Sunday, October 19, 2014
The last bathroom fixture!
The last bathroom fixture! One of our shower's grab bars arrived after everything else did, and I didn't have a chance to install it until today. This is the very last bathroom fixture to go in, which you'd think would mean it's the last hole I have to drill in our nearly diamond-hard bathroom tile. Unfortunately (for me) there's still one more set, to install our bathroom window's window shade. It should arrive next week, and then I really am done with these *#&**%^$%&* holes!
Speaking of which, the photos below give you a flavor for what it's like to drill these holes. The first photo shows what it looks like just after you've successfully started a hole. Starting on slippery porcelain is a bit of an art combined with a healthy dose of brute force. The trick is to hold the drill at 45° to the surface, then cut a little crescent-moon shaped depression while holding the drill firmly in one place (not easy, that bit!). Once you've got your crescent, you push in firmly while rotating the drill slowly to the normal perpendicular orientation, over about 10 seconds. The result is what you see in that first photo, if you did it correctly. Once you've got that “island” in the center, you're golden: it holds the drill bit in the right spot. The second photo shows some drilling in progress. Note the liquid around the tip – that's water, which I squirt at the bit continuously to lubricate and cool it. This is vital to the longevity of the bit. Let it get hot, and you're going to plunk down $20 or more for another bit! The last photo shows three holes that are (thankfully) finished. To get from what you see in the second photo to a finished hole takes 10 to 15 minutes of constant drilling while pushing against the wall hard. If your drill bit is dull, it can take twice that long...
Speaking of which, the photos below give you a flavor for what it's like to drill these holes. The first photo shows what it looks like just after you've successfully started a hole. Starting on slippery porcelain is a bit of an art combined with a healthy dose of brute force. The trick is to hold the drill at 45° to the surface, then cut a little crescent-moon shaped depression while holding the drill firmly in one place (not easy, that bit!). Once you've got your crescent, you push in firmly while rotating the drill slowly to the normal perpendicular orientation, over about 10 seconds. The result is what you see in that first photo, if you did it correctly. Once you've got that “island” in the center, you're golden: it holds the drill bit in the right spot. The second photo shows some drilling in progress. Note the liquid around the tip – that's water, which I squirt at the bit continuously to lubricate and cool it. This is vital to the longevity of the bit. Let it get hot, and you're going to plunk down $20 or more for another bit! The last photo shows three holes that are (thankfully) finished. To get from what you see in the second photo to a finished hole takes 10 to 15 minutes of constant drilling while pushing against the wall hard. If your drill bit is dull, it can take twice that long...
Sign of the end times' approach?
Sign of the end times' approach? APOD is down :(
Update: APOD is back up! I was afraid it was the victim of Obama budget raids, but thankfully my fear was unfounded...
Update: APOD is back up! I was afraid it was the victim of Obama budget raids, but thankfully my fear was unfounded...
Little flower...
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Screw...
Andrew Jackson...
More on the notion of fighting Ebola by flight bans...
More on the notion of fighting Ebola by flight bans... I wrote about this, briefly, a few days ago. Nate Silver (a statistician by trade) makes essentially the same points I did, but in much greater detail.
A reader asked me (by email) why not simply change the criteria? Instead of banning flights from (say) Liberia, ban people from Liberia, as identified by their passports or visas.
That won't work, either, for very similar reasons. It would only work for Liberian citizens trying to travel to the U.S. It wouldn't work for naturalized Americans of Liberian descent (like, I believe, Thomas Duncan), as they'd have American passports. It wouldn't work for American tourists, students, or Peace Corps workers leaving the area. It wouldn't work for tourists from Europe who later travel to the U.S. I'd like to have concrete data on the percentage of people on airplanes arriving in London from Liberia who are Liberian citizens, but I don't. However, I do have some relevant experience: I have spent many, many hours in London's Heathrow airport and Frankfurt's airport, both of which are major hubs for airlines serving West Africa. I have watched hundreds of aircraft from Africa disembarking. I am certain that only a small percentage of those disembarking passengers were citizens of the departure country. How? It's very simple: they were overwhelmingly not black. They were Caucasian, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, or ... some other race, not black. A ban on people from Liberia would surely stop on a small percentage of potentially infected people from entering the U.S.
