New Results in Physics Imply A Fourth Spatial Dimension

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that many of you have heard of something called the "Hall effect" exists.  Hall actually discovered this in 1879, before the electron was discovered, but he found an effect on electrical current caused by a magnetic field perpendicular to the direction of the current.  Today, you can buy Hall effect devices off the shelf from a number of electronic semiconductor makers, such as Texas Instruments.

Although the "everyday Hall effect" is something a lot of Makers and hobbyists play with, there's also a quantum hall effect in which the conductance becomes quantized in discrete levels.

Thanks to some rather advanced calculations – which won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2016 – we know that the quantum Hall effect points to the existence of a fourth spatial dimension.

Fourth spatial dimension?   By now, most people have heard of considering time as the fourth dimension: we have one dimension for movement left/right, one dimension for forward/backward, one dimension for up/down and the fourth dimension is time.  But time isn't a spatial dimension.  We know two things can't be in the same place at the same time.  They can occupy the same place at different times, but time isn't spatial, it's like a separator flowing (in some sense) independent of the XYZ space.  You may have heard something like the quip, "time keeps everything from happening at once".  It's another property of what we call spacetime. 

So what's a fourth spatial dimension?  It's trivially easy to introduce a fourth dimension in math, but we can't really see it.  While we can't see it, we can see effects that using the fourth dimension predicts would happen.  I turn here to Gizmodo which posted this review of the evidence for it.

This isn’t a fourth dimension that you can disappear into or anything like that. Instead, two teams of physicists engineered special two-dimensional setups, one with ultra-cold atoms and another with light particles. Both cases demonstrated different but complementary outcomes that looked the same as something called the “quantum Hall effect” occurring in four dimensions. These experiments could have important implications to fundamental science, or even allow engineers to access higher-dimension physics in our lower-dimension world.

“Physically, we don’t have a 4D spatial system, but we can access 4D quantum Hall physics using this lower-dimensional system because the higher-dimensional system is coded in the complexity of the structure,” Mikael Rechtsman, professor at Penn State University behind one of the papers, told Gizmodo. “Maybe we can come up with new physics in the higher dimension and then design devices that take advantage the higher-dimensional physics in lower dimensions.”

To borrow a concept from the classic book Flatland (which isn't about my home state) imagine how beings living in a 2-dimensional world might experience a three dimensional object.  They couldn't understand a cube; if they encountered it,  they would see its projection, its "shadow" in 2D.  They would see a line and when they tried to go around it, they'd encounter another line to get past.  A sphere could be anything from a point to progressively bigger lines, depending on where the sphere intersects flatland, and would look like a line as a 2D being tries to get around it.

In other words, just as a 3D object casts a 2D shadow, scientists have managed to observe a 3D shadow potentially cast by a 4D object – even if we can't actually see the 4D object itself. That could unlock some new findings in the very fundamentals of science.

In the same way, the physicists are seeing the projection into our three dimensional world of things happening in the fourth dimension.

Confused?  Me, too.  Well, I understand the concepts, but I can't understand what it looks like any better.  Both Gizomodo and Science Alert embed this explanation from a video game.



Gizmodo points out the drawback of these two precisely-engineered systems that display the expected result:

The major limitation of both is that, well, this is not a real four-dimensional system, but two highly engineered systems demonstrating what some effect would look like if it were happening in four dimensions. Both teams have more work they’d like to do in order to study this effect, though. Lohse and Rechtsman told Gizmodo that the atoms and photons in their systems don’t interact with one another. They’d like to see how the effect manifests itself with interacting systems. 

As for implications, Lohse hopes his system could support the study of even wilder physics, like quantum gravity and Weyl semimetals. Rechtsman thought his system could lead to other photonic devices that take advantage of higher dimensional system, or that perhaps they could find other similar effects in other materials.

“There’s another question of whether real solid-state materials with complex unit cells have these hidden dimensions, and if their physics can be understood in higher dimensional physics that wasn’t accessible before,” said Rechtsman. “Could it give us new understanding of phases of matter with complex geometry?”

If you watch that video on YouTube, you'll get links to a few more videos on trying to visualize a fourth dimension.  I liked this one.

If You're Following My Antenna Project

This is for anyone following this project and wanting to duplicate it. 

I have an important update to Saturday's post.  I made a dumb mistake and connected the ground radial to the wrong place.  This picture explains:

Schematically, it looks like this:

That awkwardly shaped thing on the left is supposed to mimic the loop.  The ground goes electrically between the transformer secondary and the termination resistor.  In my implementation, that junction is about 2 feet long, which is electrically short enough to not matter.  I could have connected it just by moving the wire to the far side of the plexiglass strip on the left, but moved it to the one on the right. 

When I hooked up the loop yesterday, it didn't work. Receive signals were much weaker than signals from the vertical antenna I generally use.  While doing some troubleshooting, I noticed my mistake and fixed it this morning.  Using the vertical and antenna tuner, WWV at 10.000 MHz was moving between S5 and S9 (pretty crappy conditions); switching to the loop and engaging the radio's high gain preamp, it was the same, as accurately as I can tell.  With 25 dB swings like that, it sure isn't like using lab equipment and getting stable numbers.  I did a much briefer test on 40 m and the two antennas sound very close to each other in performance, if not the same.  

Now that I know it's working, it's time to try it out in use and see if I can find out if this whole project was worth the time, effort and cost (admittedly not much cost).

Lately, This Simple Question Won't Leave Me Alone

Here's the setup:  I'm sure you've seen Evil Party representatives and their fellow travelers, Antifa, BLM and so on, demanding more immigration and open borders.  At the same time, they're always whining about what an awful country this is. 

So the question is, if the country is really that bad, why do they want to lure immigrants here?  Wouldn't the compassionate thing be to warn them to stay away from here?  If they're inviting immigrants into an awful, horrific, hateful place, doesn't that make them cruel and despotic?  

Sort of like asking why anyone would want to live in a sanctuary state.  Like this:

Michael P Ramirez cartoons, obviously.

Switching Projects for a Little While

I've temporarily put aside the variac box I wrote about earlier in the week, to switch over to the antenna project I wrote about last month.  Why?  This project has a deadline of sorts, a major ham radio operating event at the end of this month.  I need to get the antenna built and begin testing it to evaluate its performance and that's a priority.  Within a week or two, I'd like to know how it works on both bands it was intended for and know how it compares to what I have.

Yesterday, I cut all the PVC and glued it up.

The wire isn't installed.  Wiring everything up and getting it ready to test was today's project.

You might have noticed the pieces of orange plexiglass.  That's some scrap that was left over from making the cover for my CNC control box.  We've had that plastic around for at least a decade. 

This plastic storage bin on the back porch made an acceptable workstation.  I carried my Metcal soldering iron out there and kept adding more tools as the afternoon went by.  It was in the low 50s and breezy all afternoon which felt a bit cool to me.  The sun peaked out now and then making it comfortable, but I ended up wearing a wind breaker over a long sleeved Tee shirt for most of the work.

