My Little Side Project

Back at the start of June, I posted a little piece about a friend gifting me a junk guitar.  It's a Breedlove that was made years ago and that apparently was some sort of a sales demo.  (There's a label inside that says it's an Atlas Series, and while I can find mention of that series in many places, no mention of when they were made.)  It was missing easily replaced pieces, and had a large chunk of the left side cut out of it so that potential buyers could see how it was made.  The original was an acoustic-electric with a nice electronics package that went away at some point over the years.

The idea is that it's about as broken as broken can be, so I can mess with it with complete impunity.  Pull frets to learn how to replace them?  Why not?  Crack the sound board to see if I can fix that crack?  Steam the neck off?  I probably can't break it worse than it is.   Naturally, I said, "sure I'll take it".

It has a solid Sitka spruce soundboard (top), which isn't that uncommon once you get past the very cheapest guitars; the back, though, is solid rosewood and that's something I expect to find only in fairly high end guitars.  The closest equivalent I know of on the market today seems to be the Fender Paramount PM-3 Deluxe at a K-buck.  The sides are rosewood laminate (plywood), but a guitar's sides are largely structural and don't affect sound very much. So while it has obvious problems, it's basically a good guitar, not one of those cheap, plywood guitars for beginners.  In other words, while it's a junk guitar, it's not a "junk guitar".

When I got it in June, I said:

My mental gears are turning.  I'm curious about how it sounds now.  I could get a set of tuners, nut and saddle and have it able to make sounds for under $100 - maybe half that if I use no-name parts. That's probably necessary, too.  I mean, I can't tell if I ruined a setup, or added a fret that buzzes unless I can get sounds out of it.  The foot long hole in the side will be a problem, but I can live with that.  Actually, several custom luthiers make guitars with a solid body and the sound hole moved up to the top edge, making this example an extreme version of this approach.

It turned out that the cost was way below $100.  $27.06  to be precise.  I bought a set of no-name import tuners on eBay for $8.06 - including shipping - and a pre-notched, nut and saddle made from "bone" for the other $19 (it doesn't say what the bone is from, but "bone" is a commonly used material for these parts).   I bought those parts before my medical emergency back in late June and they've been sitting.  I finally got around to installing them over the weekend.

This view shows the "oversized top edge sound hole" as well as the bone saddle... 

while this view shows the el-cheapo tuners and nut. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it did require a little adjustment when I put strings on and tried to tune it up.  Certain notes around the middle of the neck didn't play; I'd try for the 6th fret and get the 7th fret note. The neck of a guitar is supposed to be slightly lower in the middle frets than at the nut or back at the body.  I just needed to adjust the truss rod a little to get it to play easily.  The rest of the fret board seems fine; no buzzing sounds which means the frets are probably fairly flat and level.  That's a little surprising in a demo piece like this was. 

Just why they cut this one up is hard to know.  I mean, did they cut up QC rejects that were destined for the trash bin, were they pulled from regular production, or were they made especially for this purpose?  I was a bit afraid that when I put tension on the strings that the whole thing would collapse like so much cardboard; or, at least, the bridge would go flying.  Everything is fine, though.  It actually sounds pretty nice, even with that large chunk of side missing.  It points the sound up at me somewhat better than across the room, so I'm sure it sounds different from where I'm sitting than where Mrs. Graybeard is while I play.  Hey!  Not bad for $27.  

A Techy Tuesday Special - Conspiracy Theories and Reality

Call this one the 9/11 edition.

Back on the 11th, I seriously contemplated writing something about how foolish the conspiracy theories sound based on even the smallest amounts of knowledge of construction techniques.  Add in knowledge of metallurgy of the level that a working blacksmith or welder gets, this video says plenty, let alone the knowledge of a working civil or mechanical engineer and they seem even sillier.  The way things fail is the subject of a high level mechanical engineering study usually called fracture mechanics.  I have a little exposure to it from an undergrad required elective, but it's a specialized area that I wouldn't pretend to qualified to talk about.  The only thing I can say with self-assurance is that when things are breaking, or exploding, they don't necessarily follow the neat, tidy little order that many would assume.  As I've commented before, humans tend to think in straight lines, and Euclidean geometry; God tends to think in partial differential equations. 

Why didn't I write the piece?  Basically, I think it's a waste of time.  One of the key elements of conspiracy theories is that the people who believe them tend to believe them with a faith that won't be swayed.  People often say that if someone argues against the conspiracy theory, that person must be part of the conspiracy!  Their minds are shut, they are convinced of what they want to be convinced, and contrary evidence will not be examined.  Did you notice that I just said I don't feel qualified to talk about the complexities of fracture mechanics?  You'll note that hasn't stopped the "9/11 truthers" from saying plenty about things they're not qualified to write about. 

