Frazz

Found in today's Sunday comic section.

Frazz

Half of Americans would be about 165 million, 824 divided by 165 is 4.99 . . . which is close enough to five to make me happy.

You might want to read The Secret History of Lead.

National Lead

Dutch Boy Medallion

The Silicon Underground has post about the history of the National Lead company and some its trials and tribulations over pollution. It's a curious story that got me looking for pictures and I found a couple I liked.

Lead oxide used to be commonly used in making white paint. Dutch Boy Paint was founded by National Lead, hence the above medallion.

NL Industries Houston Office
16825 Northchase Drive, Houston, Texas

Objectively there is nothing special about this building, just a plain ordinary building. Well, except for the jaggies, which appealed to me for some reason. Kind of reminds me of Pixels, or Legos.

English Lead

Lead

I'm looking at the list of articles Ross sent me and I notice one entitled The Secret History of Lead. Now I know I've written some posts about lead, but where are they? Well, we could search, and I do, but most of what turns up is lead (as in leading the charge), not plumbum. Bah, dad gum English language anyway. Ought to be a way to distinguish lead from lead, eh? So I go through my entire archive of posts picking out the ones where lead refers to the metallic element and attaching the label Lead Metal to them. Turns out there were 28 such posts. A typical page of search results would have 30 instances of the word 'lead' and only one that referred to the metal, which means I probably paged through close to a thousand posts. Lead is evidently one of my more popular words.

Articles

Some links from Ross. I haven't read them, but they promise to be better than your average muck.

Violence of the Lambs
What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About the Toilet Paper Shortage
Thaddeus Stevens, Revolutionary
At the Door of the Loony Gas Building
Three Cheers for Socialism
Smoke from Underground
I’d Like to Force the World to Sing
America’s Diseased Politics
The Secret History of Lead
Power Causes Brain Damage
Cary Grant: how 100 acid trips in Tinseltown 'changed my life'
Exiting the Vampire Castle

These two go together:

The Greatest April Fools' Joke in Sports: The Saga of Sidd Finch
The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch

These should keep you busy for a few hours.

I'm posting this here mostly so it doesn't get lost in my e-mail.

Updated a few hours later because Blogger screwed up the formatting.

Converting berdan cases to use boxer primers

Converting berdan cases to use boxer primers.

Jack has several old rifles in obscure calibers. For some of them, he has had to resort to machining cases from solid brass in order to make cartridges so he can shoot them. I have been following his efforts in this regard for a while now, so this video, if it didn't hit close to home, it certainly landed nearby. Besides, we're reusing stuff that is normally thrown away, so hey, free money.

Ammunition for rifles and pistols is composed of four elements:

1. bullet - the lead projectile
2. case - a metal tube that holds all the other elements together
3. gun powder - provides the explosive force
4. primer - sets everything in motion when properly struck

Primers work by smashing a tiny amount of lead styphnate* between two pieces of metal: the back of the primer and the anvil. With Berdan primed ammunition, the anvil is incorporated into the case (see splash photo for the video above. A shell designed for use with a Berdan primer is on the left.) With boxer ammo, the anvil is part of the primer, and instead of an anvil and two small holes, there is one hole. That hole makes it easy to push the expended primer out of the case. As such, boxer ammo is preferred by people who like to reload ammunition.

Ammunition varies widely in price, from a couple of cents per cartridge for 22 caliber ammo to 50 cents for a 30 caliber rifle cartridge. It's probably more now, I haven't checked lately. If you shoot a lot, and you are shooting larger calibers, your ammunition bills can quickly become exorbitant, hence the desire to reload. The primer, bullet and powder are all expended when you shoot, but the case remains, and the case is the expensive part as it is generally made of brass.

Berdan primers are commonly found in military ammo. We have been making modern metallic cartridge firearms for over a hundred years and there seems to be no end to the variety of guns that have been made. Likewise, the variety of the required ammunition is nearly as varied, and some of them are not very popular. If you go poking around in the esoteric world of old firearms, you may find yourself with a gun that uses an oddball caliber, and when you go looking for ammo you may find that only a handful of Berdan primed cartridges are available. Being able to reload those cartridges becomes a worthwhile quest.

*we used to use mercury fulminate but not so much anymore.

Via Irons in the Fire

Letters

The Coronation of Charlemagne by Friedrich Kaulbach
Illiterate promoter of literacy.

Came across this question on Reddit. The answer was so cogent I thought it worth sharing.

Q: Why do some letters have a completely different character when written in uppercase (A/a, R/r, E/e, etc), whereas others simply have a larger version of themselves (S/s, P/p, W/w, etc)?

