented step of offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Seth Rich's killer.  Given all that, it's hard not to think that "someone" apparently views Assange as a problem and is trying to get rid of him by slightly more subtle means than dropping a 2000 lb bomb on the Ecuadorian embassy.  Whether it's ordered by Hillary herself or someone else is a secondary question. 

Sure seems to be "something contagious" here that comes from testifying against the DNC and Clintons, doesn't there?

I would caution Julian Assange to stay away from windows and as far inside the embassy as he can get.  With confirmed sniper kills out beyond two miles, a good rule of thumb is that if one can be seen, they can be shot. 

Fixing Science for the 21st Century and Beyond

Hat tip to Zendo Deb at 357 Magnum for the story in “Einstein, We Have a Problem”.  The link, in turn, is to an online magazine I didn't previously know, The New Atlantis and “Saving Science”, one of a three part series on the Integrity of Science.  I've only been able to read this first article, and really recommend it to anyone concerned about the problems with science, some of which I've written about before.  Let me borrow the same money quote that Zendo Deb uses:

The science world has been buffeted for nearly a decade by growing revelations that major bodies of scientific knowledge, published in peer-reviewed papers, may simply be wrong. Among recent instances: a cancer cell line used as the basis for over a thousand published breast cancer research studies was revealed to be actually a skin cancer cell line; a biotechnology company was able to replicate only six out of fifty-three “landmark” published studies it sought to validate; a test of more than one hundred potential drugs for treating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in mice was unable to reproduce any of the positive findings that had been reported from previous studies; a compilation of nearly one hundred fifty clinical trials for therapies to block human inflammatory response showed that even though the therapies had supposedly been validated using mouse model experiments, every one of the trials failed in humans; a statistical assessment of the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map human brain function indicated that up to 70 percent of the positive findings reported in approximately 40,000 published fMRI studies could be false; and an article assessing the overall quality of basic and preclinical biomedical research estimated that between 75 and 90 percent of all studies are not reproducible.

Not surprisingly he quotes John Ioannidis' famous 2005 paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings are False”, along with some more of his research.  I first wrote about John Ioannidis back in 2013.  His paper may have been the one that opened the floodgates, because the number of papers retracted annually started to blossom in that decade:

The number of retracted scientific publications rose tenfold during the first decade of this century, and although that number still remains in the mere hundreds, the growing number of studies such as those mentioned above suggests that poor quality, unreliable, useless, or invalid science may in fact be the norm in some fields, and the number of scientifically suspect or worthless publications may well be counted in the hundreds of thousands annually.

Ioannidis says the most common fields for bad research papers are health, biomedicine, and psychology, but that may just be a function of where research money is going.

“Saving Science” is a far bigger article than just these few things.  Author Daniel Sarewitz spends time discussing how we got into this mess.  As WWII came to a close, there was an acknowledgement of how much that scientific teams had contributed to the victory and a deliberate effort to keep those teams together.  Vannevar Bush, the MIT engineer called the “General of Physics” by Time Magazine, was the public face behind this push.  He pushed a vision so appealing in its imagery that everyone bought into it.

Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.

Through example after example Sarewitz demonstrates that the progress of the late 20th century was virtually never, “free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice”, but instead was almost always science being managed, being driven on specific topics for specific applications.   Scientific knowledge advances most rapidly, and is of most value to society, when it is steered to solve problems — especially those related to technological innovation.  Could it be that the War on Cancer has floundered because there's nobody in charge; nobody driving toward a goal and asking specific people specific questions? 

From how the DOD pushed the development of the transistor, while putting up with poor results at first, to how the “War on Cancer” turned into individual scientists looking for findings that would give them a good paper and a good reputation rather than saving lives, it's a fascinating story.  I have to admit that my initial reaction was that he was calling for more government oversight of science, bigger government, but as I read the article that slipped away, and what I think I see is a call for science to be more applied and not just, well, playing at whatever they find interesting: “the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice”. 

A topic he didn't address was the politicization of science and how that drives bad science.  In John Ioannidis' landmark 2005 paper he said one of the important factors associated with results being false is politicization: the hotter the research field, the more likely the results are to be false.  Which explains Climate Science in one sentence.

One thing is for sure: as taxpayers, we're paying for a lot of bad science.  For that reason alone, we should care.

Yeah, it's a good half hour read with no distractions in the room and it's worth every minute of it.   