Today, I ended up at Fred Reed's place, Fred on Everything, and he had a great piece on this very subject.  Go read.  In that piece, Fred links to the Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society's December 2001 analysis of what happened in the buildings.  It's definitely a good read.  They in turn link to an updated summary from late 2007 at the same journal.  I believe this was one of the main sources for the famous Popular Mechanics examination of what happened. 

So this is not being offered here to dissuade the conspiracy theorists because that's impossible; rather it's being offered for my more rational readers who find Fred funny and a fun guy to read.  The remainder is for the readers who might be interested in the details that have been teased out of the available data. 

Although it's not related to 9/11, this is the British De Havilland Comet, the world's first commercial jet.  The Comet 1 crashed too often and the airplane's windows were determined to be the cause.  Mechanical analysis showed that the square windows caused concentrations of stress from the flexing of the aircraft in those corners; what we now call stress risers.  You'll note (if you haven't already) every jet you get on today has rounded window corners.  This is why.

Solar Update - Late Summer 2016

Technically it's late summer for a few more days. 

I ordinarily post these updates every six months, but what happens is I go to the source website and if they don't have the charts up to date early in the month I tell myself to go back in a few days.  Six months from the last update was in August; I went to the source and the July update wasn't there.  I forgot to go back until now. 

You can see the real numbers keep tracking below the predicted values (in red), with a tendency to be quite low - a smoothed sunspot number of 10 when the predicted is 40.  The last six months show more variation than the stretch from late 2015 through the February report. 

As a refresher, the dark blue line is the Smoothed Average, the last three readings averaged; the dark dots are individual readings while the featureless red curve is the predicted value.  This solar cycle is predicted to hit its minimum around 2020, which is still quite a while away.  The sunspot number is likely to get quite a bit lower, running around zero by late 2017 and staying that low for several years.  Note that when you see a sunspot number of 35, that doesn't mean you could look at the sun and find 35 separate spots; its a weighted combination of groups and the spots in those groups.  There's an excellent explanation here.

I've also been tracking the Planetary A index, a measure of geomagnetic storming, every 6 months, and the August chart follows:

It appears to have reached its interim peak in the last six months of charting and is trending toward lower levels, too, but is still on a par with levels from the declining years of the last cycle: 2006 and a couple of spikes through 2008.  As I've said before, while I don't understand it, the "tribal knowledge" in amateur radio circles is that geomagnetic disturbances tend to be more common in the declining years of a sunspot cycle.  The previous cycle (cycle 23) peaked at the end of 2002; and storming increased until mid '2004 (that A index peak at the end of '04 was the largest solar flare observed in the satellite era).

And to quote myself even more:

As I've posted before, this is the weakest solar cycle in 100 years, which means no living solar scientist has seen a cycle this weak, and our records of what the sun was doing back then are more sparse than what's available now.  Since no living scientist has seen a cycle this weak, expect all predictions to be even less accurate than usual.

My interest in solar activity grew out of the shortwave radio listening hobby I started when I was about 13 years old.  That was in the cycle right after the strongest one on record, which peaked in 1957.  Solar activity acts to increase the density of the ionosphere, which raises the frequency at which radio waves are bent back to Earth.  Following the highest frequency that will propagate between two points, the Maximum Usable Frequency or MUF, is generally the way to hear (or talk with) the most distant points on the globe with the lowest loss of signal.  It's only in the last 20 years or so has it seemed that the solar cycle might affect things like our climate, our food supply, and life in general.

I've Been Modeling

Not like that.  Unless Danskin came out with a line of workout unitards for walruses and needed a spokeswalrus. 

I've spent much of the last week modeling the layout for the CNC controller box for the G0704 project.  My goal was to find any problems before I put it together, so that I minimize the amount of time I spend working on it.  Along the way, I've found lots of gotchas, big and small, so it hasn't been a wasted effort at all.  I've found I was missing essentials I should have, like wire.  I have a spool of #24, which is nowhere good enough for the high current lines.  I found models for several widely used parts online that would be really time consuming to do myself.  DB9 and DB25 connectors for example.  I thought it was done on Friday, and did this decent rendering of the box with everything in place but the wiring. 

First thing to note is that the back of the box is at the bottom of this image.  The front is at the top and if you look on the left edge, you'll see that the front panel is floating in air, about a half inch in front of the bottom.  The bottom plate is bigger than what's shown here, but that extra space is unusable.  With that out of the way, the long box on the left is my 48V supply, the four identical black blocks with green blocks on top are the KL-6050 motor drivers.  Over on the right is the C35 BOB from CNC4PC.  There's a side panel that it mounts to which isn't visible here.  On the right side of the back panel, you'll see 5 orange blobs that are the DB25 for the printer port (right), and the four DB9 connectors which will carry the four voltage signals to the stepper motors.  Inside the back panel, around the middle, is a 120mm computer fan (AC power), and above it is a white block with brown spacers on it and flat terminals coming out of the ends; this is an EMI line filter.  These are supposed to keep electrical noise generated inside the box on the inside, and keep out electrical noise coming from the outside.  In the upper right corner is a beige block with a red knob on it; that's the emergency STOP! button.  It wires to the BOB. 