A: First of all, let's talk about the words 'uppercase' and 'lowercase'. These words come from the early history of printing, when a person called a typesetter would assemble each page of a book letter by letter. Each letter was a profile on a piece of lead, called a sort. The sorts were kept in boxes called typecases, which had compartments for each letter. There would be a typecase for each font (also called a fount), which was a typeface at a specific size, at a specific weight (bold, medium, etc.), in a specific shape (upright, italic, etc.). A typeface is what we nowadays call a font on computers. There were actually two typecases for each font, and they were kept one on top of the other. The one on top was called the upper case, and contained the 'majuscule' letters; the one on the bottom was called the lower case, and contained the 'minuscule' letters. So the proper names for 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' are 'majuscule' and 'minuscule', respectively.

Now, on to your actual question.

Letters are just simple drawings that have phonetic meanings. (In other words, the symbols represent sounds.) The nature of the symbols is affected by the thing the symbols are written on. For example, one of the earliest writing symbols we have is cuneiform, which was written by making marks with a stylus in a piece of clay. The shape of cuneiform marks is strongly determined by the shape of the stylus.

This is important, because the majuscules and minuscules were originally two forms of the Latin alphabet that were used for writing on different materials, and the same thing applies to the Greek alphabet.

Majuscule letters were originally inscriptional, which means they were carved into stone. The Roman emperor Trajan had his military victories depicted on a carved stone column called Trajan's column; at the base of this column is some writing, in the style of Roman square capitals: this style is common on Roman monuments, but Trajan's column is one of the best known examples. These letters were designed by a scribe painting them on to the stone with a brush; a stonemason would then carve out the painted areas. The motion of the brush created little flairs at the beginning at end of each brush stroke; these flairs are now known as serifs.

However, Romans writing out documents would use Roman cursive. Roman cursive, like all cursive writing forms, is basically a bunch of shortcuts in writing the 'proper' letters.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Roman culture continued to hold considerable sway amongst the barbarians. The same writing styles were preserved, until the Carolingian Renaissance under Charlemagne (Charles the Great) in the Frankish Empire (now France) in the 800s. Charlemagne was a great believer in literacy, and despite never learning to read himself, ordered the creation of a single style of handwriting to be used across his empire, to prevent documents from being misinterpreted. The end result was a pairing of these two writing styles into the majuscule and minuscule letters of a unified alphabet. The minuscule letters, being easier to write quickly, were use normally, but the majuscule letters, with their grand and elegant forms, were used for proper nouns and emphasis. Over the succeeding thousand years, different nations would slowly adapt these letter forms and the relationships between them to their needs: the Italians developed the Humanist minuscule, which later became the italic script; the Germanic peoples developed the blackletter scripts; the Irish developed the insular script. This development continues today, with hundreds of typefaces released each year by type designers.

I don't know why we need hundreds of new typefaces every year. You don't have to go too far down that rat hole before you can't see any difference between supercaligoobilicous and adventualicus. Well, I can't. Those are probably fighting words for people who live in that world.


Cutting letters into stone v-CUT lettering carving letters
Realized while I was working on this that printing and fonts are a recurring topic here.

Life

Grandpa Jack passed away last night while his daughter was en route to visit him one more time before the school year started. Last we heard he had maybe six months to live. Hmmph. That's the thing about estimates, especially on something like this.

So all my list of (chickenshit) chores suddenly got a bunch more stuff added, which pushed my reading on the ol' motivation meter off of the 'that'll keep' up to, 'hmm, there's a bunch of stuff that needs doing', so I got up (figuratively speaking) and started taking care of business.

A few minutes (hours?) later I've done all that can reasonable be expected, and it's time to take a break. I mean, shoot, beer thirty was a couple of hours ago. I'm sitting outside, drinking Palomas, feeling the pleasant breeze and watching it blow out my match. Looking around I notice a bird up in the top of a tree and I got to thinking about life and brains (BRAINS cries the zombie) and artificial intelligence.

So life. Our existence is predicated on the existence of the biosphere. Should I say 'our biosphere'? I mean, we know of no other. All life that we know of exists in this very thin layer of atmosphere and water that lies on the surface of our planet. Yes, mountains are high and rivers are deep (pause while I go find the song), but compared to the volume and mass of the Earth, our layer of existence is nothing.

I like to think of birds as sophisticated automatons. I mean, we could probably build a mechanical bird that could fly and navigate. We have drones and R/C model aircraft that look like birds. We are pretty near there. But how about building a mechanical bird that could forage over the landscape and so fuel itself?Okay, there was the fly eating office robot. But how about self repair, or the really big issue, reproduction?

