One year ago today: August 17, 2015, Planet 107, some day.
Five years ago today: August 17, 2011, Jaco Pastorius who?
Nine years ago today: August 17, 2007, lonesome highways & southbound trains.
Random years ago today: August 17, 2012, museum typewriters and Apples.
MORNING
Something new has caught my curiosity. Gyroscopes. I’ve played with the toy models and did the walk-the-string trick, but like most kids, how this could guide a rocket never followed on. Those who followed my navigation studies know that I subscribe to the notion the GPS system is every enemy’s first target. Of the sources I analyzed, you may want to watch this V-2 newsreel in full. Paying attention when the commentator states how the rocket stayed upright even when the launch failed.
My interest is that I am convinced that gyroscopes will be the technology that survives. The problem with all high-tech war is always how easy it is to kill nerds. Just mine the pizza route. Once they are gone, all you got left is the soldiers and what good are they with a computer? Look at the Abram’s tank.
I wonder if the Arduino is sufficient to use such a gyro assembly to hit a target. My personal guess is that yes, a gyro coupled to an Arduino would be handily able to hit any stationary or slow-moving object, particularly if coupled with other sensors and/or mid-course correction.
Should you need a project for 2017, there’s a good one. The bearded guy in the video does an excellent job and it was with great interest I watched him build a gimbal. I can do that. I was impressed to learn that the original V-2 and many modern artificial horizon gyros are air driven, that is, they are kept powered by air passing over some attached vanes. Hmmm. Anyhow, if I experiment with a gyroscope, it does not follow that I’d be dumb enough to go anywhere near a home-built rocket. That’s the engineer’s job. When and if he gets back with the pizza.
It depends on your level of curiosity but if you have time, here is another gyro video where the same guy gets a couple of bench techs to actually fire up an original V-2 system found in a warehouse. (He’s also educated because he never refers to weapons in political terms, as in a “Nazi” rocket.) The video shows the gyro wound up and working noisily, which the technicians say is probably normal. Fascinating.
Yes, you have spotted there is a new blog camera at work. It is another Vivitar, which should last a few months if I’m lucky. It has the same old Vivitar factory-built designed-in defects of eating batteries. This camera will cost you $5 in batteries per week of use, and the camera is fixed so you cannot power it with the USB cable. It is typical that an 8MB Secure Data (SD) card will hold nearly two hours of this camera’s video, but the very best batteries in video mode go flat dead in less than twenty minutes.
So I read this morning’s paper to see another teen “snapped” and murdered a couple watching TV in their garage. Snapped, my eye. All that’s lacking is a damn good whacking. The killer then tried to old “bite the dead guy’s face off” routine, but it’s already been done. These pricks need to be strung up by the thumbs. I don’t buy the police story that they would not shoot for danger of hitting his victims. You walk up, you put the barrel to his temple and you blow the bastard’s brains across the room. Then you take two months off with pay, end of drama and first-rate example for the next mommy’s boy who “can’t take the pressure” of being a level-zero loser.
Just you watch his mother on TV now. Mark my words, it’s a single-parent family. Every few generations after too much assimilation, you get an era like this of dismal pricks whose only hope anyone will notice them is to kill. But at least a hundred years ago, they killed the archduke, not some innocents up the road. Modern assholes are cowards, one by one.
It’s a pity that somebody, somewhere, knew the guy was going to kill, but it is a total other pity that the reason they did not come forward was because of the police themselves. There is a reason people don’t want to get involved and it is primarily the police “arrest the victim” policy. The police do this so they can truthfully state that “reported crime” is down. If people become afraid to report, then down go the statistics.
I read the Herald, the paper that continually prints debunked lies about Trump. Like the fallacy that he said Mexicans were murderers and rapists—they Herald and their totally racist staff will never give up on that. Their latest angle is that Trump could not pass his own proposed immigration changes. Well, you Libtards just don’t get it. He doesn’t have to. You see, he’s the kind we want here and we want more women who look and act like his wife, too. If that bothers you, like I said, you just don’t get it.
