Jerusalem

Everybody's packin' and nobody's freakin'. So okay, it is like on verge of becoming a war zone at any moment, but everyday life goes on including this old dude playing the guitar.

Color-Coding Wrenches

My collection of quarter inch drive tools

Once upon a time I had a small box holding a set of quarter-inch drive sockets and wrenches. But time passed, the box disintegrated, some of those sockets wandered off and I acquired new sockets, so now I have a mish-mash of quarter-inch drive tools. That's okay, I found a box on Amazon that would hold them all.

But now I've got metric and English size sockets all mixed together in the same box. If you are looking for a particular socket, be it either or metric, it's easy enough to tell which ones are bigger if all the sockets you have are of that one persuasion, but when you've got them mixed together the problem becomes much more difficult because some English sockets are nearly the same apparent size as some metric sockets, so now you have pick them up and hold them up the light and try to make out the tiny little markings stamped into the side. Bah and humbug.

ZEYAR Permanent Markers

But now I'm retired and I've got time to spend on sorting out my self-imposed problems, so I bought a set of colored markers and painted a red stripe around the base of each English socket and a blue stripe around the base of the metric sockets.

I got onto this because I'm working on a defunct pressure washer and I need some Allen wrenches. I had a bunch at one time, but during the new house project all my tools got scattered. Probably had something to do with my hip going bad and relying on Osmany to pick up the slack. He's probably got them, but he's busy and I don't want to bug him over something as trivial as Allen wrenches. Besides, I ones I had were kind of a mess. So I bought some new ones:

Topline Folding Hex Key Set

I was just looking for English and metric sizes, and I found some, but both grips were the same color. What is wrong with you guys? Why would you do that? So I kept looking and I found this. The set includes a third handle with Torx bits and that's okay, it's not like I'm overrun with Torx drivers. Not everyone likes this kind of tools, but I do. Having a complete set in my hand makes my life easier.

Ruger P85

Boring, Durable, Unsexy Bricks: The Remarkably Successful Ruger P85
Forgotten Weapons

I'm always interested in the business side of any business. How do they manage to survive? Well, 700,000 pistols, that'll pay a couple of bills. Call it a million pistols over a ten year run, just to make the math easy. That's a 100,000 pistols a year. If you make $10 profit off of each one that might be a pretty good return. Semi-auto pistols go for something like $500 to $1,000 dollars. Call it a $1,000, to make it easy. Figure half of that goes to the retailer, shipping, everything after it goes out the door. So that leaves $490 per pistol to pay for the rent on the building, depreciation on the machinery, wages, benefits, taxes and all the costs associated with running a business, like accountants and lawyers.

So if everything goes smoothly, you could be raking in the dough, but any kind of hiccup and the situation could easily turn sour. People go into business every day. Some of them will succeed, but some of them will fail.You gotta have some faith when you take a leap into the unknown.

Previous post about Ruger here.

Age of Rage

Democrat Congressman Preston Brooks beats Republican Senator  Charles Sumner, 1856

Even in the best of times, there are always going to be a few nut cases. It does seem like the there have been more cases lately of people losing their cool / their minds / going berserk, or maybe I've just been hearing about it more. Whatever, this story is a little disturbing.

Age of Rage: 26 Million Americans Believe Political Violence is Justified by Jonathan Turley

A poll released by the University of Chicago via the Chicago Project on Security and Threats offers a chilling account of the growing radicalism in America, particularly after the second foiled assassination attempt of former president Donald Trump, the poll found that 26 million Americans believe “the use of force” is justified to keep Trump from regaining the presidency.

As discussed in my book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” we have seen an increasing level of rage rhetoric in our political system. For some, violent language can become violent action. There is a normalization that can occur as extreme actions become more acceptable to more and more citizens:

“We are living in an age of rage. It permeates every aspect of our society and politics. Rage is liberating, even addictive. It allows us to say and do things that we would ordinarily avoid, even denounce in others. Rage is often found at the farthest extreme of reason. For those who agree with the underlying message, it is righteous and passionate. For those who disagree, it is dangerous and destabilizing.”

With the unrelenting claims of President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and others that democracy is about to die in America, some now feel a license to commit criminal acts in the name of “saving democracy.”

It is the ultimate form of self-delusion that one saves democracy by committing political violence against those with whom you disagree.

He goes on at length giving us numerous examples of supposedly intelligent, reasonable people, losing their minds and lashing out in an irresponsible if not down right criminal manner. Somebody needs to bring the smack down on these fools.

