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| The Archangel Michael trampling Satan - Guido Reni, 1636 |
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| Zinc Nut Cracker Set |
We had Thanksgiving dinner yesterday instead of Thursday due to the scheduling demands of the medical-industrial complex. Andy brought a bag of unshelled nuts. I can't remember the last time I had an unshelled nut. These days if we want nuts we buy them already shelled. Now I know why.
When I was a kid we had a nutcracker set like the one shown above. I think ours was steel. I can't imagine zinc ones would last too long, but maybe they don't have to as people will quickly abandon them. I don't have one of those, but I have a pair of Channellock pliers, so I set to work. Dang, these nuts are tough and if you aren't careful you won't just crack the shell but you will crush the contents as well. Cracking the shell is just the first part of the job. Now you get to separate the bits of meat from the remnants of the shell. A pick like the ones in the above set would have been useful here. After maybe half an hour I had maybe a quarter cup of meat, and most of that was tiny pieces the size of a BB.
So now I'm wondering how commercial nut farms get the job done. Do they ship their nuts over to slave labor camps where impoverished peasants spend all day cracking nuts for their cup of gruel? No, this is America where everything is done by machine.
Near as I can tell, these machines are adjusted to the size of the nut and the nuts are squeezed between two wheels that just the right distance apart. This cracks the shell without smashing the innards. Then a fan separates the wheat from the chaff.
I probably cracked a couple of dozen nuts and I think I only got one half of one walnut out intact. All the rest were busted. I think I got a little better in cracking technique as I went on, but a hard limit on the crushing would probably have helped.
The nutcracker set included six picks. Why so many? Because it took six times as long to pick the bits of meat out of the broken shell as it took to crack. You could have six people sitting around a table with a bowl of nuts. One person takes a nut and cracks and then hands the nutcracker to the next person. Now they set to work picking out the bits of meat. By the time they are done, the nutcracker has made its way around the table and you are ready to crack the next nut. Not an efficient way of getting things done, more like keeping your hands busy while you are jabbering with your fellows. Kind of like wrapping coins or knitting.
P.S. I'm surprised no one has come up with a better manual nutcracker. Or maybe I just haven't seen one. A better nutcracker would need two things, 1) an adjustable stop to easily limit the amount of crush, and 2) a sliding action to roll the nut in between the two jaws. The sliding jaws would need to move a couple of inches to ensure at least one complete revolution of the nut. You may want to go for two revolutions, just to cover the off cases at the beginning and end of a crushing rotation.
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| Pergiel Building 1036 Butterworth St SW Grand Rapids, Michigan |
Diligent daughter and I were looking at the Pergiel building (zoom in and you can read the name in the stone near the top) on Google Maps the other day. Today we want to look at it again, but we can't remember where it is or what led us to it last time. Went and rooted through my files and couldn't find anything. Finally pulled up Google Maps and searched for Sacred Heart church. Then I remember that the building was built at an angle, and there was a big dirt parking lot there. I noticed Butterworth runs at an angle, so I pulled up the satellite view and presto - there it is.
I writing this down so I will have some record of where it is. My grandfather built this building to house his bakery before WW2. Rumor has it that back then he was a competitor to Sunshine, but then the war and rationing and the draft came along and running a bakery got to be pretty thin. My dad worked there for a while before the army gobbled him up and shipped him off to Alaska and the Pacific.
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| A huge poster, pasted on a corner site in Moscow, advertising the film Who Are You, Dr. Sorge? © Getty Images / Bettmann |
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| Mercury well on Earth or Oil well on Mercury? |
About 120 years ago there was a victorian businessman who specialised in products made using mercury, a liquid metal element. He made stuff such as thermometers, barometers and even the motor driving the time machine he had invented. One day potential investors visited and wanted to know where he got all his mercury from, as it was fairly rare back then, and they wanted to minimise their risks. He said, the mercury for the thermometers and barometers came from holes in the ground in Montana. And for the time machine? they asked of him. He replied "The time machine is from Hg wells."