Techy Tuesday - Moore's Law Ended in 2012

That's the view of a column from Industry Observer Zvi Or-Bach in yesterday's EE Times online, and he makes a persuasive case.  In it, he points out two major trends: first, the cost per transistor stopped decreasing as semiconductor makers went through the 28 nanometer (28 nm) geometry in 2012.  (The size used to describe the semiconductor geometry is based on the smallest features in the part).  Today, the leading edge is 16nm, with Intel just announcing processors built to a 14nm process and talking about going to 7nm. 

What Or-Bach points out in the graph on the left is that we can still produce smaller transistors at the finest geometries available, but they aren't cheaper.  The graph shows the number of transistors (in millions per dollar) at a certain geometry, versus the year.  The climb (more transistors per dollar) until 2012 is obvious, as is the graph going flat, indicating a constant number per dollar, then fewer transistors per dollar as the geometry shrinks from 20 to 16 nm and the curve tilts down.  Since the early days of semiconductor production, each generation brought smaller and cheaper transistors.

The right side of the plot shows another interesting trend.  At 130 nm, there were 22 facilities that made integrated parts with lots of transistors ("fabs").  Today, only four fabs in the world are capable of working at 16 and 14 nm.  Going to smaller geometries entails more expenses: investment in both physical facilities; i.e, machines and buildings, as well as investment in the processes; learning how to actually make things that work.

The reality of the industry, though, is that these ultra-fine geometries are the glamor side of the business.  The actual work is done by older, less fine geometries. 

The graph on the left is showing that 43% of worldwide semiconductor production is in the five largest geometries: from 65nm up to the largest sizes used.  Further, the graph on the right shows that 85% of new designs are 65nm and larger.  Or-Bach takes this as evidence that the industry is bifurcating; very few designs move to the finest geometries while most designs are being designed into older, bigger geometries.  This is leading foundries to invest and develop enhancements to the older processes, keeping older facilities in production longer.

Saying that Moore's Law is over doesn't mean innovation is going to stop, but it does imply that the relentless trend of processors doubling in the number of transistors every two years is ending.  As we've noted before, processor speeds have been "stuck" at a few GHz for a decade or more.   We talked about 3D FLASH memory in this space back in January, and that's one example of innovations that increase density without going to finer geometries.  There are a lot of very clever engineers in that business, and I suspect we'll see more innovative approaches than just "transistor slinging" as it gets progressively less feasible to just throw more transistors at a design. 

Finally, just for fun, here's a "previous generation" processor from Intel.  It uses 22nm geometry. 

Note that it says there are 1.4 Billion transistors in that part.  I'm going to use Or-Bach's number of 20 million transistors per dollar, and predict this was a $70 part.  I don't know how many of these parts Intel made, or is making, but think of the number of transistors in these, then every other processor.  It's why I think that humanity has made more transistors (in particular, FETs) than any other thing we've made in all of human history.  More transistors than nails, sheets of paper, anything in history.

Goodbye Gene

Today, it was reported that Gene Wilder passed away yesterday, at age 83, victim of the "complications of Alzheimer's disease".   Gene was one of the great comic actors of our time, and has brought me more smiles and laughs over the years than I can ever recount. 

Wilder's nephew Jordan Walker-Pearlman said the comedy legend died late Sunday in Stamford, Conn. from complications from Alzheimer's disease, a condition the actor kept private for three years so as not to disappoint fans.

It's hard not to think of the roles he played that became favorites at a time like this.  Headlines referred to his roles in "Young Frankenstein" and "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", but the first role I saw him that made me laugh and that's still easy to remember 44 years later, was as Dr. Ross in the otherwise-forgettable 1972 Woody Allen film "Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask" (if you're under 50, it was the title of a popular book at the time).  Dr. Ross is a serious doctor of some sort, when a Greek patient comes in to talk about problems he's having with Daisy - his partner.  Dr. Ross eventually asks to meet Daisy, only to find she's a sheep.  He asks to see Daisy alone, falls for her, and the few minutes the movie devotes to this skit traces his descent from pinnacle of the medical profession to bum.   The subtlety Wilder plays this part with is just awesome to watch.  Truly a master of his craft, even at this young age. 

I'm one of "those guys" who pretty much knows the complete dialog of Young Frankenstein, and saw most of his movies.  He was one of those rare talents who could almost carry a movie himself.  Thanks for all the good times, Gene. 

Photo of the Day

I'm not quite sure how to credit it this.  It's from a CNN Story, and appears to be in the twitter feed of someone called @GoldboxATL. 

