Ah, Autumn...

We went for a nice walk up the slope behind our house this morning, Debbie and I, and all three dogs (Mo’i, Miki, and Lea). It’s the first morning we’ve had this season that “felt” like an autumn morning: 42 degrees when we left, 100% relative humidity, clear skies with patches of fog and mist spotted here and there. By the time we got back (an hour or so later), it was 52 degrees, but otherwise the same.

This is the season when all the plants are covered with dew in the morning. We still have some plants in bloom, and they were quite beautiful, all glistening with fine dew drops. Naturally, I forgot to bring my camera! The spider’s webs were prominent again — they’re always there, but you really don’t notice them much if they’re not dew-covered. The east end of Lawson Valley, which is pasture spotted with large live oaks, was particularly pretty. The sun had first struck it just minutes before we sighted it, and the sun’s warmth was raising tendrils of fine mist in the still morning air; they twisted and wove around the oaks in my idea of good performance art. And of course, the humid air made all the desert odors pop out. The dogs all lost their minds as we walked, following who-knows-what scent with enormous enthusiasm. Happy dogs…

Yesterday I had a bit of excitement. I was in my office, working; Debbie was off with all three dogs to an agility meet. Suddenly I heard all five house cats yowling — something that I’ve never heard before, in over 25 years of living with cats. I ran out to our livingroom to find all five cats prowling along our glass patio door, looking every which way and yowling up a storm. Anybody who knows cats knows that this is very odd behavior.

Well, when I got to the patio door and started looking around myself, I soon saw the cause of the commotion: a huge rattlesnake, easily the biggest I’ve ever seen on our property — about 6' 4” long, and very fat. I got my snake stick and a covered plastic bucket, and captured him easily enough — he didn’t act frightened or alarmed at all, as rattlesnakes usually do when I capture them. It was a bit of work to get him coiled up in the bucket, but I did it, and got the lid safely snapped on. I take the rattlesnakes I capture to a part of the National Forest that’s about five miles from where I live. I don’t want rattlesnakes in my yard, where they threaten us and our animals, but I also don’t want to kill them — they do a great deal of good in our ecosystem. So I do the catch and release thing…

Usually when I release the snakes, I have the bucket upright, snap off the lid, and then tip the bucket over, away from me. The snakes always immediately slither out and away. This fellow was a little different. When I pried off one corner of the lid, suddently the rest popped off all by itself — the snake pushed it off, and very quickly slithered out of the bucket while it was still upright. When that lid popped off, you can probably imagine how quickly I did the backwards walk! I watched from about 15 feet away; he got himself entirely out of the bucket in just a few seconds. He looked my way once, and then set off kind of sideways to me, into some nearby brush. This was a very confident snake, very different than my usual experience…

Boykin RotaRule 560

The slide rule at right (click the thumbnails for a larger view) was made by the Boykin Products Company. I don’t know much about it other than a brief discussion (featuring the manufacturer’s nephew!) on the ISRG (a news group on Yahoo!). The example that I have is a different, and presumably more modern model (since the model number is higher). It’s quite nicely made, with an ingenious braking mechanism to help keep the cursor in one place. I rather like the scale labels on the cursor; it greatly eases the work of figuring out “where you are” when you’re using the rule. If anyone can help fill in the blanks on this slide rule, I’d sure appreciate it.

But the main reason for this post isn’t to answer questions about the RotaRule 560 — it’s to get opinions and ideas about high-resolution photography of slide rules vs. the more conventional scanning.

What got me started on this was the artificial looking “flatness” of a scan. This is the inevitable result of the fact that a scanner just plain doesn’t work like your eyeball. Scanners by their very nature look at the object being scanned from a perspective that varies as the scanning head moves across the object. This creates an image where every element appears to be directly in front of you — something that could never happen in real life. The human vision system sees such an image as lacking all perspective. A camera, on the other hand, emulates your eye much more closely — especially in terms of recording the perspective in an image. Furthermore, a modern digital camera’s optical system (I’m generalizing here; there are exceptions) is likely to render the object’s colors and contrasts more faithfully than a typical scanner would.

So I built a shadow box (that’s why the background in the photos is completely black) and tried taking photos of the RotaRule. Clearly I have some refinements to make, particularly with respect to glare. I took these photos outdoors, in natural indirect light. The glare visible on the cursors is most likely from the bright white T-shirt I was wearing, which was directly lit by the sun. I used a 160mm (effective) macro lens on a tripod-mounted Canon EOS 10D camera, at 100 ASA, f32, and 1/15 second. I used the pinhole f-stop to maximize the depth of field.

Several things are evident at a glance. First, the overall resolution is somewhat less than what a 300 dpi scan would produce. This makes sense, as the photos work out to about 200 dpi. The photo is less “crisp” than a 300 dpi scan. Second, the “scanner flatness” is definitely gone; this looks like a normal, natural image to my eye. Third, the colors and textures are substantially more sensitively (and accurately) rendered on the photo, as compared with the scan. For a concrete example of this, look at the top of the front photo — the white background of the stator has a distinctly different tone than the background of the rotor. This difference is visible in an identical way on to an eyeball, and completely invisible on any scan I made (I made dozens of them in the course of this experiment).

I can’t say that either photos or scans are so superior to the other that I should drop one approach and take the other. I’m leaning, slightly, toward the photo — mostly on aesthetic grounds. I like the natural-looking images, and I like the fact that I can use the same method to image inherently three-dimensional objects, such as a cylindrical slide rule, where scanning simply will not work.

Thoughts, anyone?

America Alone

I just love Mark Steyn; he’s a breath of fresh air and rationality in any political conversation, and is one of the wittiest commentators around. I’m reading his latest book (America Alone), and found this bit last night:

For example, I hadn’t really followed Sudanese current events closely since, oh, General Kitchener’s victory at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, but in 2003 a story from that benighted land happened to catch my eye. In the fall of that year mass hysteria apparently swept the capital city, Khartoum, after reports that foreigners were shaking hands with Sudanese men and causing their penises to disappear. One victim, a fabric merchant, told his story to the London Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi: a man from West Africa came into the shop and “shook the store owner’s hand powerfully until the owner felt his penis melt into his body."

I know the feeling. The same thing happened to me after shaking hands with Senator Clinton.

Just seconds before reading that passage, I was taking a sip of a nice Cabernet. I’m sure glad I had swallowed my wine before reading any further!

To be quite serious for a moment, Mark’s new book is a prediction for America’s future — when it stands nearly alone as the only major non-Muslim country, and all of Europe is under sharia law. His case starts with demographics — very alarming all by themselves — and is buttressed by some cogent observations about weaknesses in our own civilization. It’s a real wake-up call, and well worth reading. The wit is just a side-benefit.

By the way, the above-quoted story carries on for quite a while. I hurt myself laughing at this section; it’s worth the price of admission all by itself…

French Steel

These two slide rules are made from polished heavy sheet steel; possibly plated, but I don’t think so. The scales and other writing are engraved into the steel. The rules are similar, but not identical.

From the writing on them one can see that they are advertising French companies. I believe some of the other language indicates they are of French manufacture, but I’m not sure about that. Perhaps someone out there knows enough French, and France, to tell me that for certain?

The “Paul Torche” rule seems to be advertising old electronic components (in English, static transformers and mercury vapor rectifiers). That would date it to about the 1950s or earlier. The other rule seems to be advertising abrasives; something I know next to nothing about. Other than those two flimsy clues, the only other thing that might help date them is that one of them (the abrasives rule) was coated with a substance that I believe was very old “cosmoline”. I’m quite familiar with that stuff from my days in the U.S. Navy; lots of stuff came packed in it. Cosmoline was a petroleum-based product with the consistency of heavy grease, and often it was green in color from the cuprous oxide in it that discouraged any life form from attacking whatever it was protecting. This was very important in places like the tropics, where they have bacteria and fungus that can eat just about anything. Anyhow, this rule was coated with what looked like hardened Cosmoline. I’m sure it was petroleum-based, because soap and water barely touched it, but Nevr-Dull sluiced it right off. I’m thinking that the cosmoline dates it to no more recent than about the late 1950s, consistent with the electronics components. But…both the electronics components and cosmoline were in use as early as the 1930s (and possibly the 1920s), so that’s still a broad range.

