Dog ramps in Paradise...

Dog ramps in Paradise...  At right is the ramp, installed over the stairs outside our back door.  I put the final (top side) paint on it this morning, and then installed it late this afternoon.  Actually installing it was a bit anticlimactic – it all just worked.  I'd adjusted the adjustable feet to my calculated height before moving it out of the shed – and that turned out to be perfect.

We made a test run, and Mo'i went down it directly, no prompting.  It was clearly much easier for him to navigate the ramp than the stairs.  Going back up was less obvious to him, but once I guided him up the beginning of it he easily ambled up the rest of it.  Again, the ramp was much easier for him than trying to get up the stairs.

I'll count that as a dog ramp success!

Track record of drugs decriminalization (or re-legalization)...

Track record of drugs decriminalization (or re-legalization)...  Friend, reader, and former colleague Simon M. passes this article along.  It discusses the experiences of Portugal after 14 years of drug decriminalization.  Bottom line: it was a big win for Portugal, and none of the outcomes feared by many (jump in drugs use, drug tourists, health issues, etc.) occurred.  In fact, Portugal's record on all these issues has improved.  The same is also true for the other countries that have decriminalized (or re-legalized) psychoactive drugs.

One aspect of the criminalization of drugs fascinates me for some reason.  It's this: many Americans – I'd guess north of 75% – don't realize that until 1914 all drugs were legal in the U.S.  In 1914, the Harrison Act was enacted, which banned the distribution of opiates and coca products.  Before that, Americans were completely free to produce, distribute, sell, and consume absolutely any drug at all.  Most Americans think that drugs have “always” been regulated.  Somehow the country survived, without any notable drugs-induced disasters...

Instant dwarf identification...

Instant dwarf identification...  Via my pistol-packing mama:

The seven dwarfs always left early each morning to go to work in the mine.
As always, Snow White stayed home doing her domestic chores.

As lunchtime approached, she would prepare their lunches and take them to the mine.

One day as she arrived at the mine with the lunches, she saw that there had been a terrible cave-in.

Tearfully, and fearing the worst, Snow White began calling out, hoping against hope that the dwarfs had somehow
survived. 'Hello. Hello!' she shouted. 'Can anyone hear me? Hello!'

For a long while, there was no answer. Losing hope, Snow White again shouted, 'Hello! Is anyone down there?'

Just as she was about to give up all hope, she heard a faint voice from deep within the mine, “VOTE FOR HILLARY IN 2016 .”

Snow White fell to her knees and prayed,  Oh, thank you, God! At least Dopey is still alive!

Snow White had no trouble identifying that particular dwarf!

Online compendium...

Online compendium ... of robotic space probes.  Interesting stuff!

What is Curiosity looking at?

What is Curiosity looking at?  A circular orb being obscured by an irregularly shaped object.  I'll speculate that we're seeing a Martian moon (most likely Phobos) transiting the sun.  This has happened several times in the past.

Well, this is discouraging...

Well, this is discouraging...  Pope Francis is getting strident in his socialism (and consequent anti-capitalism).  So here we have a major religious leader condemning the ideas that have done the most good for mankind.  Lovely.  I have no idea how much impact his views will have.  One can only hope they're minimal.  The first thing that came to mind, though, is that his views might sway American voters to first anoint Bernie Sanders the winner in the Democratic primary, then in the presidential election.  Oy!

Last look at the weird regular “spots” on Pluto...

Last look at the weird regular “spots” on Pluto...  The timing of New Horizons' flyby of Pluto on Tuesday dictates that the bizzaro-land regular geometric spots will be on the opposite side of the planet during the flyby.  The photo at right is the last one that New Horizons will see showing those spots.

This is going to keep the planetary geologists busy for a while :)

Those spots remind me of regular geometric patterns I've seen in Alaska and northern Canada, where they're caused by frost upheaval in the tundra soils.  I'm not saying that's the cause on Pluto, just that they remind me of it.  For one thing, the scale on Pluto is vastly different.  The spots on Pluto are 300 miles or so across; the tundra patterns I've seen are 5 to 10 feet across!

