I stopped watching TV many years ago...

I stopped watching TV many years ago...  I count that as one of the best life decisions I've ever made.  Ace agrees...

Happy Passover to my Jewish friends...

Happy Passover to my Jewish friends...

Progressive hypocrisy on display...

Progressive hypocrisy on display...  This is like shooting fish in a barrel, to be sure, but this video documents an unusually clear example of it.  Unless you've been sealed into a catacomb over the past week or so, you've heard about the Indiana pizzeria forced out of business by the progressive outrage over the owner's declaration that if she were asked to cater pizza to a same-sex wedding, she'd refuse.  Cue the outrage: crazy homophobic Christians are on the rampage!  The press was filled with a bazillion breathless stories, all featuring OUTRAGE!  Never mind that it was all a hypothetical, that the owners had never actually refused to cater a gay wedding (because nobody ever asked them to).  All the usual suspects chimed in, and right on cue the usual brain-dead celebrities started promoting a boycott of Indiana.

Crowder (the video maker) wondered what would happen if he were to ask a Muslim-owned bakery to make a wedding cake for a gay wedding – and, presuming that he'd be refused, how the progressives and their press lapdogs would respond.  Now you can almost certainly guess what those responses would be – but its still a great illustration of the hypocrisy that pervades the progressive, multi-culti world.  The hypocrisy is strongest when two or more of their cherished beliefs collide, as here, where gay rights and Muslim rights are in strict opposition.

I revel in the display of progressive hypocrisy, but ... that doesn't necessarily mean that I disagree with their position on the Indiana pizzeria (though I most certainly do disagree with some of their methods, and I believe the outrage is entirely misplaced).  I think these are genuinely challenging issues that really don't have clear answers.  Take the Indiana pizzeria case, and modify it slightly.  Suppose the owners had been asked instead if they would cater to a hypothetical marriage of two black people, and they refused.  Would we react differently to that?  I think that today virtually everybody would agree that was inappropriate behavior, and would condemn them – but that wasn't true even as recently as my own childhood.

There's a delicate balancing act here, with at least three competing elements: personal beliefs (religious or otherwise), the rights of individuals, and societal mores.  The Indiana pizzeria owners have a belief that gay marriage is wrong – do we force them to do something in violation of their own beliefs?  The hypothetical gay groom and groom want pizzas for their wedding – do we force them to go to a different pizzeria?  On gay marriage, American society is moving from outraged rejection toward at least grudging acceptance, but there's certainly no consensus on this yet – do we shove the notion down everyone's throat?

No easy answers here.  The only thing I feel sure of is that change is in the air...

Chained libraries...

Chained libraries...  I'd seen individual books with chains on them before, in museums, but I hadn't realized that there were entire libraries filled with books on chains – and I certainly didn't know that some of those libraries survived to this day.  Why were the books chained?  Because before the invention of the printing press and moveable type, books were made by hand-copying from the original.  It took thousands of hours of tedious skilled work to make a single book, so they were very valuable.  It wasn't the calligraphy that was the rare (and expensive) skill back then: it was the ability to read and write – not that many people could!

The gnomes are out of control!

The gnomes are out of control!  Utah humor...

More than a quarter of U.S. Presidents owned slaves...

More than a quarter of U.S. Presidents owned slaves...  It's shocking to see that statistic.  The list of slave-owning presidents had some surprises for me...

Oatmeal with currants and maple syrup...

Oatmeal with currants and maple syrup...  Because memories, of my dad...

Time lapse video of undulatus asperatus clouds...

Time lapse video of undulatus asperatus clouds...

Barn progress...

Barn progress...  All the junction boxes are installed for the fifteen lamps going into Debbie's agility arena.  Now I just have to wire them up.  I probably have a couple days more work on those.

The big excitement for the day yesterday was the surprise arrival of my new lathe.  According to the tracking information, it was expected about a week from now.  I'm not complaining about it coming early, though :)  The lathe arrived on a single long pallet weighing 980 pounds (according to the packing label).  That's just barely within the specs for my tractor's loader capacity, but fortunately I was able to get it off the truck with no problems.  It loaded the engine down a bit, and there was a little groaning from the tractor's frame ... but I picked it right up off the truck's floor and drove it into the barn.

On unpacking the pallet, I discovered (naturally) that this is one quite massive kit.  One thing that's a little unusual: the weight of this kit is such that I will either need three helpers to move the parts with me, or I'll have to figure out how to use the tractor to do the lifting.  Once I get the thing assembled I don't think I'll be moving it – so I definitely need to get it in the right place the first time :)

Update:  I just discovered the existence of something called an “engine crane”, designed to allow mechanics to lift an engine out of a car and move it around the shop.  They're not all that expensive, and they can easily lift any of the tools in my shop – so I can move things around, and assemble the lathe, all by myself.  I have one on order now...

