Florida's Assault Weapons Ban Consitutional Ballot Far From a Sure Thing

The out of state organization started to put a constitutional amendment in Florida to Ban Assault Weapons Now, BAWN (no, I won't link to them) is off to a rocky start.  BAWN is part of Americans for Gun Safety Now, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Michael Bloomberg Lobbying Industries, Inc. (yes, I made that up).

From an article in Ammoland Shooting Sports News, it appears that three briefs have been filed in the State Supreme Court against BAWN and their intended ballot initiative.

The NRA, Attorney General Ashley Moody and the National Shooting Sports Foundation argued separately in the briefs that the proposed amendment should be blocked.

The NRA argument is largely that this isn't an assault weapons ban, it's a ban of every semiautomatic long gun ever made due to the loose language of the bill.  I have to suspect that to BAWN that's not a bug, it's a feature. 

The ballot proposal would prohibit possession of “semi-automatic rifles and shotguns capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition at once, either in a fixed or detachable magazine, or any other ammunition-feeding device.”

That would certainly ban my 50 year old Remington Nylon 66, my Ruger 10/22, and virtually every rifle that isn't bolt action that's either for sale today or is already in the possession of owners around the state.  Note the phrase I highlighted in bold; that means if you can modify a gun to hold more than 10 rounds by any method that this proposed amendment makes it illegal.  The amendment bans not only the personal possession of any semiautomatic long gun, it also bans the manufacture and export of those weapons, and “thus prohibits an entire industry” in Florida, an industry that has been growing both by increasing sales and companies moving to the state for the better tax picture.

Attorney General Ashley Moody filed suit against this proposed amendment in July.

“The proposed amendment is, in practical application, a ban on virtually all semi-automatic long guns. This is so because virtually all semi-automatic long guns — either off-the-shelf or by virtue of broadly available accessories — hold, or are ‘capable’ of holding, more than 10 rounds of ammunition,” Moody’s lawyers wrote in a 27-page brief. “The ballot summary does not disclose this effect, which Florida voters are unlikely to understand absent explanation.”

All told, the amendment as described is a hot mess.  The Florida Constitution requires language in these initiatives to be “clear and unambiguous.”  The NRA suit focused, in part, on the term “assault weapons” apparently intending to get that term stricken from the text.

“Coined by anti-gun activists as a derogatory and pejorative term, its prime function is not to inform and describe in a clear, neutral, and objective way, but to deliver rhetorical impact and evoke emotion and condemnation,” the NRA, represented by Andy Bardos and other GrayRobinson attorneys, said in a 34-page brief.

Current owners are not required to turn in guns but the proposed amendment requires them to be registered and prohibits ever transferring them to another person.  If you own one it's yours for life - or until the confiscation starts, which can be made into the same date.  

About the only good news in this article is that the numbers presented show that BAWN has been ineffective at selling this abomination.  To get on the ballot, they need to get 766,200 valid signatures.  As of Monday afternoon, they submitted 115,529, a mere 15% of what they need.  Unless they're hiding something, they need to get the next 85% before their deadline in February. 

There's no mention in the AmmoLand news about the law passed in the closing moments of last year's legislative session affecting BAWN.  The law (HB5) requires paid petition gatherers to register with the Secretary of State and to attest that he or she is a Florida resident for a specified period before obtaining signatures on petition forms, along with imposing some other "truth in petition selling" requirements.

On the Cartel Slaughter, Calls for General Pershing, and The Bigger Picture

In light of the brutal slaughter of an American Mormon family apparently by drug cartel members in Northern Mexico, there's a palpable “why are we allowing this?” mood in the blogosphere.  There are calls for a modern day General John “Black Jack” Pershing to go into Mexico and wipe out the cartels.  I don't have problem with that, myself.  If we know who killed this family, that cartel should be asking for an 0300 visit, but I wouldn't do it with valuable operators like we did with Al Baghdadi.  A visit by an air wing of A-10s, B-2s, or a few C-130s with MOABs seems adequate. 

The problem isn't our lack of a general who could wipe out the Mexican military, should they decide to get in the way.  The problem is that this is a tangled web that covers both sides of the border, and if we're going to wipe out this sort of problem, both sides need targeted raids. 

Back in August of 2012, I posted about an interesting article I ran across with details on the Fast and Furious gun running program that Barack Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder had implemented.  It was widely believed that the purpose of F&F was to show American guns are ending up in Mexico as some sort of argument for more gun control.  A “logistics coordinator” for the Sinaloa cartel named Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, had testified it wasn’t about tracking guns, it was about supplying them — all part of an elaborate agreement between the U.S. government and the Sinaloa Cartel to take down rival cartels. 

In effect, the U.S. government was going to use the Sinaloa cartel to kill off the other cartels, and in return for getting rid of them, Uncle Sam was going to give Sinaloa the US drug market.

I re-visited the details of that 2012 story last July and found that the legal cases had gone forward but the story hadn't materially changed.  

Since my knowledge of this story was essentially frozen in 2012, I looked up Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla (there are other family members in the cartel, so you have search the whole name) to find he did a plea deal with the feds to "cooperate with authorities" and potentially stay out of long term lockup.  I found a Forbes article from 2014 saying the same things as the Blaze article my post was based on in 2012.  I've not found anything conclusive saying it was admitted to in court, but there is evidence that the US deal with the Sinaloa cartel was real, and there's a trail of bodies to back it up.

By appearances, I see this as saying there are groups in the Deep State who are behind allowing the Sinaloa cartel to access US drug markets, and I've got to believe there's some money flowing north along with those drugs, to the pockets of the Deep State Actors on this side of the border who are profiting from the deal.  Those Actors are partly responsible for the deaths of those women and children in Mexico on Monday evening.  It's easy to say people dying from the War on Some Drugs are dying by their own choices.  These women and children were innocent bystanders who crossed some sort of invisible line and simply ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Soldiers and police officers guard packages of seized marijuana during a presentation for the media in Tijuana, Mexico. (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias)

The National Weather Service Ruined My Day

If they're right. 

This has actually been posted for at least a week, but this is on the local NWS website:

Temperature is forecast to be above normal for the next six months; the rest all looks boringly normal.  The really odd one is in February through April when the temperature and precipitation are both above normal.  Ordinarily, the clouds associated with that rainfall keeps the temperature down, and it's pretty common for above normal rain to accompany below normal temperatures. 

The ENSO State - the phase or state of the El Nino Southern Oscillation - has a pronounced effect on our conditions, and they're predicting it to be neutral.  So far, their prediction is running a little lower than reality, which Watts Up With That summarizes as a weak El Nino.  (Warning: that link to WUWT's El Nino page will drown you with a fire hose of data)

Personally, I'd rather see temperatures in the below normal range for the entire dry season, but maybe I've been reading too much talk about the deep solar minimum leading to global cooling for the next decade.  Cool is unusual here, so the novelty appeals to me.