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  Yesterday a pleasant fellow (Scott) showed up from UIC, the folks in Salt Lake City from whom I bought my air compressor (I got there from Amazon).  The manufacturer (Chicago Pneumatic) has a program which, for $350 for certification by a technician, extends my warranty on the important bits from one year to five years.  Considering the price of that air compressor, that's a serious bargain, so I signed up for it.  Having run a business before, it's easy to see what's almost certainly going on here.  The manufacturer is fully prepared to offer the five year warranty, but tying it to the technician's visit guarantees some revenue for their dealer, and provides a (hopefully positive) introduction between the dealer and the customer.  The manufacturer wins by having a nominally reduced purchase price.  Everybody wins!  My favorite kind of capitalist deal :)

Anyway, Scott showed up and started his routine.  It was obvious, watching him, that he was verifying that my installation was correct.  When he got done with that part, he asked me who had done the installation.  I told him that I'd done it myself, fully expecting that he was going to tell me what I'd screwed up.  Instead, he shook my hand and said that he never sees the installation made correctly – that normally on these visits he ends up redoing part of the installation.  Well, how about that!  But on reflection, that's actually kind of scary, as that thing wasn't really challenging to install – I just had to connect it to both 240V and 120V power.  Is that really so unusual to get right?  Yikes!

Anyway, Scott spent the extra time he had going over all the settings and adjustments, and educating me on the care and feeding of the compressor.  I'd have been happy to pay $350 just for that, without the warranty extension – he was great!  After that, we actually lit off my new compressor.  It works great, and is vastly quieter than the piston type compressors I'm used to.  It was quite impressive to watch that thing putting out 15 cfm at 150 psi.  I'm not going to have any problems with running air tools!

Later in the day I wandered up to Logan, to Standard Plumbing, and investigated the availability of Type K (thick wall) copper pipe, 1" diameter.  They can order it with a two week lead time, and the price was acceptable, so I put 340' of it on order.  Once it comes in, I'm going to be sweating a lot of pipe together, to get that compressed air plumbed all over the shop and garage, with a couple of outside outlets as well (for tire inflation, power grease gun, and general cleanup).

Yesterday I also bought the parts for a doggy ramp, for Mo'i.  He's having trouble getting up and down the stairs to our back yard, and he's taken a couple of tumbles now that worry us.  Today I built the ramp, which you can see bottom side up in the photos below.  I chose the color based on what dogs see best, because we don't want Mo'i falling off the ramp!  The top side is just two 2x12s side-by-side.  I'll be painting them tomorrow with non-skid paint, the same color.  It's actually the same can of paint, to which I'll be adding the additive shown at right.  It looks like fine-grained sand.  While I was looking at it, at Home Depot, another customer came up and told me he's used it twice, and it worked great.  We'll put it to the dog test here shortly!

An explanation for solar cycle variability?

An explanation for solar cycle variability?  Maybe.  If these scientists are right, we've got a mini-Ice Age coming in just 15 years.  If I'm reading this article correctly, these scientists are claiming to have discovered that the sun's magnetic dynamo is driven by two roughly 11 year long cycles – but that these cycles have a small difference in frequency.  Because of this small frequency difference, periodically the cycles will be out-of-phase, and in-phase.  In the 2030s, they say, they will be 180° out of phase, and the sun's activity will fall to a low we haven't seen since the Maunder minimum in the mid-1600s.

I have no idea whether these scientists are onto something here.  In particular, I don't know whether there's any physical mechanism that would explain having two separate magnetic dynamo effects with two very close frequencies.  However, one thing I am sure of: the result of having two such mechanisms with very close frequencies really would be as described here.  That's a mechanism familiar to any electrical engineer, and that mechanism has a name: heterodyning.  That mechanism is used in just about every tunable radio receiver, and in many other devices (including audio) as well.  So if these scientists are right about the two underlying mechanisms, I have no doubt at all that the rest of their claim is correct.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.  I'm very curious, in particular, how the climate alarmists will react to this – for it suggests a major benefit is to be had by deliberately increasing greenhouse gases...

A retired person's perspective...

