Paper Bag King, er, Queen, er, Knight

Inventor Margaret Knight used this model of her paper bag folding machine to apply for a patent, awarded in 1879. Her concept is still used to manufacture grocery bags.

Roberta X put up a post about Ms. Knight. I thought paper bags were a 20th century invention, but I was wrong. Again. This means that paper was invented even farther back than that, and not in 1957 when my kindergarten teacher invented it, or so I believed. Modern machines are a little more sophisticated (read "shiny") but they still do the same basic job.

LFD-350/450 Roll Feeding Square Bottom Paper Bag Making Machine. Made in China, of course.

Fast Food

Ronald McDonald - Antonov An-2R - Budapest, Hungary, April 18, 2003. 

 Taco Time in downtown Hillsboro is closing, which is too bad. Today was their last day. Thank god for fast food, otherwise I might have to cook, and cooking implies dirty pots and pans, which means somebody should do the dishes, and since I will avoid my chores if at all possible, this leads to guilt, and I really don't need any more guilt. I have a hard enough time ignoring all the guilt I already have without piling on more. Fortunately there are a good half dozen fast food joints within about three miles, so it isn't too arduous to run out and get something.
    I like McDonald's for their breakfast burritos and their coffee, and their $1 menu when I am feeling cheap. My wife likes Black Rock coffee across from Shute Park. I like fresh brewed coffee. I like it even better when I don't have to make it. Black Rock wants $2.50 for a medium coffee, which is slightly larger than the McDonald's cup, but I know most of the people who work there even though I only stop by maybe a couple of times a month. I know one person at McDonald's. "Know" may be a bit strong, I recognize them, and they do a passable job of pretending to recognize me. I dunno, maybe they actually do. Some people are really good at that. I am not one of those people.
    I heard about McDonald's offering budget advice for their employees. I don't know that anyone aspires to make a career out of working at McDonald's. A manager might earn a living wage, but I doubt anyone else does. At best it's a temporary gig to cover your expenses until something better comes along. I wonder if the baristas who work in coffee kiosks make more than people working at McDonald's. I will tip them 50 cents when I get a cup there (or a dollar for two). There is no tip jar at McDonald's.
    I suppose that in the current economy there are people who would be glad to get a job at McDonald's. Sad state of affairs.
    Rumor has it that fast food restaurants could afford to pay people more money, possibly even a decent wage without having to raise their prices significantly, but in a cutthroat business in a cutthroat economy that would destroy you. Until we have fewer people looking for work wages aren't going anywhere. Some people might argue that if workers made more money, they would spend more money, which would stimulate the economy, which would mean more jobs, which would mean wages would go up. It's an interesting theory, but I doubt anyone is going to implement it. The last person to try something that radical was Henry Ford when he started paying his assembly line workers $5 a day, and look what happened to him: he grew old and died, and they are still using his name on cars. Is it doing him any good now that he's dead? No, it's not. Now you may argue that his generous wages had nothing to do with his demise, and you might be right. But are you willing to take that chance?

Buy It Now

American MRAP vehicles lined up at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. Photograph: Emma Graham-Harrison

The US Military has a boatload of stuff in Afghanistan that they need to dispose of. Unfortunately, being as there are no docks and no water, no boats dock there. Pakistan has water and docks, but for some reason transporting anything across our supposed ally's territory cannot be done, so everything has to be flown out. Evidently flying 8-ton MRAP's out costs more than they are worth, so they are being ground up into scrap.
    The US Federal Government has a website for selling off surplus stuff. You should go there and buy something. Something cool, something tactical, something glorious. Something useful, maybe.

Sign of the Times

Saw this sign by the side of the road today:

Fear Free

Dental

I saw the words, but it was just a flash so at first it didn't make any sense. Thought about it for a second and decided it made even less sense. Is this from a dentist offering dental services that are free of pain (Fear-Free Dental)? Or is this some right-wing nut-job warning of the coming Obama-clypse (Fear Free-Dental)?