With the pieces in place, including a spare motor controller for an additional axis, it was time to start figuring out where the holes go.  I wanted to produced dimensioned drawings of the front, back and bottom.   The more I looked at the details of how all of this gets hooked up, the BOB sitting on the sidewall kept being a problem.  It seemed like the only way around that was to make hand wired 25 pin printer cable extension about a foot long.  I figure that's painful at best, and probable outcomes just get worse from there, so I went shopping for a ready made cable under a foot long that I could squeeze in there.  Ribbon cable would be best because of its flexibility.  The standard interface on CNC BOBs has male connectors, so I'd need a male on the back panel to accept the cable, then turn that into a female to mate with the BOB.  The best I could find was a 3 foot standard printer cable, and that's not going to fit rolled up inside the box.  While searching, I found some hard plastic adapters that are designed for the same basic thing - DB25M to DB25F.  The problem there is I have to hard mount the adapter to the rear panel, which floats, and make sure the hard mounted BOB was in exactly the right place in 3-space so that they connect, including plugging together.  If I'm going to do that, the better approach is to cut out the back panel for the DB25 and mount the board to the back panel.  Only I can't; there's no hardware on the card to do that.

The answer is to make a right angle bracket that holds the board up, and allows the connector to poke through the back.  I have plenty of 3/8 aluminum a few inches wide, and drew a simple right angle bracket in Rhino.  Mrs. Graybeard was looking at it and started asking about why it was like that, so I explained it was just stuff I know I have and can make work, but I'm open to anything.  She goes out into the garage, rummages around in a storage tub of old computer stuff and comes in with a steel sheet mounting bracket for a hard drive.  One of these, to be precise.  It's actually going to be tight in there and I'm not entirely sure it will work, but I can cut that hard drive holder back on the bandsaw if I have to.  There's no bent portion to mount the bracket to the bottom plate, so a small piece of aluminum scrap will work for that.  I'll use 3/8" thick, about 1x3, so I can tap some holes in it to mount the bracket, and then mounting screws from the bottom to hold everything in place. 

No more 25 pin cable. 

While looking for some small parts in my ham shack "junk box", I inadvertently stumbled across a way to drastically cut down the size of the components I'm using for handling the AC mains voltage. 

On the left is small metal box, 1 1/4" tall and 2 1/4" wide.  It includes an on/off switch, an AC line cord interface (the ones you'll find on many pieces of home electronics), a fuse holder (under the red rectangle) and a line filter.  That one little box takes the place of the pile to its right in this picture plus a fuse holder.  It also simplifies my wiring by reducing all those interconnections.  On closer examination, the one in this picture isn't really good for this box.  It's rated for 3 Amps at 120 through the filter, and I'm planning for more than that.  A new one rated for higher current doesn't cost that much, about $25 from Digikey.  It should ship pretty quickly.

So just when I thought I was done modeling the box, the box changed again.  A lot. 

At the moment, I think this is done, but I thought that a few days ago.  I can start wiring up DB9 connectors for the motors, and figuring out how all this connects to the mill.  And I can start taking the mill apart to put the CNC conversion in place.  Then this can percolate in our minds and hopefully not change too much. 

Still chugging along, a little bit every day.

Echoing BRM on the Clinton Corruption

Echoing Bayou Renaissance Man's call to spread this far and wide.  Here's the background.  Donald Trump held campaign stops and a rally in Miami yesterday.  At one stop, this Haitian-American from New Jersey came forward with a detailed, personal story of his encounters with the Clintons from the 1990s forward.  In the '90s he was the President of the Haitian Senate.

After the big Haitian earthquake in 2010, most of us heard that the world had donated billions of dollars in relief funds.  Most of us also heard that very little of that money really went to help Haiti.  The news media reported it as the donors not actually sending what they pledged.  Perhaps that's not right.  

Most will recall that Bill Clinton and Bush the Elder were famously portrayed as an odd-couple, bipartisan team going around and raising money for Haiti.  Now it seems we know where at least some of that money ended up: the Clinton Foundation, a money laundering enterprise for Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Economics QoTW

This from Bill Bonner's diary, an entry called A Sure Sign the Economy is Doomed.  I'm not 100% sure you can read that link, but you should if you can. 

“On Tuesday, German household-products giant Henkel and French pharmaceutical company Sanofi issued a total of €1.5 billion ($1.7 billion) of new bonds at yields of minus 0.05%.”

Nick might have added an exclamation point; never, in the last 5,000 years for which we have records has loaned money yielded less than nothing.