Geek: 7 bits of mantissa are not enough for two (decimal) digit accuracy...

Geek: 7 bits of mantissa are not enough for two (decimal) digit accuracy...  Excellent discussion of this little-understood problem, with a (for me, at least) new perspective of the underlying issue as one of interleaving.  Browsing around the site led to all sorts of interesting posts...

Wood shop photos...

Wood shop photos...  After being chastised by friend and former colleague Doug S., I'm posting some photos of what I've been doing.  Below, left to right: scroll saw, band saw, and planer.  All of them are now fully assembled, aligned, calibrated, tested, and (in the case of the last two) wired to power.

Barn progress...

Barn progress...  The photo at right is from Monday, when the tile guys were putting down the Durorock underlayment in the room that will become my office in the barn.  This cement board comes in 2' x 4' sheets, stuck to the floor with thinset and then screwed down with screws at about 8" intervals.  The seams are leveled with some more thin set.  The end result is a very level and rigid substrate for the tile to be installed on top of.  The fellow spreading the thinset in the photo is the master installer who can cut amazingly straight lines with a handheld saw.

Yesterday I started installing the lighting in Debbie's agility room.  I quickly ran out of something quite important to the process: 1/2" PVC conduit.  This meant another run to Home Depot, where I picked up the conduit and a couple of tools to make my installation go a bit quicker.  I'll be continuing that today, but first I'm going to assemble a scroll saw stand that arrived late yesterday afternoon.  Today I should get the stand for the miter saw, and the last of my power tools will finally be off the floor...

Kitten and balloons...

Kitten and balloons...  Worth it, if you can forgive the vertical video...

“...multi-purpose celestial bovine containment system.”

“...multi-purpose celestial bovine containment system.”  APOD has fun on April Fool's Day...

Joni Mitchell hospitalized...

Joni Mitchell hospitalized...  She's ok so far.  Somehow it has escaped my attention that Joni Mitchell is 71 years old.  I still think of her as the freckle-faced folk singer whose lyrics entranced me in the late '60s – and forever since then.  Her early albums have always been on my “Favorites” playlist...

Another crack in the wall...

Another crack in the wall...  The warmist wall, that is.  This is a big one...

Farmers in the Stone Age got the girls...

Farmers in the Stone Age got the girls...  Seventeen of them, on average!

Barn progress...

Barn progress...  I got the upstairs subpanel installed and tested yesterday.  Now it will be quite straightforward to wire up my office, some lights in the storage area, and the electric hoist for hauling heavy stuff up through the “hatch” in my woodshop. 

The tile guys showed up with the wrong tile (dang it!), and getting the right tile is going to add a week onto the project.  They did get the underlayment (a kind of concrete board) in place, doing a very nice job.  The guy in charge was particularly skilled at cutting perfectly straight edges in the concrete board with a small, hand-held, battery-powered saw that used a 3" diameter diamond blade.  If I tried that the result would be ... not good.  He made it look ridiculously easy, but in a conversation with his sidekick I discovered that though he (the sidekick) has been trying to do it for a year, he still can't make a straight line.  It reminds me of watching the masons at work, doing things that they made look easy, but when I tried it I got nowhere at all.

Today I'm mostly going to concentrate on getting lights up in Debbie's indoor agility arena, though I have a few other little things to do as well...

Solar corona...

Solar corona...  Taken as a composite of 29 images, during the recent solar eclipse, from Svalbard, Norway.  Click to embiggen.  Via APOD, of course...

“…he was just doing his job.”

“…he was just doing his job.”  Robert Hite, one of the last surviving crew on Doolittle's Raid on Tokyo in WWII has died of heart failure.

A few years ago, when another of the Doolittle Raid survivors had died, I was shocked to learn that many of my colleagues at work had never heard of the Doolittle Raid.  It's not as though it was ancient history – it happened in 1942, just ten years before I was born.  It was one of the most memorable stories to emerge from the American side of WWII, and was the subject of a wildly popular book and movie, both titled “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”.  How could any American not know about it?

Worse, those few colleagues of mine who did know the story were all immigrants.  Several Estonian colleagues knew about it in considerable detail, having been educated in primary school about this bit of American history – in the Soviet Union.  A colleague who hails from Australian knew about it, as did another who immigrated from Israel.  It seems that everybody except Americans knows about it!