Punctuation can be important...

Punctuation can be important...  More examples of the importance of language “trivialities...”

“It looks really ancient!”

“It looks really ancient!”  So declares a modern kid, upon being presented with a ... typewriter.

They'd probably say that about me, too :)

The last balls standing...

The last balls standing...  The nanny state vs. the balls...

Barn: elevations...

Barn: elevations...  Mere seconds after I posted the last entry, the barn builders showed up to “stake out” the barn and to take “elevations” for the barn's foundation.  The objective of this work was to precisely locate where the outside corners of the barn's concrete foundation would go, and to determine exactly where the top of the barn's floor and the top of the foundation wall would be.  In the process, they also collect the information required to tell them where the bottom of the “footings” will be.

Footings are a critical part of any foundation.  They are steel-reinforced concrete structures that are underground, and they are the primary weight-bearing part of the foundation.  In the case of our barn, there are two kinds of footings.  The first one is an underground “wall” all the way around the barn.  The studs that support most of the second floor and roof rest on this.  The second kind of footings are interior footings that will go under a series of steel beams that support the center part of the second floor and roof.  These footing will be square concrete pillars, upon which the steel supports will rest.

The way that these things are done has changed over the years, especially shooting the elevations.  Before about 15 years ago, elevations were taken by using an instrument called a “surveyor’s level”.  I own a modern version of a surveyor's level, and I'm very familiar with how to use them.  They're a precision instrument that uses a combination of machinery and optics to very precisely locate a point that's at exactly the same height as the level itself.  It took two people to shoot elevations this way: one to operate the surveyor's level, the other to walk around with a “stick”: a rod held vertically that has precise elevation markings on it.

The modern way of doing this uses a rotating laser (like an old fashioned lighthouse) that sweeps out a perfectly level plane (left photo below) – a “laser level”.  Then you can take its companion gadget – a precision laser receiver – anywhere within 825' of the laser and you can locate a point on that level plane, in seconds.  This can be done with a single person, since there's nothing to do at the laser level itself.  This particular laser level has an accuracy of 3/32" in 100' – more than good enough for any construction work.  The first step is to generate a benchmark.  In this case, the top of the barn's floor is the reference benchmark, and in the middle photo below that's being marked on a benchmark stake.  Then at each of the four corners the laser receiver was used to find the reference plane, and a simple subtraction told us how far down the bottom of the footing needed to be.  The whole job was done in just a few minutes – much, much more easily than the old-fashioned way with a surveyor's level.  Let's hear it for lasers!

The barn begins!

The barn begins!  A loader came out yesterday and scraped off a (roughly) foot of topsoil from the area where our new barn will be built.  The view at right (click to embiggen) is looking to the west.

This is over two months later than originally planned, but ... it's started.  The contractor promises completion 115 days after actual start, so that makes our tentative completion date around Thanksgiving...

Some new vacation posts are up...

Some new vacation posts are up...  I know, I know, I'm way late putting these up.  Here they are.

Clearly we need a continuous delivery system for ibuprofen...

Clearly we need a continuous delivery system for ibuprofen...  Details here.

“...this is a case when that font of all quackery, New World Order conspiracy theories, and utter lunacy, NaturalNews.com, is less deluded than these homeopaths, albeit only marginally.”

“...this is a case when that font of all quackery, New World Order conspiracy theories, and utter lunacy, NaturalNews.com, is less deluded than these homeopaths, albeit only marginally.”  The homeopathic loonies think they can cure Ebola, with an (incredibly) dilute solution of:
   1. Crolatus horridus (rattlesnake venom)
   2. Bothrops (yellow viper)
   3. Lachesis (bushmaster snake)
   4. Phosphorus
   5. Mercurius Corrosivus
Barking mad, the lot of them...

Hey!

Hey!  Friend, reader, former colleague, owner of the largest car in the universe, and Idaho mogul-of-everything Doug S. passed this along.  Said he came across this and for some reason thought of his neighbors in Utah :)

Farmers are different...

Farmers are different...  Reader Jim M. passes this one along:

When you're from the farm, your perception is a little bit different.

A farmer drove to a neighbor's farmhouse and knocked at the door. A boy, about 9, opened the door. "Is your dad or mom home?" said the farmer.

"No, they went to town."

"How about your brother, Howard? Is he here?"

"No, he went with Mom and Dad."

The farmer stood there for a few minutes, shifting from one foot to the other, mumbling to himself, when the young boy says, "I know where all the tools are, if you want to borrow one, or I can give Dad a message."

"Well," said the farmer uncomfortably. "No, I really want to talk to your Dad, about your brother Howard getting my daughter Suzy pregnant".

The boy thought for a moment ... then says, "You'll have to talk to my Dad about that. I know he charges $500 for the bulls and $150 for the pigs, but I have no idea how much he charges for Howard."

Windows vs. Ford...

Windows vs. Ford...  Reader Simi L. passes this along, with this note: “Update of an oldie, but with some new additions.”  I never get tired of this one :)

For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on.

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated,

"If Ford had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, Ford issued a press release stating:

If Ford had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics (and I just love this part):

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash ... twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Apple would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask, "Are you sure?" before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously kifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.

P.S. - I'd like to add that when all else fails, you could call "customer service" in some foreign country and be instructed in some foreign language how to fix your car yourself!