The Week's Backstory Around Here

Pardon my distraction around here. 

It started Saturday night when I first noticed the hot water didn't work.  Since it was after 11PM, I just said I'll check it out in the morning. 

A bit of a back story is that the same thing happened about two weeks ago.  When I went to check it out, I found that the outlet the water heater is plugged into (a ground fault protected outlet) had no AC voltage on it.  The GFI had popped and resetting that got the outlet back functioning which got the water heater back working.  I haven't mentioned yet that the water heater is a tankless, gas-fired heater out on the back porch. The day before had an unusual amount of wind-driven rain, so the outlet resetting isn't terribly surprising.  It's a new outlet, but the previous one had done it two or three times in its life. 

While working, I noticed a strange thing.  I had laid the AC cord down on the porch while I was doing things, and when I looked at the plug, the porch was wet around the plug.  Picked the plug up to inspect it and the plug blades left some water on my fingers.  A water film on the blades would certainly blow the GFI.  Running my hands down the power cord showed some water on the outside of its jacket, so I wiped it down with a rag.  I dried up some water inside the heater cabinet, rerouted the AC cord so that it had a loop hanging below the AC outlet, and we went back to life as normal.  Except that I had noticed that the area under that loop never really dried out, so it must still be dripping from inside the heater and running down the power cord. 

Now we're back to yesterday.  First thing I found was the outlet was fine.  The GFI breaker had not tripped and there was 120 VAC making it to the inside of the cabinet.  Looking around the cabinet, I found a little ledge, about a quarter inch wide by 1/16 deep, between what I take to be the heat exchanger and a box below it with a fan mounted on the case.  The little rim ledge was filled with water.  This ledge is about a foot above the floor of the cabinet and there was water down there, too.

At this point, I realized I was in a bad place, with no diagrams, no schematics, nothing to guide my attempt to fix this.  My looking into the thing is really as valuable as calling for the Fix It All Fairy to make it work.  Further, we've tried to get someone out to look at this before and it's always difficult.  There's really one shop locally who takes care of these.  We called them.  We were offered a choice between the tech coming out Sunday at double time and a half, or no hot water for 24 hours and the tech comes out today at normal price.  We chose today. 

The tech was out before 10AM and by 11 we knew the water heater was dead.  He was rattling off parts to repair it and said he'd call later in the day once he knew what it would cost.  While waiting, we researched what a new one would cost.  The one we'd be getting parts for is 10 years old.  I found I could get a replacement for under $800.  In my mind to fix one that's 10 years old and not replace it, those parts better come out to be well under half the price of the new one - including the service calls.  When the tech called back, he said the parts would run over a thousand.  So we said we'd get a new one.  They're perfectly happy to install it for us and don't seem upset we're not ordering it from them. 

Let me recap the suck.  We're going to be close to a k-buck out of pocket either way, but at least it will be a new heater.  The uncomfortable part is that it's going to be Thursday before we can get it installed.  No hot water.  Cold showers for the next few days.  Cold water for washing dishes, clothes, and everything else.  It's like the aftermath of a hurricane except the water out of the tap is colder in November than in September.  I know those of you in Minnesota, Canada, the Dakotas, Montana and so on will laugh at the hardship of showering in 75 degree water while living in air conditioning.  The ambient environment is something one gets used to, though.  In the summer, I generally run the water to pure cold before I get out of the shower.  This time of year I haven't been doing that. 

Living Skin with Blood Vessels Can Now be 3D Printed

That's the eye-catching headline in a Machine Design news item dated Friday.

The idea of printing enough skin for a skin graft without harvesting skin from elsewhere on the body isn't new.  There have been other solutions put forward.  In the words of researcher Pankaj Karande, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute:

“Right now, whatever artificial skin is available as a clinical product is more like a fancy Band-Aid.  It provides some accelerated wound healing, but eventually just falls off; it never really combines with other skin cells.”

One of the reason it never really combines with the rest of the person's skin is the lack of blood vessels.  These are vessels that are too small to suture (stitch) individually for the person, and would have be located extraordinarily precisely for that to even be possible.

Karande has been working on this challenge for several years, and has shown that researchers can turn two types of living human cells into “bio-inks” and print them into a skin-like structure. Since then, he and his team have been working with researchers from Yale School of Medicine to add blood vessels.

He and his team recently discovered that if they add key elements, including human endothelial cells (which line the inside of blood vessels) and human pericyte cells (which wrap around the endothelial cells), along with animal collagen and other structural cells typically found in a skin graft, the cells start communicating with each other and form a blood vessel network within a few weeks.

When grafted onto a mouse, the blood vessels started to communicate and connect with the mouse's existing skin.  Vitally important because the addition of blood vessels allows nutrients to reach the skin and help keep it alive, not sloughing off like “a fancy Band-Aid.”

Over the life of this blog and going back to when I first heard of it around '97, I've been a strong fan of/advocate for/believer in tissue engineering like this example.  Prosthetic limbs are wonderful, but what if for every veteran returning without a leg or arm, we could build them a functional replacement?  What if everyone who has an organ removed due to cancer, or is burned or otherwise seriously injured, we could replace what they lost?  On a more humble scale, what if a person who's now getting a hip replacement could get their joint fixed with newly grown cartilage instead of getting cut open, bone removed and replaced with metal and plastic?  Humanity is a long way from that.  We may never get there.  But I'm glad some people are trying.

Around 15 years ago, a technician friend asked me if I'd like to live forever.  After thinking for a while, I surprised him by saying, “not without a lot of better technology first.  Looking at myself now, I'm too covered with scars and have too many joints that need grease fittings to imagine getting to be three times my age.  Maybe if we actually 'live forever' those problems will eventually get fixed, but if they don't, within the first 200 years we'll be unable to move and unrecognizable because of scar tissue.” 

Liz Warren's $52 Trillion "Medicare For All"

Yesterday, 1 November, Lizzie Warren (D., Uranus) finally unveiled her budgetary numbers for her often-talked-about-but-never-with-numbers medicare for all plan.  It will cost $52 trillion dollars "and, she claims, will not require any middle-class tax increases."

As they say in the UK: go on, pull the other one - it's got bells on.

$52 Trillion might be real; at least it's quite a bit more than the $34 trillion advanced by The Urban Institute and covered here on October 18.  It's the part about not requiring middle-class tax increases that I think is just utter nonsense. 