And since money didn’t even exist before that, we can presume that it has never before happened in the history of the universe.

Bill waxes poetic about all of the changes the world has seen in the last 5000 years, in which no one has ever loaned money to a corporation or bank and told them, "don't bother to pay all of it back".  I might say that to a friend, but if I'm buying bonds to help a company grow, that's money I could be spending on something else, and I'm paying the opportunity cost of not having my money to buy ...whatever I want, from pizza to more ammo.  I want the company to compensate me for that loss of the use of my money by paying interest on those bonds.  So I'm sure not buying those bonds.

The only way in which that makes any sense at all is the buyers are sitting on ludicrously large piles of money and think they'll lose more money by buying stocks or other instruments.  After all, if it was a small amount of money, the bank of Serta has even less loss.  It's just that billions of dollars require too many mattresses.  They know that government bonds are taking even more money than Henkel and Sanofil, and they think there's a bigger risk they'll lose more money putting it in a bank than buying those corporate bonds - which means they think it's more likely that the bank will fail and they lose everything or the bank will give them a haircut.  The Financial Times story puts it this way:

“Investors can park their cash in a higher-yielding instrument than is usually available,” said Rupert Lewis, head of European bond syndicate at BNP Paribas, who worked on both deals.

Two-year German Bunds yield minus 0.67 per cent, so the Henkel bond offers investors a premium of 52 basis points over the so-called risk-free rate on sovereign bonds.

(source)

NASA Chief Not A Fan of Private Space Companies

Dinosaur.

In an interview quoted in ARS Technica, NASA Administrator Charlie Bowden said he doesn't think it's the place of companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to be developing heavy boosters.  At least not yet.

On Tuesday, during a Q&A session at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Space 2016 Conference, Bolden was asked for his opinion on the emerging market for small satellites and launchers. He chose to respond instead with his thoughts on NASA's own rocket, the Space Launch System, and private-sector development of larger launch vehicles.

"If you talk about launch vehicles, we believe our responsibility to the nation is to take care of things that normal people cannot do, or don’t want to do, like large launch vehicles," Bolden said. "I’m not a big fan of commercial investment in large launch vehicles just yet."

In this graphic, courtesy of Blue Origin, they show the relative sizes of the launch vehicles compared to our 60 year old standard for large launch vehicles, the Saturn V.  All of these vehicles are currently flying except the Falcon Heavy and the two Glenn versions (and, of course, the Saturn V).   

You'll note that the Falcon Heavy and the Glenn are in the class of the largest launch vehicles that exist, with both being projected to launch 70 metric tons to low Earth orbit (LEO).  It also means two private US corporations are planning rockets that will compete with the biggest things NASA has ever built, including its proposed Space Launch System.

The key difference, of course, is cost. Development of Falcon Heavy and New Glenn will cost US taxpayers nothing, or next to nothing, in direct expenditures. Per-flight costs will probably be roughly on the order of $200 million per launch.

The space agency, however, is expected to spend $13 billion on design and development of SLS and its ground systems alone through its first flight in late 2018. An estimate by Ars suggested that it will cost NASA about $60 billion for 20 launches of the SLS rocket through the 2030s.

Read that as $200 million per launch with private sector vs. $3 billion with NASA, and I'm not completely clear that doesn't include some development costs.  But don't worry, it gets worse for "Muslim outreach" Bowden.

Despite the demonstrable efforts by both SpaceX and Blue Origin, Bolden nonetheless said that "normal people" cannot, or do not want to, develop large launch vehicles. What the administrator appears to be asserting here is that NASA is more special, or better, than those in the private sector when it comes to building rockets. This exceptionalism is curious, considering that NASA hasn't actually built a rocket since the 1970s and the space shuttle and that the SLS is highly derivative of shuttle components, including its engines and side-mounted solid rocket boosters.

It's also unclear why Bolden would not be a "fan" of commercial investment in large launch vehicles. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin, at their own expense and risk, are seeking to build heavy lift rockets that will augment the launch capability of the United States. Both companies have developed brand new engines (the Merlin 1D by SpaceX and BE-4 by Blue Origin) at a time when a major new rocket engine hasn't been brought forward in the United States in decades and when US national security offices must rely on Russian engines to deliver their spy satellites into space.

You'll also note that both SpaceX and Blue Origin are planning on reusability of their first stages, and both companies have successfully recovered them.  SpaceX was scheduled to launch their first reused rocket before the end of this year - which will be the first rocket ever reused for a paying customer - when their pad explosion occurred and grounded their program.  NASA's SLS is fully expendable; nothing comes back.  Just like the Saturn V.  