Any ideas, anyone? Please leave your thoughts in the comments…

Mystery Hemmi

I really love the Hemmi bamboo slide rules (they have my vote for the best overall construction and “feel"), and I’ve collected a number of them. Many of them have a model number prominently displayed somewhere, and are therefore very easy to identify. For the rest of them, the main resource I have is Paul Ross' magnificent Hemmi catalog — with which I’ve been able to positively identify almost all of my Hemmis.

This is one of the exceptions (click on the thumbnail at right to get a large 300 dpi scan). The scales are identical to a Model 1 and Model 47, but it has some of the characteristics of each. For instance, it has pins at the ends of the stators and the slide, like the Model 1. It has a cursor of the same general style as the Model 47, except it’s considerably wider. Like them, it has 250mm scales.

It’s entirely possible that the slide rule originally had the model number on the paper glued to the back. Unfortunately, that paper has been rather completely destroyed. So I’m left mystified, a state that my wife would tell you I’m all too familiar with.

One strange note: the former owner of this slide rule decided to add a few gauge points of his own. Look closely at the C scale and you’ll see 'em…

If anyone can identify this, please leave me a comment here…

Aussie Poster Girl

Where is the American equivalent?

Just listen.

This video is topping the charts in Australia.

She can be my poster girl anytime at all...

Sartorius-Werke

The aluminum slide rule at right has me completely baffled. It’s not, strictly speaking, a slide rule at all — there’s a stator and a cursor, but no slide. It resembles the simple measurment conversion rules one sometimes sees. However, while some the scales are linear, a few are not — and the labels on the scales (Nm, Td, Neb, Nel) don’t ring any bells with me at all. The company still exists, manufacturing a wide range of equipment, especially biology instruments and scales.

Click on the thumbnails at right to get a 300 dpi scan.

If you have any knowledge of this slide rule, or can make a good guess, please leave a comment here.

Fall Color (Updated)

A few minutes ago I was sipping a cup of tea, and looking out my office window at a “Liquid Amber” tree, whose leaves have turned a deep red. And I was reminded of something that happened to me in Lake Forest, California, a couple of years ago…

I was working for FutureTrade, which is based in Lake Forest. My normal routine there was to drive 120 miles or so to Lake Forest, work for two days (staying overnight in a local motel), and then driving back home. On those mornings when I woke up in Lake Forest, my habit was to stop for coffee at a local Starbucks. Most mornings I was there, a particular young lady was on shift; I don’t remember her name, but I called her “Metal Woman” because of the amazing number of metal things she had sticking into and out of her body. Her ears, cheeks, tongue, nose, arms, legs, fingers, and forehead were all festooned with metallic protuberances. More alarmingly, she was not at all shy about discussing and/or showing off her more…private…protuberances to anyone who acted interested. When I first saw her, I noted several bumps under her T-shirt — she saw my glance, and promptly lifted her T-shirt so I could get a good view (yes, she was wearing a bra — and there were bumps under it as well!).

Anyway, one fall morning as I stopped in for my morning coffee, I made a comment to Metal Woman about how pretty the color was on the Liquid Amber trees planted along the sidewalk in front of her Starbucks. She gave me a funny look, and said (I’m not joking!):

"Every year about this time, those trees get sick and their leaves die — and every year, people tell me how it looks nice. I don’t get it!"

A little questioning and I quickly figured out that the entire notion of deciduous trees was a new one to her. When I asked her if she had heard of “fall color” before, she said yes, but she had no idea what it referred to. When I told her that the Liquid Amber trees were a good example of it, she thought it was really kind of creepy that people got all goo-goo about sick trees. When I told her that the trees weren’t sick, but rather adapting to the seasons in order to survive, she gave me the kind of look you might give someone who started raving about the little green men from Alpha Betelguese who were living in the garage.

She didn’t believe me.

I’m told you have to be a high school graduate to work in Starbucks.

Every time I’ve seen fall color since that experience, I think of Metal Woman. Disturbing metallic protuberances on an otherwise attractive woman (albeit with shock exhibitionist tendencies) don’t really go all that well with the simple beauty of fall color, unfortunately. I need a way to purge my mind of Metal Woman…

Updated:

A reader wrote me to ask if I had a problem with exhibitionist women. Absolutely not! I am 100% in favor of women showing me their bodies. I just prefer them without metallic parts…

A. F. Metal Rietz

This is my week for mystery slide rules! This one arrived today, and in the materials used for its construction it is unlike any other slide rule I have ever seen…

Click on the thumbnails at right to get full-size (300 dpi) scans. They are JPGs this time, so they’re not quite as huge as the PNGs I subjected you to yesterday…

The main mystery is this: who is the maker? A. F.? This rings no bells with me…

The bottom photo shows the slide set up on edge to be scanned. This shows you the bizarre construction of this rule. What you’re seeing is the ends of metal bars, roughly rectangular in cross-section, arranged so that if you’re holding the slide rule for normal use they run vertically! How odd! The metal bars appear to be embedded in a vinyl (or something similar) extruded matrix. Both the stators and the slide are comprised of two layers of the material I just described sandwiching an inner layer of a transparent plastic with a yellowish tint. You can’t see it very well in that scan, but that transparent layer is a little wider than the other layers on the slide (forming runners) and a little narrower on the stators (forming a well for the runners to run in).

Does anyone have a clue who the maker is? What the alleged benefits of this construction technique were? Any references to information about it on the web (I googled, but found nothing)?

I’d appreciate comments on this post if you have information…

Quote of the Day

The crazy folks in California (where I live) have a voter initiative (Proposition 87) on the ballot this election that would raise taxes on oil from California, and use the money raised to fund a slew of unspecified, politically-controlled energy initiatives. If there was ever a recipe for wasting billions of dollars, this would be it.

The Wall Street Journal’s commentary page chimed in on this subject today, in their inimitable fashion. Some excerpts:

...

The jewel in this liberal crown is Proposition 87, which would raise taxes on oil extracted from California by 1.5% to 6%, depending on the price per barrel — all in the name of reducing energy consumption and dependency on foreign oil. Let us run that by you again: The idea here is to tax California oil in order to get Californians to use less Saudi oil. Brilliant.

If approved, the law would raise costs on California’s oil producers by as much as $4 billion over the next 10 years. California would overnight become the state with the highest tax on oil producers in the U.S. — which makes as much sense as Vermont levying the highest tax on maple syrup. Not one penny, by the way, would go to close Sacramento’s enormous government debt burden — which may rise by another $40 billion if the multitude of bond initiatives for new public spending are also approved by voters this November.

...

Former President Bill Clinton is starring in a pro-87 TV ad that began running last week. Al Gore is raising money for the initiative, alongside Hollywood economists Geena Davis and Julia Roberts. Its main financial supporter is Hollywood producer Stephen Bing, who is also rich enough not to care about any increase in energy prices; his $40 million contribution is believed to be the largest individual donation to a ballot initiative in history. One co-chairman of the initiative, Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist, has contributed $1 million to the campaign. Mr. Khosla happens to own an ethanol plant outside of Fresno — just the operation that, who knows, might be eligible for funding from this new energy welfare fund.

...

Love that bit about the Hollywood economists…

The latest polls have likely voters supporting Proposition 87, 48% to 38%, with 14% undecided.

If Julia Roberts supported a proposition to require all California residents to whack themselves in the head with a sledgehammer every morning, I’ll bet it would pass…

Mystery Dietzgen

Yesterday I received a package with two slide rules in it. They were from an auction I’d won on eBay. One of the slide rules was a Keuffel & Esser model that I wanted to add to my collection; the other was one that the seller could not identify (not even the maker), and from the lousy photo in the listing didn’t look very interesting.

