Microfine

My wife was peeling an orange the other day, and every now and then a cloud of tiny particles would erupt from where she was working. It would only hang in the air for a second or so and then it would disappear. It didn't happen every time she tore a piece of peel, just on the bigger tears. I don't know whether it was particles of peel or juice. I tried taking a picture, but I was too late, and the camera was too slow.

I picked up a coffee mug to make myself a cup of tea and I noticed a line in the stain on the inside of the cup that could have been a hair. I knew it wasn't, it was too thin and it was the same color as all the other tea stain on the inside of the cup, but I couldn't restrain myself, so I wiped it with my thumb, and surprise, surprise! A big bunch of the "stain" got wiped away. This cup had just come out of the dishwasher. I got a paper towel and tried wiping away more of the stain and almost all of it came off. Not much of a stain, more like a film of superfine tea dust. I wanted some pictures, so I tried the same thing on a couple of other badly stained tea mugs, but no luck. Something about the micro structure of the surface perhaps.

My friend Marc and I were poking around in a pile of stuff he had acquired from an old tool & die shop. I found a large envelope marked as containing sandpaper with one micron grit. One micron?!?! You got to be kidding, so I open it up and pull out a sheet. It looks like paper, it even feels like paper. Well, I supposed it could be one micron grit, I mean how would you tell? There was a mold for making a curved plastic mirror there as well, and it was very smooth and shiny, just like a mirror. Is that how you get there? Cut, grind, file, and then sand, sand, sand with progressively finer sandpaper until you can't tell the difference?

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.

Happy Halloween

I saw this excellent pumpkin today at Post Hip in Multnomah Village.
Somehow the colors don't seem as bright in this version of the picture.

Update November 2016 replaced missing picture.

Emma Maersk & SVG

Bateaux comparaison

Wikimedia had a nice drawing that showed the relative sizes of some large ships. Unfortunately, their thumbnail is too small to be able to read the text, and the drawing is too big to fit on the screen, so I thought I would try and scale it to a more usable size. Hmmm, it's an SVG file, not one of your normal image formats. How do we scale that? A quick Google search turns up Inkscape, which is the full-blown image editor. Let's give it a shot. Mmm, it's big, takes a while to download. It's big, it takes a while to install. But both operations go by without a glitch, and look, here's our image on the screen. Now, how do we scale it? Poke around on the menu, no luck. Look at the help, massive, look at the index, no luck here either. Post a couple of questions to help and I finally figure out that this is an editing operation for which you need to select what you want to operate on. That would be the entire image. Is "Select All" on the edit menu? It is! Click and drag a couple of times, check the zoom level. That looks like something we can use. Export to a bitmap (not really, it goes to PNG file, but close enough), and presto, chango, here we are, except not quite. Blogger doesn't like big images, so it scales it down. I tried cutting it in half, and posting the two halves, but then we get a gap between the two halves. So I open the image in Paint, select all, copy, go over to Google documents, create a new "document", paste the image from Paint. Now repeat, select all, copy, and finally go over to blogger and paste the image. Geez, what a lot of rig-a-ma-role. But I did it all without having to learn how any of the fancy schmancy applications work. Is it really easier, or quicker?

Update January 2017 replaced missing image.

What Have We Done?

Tacky, but very funny.



Someone sent me this clip via email. I liked it so I thought I would post it here, so I tried to upload it to YouTube. It uploaded quick enough, but then YouTube spent an infinite amount of time (more than an hour) processing it, only to tell me it had been rejected due to a "Terms of Use Violation" or copyright infringement. Didn't say which. So I went over to metacafe and tried uploading it there. Only took a few seconds, and then it told me they already had a copy of it. It's a WMV file, which is a Microsoft format, which means it probably has all kinds of DRM (Digital Rights Management) stuff embedded in it, which is probably what YouTube used to reject it, and metacafe used to identify it.

Update January 2017 tried to replace missing video, but I don't have a clue as to what it was.

Emma Maersk

Eugen Maersk in Le Havre France

Marston is full of beans today. Some of these pictures are from an email he sent me, some are from the Maersk Line website. I think the first one is the best. It shows you how much bigger Eugen is than your run of the mill container ship.

The 207 foot beam means it cannot fit through the Panama or Suez Canals. It is strictly transpacific. A cruise speed of 31 knots is 50% faster than a typical container ship. Built in Denmark.

• Length - 1,302 ft, 150 feet longer than the QE2 or the USS Enterprise (Aircraft Carrier).
• Crew - 13
• Engine - 14 cylinders in-line diesel engine (110,000 BHP)
• Cargo capacity - 11,000 TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit)
• First Trip - September 08, 2006
• Construction cost - US $145,000,000+

TEU stands for Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit and is the equivalent of a 20 foot long shipping container. These are the short ones you see getting hauled around on trucks sometimes. The big containers are 40 feet long and are the same size as full size semi-trailers. They are equivalent to two TEU's.

The Maersk line has 8 ships like this out of a total of roughly 200. The oldest ships in their fleet were built in 1980 and hold 2700 TEU, about one fourth of what Emma and her sisters can carry. Their smallest ship only holds 740 TEU, but it is an oddball. The next biggest size is over 1,000 TEU. They have almost two million shipping containers. One of their ships makes a port call every thirteen minutes.

Shipyard where she was built:

Odense Steel Shipyard

Update June 2019 replaced dead Picasa album with image and link to Google Drive album.
Update July 2020 replaced missing Google Map.

Corruption

We were talking at lunch the other day about drugs and current attempts to legalize marijuana, i.e. California Assembly Bill 390, being as California is broke and they are in need of a new source of loot. Opinions varied. Some people think all drugs should be legal and the government shouldn't be involved. Me, I'm worried about what will happen if all drugs do become legal. I can just see it now: television advertisements from major drug manufacturers during prime time telling you to "ask your doctor if heroin is right for you". If you follow the money, you might conclude (like me) that drugs are illegal because the way it is now, too many people are making too much money off them. Even if the South American and Mexican drug cartels were interested in making drugs legal (no telling if they are or not), there is no way it is going to happen. There are too many people in Washington who are getting too much money to allow anything like that to happen. Anyway the consensus was that while the Cartels think they may be well versed in the ways of corruption, they are mere amateurs when it comes to playing in the big leagues in Washington D.C.

Time Warp

In honor of Halloween, a blast from the past: 1975, though I didn't see it until much later.

Update September 2015. Replaced missing video.
Update February 2019. Replaced missing video.