Fairfield, Iowa

My brother Andy has been living in Fairfield, Iowa, off and on for several years now. You are probably thinking, like I did when I first heard of it, where? Why? But it's a bit like when you buy a new car. You never noticed them before, but now you see them everywhere. So it is with me and Fairfield. Just today I came across a street in Hillsboro named after this town.

Yesterday Andy called to tell me about the town's real claim to fame, one that even I, a knower of many things, was unaware of: The Dodge Power Wagon Festival! A power wagon, in case you don't know, is a four wheel drive truck built by Dodge. Big deal, until you see how ugly they are, and then, just maybe, you might begin to understand their appeal. To coincide with the festival, a local art gallery is having a show. Andy took son Nick to the show where they met the last living survivor of the “The Legendary Dodge Truck and the Arabian Expedition” who autographed a book for Nick, with the inscription, because Nick confessed his love for firearms, "don't shoot yourself in the foot". The leader of this expedition was the model for the movie character "Indiana Jones".

Allergies

Drove down to Eugene yesterday afternoon to pick up Ross from school. He has completed his first year of college and Anne and I are pleased. The Southern Willamette Valley, where the University of Oregon is located is known as the grass seed capital of the world. I suffer from hay fever, and grass is one of my prime enemies. So while we are loading the car, my nose is running faster and faster. I had just been to the allergist, and he had given me some samples, including some Singulair, so I took one. By the time we left, my nose had shaped up and was flying right. But then at three o'clock in the morning I wake up and cannot go back to sleep. It takes me 12 hours to get 7 hours of sleep. It is noon before I am feeling human. No more Singulair for me.

While I was wiling away those sleepless hours in the middle of the night, I came across a rerun of a NOVA program on PBS. They were talking about the epi-genome, something above the genome, that controls which genes get turned on and which ones don't. It seems that what you eat can have a big effect on this. Not only that, but what your parents ate, and your grandparents ate, can also affect which genes are active in your body. There is that saying "you are what you eat", well you are also what your parents and grandparents ate. This could explain a great many things, perhaps even allergies.

When I looked this up on the web I realized the PBS show isn't scheduled to air until next month, so I got to see it early. Whoo-hoo!

Note that "wiling" is a variation of "wile", not "while", which is what I thought until I tried to figure out how to spell it.

Gyro Bike

I have always liked gyroscopes. Maybe everyone does. My dad worked with inertial navigation systems for Boeing, so perhaps that is where my interest started. My dad also had this kooky idea for a device for overcoming inertia by using some of the principles involved in gyros. He never actually made it work. Perhaps it is time for me to pick up the torch. Maybe it will get me off the ground.

We lived in Seattle when they had the World's Fair there back in the early sixties. In the hall of science, they had a gyro platform you could stand on. There was a large motorized gyro mounted on a gimble on a platform that was free to rotate about its' vertical axis. I never got to try it out, it was either broken, or there was a long line waiting to get on. We went back to Seattle to visit a few years ago and I took my son John with me to the Science hall, now a museum, but it was gone.

My first Christmas after we moved to Ohio I got a flying saucer toy that contained a gear driven gyroscope. Now there was a gyro! You could crank that thing up and you had a really strong gyro. It was great. But like all toy gyros, the bearings were feeble, and it would start slowing down almost immediately. I looked on the Internet, but I could not find a picture. It was about eight inches in diameter and maybe four inches tall, made of yellow plastic with short orange (or red?) posts at either end of the axis. I think it was made by Marx.

Later on, after I had been riding motorcycles for a few years, I discovered a very interesting phenomena. If you are cruising along at a good clip, like sixty MPH or so, and you press forward on one of the hand grips, the bike will go off in that direction immediately. The handlebars will not noticeably move. That is, you press on the right hand grip, the bike will heal over to the right, and start turning right. The reaction is instantaneous. I attribute this to the gyroscopic action of the bike's front wheel. You might be able to observe the same effect on a bicycle, but the amount of force involved would be minuscule compared to the mass of the rider. In all my years of bicycle riding I have never observed it.

A few years ago, flywheels were going to be the new way of storing energy in cars instead of batteries. You would have a three foot diameter flywheel in an evacuated chamber spinning at 20,000 RPM in the trunk of your car. When you wanted to go, the flywheel would be connected to a generator, which would generate electric current which would be sent to electric motors which would drive the wheels. When you stepped on the brake, the drive motors would act as generators, and the current would be used speed up the flywheel. A nice idea, but it never really took off.

