FJ Cruiser: The Platform Begins...

My current effort on fixing up the FJ Cruiser is focused on building a platform where the back seats used to be.  This platform will serve two purposes.  First, it provides a level, flat, and elevated place for the dogs to sit behind us at the right height for them to see around.  Second, under the platform is a handy-dandy storage space for tools, winch supplies, etc.

The platform needs to be sturdy and rigid, and strong enough to handle any kind of stress we might put on it while offroading.  I came up with a design that relies on 1/2" thick marine-grade plywood (this means it has no voids on the internal plies) and 1" angle iron to join the pieces.  So far I've fabricated the fore and aft bulkheads, and a port and starboard rib – the basic strength components of the design.  All four of these pieces are bolted directly to factory threaded holes, the same places that the back seats and seat belts were attached.  The pictures below, with their captions, tell the story of what I've done so far (there's much more to go!)...

My "baby" drill press - primitive, but it works surprisingly well.  Curls are from drilling holes in steel angle irons; oil is used to lubricate the drill bit (to keep it from getting hot).

A cut, ground, wire-brushed, and drilled piece of angle iron, forming one "connector" between two pieces of plywood.

Four identical connectors (for connecting the aft bulkhead to the port and starboard ribs).

 

Two pieces cut from a 10' length of angle iron.

Rough-cut ends.

In the little "pony" vise, ready for grinding...

Yours truly, all gussied up with safety gear: face shield (I'm quite attached to my vision), hearing protectors (ditto), and gloves (those metal shaving and sparks can be very painful and hard to extract!).  The Australian bush hat is there to protect the top of my head from the sun!

The 4.5" angle grinder, armed with grinding wheel, ready to go to work.

What it looks like after grinding - flat end, chamfered edges.

After grinding, I degreased them with this magic stuff.  Probably should have done that before grinding!

Change over to the wire brush, which cleans all the non-grease gunk off the metal.  It also acts like fine emery paper, polishing off all the rough bits.

Quite a difference after being cleaned up!

All three parts completely cleaned up.

Next step is to mark where the holes are to be drilled.  The machinist's square does the measuring, the scribe (long pointy thing) scores lines in the metal, and the automatic center punch (short pointy thing) makes precise little dents in the metal, right where I want the center of the holes to be.

You can see two of the dents made by the center punch, and the scribed line they are on.

Connector ready for drilling, a drop of oil on the center punch dent.

First step is to very lightly "tap" the drill against the work, to check whether you've got the bit centered over the dent.  When you get it right, you can see a faint disk drilled out around the dent (as above).  Sometimes it takes me four or five tries to get the drill in the right place :)

We're at the right place, so it's time to start drilling.  The key with drilling into hard metal like steel is to go slow and let the tool do the work.  I just keep a steady pressure of a few pounds on the drill press handle.  The drill bit does the rest; takes about 60 seconds or so to drill the complete hole.  Above is what it looks like when the hole first gets started.

Here the entire width of the hole is started.  The little curls of steel are what it should look like if your bit is sharp and you have the right pressure on the drill bit.  Time for some more lubrication; don't want my bit to get hot...

The hole is finished, and you can see there are a number of quite large curls lying out.  That's what you want it to look like!  For a 5/16" hole (as above) through 1/8" steel (as above), I generally pause twice for additional lubrication.  For a bigger hole or thicker metal, I'd pause more.  It's all about keeping that drill bit cool, which will keep it sharp much longer (it gets softer when it gets hot).

Done, and degreased again!

Now I need to cut the port rib (the starboard rib is the piece with the angle iron bolted to it, lying down to the left of the router).  I use the router (upside down on the plywood) to do the cutting, not a saw - saws tend to splinter the top side of the wood, plus it's a challenge to make a perfectly square cut with them.  The router against a straight edge (like the big aluminum one above) makes a perfectly square cut every time, with no splinters.  It's a little tricky to control (and I screw up sometimes), but on the whole the result is superior to what I can do with a circular saw.

The router, close up, showing the milling bit (1/4" diameter).  Note the drill-like flutes to pull the wood chips up and out of the cut - key to this technique working.  The router is still upside-down, of course.

Here's my starting piece of wood, with the cuts I need to make marked on it in pencil.  There are five cuts altogether - three horizontal, one vertical, and one angled.

To make the first horizontal cut, first I set up (and clamp) the straight edge exactly 2 7/8" from where I want to cut.

All rigged for cutting.

The first horizontal cut.  Note I first cut through some waste wood to get there.

The second horizontal cut.

The third horizontal cut.

The angle cut (note some of the waste wood now fell off).

And the last cut, the vertical cut.  My piece is done.

And there it is!

Marking hole centers with a scratch awl.

These two holes are getting a counter-sunk bolt in them, so I drill them with the special counter-sink drill bit.

The trick is to counter sink them enough so that the head of the bolt projects ever-so-slightly (perhaps 1/32"), so that when you tighten the bolt, it pulls in flush with the wood.  There's a bit of art to this, as it depends on the size of the bolt and the kind of wood...

The rest of the holes are just 1/4" holes for bolts; there's steel on both sides so no counter-sinking is required.  To make a nice, clean, perfectly cylindrical hole I use a special kind of bit called a Fortsner bit - with a "backer board" so that the bottom of the hole doesn't splinter.  The backer board is just a piece of waste wood placed below the work piece when you're drilling.  The drill bit goes cleanly through the work piece and 1/8" or so into the backer board. 

The Fortsner bit.

 

Tah dah!  The perfect resulting holes...