Delta flight 67, ATL to Las Vegas (LAS), a Boeing 737-900 (that means it's a new model of the 737) getting hit by lightning while queued up in the traffic Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson gets on days like that.  I've personally waited about an hour and a half on the ground in Atlanta for the roughly hour long ride to the Silicon Swamp.  In this case, flight 67 took off around two hours late, but arrived in Lost Wages only about 20 minutes late (I assume they were re-routed more directly).  I'll conclude nothing was damaged on the plane.

The fact that planes get hit by lightning generally tends to really upset passengers, but the designers expect every commercial airliner to get hit by lightning once a year or more, depending on where they fly.  Aircraft that stay in the tropics are expected to get hit more often than those that fly in more northern latitudes, but since you'll never know where a given aircraft is flying, they're all designed to take more strikes.  I have to say that I was surprised as a newbie when I was told that my radios were not only expected to survive a lightning strike to the antenna, they were expected to play through it and not experience a processor reset or anything that cause the crew inconvenience - although there isn't a whole lot that can be done about the static noise hit.  We can do that in the laboratory, where we can make standardized, repeatable lightning strikes, but real lightning doesn't come in standard voltages and currents ("I'll take 5000 Amps, please").  It's always nice to get feedback from the field that things really are working the way they're supposed to. 

Tales From the Over Regulated State # 22 - When Federal Agencies Ignore Federal Law

There was a complex case of Federal overreach in the last month, in which the US Fish and Wildlife Service seized control of 77 Million acres of Alaska to gain Federal control over Alaskan wildlife.  The president of the Sportsmen's Alliance, Evan Heusinkveld, said, “We’re talking about an area larger than 45 of our 50 states”.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and its appointed director, Dan Ashe, have issued new regulations closing 77 million acres of land in Alaska to state wildlife management, including effective predator control and other established means and methods of hunting and trapping.

Historically, control of the wildlife in every state has been left to the states; we buy our hunting and fishing licenses from our state, not the Fed.gov.  It's a recognition that the wildlife doesn't belong to landowners, it belongs to the people closest to it, the state.  In this case, when Alaska was granted statehood in 1959, they were guaranteed ownership and control of game populations by Congress.  No other state is more legally entitled to manage its game populations, including on federal lands within its border, than Alaska.

It is spelled out in multiple laws and agreements, and was debated three times by Congress, ultimately resulting in giving Alaska precedence, including:

• the Alaska Statehood Act (1959),
• the Alaska Lands Act (1980) which created most of the 77-million-acres of refuges at the center of this unprecedented power grab, and
• the Refuge Improvement Act (1997) which also made hunting and fishing priority public uses on all refuge lands

With the vested power of Congress, these acts were clearly approved.

So that's three separate Federal laws the FWS is violating.  You might ask why?  Why now?  It turns out it's the same sordid story as we find everywhere else with this administration: cronyism.  Undue influence by left wing groups; in this case the HSUS - the Humane Society of the United States.  Behind the scenes, the HSUS – the most powerful anti-hunting lobby in the world and a group that despises all forms of hunting and hunters – was thanked by FWS director Ashe in a tweet.

"For ... ALL Americans" except the public's voice has been systematically silenced.  This was pure, banana republic, bureaucratic power grab, backed by the HSUS, an organization the country almost completely disagrees with.  In my mind, I can hear the FWS director Ashe saying,  " So what if we broke three acts of Congress?  We're the Feds!  Who's gonna stop us?  You... punk?".

The stench gets stronger. The rule changes include provisions that abruptly deny American citizens of their collective voice relative to management of the National Wildlife Refuge through the following:

• Doubling the length of emergency closures of refuge lands from 30 to 60 days
• Removing requirements for public hearings on such closures
• Complete elimination of the maximum length of a temporary closure

[emphasis added: SiG]

For the second point, they're saying the public has no voice whatsoever in how their wildlife refuge is managed.  Typical.  As for the third point, if there is no maximum length, then how can it be a temporary closure?  I'm sure you can envision a temporary closure that extends into years or decades just as easily as I can.  When has a federal regulation not been stretched to benefit those in control?

If Ashe and Pacelle were being honest with their Tweets and blogs, they’d say what these rule changes actually were: a successful usurpation of power by the federal government to advance an anti-hunting agenda in the bulwark state for hunters’ rights; an offensive move that will allow them to invade Western states and assume control of large swaths of federal public lands to eliminate hunting, trapping and other management methods with ease. 