I do not ride motorcycles anymore, not that I do not like or enjoy them, but I have responsibilities, and I am afraid of the other drivers on the road. I do not want to end up in an ambulance because I was hit by a car. The problem with motorcycles is you have no protection against impact. A fully enclosed motorcycle could overcome this difficulty, but then you have the problem maintaining your balance when you come to a stop. One way to do this would be to have mechanical struts that you could operate with your feet. A fully enclosed motorcycle would be heavy, so you might want power assist on those struts.

Another solution might be to use a (can you guess?) flywheel! Speed the flywheel up when you come to a stop, connect a vertical gimble to the bike's steering and use the gyroscopic forces to maintain your balance. When you take off, syphon the energy from the gyro to drive the wheels. When you have reached cruising speed, the flywheel would have come to a stop and would generate no gyroscopic forces.

There was a guy who built a gyro balanced motorcycle here in Portland a while back. I made an inquiry a few years ago, and it seemed like it used the gyro to stay level like a car in corners. Interesting but not what I was looking for. However, as you can see from the ad, he seems to have updated his device.

Update June 2016 replaced missing picture.

Foreign Policy

Bread and circuses. That was the Roman emperors formula for staying in power. Keep the people entertained and fed and you can pretty much do whatever you want. Things have not changed.

We now have something we call democracy, but it is actually a circus. We have two very powerful factions who are constantly putting on shows in the media, keeping people entertained and attempting to sway them to their own side, not that it will do the people any good, put it will put a stamp of approval on the dominate faction allowing them to justify whatever strikes their fancy.

When I was in high school, I had a government teacher who encouraged us to dig into the issues that were currently being discussed, find out the truth of the matter. Recently I have come to the view this as pointless. The more you dig, the more complex the issue, the less clear the solution, and the worst part is there is no bottom. You can devote your entire life a single issue and never get it resolved. Combine this with the endless number of political issues, and the business of trying to survive, never mind trying to live a little, and there just is not enough time. So I try and filter most of it out, sign up with one faction and hope for the best. And then I write these little missives that might influence a few people.

Foreign policy, like any other government issue, is decided by those who care enough to get involved, and how many allies they can attract to your side. If you can keep the masses distracted with some kind of side show, you can keep most people from even thinking about what you are doing. The thing that puzzles me is how did we make so many really bad foreign policy decisions? At least they look that way to me now, though I have been suspicious of this for a while. There was one movie I saw about American involvement in South America and there was some diplomat babbling about "our way of life", and I thought, what (the blank) is the matter with this guy? "Our way of life"? That is what indigenous peoples complain about when the white man shows up with his 7-11's. I thought America was about Truth and Justice and Freedom, not about whether we danced on Saturday or went to church on Sunday. If this is what the State Department is thinking, no wonder we have so much trouble with other countries.

The other problem was probably the red scare, exemplified by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Senator Joe would not have gotten so far if there were not a lot of people who thought there was a real problem with the red menace, and I have to admit, Stalin was one scary S.O.B. So for the last 60 years we have been fighting the communist menace, and unwittingly, or deliberately, plowing fertile ground for the communists. We support these vicious third world dictators because they claim to be anti-communist, but their ruination of their countries and their growing impoverished masses provide a perfect opportunity for a communist revolution.

My suggestion at this point is to eliminate all foreign aid except education. People who do not understand machinery do not need tractors that break down. Countries that have starving masses of people do not need medicine that cures disease.

Cruise Control

I use Cruise Control wherever I go, even for as short a distance as two blocks. Left to my own devices, there is no telling how fast I might go, so in the interests of public harmony, I restrain my speed and Cruise Control helps me do that. Driving any distance, even as short as two blocks, at 25 miles per hour is tedious in the extreme. Twelve years of living in Hillsboro has inured me to this and it no longer bothers me as much as it did, but it is still very bad.

I like the Cruise Control on our 1995 Ford Windstar minivan because it lets you set the cruise speed to as low as 25 MPH. The lower cruise limit on our other three (!?!?) (all newer) vehicles is 35 MPH, which makes it useless for traveling through these endless suburban neighborhoods. I would like it better if it went even lower, like 20 MPH for school zones, and 10 MPH for parking lots. It can take a subjective hour to get from one side to the other of some of these mall lots at 10 MPH. I cannot do it. With a Cruise that controls my speed down to that level, I could.