Let's say, with no particular reason, that this is $5.2 Trillion per year for 10 years, and not increasing exponentially from nothing in its first year.  The current federal budget is about $4 trillion per year, and revenue is closer to $3 trillion leaving a deficit of just over $1 trillion.  Spending would then go to $9.2 t per year and the deficit to $6.2 trillion/year.  The current national debt just crossed $23 trillion at the much lower yearly increases we've had for a couple of years.  Going from $1.1/year to $6.2/year is going to really shock the bond markets.  Something's got to give.

Remember part of her plan is to outlaw the medical insurance industry.  According to some numbers I looked up last time, that industry alone is about $1 Trillion/year in revenue and 621,000 people's careers.  All of those jobs will be lost.  Add that to the economic havoc that will ensue.

By convenient coincidence, the Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget did an analysis of how to pay for it on October 28th, three days before the release of better numbers.  Yahoo Financial News covers the story:

Warren justifies many of her programs by saying all it would take is “two cents” from the wealthy. That’s a reference to her 2% wealth tax on ultra-millionaires. But Medicare for All would be so expensive that if you taxed top earners at 100%—that’s right, if you took all the income of couples earning more than $408,000 per year—you’d still fall far short. And everybody getting taxed at 100% would obviously stop working.

Okay, that won’t do it. So what will? CRFB outlined a variety of options. A 42% national sales tax (known as a valued-added tax) would generate about $3 trillion in revenue. But it would destroy the consumer spending that’s the backbone of the U.S. economy. A tax of that magnitude would be like 42% inflation, wrecking consumer budgets and the many companies that depend on them, from Walmart and Amazon to your local car dealer.

Other options include a 32% payroll tax split between employers and workers or a 25% income surtax on everybody. Or, the government could cut 80% of spending on everything but health care, which would include highways, airports and the Pentagon. Or here’s a good one: Just borrow the money and quadruple Washington’s annual deficits.

The best idea might be charging every enrollee in the new program $7,500 per year, so they’d be paying directly for the coverage they’re getting. Some people pay more than that now for health care, by purchasing insurance outright or sacrificing pay raises in exchange for employer coverage. It would still be a nifty trick to propose that to voters.

The upside to these impossibly draconian scenarios is that nobody would pay anything for health care, except in the $7,500 example. And it’s possible that Medicare for All would cover health care for more people at a lower total cost than we spend now, meaning the average cost per person would go down. The problem is transitioning from what we have now to whatever Medicare for all would be. And it’s a giant problem, like crossing the Mississippi River without a bridge or a boat. The other side might look great but you’ll die before you get there.

My first reaction was to to say, "ain't gonna happen," although I did it with my fingers crossed.  I'd hope that there's enough people in the gubmint that aren't full tilt crazy.  Then I remember the prominence of modern monetary theory in the Evil party these days. 

If this twit gets her way, it's game over.  Economic collapse.

Answering an Unrelated Question

I had a question from an emailer, rather than a comment, to my post two weeks ago about getting back to cycling after long break.  In it's essence: what's different about cycling after being away a long time? 

I answered by email, but thought there might be someone else in the wild world of the internet that cares, so I thought I'd re-post it here. 

The short answer is: not much.  If you're not on the bleeding edge of technology trying to get every last gram out of your racing bike and willing to spend thousands of bucks to do that. 

The single biggest thing, and the only thing I've actually bought (other than replacements for some gear that just wore out) is one simple idea: daytime running lights.  The same high-capacity, rechargeable, lithium ion batteries that have pushed into our phones, tablets, laptops and so many other things have pushed into cycling headlights and taillights.  Most of them are sold with a USB charger cable to plug into your laptop or other USB charger. 

For my headlight, I bought a Cygolite Dash 460 headlight.  These are more for being seen than seeing; at least from my use.  With 460 lumens, though, they'll make a good headlight at night, too.  Here's mine on my everyday ride - the weird background is a tire on my garden cart standing up in the shop.

Similarly, I got a Cygolite Hotshot Pro taillight, with 200 lumen output.  In this case, though, I had originally bought a light recommended on a bike forum that I also got from Amazon, a Blitzu.  This one gave me troubles and the USB charging port broke off the printed circuit board in the unit, leading to replacing it with this Cygolite.  I would recommend the Cygolite over the Blitzu. 

I have more experience with Cygolite as a brand.  Back in the days when Mrs. Graybeard and I used to ride in the evening after work, I had a couple of Cygolite headlights and they still work (although the 10 year old NiCd and NiMH batteries have long since gone belly up). 

Both my head and taillights are set to flash and they incorporate a pattern that isn't metronome steady.  There are tests that say the irregular flashes are more noticeable and a regular flash.  That said, I'm not aware of any studies that demonstrate riders with daytime running lights are safer than those without them, it just seems to be a reasonable bet.  They should give me something like six hours on a charge, but I recharge them after each hour ride.  I'll try long tests someday.

Let me just list throw out some of the other changes in the things I know

• Disk brakes and especially hydraulic disk brakes really took off.  They're starting to make inroads into road racing, slowly, but the big growth has been for the two off-road style bikes: mountain bikes and:
• Gravel bikes.  The last time I was riding a lot ('11 or '12?  Before that?), the big thing was cyclocross - essentially road bikes with wider tires, and a more relaxed geometry.  The idea was to race on dirt and gravel roads.  Now the word appears to be gravel bikes for the same basic kinds of riding. 
• Recumbent bikes and especially recumbent tricycles have continued to grow in popularity, although not as quickly as proponents have been saying since I started hearing it in about 1994.  Recumbents are bikes that are ridden in a sitting position.  Both two and three wheeled designs are popular; like everything else, they have good points and bad.   
• The substitution of smartphones for all sorts of other devices on the bike.  To the right of the headlight in my photo is a plastic case marked "CATEYE".  That's my bike's speedometer and odometer.  There are models on the market now that just have pickups near the back tire and display on the phone by Bluetooth.  The same idea goes for heart rate monitors, GPS, route planners and any electronic gadget people might like to ride with. 

Finally, it seems as if titanium bikes, like my Airborne, didn't really take over the market as the true believers thought back in 2000 or 2005.  Carbon fiber has become the material for lightweight racing bikes and the choices are still largely carbon fiber vs. aluminum or high-end steel.  There are still titanium bikes made in the US (Litespeed in Tennessee and Habanero down the coast in south Florida to name two).  I would think titanium would have the advantage due to the frame being weldable, but I guess carbon fiber has gotten less mysterious to repair.

The Worldwide Small Satellite Launcher Picture

In this week's Ars Technica Rocket Report update, I learned of an interesting resource.  The brief overview is that there are more small launch vehicles being developed than one, experienced, engineer can track! 