Bolden's attitude, surprising as it might be to rational folks like you, me and the writers at Ars, is not unusual.  NASA's (and Bolden's!) former Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said in a November 2015 talk,

“The NASA people would say, ‘Come on Lori, you’ve got to talk to Elon because we got out of low-Earth orbit. We’re giving him that, but you’ve got to get him out of long-term, deep space, because that’s ours,’” Garver recalled. “I thought, fundamentally, you just don’t understand. We’re not in a race in a swimming pool where everyone is racing against one another. We’re in a cycling race where the government is riding point and the others are drafting behind us, and if someone comes alongside us and can pass us because they’ve found a better way, we don’t get out our tire pump and stick it between their spokes.”

She said it best, perhaps, when she made this observation.

“NASA was a very symbol of capitalist ideals when we went to the Moon and beat the Russians,” she said. “Now what we’re working with is more of a socialist plan for space exploration, which is just anathema to what this country should be doing. Don’t try to compete with the private sector. Incentivize them by driving technologies that will be necessary for us as we explore further.”

You might imagine she wasn't terribly popular at NASA.   She "made more than a few enemies in Congress and at NASA. She stepped on the toes of center directors. She got crosswise with the astronaut corps. And she didn’t always play nice with NASA’s traditional aerospace partners, who expected fat contracts from the space agency but also flexible deadlines."  NASA, though, long ago became an arthritic bureaucracy incapable of much beside shuffling papers; an insider told me, back in the '90s, that the miracle of NASA was that despite all the road blocks put in the way, they still managed to accomplish things.  It's a shadow of its former glory days in the 60s and 70s.  It still has the infrastructure, which translates into NASA centers in many congressional districts, which inevitably translates into money being passed around in DC.  For dinosaurs like Charlie Bolden. 

Personally, I think Bolden is afraid that one day in eight or ten years, he'll be watching SpaceX astronauts landing on Mars on TV, while the SLS and NASA are still bound to LEO.  

World's Second Largest Known Meteorite Recovered in Argentina

The second largest meteorite known to man was pulled out of the ground in Campo del Cielo, Argentina over the last weekend.   It's been named the Gancedo meteorite, after the small town nearest where it was found.  Campo del Cielo ("Field of Heaven") is a well known site among meteor collectors, and at any rock show you're likely to find some pieces of Campo del Cielo meteorites for sale.  Or just search on eBay. 

Campo del Cielo is rife with iron meteorites estimated to have fallen around 4,000 years ago. What makes Gancedo unusual is its massive size, with a weight estimated at around 68,000 pounds (31,000 kilograms).

The Mail science tech page sums it up this way:

The original space rock weighed an estimated 800 tonnes and hailed from the Main Asteroid Belt located between Mars and Jupiter.

It split into multiple meteorites that branched out over an area of approximately 124 square miles (320 square kilometres).

Note that "space rock" is entirely wrong.  This is a iron-nickle meteorite, not rock, and they call it iron elsewhere in the piece.  

With specimens going for around $1/gram on eBay, that's $31,000,000.  That's a joke, lame as it may be.  It's undoubtedly more valuable intact.  The largest known meteorite in the world is the Hoba meteorite in Namibia, estimated to weigh more than 132,000 pounds.  It has never been removed from the ground and is a tourist site.

This is the Gancedo meteorite from Argentina.

You never know when something like this can hit.  All jokes about SMOD aside, a meteor of the size that resulted in the Campo del Cielo field is thought to be a once in "a couple" thousand years event meaning "we're overdue".  Could be tonight, or it could be in hundreds of years. 

Techy Tuesday - How Do They Make Those Things Anyway?

Back at the end of August, we spoke briefly about how silicon carbide (SiC) wafers are processed.  My point there wasn't how chemically pure SiC wafers are turned into transistors, but how SiC wafers were handled.  The main point of that article was how a company had developed a new way of handling the wafers; instead of slicing them apart with diamond wire saws, they used a laser to break chemical bonds a few molecules below the surface of crystal, letting the slice almost slide off with no effort.  The resulting wafer still needed to be polished, as was the case in the old method, but the new approach yielded massive improvements in efficiency.   They produced 50% more wafers through reduced material losses and produced wafers in 16% of the time of the old method.

First a note.  Some people may have very minimal knowledge of electronics.  You may want to see my "The Least You Should Know" series, in particular Electronics 1 and Electronics 2. 

The question came up, though, "just how do they make those complex integrated circuits?", and it's a deep question.  The short answer is by photographic processes, but that doesn't really tell you much.  Especially in the modern geometries we speak about - 14nm and smaller.  Here, features are the size of a group of atoms; perhaps 50 or 60 atoms.  Photographically, you can reduce an image, but can you reduce it that far?  It doesn't take place with one photographic process, there are multiple steps and they require the "masks" to align to very high precision.  Light can't be used to shine through photographic masks (just dark and light areas) because light waves are too big.  Generations of transistors ago, designers compensated photo masks for how the diffraction of light would degrade the features they were trying to create.  Now they've gone to shorter and shorter wavelengths, extreme ultraviolet light, to keep the wave nature of light from destroying their work. 