The K9AY antenna uses a terminating resistor (at right) and a matching transformer (on the board on the left).  The terminating resistor's value by what's marked should be 490 ohms, but measured closer to 520.  The actual optimum value is probably a bit lower, and that's probably an experiment I'll be doing.  Everything is unprotected from the elements, just bare soldered wire and parts so that I can get to that resistor or to the transformer, should I need to change that.  Another reason for the deadline date on this project. 

The slow part about today was that I hadn't looked into the details well enough to have parts prepared and ready to mount, so finding resistors, winding and testing a transformer, then cutting and drilling the plexiglass was part of the day. 

Tomorrow will be time to feed the coax through the wall feedthrough into the ham shack and begin the evaluations.  The resistor and feed polarity give the antenna a direction; I believe the "front" is on the left in these pictures, but that's the first thing to determine. 

UK Navy Aircraft Carrier Story is Frankly Puzzling

The British Navy recently launched a new aircraft carrier, the HMS Queen Elizabeth.  As is the usual routine, the ship is undergoing a period of sea trials to evaluate how well everything performs.  A couple of weeks ago, the story broke to much fanfare that the ship was leaking and might have to go to dry dock for repairs.

The part I find puzzling?  A big deal is being made over this:

A faulty seal around one of the vast warship’s propeller shafts means 200 litres of sea water pour in every hour.

200 litres per hour?  In Imperial units, that's just shy of 53 gallons per hour.  Granted that nobody wants to be on a ship that's taking on tons of water, but for a ship that displaces 77,800 short tons, 53 gallons, 442 pounds, just isn't much of a leak. 

As a reference to those of you who aren't boaters, here's a low cost bilge pump I've had on a fishing boat before.  For a mere $70, one can buy a bilge pump that will pump out 750 gallons per hour, 14 times as much as is leaking into the carrier.  I know a MilSpec version of that plastic pump will cost at least five times that, but they could still deploy dozens of those on the ship.  And guess what?  Ships that size have pumps.  A little shopping at a Marine Supplies store like West Marine or Overton's will show you bilge pumps for the recreational boater that vastly exceed the capabilities of that little Rule 750 GPH pump and vastly exceed the amount of water leaking in.

If my boat was taking on 53 gallons per hour, I'd run the pump for 4-1/2 minutes every hour and keep an eye on it to make sure it's not getting worse.  

(HMS Queen Elizabeth, heading for her home port of Portsmouth)

So why the kerfuffle?  That's my puzzle.  First off, the purpose of sea trials is specifically to find issues like this.  None of the companies who built the "largest warship in UK history" are contesting that they're at fault.  The Sun reports:

An insider added: “We’re about to uncover the true cost of carrier ­operations.

"There is a feeling that the ACA mugged us off by not sorting this before the handover.” 

The Queen Elizabeth is currently in Portsmouth and may need to go back into dry dock to be fixed.   [Note: the ACA is the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, a grouping of BAE Systems, Babcock and Thales, who built the ship - SiG]

The BBC has what seems like a bit less sensational summary.

The truth is similar leaks in other warships are not unusual and can be fixed relatively easily.

The difference this time though is the scale of HMS Queen Elizabeth and the fact it has just been handed over to the navy.

The big question is whether the leak can be fixed while it is still in the water.

The navy insists the job can be done without her going back to dry dock, which would be costly and add to delays.

Either way, the navy insists the fault will have to be rectified and paid for by the contractors, along with a list of other "snags".

I just don't see what the big deal is.  While I don't claim Naval experience, I think if you buy a multi-billion pound aircraft carrier and this is all that's wrong, you've done pretty damned well.  Perhaps it's some sort of UK politics, which I have to admit is rather opaque to me.  Perhaps someone from the UK might comment if I've missed things. 

Is a 50 Year Old Treaty Holding Back Private Space?

Fifty years ago, there were two entities on Earth engaged in "race to the moon".  In what's considered a landmark agreement between the US and the USSR, the Outer Space Treaty (officially it's the United Nations Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space) declares that “the moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all states parties to the treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes.” It says nothing about businesses or individuals, just states.  Therein lies the problem.

Unfortunately, now it appears to be getting in the way of private space-exploration as a profit-making venture.  As the New York Times put it (in a surprising article) "If No One Owns the Moon, Can Anyone Make Money Up There?"

Meet Robert Richards, founder of a company called Moon Express, now moving into facilities on Cape Canaveral, in what's called the unmanned side (Cape Canaveral Air Force Station), since all manned flight since the Gemini program in the 1960s moved to Merritt Island and the Kennedy Space Center:

Moon Express occupies Launch Complexes 17 & 18 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, adjacent to the Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s Space Coast, where many of the robots that explored new worlds and unlocked the secrets of our solar system began their journeys. We are now honored to be able to re-purpose these historic sites into a vibrant new commercial spaceport, approximately 70 acres of facilities and range, supporting Moon Express spacecraft development and test, and incubating fresh new dreams of extraordinary adventures into the space frontier.

(NY Times photo)
This year, the 30-employee company aims to be the first private company to soft land a satellite on the moon, and perhaps win $20 million in the Google Lunar X Prize competition. To quote the NY Times,

It is investing at least $1.85 million to renovate decades-old buildings here. The company is transforming a parking lot into a miniature moonscape, and will also set up an engineering laboratory, a mission operations room and a test stand for spacecraft engine firings.

Moon Express would not need all of these facilities if its only goal were to win the Lunar X Prize.

Its second spacecraft aims to land in 2019 near the moon’s south pole. A third, larger spacecraft in 2020 is to gather samples and then bring them back to Earth, the first haul of moon rocks since a Soviet robotic probe’s return in 1976.

It's that third probe that ran into the Outer Space Treaty and impacted their plans.

Moon Express ran into a bureaucratic wall because the treaty declares that activities of nongovernmental entities — a classification that includes commercial companies — “require authorization and continuing supervision” of the government. (The United States had insisted on the clause, rejecting the Soviet view that space exploration should be limited to governments.)

“We had a mission planned, we had investors invested, but didn’t have a way forward at the end of 2015,” Dr. Richards testified during a Senate committee hearing in May. “There wasn’t anybody that didn’t want to say yes. There was just no mechanism to do so.”

The Federal Aviation Administration licenses rocket launches and re-entry of commercial spacecraft from orbit in order to ensure the safety of people on the ground. The Federal Communications Commission regulates communications satellites, and the Department of Commerce regulates commercial remote sensing satellites.

But the United States does not as yet have a process for authorizing or supervising novel endeavors like a private company landing on the moon.

Moon Express spent about a year working with the F.A.A., the State Department and other agencies to jerry-rig what Dr. Richards called a “temporary patch,” using the F.A.A.’s existing authority to review rocket payloads in order to gain the approval Moon Express was seeking.