The chart is a bit cluttered but shows a total number of small launch vehicles, defined as less than 1000 kg to Low Earth Orbit, of around 150.  As they say on the infomercials; but wait - there's more.  His source materials for these numbers are US Government reports on rockets offered for sale to the US.  Because of that, rockets from nations like Iran that the US won't trade with, and rockets from nations that don't want to sell to the US don't show up.  The true picture is bigger than this.  Further, due to the 1000 kg (2205 pound) cutoff, that cuts out Relativity Space, who's targeting a vehicle over that class, and others.  Consider it a limited sample of what's really going on!

The guy gathering the data is Carlos Niederstrasser, a Northrop Grumman master systems engineer.  Niederstrasser doesn't attempt to judge technical or business viability of the projects, he just reports development programs and a watch list of others trying to raise capital.

The problem for Niederstrasser and anyone trying to keep up with the market is that the list continues to grow. “Every time I kill off one [launch vehicle], two more show up,” he said.
...
Of the 148 vehicles Niederstrasser has been tracking, eight have flown, including three U.S. and five Chinese launch vehicles, and 41 are active development programs.

Another 58 are on a list of projects that Niederstrasser considers worth watching even though they do not meet all the criteria to be considered active. For example, the companies may not be developing entire space launch vehicles or they may not be sharing information publicly through websites, social media campaigns, news reports or conference papers.

It sounds like a messy situation to try to get a handle on, so you can bet that plot is wrong.  Some of these companies trying to get funded are actually “a couple of grad students with a web site” while others are a bit farther along.  Whether all the numbers are too high, too low or possibly both, we can't know.  As others have said, the big milestone is actually testing working hardware on the ground.  Still, as Niederstrasser says, “the ultimate proof is if the pointy end goes up, fire goes out the other side and you get a satellite into orbit.”

One thing that stood out to me about that plot is the lightest blue bar, on the right.  That shows the number of defunct booster programs.  The number that went defunct and closed up shop for the 2019 survey is over twice the number that closed in 2018.  I can almost hear them saying, ”gee, this rocket science stuff is kinda hard, isn't it?”

---

Another interesting piece of news I've been watching for showed up in the Rocket Report.

Busy times ahead for commercial crew. During NASA's Advisory Council meeting this week, the agency's manager for commercial crew, Kathy Lueders, provided some updated mission dates. During the week of November 4, both SpaceX (Dragon static fire thruster test) and Boeing (pad abort test) have critical milestones scheduled for their vehicle developments.

And if those tests are successful ... It sets up a busy December. At this time, SpaceX is planning an in-flight abort test of its Crew Dragon vehicle on top of a Falcon 9 rocket early in the month. And Boeing is planning its first orbital flight test of Starliner, an uncrewed mission, on Dec. 17. That test is contingent on rolling Starliner out to United Launch Alliance's integration facilities at Cape Canaveral in mid-November to stack Starliner on top of an Atlas V rocket.

Could get interesting around here.

Exclusive News Scoop - Story of the Day on Hero Dog

Hat tip to 90 Miles for the CNN Babylon Bee story.  

U.S.—Everyone praised the classified "Hero Dog" for taking down ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Everyone, that is, except CNN, who quickly searched through the dog's internet history and college yearbooks. Sure enough, CNN found a picture of the Hero Dog partying at obedience school. In the picture, the dog is seen sniffing a butt without consent.
...
The dog has issued a statement: "I like butts. I've always liked butts. I still like butts, but I never sniff butts to the point of excess. Who's a good boy? I am."

I think the Bee got it wrong, though.  Conan (the dog) is a female, according to The BLOG.  Edit that last line in your head to, "who's a good girl?" etc..

When I saw this I "L'ed My A Off".  Does this sound like a news story that could be true, but that's just a little too far?  The more it makes you look, the more it makes you think it could be true, the better the satire.

The Halloween Spirit

My neighbor two houses down has his halloween decorations out again; a giant inflatable ghost with purple or longwave black light in it; various black cats, ghosts and whatnot, along with Halloween colored lights.  They've been up for a while and maybe they got to me, because I'm noticing Halloween stuff this year. 

When I think Halloween, I think Jon Neill, the professional artist who has become a pumpkin carver.  This guy has "mad skilz" as the kids say.

Meet Slushy the Cyclops.  Like most of Jon's work, Slushy is apparently done with your average pumpkin, but another pic from his website appears to show a carving made from an entry in one of those biggest pumpkin contests we hear about this time of year; in this case something called the Fair Oaks Farms Cowtoberfest. 

No, no mention of how big it was.  Go look around on his website.  The guy has some serious talent.

News From The Lighter Side

I started on a serious piece tonight, but it was just too rough to read let alone write.  Happens sometimes.  Instead, some funnin' around, saved specifically for a night like tonight.

The background is what makes this cartoon.  From Bizarro Cartoons but I don't recall where I found it posted.

So Near, Yet So Far

For a few brief, shining moments, I thought the lightning episode in the ham shack was over.  Ignoring the 60 pound doorstop of an amplifier, and I thought I could see the light at the end of that tunnel last Tuesday. 

You see, I got my main station radio (rig - in ham speak) back from the service center on Friday.  It had been gone nine weeks, and it was a relief to get it back into place as the center of the operating position.

As refresher, I sent it off because the part that I had to replace was in a package I'm just not set up to work on; among the worst of the surface mount packages, called a QFN.  It has no discernible legs, just tinned areas that are reflow soldered onto the board, with the worst being a large ground tab in the middle of the bottom.  In manufacturing, these are soldered down and removed with hot air.  I have a paint-removing heat gun, but nothing I'd feel comfortable using for this.  (I know - I need to practice on some)  Here's the datasheet drawing of the part's package upside down.

While it was at factory service, I asked the guy in charge if they had a way to do a thorough checkout of the rig before they sent it back.  He said they did and I said "do it."  

For the last several months, I don't think I'd have had a voice mode contact on the radio.  I either operate Morse code (what hams call CW) or one of the many digital communications modes that are run with a computer sound card and software that supplies audio to modulate and demodulates the receiver audio.  Setting up the radio and computer to do these things is something you do once or twice and then forget about, so it's always good for some headaches and anguish until you remember the secrets from last time.  I got everything running by early afternoon yesterday, and for few happy hours, I was just a ham again doing what I had been doing before being so rudely interrupted by the lightning.  

Late in the afternoon, I noticed my station microphone where I had put it aside and thought that I haven't tried verifying the voice circuity since the lightning strike.  A voice in my head said, "ya know, people talk through these radio things - you should try that."  I grabbed the microphone and plugged it in, then found an open area where no one was likely to be interfered with to give it a test.

Nothing.  No output signal at all.  Worse, the radio has an audio feedback to headphones that allows you to hear your audio and there was nothing there.