Conversion Error

Entrance to Bob Damstrom's homemade kiln

I'm reading about kiln drying on Wikipedia and they give the density of wood in kilograms per cubic meter, which means nothing to me (or at least I pretend that it means nothing). I want my measurements in good old 'Merican standard: feet and pounds. Well Google does conversions, so I pick a big round number in the middle of the range, hand it to Google and I get back:

1000 (kg / m3) =
0.036127292 pound / ft3

That doesn't look right. Three hundredths of a pound? That's like half an ounce. Even lightweight balsa wood weighs more than that. So I put the calculation in a spreadsheet and I get 62.3 pounds per cubic foot. That's more like it.
    Wait a minute, that's like the density of water (a pint's a pound the world around, eight pints to a gallon, that's eight pounds, and roughly eight gallons a cubic foot, which comes to 64, which is pretty close to 62.3.
    One cc (cubic centimeter) of water weighs one gram. There are a hundred centimeters in a meter, and 100 times 100 times 100 is one million cc's per cubic meter, or 1,000,000 grams, which is one thousand kilograms. So wood has about the same density as water.
    So how does wood float? Well, density of wood ranges from 350 (kg / m3) to 1250 (kg /m3), so some of it is less dense than water and does float and some of it is denser than water and doesn't. They used to send logs from pine and fir trees to the mill via the rivers, so softwoods float. I remember being out at a fresh water marina where they had some floating logs tied to the dock to act as fenders, and they were barely breaking the surface. And then there are those stories about old logs being reclaimed from the bottom of lakes and rivers where they have been sitting for a hundred years or so and are perfectly preserved. They didn't float.
    I was going to complain to Google about their erroneous conversion, but navigating their help maze to get to the point where you can actually say something required more effort than I wanted to spend. Especially since I can make a blog post about it and make Google look dumb. Unless I made an error and I end up with egg on my face.

Ghost Ship by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller

Picture I found on Concept Ships

I thoroughly enjoyed Ghost Ship. It's got everything you could want in a space adventure: evil villains, talented heroes, internal and external conflicts, loyalties tested, protocols observed, plus your standard futuristic hardware like interstellar ships with warp drive. They also have books and bookstores, which adds a nice anachronistic touch. And giant turtles. Don't forget the giant turtles.
    I liked it so much I ordered three more books in the series. They came from bookstores that post their wares on Amazon. I try and buy somewhat locally, like the West Coast as opposed to New York City because it makes sense to my primitive brain to order things from places that are closer than farther away. It probably doesn't make any real difference, everything probably goes through Atlanta anyway. What's even odder is that I order books from one store and they show up with a shipping label from another. Last time I ordered a book from California and it came from a local store here in Hillsboro! This time I ordered one from Washington state and it came from somewhere in Great Britain (BN124QY). There must be some kind of underground railroad for used books.
    When you look at a book being sold by someone besides Amazon, Amazon lists the supposed shipping location, but if you look at the vendor page there is no "ship from" location.
    Another book I ordered originally came from the Multnomah County Library, which is Portland, which is just down the road from here.

Time & Money

October 3, 2012. Gas Turbine Technician Kathrine Shost cleans out a gas generator in Main Engine Room Two aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Stout (DDG 55). Not much to do with this post, but nothing like a cute girl and some hi-tech machinery to make my heart go pitty-pat.

I plugged the ABS connector back in. I was thinking that we could drop the radiator and the ABS controller out along with the engine all in one fell swoop, but we would have needed to disconnect the rear brake lines and the lines to the master cylinder, and I didn't see any easy way to do that. Younger son got tired of waiting for me to come up with a plan and suggested we just do it the way we did last time, which was to pull the radiator. When you are doing things you at least feel like you are making progress, even if it ends up taking longer. Standing around puzzling how to do things is a good idea if you have never done a task before, but once you have a plan, no matter how good, bad, or indifferent, it makes more sense to just start working on it rather than spend the rest of the day trying to figure out whether it is the best way or not. Me, I like puzzles, so I like the figuring it out part, but that is not necessarily the quickest way to get the job done.
    On some jobs it looks like all you have to do is remove this one little part, and that should be quick and easy, but that part is so inaccessible you could spend hours trying to finagle it out. You could get to that part easily if all this other stuff in front of it was out of the way, but taking all that stuff off would be a lot of work. It might be a lot of work, but it will likely be quicker than trying to finesse it.
   And then there is whole business of telling you all about it. It took me longer to put together the post about the Catalytic Converter than it took Mr. Hortnagl to do the actual work.