As all of you gentle readers well know, Moon Express isn't the only company trying to go down this path.

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX, boldly proclaims that his company will begin sending colonists to Mars in a decade. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is using part of his fortune to finance his rocket company Blue Origin, and predicts millions of people will be living and working in space.

As these companies go where no businesses have gone before, they raise questions only fuzzily addressed by the Outer Space Treaty: What are private companies allowed to do in space? Can a company mine the moon or an asteroid and then sell what it has pulled out? How are countries to regulate these businesses?

This problem with one business launching a probe to the moon reflects the larger world we live in.  If there's something you want to do, is it best to consider it legal unless it's specifically forbidden, or is it best to consider it forbidden unless it's specifically allowed?  When I was a kid, walking around the areas well outside the neighborhoods with a .22 plinking at tin cans and whatever we found, I would have never hesitated to say everything not specifically illegal was something we could do - limited by our own ethical systems and the community's enforcement of theirs.  Clearly the bureaucrats here felt it was illegal since it wasn't specifically allowed.  Today, I think the US has morphed to that view.  Everything is illegal unless it's specifically permitted.  (and this is something I fear far, far more than something like "fix NICS" - because we're rapidly approaching a time when our "3 felonies a day" become 5, then 10 or 20 because everything becomes a felony - and everyone is a prohibited person).

Getting back to the story, the FAA fix is valid for one launch only.  Although Richards and Moon Express believe they will eventually be able to launch everything they want, all private space industry is working with this risk hanging over their heads.

Another space upstart is Planetary Resources, a small company located in an unremarkable office park outside Seattle. Its early investors included Larry Page, co-founder of Google, and Charles Simonyi, a former chief software architect at Microsoft. The company is also taking advantage of an investment from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

Planetary Resources’ goal is to mine the solar system’s asteroids. Luxembourg, a nation smaller than Rhode Island with a long history in mining, has bet 200 million euros — more than $225 million — on this industry that does not exist. That includes $28 million invested in Planetary Resources. In return, Luxembourg owns a 10 percent share of the company, said Etienne Schneider, the country’s deputy prime minister.
...
For Planetary Resources, the first wave of development is to culminate in a doughnut-shape spacecraft heading on a prospecting mission to a near-Earth asteroid in 2020.

Sometime after that, the company hopes to mine in earnest — for seemingly mundane water ice. But water, in addition to potentially providing something to drink for astronauts, can be split into hydrogen and oxygen. Both can be used as rocket propellent; the oxygen, of course, also can provide air to breathe.  [Note: if you separate water into Hydrogen and Oxygen with the intent of burning the hydrogen, there's no extra oxygen to breathe - SiG]

As a business, Planetary Resources is betting that by the time it extracts water from an asteroid, there will be a customer like NASA interested in buying water, hydrogen and oxygen.

Eventually, the company aims to extract platinum, currently worth more than $900 an ounce, and other precious metals.

To make these pursuits easier, Luxembourg passed a space law that took effect this summer. Planetary Resources has set up its European office there. Moves like this one are in part motivating policymakers in the United States to devote more attention to American laws that currently govern commercial space activities.

The good news is that, partially aided by Luxembourg passing its law, the US is now reviewing our own policies.   In the last session of congress, the House crafted a bill that would leave the Outer Space Treaty in effect, but create an Office of Space Commerce, which would have 60 days to decide whether to approve or deny a company’s application.  It never went farther.  Two years ago, Obama signed a similar bill that said private companies can own and sell what they extract, but that the companies cannot claim ownership of the celestial body itself.  This is in alignment with the language of the treaty.

(NASA Photos from Apollo 17 - at right, Harrison H. Schmitt, an Apollo 17 astronaut, working beside a large lunar boulder on one of three moonwalks during that mission.)

This could be a great time coming for space exploration.  It's easy to imagine that having a handful of companies competing with cheap satellites could help lots of small organizations interested in exploring in space.  Moon Express' second satellite, for example, is going to carry a small telescope for the International Lunar Observatory Association.  Some locations near the lunar south pole, offering a continuous view of the universe, could be ideal for an astronomical observatory.  It's possible bidding wars for real estate in those locations could happen. 

Dr. Richards compared this moment he sees coming to the 19th century California Gold Rush, when gold diggers jousted over the most lucrative places to sift ore. But he was confident that the new competitors would reach compromises.

“I don’t think there’s going to be bad players per se, but there could be arguments over areas of operation overlap,” he said. “But those are problems for the future, and that’ll be a great problem to have.”

Model vs. Reality

Reality 1: the deep freeze that many (most?) of you have been enduring is making its way into middle Florida, modified by the warm water everywhere, of course.  The temp this afternoon was 46 (I think it was 2PM).  It has been raining since Monday, stopped after 3 or so, and tonight is forecast to possibly touch freezing.  With winds 15mph gusting 20, I don't think "cold pockets" are stable, so we'll get whatever the area gets.  Certainly not record-shattering, but the coldest night in a year or two. 

Reality 2: given the cold rain until late afternoon, instead of building my antenna on the back porch, I focused on building the box for the AC transformer that I mentioned Sunday.  The model is pictured in that post.  Here's what the looks like in reality after a few hours in the shop.  Only the top is cut out.

No, it's not done, but my main worry, the cutout for the variac came out OK although the initial CNC cut required modification. 

To get to this point, I draw the parts in my 3D CAD program, Rhino3D, then used my CAM program Deskproto to generate a simple tool path, based on cutting it with a 4-fluted, 3/8" end mill. 

The light purple line is where the center of the cutter goes.  No, I didn't need the outer rectangle to cut the panel to size; it came that size.  I just needed the circle and rectangle cutout.  There's a potential GOTCHA here.  I can compensate for the cutter's diameter in either this program or in the CNC controller with a tool table.  I have to remember to Never Do Both.  

The measurements for the big circular cutout and the rectangular cutout for the meter were all taken by hand, and used to make the layout.  Notice that I said I was using a 3/8" diameter cutter?  That means none of those sharp corners you see are actually sharp - they have a 3/16" radius (the cutter's radius).  That means I need a secondary cutting operation, or even finer with a couple of cutters.  I chose to use a single cut with a 1/8" diameter cutter, because that has worked for me before.  Now the corner radius goes down to 1/16" and I can cut the corner square with a file.  You can see those radiused corners in this shot, right after the first pass with the 3/8" cutter. 

To do the last cut, I use the CAD program again to get the X/Y coordinates of where the 1/8" cutter is when the cut is complete.  To do that, I draw a cylinder the diameter of the cutter and push it into the corner until it's tangent at both sides.  Then I take the coordinates of its center at that point, and use those values in the code that moves the mill.  It's a pretty easy cut and takes off very little metal.  You might notice that I drilled and tapped my "tooling plate" for the four screw holes the cover has built into it, and put scraps of 1/8" aluminum under it to save cutting into my plate.