The obvious question was whether it's the microphone or the radio that's bad.  I didn't have a "known good" microphone handy yesterday; the other radio's microphones have a different connector.  Today, I dug out the microphone that came with the radio and tried it, assuming it's good.  Same result, so I'm 99% positive it's the radio. 

Frankly, the thought of sending it back to get them to fix something that they should have found (in my opinion) makes me sick to my stomach.  Another two months?  Another $100 in shipping and hour of labor?  If everything were to go perfectly, the parts are about $1.50 from Mouser.  They're surface mount SSOP (shrink small outline package), which would be much easier to remove and replace than that QFN36. 

Then there's the thought of whether the radio is just going to fail one part at a time, from being overstressed in the lightning's electric field.  I feel a bit overstressed just thinking about it.


Edit to add 10/19 at 0915 EDT:  This in the comments, but I called the service center and they verified they had tested the mic input and it was good.  I explained what was going on and he quickly led me to a setting screen in the radio that had been unintentionally set which disabled the microphone.  The radio is fine, and it's back to normal life.

Rocket Lab Elevating Their Game

I've been watching New Zealand-based Rocket Lab for nearly two years, with my first piece in December of '17 and the latest a piece on how successful they've been in July.  They've made the transition from a startup to an operational launch company with five successful Electron missions in 2019 and the promise of a couple more before the year ends.  In doing so, Rocket Lab has become the world's first private company to develop a low-cost rocket for small satellites.

On Monday, 10/21 (from New Zealand) they announced plans to elevate their game.  To be specific, they plan to launch small payloads to the moon.

On Monday, Rocket Lab announced that with its "Photon" upper stage, it will be able to send small payloads all the way to lunar orbit. “Small satellites will play a crucial role in science and exploration, as well as providing communications and navigation infrastructure to support returning humans to the Moon," Peter Beck, the company's chief executive, said in a news release. "They play a vital role as pathfinders to retire risk and lay down infrastructure for future missions."

A Rocket Lab spokesperson told Ars that the new service, launching on an Electron rocket, would be capable of sending up to 30kg (66 lbs) into lunar orbit and be available as soon as the fourth quarter of 2020. As for pricing, it was not disclosed. "Pricing is tailored to mission requirements, but we'll be bringing previously impossible missions within reach at attainable prices," the spokesperson said.

The Photon upper stage is essentially a "micro" third stage for their successful Electron booster that will provide maneuvering capability for payloads once in space.  It combines propulsion, power, attitude determination and control, and radiation-tolerant avionics.  What do I mean by "micro" third stage?   Here's a photo from Rocket Lab.

No, not the one on the middle left with the obvious engine bell, that's the second stage.  The Photon is the white (almost) disk on the right.  If you look closely, you can see a thin stick in the middle of the white square (diamond in that orientation); that's the engine bell for the photon.  

If you've got a research satellite that you can fit into that 66 pound payload capacity, or can split into several missions that each can make that limit, you just might have a way of getting to the moon cheaper than you previously thought.  Maybe not cubesat cheap, but cheap.  (Cubesats are quite a bit smaller than 66 lbs (the largest are 18 pounds) and usually flown for free or darned near it, thanks to a NASA program to encourage them).  I can see miniaturization being strongly incentivized here.   

On Drudge Alternatives

Many of you will have read Irish's note that he had given up on the Drudge Report last weekend.  Me, too.  In the case of Drudge, he has been sliding into irrelevancy (by sliding to the left) for a while now.  I understand it was a business decision to move his main advertising revenue to a different provider and had something to do with his father's own website.  According to an article on Investment Watch, linked to by a Twitter comment to Mark Dice, also referenced on Irish (whew!):

 “He recently signed on with a Google affiliated company, which purchased Matt Drudge’s father’s website, RefDesk, as part of the deal.

“Frankly, I’m concerned this is the sole reason Drudge went mainstream and to the left: to satisfy his new advertising agency.

“The agency is called Granite Cubed. The timing of when all this went down is not a coincidence.

I had been noticing the slide to sounding like the usual media on Drudge for a while.  I started going to a place called Rantingly.  After some thinking about where I got the link, I believe it was a comment to a similar article on Stilton's Place.

Rantingly sort of looks like Drudge's layout, with some differences that are easy to get used to.  The right column is Twitter feeds from the conservative universe: the President, Dan Bongino, Candace Owens, Buck Sexton, Tom Fitton and more - in no particular order.  I suspect that changes with activity and how people react to them.  The left column is news stories for four or five screen heights, followed by links to another large block of good sites.  Give it a look.

The other issue that needs to be brought up is that Fox News Channel (FNC) has slipped left, too.  You may recall that over two years ago, we did a piece on the management changes at FNC and that the next generation taking over top management didn't attempt to hide the fact they wanted to kill the network.  Their only problem was they were frustrated that FNC was the goose the just kept laying golden eggs and funding the rest of their empire.

Back on 4/20, when I wrote that Bill O'Reilly's firing didn't bode well for the future of alternative voices on the news, I passed on that Rupert Murdoch's son, James, was apparently going to scuttle the channel.  He "regarded many of the people at Fox News as thuggish Neanderthals and said he was embarrassed to be in the same company with them".

In the Hollywood Reporter piece, James Murdoch is not in the least bit trying to disguise or hide the message that he wants to kill Fox News as we know it.

There's just no real alternative, at least that I can get.  Here's the thing: Fox News has never claimed to be conservative, they've just given air time to a few big-name conservative opinion pundits.  As far as I remember, and I've been watching since around 9/11, they've never used a motto claiming to be constitutionalists, libertarians, or conservatives; the motto has always been, "Fair and Balanced."  Someone's idea of good commentary came to be having two people on screen representing both sides in a debate and then have them talk over each other and bicker like four year olds, instead of waiting for the other guy to give their side.  It drives me nuts. There's a handful of pundits that I just won't listen to because I know they're just going to talk over the other guy.  I find I listen to FNC programs less and less every day.  If James Murdoch wanted to drive viewers away, it's working with me. 

I hear good things about One America News Network (OAN or OANN) and they could be better, but it seems the only way to get them is through AT&T or DirecTV. We cut the cable and switched to internet streaming about 18 months ago, and they're the only major streaming service that carries OAN.  There's a minor streaming service I'd never heard of that carries them but doesn't offer anything else that interests me, KlowdTV.

It seems to me to be a business opportunity.  Depending on broadly you want to define things, people are either oriented to prefer deciding what they want or oriented to prefer being controlled.  Sure that's broad brush, and there are people who describe themselves as "socially liberal but fiscally conservative" and other variants, but either you control your life or someone else does.  In comparison to the number of media outlets that represent that major dichotomy, instead of an equal mix, there are far more that represent the latter ("someone else" controls you) than the former.  The streaming service we use has 12 news channels, with only one, Fox News, putting forward any real conservative viewpoints. 