Since this a violation of at least those three federal laws, in a sane world, this should be easily defeated.  It does, however, require going to court, which invokes the massive legal expenses that are incurred whenever anyone fights the infinite checkbook of the Fed.gov.  The Sportsmen's Alliance has already filed protests about this ruling.  I don't know if this ruling is a "done deal" or if it's open for comments, but it appears to be a final ruling.  The FWS, like every other federal agency, is required to follow the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 when they announce new rules.  I've been unable to find anything open for comment on Regulation.Gov, so it appears this may be too late to comment on.  Or they figure that since they just violated three other major federal laws, what's one more?

An Alaskan Grizzly (source) 

An End to the Sliming

Tuesday is the Florida primary election, meaning this weekend has been almost back-to-back telephone calls, we've actually had opponents of each other call back-to-back, and the snail mail (like most days for at least the last week) has brought six to 10 large photo postcards.  The primary will bring with it a blessed end to the non-stop, neck-deep slime we've been assaulted by for months. 

This election season has been the most negative, most vitriolic, most slimy primary I can easily recall.  There might have been worse, but it's buried somewhere in the past.  It started early, too.  Our Presidential Preference primary was back in March.  The ballot was simply presidential preference: no other offices were present.  This Tuesday's primary (or for the last two weeks for those who do early voting) is for our local state representatives, senator, judges, school board, and then for US senator and one of the constitutional amendment votes Florida is justifiably infamous for.  For example, have a look at the 2002 pregnant pig amendment story  an amendment to the state constitution to outlaw a practice used by two farmers in the entire state.  That's right: two.

The most vicious races have been for the state senate and representative, with the state senate race being the worst.  With a primary at the end of August, it was a surprise when we started getting attack mailings in early June, aimed at our current representative who's now running for "promotion" to the senate.  There was no mention who the ads were promoting, but they all were from a PAC apparently dedicated to keeping him out of the senate.  He's a two term representative, first winning a seat in 2008, and while he's not what I'd call stellar as conservative/libertarian, he's a "4 out of 5" to me.  Naturally, I assume that a PAC dedicated to destroying a candidate is either funded by, affiliated with, or in other ways connected with his political opponent, so I started looking into who that was. 

The story gets needlessly complicated here (what?  more needlessly complicated than it already is?) with redistricting, the opponent and state rep. actually having been friends (I'd add "at one time"), the state rep's wife and ex-wife getting dragged through the mud, and then doing a commercial to support him, the same three or four politicians running against each other every election, and more.  My "issue" is that I've never seen the volume of glossy photo cards attack mailers (11x14 size postcards) that this race is generating, nor have we gotten the number of junk phones calls as we have this election. 

Long ago, like 35 years or so, I decided that a good rule of thumb was to not vote for the first candidate to sling mud.  Like all "zero tolerance policies" or rules of thumb, it's not right all the time, and should be used with some commonsense, but it's a pretty good indicator.  In this case, the state rep actually comes out on top.  He has released some negative ads about his opponent, but nowhere near the volume of slime she has generated against him. 

Comparatively, the race for the state representative has been a model of decorum.  Two of the four candidates for that race have actually knocked on our door and wanted to meet us - if only to give us another glossy photo card.  That race is marred by a "carpetbagger" - in this case, not a northerner coming to take advantage of us, but someone from south Florida coming to take advantage of us - and a candidate who has been a fixture in Tallahassee government, going from job to job, getting term limited out only to be elected to another, all while being our local model of the GOP Establishment.  The favorite trick is to pass a large amount of taxes, then pass another bill cutting some other taxes so that they can say they cut taxes while the total tax bill has gone up.  We get about a quarter of the junk phone calls for this race.

The candidates all act like there's a template they're filling out.  They all act like if they just say the same handful of buzzwords, or buzz phrases, they win.  This year's buzz phrases include:

• I'm against Illegal immigration
• I'm against Common Core
• I'm pro-Second amendment (having the NRA ratings to back it up adds cred)
• I'm against supporting illegal immigrants in any way, or doing anything that might benefit them 

Whoever the campaign consultants are this year, they've apparently convinced everyone this is the winning formula because they all say the same things.  Not that there's anything wrong with any of these, but if you're trying to distinguish yourself from other candidates, it's not working. 