Karsy's Giant Myriophone...

Karsy's Giant Myriophone...  What had 2,000 strings, sounded like a string orchestra, but only required two musicians?  Why, Karsy's Giant Myriophone, of course!

When you have appalled Barney Frank...

When you have appalled Barney Frank ... then it's clearly time for you to change your behavior – radically!

The 11 types of programmers...

The 11 types of programmers...  I was easily able to identify former colleagues for each of these types :)   I wonder where they would place me?

In defense of Zionism...

In defense of Zionism...  That's the title of an excellent piece in today's WSJ, by Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. (and an interesting fellow for many reasons)...

Breastfeeding in public...

Breastfeeding in public...  This caught my eye because the incident described happened in Logan, Utah (just a few miles north of our new home in Paradise, Utah).  The comment thread is quite entertaining if you can keep yourself from getting emotionally invested in it.

This is one of those issues that cause many foreigners (i.e., non-Americans) to look at us and wonder whether we're part of the same species as they.  I've traveled a bit more than most Americans have, and I know from experience that in much of the world breastfeeding in public is absolutely the norm.  In most of Asia (especially southeast Asia) and Africa, much of Europe, and in many other places, any mom who needs to feed her baby will simply do so.  Usually there's no attempt at being “discreet” (whatever that is!), and clearly they're not uncomfortable about the public exposure of their breast while feeding their baby.  I've never witnessed anyone in the vicinity of a breastfeeding mom exhibiting any sort of discomfort or embarrassment about seeing a baby being breastfed.  In fact, quite the opposite – usually the people around are smiling, making conversation with the mom, and otherwise displaying the behaviors of people who are comfortable and in the presence of something attractive and pleasant.  I've also never witnessed any male acting as though the spectacle of a breastfeeding woman was sexually provocative.  Speaking as a member of the male community, I personally find the sight of a breastfeeding woman to be something quite beautiful to behold, and not sexually provocative at all.

So why is it so different in America?  Reading that comment thread, it's quite clear that some number of Americans – both male and female – are quite disturbed at the sight of a breastfeeding woman.  Some think its sexually provocative.  Some think it will somehow be bad for their kids.  Most Europeans I know would attribute this to our cultural prudishness, which they'll in turn attribute to our primitive religious beliefs.  Maybe they're right.

We're quite a bunch of weirdos, we Americans...

NASA validates the “impossible thruster”?

NASA validates the “impossible thruster”?  A “thruster” is an engine that will cause a spacecraft to move.  Several readers sent me links to this story, which I've been following since the Chinese “confirmation” last year.

The claim of the designers of this thruster is extraordinary: that their thruster works without any reaction mass at all.  It requires nothing but electricity to work.  Every other thruster works by throwing something (anything!) away from it at high speed.  Newton's third law says that every action causes a reaction – and all these other thrusters depend on that.  It's the only way anyone has ever made a thruster that works.

Furthermore, an extremely well-tested physics principle – the conservation of momentum – requires that any change in momentum (as in a thruster accelerating something) must be accompanied by a precisely matching counter-change (as in the momentum of the quickly receding mass being thrown away from the rocket).  A thruster that didn't throw away any mass would violate this principle, and nobody has ever before found a violation.  You could justly call the conservation of momentum a bedrock physics principle.  To find a violation of it would upset darned near everything we thought we knew about physics.

So...

I am very skeptical of this claim, despite the NASA “validation”.  I put that word in quotes, because I note that the NASA engineers called the effect they detected an “anomalous thrust”, which I think is exactly right: it's a thrust whose source they have not yet identified.  This thrust is incredibly tiny, too – just the sort of thing you might get from an instrumentation problem, an experimental error, or even measurement error.  I infer from their wording that the NASA experimenters are themselves unconvinced – and it's easy to see why.  To a physicist (even of the amateur flavor!), this claim is about as likely as claiming that you could fill your gas tank with water, then add a tiny tablet, made from dried yak dung fermented in sloth urine, to create high-octane gasoline.  It's just too good to be true...

I say this very reluctantly, though.  If it were true somehow, then all sorts of marvelous things might derive from it: interstellar travel, flying cars, backpacks that took a load off your feet, etc.  I'd love for those things to magically become possible!

But I'm not betting on it :)

“This may seem like a classic case of ivory tower navel gazing...”

“This may seem like a classic case of ivory tower navel gazing...”  Actually it seems to me more like a terribly overdue reality check.  This piece in Slate is a good overview of the current flap in psychology concerning the irreproducibility of the majority of landmark psychological studies.  Reproducibility of experimental results is a key part of what makes science credible.  Certain branches of science – most notoriously the “soft sciences” like psychology – have been more lax than others (like, for example, physics).  That's beginning to change in psychology, and the lessons from this are starting to be applied to some other soft sciences.

Mann et al should be listening, but of course they won't be.  Their fame and fortune both depend on acceptance of their utterly failed models.  This isn't exactly the same as irreproducible experimental results, but it's a close relative...

Introverts Unite!

Introverts Unite!  Sent along by friend, reader, and proud papa of two prodigies (one a Google Engineer, the other a golf champion) Simon M...

“…and I want to thank you for being here.”

“…and I want to thank you for being here.”  That quote will make sense when you watch this video (from whence the quote comes).  But please make sure you've finished your drink before viewing...