Wait.  Masks?  Photographic processes?  Extreme ultraviolet light?  How incredibly exotic.  How did transistors ever get invented and made?  A few years ago, I discovered this 2010 video where self-taught  engineer Jeri Ellsworth describes making a type of FET (Field Effect Transistor) at home with specialized but homemade equipment and the right chemicals.  It's 8 minutes long, but it captures the essence of the process.  To begin with, the vast majority of electronics hobbyists would say it's not possible to make a transistor at home, without a semiconductor fab.  But the first transistors and first integrated circuits were made before fabs existed, and while they were crude by today's standards, they worked.  If one can gather the equipment and supplies required, they can make functional transistors this way.  Here she demonstrates the transistors working.

A silicon wafer is first heated, and exposed to steam at high temperatures to create an oxide layer.  Then it's coated with a photoresist that cures on the wafer, exposed to light which causes the photoresist to break down and expose some areas of the silicon oxide layer.  The wafer is then treated with Hydrofluoric Acid (nasty stuff!) to etch away the silicon oxide, exposing bare silicon again.  The bare silicon is treated with yet more chemicals, and this process repeated.  The process with complex integrated circuits, which can include transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors (and very rarely because they take so much room on the wafer - inductors), is essentially the same as what Jeri does, just repeated many more times and using some different chemicals.  The manufacturing of a complex chip like a Digital Signal Processor can have over a thousand or 1500 operations from bare wafer to final product.  It can require a few hundred additions of materials, and etching some or most of it away.

A couple of entertaining videos are here, only a few years old, and a considerably older video from Phillips here.  While the Phillips video talks about geometries and numbers of parts that are rather dated, those processes are still used, as we also talked about. 

This is a very deep subject; there are multiple textbooks available.  I can only touch the surface here and give you a very superficial idea of how it's done, but it's still remarkable stuff.

This is the die of a Texas Instruments Digital Signal Processor, a TMS320C25, a "second generation DSP" - I've worked with these.  DSPs are specialized microprocessors that are very good at floating point operations and especially signal processing algorithms, like a Discrete Fourier Transform.  I don't know how many transistors are in this, but would guess around a billion.  The low power magnification here can barely hint at the complexity that would be seen at high powers. 

The Small Manufacturing Revolution Gets a New Tool

Over the years, I've written several times of the new industrial revolution.  It's called convergence. 

With the advance of personal fabrication - the intersection of home CNC, 3D printing, continually more powerful digital electronics, what's called the Maker movement, it is literally getting to the point where you will be able to buy anything you need to make any gun you want. To use the cliche' again, "you can't stop the signal".

Just substitute "anything" for "any gun" in that paragraph because it really is that big.  For a new capability to add to that list of home CNC machine tools, and 3D printing, I'd like to direct your attention to Kickstarter, to the first desktop waterjet cutting machine, called the Wazer.  I don't usually link to Kickstarter, and no, I have no connection to the folks producing this, but the machine is revolutionary, and the project is completely funded (430% as of tonight) with 59 days to go.  Waterjet cutting machines have been known for being the province of major manufacturing companies, like the aerospace industry: large and expensive machines that require significant infrastructure and high maintenance.  This machine holds the promise of bringing waterjet cutting to the small shop and the hobbyist shop. 

What is a waterjet cutting and why would one want it?  As the name implies, the cutting is done with a very fine, very high pressure jet of water.  Water, while erosive, isn't much of a cutting tool, so its charged with abrasive particles.  They use the term "garnet" for it: garnet is a moderately hard stone that has historically been used as an abrasive - you can still buy garnet paper.  It's a non-toxic, safe abrasive, just a harder version of the silicon dioxide sand in sandpaper. 

The abrasive particles allow the waterjet to cut anything from common metals like steel or aluminum, to titanium, glass, ceramics, carbon fiber sheets, and more.  Because it's a computer controlled machine (CNC), it can cut any shape outline you might want.  There are several interesting examples to look at on the Kickstarter page.  For metals, you might compare this to a plasma cutting machine, and there are home CNC plasma cutters, too.  The plasma cutters don't cut the materials like carbon fiber, fiberglass, glass or tile. 

While this isn't directly up my alley, it's yet another example of how manufacturing is becoming more democratized.  Today, someone looking to start a home business that makes one-of, specialized, or personalized items, like the Studio Neat stand, has their choice of 3D printers in a bewildering array of sizes and capabilities, CNC machine tools or routers in a similarly bewildering array, small laser cutters or engravers for under $100, (or more capable versions that cost more, of course), plasma cutters and more.  This adds yet another tool to the small shop's domain.  It's the convergence of the digital revolution with improvements in motor manufacturing, and half a dozen other things.  It is the future.