I'm looking for the slime to ease up once Tuesday is over with.  Of course, then we transition to the mud slinging for the presidential election in another two months.  I'm going to move the recycling bin right next to the mailbox so that campaign literature can just be directly dumped from the mailbox into the recycling can.

(The famous Indonesian mud volcano has nothing on us).

Is the Stock Market Overvalued?

Is the stock market overpriced?  Are stocks way too expensive?  Or are we looking at another example of Bigger Fool Theory, which can be stated as buyers saying, "I may be a fool for paying this price for this stock, but there will be a bigger fool to sell it to next week for a higher price". 

There are probably as many favorite metrics to track as there are market commentators, but one of the standards is the Price to Earnings ratio, the P/E ratio or even just PER  As the name implies, it's the price paid for a stock vs. the earnings it pays: price per share vs. earnings per share.  The value usually given is the average over the last year.  A Nobel Prize winning economist from Yale, Robert Schiller, came up with a slightly different way of looking at this called the Cyclically Adjusted Price to Earnings Ratio, or CAPE.  Sometimes you'll see it called the Schiller P/E Ratio.  Instead of just looking at the last year, the CAPE ratio factors in the average of the past 10 years of earnings and adjusts for inflation.

In either case, how do you know what a fair P/E or CAPE is?  As always, opinions vary, but this is the process of price discovery: in the ideal market transaction, each party thinks they got a good deal at an agreed upon price.  That's when the information processes in an economy are all working, something that hasn't been the case since the age of fiat money began in full swing when Nixon decoupled the dollar from gold.  Historically, the chart looks like this:

This is the S&P 500 CAPE dating back 134 years.  The median CAPE value for stock trades was 16.0; the upper and lower 25th percentile are clearly marked on the figure (Wikimedia Commons).  It might be interesting to look at a slightly differently annotated and smoothed version of the same data:

This chart appears to go back to 1886 (by eye), so it's 130 years.  In that 130 years, the only three times that the CAPE ratio got as high as it is today, a crash followed.  You'll note that the run-up to the peak in both 1929 and 2000 was quite a bit sharper; that is, a faster increase to the peak than we're having now and the crash came immediately, dropping the CAPE back near to valuations it was at before the run-up and crash.  Comparatively, in the mid 2000s, the CAPE stayed on a high plateau for a few years before the crash happened. The Federal Reserve's massive dumping of money to banks, with at least part of the intent of pumping up stock prices, made the CAPE go back to the same valuations by 2015 as in the (roughly, again by eye) 2003 to 2008 period.  It really seems quite phenomenally stupid, spending trillions to restore a CAPE that is historically nowhere near the median.  You would think they'd try to drive the prices of stocks closer to the median CAPE values.   

As with all other indicators, there's debate over how good the CAPE is.  That's good.  From my viewpoint, any market near its all time high nominal prices (that is, not inflation-adjusted prices) is overpriced.  I think a drop of a couple of thousand points is more likely than a rise of a couple of thousand.  A drop of a few thousand points would be a buying opportunity. 

Are we headed for another crash?  Could be.  The CAPE valuation argues we are.  Not the shape of the curve, just the number being over 25.  The value says nothing about the timing.  Since the 1929 and 2000 crashes had massive, sharp peaks that immediately preceded crashes, perhaps this time our slower climb to the current value really is different and it doesn't mean another crash.  In that case, the New Normal is that stocks are quite a bit more expensive than they used to be.  From 1881 until 1996, 115 years, CAPE ratios hardly ever went above 20, and only once went as far as about 28.  Since 1996, CAPE ratios have almost never gone below 20, have hit 45 and spent a lot of time above 25.  It's a different world.

Taurus Rumblings

Just over a year ago, last August 19th, I posted a story about the Gen 1 Taurus Millennium series pistols and a legal settlement over allegations that, among other things, the guns would fire with the safety engaged.  I talked about my own PT-145 compact 45 being involved.  I pointed out it was not officially a recall, but they had agreed to look at, fix or replace all guns turned in.

I did the online customer service chat with them and inadvertently referred to this as a recall, asking how I could tell if my model was affected by the recall.  I was informed there was no recall, but they would look it over to make sure it was OK.  They emailed me a FedEx mailer to return it.  If they're offering to take a look at it, I'm game.

There was some talk about "like heck if I'm sending a perfectly good gun back", but I went ahead and sent mine.  In November, I posted this.