When we first started making industrial machinery, everything was designed to last forever. Yes, there was maintenance to be performed, oil to be changed, bearings to be replaced, but it you followed instructions your machine would last forever.  Now the economics of manufacturing have changed. Diagnosis and repair are rare skills embodied by only a few people of exceptional abilities (a little self promotion never hurts, I'm told). Put those together, along with the large number of Asians who are willing and able to follow directions for a few kopecks a day means that is cheaper to build new ones than repair old ones.

Which should be our model going into the future? Dutiful maintenance of big, solid machines? Or continual replacement of chickenshit consumer goods? My opinion (and yours) don't matter. There are proponents of both approaches. They will either succeed or fail. They both may survive, or one or the other, or even both may fail. Keep a record, write it down. Maybe that information will prove useful to someone the next time this situation arises.

NASA humanoid robot

The point I am trying to make (I'm taking a shortcut here, the whole explanation exceeds my attention span) is that going into space, we really need to be designing our robotic children. People do really well on the surface of the Earth, but the surface of the Earth is an infinitesimal portion of the universe. If we are going to explore outer space, we really need bodies that survive without air, withstand more than 3 gees, and aren't bothered by temperatures that approach absolute zero or exceed the boiling point of lead.

The answer of course is mechanical men. Robots do not need to look like people, they can look like anything, like a refrigerator or a tractor. But people are the end result of a zillion years of evolution. We have an extensive array of capabilities. We might have abilities that no one has thought to catalog. Shoot, we might have abilities that no one has even noticed. Building a robot that has all of the abilities of a human would be a good exercise. We might not want to send people-like robots into outer space, but knowing how to build a machine that could emulate a person would be worthwhile goal.

Reproduction though, that's going to be a tough nut to crack. To emulate animal reproductive processes we would essentially need to design our own cell that could grow into a creature that could survive in outer space. We might be able to do that in another thousand years.

Another approach would be to give our robot children the knowledge of how to mine the materials, process them and build the machines that could make more robots. Biology is suitable for the biosphere, but not for outer space.

P-47

Great Planes Republic P 47 Thunderbolt
RCAF TW
The whole thing is grainy WW2 footage and it's mostly done in black and white. I suspect the narrator has a lot to do with whether I can watch a documentary or not. Or maybe it's the music. This isn't a great video, but it's tolerable.

The video points out that the P-47 was the most produced American fighter aircraft ever, but what they don't tell you is that the P-51 was a close second. (See my spreadsheet for the glory details).

Lady Jane

One of the planes in the video is named Lady Jane, and I'm wondering who the reference might be. I know the Rolling Stones recorded a song by that name, but that wasn't around during WW2, so I did a little checking. Finally found this:

John TruluckMILITARY | CAPTAIN | FIGHTER PILOT | 56TH FIGHTER GROUP
71 missions from May 1943 to April 1944. P-47 plane name was 'Lady Jane', for his future wife. DSC/ DFC w/ 3 Oak Leaf Cluster/ AM w/ 3 Oak Leaf Cluster 5

So regular old romance, no hi-faulutin' literary reference.

Loading Ammunition into P-47 wing magazines

I can sort of understand how an all-metal airplane can fly: the aluminum is thin enough that the whole airplane doesn't weigh much compared to the amount of surface area it presents. But it becomes a little more difficult to understand when the wings are full of lead and brass and not just empty space.

Mariana Islands (Blue Markers) in the South Pacific
Orange Markers are Okinawa (upper left), Palau (lower left) and Marshall Islands (lower right)
Tokyo is near top center, Taiwan left center, and Manila is lower left.

My father flew on B-24's in the South Pacific during WW2, so I was more interested in that portion than the stuff about Europe. I'd heard of the Mariana Islands before, but I didn't realize it was THE major turning point of the war in the Pacific. But then I recalled hearing about The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.

Update November 2020 replaced missing video.

Update May 2023 replaced missing video.

The Return of Amenhotep

Cheops Pyramid with Camel

I'm thinking about business and unemployment and I think I figured out why we have problems.

We start with a stable situation. Everybody's a farmer, everybody works, everybody eats, everybody has a house to sleep in, everybody works hard, everybody dies young.

Then somebody comes up with an idea. Could be most anything. We sharpen our scythes every day instead of just once a week, we use scythes made of iron instead of lead, we work together in teams to harvest one field at a time instead of everybody struggling alone with their own field. I don't know, could be anything.