So I was very surprised when I opened the package to find that the unidentified rule was actually the more interesting of the pair. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with the Keuffel & Esser, mind you — it’s just that the other one was a real prize. It was extremely grubby, and I wish now that I had taken a “before” picture so I could show you what a good cleaning can do. But even when it was dirty I could see that it was something special: a very old Dietzgen, almost certainly from the first decade of the 20th century.

The first thing I did was to search through all my reference books, and on the web, to try to positively identify the model. I failed; the closest thing was a Dietzgen slide rule scan I found at Mike Konshak’s wonderful online slide rule museum. Mike has this identified through the “3746A” that is stamped into the bottom of the rule. If that identification is correct, then the rule I have is most likely a “259A", as my rule has that number stamped in the same place as the rule Mike shows with the “3746A”. However, I’m suspicious that those stamps are actually serial numbers, and not model numbers — as I could find no references anywhere to a model 259A (or 3746A, for that matter).

So, I’m left wondering just what I’ve got. And I’d appreciate any help, or even wild speculations, that anyone might have (please use the comments here). At right are thumbnails of 300 dpi scans of the slide rule (after cleaning!); click on any of them to view them (warning: they’re big!). Worth noting is that the wood this Dietzgen is made from isn’t the usual mahogany; it is distinctly lighter in color, a sort of honey colored wood. I have a couple of other slide rules made from pearwood, and this looks exactly like them. The scan on Mike’s site looks like mahogany — but looking at my scans, the color didn’t come across very well, and perhaps it didn’t on Mike’s scan, either.

Boring notes on cleaning:

Most of the cleaning I did in a very low-tech fashion — I used very a dilute dishsoap solution, lint-free Kimwipes, and lots of elbow grease. A century’s worth of crud (whose components I really don’t want to know) had accumulated in every nook and cranny on the rule, even in the engravings. The slide’s motion was very difficult before cleaning, and I was worried it was in need of sanding; afterwards it was smooth as silk. Crud, and lots of it, was the only culprit.

I used a soft-bristled toothbrush to clean the engravings — tedious, but the result was crisp, black markings instead of the slightly vaguely defined, grayish markings it started out with. The biggest crud-removal challenge turned out to be the cursor — the inside of the slides had a millimeter or so built up. I soaked it for an hour in the soap solution, and then the toothbrush did the trick.

I always worry that the water in the soap solution will soak into these old wooden rules. My standard procedure with them is to use a very sparing amount of the soap solution, and to wipe it off immediately. This time, however, the crud was so thick — and the wood was clearly not being affected — that I felt safe using much more soapy solution (though still drying if off very quickly). There were no ill effects at all.

After this cleaning, there were still some yellow spots on the face of the rule. Rubbing my finger over them very lightly, I felt (or imagined that I felt) a slight bump, as though there were some substance on the surface. These spots were quite unsightly, and detracted a lot from the appearance of this otherwise very fine old slide rule. I decided to try abrasion, and I chose the finest grit abrasive I have: some 12,000 grit Micro-Mesh. I used some of the soap solution for lubricant, and my finger instead of the foam pad they give you (as I wanted to be able to apply more pressure). In about 10 seconds, those yellow spots were history — and better yet, there was no telltale texture difference on the spots I cleaned. Hooray for Micro-Mesh!

Quote of the Day

Justice Scalia (one of our Supreme Court Justices, for all you public school graduates) gave a very interesting talk yesterday. He commented extensively on the historically very recent intervention by federal judiciary in social questions, via the “discovery” of new, heretofore unsuspected, Constitutional rights — and trampling on democracy in the process. Abortion and suicide rights featured in his talk as social issues that the Supreme Court really didn’t have much business deciding (in other words, he believes these social issues are properly matters for the states to decide).

Near the end of his talk, Justice Scalia let fly with this sweet and succinct verbal dart:

It so happens that everything that is stupid is not unconstitutional.

That one-liner quite beautifully sums up what’s wrong with judicial activism. The courts have become too powerful compared with the other branches of the federal government. Justice Scalia knows it, and knows the only way to stop it is to appoint more strict constructionist judges.

We need more justices like Mr. Scalia, at every level of the federal judiciary.

Faster, please.

Bumper Sticker

On a car absolutely plastered with “Kerry/Edwards” stickers:

If you want to see hate, disagree with a liberal.

What is this? Did some conservative spot the car, and think it needed a new sticker? Or is this liberal so blinded by his ideology that he actually thought that was a positive statement about liberals?

I don’t know the answer to that.

But I want one of those bumper stickers!

Quote of the Day

From Omar Fadil of the IraqTheModel blog:

"All they want is to prove that our struggle for freedom was the wrong thing to do. This fake research is an insult to every man, woman and child who lost their lives."

Said in response to the recent propaganda in the guise of a “scientific” study published in the Lancet — and promptly debunked by a host of real scientists. Today’s Wall Street Journal has a piece ($) that excoriates the Lancet, saying in part:

So read a story in last week’s Washington Post on the new John Hopkins-led study — published in the British medical journal Lancet — purporting to document “excess deaths” in Iraq. “We have no reason to question the findings,” the Post quoted a Human Rights Watch official as saying. The article was fairly typical of reporting on the Lancet study, which has also been all over television and radio, as well as Internet sites such as Google and Yahoo! news.

All of which leaves us wondering if reporters and editors have enough sense anymore to ask basic questions about such enormous numbers, or whether they are simply too biased against the Bush Administration and its Iraq policy to do so. The 655,000 figure is more than 10 times higher than previous estimates of violent deaths in Iraq since the U.S. invasion, and it is larger than the number of Germans killed by allied bombing during all of World War II and larger than the number of Americans who died during our own Civil War.

Others have noted elsewhere that the Lancet’s estimate would require that over 1,000 Iraqis were killed every single day in 2006 — that nobody bothered to report to any police, hospitals, or other authorities. This seems unlikely in the extreme, as many Iraqis on the ground have observed.

Omar has it right: the Lancet has a political agenda in opposition to the war in Iraq. And it seems clear that their report was timed to influence the upcoming American elections. Shame on this “science” journal, both for publishing such a piece of rubbish, and for sullying the once-good reputation of a once-fine scientific journal…

Lovely Morning

Yesterday, as a measure of atonement for our absolutely decadent meal on Saturday (lobster l’americaine, garlic/cheese French bread, Caesar salad, and chocolate Grand Marnier cheesecake, all homemade and washed down with generous quantities of good wine), Debbie made a lovely Mexican chicken soup (tlapeno). Slightly more down-to-earth than Saturday’s meal, but awfully good. Anyone who knows Debbie is aware of her inability to make less than enormous quantities of soup — so now we have (yum!) gallons of leftover tlapeno. You all should envy me!

Now, making tlapeno involves large quantities of chicken processing — you have to roast the chicken, then strip the meat, and boil things down to get the broth. For our three field spaniels, life doesn’t get much better than a kitchen with unwanted chicken parts flying around. We had the full and undivided attention of all three dogs while we were processing the chicken — and we didn’t have to dispose of anything other than the totally stripped skeletons. Happy, happy dogs, they were.

Until 1:30 this morning, that is. Because at that moment, Lea decided (rather abruptly) that vomiting was the appropriate thing to do. On the bed. On Debbie. In large quantities. Full of delightfully greasy, fragrant chicken parts. Lovely.

Not.

So… Up we got. First, Debbie (in her vomit-dripping pajamas) took Lea outside, hoping that any further spewing would occur in the great outdoors. But Lea was terrified by the howling of bazillions of coyotes, some pretty close, so Debbie brought her back in — and got my sorry butt up, so I could take the poor girl out for a walk (on a leash), hoping to encourage whatever foul humors remained to disgorge. But nothing more was forthcoming. Debbie, meanwhile, took a shower and did something to her pajamas. We gave up on sleep; stripped the bed, applied various chemicals, and parked Lea in the office (which has an easily cleaned linoleum floor) in her favorite doggie bed. We had coffee. Then, a couple of hours later, Lea casually stands up in her doggie bed and vomits again, in the same style as previously. Right into her doggie bed, not the easily cleaned floor, naturally. The disaster response team swung into action again, with practiced moves. Large quantities of paper towels were consumed. The doggie bed, washable, fortunately, went into the washer with appropriate chemicals. Now Lea is lying beside me in the office, on naught but an old towel — which is also easily cleaned.