A Universal Truth

You can tell that this photo was taken at a range, and is talking about training for shooting, but it applies to everything.  (Picture from Gun Free Zone, 10/21)

It's a universal truth.  It works for anything from learning a musical instrument, to triathlons, to any athletic endeavor.  It works for learning math as well as shooting.

In sports they say, "train your weakness, race your strength."  In learning a piece of music and in martial arts, they say, "if you can't do it slowly, you'll do never do it fast" or "find the part of the song you play the worst and play it over and over again until you get it right."

No matter what you suck at, from calculus to clearing a holster and putting shots in a target's COM, practice what you suck at. 

Texas Jury Blocks Father From Preventing His Son's Sex Change

I want to copy and paste some of the Washington Examiner news story here to get the wording exactly right.  It says:

Texas father blocked from stopping gender transition of son James, 7, to girl called Luna.

That's correct but incomplete.  It should read:

Texas father blocked from stopping his ex-wife forcing the gender transition of son James, 7, to girl called Luna.

Sounds different, doesn't it?  A little farther down in the story it becomes clear that the father, Jeffrey Younger, had petitioned a court in Texas to grant him sole custody of his twin sons, James and Jude specifically to avoid this and his ex-wife was granted the sole custody of the boys.  

Anne Georgulas, the mother of the two boys, has advocated for James to transition into Luna and has strongly backed the idea of chemically castrating her son and beginning hormone replacement therapy. The ruling on Wednesday will prevent Jeffrey from having sole custody of his children and paves the way for Georgulas to proceed with the procedure.

The court has ruled that Georgulas will maintain sole custody of her two children and go forward with plans to give James life-altering medical procedures. Her original court filing had sought to limit her ex-husband's visits with their children and require that he now refer to James as Luna.

What caught my attention in this story is that they're talking about puberty blocking drugs for seven year old James, a type of drug I did a story on back on October 7th.  One of the main takeaways from that article is that these are very dangerous drugs and have a disruptive effect on the complete endocrine system of the child, likely putting them onto hormone disrupting drugs for life.  The problems associated with forcing these drugs on a child who may not even need them are irreversible and include cancers, cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and blood clots, suicidal behavior and other psychological disorders, brittle bones, painful joints, and sterility. 

The various news stories go back and forth on it, but to me, the biggest point is that there was testimony from medical professionals (admittedly witnesses for the father) who said James doesn't meet the diagnostic criteria to have gender dysphoria according to the DSM-V, and that his behavior may be trying to fit in with whomever he's around: mother or father.  The doctor claims James doesn't appear to exhibit "distress" when associated with his male identity, a requirement for diagnosis.  Could it be the annulment of the parents' marriage and being involved in a custody dispute is what's bothering James and that's the real issue?  J. Kb at Gun Free Zone put it like this. 

I am usually the first to say “no, there probably shouldn’t be a law” but when it comes to letting a child who still thinks Santa and the Easter Bunny are real decide to claim an alternate gender identity and then use that as evidence for chemical and surgical mutilation of that child, there should be a law against that.

I think this cartoon gets it right for the societal question.  For this family, it seems like the root is the conflict between the parents.  It seems like the mother is trying to get back at the father and, unfortunately, is going to sacrifice and quite possibly kill her son to hurt his father.  I'm sure she'd somehow see it differently.

Pat Cross Cartoons for October 8th.

Hey, what do I know?  I fix radios, not people.  If one of the radios is really behaving oddly, I can redesign it or replace a lot of parts and rebuild it. 

Thinking of Tossing In the Towel

On my amplifier repair and trying to recover from the lightning strike.  The last update I posted, back on the 13th, I was optimistic.  Since then, I've gotten a bit more discouraged.

Some deep technical stuff about the PW1 follows.

The amplifier package is about one third power supply by volume and is what many technicians would call a "blivet," defined as 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound package.  The story you'll see on ham radio forums is that if your power supply is bad, be prepared to pay half the price of a new amplifier.  The amplifier weighs about 60 pounds and would cost a lot to send to the factory service guys.  I read that as spending a lot just to find out how much I have to spend. 

My goal here has been to get the amplifier to turn on so that I can see if it still amplifies.  That's more hope than realistic expectation, but the alternative is to spend (guessing) $150 to $175 to ship it both ways, and then probably run up a total close to the price of a new amplifier to get it fixed. Another reason for the hope is that no other piece of radio gear was damaged in its radio portion.  In my main radio, the only damage was my USB port getting blown out.  No other radio had any damage.

When you first look at the schematics, it's not even clear how the thing gets turned on.  It has a remote control head (pictured in that link above) with small on/off switch - certainly not a switch that will handle 240 VAC at high current.  There's a small power supply in the main box that's on any time the amplifier is plugged in.  That supplies 15V to the remote head, where it switches a couple of logic circuits that tell the main box to turn on everything.  At first it seemed possible that only that supply was damaged, then it seemed only things attached to the 220V AC line were damaged. 

I'm sure I've said a bunch of times that the problem is I have no documentation on circuit details.  At first, I had no schematics at all, but was later able to find a set of schematics that had parts drawn, but no values or part numbers.  It's actually worse than that because there's 11 subassembly schematics and not one thing to tell you where those subassemblies are in the unit.

Let me show you what I mean.  This is a screen capture of one of those schematics in pdf format.  It's the portion on which I most recently replaced a blown part.  I deduced where it was in the box by following another few drawings.

The only part numbers on this are in the upper left and I added those.  See that 16 pin IC (IC1) in bottom, toward the left center?  I have only the vague idea that it's "some sort of voltage regulator" but without knowing more about it, probably by looking up a datasheet online, I don't know how to tell if it's working or not.

This turns out to be the heart of the high voltage supply.  The last thing I posted about was that while the lower voltages seemed OK, the 45V supply wouldn't turn on.  When I tested the bridge rectifier (top left) I found it was shorted across any two pins you looked at; what we call a "blob o' silicon" in the biz.   Since the bridge had a part number marked on it, I ordered a replacement from one of the big name distributors (Arrow); they came Friday and I installed the replacement on Saturday.

Before that part got here, though, I recognized that there's a logic line going to that board that tells it to turn on the HV supply.  I had to go through the five or six pages that signal passes through several times before I realized where it was coming from, but not how to fix turning that line on properly.  I figured if I could pull that signal low as a test, it would turn on the HV supply.  Once the diode bridge was in place, measuring like real diodes (power off!), I set up to do the experiment of pulling that line low.  There was a loud noise and a flash of light, followed by the smell of burned electronics.  Uh oh.  Once the dust settled, I was able to determine that the parts I've replaced are still fine, and the unit behaves like it did before I grounded that logic line.  I just found or created new ones to replace. 