So now we don't need quite so many people doing the work. Small changes might not actually put anyone out of work, it might just make things a little easier for some people.

It's when you get a disruptive technology, like a combine, then things get messy. Now all the people who used to work harvesting the crops are out of work, but the price of bread has fallen so that almost everyone can afford to buy it instead of making it, well, everyone except those people who aren't working anymore because their jobs have disappeared.

To build a combine, or any other disruptive technology, takes a sizable capital investment and entails a certain amount of risk. Not all business ventures succeed, so people are leery of investing in them, which is to say that there isn't enough money to gamble on new ventures to keep everyone employed all the time.

During WW2 and during the 1950's, things might have been different. There was a huge amount of money being invested in new production machinery, and a lot of the machinery was very elementary, at least as it is seen from today. To look at it another way, it didn't take a whole lot of capital to start a factory that would employ a thousand people, probably one percent of what it would take today. Sure there's been inflation, but the machinery has gotten a lot more complex and a lot more expensive.

And it doesn't last as long. I'm going to venture that to say that half of the factories we build these days are obsolete before they are halfway through their expected lifespan, and thus, while they may have paid off their build costs, they are not going to generate all the profit that was expected.

This is how wars get started. It's also how the communists get started. You've got a mass of people with nothing to do. They are probably better off than they were, they have bread to eat that they didn't have to make, but they don't have anything to do. And they see or hear about other people putting jam on their bread and they want some jam too, but they don't have a job, so no jam for you.

So then some demagogue comes along and says 'we deserve jam, too' and we're going to stir up shit until we get what we want. And the unemployed, because they have nothing better to do, jump right in on that program.

So the moral of this story is that if you are going to introduce a disruptive technology (like sending all of our assembly jobs to China), you need a program to keep the newly unemployed busy, and it needs to be a program they can believe in, not something everyone despises and denigrates.

And that's why the democrats lost. There isn't anything of substance in liberal policy, nothing you can hang your hat on. It basically all boils down to 'let's be nice to each other', and people basically got tired of listening to that horseshit. We want something to do, and if you're not going to give us something to do, well, we'll go find something to do. Devil finds work for idle hands as they say, and that's how riots get started and whole sections of town get destroyed. It's not because people are broke or unemployed, it's because they don't have anything to believe in.

Our scientific / capitalist society is founded on doubt: will that work? Well, let's try it and find out. People operate on faith, faith that what worked yesterday is going to work today, because most of what we do we do on autopilot, there is very little that requires conscious thought and besides, there are distractions and distractions use up most of our quota of daily thought. That's why it can be very difficult to get a drone, someone doing a repetitive job, to actually think about your problem: they are hoarding their mental energy for important stuff, like lunch, or their boy/girl-friend.

Personally, I am in favor of bringing back the sun god, and the belief that everyone needs an enormous stone tomb. We need to start a program for building pyramids like they did in the old days, by hand. It would give the unemployed something to do, and more importantly, something to believe in.

Boilerplate

Trey Gowdy on National Security and Refugees
I originally found this on Facebook with the tagline

"What I'm really afraid of is a foreign policy that creates more widows and orphans."

That line struck a chord with me, so I 'shared' the video clip. (The line shows up just after 7:50.)

I just found out that Trey Gowdy was "the chairman of a House Select Committee to investigate the 2012 Benghazi attack." How did I not know that? Because from the git-go the 'Benghazi investigation' smelled like all politics, all the time, and so I turned my filters up and blocked it out. So Trey is a politician. Big surprise. Doesn't mean he's an idiot, or that he's wrong about everything.

Another line from Trey that resonated with me comes just after the 5:50 mark:

"We have no idea what our foreign policy is in the middle east." 

I have asked that same question myself a couple of times, but I have never gotten a satisfactory answer. The State Department had a statement, but I found it vague to the point of useless. I just looked for it and couldn't find it. Crawled off into some deep dark hole. Afraid of the light, no doubt.

Last weekend I came across an essay by Robert Kagan in The Wall Street Journal. I found it impenetrable. Bayou Renaissance Man put up a post about it. He seems to think he understands it.

These two items (the State Dept. Foreign Policy and Kagan's essay) appear to be useless, much like the pages of text (that no one reads) found in legal documents, i.e. boilerplate, which got me wondering how that term came into existence. Could it be because documents made using boilerplate are impenetrable? Not quite.