A retired person's perspective...  Via my lovely bride:

1. I'm not saying let's go kill all the stupid people. I'm just saying let's remove all the warning labels and let the problem work itself out.
2. I changed my car horn to gunshot sounds. People move out of the way much faster now.
3. You can tell a lot about a woman's mood just by her hands. If they are holding a gun, she's probably mad.
4. Gone are the days when girls cooked like their mothers. Now they drink like their fathers.
5. You know that tingly little feeling you get when you really like someone you've just met? That's common sense leaving your body.
6. I don't like making plans for the day. Because then the word "premeditated" gets thrown around in the courtroom.
7. I didn't make it to the gym today. That makes 1,500 days in a row.
8. I decided to change calling the bathroom the John and renamed it the Jim. I feel so much better saying I went to the Jim this morning.
9. Dear paranoid people who check behind shower curtains for murderers: If you find one, what's your plan?
10. Everyone has a right to be stupid. Politicians just abuse the privilege.

Pluto!

Pluto!  New Horizons returned a new photo.  Via APOD, of course.  Next Tuesday is the big day: New Horizon's flyby of Pluto...

Mark Steyn...

Mark Steyn ... is at the top of his form in this piece.  He has an uncanny ability to make me cry, then laugh through my tears.  An excerpt:

Hillary, by contrast, is in trouble not because she's a sleazy, corrupt, cronyist, money-laundering, Saud-kissing liar. Democrats have a strong stomach and boundless tolerance for all of that and wouldn't care were it not for the fact that she's a dud and a bore. A "Hillary rally" is a contradiction in terms: the thin, vetted crowd leave more demoralized and depressed than when they went in. To vote for Bernie is to be part of a romance, as it was with Obama. To vote for Hillary is to validate the Clintons' indestructible sense of their own indispensability - and nothing else. Hillary is a wooden charmless stiff who supposedly has enough money to be carefully managed across the finish line. But that requires Democratic electors to agree to be managed, too, and the Sanders surge is a strong sign that, while they're relaxed about voting for an unprincipled arrogant phony marinated in ever more malodorous and toxic corruption, they draw the line at such a tedious and charisma-free specimen thereof.

So Bernie is a real danger to her. He will be nimbler, more fun and more human in the debates. And he enthuses the young in a way Hillary doesn't. He could win Iowa, and I know he could win New Hampshire, too, where he will ensure that, instead of going off to destabilize the Republican primary, Granite State "independents" vote in the Democrat poll and play hell with Hillary's ability to manage turnout models. If Mrs Clinton's two down by South Carolina, Berniephobes will be begging any alternative (starting with Crazy Joe) to jump in the race.

His conclusion made me laugh ... and then I spent a few minutes thinking over his premise:

Step back and let's be bipartisan about what Rove calls the "disruptiveness" factor: Be honest, which would you prefer and which is a bleaker comment on the political health of the republic - Bernie vs the Donald? Or Hillary vs Jeb?

I think he's right: bring on Sanders vs. Trump, please!!!

There's ever so much more, including (of course!) an equally acerbic take on The Donald.  Do go read the whole thing!

Last evening's walk in Paradise...

Last evening's walk in Paradise...  My two companions and I did our usual mile-each-way walk to the east of our house.  This photo is from the road that runs north/south, near the end of our walk.  The dogs have had all the frenetic energy walked out of them, and now they're just ambling companionably along. 

They looked like this all the way home, except for one moment of excitement when a striped skunk burst out of the tall grass on our right, just 5 or 6 feet in front of us.  The skunk immediately turned toward us and started the stamping-feet behavior that precedes a skunk-squirt.  I hauled the dogs back right quickly :)  They, of course, picked this moment to get all brave; they were bouncing up-and-down at the end of the leash, trying their best to chase the skunk.  Neither of them has ever been skunked, so they have no idea what would be in store for them.  With these two, though, I'm not sure how much difference that would have made.

I'm really enjoying watching the changes along our walk; some from the passage of time, others from changes in lighting.  It never seems to look like the same walk twice.  On this walk, lighting was the big change from the previous day.  The photos below are my attempt to capture that.  I was most successful with the middle photo...

Independence Day Parade...

Independence Day Parade...  This collection of photos (not mine) are from the Independence Day Parade in the town of Hyrum, less than four miles north of our house.  I drove by the parade on an errand as it was breaking up, and saw some of the floats driving off.  Next year, assuming Debbie isn't broken, we're going to go watch it.

It looks very old-timey, doesn't it?  There are moments when it feels like we not only moved geographically, but culturally and chronologically as well.  Viewing these photos was one of these moments...

Messier 43...

Messier 43...  Via APOD, of course.  Click to embiggen.  They're on a roll this week!