I went looking for a picture of a mercury well but found that mercury doesn't come from wells, it comes from mines. I sort of knew that, but there's always some whiz kid cooking up something so I wouldn't have surprised to find they were drilling for mercury and injecting high pressure steam or gasoline or something to liberate the mercury from its rock prison and send it up the pipe. Anyway, I go looking for a mercury mine and all I can find are mines that have been closed. There were mines in west Texas, and there were big mines in Spain, but now virtually all mercury comes from China. Tjakistan deserves an honorable mention by producing something less than 10% of what China produces. No one else produces even 1% of the world supply. And there''s no pictures of any operational facilities. I couldn't even find a satellite image on Google Maps. Kind of weird, but given its recently discovered toxic nature, not too surprising.
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| When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1969) |
Handwaving Freakoutery has a post up about the war in Ukraine and how it's a war of the Lizard People. Cool. Remember when dinosaurs ruled the Earth umpteen zillion years ago? Well, nothing much has changed.
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| Shenyang J-6 Drone |
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| Shenyang J-6 |
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| Chinese Airbases near Taiwan |
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| Hakko FR-300 Desoldering Tool |
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| 300 |
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| FLUG WERK Fw-190 Replica |
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| Curtiss P-40 Warhawk |
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| Phantom F4EJ |
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| Last week's Jumble |
Veteran's day was last week (maybe?). It was accompanied by flood of posts thanking veterans for their service and lot of other useless blather. Okay, maybe it wasn't entirely useless, maybe it improved some people's outlook for a bit. But it strikes me as kind of weird. Maybe that's what we do instead of having a parade, or maybe that's what we do so all the people who didn't go to the parade (like me) get to hear about what all the good citizens are doing. Anyway, the military is part of our society. It's been part of human society for thousand's, perhaps even hundreds or thousands of years. It ain't going away anytime in the foreseeable future, and certainly not anytime soon. People in the military deserve respect, just like everyone else. That's a great rule of thumb, but it is not inviolable. If an individual does something rude, criminal or evil, that individual may be rightly condemned, but don't trash that entire section of society because of the actions of one individual.
Military service has its pro's and con's. It requires obedience but it provides a certain level of support (food, clothing, shelter, okay shelter might be a little iffy) and medical care. On the downside there is the risk of being killed or maimed in combat, though I haven't been able to find out whether the odds of that happening are any worse than they are for the general population. Something like 90% of the military is involved in supporting the 10% who are actually in combat. What percentage of the general population is involved in turf wars over illegal drug distribution rights?
And then there's free health care for life from the Veterans Administration. That is a benefit I am only now beginning to appreciate. If you are not a veteran, when you get to be old you start having to deal with commercial medical-industrial establishment and what a pain-in-the-keister that is. IAman spent some time in the VA hospital this year. Being in the hospital is no fun, but the administrative side was a piece of cake. All he had to do was show his ID.
Watching the Blazers basketball game last night, I was struck by the tone of some of the ads, especially MODA. MODA bills itself as some kind of health care company but I suspect they are actually just an insurance company. They are portraying themselves like a soft fluffy pillow that can support you. Nothing about how much it costs.
A third of the people in this country are making $100,000 a year or more. That's like 100 million. That's MODA's target audience. That still leaves 200 million who are basically second class citizens. Half a million are homeless. That's like less than one percent.
The VA spends about $100 billion a year on medical care. There are roughly 20 million veterans. That's $5,000 a year per person, or about $400 per month.
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| Die Hard Advent Calendar |
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| Peter (Jeb Kreager) and Basil (Ken Leung) - Monique Carboni |
Variety has a review of Evanston Salt Costs Climbing by Trish Deitch. It's a weird review, it's talking about how great this one act play is, but every other paragraph the dreaded Climate Change is thrown in like it's got something to do with the story. Near as I can tell, which could be completely wrong since I haven't seen the show, the only connection this show has with Climate Change is in the mind of reviewer.
The show is basically about two guys (above) who drive a salt truck during the winters in Illinois. You know, everyday life in a state being run into the ground by the dang fool Democrats. The show is being performed in New York City so maybe the reviewer is required to mention Climate Change in every other paragraph.
The reviewer included a nice succinct description of the set which I appreciate. A picture would be better, but a text description is better than nothing. Can't always get what you want and all.