When I said, "the initial CNC cut required modification", what needed to be changed was the depth of the rectangular cutout on the variac; it was too short.  It was right at the top of the part, but to get the box cover onto the variac, I had to slip it over some terminals which are taller than that rectangle allowed.  I extended it 1/10" and it went together easily.  Similarly, the rectangular cutout for the AC panel meter was too small to pass a feature it has on the sides, so The rectangle had to be opened up about 1/8" as well. 

And that's how I spent my day today.

The US Didn't Have A Spike in Violent Crime in 2016

A handful of neighborhoods in the US did.  A mere five neighborhoods in Chicago supplied one third of the increase in violent crime in 2016. 

Murders in the U.S. rose nearly 9% last year, and one-third of that increase came from just a few neighborhoods in Chicago, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis [paywall warning] of the FBI’s annual 2016 publication, Crime in the United States.

While violent crime (homicide, rape, assault, and robbery) also rose nationwide from 2015 to 2016 — over 4% — the data show the increase was not uniform, but rather concentrated in cities like Chicago and Baltimore.

Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., meanwhile, saw “meaningful declines in violence [that] have been sustained since the 1990s.”

This means the US doesn't have a violent crime problem.  We have a violent zip code problem. 

This, of course, is hardly news.  Anyone watching the country knows that the worst of criminality falls in a handful of places, typically poor neighborhoods in big cities, and the root of the problem is gang violence and turf wars.  John Lott published a study in 2016 using 2014 crime statistics finding that murder in the US is very concentrated by location.

In 2014, the most recent year that a county level breakdown is available, 54% of counties (with 11% of the population) have no murders.  69% of counties have no more than one murder, and about 20% of the population. These counties account for only 4% of all murders in the country.

The worst 1% of counties have 19% of the population and 37% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 47% of the population and account for 68% of murders. As shown in figure 2, over half of murders occurred in only 2% of counties.

Murder has gotten more concentrated in fewer places.  John Lott again:

Murders actually used to be even more concentrated. From 1977 to 2000, on average 73 percent of counties in any give year had zero murders.

Criminologist David Weisburg of George Mason University criminologist, released a study in 2015 that described what he called the “law of crime concentration,” and “the criminality of place”: a disproportionate amount of any city’s violent crime occurs in a small geographic area of the city.  His data showed:

Weisburg found that in large cities, 50% of crime occurs on just 4% to 6% of a city’s streets, while 0.8% to 1.6% of streets produce one-quarter of all crime.

In many concealed carry classes you're dutifully told there's no such thing as a bad neighborhood that you can avoid to have no risk of violent attack.  While I agree with the sentiment that you should always be aware of your surroundings and that lightning can strike in odd places, these statistics show that statement is just wrong.  There are bad neighborhoods, and your chances of being involved in a violent crime are much worse in some places.  If you don't have to go there, don't go.  

Complicating Weisburg and Lott's findings is the side effect of protests against police that have police vowing to have a lighter presence in the areas that need them the most.

A Pew Research Center poll from January 2017 showed that an overwhelming number of police officers say widespread protests following high-profile killings of black suspects have made police less willing to conduct basic police work, such as stopping and questioning suspicious people in high-crime neighborhoods, and using an appropriate level of force to diffuse a situation.

In Baltimore, violent crime rates were going down until 2015, when police officers “pulled back from a more proactive approach” following widespread city riots after the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who suffered a severe spinal injury while being transported in a police van on April 1, 2015, and died one week later.
...
Violence in Baltimore has stayed historically high following the riots, with arrests plummeting, shootings soaring, and the police force itself getting smaller.

One thing that has been proven to reduce crime rates is more proactive policing.   Yet the "Ferguson Effect" has caused an increasing reluctance of police to go into those neighborhoods, and more reluctant to carry out everyday tasks of policing.  You might have noticed that the left is currently lobbying for all of the things that make the murder rate worse, as in this gem posted at Gun Free Zone. 

(Daily Wire photo)

Remember: it's not gun control we need.  It's zip code control. 

Nature Show Scene You've Never Seen

Here we see the Mother Wrench feeding nuts to her babies in their nest.

I have no idea who did this and would love to credit it.  I found it on Pinterest, unattributed. 

Happy New Year 2018

New Year's Eve is upon us, and I just want to wish all of you a happy New Year.

2017 was my second full year of retirement and was better in a couple of ways than the first year.  The biggest was that the year was free of medical issues like my emergency gall bladder surgery in June of '16.  It was largely a year of doing what we felt like doing - the privilege of retirement.  We took two vacation trips, one to South Dakota for a week with the kids and Precious Grand Daughter; the other to Tennessee to see the eclipse and they met us there.  We currently don't have anything planned for 2018, so it's getting to be time to plan something. 

Retirement is a relatively new concept in society, at best a couple of hundred years old, and it's evident that society (in some sort of nebulous, society-at-large sense) is having troubles with it.  See "underfunded pension plans" with your favorite search engine.   

I was looking at last year's blog entries to see what I was doing a year ago, and most of my posts were about completing the CNC conversion of my Grizzly G0704 - a year ago this weekend, I was completing the plumbing for the oiling system.  I also pointed out traps and tripwires that Obama was leaving for Trump.  We've encountered some of them as the year has gone by.

I had the mill built into a functional mill, completely under CNC control by February 2nd.  That quickly turned into a couple of months of tweaking and  improving.   First was reducing backlash on each of the axes, followed by completing an enclosure made from 12mm aluminum extrusion and plastic panels from the local Borg (mostly the blue Borg, not the orange).  And no, I don't know where that nickname comes from, other than I think it was the old Usenet newsgroups (kids, ask your parents).

I can't say I was done, because as recently as a few weeks ago, I talked about improvements to the rotary axis I originally added last May.  I can still think of things to do to improve its usability and user friendliness.  Then came adding an oiling system, fighting leaks until I went over to manual oiling, and finally adding a misting cooler.  It's probably best to never think of a project like this as done.

Then, of course, there was my "Son of Side Project".  Originally, Side Project was a joke because the project was putting a new side on the sawed away Breedlove guitar.  The original side was plastic left over from making the mill's enclosure.  Son of Side Project was a sequel to Side Project to replace the plastic with wood.  Now, it has a quilted maple side where the plastic was.  I gathered up the tools to do a setup on it this week and now it plays quite a bit better.  The guitar was most likely a Quality Control reject, so it needed lots of work.  The frets were uneven and had to be leveled with a file.  It probably needs some additional work.  I know the $8, eBay-special tuning machines I bought for it need to be replaced. 

As far as projects with my CNC'ed, four-axis G0704 mill, I haven't accomplished much.  I built the GB-22 but never got it to function reliably.  It's still sitting as a "one of these days" project, in pieces.  I built the Little Machine Shop wobbler steam engine.  After drilling out the flywheel on my rotary table, I took the whole thing apart and put a shinier finish on all of the parts by lapping them on finer grits of sandpaper, and/or turning in the lathe's chuck.  Put it back together to find it doesn't run as reliably as it did.  I think I took too much mass out of the Flywheel.  I will turn a new one and get it back to where it was. 