Geek: the simplest things...

Geek: the simplest things ... can be so complicated sometimes.  What could be simpler than a String?  BTW, Dr. Kabutz's email newsletter is an excellent resource for anyone interested in Java's performance or its nether regions.  You can subscribe for free.  I've never taken one of his courses, but I'll bet they're pretty darned good...

Holy cheap (solid-state) bits, Batman!

Holy cheap (solid-state) bits, Batman!  Just read this piece about a new line of cheap SSD drives from Toshiba.  Looked them up on Amazon, and sure enough: they're selling for just 37¢ per gigabyte.  That's kind of mind-boggling for an ancient and venerable geek like me, who bought his first brand-new hard drive at the price of $240,000 per gigabyte (that was for a Quantum 10MB disk at $2,400).

The volume difference is kind of amazing, too.  The Toshiba SSD packs 980GB into 3.28 cubic inches.  Those Quantum 10MB disk were 440 cubic inches each, and I'd have needed 98,000 of them to equal that Toshiba disk's capacity.  That would be a total of 43,120,000 cubic inches, or roughly 25,000 cubic feet – a cube 30' on each side solidly packed with disk drives.  You'd have to have a specially reinforced floor to hold that weight, and I don't even want to think about the power bill.  Those old hard disks failed quite often, so I suspect I'd have to employ a couple of people just to replace the failed units.

Then there's the performance aspect.  The Toshiba SSDs are just stupid fast by comparison with those ancient Quantum disks – which were just stupid fast by comparison to the 8" floppy disks we used to use before the Quantum disks arrived.  And the Toshiba SSDs aren't even fast SSDs!

Here's the real kicker, though.  I'm ancient and venerable enough to remember my own reaction upon seeing those Quantum disk drives for the first time.  It was approximately the same as my reaction to these Toshiba SSDs :)  How can that be?  Well, consider this.  The first storage device that I ever encountered, during my U.S. Navy training in the early '70s, was a “high speed” mercury acoustic delay line memory system. I also worked on magnetostrictive delay line memories, described in the same article.  If I remember correctly, the mercury delay machine had 512 18-bit wide words.  That machine was the size of a couple of large refrigerators, and it weighed perhaps three tons.  By comparison to that machine, those Quantum hard disks were just as amazing then as the Toshiba SSDs are today...

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  Spotted in the Ricochet Daily Shot:

“Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”

Isaac Asimov

Awesome :) 

When I was a young lad, lo these many years ago, Asimov was one of my favorite authors.  I first ran into him with his science fiction, but a high school librarian mentioned to me one day that he also wrote a lot of non-fiction (which the library had).  That started me on a binge reading of his books on science, math, and technology – a fantastically accessible body of work that played a major role in developing my interest in those topics.  His books were perfect for someone like me who found the classroom too slow and basic, but who didn't have the background at the time for college texts.

Perfect pictures...

Perfect pictures...  Bored Panda has a collection...

A cheerful morning in Paradise...

A cheerful morning in Paradise...  How can you help but smile when you see a sunflower in bloom, like this one that we saw on our walk this morning (at right)?  These sunflowers are common around here.  I don't know if they're natives, escapees, invaders, or something else – but they show up mostly at the edges of cultivated fields.  They're a bird magnet for any seed eaters.  A few weeks from now, these things will be covered by goldfinches and house finches, and probably magpies, too.

On the way up the hill this morning, we had nearly perfect lighting for photography: a perfectly diffusive layer of clouds giving us even omnidirectional lighting.  No shadows, and everything lit up.  That's how I got this photo of a sea of alfalfa.  This field was cut just two weeks ago.  Since then it's been irrigated twice and rained on twice, and there were about 10 sunny days.  That is apparently the recipe for luxurious 2' tall alfalfa!  There are going to be some happy moo cows at Clausen's dairy later this year (the Clausens lease this field for hay).

While looking at one of the sunflowers along the road, I spotted this yellow jacket (wasp) at right.  Look closely at it and you'll see that its wings have been clipped.  I've seen this before when a bird attempts to eat the wasp before it realizes what its grabbed.  I didn't see it happen to this one, but that would be my best guess.  It's doomed, I'm sure – I can't imagine that it could grow those wings back out (if that even happens!) before it starves...