So far she has vomited approximately 30 gallons of partially digested chicken. We’re pretty sure that’s more than went into her. We’re hoping there’s nothing more to come out.

Pray for us.

Update: It gets better. We have one of those Tempurpedic foam matresses, and after stripping all the bedding earlier, it is exposed to the air (awaiting appropriate chemical treatment, once we find out what that is). I just went into the bedroom a moment ago, and discovered a trio of our cats all looking at one part of the mattress (not where the dog vomited, but rather down by where our feet would be). I looked to see what they were all interested in — and discovered that they had eaten a few cubic inches of the foam!

Oh, my. One wonders what memory foam will do to a cat’s innards…

Rain!

Last night, just before we went to bed, we had a light shower. I woke up several times during the night to the delightful sound of raindrops hitting all the dry leaves and grasses — a bit like rain on a distant, muted tin roof. And this morning, I ran in to look at the weather system first thing — and miracle of miracles, we got over a half inch!

You non-desert folks might scoff at this. I can just hear some of my friends now, mocking our half inch as “just barely damp”. But for us, this is an extremely welcome wetting of the tinder we’re surrounded with; it means a significant reduction in the fire danger.

And we like that!

Update:

I took a run into town to do some errands, and once again had the experience of seeing the sudden greening that comes to the desert very quickly after a rain. As always, the most dramatic greening is with our mosses — they’ve been black all summer, tricking our expectations into thinking that flat black is their normal state. But within minutes after a rain, they start turning green — and by this morning they are all bright emerald green, very different than yesterday. Slightly subtler is the greening of the other plants — a combination of happy chlorophyll and the dust getting washed off. I’m not sure which effect is predominant. Another change, not so subtle, is that everything got darker when it got wet — rocks, tree trunks and branches, even the pavement — so the greens are more dramatically contrasted…

Quote of the Day

This is a long quote, I know — the conclusion to her very fine column yesterday:

What is most missing from the left in America is an element of grace — of civic grace, democratic grace, the kind that assumes disagreements are part of the fabric, but we can make the fabric hold together. The Democratic Party hasn’t had enough of this kind of thing since Bobby Kennedy died. What also seems missing is the courage to ask a question. Conservatives these days are asking themselves very many questions, but I wonder if the left could tolerate asking itself even a few. Such as: Why are we producing so many adherents who defy the old liberal virtues of free and open inquiry, free and open speech? Why are we producing so many bullies? And dim dullard ones, at that.

Go read the whole thing. Now.

Dang, she’s good! What a talent she has for distilling the essence of things…

Title

Neo-neocon is one of my favorite bloggers, always interesting. Today she starts with this:

North Korea is a country formed by a war that never ended.

Pacifists are fond of saying that war never solves anything. I beg to differ — war, for example, solved the problem of Adolf Hitler and German expansionist aggressiveness, although at great cost.

But that war was fought to the bitter end, unlike many subsequent ones. Revulsion at war — which I share, by the way, although my critics won’t credit that — has led to a series of unfinished, prematurely truncated wars. And like most unfinished business, there’s a tendency for these conflicts to come back to bite us.

Read the whole thing.

War can be the least awful of the alternatives available. Looking at the current situation in North Korea, one can’t help but think it would have been better to have finished the job back fifty years ago…

Straw Poll

A GOP straw poll...

...with some interesting results...

Quote of the Day

From today’s Wall Street Journal comment page:

Majority Leader-in-waiting Harry Reid insisted the Administration appoint a “senior official to conduct a full review of [its] failed North Korea policy.” Mr. Reid performed the rare feat of making Nancy Pelosi sound statesmanlike. Ms. Pelosi at least acknowledged that countries such as China might have played a negative role here.

Emphasis mine.

Ha! …and “indeed”.

Washington Politicians: rope, tree, pol; some assembly required.

I’d vote for an iguana if it would keep one of these sorry excuses for an American out of office. Hear that, lizards? Lots of lizard chow down there in D.C…

Seriously

Thomas Sowell is a columnist you should always take seriously. In an excellent column at Townhall, Mr. Sowell accuses our media of the obivous — being unserious:

In these grim and foreboding times, our media have this year spent incredible amounts of time on a hunting accident involving Vice President Cheney, a bogus claim that the administration revealed Valerie Plame’s identity as a C.I.A. “agent” — actually a desk job in Virginia — and is now going ballistic over a Congressman who sent raunchy e-mails to Congressional pages.

This is the frivolous media — and the biased media. Republican Congressman Foley was wrong and is out on his ear. But Democrats in both Congress and the White House have gone far beyond words with a page and an intern. Yet the Democrats did not resign and Bill Clinton’s perjury, obstruction of justice, and suborning of perjury by others were treated as if these were irrelevant private matters.

Even when serious issues are addressed, they can be addressed either seriously or frivolously. If you are content to see life and death issues of war and peace addressed with catch phrases like “chicken hawk” or to see a coalition of nations around the world fighting terrorism referred to as “unilateral” U.S. action because France does not go along, then you are content with frivolity.

This is exactly why I don’t rely on the lamestream media, the Wall Street Journal excepted, for my news. What Mr. Sowell doesn’t mention, but what worries me deeply for its implications to the future of America, is why the lamestream media is unserious: because unserious news reporting makes money, and serious news reporting doesn’t. Yes, Virginia, it really is that simple. Most Americans will gladly spend money to read about celebrities, or sports, or left-wing rants — but they won’t spend money for serious reporting that requires one to think. There are niche exceptions, of course — the Wall Street Journal, various specialty journals, and so on — but the sum of their revenues is miniscule compared with the rest of the unserious media. Ponder the long term implications for America of this preference for the unserious. It’s not a happy thought…

Mr. Sowell concludes his piece with this observation about the war in Iraq:

Those who discuss the current war in terms of frivolous talking points make a big deal out of the fact we have been in this war longer than in World War II. But, if we are serious, we would know that it is not the duration of a war that is crucial. It is how many lives it costs. More than twice as many Marines were killed taking one island in the Pacific during World War II than all the Americans killed in the four years of the Iraq war. More Americans were killed in one day during the Civil War. If we are going to discuss war, the least we can do is be serious.

Exactly right. But most Americans don’t seem to understand this, and I’ve been surprised about why at least some of them don’t. During the runup to the Iraq war, and for the first year or two of it, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with quite a few people who were opposed to the war. A few of these people — depressingly few — had fairly well developed positions, based on reality and their own opinions. I disagreed with these folks, but was cheered by their seriousness. However, most of the people I talked with who opposed the war did so for a variety of absurd “reasons", impossible to respect. Some were of the tinfoil hat, Michael Moore school of reflexive Bush-bashing: never mind if he’s right, he said it, so I hate it. But what brought these folks to mind today was another pattern I saw, which Mr. Sowell’s conclusion reminded me of: a significant proportion — perhaps half — possessed a context so warped, so divergent from reality, that it prevented them from analyzing the war in Iraq in anything like a rational manner. One recurring example of this was exactly the point Mr. Sowell raised about relative casualties. I talked with dozens of Americans — almost all of them college graduates, and most considerably younger than I — who really believed that the casualties we experienced in the first year of the war in Iraq were numerically comparable to, or even exceeded, the casualties America suffered in Vietnam, the two world wars, or the American Civil War. In a dozen or so cases, when I shared the actual casualties of those past conflicts with the person I was conversing with, I was frankly disbelieved. In more than a few cases, we repaired to a reference work to ascertain the truth of my assertions — and in one memorable case, even then I was disbelieved!

Some of you may be surprised at this. Myself, I’ve become quite cynical about the general American understanding of history. Mind you, I’m no history expert myself; my small knowledge of history comes mostly from reading I’ve done on my own. But my default assumption about other Americans' knowledge of history — especially those much younger than myself — is now approximately zero. And I’m right far more often than I’m wrong.