I should point out that I had talked with chief technician at the factory service center, the guy who just repaired my main radio (now supposed to be here on the 23rd) about what I had been doing.  He said if the RF deck has problems like shorted power transistors and I tried to turn it on, "it will be loud".  I think there was a DAMHIK implied.

In our long discussion, he basically said I've spent more time trying to get it to turn on than they would because he doesn't have any more documentation on that power supply than I do.  The ironic part is that so far, I've replaced less than $10 worth of parts and have gotten it to power on and look alive.  He said, as the forums say, that their standard repair was to replace the power supply and that's about half the price of a replacement unit.  They can check the amplifiers with a laboratory power supply and verify them or repair them, then replace the big power supply.

Since I don't have anything that's known good, progress is painfully slow.  The most painful part, though, is the uphill struggle of the lack of documentation.  My inner motivational speaker reminds me that, "quitting is a permanent solution to a temporary problem."  Frankly, the motivational speech isn't doing much for me.  

What I haven't mentioned all this time is that I have the ARRL equipment insurance and they do cover this sort of damage.  The insurance value is a replacement price that you enter; you decide how much you want for it.  After the weekend explosion I figured it was time to call the claims office and see what they said about getting started.  I don't know if the guy is a ham, but he was very knowledgeable about the problems I've been facing and suggested I talk to factory service, or anyone with experience with these.  He said if a tech said it was worth scrapping, he'd send me a check. 

Speeding Up 3D Printing By Going to Planar Laser Light

In conventional 3D printers, the object is only being printed at one point.  In the case of the common plastic filament printers, the filament is run through a head the melts it to liquid plastic that's extruded out of the nozzle, and prints as a strand.  The head moves in X and Y directions (left/right and forward/backward), and when the layer is complete, the head rises a small distance in Z, (say half the diameter of the spot being extruded, .005"), and extrudes the plastic for another layer.  This continues, one layer at a time, to build up the parts.  Prints can take many hours, and overnight or 24 hour builds aren't uncommon, from what I read.  (No, I still haven't bought or built one).

The early incarnations of 3D printing worked by shining an intense laser at a point on the surface of a liquid resin.  The laser would convert the photosensitive resin into plastic while the resin not hit by the laser remained liquid.  This type of printer is still available and lately seems to have decreased in price more than the equivalent filament printers, although still typically a smaller print volume.  Again, the laser has to scan the entire layer, then the table would drop a tiny amount (say .002") into the liquid and the process repeated, building the part layer by layer.

The key similarity is that all that's getting printed is one spot at a time.  What if instead of printing one spot, one dimensional printing, the printer could sweep across the entire layer as a plane rather than a filament or a spot?  Bring the printing into two dimensions at once.  That could gather enormous improvements in speed!  It has been a holy grail of research for a while, and a team at Georgia Tech seems to be breaking barriers.  They're still working with very small parts but seeing prints coming out 1000 times faster than using a single laser spot. 

Engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a nanoscale 3D printing technique that fabricates small structures a thousand times faster than two-photon lithography (TPL) techniques, the conventional method of making nanoscale components. The new parallelized technique, known as femtosecond projection TPL (FP-TPL), can make parts with depth resolutions of 175 nanometers (6.89 millionths of an inch), which is better than established methods,  and can fabricate structures with 90-deg. overhangs that can’t currently be made.

The key difference is that instead of printing at one single spot of high-intensity laser light, typically around 700 to 800 nanometers in diameter, a million points of light are projected simultaneously in a plane.  This entire plane of projected light that can be patterned into arbitrary structures.  For example, look at this (magnified) image of a sample print of a micropillar forest still submerged in the photopolymer resist.  The inset is an electron microscope image of the micropillar array. 

The printed array contains 900 micropillars over a 7 mm × 7 mm area (just over 1/8" on a side) and was printed in less than 90 minutes, as compared to more than a day of printing with serial techniques.

To create a million points, the researchers use a digital mask similar to those used in projectors to create images and videos. In this case, the mask controls a femtosecond laser that creates the desired light pattern in the precursor liquid polymer material. The high-intensity light causes a polymerization reaction that turns the liquid to solid, where desired, to create 3D structures.

Each layer of the fabricated structure is formed by a 35-femtosecond burst of high-intensity light. The projector and mask then create layer after layer until the entire structure is produced. Removing the liquid polymer leaves behind the part. The FP-TPL technique lets researchers turn out a structure in eight minutes that would take several hours using conventional processes.

35 femtoseconds is 35x10^-15 second.  You may have bought RAM rated for 80 nanoseconds, which was considered fast static RAM in the day.  A femtosecond is 1 millionth of 1 nanosecond.  The speed of light in a vacuum is about 11.8 inches per nanosecond.  Which means in 35 femtoseconds, light goes about 400 millionths of an inch. 

This is an example of a structure printed in eight minutes that took hours with existing processes.  Like the existing processes, it's printed with multiple passes of these planes of laser light, building layer upon layer, as with existing printers.

The article also emphasizes they are printing structures with this technique that have never been successfully printed before.   For instance, the technique can produce what the researchers call an “impossible bridge” with 90-deg. overhangs and more than a 1,000:1 aspect ratio of length to feature size.  “We can project the light to any depth we want in the material, so we can make suspended 3D structures” like that.

Researchers have printed suspended structures a millimeter long between bases that are smaller than 100 microns by 100 microns. ...

Beyond bridges, researchers also made a variety of structures that demonstrate the technique, including micro-pillars, cuboids, log-piles, wires, and spirals. The researchers used conventional polymer precursors, but Georgia Tech Assistant Professor Sourabh Saha believes the technique would also work for metals and ceramics that can be generated from precursor polymers.

An interesting highlight here is that groups have been working for years to accelerate the two-photon lithography process used to print nanoscale 3D structures.  Georgia Tech's advancement was to adopt a different way of focusing the light, using its time-domain properties, which allowed production of thin light sheets capable of high resolutions and tiny features.

Using a femtosecond laser let the team maintain enough light intensity to trigger two-photon polymerization while keeping point sizes thin. In the FP-TPL technique, femtosecond pulses are stretched and compressed as they pass through the optics to implement temporal focusing. The process, which generates 3D features smaller than the diffraction-limited focused light spot, requires that two photons hit the liquid precursor molecules simultaneously.

“Traditionally, there are tradeoffs between speed and resolution,” Saha says. “If you want a faster process, you lose resolution. We have broken this engineering tradeoff, letting us print a thousand times faster with the smallest of features.”