In addition to my ham radio antenna project, I have another electronics shop project, a box for a component called a variac.  This will allow me to put lower voltages on older vacuum tube equipment, at least while I get it running the first time. 

The black rectangle on the top is an AC voltmeter/ammeter like one of these and the AC outlet on the front is still under consideration.  This is going to be like my controller box for the CNC 704, with the panels laid out in Rhino3D CAD and cut out on the CNC mill.  This time it will be cut out on the big system, though.

Aside from those two, I'm looking at more projects for the metal shop, with fewer involving guitar resurrection.

Happy New Year!  Remember, if you drink, don't text and if you text, don't drive.  Or something like that. 

99 Reasons 2017 Was A Great Year

99 Reasons 2017 Was A Great Year is the provocative title of an article linked to by economics writer John Mauldin, available on his website.

Before I go much farther, I have to say that I don't think much of this.  There's too much odor of Hippy to it - celebrating some bad fortunes in the fossil fuel industry for one, and they seem to be completely in favor of big government interventions that always seem to bring more unintended consequences than actual improvement.  On the other hand, they point out some real contributions to making the world a better place, mostly brought to you as usual by doctors, research scientists, and, yes, engineers.  Some of the things they list:

1. This year, the World Health Organization unveiled a new vaccine that’s cheap and effective enough to end cholera, one of humanity’s greatest ever killers. New York Times

2. Cancer deaths have dropped by 25% in the United States since 1991, saving more than 2 million lives. Breast cancer deaths have fallen by 39%, saving the lives of 322,600 women. Time

3. Zika all but disappeared in 2017. Cases plummeted in Latin America and the Caribbean, and most people in those places are now immune. Science Mag
   ...
8. Premature deaths for the world’s four biggest noncommunicable diseases­ — cardiovascular, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory — have declined by 16% since 2000. World Bank

9. Global abortion rates have fallen from around 40 procedures per 1,000 women in the early 1990s, to 35 procedures per 1,000 women today. In the United States, abortion rates have reached their lowest level since 1973. Vox
    ...
12. The United Kingdom announced a 20% fall in the incidence of dementia over the past two decades, meaning 40,000 fewer people are being affected every year. iNews

13. Thanks to better access to clean water and sanitation, the number of children around the world who are dying from diarrhoea has fallen by a third since 2005. BBC

Add to that impressive list (largely) from the Evil Devil Big Pharma industry, that Leprosy has almost been wiped out, with cases down by 97% since 1985.  Other infectious diseases for which there are successful vaccines are also being reduced to much lower rates of infection.

Mauldin chimes in with this shocker:

I read last week that there are 2,049 different types of cancer trials being run all over the world. The one I am most focused on is being conducted by a company called Bexion in Cincinnati/West Covington, Kentucky. They are engaged in a phase I trial and are seeing truly remarkable results with late-stage brain gliomas and pancreatic cancer. Essentially, the patients involved in the trial were the walking dead. The team has treated another person with a type of brain cancer for which there is not even a recognized protocol. This type of tumor is completely inoperable: You just die within a year. A thousand people a year get this type of cancer, and there are usually a number of pediatric cases. It is too soon to know the final outcome, but the person treated has gone from being mostly paralyzed on his right side to being up and walking around, and the tumor has shrunk by 59% in just a few months.. All involved are still shaking their heads. But the researchers know the mechanism of action and are ultimately hoping it works on all mass tumors.

The world dedicated more space to parks and conservation

17. Chile set aside 11 million acres of land for national parks in Patagonia, following the largest-ever private land donation from a private entity to a country. Smithsonian

21. A province in Pakistan announced it has planted one billion trees in two years, in response to the terrible floods of 2015. Independent

28. Cameroon committed to restoring over 12 million hectares of forest in the Congo Basin, and Brazil started a project to plant 73 million trees, the largest tropical reforestation project in history. Fast Co.

And it goes on (there are 99 on the list, after all)

31. The International Energy Agency announced that nearly 1.2 billion people around the world have gained access to electricity in the last 16 years.
...
34. In the last three years, the number of people in China living below the poverty line decreased from 99 million to 43.4 million. And since 2010, Chinese income inequality has been falling steadily. Quartz

Gaining access to electricity is a big one.  That’s one of the first steps out of poverty. All the modern technologies that enrich our lives and wallets need electricity to work. Gaining it is truly a life-changer.  For an example, look no farther than Puerto Rico, where Hurricane Maria's aftermath still has 50% of the island without electricity and back to literal dark ages.

The list, though, doesn't cover this shocker that John Mauldin put in his newsletter.

We are using roughly the same amount of water in the US as we did back in 1970, but the population has grown by almost 50%. We are producing vastly more food, generating more hydroelectric energy, and doing more of all the other things that can only be done with water. The chart below is from the USGS Water Science School. Other charts on that page indicate that the largest use of water is for the generation of thermoelectric power. And this is the trend all over the developed world: more efficient use and better conservation of water.

Using the same amount of water as we did in 1970 with 50% more population is really an important thing.  It's a jarring reality that as soon as you run clean, treated tap water down your sink, it becomes sewage.
 

Again, I might quibble with the authors on some items.  They clearly think global warming is a real problem, and they are anti-fossil fuels which, with no real alternative in many places, is immoral. No other commodity in history has helped advance the quality of life for more people.  As I said above, they seem to love big government interventions.  Still, most of the 99 items represent welcome progress.

I Wonder How The New Tax Law Affects This?

Interstate population migration.  A while back, I found this graphic from Business Insider:

While other factors are involved, it's pretty clear that states with high tax rates like New York, Illinois, and New Jersey for instance were subject to a lot of movement into states with lower tax rates like Florida (no income tax, at least), Tennessee, Arizona and South Carolina, but there's other stuff going on here as well.  The entire Midwest had net outward migration, but so did New Mexico and the old deep south: Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.  California only losing 2.8 people per thousand residents (PPT) surprised me. 

This map was only for the period of July 1, '15 to July 1, '16, though.  Virginia lost 3 PPT but after Virginia (and the DC suburbs) already had become one of the richest areas in the country and before the Trumpening so probably not related to government.  North Dakota lost 8.27 PPT, which is a lot, but late 2015 was the time of the North Dakota oil bust.  In the broader sense the pattern of tracking highest tax rate states holds, though.  Between July 1, 2016, and July 1, 2017, nearly 450,000 people moved out of New York, Illinois and California.  That said, Oregon, Nevada, Colorado and and a few others surprise me.  Perhaps it's Californians moving someplace more like home than others, but

Hearing talk about the new Trump Tax Plan has gotten me thinking if we're likely to see more movement between states to reflect capping the tax deduction for state and local taxes at $10,000.  The lower cap will have the effect of making it mean more to middle income than high income taxpayers.  Obviously, if a family's SALT (State And Local Taxes) are under that limit, they have less incentive to move to escape the burden than a family that might owe quite a bit more than $20,000 in SALT.