"Boiler plate" originally referred to the sheet steel used to make boilers.
The analogy between the curved steel used to make water boilers and curved metal used to print prepared text was based both on the curved shape of the plate and to the fact that it had been prepared elsewhere before being incorporated into a downstream producer’s finished product. . . .
In the field of printing, the term dates back to the early 1900s. From the 1890s onwards, printing plates of text for widespread reproduction such as advertisements or syndicated columns were cast or stamped in steel (instead of the much softer and less durable lead alloys used otherwise) ready for the printing press and distributed to newspapers around the United States. By analogy, they came to be known as 'boilerplates'. Until the 1950s, thousands of newspapers received and used this kind of boilerplate from the nation's largest supplier, the Western Newspaper Union.  - Wikipedia

Cast in steel! Good grief, that's pretty serious. Takes a lot more heat to melt steel (1400°F) than it does lead (650°F).

Baking to the next level

Richard Hamming

Detroit Steve pokes a yeast cell:

    I've been on a bit of a search kick on foods that have copper affinity. It started with my use of cinnamon, I use it every day in my oatmeal and it is red so I wondered what made it red. Still no idea, but thought it could be copper. Not likely but still. Like Iron for the Irish, I was wondering if it could be possible poisonous in larger accumulated quantities.
    The Irish and iron premise is 8,000 years of isolation on Ireland with a soil devoid of iron, has made the Irish very good at pulling out any available iron in the foods to the point that a diet rich in iron will accumulates to toxic level such that it actually damages our hearts. Thus, giving blood is an important habit and necessary.
    Many foods have affinity to different elements, tobacco for lead and radon, rice has one for arsenic. Basically a strategy for survival for plants is a chemical approach, they are trying to find ways to kill or discourage anything that might eat it.
    The EFSA European Food Safety Authority put out a Scientific opinion on the inability to assess the safety of copper-enriched yeast added for nutritional purposes. I tried yeast additive in college, did not agree with me then.

So this lead to one of my favorite and Tyler's yeast; Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
​I was surprised but should not have been by the broad list of research that has been going on with this yeast.​
There is a Database devoted to it!
So I started to read one of the articles.
Right off the bat, it reminding me of the Dr. Strangelove plot.
They are playing around with the yeast to have it use a sugar found in wood. Keep in mind what three concepts I have in mind while reading this: the Richard Hamming story and the Atom bomb (igniting our atmosphere with and atom bomb), second why coal stopped forming (bacteria was able to digest cellulose) and third the garlic mustard in my yard starting to come up (invasive species that take over).
​It is all so unlikely it's funny. First assumption is there is a lot of xylose, I have no idea how much xylose sugar is out there. So this new version of our favorite yeast gets out and starts its fast consumption of all the xylose, what might happen?

I remember reading about a case of iron overload some years ago. The treatment they used then was blood letting. The man took the blood home and poured it on his roses.

Nightcrawler

Nightcrawler (warning: autoplay), starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Louis (pronounced Lewis) Bloom

Right off you can tell there is something wrong with Lou: he's stealing manhole covers to raise cash. Copper, bronze, lead and even aluminum I can understand. Those metals are actually worth something, but manhole covers are cast iron which has got to have a value of less than zero. I mean it takes more gas to haul them to the scrap yard than they are worth. That's why cities can leave them lying around on the street. Nobody in their right mind is going to bother stealing them.

    And he's glib. He can run off a line of patter as well as the best corporate spokesperson or a good motivational speaker. He's obviously smart, is able to communicate well, yet he's using the same technique for raising funds that crack addicts use.

   He's also attracted to shiny things, like the security guard's watch, and the shiny red car (read Chrysler Corporation product placement, above). Once he gets going in his new (nightcrawling) business he's making a couple hundred dollars a night, which is not really enough to afford a shiny new muscle car, but hey, every adolescent male has that dream, don't they? Who am I kidding? Even I have that dream, although I'm too cheap to do anything about it.

    The movie does a good job of taking apart our TV news business, which includes both the cutthroat culture and teamwork involved. People want to see stuff (that's the demand), other people find things to show (that's the supply), and somebody else figured out how to make it pay. And then there's the whole tech crew that puts it all together to deliver the package to your screen. I can see how just putting together a single news broadcast could give you a quick ego boost. The sad part is viewers won't even notice, unless you screw up.

    Jake is a very unpleasant person. It's hard to explain just what is wrong with him, but the feeling is there from the get-go. He is polite and well spoken. Perhaps too polite and too well spoken, like maybe he's a con-man trying to sell you a bridge. He is persistent, perhaps a little too persistent. Sometimes I expected someone to yell at him or punch him, but that never happens. Kind of makes me wonder how he got to be this way. Kind of, but not very much.