The Hounsfield scale, named after Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, is a quantitative scale for describing radiodensity. It is frequently used in CT scans, where its value is also termed CT number. - Wikipedia
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| Internet IP Address Map |
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| 69.168.83.86 |
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| Strain Wave Gear |
Marc sent me a video about Harmonic Drives this morning. Okay, cool, I've seen these before, but wait a minute, how can that inner gear be rotating when there are teeth engaged at both the top and bottom? Turns out there are two kinds of these gear systems. The first is the Harmonic Drive.
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| Harmonic Drive Also known as Strain Wave Gearing |
The inner gear on a Harmonic Drive (the red one in the GIF above) is flexible. You can tell that it is rotating by focusing on one of the red teeth. You will see that each time one of the lobes of the green cam comes by, the red tooth steps from one blue tooth to the next.
That's fine and dandy, but a flexible gear? I was pretty sure there was a Harmonic Drive that used regular, made of steel, rigid gears. There is, but it's called a Cycloidal Drive.
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| Cycloidal Drive |
In this one, the purple output shaft is connected to a disk with a bunch of pins that transmit the force from the yellow rotating gear. You could just hook the yellow gear to the output shaft, but then you are going to get some wobble. You could handle that using a pair of U-joints on either the input or output shaft. Probably the input, less torque there.
Rumor has it that FBI raided the home of the guy who runs the dreamlandresort.com website in Rachel Nevada. The site is devoted to all things pertaining to Area 51, you know, the place where the gummit hides the UFO's and the aliens. This piqued my interest because I've seen at least a couple of movies where Area 51 played a part and I enjoyed those movies (Independence Day comes to mind). So let's see what we've got. We've got a Twitter thread offering up the internet's opinion. One of the subjects is whether the FBI has taken down his website (they haven't), but then the issue comes up as to whether then can take it down. Do they even know where it is? So sum dood looks it up and comes up with the latitude and longitude. Hmmph. How he'd do that? Well, it can't be too tough, so I thought I'd give it a go. I opened a terminal window on my Linux box and typed "ping " and then pasted the website's name. You didn't expect me to actually type it, did you? Of course, the Linux terminal window is old, so the standard cut and paste keys (Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V) don't work. You need to right click and select. Still, copy and paste is generally more reliable than my typing, especially for experiments where you don't know whether it is going to work or not.
Anyway, ping returns the IP address along with some gobble-de-gook about once a second. It will keep on doing this until you kill it with a Ctrl-C (yes, the same Ctrl-C you used to copy the URL. Different interpretations for standard commands on different planets). Take that IP address and feed it to iplocation.net and dumps a bunch of valuable data on your screen. Highlight that data, copy and paste it into your text editor, remove all the redundant stuff, Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy, open a spreadsheet on Google Drive, type Ctrl-V to paste it, do a little judicious editing and you get this:
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| Geolocation data for IP addess 69.168.83.86 |
It is as difficult and as dangerous to try to liberate a people that wishes to live in slavery as it is to try to enslave a people that wishes to live in freedom. - Machiavelli
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| Frank Zappa |
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| Cessna Caravan (PS-CNG) |
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| Waypoints on the way south |
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| Bad Decisions |
ZeroHedge has a story about the Rapid Dragon palletized weapon system. It can be used to drop cruise missiles out of the back of a C-130 transport aircraft. They talk about how it can give us some kind of tactical advantage. I don't know about that, it looks like just another defense contractor boondoggle to me, but hey, maybe it could be useful in some screwy situation. Of course, screwy situations is about all we've got these days.
But that's not why I'm confused. Here's what got me:
"It puts this thing within range of Russia," Special Operations Command Europe’s Lt. Col. Lawrence Melnicoff was quoted as saying of the new parachute dropped long-range missile which was tested. "We are intentionally trying to be provocative without being escalatory."
Provocative without being escalatory? WTF? A kinder person might say the warmongers in Washington are gambling that their provocations will not result in a nuclear war. I suspect they really want a nuclear conflict. Fuck Joe Biden and whoever is pulling his strings.
Whenever you insert an image in a Blogger post, the path for the image gets written twice. Being as Blogger creates horrendously long pathnames for these images, the html, if you look at it, looks like a pile of garbage. I see that and I think WTF? But then I put it out of my mind and concentrate on what I am trying to accomplish and that is often to move the image to where I want it, not where Blogger in its infinite stupidity has put it.