Of course, something you'll never hear Chuckie Schumer, Nancy Peloski, Andrew Cujo or any other politician from a high tax state is that the rest of the country's taxpayers are subsidizing their spending by paying for the SALT deductions.  Florida and Texas taxpayers are paying for the mortgage interest deductions of people living in $750,000 dollar homes in California counties where that's the median house price.  We're all paying each other's taxes and not just our own.  There's no better argument for a flat tax/fair tax approach.

I have yet to come across anything of sufficient detail on the new Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that I feel comfortable commenting on it.  I've seen several apparently-trustworthy pieces that list "typical families' tax situations", but those are hard to digest.   See the Tax Foundation's analysis and another version from the Heritage Foundation.  It seems to me that cutting taxes while not creating "tax cuts for the rich", which is going to be the cry no matter the reality, is a tough needle to thread.  It seems like they did a pretty decent job of threading that needle.  Let's face it, the lowest 50% of incomes pay about 3% of federal income tax.  The rich pay the lion’s share of the tax burden, so they will see the largest dollar value in benefits.   I think the Heritage Foundation has a pretty good look at the truth in a piece on 5 Myths About Tax Reform and Why They're Wrong:

Myth 1: This is just a tax cut for the rich, and it will actually raise taxes for everyone else.

The truth is in fact the opposite. The Senate tax bill increases the amount of taxes paid by the rich and, according to the liberal Tax Policy Center, 93 percent of taxpayers would see a tax cut or no change in 2019. They found similar results for the House bill.

Both tax bills would actually increase the progressivity of the U.S. tax code. That means fewer people at the bottom will pay income taxes, and people at the top will see their share of taxes paid increase.

The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards notes that the Senate tax bill cuts income taxes for people making $40,000 to $75,000 a year by about 37 percent. People making over a million dollars see a cut of only 6 percent.

In two recent Daily Signal pieces, we calculated how 12 different taxpayers would fare under each of the tax plans. The results show that almost everyone will see a tax cut, and only the wealthiest families are at risk of their taxes going up.

Under the current tax code, the top 10 percent of income earners earn about 45 percent of all income and pay 70 percent of all federal income taxes. The U.S. tax code is already highly progressive, and these tax reforms will only increase the trend of the wealthy paying more than their share of income earned.

It seems to me this will lead to some movement across state lines, but it's hard to know if it will have the effect of making mass movements.  There could be an uptick in housing sales because of this law, though.

One Hundred Racist Things

While Fox news host Tucker Carlson is enjoying time off the air, presumably back after New Year's, last week he provided his Twitter followers with a list of One Hundred Racist Things.  If it ever appears to you that every day some idiot spokesperson somewhere comes forth with a declaration of something innocuous being racist, it's worth looking at this list.  We know it's an incomplete list because that link is to something racist that's not in the 100.  From a link to Vanderleun, who linked to Waka Waka Waka, which I must say is a place I've never seen before.  For your amusement, some of them...

17. Mathematics. (See also here.)
18. Science.
19. Yale requiring English students to study Chaucer and Shakespeare.
20. All white people.
21. Proper English grammar.
...

36. Apu from The Simpsons.
37. The white nuclear family.
38. Algorithms.
39. Artificial intelligence.
40. “Jingle Bells.”
...
49. Expecting people to show up on time for things.
50. Cartoons of frogs.
51. Nostalgia.
52. Soda taxes.
...
90. Diabetes.
91. Climate change.
92. Accurately describing criminal suspects.
93. Pollution.

About 1990, my project leader at Major Southeastern US Defense Contractor had a saying that has stuck with me.  When faced with illogic like this, he'd say, "there's just no arguing with that kind of logic".   Anyone who would think like that is immune to logic.  Which must mean I'm racist.

I got this graphic from a commenter to Tucker Carlson's original feed for the article. 

Imagine an Airplane With No Control Surfaces

That's the tantalizing idea now moving into real world testing at the University of Manchester in the UK.  The research is being backed by BAE Systems, the UK Defense company.

Let's back up for a moment.  Aircraft change their position in flight by changing the positions of various small surfaces primarily on the wings and the vertical stabilizer.  A "typical" configuration looks like this:

During the majority of the flight, the main things moving are the ailerons out on the wings and the rudder on the vertical stabilizer (what most people call the tail).  The flaps or slats extend backward and down or forward and down for additional lift at low speed, but the extra lift comes with the penalty of more drag at cruising speed - which is why they extend and retract - so they're used only during takeoff and landing.

The main drawback to all this is mechanical (or electrical) complexity which in turn brings maintenance and weight issues.  "Fly by wire", followed by "fly by light", are terms that come from replacing mechanical linkages; that is, cables on pulleys, first with electrically controlled activation of the surface, then with fiber optic command activation.  Instead, these researchers intend to control the aircraft by blowing air from the engine in the right directions and places

Magma Aviation Project is a new concept that will remove the complex moving parts, and reduce the weight and maintenance costs needed for aircraft to manipulate the air. As a result, aircraft will be able to travel quieter and more efficient. The project looks to accomplish this feat without any control surfaces—no ailerons, flaps, or tails.

Two key technologies allow the aircraft to manipulate air differently. First, the aircraft will have wing circulation control. This siphons the air from the aircraft’s jet engine and dispels it at supersonic speed through the trailing edge over the back of the wing, proving lift control. It eliminates the need for any mechanical moving surfaces. The second technological advantage is fluidic thrust vectoring. By using jets of air, the aircraft can deflect the exhaust and change the aircraft’s direction.

The test vehicle, the Magma drone, flew its first successful test flight on December 13.

Clyde Warsop, Engineering Fellow here at BAE Systems, said: “The technologies we are developing with The University of Manchester will make it possible to design cheaper, higher performance, next generation aircraft.”

I was unable to find a better (bigger, more legible) version of the graphic from the original source Machine Design article  which describes what the system does.

At this point, I can hear the pilots in our group saying "what happens if the engine dies?  Then you can't steer, you can't change attitude, you can't do anything".  That has to be a concern.  Mechanical control systems had redundant cables in case one broke.  Fly by wire systems are designed with redundancy and emergency back up systems to keep them available in case the power dies.  You'll rarely run across a group of people more interested in system integrity and redundancy hardware than pilots.  In this case, it looks like the aircraft designers and airframe owners might be really happy to save the size, weight, power and cost (SWAPC) of the current systems to go to this approach, but they aren't going to give up safety and redundancy. 

It occurs to me that flaps are most needed during takeoff and landing, but during takeoff is a bad time to take some of the engine thrust to do anything else.  While commercial aircraft are rated to perform a safe takeoff and landing if one of their two engines dies at the worst moment, adding more thrust requirements for the tiny amount of time of takeoff might be the point of diminishing returns.