What does this portend for America? I don’t pretend to know the answer to that, but it’s very hard to see how the result of such profound ignorance could be good…

Seriously Loony

Isn’t it amazing that someone as overtly insane as Kim Jong-il could be the leader of anything, much less an entire country? Now this maroon has gone and tested a nuclear weapon, or at least claimed that they did — the official North Korean press release:

The field of scientific research in the DPRK successfully conducted an underground nuclear test under secure conditions on October 9, 2006, at a stirring time when all the people of the country are making a great leap forward in the building of a great, prosperous, powerful socialist nation.

It has been confirmed that there was no such danger as radioactive emission in the course of the nuclear test as it was carried out under scientific consideration and careful calculation.

The nuclear test was conducted with indigenous wisdom and technology 100 percent. It marks a historic event as it greatly encouraged and pleased the KPA and people that have wished to have powerful self-reliant defense capability.

It will contribute to defending the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the area around it.

This press release is so bad (as are virtually all of them from North Korea) that it’s hard to take seriously. They need a new PR agency, badly…

Initial reports said that seismic activity consistent with magnitude 3.58 earthquake on the surface was detected. The USGS has an automated earthquake reporting system that publishes to the web (see map at right); they are reporting a 4.2 earthquake, on the surface. These reports indicate that a large explosion took place — the equivalent of between 550 and 4500 tons of TNT. So North Korea either set off an amazingly small nuclear explosion (perhaps a failed weapon), or a very large conventional explosion. The lamestream media is reporting it as if it was a confirmed nuclear explosion, though no evidence other than seismic has been presented, and the seismic evidence is ambiguous. I suspect that stupidity, sensationalism, and political expediency are combining to make this happen — after all, a nutjob with a nuke is far more sensational than a pathetic loser with a fake nuke or a fizzled nuke.

But other sources are much less confident that fearless leader Kim actually pulled off a nuke. The speculation seems pretty evenly divided between a nuke that fizzled and an outright piece of fakery. Supporters of the first notion point to similar fizzles with the Kimster’s ICBM tests; supporters of the second notion point to the careful mention (in the press release) that there was no radiation leak — as atmospheric radiation is normally how nuke tests are confirmed.

Who knows what the truth is? And it may not actually matter, because the test — whether faked, fizzled, or factual — has got everybody in the neighborhood in a tizzy. Japan and China are talking about their mutual security, a circumstance not quite as likely as pigs suddenly starting to fly around. Japan and South Korea are integrating their intelligence and defense efforts — another unlikely pair. About the only unexcited neighbor is Russia, and I’m not sure why that is. Maybe they just like the idea of a destabilizing influence on their border.

As others have noted, it’s really hard to deal with a lunatic — whether you’re talking about people or countries. You can’t negotiate, you can’t make agreements. About the only choices we have are (a) ignore them, or (b) conquer them. The first choice gets less attractive every day…

Hawk Blogging

Over the past few days, we’ve seen this small hawk flitting about in and near our front yard, executing spectacular aerobatics as it darts through our shrubbery, always very near the ground. For some reason it decided to perch in a fig tree that’s just 15 feet from our windows, and I managed to grab these photos by standing in the shadows inside the house, and taking the pictures right through our (very dirty!) window panes.

I love it’s expression in the left-most picture, when it spotted my motion and was trying to figure out if I was edible! Moments after I snapped this one, it took off for parts unknown…

Hawks are notoriously hard to identify, and this one was no exception. From its size and behavior, it was easy to identify it as an accipiter — small, agile hawks that prey on other birds. But two nearly identical accipiters are common here (the Sharp-Shinned Hawk and Cooper’s Hawk), making positive identification challenging. I’m calling this one a juvenile Sharp-Shinned Hawk (Accipiter striatus), based on the paintings in Sibley’s Guide to Birds (an absolutely wonderful book!).

As always, click on the small photos to get a larger version.

Quote of the Day

James Lileks:

It comes down to this: Islam is being defined in the popular mind by three forces: the radicals who kill, the PR-savvy activists who protest, and the officials who cave. The aggregate effect does not produce good will.

Yes, that’s exactly right. The barbaric and outrageous actions (whatever their motivation) of the fundamentalist Islamic radicals are seen by most Americans (and portrayed by the lamestream media) as something much more benign than they actually are. And somehow the spectacular (by any historical standard) successes of our military are almost unknown to the populace. This dangerously warped perception is, I’m afraid, on the verge of controlling how we prosecute the war on terror. Even more frightening: it seems plausible that the only thing that will change this is another successful attack by the enemy. In this age of short attention spans, a deadly enemy seems to be perceived as such only if they kill, say, a few thousand Americans each year. And in this age of shallow, sound-bite “thinking,” the analysis of a disturbingly large segment of America seems to be limited to the latest pronouncement from their favorite promise-spouting, feel-good pol.

Read the whole thing.

Masturgate

Several of my readers have (unaccountably) wondered why I haven’t blogged about Masturgate (the Foley affair), and have generally slowed way down on the political blogging.

The reaction of the politicians to Masturgate has completely disgusted me. On both sides of the aisle the worthless scum we elected have invented new ways to sink to new lows. The hypocritical, posturing Democrats (I give you Pelosi as a prime example) apparently believe that all of America has no memory at all — that we can’t remember Stubbs, Frank, Kennedy(s), Clinton and the seemingly endless demonstrations by Democrats of just how depraved and shameful humans can be. They want us to believe that the Republicans have a monopoly on perversion. And the Republican “leadership", trying so hard not to see, to be politically correct, and then running like the rats they are when they see the political winds blowing against them — they’re no better than the Democrats.

So I’ve lost my motivation. I’ll get it back, I’m sure, one of these fine days. But meanwhile, this refrain, invented by another blogger, keeps running through my head:

Washington politicians

Tree

Rope

(some assembly required)

Internet Troubles

Warning: techno-geek content follows:

Just after 2 am this morning, we lost our connection to the Internet. I know this not because I was up and watching it, but because the last email my computer picked up was at 2:08 AM, which I discovered when I logged in at my normal time (around 4:30 AM). The symptoms were familiar, and frustrating as all get out: if I connected my WildBlue satellite modem directly to my laptop, it worked fine — but just for the laptop, of course. If I connected the modem to my Cisco 806 firewall/router, it didn’t work. We’ve seen this movie before.

But hopefully, never again — as I managed to troubleshoot the issue, and (I think!) fix it, with an electronic version of a Rube Goldberg device…

I knew from troubleshooting that I had done on previous occurrences of this problem that the basic issue was that the Cisco router wasn’t getting provisioned by DHCP via the satellite modem. For some reason, DHCP was working fine with the laptop, but not with the router.

Today I discovered why the router wasn’t being provisioned, through much googling for help on the web and correllating that with what I was observing. The problem was that the DHCP server (back in WildBlue-land somewhere) was taking so long to respond (as much as two minutes) that the router just silently timed out and tried again, which restarted the timer. It did this in an endless cycle of failures. The laptop (running Windows XP, of course), on the other hand, just stupidly sent out a single DHCP request, and waited forever for a response — which eventually WildBlue coughed up. The intermittent nature of the problem turns out to be caused by the varying speed of the Wildblue DHCP server — when it’s fast (presumably because of a light load), the Cisco worked fine because it didn’t time out. But when the DHCP server was slow (most likely due to a heavy load), the Cisco would time out and never get provisioned. And we’d be sawed off from the Internet, except for one pathetic connection on the laptop.

Once I figured out the why, the next problem was how to fix it. There’s gotta be a way! is my motto. Somewhere along the line I had an idea, a grotesque and perverted idea, one that will make every elegance-loving network engineer cringe and wince: to buy a cheap, simple, stupid broadband router and put it in between the Cisco router and the satellite modem. My thinking was that an el crappo especiale would quite likely use the same brainless algorithm to get provisioned as Windows does on the laptop — and then the Cisco would in turn get provisioned from the broadband router, quickly.