Around the end of October, the 8 weeks were up and I checked online to see the status.  They said it had been repaired, but had not been shipped.  This was a Sunday night (probably 11/1) so I figured I'd have it soon.  After another couple of weeks, I checked the status and it said the same thing, so I used the online chat feature to ask about it.

I was told they're going to replace my PT-145 with a new pistol of my choice, out of a few models they offered me.  Of course, this has to go to an FFL and I need to set up a few things, but they offered me a choice between the PT845 or 24/7 45 g2/or 24/7 45 Compact.  Since my original was most like the 24/7 Compact, I'll probably get one of these.  They're saying "4-6 months" which I'm assuming means I'll get the replacement next August - 9 months from now and a full year from sending the gun away. 

They told me to set it up with my local Taurus dealer/FFL, which I did.  Of course, it's now August and over a full year since I first contacted them, and (need I say?) no replacement Taurus.  Yesterday I contacted them again, and it seems we went backwards.  My conversation went this way.

(Taurus Rep)  At this point, all replacements are on hold until the repairs are completed. We in the process of having the firearm go through inspection. If the firearms needs a repair, it will be repaired and returned to you. If the firearm cannot be repaired, only then will the firearm be replaced.

(Me)  I was told it was going to be replaced last November. I was told to choose from a few models and have my Taurus dealer contact you. All that was done.

(Taurus Rep)  At this point, all replacements are on hold until the repairs are completed. We in the process of having the firearm go through inspection. If the firearms needs a repair, it will be repaired and returned to you. If the firearm cannot be repaired, only then will the firearm be replaced.

Note that her second response is another paste of the same text.  Finally she gave me this tidbit:

[SiG] your firearm is a part of a class action settlement. All information related to the matter can be found at www.tauruscartersettlement.com. A Third Party Administrator has set up this site , and can handle inquires. Please visit the website. You can fill out the contact us form or call the number on the website for further assistance.
https://www.tauruscartersettlement.com/ 

This website, in turn, says everything is on hold due to some sort of appeal to the class action lawsuit.  It seems that once the delay due to the appeal is over, there will be two choices

• Settlement Payment Option – Settlement Class Members may elect to return their Class Pistol to the Taurus Companies and receive a payment of up to $200 per Class Pistol.  
• Enhanced Warranty – The Taurus Companies agree to modify their existing warranty for all Class Pistols to allow any owner to submit a warranty claim at any time.
• The Class Pistol will be inspected by the Taurus Companies at no cost and repaired or replaced with no requirement that you prove the pistol is defective.

There are more details but the important point is that there is no fix for this.  The owner's choice is either get their gun replaced or take $200 for it; which is probably quite bit less than they paid for it.  Should they develop a fix, they'll fix the guns and we'll get our old guns back.  I would guess that considering they've been working on this problem for well over a year, if they don't have a fix by now, they probably won't come up with one.  There doesn't appear to be any way to know if the cash is faster than the replacement, so it's definitely not "take $200 now, or wait another six months for your gun".   

As I said to the customer service rep, "so here we are a year later, and you tell me there's no fix and no schedule for when there will be one?"  Her answer, of course, was to refer me to the settlement web site.  I can understand that their assembly line may be set up to do some number of guns per month, and this may have put a burden of another 25 or 50% on them, but it's a short term problem.  Hire some contract workers, pay some overtime, do something to get over the rush.   Frankly, I'm more than a bit sick of it.  I consider that Taurus gone and unrecoverable, but I have to keep pushing this rope until I get a real answer. 

Considering the meaning of "Taurus", this seems appropriate. 

Techy Tuesday - How Do You Build Those Things, Anyway?

Semiconductors, that is.  Everyone knows the world is awash in electronics, from things like iPods to Fitbits, and really far more than one could ever list.  I'd hazard a guess that few people except those in the business have an idea how the integrated circuits in these things are made.  This is a topic that could fill a good-sized series of these posts, but tonight I want to focus on an improvement to the processing of raw semiconductors into integrated circuits (ICs) just announced.

To begin with, most of what you're familiar with is made from elemental Silicon.  It starts out as the most pure substance known to man, but pure (intrinsic) silicon isn't very useful by itself.  It's rather resistive, which is why Silicon is called a semiconductor - it's not a very good wire.  What makes Silicon useful is that tiny amounts of alloying elements are added to it ("doping"), producing either too many electrons in a given volume (N-type material) or too few electrons in a volume (P-type - also said to have "holes", places in the electron cloud that should have an electron but don't).  This ability to customize the conductivity of Silicon is why it's so useful and why this has become the silicon age.   