 

Geometry Refresher

Brilliant Geometry Puzzle
Andy Math

I am a sucker for math problems. I like the ones that are easy for me to solve, I don't much care for the really esoteric stuff, i.e. problems I can't easily solve. I started watching this video and I'm thinking I should be able to solve this. I attack with the Pythagorean Formula (which is basically the only tool in my geometry toolbox) but I get nowhere. So I resume watching to see how he is going to solve it and he immediately brings up the Intersecting Chords Theorem. The what? Never heard of it. What the heck is this thing? So, more YouTube:

Intersecting Chords Theorem! (explanation and examples)
You Can Learn Math with Alyssa

I like Alyssa, she moves a little too slowly for my taste, but she is crystal clear and she has a pleasant voice. But then she comes to Central Angles and Inscribed Angles and my brain objects, so more YouTube:

Central Angles and Inscribed Angles! (theorems AND examples)
You Can Learn Math with Alyssa

Alyssa explains what the theorem is and shows how to apply it, but she doesn't explain how the theorem is derived, what some people call 'a proof', so now we need another explanation.

Inscribed angle theorem proof | High School Geometry | High School Math | Khan Academy
Khan Academy

Now that I think about it, I probably learned about all this back in high school, but I think that was it for geometry. After that is was calculus, trig and matrices, and geometry kind of got left in the dust.

Love Between Fairy and Devil - Netflix Series

Official Trailer: Love Between Fairy and Devil | iQIYI Romance
iQIYI Romance - Get the iQIYI APP

This is a very silly fantasy, but the visuals are out of this world. Our girl is a flower / fairy. She is apprenticed to the Aribiter, who is some kind of record keeper. The arbiter has been on leave for a zillion years, so our girl is basically running the shop by herself. The devil has been locked up in a tower for zillion years. He manages to break out. The hero calls upon his minions to reseal the lock on the tower.  They struggle mightily, but are unsuccessful until our girl shows up and by throwing herself at the tower she manages to reseal the lock. She vanished so I thought she was stuck inside, but maybe not. The hero and his minions manage to catch all the other escaped devils except for the big guy. 

The devil runs into fairy and the collision results in a kiss which has mucho magically effects - they exchange bodies which they find disconcerting. They kiss again and manage to return to their bodies, but now anything that happens to one, like getting hit or cut, happens to the other, so now the devil has to protect the fairy even though he wants her dead. So it's a bit of a comedy.

It's not our usual fare, but the sets, the scenery, the clothes and the battle grounds are all phenomenal. The fairy's treehouse-in-the-clouds is fabulous. Some of it is ridiculous, but hey, it's fantasy, so go with the flow.

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When the characters in this show wish to unleash their magical powers (for good or evil), they go through some contortions with their hands. You remember that line about how any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? (Arthur C. Clarke) I see modern day magicians play card tricks and I can't figure out how they do it. I know there is no real magic, it is just artful distraction and slight of hand, but to me it may just as well be real magic. And then you have people doing any kind of intricate work, like assembling a circuit board, typing at a keyboard, operating a big, complex machine. Their hands are flying over their work, too fast for the eye to follow. They work for a few minutes, and presto-chango, we have a new thing, or something has come to life. If you don't understand what's going on, it looks a lot like magic.

So we have our hero and villain fighting each other with giant magical swords. They are both lords in their respectively realms, so they have serious resources backing them. The present day equivalent would be piloted jet fighters engaged in a dogfight. Magical swordfights look better on the screen because you can see the fighter's facial expressions and body movements. Modern day dogfights all you can see is the black visor over the fighter's faces.

Exploding Pagers

Not much new in the news this morning. Oh wait, what's this? Exploding pagers:

• AlJazeera: Hezbollah members among hundreds wounded as pagers explode in Lebanon
• ZeroHedge: Hezbollah's '9/11': Iranian Ambassador Among 1,000+ Wounded After Israel Remotely Detonates Pagers

No real information on how it was done. Did someone insert an explosive into all these pagers? Or did some whiz kid figure out how to put a pager in melt down mode that somehow caused the lithium battery to explode? I'm not sure you can make a battery explode simply by messing with the controlling program, but they do pack a lot of energy in a small package, and lithium batteries can be dangerous. So, maybe.

The news reports imply that someone (Israel) managed to infiltrate the pager distribution channel, and went in and loaded explosives in a bunch of pagers. The bad guys switched to pagers only recently, and this was only done when they figured out that someone (Israel) was listening to their phone calls. I wouldn't wonder if Israel had all those pagers prepped and were just waiting for the bad guy's leader to order the switch to pagers. The trigger? Israel leaked the idea that they were listening to Hamas' and Hezbollah's phone calls.