So off I went down the hill, thinking I’d go to Frye’s (about an hour away). But as I was passing the shopping center closest to our house (a mere half hour away), it occurred to me to see if Target might carry such a thing. And those fine folks, it turns out, carry exactly the kind of router that before today had been banned from my home: the D-Link EBR-2310, for a mere $49. I snarfed it and headed home, figuring I had about a 20% chance of this gambit succeeding.

On arriving home, I unpacked the little-bitty router (about the size of a small paperback book), followed the very simple directions — and in about two minutes, I had it installed and running. The D-Link was able to get provisioned from WildBlue without a problem, even though the DHCP server took 78 seconds to respond. And the Cisco router very happily provisioned itself from the D-Link, and now everything is working.

But following the tortured course of a packet coming into our home from the Internet (or leaving to the Internet) will definitely make your head hurt. There are 3 NATs (one each in the satellite modem, the D-Link, and the Cisco) before you get onto my LAN’s DMZ, and yet one more NAT before you land on one of my workstations. There are two firewalls those packets must traverse, plus whatever is going on inside the D-Link. Not to mention the physical path, which resembles a magnet winding more than it does a network.

But it works. The brain-dead little D-Link router works just fine, where the vastly more sophisticated Cisco fails in an obscure and frustratingly symptomless fashion. There’s a lesson in here somewhere, if only I was clever enough to suss it out…

Quote of the Day

Josh Treviño, at the Claremont Institute:

The Cato Institute today runs a piece by Markos Moulitsas on the rise of the “libertarian Democrat.” It is a real phenomenon, which is not to say it’s an intellectually coherent one: but then, Moulitsas and intellectual coherency have never been intimate companions.

Ouch.

And well said!

Hope?

Arthur Brooks (a professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Affairs) has a commentary piece in today’s Wall Street Journal ($), that discusses conservative parental fears that their children will be brainwashed into liberalism when they send them off to school. An excerpt:

The most recent evidence on this subject comes from the mid-1990s, in the University of Michigan’s National Election Studies. These survey data uncover two facts. First, people who go to college are more likely to vote Republican than those who don’t go to college. Adults 25 and under from Republican homes are, for example, 11 percentage points more likely to vote Republican if they attended college than if they didn’t. And young adults from Democratic households are 11 percentage points less likely to vote Democrat if they’ve gone to college than if not.

Second, nearly everybody grows more likely to vote Republican as they age — but especially college graduates. It is no shock that the vast majority of people of all educational backgrounds from Republican homes vote Republican by age 40. It may come as more of a surprise that 40-year-olds with Democrat parents are far less likely to vote Democrat if they’ve gone to college than if they haven’t. In fact, while three-quarters of the uneducated group still vote Democrat, the odds are only about 50-50 that the college graduates vote this way. And they’ve not all become skeptical political independents: Fully a third are registered Republicans.

This is an old study, but the conclusions are news to me. And somewhat hopeful. I don’t know of any reason to believe things have changed (in terms of brainwashing success) in the past ten years…

I find it very interesting — and a little surprising, in light of my personal experiences — that both age and education correlate negatively with liberalism. But hopeful, because we’re all going to get older, and because the American population’s average age is increasing. A wisp of hope to hang onto…

Non-Breaking Shoelaces

For years I’ve be plagued with a stupid problem: I break the shoelaces on my hiking boots (which is basically the only kind of shoe I wear outdoors) with distressing regularity. Typically they last just two or three days before the first break occurs, and then I live with knotted repairs for weeks until I remember to buy a new pair. The most recent pair I replaced had six knots in them — and they’d been on my shoes for less than a week.

A couple of weeks ago, I got good and fed up with this situation. I’m tired of being a one-man subsidy for the shoelace industry! So I looked all over the web, trying to find shoelaces with a steel-cable core, figuring that they would stand up to my abuse. I failed in that effort, but I found something even better: Kevlar shoelaces, available from Gempler’s. I’ve had them now for a week, and I am delighted to report that they are so strong that I cannot even purposefully break them — much less accidentally.

I bought three pairs, but I suspect it’s going to be a long while before I need the second…

Orientation Ponder

This morning I prepared four envelopes for mailing out checks. I did it production-line stye: first I put stamps on all the envelopes, then return address labels, then stuffed the letters. But when I went to stuff the letters in, I discovered that I’d managed to affix the return address label and stamp on what we normally think of as the “bottom” of the envelope. It gave me a start, and for a moment I was even thinking that I’d have to throw them away and start over — until I realized that the notion of “bottom” was wholly an artificial construct, and that having the postage and address on “upside-down” wouldn’t make any difference at all to the function of the letter.

But my instinctive reaction got the ponder going, and reminded me of a couple of other more interesting examples I’ve heard over the years.

The first one I heard from a comedian (Bill Cosby?). It concerns the way we all eat a slice of pie. This comedian observed that everybody will turn their pie plate until the pointy end of the pie faces them. Why on earth do we do this? I’ve experimented with this, folks (it’s the kind of guy I am, and besides, it was a good excuse to eat more pie!). It makes no difference how the pie is facing, it’s equally easy to eat in all of them. Somewhere deep inside us, there is an “correct orientation” sensor — and it gets unhappy if we have our pie turned the “wrong” way.

The second one I read in a science journal. It was a report on an older piece of research, from the 1930s as I recall. An anthropologist visiting with the Eskimos of northern Canada noted something interesting: all but a few of the Eskimos, when viewing a photograph, would hold the photo in whatever orientation it had when it was handed to them. If they were looking at the photo sideways, or even upside-down, it didn’t make any difference to them at all. Those few Eskimos who did care about the orientation all had something in common: they had learned to read. This anthropologist leapt to the conclusion that visual orientation was irrelevant to humankind until reading was invented — at which time it became crucial. Interesting theory, but most anthropologists and biologists do not believe it’s correct. Gravity on the earth’s surface, just to present one example, definitely has a direction — and orientation to gravity matters a great deal, whether you can read or not. Still, the anthropologist made the observation (and it was subsequently repeated) — and the question remains: why don’t non-reading Eskimos care how a photo is oriented, when the rest of us seem to care a great deal?

I sure don’t have any answers — do you?

Referral of the Day

Someone found my blog this morning by typing this search term into Ask.com:

we have just moved to a rural area what is the red flag on the mailbox for?

As usual, they found my blog because all those words appeared in unrelated posts on the same day — not because I actually answered this question.

I am at a complete loss to explain how someone could live in the U.S. long enough to learn English, and yet not know what the red flag on a mailbox is for.

Or is this just the “country boy” in me? Is this really an obscure fact, only known to gun-toting hayseeds?

Global Warming

Just a few days ago, the Denver Post published an unusually balanced report on global warming. In it they quote meterologist Bill Gray. Dr. Gray is not a household name, but everybody knows his work — he is the preeminent hurricane forecaster, with a far better track record than anyone else in the world. He’s the forecaster the media quotes every year when they talk about the expected number of hurricanes.

Dr. Gray is a skeptic on global warming:

Gray is among the most strident critics, quick to use words like “fraud” or “gang” to describe the modelers.

Instead of model projections, Gray looks at the history and patterns of weather to find trends.

And befitting his 76 years, Gray has a long view. His first report on climate - on the return of the dust bowl - was in the early 1940s when he was in junior high school.

"We’d gone through a warming trend in the '40s, and everybody was saying we were going to win World War II but face terrible droughts,” Gray said.

Soon after, temperatures went into a cooling trend and by 1975, Gray points out, there was talk of a coming ice age.

The Earth does have natural cycles of cooling and warming - during the past 740,000 years there have been eight cycles with four ice ages.

The cycles appear to be tied to slight variations in the tilt of the Earth toward the sun.

During the last ice age - which ended about 10,000 years ago - Earth was on average about 4 degrees Fahrenheit cooler, and what is now Manhattan was buried under ice.

At some point the Earth will wobble on its axis again, setting the stage for an ice age.

There are other phenomena affecting global temperatures over time, such as El Niño, a Pacific Ocean warm-water mass that appears in roughly five-year cycles and changes world weather patterns.

And there is the Atlantic thermohaline current, a conveyor belt moving heat north on the surface and then dropping it to the ocean floor and heading back to the equator - a 1,200-year trip.

