The 45 caliber M1911 pistolgot its start with US Army during Moro Rebellion in the Philippines. It's still very popular. I never had a strong desire to own one, they're kind of big and heavy, only hold a few rounds of ammunition, and because the bullet is a largish chunk of lead, the ammunition is expensive. 9mm automatic pistols are smaller, lighter, cheaper, hold more bullets and the ammo is cheaper. But a 9mm is not a 45.
My Everyday Carry
No it's not a real 45, it's just a butane lighter, but whoever made it thought it was important to include '45' in the logo. No you can't see it, but trust me, it's there.
I never had a strong desire to own a 45, mostly for all the rational reasons I mentioned above, but then the other day I inexplicably got a hankering for a fancy 45, so I go looking around on the net. As you might expect, there is no end of fancy 45's out there. People are weird, man. Why would you buy one of those gaudy, over-priced play pretties when a plain steel 45 works just as well?
Makes no sense, but I still want one. Maybe when I get the new house project done I'll buy one for myself for Christmas. In 2021.
P.S. The price of ammunition only matters if you are going to be shooting thousands of rounds. If you are only shooting a hundred rounds a year, which should be plenty enough to keep your hand in, the price difference between 45 ACP and 9 mm is just background noise. And when's the last time I went shooting anyway? I should rectify that.
I look into a bit and find that someone has written a 40 page proof showing this to be true. I don't much care for academic papers. There might be reasons why they are written like they are, but providing a clear explanation does not seem to be one of them. Besides, I should be able to throw together a program to test this out. How hard can it be?
My basic idea was to make the biggest palindrome that was smaller than the given number, subtract it, and then repeat one more time to get the third number. If the last number is a palindrome, great, we're done. If not, go back to the previous step and find the next smaller palindrome. Repeat until the third number is a palindrome, or if it is smaller than the result. In that case, go back to the first step and find the next smaller palindrome.
I wrote the program to try this and immediately ran into a problem. Take a number like 1234567. You can make a palindrome that will take care of the bulk of the sum by simply using the first 3 digits as the last 3 in reverse order, like this: 1234321. This works fine until you get something like 1234111. Now you can still get a big chunk making 3 digit numbers from the first three and the last three digits and then using the smaller one to generate a palindrome, in this case it would be 1114111. That's a little better, but what about something like 1234000? Now we need to reduce the low order digit of first four digits, i.e. the center digit. Now we get 1233321.
Take the first half of the digits in the number and make a palindrome. If it is larger than the original number, decrement the center digit. If there are an even number of digits, use the digit just to the left of center.
If the first half of the number is a one followed by zeroes (i.e. ten raised to some power, like 100 or 1000) and you subtract 1, then your number is going to have one fewer digits and if you follow our previous rule for constructing a new palindrome, it will have 2 fewer digits, so we need to make some adjustments.
Since we are losing a digit, any number we create using our prefix will be smaller than our starting number, so we may as well make the most of it and just make it all 9's:
Start with 10004xxxx
Our new palindrome will be 99999999
For some reason, probably because I wasn't sleeping all that well, I had a very hard time figuring out this business of making the next smaller palindrome. In the last couple of weeks, my mind is back in gear and I got it all sorted out.
The program runs fine. Starting from 0, it can find a three number sum for any integer. So far it has gotten up to the hundreds of millions. I was kind of hoping that by watching the output of this program, a mystic crystal revelation would appear and I would grok the essence of palindromic splendor. That hasn't happened.
The program has been running for 20 odd minutes and it has been counting the number of digits in the third palindrome and these are the results so far:
Chart showing number of digits in third palindrome number
Have not found any 3rd palindromes with a length greater than 5
So it's a trivial problem, doesn't seem to have any special significance, but it kept me entertained for a bit. Numberphile did a video about this. I gave up watching about half way through because I wasn't going to go through all their gyrations. I suspect the idea in the paper is that you can derive the three numbers without having to test your results, but from what I've seen their method requires a great deal more work than mine.
I am brought by the lee. I don't know just exactly what that means, but from context I conclude it isn't good. Too much Patrick O'Brian I suppose.
Turns out it wasn't over exertion that was causing my legs to hurt. One of my vertebrate has seen fit to escape from its duty bound place by a fraction of an inch and is impinging on the spinal cord resulting in a myriad of false signals being transmitted both up and down the spinal column. Upwards I get pain, mostly controlled by a single tablet of Naproxen taken twice a day, and downwards I do not have all the control I could wish. It takes considerable determination to overcome the feeling of weakness and climb the stairs at a cheerful pace. Fine control is lacking as well. I now need to sit down on the bed in order to put on my trousers without risk of toppling over.
It's been three months since this started up and I have made half a dozen visits to medical people of one sort or another. The last one was a back specialist and she avers that an epideral injection of steroids may bring some relief. I hope so.
Jack went through something similar. I vaguely remember him mentioning it occasionally. He underwent surgery a few months ago and it seems to have helped. On the other hand I have a cousin who also underwent surgery on his back recently and his outcome wasn't quite so good.
Still, compared to some other bloggers I follow, I am in pretty good shape. One fellow reported that doctors want to take his legs. Another lost both legs and an arm in Afghanistan, so maybe 'lee' just means a slight inconvenience.
Watching Matt's Off Road Recoveryvideos I am reminded that going off road often means letting air out of the tires until the internal pressure is more like 10 PSI instead of 30 PSI. Higher pressures work well on the highway. You have less rolling resistance, better control and the tires don't get over heated. Lower pressures off road give you better grip on iffy surfaces like mud and sand. Getting back on the highway after an off road adventure, you want to pump up your tires back up to 30 PSI. This usually means carrying a portable air compressor with you, and if you have very large tires, spending a quarter hour or more waiting for your tires to reach highway pressure.
Of course, you need to stop the vehicle and get out to perform these operations. The military gets around this by having an air system built into the wheels and axles, an expensive proposition that few civilians can afford.
It occurred to me that it might be possible to build a system into the wheel with no mechanical connection to the rest of the vehicle. A small air compressor would be mounted to the wheel inside the tire and would be controlled by a radio signal, much like Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems do now. The only real problem we would have is providing power to the electric motor that will drive the air compressor. This could be done by turning the wheel into a generator. A ring of magnets would be mounted to the vehicle some where around the brakes, and a set of coils of wire would be mounted to the wheel so that they are in close proximity to to the magnets. When the wheel turns, the coils of wire would pass through the magnetic field, electricity is generated, the motor drives the air compressor and the tire is inflated.
Given that we would want to keep the weight as low as possible and the low speed of the wheel, this wheel mounted generator would probably not be able to generate much power. It might be enough to do the job. You might have to drive a mile at a lower speed before the tires were inflated enough to handle highway speeds. You would however, be moving as opposed to being stopped waiting for your portable air compressor to do the job. An experimental model would have to be built and tested.
If that arrangement is not adequate, we might want to add battery packs, which are heavy, or a bladder to hold a supply of high pressure air. It would be in the shape of a small inner tube that would hug the wheel and so not interfere with the deformation of the tire often encountered when crawling over rocks.
Way back in the 1960's, Alf was a terror. He ran the quarter mile in 9.5 seconds and went through the traps at over 150MPH. In 1968 he was the first Brit to cover the flying mile at 200MPH.
George is from the same era and has a number of records to his name. Both of these guys were pioneers in motorcycle racing. I would love to have one of these bikes.
You go Rollie! Funny how all the English speeds are given in Imperial units and the American one is given in metric. In case you are curious 249.1 KPH is equivalent to 154.8 MPH.