    Then there's the bit about tailing the bad guys with his bright red car. Are the bad guys dunderheads? Didn't they see the bright red car earlier? Could be that high stress impaired their perception, or a feeling of elation made them careless. We'll never know, they are out of the picture soon enough.

Hot Lead Versus Cold Steel

Charge! Painting on the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 by Georgios Roilos (1867–1928)

I thought the bayonet charge went out with the horse mounted cavalry. Tam links to an Oleg post advocating marksmenship and naturally a whole field of dunderheads pipe up about how knives are better than guns because they don't jam or run out of ammo or blah, blah, blah. But then someone mentions a bayonet charge by the Scots in Afghanistan in 2004, which prompts me to look around and I discover that there have been a few others in the last 70 years. I'm not even going to look at WW2, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like what I found.

08-03-97. Doldol Training Area Kenya. Ist Battalion The Princess of Wales Own Regiment of Yorkshire, B Company. Photographer Giles Penfound.

Turns out I'm all wet about horse mounted calvary as well. First US soldiers in Afghanistan rode horses. You may have heard about the statue erected in their honor.

America's Response Monument - De Oppresso Liber, by Douwe Blumberg 2011

P.S. I thought it would be easy coming up with a picture for this post, but it seems like the old school painters preferred calvary charges to bayonets. There is hardly anything in the way of photographs. I suspect that is because the situation has to be pretty desperate to warrant a bayonet charge, and at times like that who's got time to fool with a camera?

Fair

The world is a strange and wondrous place. Some Africans are fighting a war over land using bows and arrows. It doesn't look like any war I've ever seen, but it seems to be pretty serious: 20 people have died in the fighting.


Automobilismo: Taruffi batte cinque primati mondiali.
    Then I'm watching a video about an old record setting Italian race car and the narrator is talking a mile a minute (in Italian. I don't understand just what does he say).
    I'm looking at this old car with absolutely no safety features and I'm reminded of ToddG's rant about gun safety and I realize that the gun community's attitude about safety is very similar to the attitude about automobile safety that was prevalent back in the 1950's. Yes, these machines can be dangerous if you are careless, so you should be careful, but even if you are careful, sometimes bad things happen and you have an accident and people get hurt. That's too bad, but that's just the way it is.
   Then it hits me: why don't mass murderers use automobiles to wreak their vengeance on the world? A car is at least as dangerous as a gun, maybe even more so, but you don't hear about nut cases deliberately driving into crowds of people with the intention of killing as many people as possible. I mean you occasionally hear about it happening by accident, and some of those accidents might have been deliberate, but those seem to be very rare.
    Getting back to our Africans. I suspect there is some kind of tradition or unspoken social contract that prevents them from using guns, and now I'm thinking that there is something similar going on that prevents people from using cars for mass murder.

P.S. Talking to Jack about the Africans the other day and he mentioned how Benjamin Franklin proposed arming the Continental Army with bows and arrows. They had almost the same range and were as least as accurate as the muskets the British were using, and they were a heck of a lot cheaper. Jack was of the opinion that they used guns because they didn't want to be laughed at. I think it was because little balls of lead were cheaper than an accurate hand made arrow. Plus balls of lead would be so deformed on impact as to render them useless for return fire, whereas arrows were more likely to be undamaged and sent back.

Update May 2020 replaced missing video. Using the wayback machine I found the term 'il bisiluro di Taruffi' which turned up a couple of similar videos. The other one can be found here. A later model Bisiluro has appeared here also.

Nazis Persecuted Jews for Torturing Animals?

Caricature from Kladderadatsch, a satirical journal, September 1933. Lab animals giving the Roman salute to Hermann Göring for his order to ban vivisection.

As with most things regarding Nazi Germany, none of this makes any sense. Maybe they had too much lead in their diet. Came across this picture and then I did a little reading in ye olde Wikipedia. From the article on Animal welfare in Nazi Germany:

At the end of the nineteenth century, kosher butchering and vivisection were the main concerns regarding animal protection in Germany. These concerns continued among the Nazis. According to Boria Sax, the Nazis rejected anthropocentric reasons for animal protection—animals were not to be protected for human interests—but for themselves. In 1927, a Nazi representative to the Reichstag called for actions against cruelty to animals and kosher butchering.

I had never heard any complaints about kosher butchering before. All I had heard is it had to be done by someone with some standing in the church, like a priest or a rabbi or something. So I go look that up and find a article titled Shechita which is a Jewish word for Kosher slaughter, though I don't know why they can't just call it slaughter instead of this funny, made up name. In any case, they give an explanation of the requirements (slightly condensed by me):

The animal must be killed "with respect and compassion" by a Jew who is duly licensed and trained. The act is performed by severing the trachea, esophagus, carotid arteries, jugular veins and vagus nerve in a swift action using an extremely sharp blade. This results in a rapid drop in blood pressure in the brain and loss of consciousness. According to Jewish religious sources, the animal is now insensible to pain and exsanguinates in a prompt and precise action.