9/11 15 Years After

While sipping my coffee this morning, I was watching the annual ceremony of the reading of the names of the 9/11 victims in the WTC.  I don't know why it surprised me to see as much crying as I saw, but I was struck by how raw the wounds from that day still are.  From the way most mass media talks about it, it's like dim distant past, something the country is completely over.  Easy to say if it's not your loved one, coworker, or other friend that died that day. 

In going over my years on this blog, I find I've written only a few posts on 9/11.  I suppose I try to contribute something that other people don't and with the superb writers that are here in the blogosphere, I'm not sure I have much to say that's worthwhile.  I find it's one of those few days in my life where I instantly can vividly recall where I was, what I was doing, and all of the things we saw and heard.  

On that bright Tuesday morning, I was out of the office at a company that we contracted to do some testing on our radios.  As the technician and I were setting up the test, the company's secretary/receptionist came in and said the radio had a bulletin that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center.  My first reaction, perhaps strangely, was that radio navigation systems can't be that wrong, it must have been a terrible accident.  Act of war did not enter my mind.  As the morning went on, a TV set was put in place and large antenna hooked up outside (there are no local TV channels).  We watched the second plane hit and quickly realized this was no accident.  That's when the thoughts of Pearl Harbor and other acts of war started.  I've heard it credited to Ian Fleming as his character Auric Goldfinger, but the saying goes, "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action".  And so it appeared that day. 

In the days that followed, I learned that friends were affected by the events of 9-11, but weren't involved.  A co-worker was on business at Boeing, and had to rent a car to drive home.  A very close friend was waiting at JFK airport to fly home, and saw the attacks in real time.  He also had to rent a car and drive home.  A cousin lives within viewing distance and watched it. And now I have friends who have sons in the armed forces in Afghanistan, and others who have been in Iraq.  We need to remember we are at war, even if our enemy isn't a convenient nation-state.  You can pretend we're not at war if you'd like, but if someone swears to destroy you, it's prudent to believe them.

This post shouldn't be about me.  It's in memory of all those who died that day, and since then.  Let us really never forget.  This poster is several years old, but it'll have to do.  Remember the fallen. 

A Shop Project Milestone

My emphasis this week has been getting my shop computer running.  I've suspected the power supply as going bad in this computer for a long time.  Some time last winter or spring, I tried to turn it on to use my CNC Sherline and it didn't boot up.  The system died somewhere during the boot process.  To shorten the story, I found that by turning it off and on again, it would usually wake up properly and run without a hitch.  It was just the turn-on that didn't work, and only some of the time.  Some times, I'd have to turn it on four or five times to get it to work; other times it would turn on the first time I pushed the button.

A while back, I swapped the computer with another one we were using as a doorstop.  Since the hardware is virtually identical, I took the hard drive from the shop computer and stuck it in the doorstop.  The doorstop never had problems booting, but a couple of times it would just hangup and stop responding to any input.  This is bad if the mill is running, so I was planning to replace it, but have been lucky enough to never face that. 

As part of getting it running again, we turned it on Tuesday morning.  Power supply wouldn't start.  Just in case it was corrosion from sitting around unused, we pulled the power supply connectors and cleaned the connectors out with DeoxIt.  Turned it on after all the cleaning and it started right up.  Did we fix it or were we just lucky?  (One of the philosophical question technicians ask is "how do I know if I fixed an intermittent problem, or only made it more intermittent?")  Wednesday morning it wouldn't start and had to be power cycled again.  That afternoon, I ordered a replacement power supply from Amazon.  The new power supply got here Friday and I've turned the computer on four times without it messing up.  Meanwhile, while the PC was working Tuesday, I built a LiveCD of LinuxCNC and after playing with it a little while, installed Linux as its only operating system.  No dual boot, no Windoze (XP) partition.

Meanwhile, it was off to building up my CNC controller box.  Except not in a box, just laying everything out on the PC side panel on the workbench and wiring it up.  My motors are 570 in-oz steppers I got from Automation Technologies and those are driven by KL-6050 Stepper Motor Drivers from the same folks.  The interface from the computer is via parallel port, which I've been using for over 10 years with Mach3 on my Sherline.  Since LinxCNC is optimized for the parallel port, I'm staying with that.  The printer port can't just drive those motor drivers, and a company called CNC4PC sells what they call a C35 Breakout Board that takes the parallel port cable and maps its signals to outputs to the motor drivers.  All of the outputs from and inputs to the C35, other than that one DB25 parallel port, are on RJ45 connectors, so connecting the C35 to the motor driver inputs is as simple as plugging a short jumper where you want it to go.  Connecting the motors to the motor drivers' outputs is just a little harder.  Six wires have to be stripped 1/4" or so, pushed into a connector and a screw tightened - four wires for the stepper motor windings and two wires for the 48V.   In addition to this, all that's needed is a power supply for the motors, in my case a 48V 10A supply from a vendor on eBay.  Well, the C35 needs 5V at half an amp, so I dedicated an old wall wart to it.  It may be possible to come up with a simpler way to get that, passing 5V from the PC, but this will do for now.  First test of all three motors running a test file I had.  X Y Z from left to right. 