File this away as something to keep an eye on.  Flapless demo aircraft have flown before, I just don't find evidence that aircraft without ailerons have flown before.  It seems revolutionary. 

Happy Kwanzaa to Idiot Liberals

I think the best stuff I've read on the made-up holiday of Kwanzaa comes from the acerbic wit of Ann Coulter.  I've linked to a piece from 2013, but she re-uses most of it often because the facts don't change.  You should RTWT, but I'll lift some of it here to tease your appetite.

It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga -- aka Dr. Maulana Karenga -- founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers. He was also a dupe of the FBI.
....
Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the '60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. They did not seek armed revolution (although some of their most high-profile leaders were drug dealers and murderers). Those were the precepts of Karenga's United Slaves.

United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented "African" names. (That was a huge help to the black community: Three of the four suspects recently arrested for the fatal carjacking at the Short Hills, N.J., mall were named Basim, Hanif and Karif.)

It's as if David Duke invented a holiday called "Anglika," which he based on the philosophy of Mein Kampf -- and clueless public school teachers began celebrating the made-up, racist holiday.
....
Karenga's invented holiday is a nutty blend of schmaltzy '60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. The seven principles of Kwanzaa are the very same seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another innovation of the Worst Generation.

In 1974, Patricia Hearst, kidnap victim-cum-SLA revolutionary, posed next to the banner of her alleged captors, a seven-headed cobra. Each snake head stood for one of the SLA's revolutionary principles: Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba and Imani -- the exact same seven "principles" of Kwanzaa.

Kwanzaa praises collectivism in every possible area of life -- economics, work, personality, even litter removal. ("Kuumba: Everyone should strive to improve the community and make it more beautiful.") It takes a village to raise a police snitch.

Go read.  Is there any other holiday that was created by FBI COINTELPRO? 

I'm sure most of you have seen the Western Rifle Shooters Association link  to a piece on Gab by John Rivers making up a White Kwanzaa like Ann Coulter describes.  (Can't you hear old Bing Crosby singing "I'm dreaming... of a White Kwanzaa"?)  If not: here it is:

Here's a sure sign you're dealing with an idiot: if you hear someone talk about the "country of Africa", or about Africa as some sort of homogeneous culture, instead of hundreds of cultures at war with each other for hundreds - or thousands - of years.  That's the mindset that, aided by mid-60s tax dollars, created Kwanzaa. 

Merry Christmas

It's sort of annual tradition on my part to put up this post, or at least the essence of it, since I revise it regularly.

Tonight, December 24 in the US marks another occasion.  On this night 49 years ago, Christmas eve of 1968, Apollo 8 was on the world's first mission to the moon. Like sailors sailing out of sight of land for the first time, man was leaving the safety of our big rock for the first time. We were becoming a space-faring population.  Here on the ground, 1968 had been a tumultuous year but we were united in watching the Apollo 8 mission in a way few things have united Americans.


I suppose that like most people alive then, I'll never forget that.  I can't imagine the world of trouble a modern crew would be in for what they read back to Earth from about 1:10 on.

Churches, like all groups, have personalities, and in the one I attend, it would be remarkable to toss a wadded up paper ball and not hit an engineer, nurse, doctor, or a tech professional.  It's not news to this bunch that most people say we have no real idea when Jesus was born and that the December 25th date comes from adapting to the Roman Saturnalia or other pagan holidays; nor would they be shocked if you told them Christmas has more secular than holy traditions associated with it and many things that are totally ingrained in the holiday traditions started out as advertising gimmicks.  There was no little drummer boy when the events we portray as the nativity happened; in fact, the entire scene we call the nativity is a conglomeration of bits and pieces from multiple Gospels, and certainly did not happen within the first couple of days of Jesus' life.  Nobody knows how many magi ("wise men") came to visit the child; we say three because of the three gifts listed, but it could have been almost any number.  Furthermore, it wasn't at his birth; it was when Jesus was closer to two years old. 

A friend sent me this contribution on the question of the exact date.

The truth is we simply don’t know the exact date of our Savior’s birth. In fact, we don’t even know for sure the year in which He was born. Scholars believe it was somewhere between 6 B.C. and 4 B.C.  One thing is clear: if God felt it was important for us to know the exact date of the Savior’s birth, He certainly would have told us in His Word. The Gospel of Luke gives very specific details about the event, even down to what the baby was wearing – “swaddling clothes”—and where he slept—“in a manger” (Luke 2:12). These details are important because they speak of His nature and character, meek and lowly. But the exact date of His birth has no significance whatsoever, which may be why God chose not to mention it.

I've heard another explanation for why December 25th was chosen.  It's close to the solstice, the longest night of the year - which made it the darkest night of the year in those days. Jesus was the light of the world, and the symbolism of bringing light when things are at their darkest fits perfectly with the story.  If someone came out with a convincing line of evidence that Jesus really was born on December 25th, I'd be surprised... but not terribly shocked.  Again, paraphrasing that previous quote, not that it matters.

"And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more." -- Dr. Seuss

Hold close the ones you love.  If we're very lucky, this will be the worst Christmas of our lives and everything in life gets better year by year for the rest of our lives.  And if things get worse, we'll remember this as the "good old days".  Either way, hold tight.  And do it "before you dot another 'i' or cross another 't', Bob Cratchit!"

It's one my of my blessings that a group of really great folks stop by here to share my blather - Google says about a 1500 of you every day, which blows my mind.  Thanks.

So however you mark this day, enjoy it well.  Spend time with family or friends or both.  Remember the good service members deployed far from home.  If you're Military, LEO, or fire; EMT, Nurse or MD, and are one who must work while the rest of us rest, thank you.

A Little Ham Radio Side Project

With the solar cycle at near minimum levels, propagation on the higher ham bands (roughly above 14 MHz) has been mostly the Miss portion of hit or miss.  That leads to an emphasis on the lower bands, 3.5, 7, 10, and 14 MHz - there's also a band at 1.8MHz that I've never been that interested in for some reason.  I think I've said here before that all my antenna projects begin with "when it cools off", so now's the time for messing around with antennas.

One of the characteristics of the lower bands is the higher noise levels, and the old ham axiom "if you can't hear 'em, you can't work 'em" is as true now as it was a hundred years ago.  The noise levels, especially 10 MHz and below are far higher (over 1 Million times higher) than the weakest signals the radios can demodulate, which means the radios don't usually determine what you can hear; the local noise does.  This is a plot from  "Reference Data for Engineers".

The vertical scale is how much higher the noise is at some frequency, compared to than the normal noise in the receiver bandwidth. Note that just below 10 MHz, the largest noise source by far is the "atmospheric night" noise level; at 1MHz, it looks to be over 100 dB higher than the radio's noise (10 billion times higher).  The diagonal lines show some measurements of noise in business areas, residential areas, rural and "Quiet rural" areas.  The noise at a quiet rural location, perhaps a deserted island, is the only place you can go where the noise approaches being below sky sources (besides the sun). 