The port and starboard ribs, with all their connectors installed.  The two long connectors tie into the fore and aft bulkheads; the short connector on the bottom ties directly into the FJ.

Lunch Yesterday...

Debbie and I went to lunch yesterday with a friend and former colleague, Aleck L. – at Sushi Ota in Pacific Beach.  It was make-your-brains-fall-out good, and it was even better to spend some time with Aleck.  This was my lunch, a daily special:

Debbie ordered several rolls and gobbled them down like Mo'i attacks dog food.  Then we had dessert – green tea creme brulee, also delicious.  After we ate, we sat and had a delightful conversation in which three hours went by without our noticing...

Murphy's Law...

Dave Carter, over at Ricochet, waxes poetic about his personal encounter with Murphy's Law the other day.  Here's one paragraph to whet your appetite:

As it turned out, the remainder of THAT day was filled with one human abnormality after another.  It began to wear on me, so that by the end of the day, I sought out a booth in the corner of the restaurant, as far away from everyone as possible.  That was when, predictably, a very large fellow and his wife arrived at the booth directly behind me.  When the big fellow -- we'll call him Jabba the Customer -- plopped down in the seat directly behind me, it had a seesaw effect that nearly launched me across the room.  I tried to make the best of it though, honestly I did.  When he decided to blow his nose loud and long in the restaurant, it sounded like the contents of his head were being spackled into his hanky.  I didn't say word, though my appetite was waning.  But when he followed up that little display of grace with a chunky, wide open-mouthed belch, I quite reflexively turned around and asked, "Would you like me to get a waitress to clean that up or do you want to barf first?"  His wife sat there wide-eyed and speechless, and Jabba the Customer didn't even acknowledge that I had said anything.  A few minutes later, they left. 

The rest is here...

Key Management Is the Problem...

In any system for transmitting messages using encryption, the security of the system boils down to the security of the encryption key.  This key security often isn't electronic at all – you need a secure way to distribute keys to authorized message senders and receivers.  If that key is stolen or misplaced, your key distribution process and ensure that no real messages are sent with that key – as the bad guys might have it.  This process is called “key management”, and it's hard.  Almost always there's a flaw in key management – anything from a minor and unlikely vulnerability to a gaping security hole you could drive an aircraft carrier through.  All of this is well understood by anyone designing a security messaging system.

So...how do you make a secure key management system?

Well, Roarke Horstmeyer at the California Institute of Technology and some others think they have an answer.  For their “key” they use a slab of special glass whose microscopic structure is random, unpredictable, and readable.  To set up a secure system, they make two slabs of glass – one for each side of the messaging system.  They then read the random data in each key and combine them to make a public key.  This public key can be safely published to the world, as it's contents can't be used for anything by itself – you have to possess one of the two glass slabs to make it useful.

Let's say we have two parties: the traditional Alice and Bob, each of whom have one of these special glass slabs.  The combination has been published.  Now Alice wants to send Bob an encrypted message.  She figures out how long her message is (“n” bits) and then takes the next “n” bits of her key (read from her glass slab) and uses them to encrypt her message.  She sends the message to Bob.  Bob takes the next “n” bits of his key (read from his glass slab) and subtracts it from the published combined key, yielding Alice's key – which he then uses to decrypt her message.  Straightforward and as secure as a one-time pad.

Really the glass slabs are just a memory – a very reliable, physical and tangible memory that (today at least) could not easily be copied.  Even just reading it would take a considerable amount of time, which means that security protocols (processes) could detect the fact that someone was reading it.  There's nothing special about the glass per se; it's this combination of characteristics that make it attractive.  A thumb drive could store data for a key, and be used the same way as the glass – but copying the thumb drive takes only a few seconds, and it's easy.  A thumb drive (or any other electronic store) would be vulnerable to any such attack.

The trouble with the glass, though, is that almost certainly there's a technical attack – some way that a bad guy could quickly read it.  Any conceivable storage mechanism for a key has this problem...

What a Great Idea!

Hmmm...

When you distrust your government, you start looking at things in a different light. 

Consider this: on March 31st, 2010, Colleen Kelly visited with President Obama.  Kelly was the president of the National Treasury Employees Union – a virulently anti-Tea Party group that happens to represent most IRS employees.  Nothing suspicious about this visit; that's exactly the kind of friendly visitor you'd expect Obama to have.  But...the very next day IRS workers started targeting conservative and Tea Party groups.

Coincidence?  Hmmm...

Quote of the Day...

From a post by Neo-Neocon:

That has always been the danger of having a republic. Its success rests on the character and the understanding of its people, because if they stop learning and comprehending what makes us great and unique—are not taught it in the schools or in society at large, or lack the skills or the motivation to understand or to care—then we will lose it. And the funny thing about liberty is that it’s only then that people experience (up close and personal) how important it was, and how deeply they yearn for it.

Read the whole thing...

I yearn.

Hue Light Bulbs...

Former colleague, friend, and reader Doug S. says “Just got these and they are freakin (geekin) awesome!”  Yes, he really does talk that way :)  These Hue LED light bulbs (by Philips) can be set to any color in the spectrum and changed any time you'd like, through a smartphone app.  Awesome!  But a bit pricey – it helps to have a job in high tech and be a real estate mogul like Doug (he owns a significant fraction of Idaho)...

Red Sprite Lightning...

Red sprite lightning is a phenomenon that was long rumored, but only recently confirmed.  This is the only color photograph of it.  This sort of thing – phenomena hiding in plain sight – fascinate me.  There seems to be no end of unmade discoveries!  From APOD, of course...

The Dog and the Tornado...