Anyway, I got to wondering about this today and I did some checking. The first time the pathname is used is in the a tag which is simply a link. The second time the pathname is used is in the img tag which is what causes the picture to be displayed. If you click on the image in a published post, it will take you to the original image which may be much larger (or smaller) than the published image. If you remove the complete a tag, then clicking the image on the published post will take you to the same image with the same size as it is in your post.
Here is an image inserted using the Blogger. Clicking on it will take you to a much larger image.
I have a piece of land. It's at least a couple of acres, maybe more. There are some old asphalt paths near the house and the pond. There is also a long concrete sidewalk that leads off to who knows where. The asphalt paths are deteriorating and there are weeds growing up from cracks in the concrete. There is one large expanse of asphalt where several paths come together. This section is also rather steep, too steep for easy walking. Osmany has engaged a crew to do some cleanup. From a distance I see one guy walking across a field of grass carrying a weed eater. Inside I'm talking to a man about coming up with a plan to improve these paths.
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| A mosaic of Hippocrates on the floor of the Asclepieion of Kos, with Asklepius in the middle, 2nd–3rd century |
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| Helsinki to Kos - 1,600 miles |
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| Flak tower in Rajamäki |
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| Porsche Tacyan Turbo |
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| SpaceX Raptor 2 Engine |
The Silicon Graybeard has a post up about SpaceX's engine building program. They're looking to reduce the cost of building a Raptor engine from $2 million down to a quarter of a million. With progress like that we might actually be back on the moon by the end of the decade.
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| Shark reconnaissance drone |
It carries a day-light camera, a thermal imaging camera, a video camera and a radio transmitter in a gyro-stabilized camera pod that is fitted under the nose of the fuselage. - Defence Blog
Seems drones are all the rage these days.
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| REMUS 620 UUV(unmanned underwater vehicle) |
The REMUS 620 UUV is is made by HII (Huntington Ingalls Industries), the largest military shipbuilding company in the United States. It's powered by batteries like a torpedo, but it has a range of 275 miles. Plus it has an electronic brain so supposedly it can find it's way home if it every gets lonely. Defence Blog talks about how it can be loaded up all kinds of gizmos, they don't say anything about a warhead, but they don't say that it can't.
P.S. When I saw HII in the Defence Blog post I thought it said HILL. That's what you get when you use them cheap fonts where you can't tell a lowercase L from an uppercase i.
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| © Getty Images / Jake Wyman |
Could this be the reason for the war in Ukraine?
I found this on RT, but they are quoting the Financial Times. I haven't verified that the quotes come from FT, but I have heard this story elsewhere.
Aggregate net income for publicly listed oil and gas companies operating in the United States exceeded $200 billion for the second and third quarters of the year, according to analysis of earnings reports and estimates carried out by S&P Global Commodity Insights for the Financial Times.
The media outlet reported over the weekend, citing the analysis, that US oil producers have cashed in on a period of geopolitical turmoil due to the conflict in Ukraine that has shaken up the global energy market and sent prices skyrocketing. The $200 billion figure, which included supermajors, mid-sized integrated groups and smaller independent shale operators, marks the sector’s “most profitable six months on record and puts it on course for an unprecedented year,” it wrote.
“Operating cash flow will likely be record-breaking – or at least very close to it – by year’s end,” executive director for upstream equity research at S&P, Hassan Eltorie, told the FT.
Okay, there's been a lot teeth gnashing over the price of gasoline and how it's all Biden's fault and Biden is going to fix it, both of which are balderdash. I say that because I don't think Biden is operating independently, I think he's just a puppet and someone is pulling his strings.
Or it could be that he's just a member of 'the club' that actually runs thing and they needed a front man to go out and tell stories to the press and they picked Joe. Doesn't matter whether the stories are true or not, just as long as they are really stupid or insane because that's what you need to get people's attention these days.
So what the club decided was that the oil companies weren't making enough money. Then they wondered how they could fix that, and then they had a good long think and said "why don't we start a proxy war with Russia?"
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what happened. If you want to stretch your imagination, imagine that the Russian arms makers were in on it. They needed more money to build up their armaments and what better way to do that than to increase the price of oil that Russia was exporting.
New World Order, bah! It's never gonna change, the world has always been run by the rich and that's the way it's going to be.
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