Ha, that was fun. Enraging losers has always been a kind of pet project when times are slow. It isn’t enough that they stew in their own juice all day, they occasionally need someone (like myself) to come along and turn the burner up a notch. It’s pure social efficiency. If you don’t give these losers their quota of self-pity and fake altruism to wallow in, they might start attaching themselves to causes that matter.
Crater Lake.
NOON
How intriguing, that gyro guidance system. Vectors were never my strong point nor do I remember a thing about torque or angular momentum. That doesn’t stop me from wondering what happens if I connect a gyroscope to the axle of an electric motor, in-line. Will not the gyro try to resist any change in the orientation of the motor? If so, I know how to get the Arduino to measure that to ten-power resolution at 15,000 times per second. Just maybe I’ll have a go at that.
Trivia. The picture of the day is Crater Lake, the trivia is that since the lake has no inflow rivers, the water takes 250 years to cycle via snow and rainwater. The water is crystal clear and it is also the deepest lake in the USA. (1,950 feet.)
It was a pleasant day giving me a chance to half-clean out the shed. I’ve got a lot of neat stuff back there that I was going to put into this place. It will come in handy upstate. I found boxes of electrical fixtures and plates, although I am toying with the idea of putting authentic 1946 switches throughout the house. Except for the ground-fault receptacles, of course.
You might get a kick out of some of these old electrical devices or their prices. And take a look at this 1926 electric stove. A lot of my readers probably don’t remember these puppies, and quite frankly neither do I. Never saw one before today. Six burners, so it must have been back in the days before cooking for the family was supposed to be fun. So if you like this sort of thing, visit the antique stove site. It’s a chuckle.
Hashtags. I’ve never used one. Because I’m one of the majority of adults who took one look at Twitter and said, “Nope”. I understand exactly how they work, they are basically search terms that categorize you in with others using the same word preceded by the octothorpe. Anyone who thinks that process is some new or novel computer idea has to be pretty much of a lunkhead to start with. So we’ll assume most Twitter users are public school, the common core kool-aid bunch.
Notwithstanding that the greatest discovery on line was that stupid people who bought computers they can’t do anything productive with have a yen to talk to other stupid people in the same category. So it was not much of a leap from that concept to #stupidpeople. Like all computer idiots including the klutz at CERN, they can’t deal with spaces between words, a hallmark of the semi-educated who never learned to type. Since I don’t twitter, I don’t hashtag.
And Facebook? I spotted that for what it was the instant I heard about it. I didn’t have to sign up. If you don't have a criminal record, as long as you have Facebook, that'll do. Facebook people are stupid, and you know what they say about stupid people. You don’t? Well, this is your lucky day, here let me help:
√ Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.
√ Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
√ Irony is wasted on the stupid.
√ I would prefer an intellectual hell to a stupid paradise.
√ It is fools, not wicked people, who cause all the trouble in the world.
√ Stupid people would sooner die than think, and often do.
AFTERNOON
I dedicate this section to my own private rant and rave. The news today was Trump attended a security briefing and I found it significant that he does not accept such information at face value, pointing out how disastrously wrong they’ve been so often in the past. Good point.
I see that a year ago, I streamlined the deportation process for Mr. Trump. Say Don, if they name the wall after you, can you name the test after me? Or at least call it “The Florida Test”. You can read the three questions by following the one-year ago link above. I was thinking about the family issue that so many Liberals bring up.
Have the Libtards considered that, now listen closely, if these illegal immigrants are anywhere near as hard working and productive as they claim, and you couple that with their experience in the American system, why, they would return as heroes. They should be able to set themselves up admirably back wherever it is they came from. This would not be the case, of course, if they were on welfare and food stamps. In that case, let Ramos and Geraldo who say these illegals are so wonderful, let them support the family.
And the Coast Guard. Disband the lot and send them home. What coast are they guarding? Certainly not the one between here and Cuba. One illegal Cuban is one too many. Not when thieves and rapists can slip through the blockade on inner tubes and rafts. Coast Guard, my eye. They should apologize to America and start paying back the money they took for not doing the job right. Mr. Trump, we need another wall between America and that rat-hole, Cuba.