This is but one of many stories emerging from the Oklahoma tornado tragedy, but this one is of particular interest to dog lovers.

What If...We Never Run Out of Oil?

Ocean-bottom methane hydrates offer that possibility.  Researchers are working hard on practical ways to “mine” the stuff.

So think about it.  What would change if we knew that we had an essentially infinite supply of naturally renewed hydrocarbon fuel?

• Environmentalists who are convinced that carbon dioxide is causing global warming will be horrified.
• The economic incentives for switching away from hydrocarbon fuels (still by far the most efficient way, by volume or by weight, that we know how to store energy) will be greatly reduced.  Unless, that is, government decides to distort the market with “carbon taxes” or some such thing.
• The oil-supported country economies (Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, etc.) will be sorely tested.
• Prices for most goods and many services (especially transportation) will fall.

Most of that sounds pretty good to me!

Update and bump: reader and friend Doug W. points out this marvelous quote from the above-linked article:

To ask utilities to take in large amounts of solar power—electricity generated by hundreds or thousands of small installations, many on neighborhood roofs and lawns, whose output is affected by clouds—is like asking a shipping firm to replace its huge, professionally staffed container ships with squadrons of canoes paddled by random adolescents.

Hah! Squadrons of canoes paddled by random adolescents :)

Sounds pretty good compared with the Obama administration and Congress, though, doesn't it? 

Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks...

Executive summary: excellent book; read it.

Henrietta Lacks was a black woman who died in 1951 – far too young, of cancer.  Her cells were sampled (without her knowledge or informed permission) and turned out to be immortal.  Such cells are incredibly useful for many different kinds of investigations and tests.  Researchers figured out how to grow her cells (dubbed “HeLa” cells) and soon they spread throughout the world of medical research.

That's an interesting bit of science history, and I can easily imagine someone writing a book about that.  That's not what Rebecca Skloot (the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks) did.  In fact, science's use of HeLa cells isn't really detailed much at all in her book.  Instead, her book is mainly about the impact of HeLa cells on Henrietta Lacks' family – and Rebecca Skloot becomes a part of that story herself as she researches her book. 

I picked up this book thinking that it was going to be a sort of standard history of science book; a genre that I particularly like.  But instead it was something else altogether, something unlike any other book I've ever read.  Part science history, part human interest, part philosophy, and in places it reads like a novel.  I couldn't put the book down, and found much in it that provoked thought about the conflicts between medical research and human rights.  Some of these conflicts are avoidable, but others are, I suspect, intrinsic to the field. 

One helluva read, and I highly recommend it – despite the New York Times also recommending it :)

Understand How It Works...

Martin Rue writes about this simple piece of advice he got from his grandfather: “Understand how it works.”  Instead of just understanding what something does, understand how it does it.

This resonates strongly with me.  I've written before about my surprise that many programmers working today really have no idea at all how a computer actually works, and yet they can still write good software.  Lots of people know how to drive a car, but they haven't a clue what actually happens when they press on the gas pedal, or the brake, or turn the steering wheel.

I've noted that it is quite powerful, sometimes, to actually understand how something works.  Martin makes this point better than I have:

If you simply remember how to do something, then all you can do is use it the same way over and over, but if you understand how it works, you can reason about it. Once you can reason about something in your mind you can contemplate why it is the way it is, you can apply your entire creative mind to making the most of it, and you can implement and question improvement – you own it intellectually.

What he said.

Good or Evil?

Here's a very compact collection of statistical formulae, nicely organized and with almost no explanation.  I can't decide whether this is a great thing (a sort of “cheat sheet” for statistics) or if it's an evil thing (encouraging programmers to misuse tools they don't understand)...

Dolphins Find Antique Torpedo Off San Diego's Coast...

Dolphins trained by the U.S. Navy to locate sea mines (at the Pt. Loma facility) have located a Howell torpedo from the late 1800s (the only other known example is at right).

Awesome!

Sometimes We All Have a Day Like This...

Via reader Simi L.:

Cicada Periodicity...

Cicadas are currently emerging on the east coast of the U.S.  These are interesting large insects that I remember well from my childhood in New Jersey.  The North American species (called “periodical cicadas”) have a fascinating quirk: they breed in multi-year cycles of either 13 or 17 years.  They spend most of their lives underground, feeding from the roots of trees.  But every 13 or 17 years (depending on the group, or brood they belong to), they emerge, transform in the large flying insect pictured at right, and breed – thereby starting the next 13 or 17 year cycle.

If you're into math at all, you probably noted immediately that both 13 and 17 are prime numbers.  Is there are reason why those cycles are a prime number of years?  I've wondered that myself.

This morning I read about a hypothesis for this phenomenon.  If it's true that the cicada have multiple predators (that is, things that eat cicadas) whose populations vary cyclically (but independently), then it's provable that the best way for the cicadas to have a regular life cycle while minimizing the chances of being eaten is to have a life cycle that is a prime number of years long.  This, of course, would provide an evolutionary pressure giving the advantage to cicadas whose life cycles happened to be a prime number of years long.  After a few thousand generations, you'd get the situation we have today.

Awesome!

Steyn on Scandals...

Just go read it...

College Tuition Increases...

This article rants and raves about the cost of college tuition, which for the past 20 years or so has been rising much faster than inflation.  The author explores several possible reasons for the increase, but none of them are satisfyingly simple and obvious. 

There is such a reason, however: the fast ramp of college tuition almost exactly correlates with the easing of student loan availability.  Way back in the Cretaceous era when I was examining the possibility of going to college, there's no way that I could have gotten a student loan.  These days, thanks to numerous Federal and State programs, if you can fog a mirror and get admitted to any college, you can easily get a loan to pay not only your tuition, but your books and living expenses as well.