One of the tricks that hams do to try to reduce the noise level is to use a small, steerable antenna; they receive less signal as well as less noise, but the signal is not always as reduced as the noise is.  This sounds odd, but often the noise is coming from a different direction than the signal is, and by steering the antenna, the noise can be lowered more than the signal.  Loops tend to be sensitive edge on, so pointing the edges at the desired signal peaks it, and turning the loop broadside to the signal decreases it.  With luck the noise might be coming from a different enough direction that the antenna reduces it even a little bit.  Every little dB helps.

Most ham antennas are generally sized to be 1/4 to 1/2 wavelength at the operating frequency, so a small antenna would be under a quarter wave.* 

One of the most popular loop antennas was designed by an engineer and publisher named Gary Breed, K9AY, and his antenna is generally called a "K9AY Loop".  Gary designed his antenna for the 1.8 MHz (160 meter) amateur band, finding it useful for 3.5-4.0 (80 meter) and 7.0-7.35 (40 meter) bands.  A typical installation uses two loops set up at right angles to each other, with each loop looking like this:

The three corners are supported by handy trees or posts, and the little "matching transformer" on the left becomes a relay box for switching between the two loops.  Why two loops?  It electrically steers the antenna so that the peak and null directions are different. 

My main interest is an antenna for the 10 MHz ham band (30 meters), so I thought about scaling this down by 10/1.8 or shrinking by a factor 5.6.  After some pondering, I decided to try for the 40m band and scaled it by 3.9.  The important part is the loop length, so I made that 21.8' around.  I don't have handy trees and I don't intend to make it a permanent installation.  Yet.  I'm gathering the parts to make an antenna to play experiment with out of PVC pipe and fittings.  Naturally, I modeled it in 3D CAD (Rhino3d). 

The dimensions aren't readable when scaled out this far, but the center is an 8' tall piece of 2" schedule 40 PVC pipe.  The cross members are 1" PVC, which may sag given that they're 4'4" long. Since the loop is going to be #22 wire, it's not like there's much weight out there, but they may sag under their own weight. The base it stands on is all 2' sections of PVC with some Tees joining them.

This is going to be carried out into the yard for experimenting and then stuck on the back porch when not in use.  Gary's original design is permanent and the ends of the loop terminate in a ground rod, so I'm going to terminate them in a quarter wavelength wire that will stretch out along the grass while it's in use and just be rolled up into a handful of wire when it's on the back porch.

Given the nature of the next couple of days, it will be Tuesday or later before I start building it.

* A couple of nearly indispensable things to memorize: a quarter wave in feet is 234/f with f in MHz.  A half wave is twice that, 468/f.   If you try to derive that from the speed of light you'll get confused because you'll come up with different numbers.   These are about 5% short because lengths of wiring have an "end effect" that makes them behave a little differently.  Besides; 234 and 468 are easy numbers to remember!

Looks Like Concealed Carry Reciprocity is Dead

With the senate on the verge of going home for the year and ending the session, it looks like the Concealed Carry Reciprocity bill has successfully been killed off by the swamp.  The last I heard, mid-afternoon, was that the House was going to pass a "continuing resolution" to stave off the imaginary debt ceiling and then go home.

The House's version, the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017, HR38 (pdf version) and the Senate version, S446 are both left hanging.  The Senate version was pigeonholed last January, and the House Bill had the "Fix NICs" bill, HR 4477 stuck onto it a few weeks ago.

Gun writer Alan Korwin, who writes under the name "the Uninvited Ombudsman" takes a look at the monstrosity the House bill was turned into in his weekly Page Nine mailing.  As you'd expect, when you don't watch every step of how the sausage is being made, the unscrupulous are sure to mix some turds into the law to make sure it's ineffective or just not passed.  Add to that the appalling lack of knowledge of firearms we typically see elected officials displaying and you can imagine the bill can get messed up.  Korwin lists a lot of things that might make you say "is that the best you can do?" For starters:

• The House bill makes LOCAL or STATE “gun-free zones” into federal gun-free zones.
• The House bill makes PRIVATE “gun-free zones” into federal gun-free zones.
• "The term ‘handgun’ includes any magazine for use in a handgun and any ammunition loaded into the handgun or its magazine."  [Direct text copy from the pdf - SiG]

Korwin argues that the last sentence there is changing the definition of handgun. Not only is a magazine a handgun, but the ammunition is a handgun.  That could argue a loaded 15-round magazine would be 16 handguns under the House bill.  I think they were trying to say that a magazine loaded into a handgun is just part of the handgun, but that doesn't look like what they actually say.  If you carry a spare magazine with 15 rounds in it, are you carrying one gun or 17? 

He also posits that the first sentence means the STATE (think New York or California) could say its roads are state property and gun-free zones.  That would elevate violating those laws to federal offenses. Any state is free to establish any gun-free zones they'd like to have, and now those are federal gun-free zones. 

It seems to be a giant escape clause for the anti-gun states.

What seems to be clear is that all Federal lands will be covered by reciprocity.  From the text of HR 38, the following are covered by this law.  As long as you can get to them on state roads:

(A)  A unit of the National Park System.
(B)  A unit of the National Wildlife Refuge System.
(C)  Public land under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management.
(D)  Land administered and managed by the Army Corps of Engineers.
(E)  Land administered and managed by the Bureau of Reclamation.
(F)  Land administered and managed by the Forest Service.’’.

In overview, there's a lot to like about the law. It's intended for just what it says: concealed carry permits recognized like drivers' licenses are.  If you carry a concealed weapon and have a photo ID, that's all you need.  Constitutional carry is supported.  Freedom from spurious search by LEO, including fines for departments that don't obey, is also in there.  If they could clean up some of this confusion about guns, magazines and ammunition, that would be better.  If they could ensure that states can't declare every road in the state a gun free zone it would be fantastic

The Fix NICS provisions appear to be aimed at causing more false positives in the NICS system so that more purchasers are denied (John Lott estimates they're running at 99% false positives).  (That was sarcarm)  Other than that, there doesn't appear to be new things, just efforts to get more people put into the NICS system.  Korwin points out a scary line:

Every two years the AG must assess whether Fix NICS has “resulted in improvements in the system established under this section.” Improvements measured how? It’s not defined.

Of course the AG will say they're doing great!  As long as there are no standards to define "improvement", they're always getting better.  I don't know, maybe not if they can request more money to get more better.

As I started out saying, it appears the bill is dead. With congress gone for the year, it looks like it's moot to talk about.  Just like the hearing protection act, and the other gun laws that were eagerly looked forward to, it's dead.  Better luck next year.

(image from my homies at Springfield Armory.  I figure with all the SA guns around the house, the least they can do for me is let me use this picture)