This is clearly a lab achievement at this point, but in the high tech world, lab curiosities move into production faster than in fields like medicine.  I don't know how long we're talking before they start getting commercialized, but thousandfold improvements in productivity are pretty hard to ignore. 

Air Force Finally Retires 8" Floppy Drives

You may have seen this entertaining little story going around the last couple of days, but the Air Force has finally retired 8-inch floppies from the missile launch control system.  Those would be the strategic missile launch facilities.

Five years ago, Ars Technica reported on how shocked the CBS News program 60 Minutes was to find that 8 inch floppies were still used to store data for operating the Air Force's intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) command, control, and communications network. The system, once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), relied on IBM Series/1 computers installed by the Air Force at Minuteman II missile sites in the 1960s and 1970s.  Five years ago, the Air Force offered the view that the hardware (which virtually everyone thought was long obsolete) provided a cybersecurity advantage.  I can see their point to some extent; certainly nobody is going to casually leave an 8" floppy disk in the men's room as has been done with a USB drive. 

Today, the Air Force is singing a different tune.

[T]he service has completed an upgrade to what is now known as the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS), as Defense News reports. SAACS is an upgrade that swaps the floppy disk system for what Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force’s 595th Strategic Communications Squadron, described as a “highly secure solid state digital storage solution.” The floppy drives were fully retired in June. 

The IBM Series/1 computers remain, however, in part because of their reliability and security.  

Air Force officials have acknowledged network upgrades that have enhanced the speed and capacity of SACCS' communications systems, and a Government Accountability Office report in 2016 (28 page pdf) noted that the Air Force planned to "update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals, and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017." But it's not clear how much of that has been completed.

When I think of electronics from the '60s and '70s, my thought isn't "reliability" so much as "end of life".  I have some 1960s radios, in case you're wondering how I know.  Electronic components are often referred to as having a bathtub-shaped reliability curve; steep walls on both ends and a long flat bottom between the walls.  When the parts are first put into service, they go through a short period of "infant mortality" failures as various problems (both in fabrication of the parts and of assemblies they're in) cause the components to fail.  This is followed by a long period in which the failure rate is quite a bit lower and parts fail essentially at random.  Finally, parts wear out and fail - literally dying of old age - and the bathtub side curves upward again.  These computers should be well into these later failures, but they do get constant attention from folks very experienced with these computers; probably the greatest living experts on these systems.  I'm guessing they need this attention.  Along with lots of spare parts.

Ars notes:

Civilian Air Force employees with years of experience in electronics repairs handle the majority of the work. But the code that runs the system is still written by enlisted Air Force programmers.

For those who have forgotten what 8" floppies looked like - or never saw one.  These were pretty much considered obsolete when I first had a computer that I worked on as a technician in the late 1970s.  Our first computers around the house used 5-1/4 floppies that just were a smaller version of these, before the 3-1/2" floppies in a hard plastic case.  So, so long ago...

Riders and Mamils and Omils, Oh My!

Since the last few posts have been serious, and it's the weekend, I figure I'll be less serious and bring y'all up to date on something else around here. 

Are you puzzling over the title?  Besides it being an homage to "Lions and Tigers and Bears" from the Wizard of Oz? 

In my right sidebar's About Me box, it has included the term "roadie cyclist" for as long as I can recall.  Cycling used to be one of the main activities Mrs. Graybeard and I engaged in; our main exercise/outdoor hobby.  Twenty years ago, a fun Saturday might be to ride up to and through the Kennedy Space Center and back, a ride of about 80 miles round trip from home.  Which is how we'd ride it; we'd leave home in the morning and get home in the late afternoon.  In the last 10 years, since I started the blog, we'd ridden less often, less distance, and eventually stopped riding altogether.  I'm not sure when we stopped but I made a reference to riding in late 2010 and some other posts into late 2011 make me think we were riding then. 

The point being that I had not been living up to that term for quite while. 

Back in August of '18, a random neuron fired in my brain saying, "you really ought to get back to riding again."  I ignored it.  A couple of weeks later it started up again.  We'd never gotten rid of our bikes and gear, just pushed everything into convenient corners.  I started looking at my "indoor bike", a bike far too good to be relegated to riding on an indoor magnetic resistance trainer.  Pumped up the tires, brushed off the spiderwebs and dust.  By the end of August, I took my first indoor ride on the trainer.  I don't think it was 15 minutes long. 

It was also August in Crematoria, where being outside carries the risk of spontaneous combustion, so I rode indoors until I could comfortably do 30 or 40 minute rides on the Magneto trainer (I'd do a link but the model I have is also over 10 years old and not on the websites anymore).  By the start of October I was ready to ride outdoors.  By the middle of October, I rode my bike on what used to be our several-nights-every-week ride, out to a lake west of town.  It's a 13 mile round trip using the backroads I take.  I took this picture January 7th of this year.  You can tell it's January - I still have ice in my water bottle.

All cyclists like to tell you about their bikes.  This is a titanium bike from a company called Airborne (as you can see).  Airborne built very nice bikes and had built some touring bikes for a company that takes tourists on bike tours - referred to as supported touring.  They'd take people across Vermont, for example, and go from town to town, carrying the customers clothes, overnight bags and more, so that they didn't need to hang that stuff from their bikes.  For some reason, Airborne had a few leftovers and put these up on eBay.  I got it for well under a k-buck, while finished titanium bikes like this were easily $2500.  It was setup as touring bike but with odd components and very lightweight wheels.  Within the year I rebuilt it as a comfortable road bike, changed the handlebar from straight to drop style, changed shifters, wheels, tires, and the rear gear cluster, so a rather complete rebuild.  I think with all the parts I bought for the rebuild, it still came in under $1000. 

So what's all this Mamils and Omils stuff?  I ran into the term MAMIL in 2010 and used it in a blog post (which is one way I know I was riding in '10).  As you can see, MAMIL is an acronym for Middle-Aged Men in Lycra.  The only problem is that since I'm 65, I can't claim to be middle-aged, so I changed that into Old Men in Lycra.  By Riders, I'm referring to being too young to claim even Mamil-hood.  I was there once, but I don't remember it.

These days I ride three days a week, by myself.  Retiree privilege allows me to ride at 9 or 10AM on weekdays when traffic along my route is essentially nonexistent.  My rides over the year have ranged from 10 to 20 miles; no full days riding anymore. 

I have many friends who simply can't do this.  I have one friend waiting on knee replacements who can hardly walk.  Others that get around but have various conditions that impact their health in serious ways.  I know that my riding doesn't do a thing for them but I feel that since I can do this it would be wrong not to.  Every time I throw a leg over the bike and leave the house, I feel blessed to be able to do it.