This sounds like a pretty good way, i.e. humane, way of killing an animal. I can't imagine why people were opposed to it, unless they didn't like all the blood. Or maybe they just didn't like the idea of Jews having knives.

Air-Plane

RAF  F-15E 

Sometimes it takes a good long while for the obvious to make its way to the front of my brain where I can recognize it. Take, for instance, the brand name Frigidaire. We had a refrigerator of that make when I was a kid. We always called it "the fridge". It wasn't until many years later that I realized the name came from combining the two words "frigid" and "air", and then tacking an e on the end to make it French or something, Frigid Air. What a concept.
    Looking at airplane specifications, mostly just to see how different warbirds compare in terms of size and weight, I noticed that the wing loading seemed awfully high, like 50 pounds per square foot (metric). Put 50 pounds in a box and drop it and it will fall through the air like a lead balloon.
    Pictures of airplanes flying always look like the wings are totally level, so it must be that Bernoulli principle, the difference in air pressure between the high velocity air on the upper side, and the slower air on the lower side, right? Except for the B-52. B-52's always look like they are headed downhill.
     And what's the deal with "rotation" at lift off? Airplanes charge down the runway with their wings all nice and level until they get to their flying speed and then the pilot hauls back on the stick, the plane takes on a nose up attitude and it leaps into the air. Magic!
    The key word here is "plane". Much like power boats get up on a "plane" on the water, that's what airplanes are doing, they are "planing" on air.  At high speeds it doesn't take much of an angle of produce all the air pressure you need to support your multi-ton aircraft. At lower speeds it takes more of an angle. The appearance of the airplane flying right along the same line as its wings at liftoff is an illusion. It is still going 99% of it's horizontal velocity, it's just going up because the wings are pushing air down. It's travel vector is still much more in line with the ground than with with the angle of the wings.
    The Bernoulli effect? All that does is add a bit of efficiency.

Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope

You know, back when I was a boy, they weren't puttin' up a new satellite every 15 minutes. We put up one at a time and waited until it died before we put even thought about puttin' up another one. Now they are putting up so many you can't keep track of them.     Last April I stole a post from E.B. Misfit about dark lightning. This satellite is how we found out about it.      So this is all very cool, but how are they detecting these gamma rays? I mean gamma rays are pretty much undetectable, that's what makes them so dangerous. You don't know you've been exposed until you're dead. Basically what they do is put up some radiation shielding and wait for a gamma ray to impact an atom in the shield. Any such impact will cause a certain amount of excitement, like generating a positron and an electron which are detectable by ordinary stuff. Problem is you need a lot of shield material to be sure of stopping/detecting the gamma ray. Wikipedia puts it succinctly: Space-based pair-conversion detectors tend to make for rather expensive missions, since they unavoidably contain several hundred kilograms of lead or tungsten.

Battery Testing

Batteries are a perfect example of the double-edged sword of technology. They are really great in that they can put electrical power in the palm of your hand. They are really bad because if you are not careful you can waste a lot of money on them, you can ruin your expensive little play-pretty, or you could even hurt yourself.

Used to be there were two kinds of batteries: big, heavy lead-acid batteries for cars and such, and dry cells for your flashlight. But then some whiz kids started looking at them and we started getting all kinds of new, improved batteries that used things like mercury, cadmium, nickel, and now lithium.

We go through a fair number of batteries around here. Double A, triple A and nine volt are the most popular. Sometimes you have a play-pretty that isn't acting right and the first thing you do is replace the batteries. Sometimes that fixes it, sometimes it doesn't, but the old batteries end up in the discard pile. Given the price of batteries (EXTREMELY HIGH), my compulsive self requires that I sit down and test all of the batteries in the discard pile before consigning them to the recycling bin. Today I found two nine volt batteries that are probably still good. I say probably because they measure nine volts on my multimeter. Generally speaking, measuring the voltage on any kind of small battery, except for the lithium ones, can give you a pretty good indication of whether it is any good or not. If they show any less than full voltage I will toss them. By less I mean a tenth of a volt.

This test doesn't work with Lithium batteries. Fortunately I don't have many of those.