So why would that make college tuition increase?  Because the marketplace for college has been distorted by the government subsidies and guarantees in the student loan market – a student selecting a college no longer needs to worry so much about what it costs.  Because the loans are so easy to get, the only pricing pressure comes from a students deferred need to pay off the loan.  This greatly reduces the pressure on colleges and universities to keep their prices low, as the “buyers” not longer care so much about the price.  Instead, they are now motivated to spend more money to compete for student loans (the fact that a student comes along with the loan is just a cost of doing business for them, and a relatively minor one). 

This is yet another example of the government's intervention causing a huge distortion in the market.  Like the housing bubble, the taxpayers are going to be on the hook again – because a large fraction of all the trillions in student loans are guaranteed by some Federal program or another.  Of course “Federal guarantee” is just the polite way of saying “They're going to stick their hands in my pocket to steal the money”...

Slo-Mo Hummers...

This was taken in Los Angeles.  The two hummingbird species shown (Allen's and Anna's) are both native to us as well...

Reunited...

Marine Sgt. Ross Gundlach served in Afghanistan with Casey, a yellow lab trained as an explosives dog.  Sgt. Gundlach wanted to take care of Casey after she was retired, but she was assigned to the Iowa State Fire Marshal's office.  After pleading his case to the Fire Marshal's office, some state officials with a heart decided to make Sgt. Gundlach's dream come true.  They arranged a surprise reunion of Sgt. Gundlach and Casey, and now the two will be together permanently.

There's a government story that makes me feel good.  First time in a while...

A Most Excellent Wildlife Viewing Evening...

Last night Debbie and I went up to one of our favorite local wildlife viewing spots: the Stonewall Mine Road in Cuyamaca Park, just before dark.  We're still delighting in the return of a substantial deer herd (gone since the 2007 fires), and last night didn't disappoint on that score – we saw at least 50 deer in two different main groups and in several singles and pairs.  We hoped for a bobcat or mountain lion, but alas didn't see one.  We did get a extended great view of a male meadowlark singing his heart out.  What glorious colors on them!

But the highlight of the evening wasn't at Stonewall – it was on the way home.  Debbie, sharp-eyed as always, spotted a hawk silhouetted on a nest with chicks – just 15 feet or so from the road!  I never saw a thing, as I was concentrating on getting the truck safely around the tight corners (this is on the stretch of State 79 between Oakzanita and Descanso town, where the road is very curvy).  I found a place to turn around, and we drove back up to find that nest.  We parked the truck on the road, half on the (narrow) shoulder and turned on the 4-way flashers – and then settled in for a delightful 10 minutes or so watching one hawk parent (we think a red tail, but we couldn't positively ID it) and its two chicks.  The chicks were still mostly white, with a mottled appearance as their first flight feathers were emerging.  There wasn't much action; they seemed sleepy (this was right at dusk) and maybe a little cold.  The parent just stared at us the whole time :)

I've never been this close to a raptor nest with chicks before.  We both had our binoculars with us, so we had a real treat – with the binoculars, were were count-the-feather-barbs close.  Awesome!

One fellow drove by the other way while we were stopped.  He asked if we were ok, and I told him we were watching a hawk's nest.  He said “Nice!” and drove on.  Shortly after we packed up our binoculars and left, though, several cars passed us the other way, and a sheriff's SUV came up behind us.  Our timing was very good :)

We drove home with big silly smiles plastered all over our faces...

Pelargonium tetragonum...

From BPOD, of course:

Quantum Computing Skeptic...

Scott Aaronson doesn't think we're likely to see practical quantum computers anytime soon – if ever.  The rash of recent news concerning the D-Wave company and their claims of working quantum computers drove Scott to comment publicly (for the first time in a while) and even to talk with some reporters.  The reporters all want to know, basically, why he remains skeptical when big businesses (can you spell Google?) and government (uh oh) are spending millions of dollars on D-Wave machines, and have announced spectacular results.  Scott's awesome response:

My reaction, I confess, is simple.  I don’t care—I actually told them this—if the former Pope Benedict has ended his retirement to become D-Wave’s new marketing director.  I don’t care if the Messiah has come to Earth on a flaming chariot, not to usher in an age of peace but simply to spend $10 million on D-Wave’s new Vesuvius chip.  And if you imagine that I’ll ever care about such things, then you obviously don’t know much about me.  I’ll tell you what: if peer pressure is where it’s at, then come to me with the news that Umesh Vazirani, or Greg Kuperberg, or Matthias Troyer is now convinced, based on the latest evidence, that D-Wave’s chip asymptotically outperforms simulated annealing in a fair comparison, and does so because of quantum effects.  Any one such scientist’s considered opinion would mean more to me than 500,000 business deals.

Read his entire post for a (much) more detailed D-Wave takedown...

I don't understand enough about quantum computers to have an informed opinion on their plausibility.  But I have seen hype before, and I have personally witnessed hype completely overwhelming any semblance of reality.  Anybody who lived through the dot-com bubble and was at all observant can say the same thing :)

Cold War Gadgets...

A collection of photos of Cold War KGB (Soviet) gadgets, like the listening device shown below, hidden inside a hollowed-out log:

London in 1927...

This is America?