Over the last 30 years or so, new materials have been developed that offer improvements in performance over silicon transistors.  The III-V (three five) materials were among the first to market.  III-V materials typically give higher electron mobility, a characteristic of their atomic structure, and are often used in High Frequency and microwave applications.  Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) was the first commercial success, and the current industry darling Gallium Nitride (GaN - pronounced with a short "a", like in can).  Another material that has a lot of interest is Silicon Carbide, SiC.  SiC doesn't achieve the high frequency performance of GaAs or GaN, but it has excellent high temperature performance because the compound has very high thermal conductivity.  This makes it a natural for parts intended for car engines, at the end of well-drilling rigs, and other places where the temperatures exceed the 150C or so that Silicon will tolerate.

There's just one problem with SiC: it's very hard.  In mineral terms, it's between sapphire's Mohs hardness of 9 and diamond at 10.  So if one has a crystal of SiC, how does one cut that thing into wafers for further processing?  Any rockhound, tombstone, or granite countertop maker would recognize the current method: a saw made of thin wires carrying a slurry of diamond grit, kind of a hi-tech bread slicer, cuts the wafers free.   

As you can see by the picture, this is a time consuming process.  I find it remarkable that over the diameter of the crystal being cut (4 to 6" is common for SiC), the wire only wanders enough to cause a surface roughness of 50 millionths of a meter.  Which has to be ground away in that final step. 

The big innovation is that Japanese ingot processing equipment manufacturer DISCO Corporation has come up with a laser-based technique to slice wafers out of the SiC ingot, producing 50% more wafers through reduced material losses while slashing production times by a factor of six.

Dubbed KABRA (for Key Amorphous-Black Repetitive Absorption), the patent-pending process uses a focused laser to form an amorphous layer of SiC decomposed into its constituents silicon (Si) and carbon (C), which becomes the base point for separating the wafer through cleavage.

They save material because the diameter of the wire and the diamond grit combine to lose about 200µm per wafer of SiC.  The diamond is focused below the surface of the crystal, turning the point it scans into separate silicon and carbon atoms; the wafer is cleaved off resulting in half the loss of the SiC.

With half the loss of the diamond wire saw method, this has to drop the costs of SiC components.  Add to that the lowered cost of processing by taking 1/6 the time of the previous method, and SiC parts are about to get quite a bit cheaper. 

I debated doing this story because it's rather deep into the weeds for those of you who aren't even tangentially associated with the business, but I love this sort of story.  We have a problem - if we can get enough production on SiC transistors, we can make a butt load of money - so we get a bunch of clever folks together and say, "make it better".   It's what engineers do, and it's why this is the most dynamic industry in the world.

Oh.. By the way.  The people among the farthest from the semiconductor business know silicon carbide now, but don't know it.  It's sold as the diamond simulant Moissanite.  Exactly how they produce those clear, white crystals to cut into imitation diamonds when the chemically pure semiconductor is that off-yellow color is their trade secret. 

Shoehorns and Shop Machines

When I last updated the progress on my CNC conversion, I had completed the wooden chip tray, although I hadn't painted it. The paint came Tuesday, and I eventually got three coats of paint on the inside and two on the outside.  What I've been doing since Tuesday, instead of cutting metal, is 3D modeling on the computer.  I want to be sure things are going to fit before I start moving 300 pound machines around.  I am well past my years of looking at 300 pound machines and boasting, "I can carry two of them and drink a beer".

I was able to model the G0704 with the plywood chip tray in place.

While a "realistic" model isn't really needed - details like the red "STOP" button on the motor speed controller take tiny amounts of effort but aren't necessary - the size of the base is critically important, as is the size of the tray. 

Next I pulled out my floor plan layout that I originally created in '14 when the shop was being built, and then added to and tweaked as things were done.  The chip tray is 5'4" in the long direction, and 3' across.  I'd like two feet on each end, making 9'4" of floor space.  There's 6'8" between other stuff and the back wall.  Can't fit 9'4" with a shoehorn.   There's really not even enough room to put 2' of room on one end and the other against a wall, but that's a bad idea anyway.  Certainly while I'm building it (in place) and then while it's running, it's possible I'll need to get anywhere around it, and if I have to work on some side for a long period of time, I want a small chair (which is where my two foot border comes from). 