The meter test works, but it's kind of a hassle. I have to hold the battery and two test leads and I don't have a gripping hand. And then I have to peer at the meter and try and make out whether it reads 1.5 or 1.4 volts. So I looked on Amazon for a battery tester. They have 2,000 different battery testers for sale. I am sorry, that does not really help me. Google wasn't any better. They found all kinds of outfits from hype-mongers to specialized industrial technologists.

I poked around for a while, but eventually I gave up and decided I would just stick with my multimeter, clumsy as it is.

Green Century Electronics Recycling

Entrance

Jack wanted a flat panel display for his seismograph, so we drove downtown to this computer recycling place.

They have a small showroom where they have used/refubished computers for sale. I saw one that looked kind of like mine, but newer, for $50. Jack picked up a display for $30. Complete computer systems run $150.

They also have sizable warehouse full of old computers and CRT's (Cathode Ray Tube). Can you believe it? Nobody wants a CRT any more. Twenty years ago we would have killed for a 17" CRT. Now you have to pay to get rid of them. These guys load them on pallets and ship them to a processor where they take them apart. Plastic cases go in one pile, steel bits in another, electronics in another. The deflection coils, which are made of copper wire are pulled off, and the tube itself is pulverized. The electronics and the tube contain lead and so require special treatment. The copper wire is the only thing of value.



Can you imagine how much work it is going to take to get rid of all the old CRT's? There must be millions of them in the country, and everyone is replacing them as fast as they can.

I have a 36" CRT TV that I bought five or ten years ago, at the very tale end of the CRT age. It's in a cabinet built into the wall. At the time, we really liked it. It was a big improvement over our 20 inch. It hasn't been turned on for at least a year. I think it will probably just stay there. It weighs 300 pounds, no one wants to put in the effort to move it. I think if we ever need a TV in that room again, we will just hang a flat panel on the wall in front of it.

Children's Books

I am reading The World At Night by Alan Furst, a really excellent tale. Mr. Furst has written several books about life and espionage during WWII. This one takes place in France. I am reading along and this pops up in the middle of the page:

Seize hommes sur
le coffre d'un mort,
yo ho ho
la bouteille de rhum

Boisson et diable
ont tues les autres
yo ho ho
buvons le rhum

Yo ho ho? Hommes is men, mort is dead, bouteille sounds like bottle, rhum sounds like rum. Um, could this be 15 men on a Dead Man's Chest? Yes, it could and it is. I haven't heard this in like forever, so I went a Googling. I found several recordings on YouTube, but none that I thought really captured the flavor of the song, so you will just have to sing it yourself. And for that we have the lyrics (from Midi Melodies). It was never a real authentic sea chanty. It started as just a couple of lines in Treasure Island, but then it took on a life of it's own.

1. Fifteen men on a dead man's chest
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
Drink and the devil had done for the rest
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
The mate was fixed by the bosun's pike
The bosun brained with a marlinspike
And cookey's throat was marked belike
It had been gripped by fingers ten;
And there they lay, all good dead men
Like break o'day in a boozing ken
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

2. Fifteen men of the whole ship's list
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
Dead and be damned and the rest gone whist!
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
The skipper lay with his nob in gore
Where the scullion's axe his cheek had shore
And the scullion he was stabbed times four
And there they lay, and the soggy skies
Dripped down in up-staring eyes
In murk sunset and foul sunrise
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

3. Fifteen men of 'em stiff and stark
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
Ten of the crew had the murder mark!
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
Twas a cutlass swipe or an ounce of lead
Or a yawing hole in a battered head
And the scuppers' glut with a rotting red
And there they lay, aye, damn my eyes
Looking up at paradise
All souls bound just contrawise
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

4. Fifteen men of 'em good and true
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
Ev'ry man jack could ha' sailed with Old Pew,
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
There was chest on chest of Spanish gold
With a ton of plate in the middle hold
And the cabins riot of stuff untold,
And they lay there that took the plum
With sightless glare and their lips struck dumb
While we shared all by the rule of thumb,
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

5. More was seen through a sternlight screen
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
Chartings undoubt where a woman had been
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
'Twas a flimsy shift on a bunker cot
With a dirk slit sheer through the bosom spot
And the lace stiff dry in a purplish blot
Oh was she wench or some shudderin' maid
That dared the knife and took the blade
By God! she had stuff for a plucky jade
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

6. Fifteen men on a dead man's chest
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
Drink and the devil had done for the rest
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
We wrapped 'em all in a mains'l tight
With twice ten turns of a hawser's bight
And we heaved 'em over and out of sight,
With a Yo-Heave-Ho! and a fare-you-well
And a sudden plunge in the sullen swell
Ten fathoms deep on the road to hell,
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!