Sarah Ingram headed the IRS' unit that oversaw tax-exempt organizations up until a short time ago.  She was the boss of that unit when conservative organizations were being targeted for tax-exempt application slowdowns and runarounds, and when conservative organizations and individuals were audited.  She's at the very center of the current scandal, and a completely relevant questions (all as yet unresolved) are:

• How much did Sarah Hall know, and when did she know it?
• Did Sarah Hall direct any of the conservative targeting?
• Did Sarah Hall, directly or indirectly, condone any of the conservative targeting?
• Should Sarah Hall have had the processes and procedures in place to detect and prevent the conservative targeting?

That last point may sound like a no-brainer, but it's really not – it depends substantially on how the IRS organizes its oversight and audit processes (I'm making the large assumption that they actually have such processes).

Now, given all those questions hanging over Sarah Hall, what's the right thing for the IRS to do with her?  You and I might say she should be put on paid leave while the investigation unfolds.  The IRS says she should be promoted and put in charge of the implementation of the parts of Obamacare that the IRS is responsible for.

That should terrify any American – the possibility exists that an operative devoted to abusing the IRS for political purposes just got placed in charge of access to healthcare for millions of Americans.  If you're not terrified, you might want to play a little connect-the-dots...

As I read this, I felt like I was reading about East Germany or Romania in the '60s – but I double-checked, and that article really is about America in 2013.

I want my country back.

Quote of the Day...

From today's Day-by-Day cartoon (below):

...you don't want to grow up to be like the president, do you?

Can You Raise 73 to the 12th Power in Your Head?

I certainly can not (it would have to be a good day for me to do 5^5 in my head!), but apparently this fellow can.  Not just that pair of numbers, but any pair you can throw at him.  If this is for real, it's amazing...

National Geographic Photo of the Month...

It'a a corker of an Eastern Screech Owl, in the Okefnokee Swamp of southern Georgia...

In the News...

Spotted:

WASHINGTON—Saying that none of the facts quite add up, first daughter Sasha Obama, 11, reported being “highly suspicious” today after poking around the details of the 2012 Benghazi attack. “I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t make sense—first they blame the attack on a spontaneous demonstration, but now we find out the CIA talking points were secretly revised?” said the sixth-grader, sitting in the darkened White House library intensely scrolling through pages of articles about the controversy and classified Pentagon briefings. “Obviously, someone’s hiding something: the poor security; the al-Qaeda link; the leaked emails. All I’m asking for here is a simple explanation from the State Department and the White House, and I’m not getting one. I mean, who are they protecting here? And why?” Sasha went on to tell reporters she felt even more suspicious after former defense secretary Leon Panetta failed to respond to any of her 24 voicemails.

The Onion, of course.

When you've lost the Onion, ...

Leg Room...

If you've flown in the past few years, and you're not one of the fortunate few in business or first class, then you've had the lovely experience of seat compression.  The airlines keep moving the seats closer together (they call this “seat pitch”) to cram more seats in the airplanes.

It's occurred to me to wonder how much this is actually worth to an airline.  Does making their passengers miserable actually make them any more money?  You have to believe it does, or the airlines would quickly stop doing it (competition assures that some airline would try this as a way to attract passengers).  But how much does it make the airlines?

Well, now we know the answer.  For Southwest Airlines, changing the seat pitch from 32" to 31" was worth $773,074,040 a year.  That's serious money!

I would guess this could be optimized a bit more.  If you had seats available at various pitches (say, 31", 32", and 36"), I'd be willing to bet the airlines could sell the seats with more separation for a considerable premium, just as they do today for exit row seats (which have more separation)...

Overheard...

Yesterday I had to venture “down the hill” into San Diego to pick up some specialty lumber items (I'm getting ready to build the storage compartment and dog platform in the FJ).  The vendor I was visiting, who shall remain unnamed, is notable for two things: (1) the marvelous selection of hardwoods and exotic plywoods, and (2) the glacial pace of their customer service and antiquity of their computers (they should really be in a museum somewhere, not actually in use!).  The second of these characteristics assures there will be a collection of customers at the counter, waiting with various degrees of patience.  And there are conversations...

I sat on one of the provided benches and read the text on the container of glue I was buying.  Next to me, a thirtyish young man was complaining about the negative portrayals (by the media) of the current Washington scandals.  This provided me with a fascinating view into the mind of a progressive voter, and with the opportunity to ask some questions.  From memory, here's how it went:

“I'm OK with Obama ordering searches of those damned reporters!” said my progressive voter.  “If he thinks they leaked that intelligence information, then I want him to go after the leakers!”  I asked if he really thought that Obama had personally ordered the phone records searched, and if he really thought that the AP employees were the actual leakers – yes on both counts.  I then asked if he would have been OK with G.W. Bush ordering a similar search.  “Hell, no!  Don't trust him!” was the answer.  OK, I said, but how would you codify that into the law?  “Easy!  Democrat presidents can do it, Republicans can not.”  I asked a few questions to see if he was serious about that, and as far as I can tell, he was.  If you distill what I heard there, it comes down to fascism – my progressive voter was really proposing a flavor of fascism.

Now to the IRS kerfuffle, wherein progressive-leaning groups applying for tax-exempt status had their applications expedited, and conservative-leaning groups got the run-around, threats, and extended information requests.  You can probably predict that my progressive voter thought that was the way things should be.  He saw nothing wrong with it at all, and thought the press should be lauding the IRS's efforts.  Shades of 1984! 

Finally, the Benghazi affair.  My progressive voter surprised me a little here.  Basically he was completely ignorant of the damning emails and other documents that have been trickling out, or else he's just pretending they don't exist.  His belief is that all of the Benghazi flap is a Republican “dirty trick”, and that they've got stooges manufacturing all this testimony about Obama having political motives for not treating the Benghazi attacks as a terrorist attack.  He thinks that the four Americans were likely killed “by accident” when they tried to interact with an unruly mob enraged by viewing the YouTube video.  As best I could tell, he really, truly believes all that.