So now comes moving things around in the software to try and get everything to fit better.  In this corner of my shop I have the G0704, and my Little Machine Shop 3450 lathe.  I'm not sure it's possible to work on both the mill and the lathe without popping a breaker (maybe with light cuts on both machines), but I do want to be able to easily move from one to the other.  I needed to do a model of a chair I could move around and get a feel for how it fits, so I went searching for a free 3D model of a chair and found one I could modify.  Which was good because I don't know if it was the original or the translation into Rhino, but it came into Rhino being 65 meters across the seat!  (Obligatory, "even Moochell's butt doesn't need 65 meters").

I ended up making several copies in different modifications of the chair to get a feel for how much room there really is.  I think this layout will work. 

The bad part is that both heavy machines have to move.  I can't just put the mill in place without touching the lathe.  I have a shop crane to lift the heavy things, but it makes the job bigger.  A heavy duty extension cord or two may be needed. 

The large gold/mustard colored rectangle to the right of the mill is the LMS lathe set up with operator's position on the left looking right and its headstock on the left.  As positioned right now, it could handle a rifle barrel 34 or 36" long.  To the lathe's right is a set of bookshelves in front for manuals and catalogs, a rolling cabinet and more benches behind them.  To the left and in front of the mill is where my Sherline micro CNC stuff is.  You might notice nothing has the level of detail the mill and chairs do, although the bookshelves are close. 

One Year From Today, August 21, 2017

I've been sitting on this post for a long time.  One year from today, Monday August 21, 2017 comes the best chance most of us will have to see a total solar eclipse, one of my top bucket list items since I was a teenager.

This screen capture shows the path of totality, with the centerline being the peak of the eclipse.  The two highlight boxes show that the eclipse geometry favors the SW corner of Kentucky and SE Missouri, giving those places the longest duration of totality and greatest eclipse (" the instant when the axis of the Moon's shadow cone passes closest to Earth's center"), but if you go to this interactive web site, you can get numbers for anywhere on that path.  Few people are fortunate enough to live on the path of totality of a total solar eclipse, but this one goes through fairly well-populated areas of the southeast, hitting Charleston, SC; Nashville, TN; SW St. Louis, MO; Columbia, MO; and Kansas City, MO.  The path of totality is also within an easy drive of Atlanta and a ton of other cities.

The better question is where's the best place to see it?  By that I mean, that combination of view to the horizons and weather, which is the most important of all.  The Greatest Duration and Greatest Eclipse points are at 1821 and 1825 UTC, respectively, and that's 1:21 PM (MO) and 1:25 PM (KY), both CDT, the local times.  If you're from that area, what's the weather like at that time of day in late August?  Around here, there's probably an increased chance of clouds and showers compared to earlier in the day.  I'd guess storms might be brewing that time of day there, too. 

The path, however goes across the entire lower 48; the shadow of the moon enters the  US near Depoe Bay, southwest of Salem Oregon, and proceeds easterly, leaving the mainland near Bulls Bay, SC, NE of Charleston.  For example it crosses virtually over Jackson Wyoming at 1736 UTC, where it's 11:36 AM local time (UTC -6 for MDT).  I would guess the weather would be better in Jackson Hole, than in SW Kentucky, but I don't know that.  Note that even as far away as it is from the point of greatest duration (2 min 40.2 sec), the duration in Jackson Wyoming is 2 min 16.6 sec, not a bad compromise if the weather is likely to be much better.  In general, the closer to the centerline on the map you get, the greater the duration, but you must be between the blue lines on the map to see totality.  A viewer in Nashville, off the centerline, sees 1 min 53 seconds of totality instead of the 2 min 40 on the centerline.  Within a few miles SW of Nashville, that goes to zero as the eclipse becomes partial.

If you have the freedom to move around to find the best weather based on last minute forecasts, plan to follow the centerline as much as you can, and go east/west as necessary. 


EDIT 8/21 at 0200 UTC:  Thanks to commenter Roy who pointed out SW Kentucky is also CDT, I revised the times to 1:21 and 1:25 CDT.

OK, I'm Really Late to this Party

Several weeks ago, Borepatch and several of the smaht folks did that "I Side With" test to identify the candidate we align most closely with.  I did that at the time, but never posted about it for some reason or other.  I was a bit surprised to find I was closest to the Constitution Party - I didn't know they had a candidate, or, frankly that they even existed. 

Note my amazing similarity to Hilldebeest.  I've always thought if she told me the sun was rising in the east, I'd look west first.  This proves it.