Changes in the current lead to changes in temperature. Somehow the models have to account for these natural variations too.

Gray believes that the warmer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are linked to a natural slowing in the thermohaline current, not the carbon dioxide.

Some of the models also show the current is slowing and that, along with warming oceans, adds to hurricane risks.

Dr. Gray is as skeptical of the model-based global warming forecasts as I am — but his weather forecasting credentials are impeccable, whereas mine are non-existant.

I’ll add one point this report didn’t cover: follow the money. Billions of research dollars each year are going to the global warming wing of meterology. Zippity-doo-dah is going to the skeptics. If you were an ambitious meterologist, what would attract you more? Hmmm???

Just one more reason why public funding of science is a mess…

Quote of the Day

In today’s edition of the Liberal Lickspittle Los Angeles Times, Max Boot writes with this conclusion:

The real enemy we face is not Islam per se but a violent offshoot known as Islamism, which is rooted, to be sure, in the Koran but which also finds inspiration in such modern Western ideologies as fascism, Nazism and communism. Its most successful exponents — from Hassan Banna and Sayyid Qutb to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden — are hardly orthodox interpreters of Islam. They are power-mad intellectuals in the mold of a Lenin or a Hitler. The problem is that the rest of the Muslim world, by not doing more to curb the radicals — whether out of fear or sympathy — lends credence to the most objectionable caricatures of their faith.

Read the entire thing.

Then marvel at its appearance in the bird cage liner of choice in Southern California. Quite likely, some editor there is being fired as I write — for surely it’s a firing offence there to publish a piece that doesn’t adhere to the blame-America-first crowd’s spin, and even worse, smacks of red state commonsense…

Shocked

I went “down the hill” today to run some errands, and as my gas tank was low, I filled up at the Jamul 7/11. I didn’t even look at the price, as past experience suggested that would be depressing.

So when my tank was full and the total was “only” $44, I was shocked, pleasantly so. Actually, at first I thought the valve had shut off prematurely and my tank wasn’t really full — but it was. The price was down to $2.55/gallon for regular, a level we haven’t seen in a long while.

Of course, this only sounds good because just a few weeks ago we were paying almost $4/gallon. It’s that old expectations game again — if you expect a price higher than the actual, why then you feel good about it. If, on the other hand, prices had been under $2 for the past few months, I’d have been shocked in a completely opposite way.

I think humans must be wired this way in general. There’s a simple experiment you can do to prove this to yourself in a dramatic way. Draw a bowl of lukewarm water and put it on the counter. Then draw a bowl of cold water, throw a few ice cubes in it, and put it on the counter. Then run the tap as hot as you can stand to have your hand in it. Put one hand in the cold water, and the other hand in the hot tap water, and leave them both there for a minute or so. You’re setting expectations: one hand will now “expect” to be cold, the other hot. After the minute is up, put both hands in the luke warm water — it’s a very surprising feeling! The hand that was in the cold water will perceive the lukewarm water as warm (or even hot!); the other hand will perceive it is cool (or even cold!). The same water, you’re own two hands, at the same instant, and they won’t be in agreement at all…

Quote of the Day

Charles Krauthammer, on the Muslim world charging the Pope with insulting Islam:

"How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I’ll kill you for it” is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge.

Read the whole thing.

Fowler Adventures

I recently acquired this Fowler’s Long Scale Calculator through an eBay auction. The right-hand photo is a front view, the left-hand photo a rear view. This clever little gadget works on the same principle as a slide rule, using logarithmic scales — but by using six circles to hold one scale, they managed to pack a 30-inch long scale into an instrument that’s less than 3 inches in diameter! You can read more about how to use one here if you’re interested.

When I examined it upon its arrival (from Scotland!), I discovered that it was not actually in working order — the black cursor on the front did not rotate when I turned the right-hand knob. Functionally, everything else was ok. Aesthetically there were several issues: corrosion at various places on the metal parts, some “junk” floating around on the inside, a badly scratched cursor disk (more on that in a moment), and various marks and splotches all over the scales on both sides. It wasn’t quite a disaster, but it certainly wasn’t the nice, shiny calculating instrument I was hoping for.

I decided to fix it, and to try to clean it up a bit. The first challenge was how to open the darned thing up — it wasn’t obvious at all. I asked on the sliderule newsgroup if anyone had ever opened up a Fowler’s, but got no response. I turned that thing every which way and could see no screws or fasteners at all — it looked like the two sides were simply pressed onto the “chassis” and held there by tension. So I took a block of hardwood, wedged it against the exposed edge of the front half (which fit tightly over the back half), and pushed. Hard. And it gave just the tiniest bit. I worked my wood block around the circumference, and after about 20 little pushes, the whole front just fell right off. The back half came off the chassis in a similar way. Whew!

When the front fell off, the reason for the black hairline not moving became obvious: the black hairline was etched into a clear plastic (celluloid?) disk (the aforementioned cursor disk), and that disk had come unglued from the brass post in the center (you can see this post on the photo). This is why the cursor disk didn’t rotate. I set that aside for later repair, and took a close look at the scales. To my surprise, the scales are simply printed on thick paper, which is then glued to a metal disk. The markings and dirt that I saw on those disks would not be as easy to clean as an ordinary slide rule, where I could use soapy water — sure don’t want to do that with paper! I’d read that a soft art or drafting eraser was a good way to clean paper scales, but I didn’t happen to have one of them around. But…I did have some Micro-Mesh polishing clothes — basically very fine abrasive (in several grits) embedded into a rubbery compound with a cloth backing. I tried the finest grit I had (12,000), and discovered that it worked very well indeed. In just a few minutes I had nearly all of the marks off the paper scales.

The next challenge was the cursor disk. The old glue was still stuck to both the disk and the post — the first job was to get all that off. I used dental picks to get the big chunks off, then used a small flat jeweler’s screwdriver as a chisel to scrape the rest off. I had to be very careful when scraping the post not to lose control of the screwdriver and tear the paper scale — and equally careful on the disk so as not to poke a hole in it. This was tedious! The cursor disk was very badly scratched, with circular scratchs from the motion of the cursor disk moving over the scale. This Fowler’s must have been used a lot to cause all that scratching! I’ve had some previous success with Novus plastic polishing compound, so I tried that — and got terrific results, albeit with a good deal of elbow grease required. I had to take great care here not to fold up the cursor disk as I bore down hard while polishing. It is very thin and flexible, and threatened to fold up (and almost certainly break) on several occasions. In the end, though, it was well worth while — that cursor disk is now as smooth and shiny as the day it was made. Not a scratch on it. I used Duco cement to glue the disk back onto the post, being very careful with the glue — I didn’t want to get glue on the scales, where it would have been impossible to clean up. So I squeezed glue onto a jeweler’s screwdriver, and then used the screwdriver to carefully “paint” the brass post with glue. This worked well, and now the Fowler’s was back in working order.

I was hoping to find a way to lubricate the gear mechanism, which is in the innards of the chassis. But I could not find any way to gain access to that area. The scales are mounted on metal disks that block all access, and those disks appear to be permanently fastened on. So I gave up on that part.

I used some Nevr-Dull metal polishing cotton to get all the corrosion off the exposed metal parts. While I was handling the back half, the glass fell right out — the glue holding it in had long ago dried completely up and given up on any adhesion. When I discovered that, I pressed gently on the front half’s glass, and it came right out as well. So then I cleaned up all that old glue, thoroughly cleaned both pieces of glass, and reinstalled the glass with Duco cement. That worked great.

After the glue set, I squeezed the back side back onto the chassis, and then the front side onto the back side. And I had a much nicer Fowler’s Long Scale Calculator than I started out with, not the least because now it worked!

Title

This morning’s Wall Street Journal features essays by both the Republican (Melman) and the Democratic (Dean) chairmen of their respective parties. Here’s Howard Dean’s conclusion:

Democrats offer America a new direction in fiscal policy, for the middle class, and in the war in Iraq. We believe that America should work for everyone:

We will restore honesty in government, starting with the pay-as-you-go discipline in Congress that served Mr. Clinton so well. Balancing the Federal budget will be a high priority with concurrent limitation of spending. We will ease the burdens on middle class Americans and reverse Republican cuts in college tuition aid and health care. We will ensure that a retirement with dignity is the right and expectation of every single American, including pension reform, and preventing the privatization of social security.