By the time we finished with our conversation, we had a small knot of others waiting for service around us.  Some of these people had peripherally participated in the conversation.  It was clear from the general tone and facial expressions that most were with my progressive voter (there were, thankfully, a few scornful faces of those who were not).  From some of the comments, it was clear that in general this was not a well-informed crowd.  One fellow, for example, was certain that Benghazi was a city in Iraq; another was convinced that every word we said (on the telephone or not) was being recorded by the CIA and this AP flap was therefore by definition a tempest in a teapot.

Being quite immersed in the news myself, I sometimes forget that most people pay much less attention to these things that I do.  They're probably happier for doing so :)  What's interesting is how these folks make up their minds about the news items they've heard just a little about.  It's clear that the lamestream media has a big influence.  It appears that preconceived notions and their personal feelings about the president also have a lot of influence.  And for some people, a predisposition to conspiracy theories seems to be a predominant driver.  All of these people are quite likely to arrive at a conclusion that simply cannot be supported by those pesky things known as actual facts – and this doesn't actually seem to bother them too much.

It bothers me, though.  These people vote.

I got no answers, just worries...

FJ Cruiser: Shakedown Cruise #2...

Sunday (Mother's Day) turned out to be too danged hot to do any work outside – so we decided to take the FJ Cruiser out for another shakedown ride.  This time we headed out to Los Pinos, the northernmost road that's in the Corral Canyon offroading area.  This is a few miles south of I-8 and a few miles east of Pine Valley, which means it's not very far from home.  There's a road there that starts just below the Los Pinos fire lookout (the photo at right was taken from near the start of this road, with Corte Madera visible just above and left of the FJ), heads down to the saddle between Corte Madera and Los Pinos, and then west down the ravine just south of Corte Madera (the photo below left was taken just at the start of the section down the ravine, with Corte Madera visible above the FJ).

In past years this has been a moderately rugged ride with just one or two challenging parts.  We were surprised once again – the entire section that runs down the ravine is challenging, with several very challenging parts.  All this is thanks to the rains this year and the consequent erosion; in some parts the road looks like it's lost 8" to 12" of soil, with big bad rocks left exposed.  So this turned out to be the best set of challenges yet for our little FJ Cruiser.

And challenge it we did!  We managed to sit it down on one skid or another at least a half dozen times, and twice we smacked a rock or two hard enough to make scratches and dents in the 1/4" GR-50 skid plates.  The photo at right was taken on the way back out, near the place the previous photo was taken – past all the challenging bits, just easy stuff left to go.  When I crawled under the FJ afterwards to see what we hurt, I found a couple of gouges and a nice big dent on the front suspension skid, a gouge on the rear differential skid, and a nice big scrape on the forward port-side lower link skid.  Any one of those, if we didn't have the skids, might have caused some very inconvenient damage.  With the skids, just a bit of touch-up paint is needed.  Big smiles from us for the skids!

The real test, though, was the handling.  We got to exercise, for real, many of the features of our little FJ Cruiser.  We stayed in low 4 wheel drive range for much of this trail, and I found the handling both uphill and downhill to be superb – secure footing, nice high clearances, easy and solid steering, totally controlled braking.  The FJ is a very competent offroad vehicle; considerably more agile than the LandCruiser we've been driving for the past 15 years (though also considerably smaller and less comfortable!).  At one point I needed to use the rear differential locker, and it just worked, nice and smooth.  We had the A-Trac system on most of the time, and we felt the brakes kicking in fairly frequently to keep one wheel or another from spinning.  All-in-all the FJ made it very easy to drive on quite a rugged road.  I'm calibrating my driving to the new ride, and my confidence in it is rising rapidly.  It's all good!

All the photos in this post were taken with my iPhone, including the panorama below, which I took from just below the Los Pinos fire lookout.  The iPhone makes taking a panorama ridiculously easy, and its software does a bang-up job of seamlessly stitching the whole thing together.  The result beats the pants off of any panorama software I've ever used.  I've labeled some points of interest on this roughly 180° panorama; if you know San Diego County these will mostly be familiar places to you.  As always, click to enlarge.

And of course there were flowers:

The Paradox of the Proof...

A fascinating story (with no difficult math) for anyone interested in math – Shinichi Mochizuki's still-unreviewed proof of the ABC conjecture...

Caught on Camera: Good People...

What Giraffes Do When You're Not Looking...

Awesome!

Optical Illusions Collection...

A wonderful collection of optical illusions of all types, by Akiyoshi Kitaoka.

Says the Dog: “What Just Happened Here?”

Via my lovely bride...  I wish I knew the backstory on this one, but the photos' story is very clear.  First we have a disastrous looking situation from the squirrel mama's perspective: the big black dog has her baby pinned down, and it's looking like hors d'oeuvres time:

Things are not looking good for baby.  But then mama squirrel gets right in that nasty dog's face, like a fractional horsepower chainsaw mounted on motorized crampons.  That ole dog is mighty distracted – and baby squirrel makes a mad dash for safety:

Mama and baby, safe on the tree – and one very confused looking dog, the expression on her face saying “What just happened here?  Did I just get my ass kicked by a squirrel?”

Why, yes, as a matter of fact you did!

Imagine...