Now according to the UN, Cuba is paradise. Free medical and all that. So you gotta ask, what is the ones who run away are really after? Funny they aren’t running to Mexico or Jamaica.
Even then, today it took forty minutes to reboot as the second and third panels appeared and stayed there seemingly forever. You don’t want or need Microsoft “updates”. Get one thing straight—it is not computers that catch viruses. It is operating systems that catch viruses, and the number one culprit is MicroSoft. They are no more going to build a system that is immune to viruses than the medical profession is going to cure cancer. In both instances, the solution has to be an upstart discover that puts both those sordid organizations permanently out of business.
I mean, stop to think about it. Why is MicroSoft so adamant that you install their updates that they make it a pain in the ass if you don’t? And why are millions being devoted to AIDS research every year with that disease only kills a fraction of the cancer total. Let me spell the answer out for the greatest generation. M-O-N-E-Y. Nothing new has come out of America from your entire generation, all you do is try to slice the pie to get yourselves a bigger share. That is not progress and you will get what is coming to you.
To hear these pansies talk, all the good ideas are already taken. As if inventing was easier in the last century, duh, because so many things had not yet been thought of. You hear this with guitar players who think all the good riffs are composed—and all they have to do is memorize them. I’m keen on spotting that attitude in others because of my brothers, who remain convinced that my purpose in life was to “steal” ideas just before they themselves were about to become world-famous with them. You know the type.
NIGHT
I fell asleep in my armchair. But not before I took another look at the Italian campaign in North Africa during WWII. For the sake of Millennials, that’s Roman numerals, not World War Eleven. The Italians got as far as Sidi Barrani and stopped. It doesn’t make sense. They outnumbered the Brits three to one. So the answer is somewhere and to me that means funny stuff going on at the command level. I’d say it is pretty clear the English paid the Italian generals to stop and sit down. I can’t prove it, but that is where Occam’s Razor comes in handy.
ADDENDUM
Book Seven on Darwin is where it moves into a period where I am at least semi-familiar with his story. It was Emma that he married, not Fanny. Tough luck Fanny, you chose the goof who can’t hold a steady job. You had your chance, so don’t come crying. Charles is working away with his assistant in a rental mansion across from the various academies in the right neighborhood. He’s had some success publishing articles and several small volumes on individual topics like coral reefs and birds.
Yet Book Seven is boring, mainly concerned with how rich families live, a popular misconception among English authors. I know about this time Darwin was reading other papers that were getting awfully close to the point he (Darwin) was making—that the Earth was old enough for slow-moving evolution to account for the state of things. Example, Agassiz, the French guy, was proposing that glaciers not only moved, they carried boulders to erratic locations.
For all that is said for Darwin’s strenuous efforts—what with having to take all those carriage trips back home for month-long holidays—it is becoming clear that other scientists were catching up. Again, I know about this part of his career, I’m looking for details this time. I agree with Darwin’s reasoning and the chapter is full of witty anecdotes after my own heart. “Don’t hope to convince your peers, the next generation will believe you.”
Skipibus. That’s the book’s term for speed-reading past sections of large works that get dry. Well, I have to skipibus the segments of who’s sister is finally pregnant and the over-long descriptions of English class structure. Rich people have far more opinions of how poor people should act than the other way around. For example, Charles and his father are quite concerned that the children’s nursemaid doesn’t always wear a bonnet. Will this not cause the local men to conclude she is of loose moral character? (They don’t ask what the local men would be doing in their private nursery.)
Mind you, Book Seven has really opened my eyes to my own situation with Judy, the surplus English daughter of my youth. The one who was pressuring me to get married long before I’d even seen Disneyland, you could say. That’s the one whose father hated me and now I can see why. It is the province of every staunch and rich Englishman to see his daughters marry for money. Now he makes sense. (Remember, Judy’s father was the one who never could understand how, as a teenager, I’d managed to achieve such complete poverty, why I was even borrowing money to go to school and whoever heard of that?)
Last Laugh
Return Home
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