The Cruise Control on my 1999 Dodge Dakota has a "Cancel" button, something the Ford does not have. It's function is mostly psychological. It has the same effect as tapping the brakes: it disengages the Cruise function, but does not turn it off, so it retains the speed setting. Pressing resume will return the vehicle to its' previous speed. You can tap on the brakes so lightly as to not have any noticeable braking effect, yet it will disengage the cruise control. However, your brake lights will undoubtedly come on, and you are using a control for other than it's intended purpose. Disengaging the Cruise Control can also cause the vehicle to slow down, but it is mostly a function of wind resistance. Brakes are to slow the vehicle very quickly. In any case I like and use the "Cancel" button.

Another feature of the Windstar's Cruise Control is that you can adjust the speed in one MPH increments. Tap the "ACCEL" button, and speed will increase by one MPH. Tap the "COAST" button, and speed will be reduced by one MPH. Five taps will change your speed by five MPH. I also use this feature. I would rather have a dial that would allow me to set the speed anywhere from five to five hundred MPH (Whoa dude! five hundred MPH! That would be so cool!), but dial controls seem to be out of favor these days. Maybe I will build one someday.

The Cruise controls on our three American vehicles are buttons on the steering wheel around the central horn button/air bag. Our newest vehicle, a Japanese Mitsubishi Endeavor, uses a short stalk, like a turn signal stalk, which gives it a total of three. One for lights, one for wipers, and one for cruise. I think they moved the Cruise control to a stalk because they put a bunch of radio control buttons on the wheel itself. No more room there for Cruise controls. Interestingly, the buttons for the radio are on the back side of the wheel, invisible to the driver, though they can be easily located by touch. But back tot he Cruise control. The first two stalks (for lights and wipers) are mounted to the steering column housing, that is, they do not rotate with the steering wheel. However, the Cruise control does. It is a little odd. And this little lever has more functions than Carter has pills. It moves up, down, back and it has a button on the end to be pressed.

Run Johnny Run

John and his friend Keven ran the Helvetia half marathon Saturday. Last year John beat Keven, this year, Keven beat John. They both beat last years times in spite of not training for the last month.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Lost In Translation

When I was in Seattle a couple of weeks ago, I was startled by a serious gap in my children's education, and so, in a feeble effort to correct this deficiency, I purchased a copy of the "I Ching" (translated by James Legge). In his preface I came across a section that illuminated the whole Asian to Western Language translation problem:

"When I made my first translation of it in 1854, I endeavored to be as concise in my English as the original Chinese was. Much of what I wrote was made up, in consequence, of so many English words, with little or no mark of syntactical connexion. I followed in this the example of P. Regis and his coadjutors (Introduction, page 9) in their Latin version. But their version is all but unintelligible, and mine was not less so. How to surmount this difficulty occurred to me after I had found the clue to the interpretation;- in a fact which I had unconsciously acted on in all my translations of the other classics, namely, that the written characters of the Chinese are not representations of words, but symbols of ideas, and that the combination of them in composition is not a representation of what the writer would say, but of what he thinks. It is vain therefore for a translator to attempt a literal version. When the symbolic characters have brought his mind en rapport with that of this author, he is free to render the ideas in his own or any other speech in the best manner that he can attain to."

Last night my wife and I watched "The History Boys", or at least the first 95% of it. Something in this movie prompted me to realize that a large part of poetry is the sound it makes. Not everyone is enraptured by the same kind of music, and for some spoken poetry is very pleasant, perhaps even enthralling. My father liked poetry. It does not do much for me. I might enjoy it, but not enough to make note of it.

I do not listen to music much anymore. I really liked rock and roll when I was growing up, but I have heard all the songs so many times, I do not want to here any of them again. Hearing one once in a while is okay, but I pretty much go without music now. The classics do nothing for me, nor does hardly anything modern. I last thing I heard that I really enjoyed was the soundtrack to "Kill Bill".

And speaking of Uma Thurman (star of Kill Bill), she has followed Clive Owen into the "made for advertising" movie business with a film for Pirelli.