Imagine that you're a chemist, and you've followed a standard procedure to produce a chemical that's new to you.  The procedures that you read didn't mention that the chemical you're making has an odor, but it does – an unimaginably foul, evil odor.  So bad, in fact, that it ended up getting you fired.  Now imagine that you had to describe that odor.  Here's a valiant attempt:

But the smell - right at the moment when we quenched (in a hood of course) we were pushed back by the solidity of the reek. I got to know many evil chemical smells over the years but nothing comes anywhere close. With the other stinkers, at least one can imagine what sort of unwashed, putrid, fishy, skunky, human-waste object those smells are related to. But I never encountered anything as nauseating or alien like PhePHMe: The memory is stil with me - the most sickly and sweetish smell of rancid gasoline combined with rotten water melons, with undertones of stale sweat, pig carcass, a hint of garlic, moldy oranges, russian-made aftershave and a cheap household air freshener…  its a whole package, and rather sweet one – like isonitriles or cyclopentadiene but magnified thousand times. A whiff of that thing and you feel that your nose just suffered a stroke and will hopefully die and peal off so that you never smell that thing again.

Not bad.  Not bad at all :)  Do read the whole story – it's marvelous, and you don't have to be a chemist to appreciate it!

Murder Charges For Ariel Castro...

Prosecutors in Ohio announced that they'll be seeking aggravated murder charges against Ariel Castro, for the miscarriages his abuse of his captive women caused.  I'm surprised that keeping three women captive for ten years doesn't carry the same sort of penalties as murder (life in prison without parole or execution), but apparently it does not.  If charging him with murder is required to make sure that miserable scum is never a free man again, then I'm all for it.

But it does raise some questions.

How, exactly, is it possible to simultaneously have legal abortion and charge someone for murdering a fetus?  If you can charge someone with murder for killing a fetus, then you are saying that killing a fetus is (under the law) the same as killing a human.  If that's the case, then how can abortion be anything other than murder?  It can't be the mother's permission – there's no other circumstance I can think of where permission excuses murder.

I'm no lawyer, but this isn't making sense to me.  I don't see how our legal system can simultaneously hold that abortion is legal and that Ariel Castro is a murderer...

Better Names for Things...

Happy Mother's Day, Moms!

Here's a little something to put a smile on your face:

Ah, California...

Not long ago, California Senator Dianne Feinstein said (in the context of pushing her gun control bill, which failed) “All vets are mentally ill and government should prevent them from owning firearms”.  She didn't actually say those words, but that is how many understood her meaning.

Columnist Burt Prelutsky had this thought:

Frankly, I don't know what it is about California, but we seem to have a strange urge to elect really obnoxious women to high office. I'm not bragging, you understand, but no other state, including Maine, even comes close. When it comes to sending left-wing dingbats to Washington, we're Number One. There's no getting around the fact that the last time anyone saw the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Maxine Waters, and Nancy Pelosi, they were stirring a cauldron when the curtain went up on 'Macbeth'. The four of them are like jackasses who happen to possess the gift of blab. You don't know if you should condemn them for their stupidity or simply marvel at their ability to form words.

No other state even comes close.  Ouch.  What a sad statement that is...

Meanwhile, Down Under...

This beast, dubbed “SkyWhale”, is about to take flight.  Tim Blair says: “The perfect symbol of our capital city – a bloated, gaseous, multi-breasted monster feeding those who dwell in its poisonous shadow while leeching off the rest of us”.

Study it a bit, and try to imagine what the artist is trying to convey.

I have no idea.  None at all.  But I'm now newly worried about my friends who hail from the land down under...

Quote of the Day...

Said by my mom, upon reading that 78,000 people have volunteered for a one-way mission to Mars:

It's my fervent hope that all 78,000 that want to settle on Mars are politicians!

Oh, yes.  Let's certainly hope so.  And let's also hope that there isn't some galactic environmental protection agency that will punish us for polluting the now-pristine Mars...

FJ Cruiser: Shakedown Cruise...

Yesterday morning I finished putting on the last of the skid plates (the four lower link skids).  The FJ's “armor” is complete!  And that meant it was time for a shakedown cruise to test all this stuff and work out any rattles, loose bolts, etc.

I decided to start out with a route we know well: entering near Banner, we made a loop of the Rodriguez Canyon road and Oriflamme Canyon road.  In past years, the Rodriguez Canyon road was by far the more rugged – but this year, extensive erosion on the lower reaches of Oriflamme Canyon road gives that route the edge.  No matter, the FJ took it all in stride with ease and equanimity.  We scraped a skid just twice, showing off the FJ's high clearance.  We had a chance to exercise crawl mode, the A-Trac positive traction system, the rear differential lock, and of course basic four wheel drive; all performed flawlessly. 

Today I get to crawl under the FJ and see what needs tightening, and maybe do a little touch-up painting.  Oh, what fun :)

Along the way we saw a few wildflowers, actually unexpected at this late date.  Some of these were quite beautiful.  The tiny little blue ones were my favorite; they covered the ground in a few places like a blue gas hugging the ground.  As always, click to enlarge.  BTW, these were taken with my iPhone – that's an amazingly nice camera for its size...

Dancing Granny...

Via Rachel Lucas, this is a slightly different version of a video I've posted before.  But what the hell, it's still wonderful :)

Consumer Reports Really, Really Likes the Tesla Model S...

They note with some regret the 200 mile limitation, but otherwise they make the Tesla Model S sound like basically the perfect car:

Math-for-Programming Primers...

Here's a nice collection of very terse math primers on a bunch of different math topics that are frequently used in programming...

Benghazi...