Underlying this notion of flight bans is the notion of a quarantine writ large. If we want to quarantine West Africa, the place to do it is in West Africa, not in U.S. airports. That would actually make sense, from the perspective of trying to control the epidemic. So far as I know, there is no precedent for quarantining an entire country. Liberia is a small country; its borders are only about 1,000 miles long. I'm sure a concerted, coordinated international effort to quarantine the country could be accomplished. Will it be? Not likely, unless things get much worse...
A reader asked me (by email) why not simply change the criteria? Instead of banning flights from (say) Liberia, ban people from Liberia, as identified by their passports or visas.
That won't work, either, for very similar reasons. It would only work for Liberian citizens trying to travel to the U.S. It wouldn't work for naturalized Americans of Liberian descent (like, I believe, Thomas Duncan), as they'd have American passports. It wouldn't work for American tourists, students, or Peace Corps workers leaving the area. It wouldn't work for tourists from Europe who later travel to the U.S. I'd like to have concrete data on the percentage of people on airplanes arriving in London from Liberia who are Liberian citizens, but I don't. However, I do have some relevant experience: I have spent many, many hours in London's Heathrow airport and Frankfurt's airport, both of which are major hubs for airlines serving West Africa. I have watched hundreds of aircraft from Africa disembarking. I am certain that only a small percentage of those disembarking passengers were citizens of the departure country. How? It's very simple: they were overwhelmingly not black. They were Caucasian, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, or ... some other race, not black. A ban on people from Liberia would surely stop on a small percentage of potentially infected people from entering the U.S.
Underlying this notion of flight bans is the notion of a quarantine writ large. If we want to quarantine West Africa, the place to do it is in West Africa, not in U.S. airports. That would actually make sense, from the perspective of trying to control the epidemic. So far as I know, there is no precedent for quarantining an entire country. Liberia is a small country; its borders are only about 1,000 miles long. I'm sure a concerted, coordinated international effort to quarantine the country could be accomplished. Will it be? Not likely, unless things get much worse...
A way to separate the parties...
A way to separate the parties... As I've noted here quite a few times before, there generally isn't much daylight between the actual work product of Democratic or Republican candidates. There's more, though still not all that much, between their articulated positions. I stumbled across something today, though, that shows a much clearer difference: a chart showing what percentage of political ads on various networks are place by Republicans (red), Democrats (blue), or others (green). The chart is fascinating:
There's a good fraction of those networks that I've never heard of before, which I'm sure exactly nobody finds surprising. Just looking at the ones I knew (or could figure out from the name), it looks like the ad buy strategies of the two parties could boil down to this:
Democrats: buy ads on networks whose audience is dominated by women and young people
Republicans: buy ads on networks whose audience is dominated by men, older folks, and possibly business people
There's another way you could look at this, too:
Democrats: buy ads on networks with content that is mindless and entertainment-based
Republicans: buy ads on networks with content that engages the brain at least a little bit, or involves golf (a sport that I find very puzzling, as in I can't figure out why anyone would do it)
And there's yet a third way to look at it: the fact that either party is seeking voters on any of these venues smells an awful lot like ... doom...
Such a lovely thing...
Melotte 15...
You should all be envious...
You should all be envious ... because I just had a completely unrestrained Angie's breakfast. What did I have? Chicken-fried steak, eggs over easy, and a “scone” with honey butter. It was brains-fell-out-on-the-table good, and the folks there were as friendly as always. Now my biggest challenge is to avoid descending into a steak/egg/scone coma...
Friday, October 17, 2014
Barn: encapsulated, almost...
Barn: encapsulated, almost... The builders installed the rest of the house wrap and all of the windows today. The only unprotected hole in the building now is the large opening where an 18' wide, 9' high roll-up door will go. That door should be installed early next week. Also next week: the entire first floor will be insulated. The ceiling will be R50 blown-in fiberglass; the walls a bit lower R factor (probably around R35), also blown in. To blow fiberglass into the walls and ceiling, they first cover them with a fine netting to contain the fibers, then blow it into the resulting cavity. The blow-in insulation is superior to the conventional bats because it fills every nook and cranny...
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