We will dramatically expand support of energy independence in order to generate large numbers of new American jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. We will have a jobs agenda that includes good jobs that stay in America, a higher minimum wage and trade policies that benefit the global labor force, not just multinational corporations.

We will have a defense policy that is tough and smart, starting with phased redeployment of our troops in Iraq, and shore up our efforts to attack al Qaeda and fight the war on terror. We also will close the gaps in our security here at home by implementing the 9/11 Commission recommendations.

We are ready to lead with a thoughtful, fiscally responsible long-term vision. We will reach out to all Americans who value hope over fear and begin moving the country forward again.

Let’s take these one at a time, shall we?

We will restore honesty in government. Uh, right. The party of Clinton ("I never had sex with that woman!"), Nagin ("Chocolate City"), Daley ("I never met a man who couldn’t be bribed"), La Guardia ("The machine is greased with green"), McGreevey ("I confess!"), and Jefferson ("Doesn’t everybody keep $100K in their freezer?") is going to restore honesty. Sure. I’ll buy that one, right about the same time the sun stops rising in the morning…

We will dramatically expand support of energy independence in order to generate large numbers of new American jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Nice sentiment, hard to disagree with. But … this is from the party that consistently opposes expanding the exploitation of American sources of energy. Drilling in ANWAR, wind generation off Cape Cod, more oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico or off the Florida coast or off the California coast, oil extraction from shale and tar sands, coal mining, advanced nuclear power generation — you name the domestic energy program, and the Democratic party has long stood against it. And they still stand against it. So far as I can tell, the only domestic energy programs supported by the Democrats are those that don’t actually exist, or those that generate campaign financing from rich constituents (think Tom Daschle and his support for alcohol from corn). So now the Democrats are taking a completely opposing position? Nope, they still oppose all those programs I listed, and more. All they’re for is the warm sentiment, which I guess they hope will fool a bunch of voters into thinking they actually support a program that might, er, work. But no such luck, folks.

We will have a defense policy that is tough and smart, starting with phased redeployment of our troops in Iraq, and shore up our efforts to attack al Qaeda and fight the war on terror. “Phased redeployment” is Democratic doublespeak for cut-and-run from Iraq — Pelosi, Kerry, Kennedy, Dean, and Reid have made this very clear by declaring, over and over, that our “redeployment” should be unconditional. Unconditional on winning the war, that is. They want us to leave, tails tucked firmly between our legs, and let Al Qaeda and Iran have Iraq. I wonder how they believe that’s “tough and smart", or even “tough or smart”. Sounds more like “wimpy and idiotic” to me, like we’d be joining the likes of their heroes, the Chiracian cheese-eating surrender-monkeys. And what, you may ask, do they mean by shoring up the efforts to attack Al Qaeda? Well, the only concrete proposals I’ve seen from the Democrats are to stop any productive intelligence efforts, to treat terrorists as common criminals rather than as an enemy in wartime, and to run (quickly) from anything that resembles armed confrontation. Closer to the truth would be to say that the Democrats have been for shoring up Al Qaeda’s capability to attack us!

About half of adult Americans believe the Democratic party best represents their political positions. Presumably those folks would be nodding their heads in agreement as they read Dean’s piece. That simple fact sums up my concerns about the future of America pretty well…

UN Futility

Just a couple of months ago, after Iran had made it crystal-clear to the entire world that it had no intention of stopping its nuclear weapons development, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 1696. As the Wall Street Journal summarizes in a commentary piece ($) this morning:

In July, the Council adopted Resolution 1696, which noted “with serious concern that . . . Iran has not taken the steps required of it by the [International Atomic Energy Agency] Board of Governors.” The Council went on to express “its intention . . . to adopt appropriate measures under Article 41 of Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations to persuade Iran to comply with this resolution. . . .” Article 41 refers to all legally binding measures short of war — sanctions, that is — to bring states into compliance with U.N. resolutions. The Resolution said Iran must cease enriching uranium by August 31, a deadline Tehran has openly flouted.

So, serious consequences? Not quite. Chinese Middle East envoy Sun Bigan has rejected sanctions on Iran as “detrimental not only to the region but also to ourselves” — the latter a reference to China’s oil imports from Iran, up 56% from last year. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov — who is selling Iran a $700 million air-defense system — also says sanctions won’t work. That sentiment was echoed earlier this week by France’s Jacques Chirac, whom the Bush Administration has claimed is a stalwart ally in stopping Iran. “I am never favorable to sanctions,” said the French President, adding that, if they are unavoidable, they should be “moderate and adapted."

In other words, it has taken less than a month for the deadline set by Resolution 1696 to prove to be absolutely meaningless, something Mr. Ahmadinejad predicted in April. Why then would the Permanent Five risk their credibility as an institution by setting a deadline in the first place? Why threaten sanctions if they have no intention of imposing them?

A very good question.

The WSJ’s editors go on to theorize that this is all part of a deliberate effort to persuade America that we can just “live with” an Iranian nuclear weapons capability. In other words, they speculate that the U.N. is actually the manifestation of a vast anti-American conspiracy — and they’re serious.

I think they’re wrong about that, just as most conspiracy theories are wrong. Much more likely, as always, is to find a way to explain the observations with some good old human stupidity. And I don’t think that’s difficult in this case, as the U.N.'s ineffective posturing and drawing lines on parchment is strongly reminiscent of the European’s “handling” of Hitler just prior to his commencing hostilities. Read about the period, and you’ll find that organized groups of liberal-minded fellows who were very adverse to open confrontation with Hitler made agreements with him, over and over. And over and over, Hitler ignored them, using bombast and propaganda to “explain” his actions. The world took a depressingly long time to finally wake up and realize what a monster Hitler really was. Before this moment of clarity (which came when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939), the historical record is full of events that look distressingly similar to the way the world is dealing with Iran today.

I have little doubt that if Iran actually manages to obtain a nuclear weapon, the world will have another such moment of clarity. And it will be even more clarifying than Hitler’s invasion of Poland, as it will likely involve the demise of an entire city. Tel Aviv or another Israeli city would be most likely, but I wouldn’t rule out a European or even American target, as Iran has quite sophisticated delivery systems, including very quiet diesel-electric submarines. My fond hope (which keeps getting dashed) is that the world will somehow come to a consensus before such an awful event, but I’m getting less optimistic about this as each day passes…

Tomcats Retired

When I first went out to sea in the U.S. Navy (in 1973), we were at war in Vietnam. The Navy’s primary mission was to support the war with its airpower, and the workhorse fighter/bomber was the F-4 Phantom. A year or two later, the radical new “super plane” was introduced to the fleet: the F-14 Tomcat, with amazing new capabilities. I remember watching the very first squadron of Tomcat’s operating off the USS Enterprise, which was in the same task force as my ship (the USS Long Beach).

This morning I read that the last F-14 Tomcats are being retired this week, replaced by newer and even more sophisticated aircraft. The Tomcat is now a museum piece.

What does that make me?

Chavez Ponder

Just in case you missed Hugo Chavez' completely loony speech at the U.N. yesterday, here’s a link to a decent news story about it.

Claudia Rosette said that the Chavez speech did more to demonstrate what’s wrong with the U.N. than years of gumshoe reporting ever did. She was mostly referring to the enthusiastic applause Chavez received as he made each of his deranged points.

TigerHawk said “What a maroon!", because Chavez expressed regret that he couldn’t meet Noam Chomsky, as he was dead. This was news to Mr. Chomsky, who is still plaguing the planet at 77.

Neo-neocon said (in Spanish): psychological help, quickly, please!

And I say this: that speech demonstrates what happens when a corrupt (and have no doubt, Chavez is profoundly corrupt) moonbat attains a position of effectively unlimited power. It ain’t purty…