Several readers have emailed to ask me why I'm not commenting on this story.  Mainly it's because there's nothing for me to add.  The entire disgusting, sickening story is now emerging.  I still have no intuition whether the main culprits (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in my view) will be held to account.  I certainly hope so, but I can't say I'm optimistic about that.  But even that emotion is completely dwarfed by something else I'm feeling: an overwhelming sense of despair and resignation about politics sublimating everything good about my country.  It's getting to the point where it's difficult to imagine anything short of a revolution effecting a cure.  Another Thatcher or Reagan, perhaps...though I don't see anyone like that emerging.

Peggy Noonan has a good piece in today's Wall Street Journal discussing Benghazi.  Here's her summary of the affair:

The Obama White House sees every event as a political event. Really, every event, even an attack on a consulate and the killing of an ambassador.

Because of that, it could not tolerate the idea that the armed assault on the Benghazi consulate was a premeditated act of Islamist terrorism. That would carry a whole world of unhappy political implications, and demand certain actions. And the American presidential election was only eight weeks away. They wanted this problem to go away, or at least to bleed the meaning from it.

Because the White House could not tolerate the idea of Benghazi as a planned and deliberate terrorist assault, it had to be made into something else. So they said it was a spontaneous street demonstration over an anti-Muhammad YouTube video made by a nutty California con man. After all, that had happened earlier in the day, in Cairo. It sounded plausible. And maybe they believed it at first. Maybe they wanted to believe it. But the message was out: Provocative video plus primitive street Arabs equals sparky explosion. Not our fault. Blame the producer! Who was promptly jailed.

If what happened in Benghazi was not a planned and prolonged terrorist assault, if it was merely a street demonstration gone bad, the administration could not take military action to protect Americans there. You take military action in response to a planned and coordinated attack by armed combatants. You don't if it's an essentially meaningless street demonstration that came and went.

The rest of her piece is interesting as well.

The current Crowder (with a guest appearance by Andrew Klavan) is also an effective summary.


You know this all means we need:

   Rope (lots of it).
   Trees (an entire forest full of them).
   Bureaucrats and their leaders (an administration full of them).
   Some assembly required.

Oh, That's Gonna Leave a Mark!

Let's say that you're a big government organization.  Let's say that you have an application where your computers really, really need to be reliable.  Like, say, NASA's computers on the International Space Station.  What's the absolute last operating system you would choose for those computers?

Everyone I know in IT or programming would instantly say “Windows!”.  Naturally, NASA chose Windows.  Windows XP, to be precise.

But...even NASA eventually got tired of crashing, virus-vulnerable computers.  They just switched to Linux (Debian 6). 

Somewhere a Microsoft salesperson is being boiled in oil while Bill Gates stirs and Steve Ballmer piles on the coal...

The True Culprit...

Megan McArdle does what she does best: a merciless beating applied to a government agency.  A sample:

Central States is in particularly bad shape, but it's far from alone.  A whole lot of the big union pension plans are in trouble.  This is usually cited as an example of The Trouble With Unions, or alternatively, The Scandalous Underregulation of the Private Sector.  As I dug into the details though, I found out something that surprised me: this wasn't just a story about union mismanagement.  And it wasn't a story about deregulation, either.  Oh, to be sure, the funds could have managed things better (more about that in a little while).  But the reason that they're in such deep trouble now is neither bad management, nor inadequate regulation.  In fact, the opposite is true: managers wanted to do a better job, and the government actively stopped them.  Meet the true culprit behind the crisis in union pension plans: the friendly folks at the IRS.  

You really should read the whole thing...

I Don't Need Any Reinforcement...

I don't need any reinforcement of the disdain I have for our president, Barack Hussein Obama.  But just in case you do, go read this.

As Simon says, the expression on Buzz Aldrin's face says it all...

Evolution Often Got There First...

Stealth aircraft and ships are a response to radar and sonar; they make the targets hard to find.  Electronic counter-warfare (ECW) kicks it up a notch: ECW systems actively fool radar or sonar, either by jamming them so they can't receive a signal, or by deliberately tricking them into thinking their target is somewhere it isn't.

Evolution produced all of these defenses (against the echo-location, or sonar, of bats) long before humans ever did so...

In Praise of CO2...

Harrison Schmitt (of Apollo fame) and William Happer have an interesting article in today's WSJ.  The lead:

Of all of the world's chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That's simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.

Read the whole thing...

Older Programmers Are Hard to Find...

I've noticed this phenomenon myself: there aren't enough 50+ year old programmers.  What do I mean by “not enough”?  Take me as an example.  I turned 60 years old last year, and was still gainfully employed as a programmer.  If I had followed a normal career progression (I didn't, but never mind that), I'd have graduated from college in about 1974 or so.  There was a cohort of engineers who became programmers who graduated in that same year.  Where are they?  There aren't enough 60 year old programmers this year to account for that cohort.

This article explores this phenomenon with some actual data (Stack Overflow membership).  I must point out, though, that the Stack Overflow data could easily be systematically biased.  I'm not a member, for example – and it could easily be the case that older programmers are generally less interested in things like Stack Overflow...

The Hazards of p-Values...

The p-values of statistical analysis get people in trouble all the time.  Here's a great explanation of how they do it...

Almaleea subumbellata...

Common name wiry bushpea, native to Australia and Tasmania.  Via BPOD, of course:

Good Doggie!

Watch:


I can't find the origin of this, but what it appears to be is a video of someone firing his gun at police, then being taken down by a dog (presumably a police dog) that jumps right over the car to get him.  The police then approach, guns pointed at him.

Good doggie!  Lots of treats for him that night, I'll bet...