One year ago today: June 9, 2013, eBook comments.
Five years ago today: June 9, 2009, I coin the phrase "CPQ".
MORNING & DAY
Can you even see what I’m holding in this cluttered picture? It is a “self-centering boat roller”. As you drag your boat onto your trailer, the keel naturally seeks the center position and is assisted by spiral grooves in the design. That’s the big event of the day, as I got out of the sun and stayed home watching disks. I found that old DVD series Wallace and I used to watch, Roy Rogers. I even watched the episode (“Hands Across The Border”) where Roy found Trigger, "the smartest horse in Hollywood".
Say, Roy, how many horses are there in Hollywood?
Roy was well before my time, so the programs are new to me. But what an advantage the early film-makers had. All the corny stuff had not been used up yet. Scripts could be written to match whatever scenery was easy to record. There was hardly a situation that old Roy could not defuse by singing a song. Even the lyrics were written to match the footage. Go get ‘em, Roy.
I am not a fan of cowboys. To me, what you see on Roy Rogers or the rodeo has very little to do with the grunt job of being a ranch hand. Talk about your unskilled occupation. Thus, I get a laugh out of these old reels. Is it me or does Roy look a little Chinese or something? And I’ll have you know that although I do wear silk scarves while driving my motorcycle, I avoid those really bright cowboy bandana colors. But hey, if you guys wanna wear them, okay.
Do you know what “survivorship bias” is? I won’t link to any definitions, as it is basically a financial term and I mean [I heard] something different. Today I heard it applied to people. This was new to me. An example of survivorship bias would be to calculate the amount that your average mutual fund returns to investors. The result is biased from the fact that all of the failed funds, no longer being available for study, are excluded from the calculation. According to Ruska, the same bias is at work when movie stars and motivational speakers say anybody can succeed. This is simply not true, most people never succeed but there is your survivorship bias. It's when people say, "If I can do it, anybody can."
Trivia. Why does Lipton tea have a picture of a boat captain on the box? Because Lipton made so much money from his tea, he bought a yacht. Then he commenced to enter the America’s cup race five times, all unsuccessful. But when you have enough money they let you dress up in funny clothes, become eccentric as you’d like and the English will sell you a title. However, Lipton did manage something that was still possible a hundred years ago. He became famous and still enjoyed the private quiet life. I’ve spoken before about fame being better than riches because they can’t take away your fame. But there is a tremendous lot to be said about having a undisturbed refuge by the end of the day.
Crowdfunding is on the rise and the government is gearing up to severely crack down on it. Their beef has nothing to do with protecting the public, it has to do with collecting taxes. While some see crowdfunding as the wave of the future and a way to restore opportunities to the small investor, the non-elects see it as soliciting money through the mails. Such activity always draws a lot of federal attention. It won’t be long before an SSN is required to invest five bucks on a venture that is basically gambling. The first step is in place, with the US government projecting its power to require 80,000 foreign banks and institutions to report account activity to the IRS. True, it is drug money they are after, but there is nothing stopping them from turning on the little guy. Don’t fool yourself.
Detractors are whining the metal spikes are inhumane, though I’ve got twenty bucks saying nobody of that opinion actually lives in this complex. As usual, most bleeding hearts are self-centered and hoping if they are ever down and out, they could help themselves to the comfort of others. They also don’t mind inconveniencing the better off for the meanwhile.
Myself, I can never side with the chronically homeless as long as there is a welfare state supported by income taxation. Institutionalized welfare becomes a fourth class of society and moves to the city. Before the welfare state came along, the homeless were vagrants and hobos, gypsy types with a large geographic spread. Something changed to make them cluster into the cities. I don’t know what the cause is, but the people who are supposed to look into these things aren’t doing their job. Anyway, it is hypocrisy to decry the spikes unless they are located in your own doorway.
Miguelito called and I think he is serious about packing up and moving north. Maybe a couple months from now. I lose my mechanic but I gain a free trip to New York and a free place to stay while up there. Not that I’ve ever had anything for that part of the world but it is on my bucket list. The Statue and the Empire State, maybe a hotdog off a roach coach in Central Park.
I can’t shrug my sixth sense that that all the chances for success have been squeezed out of New York and what’s left today is the soddy pulp. That means what’s left is 99% of the population making a living by legally or illegally screwing pennies out of the next guy. At least, that’s what the New York lifestyle looks like to me, an area where nothing good for humanity has come out of in fifty years.
It’s like Acapulco. I’ll visit there and party up with any good-looking women I can find who aren’t sleazy, but I would never move there. That’s today’s controversy. Is New York the has-been city of America?
EVENING
More navigation. Going over the maps such as are available here, maybe that first position plot [from yesterday] was not so bad. If I was lost in the middle of the ocean, I’d not mind knowing within 180 miles where I was. But I’m a long way from being able to navigate. I’ve found that tall tree across the way to be 21° 30” from my line of sight, I do not yet know the distance to the along the ground. But I have learned it wise to begin all angular measurements with as good an estimate as possible. In fact, here is a gizmo I’ve thrown together to assist in precisely that situation. I call it “the angulator”.
To make it quick, the tangent of my measured angle is 0.39391048, so that tree is about 39.39 feet tall from line of sight. Add the height of my eye from the ground (sitting down) and that tree is approximately 44 feet 3 inches tall. I can honestly say that is the first time in my life I ever did anything practical with a tangent.
If it was possible to see the constellations from this area (it is not) I would now be able to get a fix on my latitude from the Pole Star. I still have not found any clear instructions on how to use a compass. And I am nowhere near being able to find a position on a map or a chart. Already I see it is smarter to learn to visualize how the angles work than to try and memorize how the tables and arithmetic work.
ADDENDUM
Here’s an overview of the status with electronics and the robot club. I realize the number of loose ends increases over time, so let’s confine it to what doesn’t work and what is still on the table. I have not yet placed the order for Arduino clone chips because of the lack of actual robotics developments at Nova. Sadly, to date that has been all talk and no action. Even the few people keen after viewing my working models have not made independent contact. Same with the student with the 3D printer.
Short of building a kit, our club has rejected building any type of robot except a guided cart. Mind you, our concept for that cart is vastly more complex that two years ago and much of that has been the result of learning the limitations. The most you can expect from us is a sensor guided toy that can perform some type of obstacle avoidance. The machine we would require to build what we had first hoped for would cost around $8,640.
My research on an electronic switch using discrete components (diodes, resistors, capacitors) has dead-ended. I can’t see NASA sending mechanical relays to Mars, but nor can I find a single reference to a switch that works any other way. I’m now looking at logic gates that may, in some combination I don’t know, behave as a switch. For clarity I need I switch that turns itself off and on depending on whether a voltage is present. I know what you are thinking, but what I want is not the switch that controls the current. That would be too easy.
The only project on the drawing board right how is a motor tester. This will determine if a motor is 5Volt, single- or bi-directional, and how it responds to pulse width modulation (PWM). PWM is the preferred method for getting a digital signal to emulate a varying voltage. Think of it as a signal that switches off and on very rapidly. If it was on 50% of the time, known as the “duty cycle”, a motor would think a 12 volt source is running at 6 volts. Why? To control the motor speed.
All other projects are either minor or slow to get underway. Or stalled by excessive expense. Woe to the world if I ever get enough money to pursue my capabilities.
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