Confession:  I had some problems getting the C35 to respond, so since I had a "known good" system handy, I put the LinuxCNC machine aside and moved my Mach3 over here, with its Sherline configuration file.  Still wouldn't move.  It allowed me to find the paragraph in the datasheet for the board that said I needed to jumper a point on it to the 5V supply.  Once I did that. LEDs on the C35 board turned on and everything started to work.  I'll switch back to the Linux PC tomorrow. 

First motion is always a good milestone to pass. 

A Note To The NeverTrumpers

I suppose the cool kids use a hashtag with that: #nevertrump.  They even have a couple of competing websites.  Isn't that special. 

I have a few things to say to you.  I think I've been particularly quiet about this election.  I see I did two pieces back during our primary process, and mentioned him a few times, but very little specific about the election.  I think Trump is interesting as a phenomenon but I've never really been a supporter.  I mean I've never seen a total outsider run for president and get this close.  He has even less political experience than Obama had in '08, and that's really tough to do.  To get less experience than Obama, a candidate would need to have negative experience.  Heck, Trump essentially has negative experience when you consider how he thought politicians were convenient purchases to get things done for his businesses.  D? R? Doesn't matter.  Buy 'em by the six-pack.

Certain lugubrious talk show hosts (I won't name) are making a big deal about not being able to vote for Trump.  They act like there's some sort of horrible moral quandary associated with not getting the one ideal candidate whom they adore to vote for.  That old "voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil" ideavirus.  Please.  Can we talk like adults here?  

Look, if you honestly think Donald Trump is evil incarnate, go ahead and don't vote.  Join the 60,000 people between the two #nevertrump websites who have signed a pledge to not vote for him.  I personally don't think Trump is evil.  I've read enough stories of nice surprises he's unexpectedly pulled on people to think he's a basically good guy.  I like how he had the kids working: driving heavy equipment, and working with construction crews.  Will he do stupid things?  Of course: he's human.  Also, see the remark about having zero experience in public office.  Will he crash the country?  I think the country might well crash no matter who's in office.  With Hillary it's a slam dunk guarantee, if she isn't lying about her stupid programs while she's campaigning.  With Trump, it's probably inevitable, too.  He won't push as hard as her to destroy the country, it's just that it could be so far gone that repair without "the blood of patriots and tyrants" is no longer possible.

My perspective is that not once in my voting life has the general election offered a candidate I thought was ideal, and I've been voting since 1972.  I've never gotten to vote for a candidate I'm really 100% behind and this year is no exception.  I may get that candidate in the primaries, but by the time the general election gets here, the choice has always, always, always been who the least awful candidate is.  If you #nevertrumpers are just now discovering that shit sandwich: welcome to your mid thirties.  If you're older than that and never experienced that the choice is always for the least bad candidate, you've led a charmed life - or didn't really look at the candidates.  Maybe you just loved Obama, God forbid.

A few days ago, CA at Western Rifle Shooters Association linked to an article called "The Flight 93 Election", with the line that this is the "Charge the Cockpit Election".  Now, I'm pretty bad at metaphors (I'm too literal) and the puzzle over what "charge the cockpit" means in the context of elections didn't really work for me.  It took a few days for it sink in that the analogy is that on flight 93, if we had just defeated the terrorists and got control of the plane back by charging the cockpit, we weren't out of the woods by any means.  It could be that not one of us had a clue how to fly a plane or work the radio or anything.  The only thing that was absolutely sure was that if we did nothing we were dead right then and there.  At least fighting off the terrorists gave us a chance to live. 

And that's the way I'm looking at the election.  Hillary is an absolute DRT.  Trump, for all his tendencies to boast too much and say stupid things, is our only hope to get into a survivable position.  To use Mrs. Graybeard's analogy, someone in our group has a badly bleeding wound.  Could be an artery.  QuickClot causes problems for the doctors later, but it might just keep them alive long enough to get to surgery.  There's really no choice of whether we do it or not.  

The media, from the hard left New York Times and MSNBC to the slightly left Fox, are in full "Destroy Trump!!" mode.  Even though, with the full tilt crap 24/7, I still hear encouraging things from and about Trump.  I don't see it as a hard choice at all.  Would I rather have someone else?  People in hell would rather have air conditioning and ice water.  Doesn't matter.  I really only have the two choices. 

(zazzle.com)
 

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.