January 13, 2014

           Today is library time. Here’s some eBike art. I’ve never decided if these murals represent the city’s surrender to graffiti. It will be another day or two for the red scooter, as I went ahead with replacing the starter assembly. Whenever I ride through downtown (it’s rare because bicycles are banned off the sidewalks) I look for, in vain, a new coffeeshop. There has been no such thing downtown for at least the ten years I’ve been here. Not to be confused with shops that sell coffee, such as Starbucks. And even that operation is not really downtown, but on the northern side, the least popular edge, near the post office.

           There is a constant turnover of small businesses, but for dining nobody can compete with the illegal wages the Latino places pay their staff. So instead of cafes, you get vegetarian cafes. Instead of ice cream, you get Italian “glace”. Junk food of fringe quality where the average American couldn’t say if the price has been cranked. And you don’t walk into a veggie café and ask if they serve coffee unless you like a troop of drop-outs looking at you like you are a crazy trying to poison yourself.
           Instead, I left downtown and took a chance at BK having a fresh pot. Nope. But that funny lady was there, still looking for something. The desperately lonely one. Sorry, not my type. If I’m overqualified, she is the opposite. When I’m there, I have a pencil and blank page to begin. She has no pencil, a blank stare, and hasn’t begun a thing in all the years she’s been hanging out there. Not my type at all.
           The library has a “new” set of encyclopedias. A 2008 Americana. That’s a brand I don’t often use because of the imbalance of their entries toward minorities, women, and ethnics. An encyclopedia is not the place to push cute equality theories. I don’t mind if these obscure topics are included in proportion to what they have actually contributed, which probably amounts to 1%. Anyway, once more it was clear from the binding noises that I was the first person to touch the books. Even bypassing the filler articles, it is not a great research tool. It reports shallow knowledge rather than teaching anything new (although the complicated articles are a nightmare to follow).

           Example. Here is a depiction of bridge truss designs. What can be gathered from this entry in the Encylopedia Americana? Well, Pratt and Howe drank at the same off-campus watering hole. And Warren, well, he either lost his crayon again or had to leave the lecture early upon developing a uncontrollable craving for slices of pizza pizza by the slice. That's what I meant to say.
           So as not to convey the impression I have only leisure on tap, be aware that I awoke this morning with shoulder pains, which progressed to general muscle aches. Probably from riding my eBike so much with that rotten battery. On the bright side, you get better trivia, but the more academic brand of trivia that so far seems exclusive to this blog.
           For example, why hasn’t anybody ever told those soldier-boys that a surprise attack always starts early in the morning. Pearl Harbor, Gallipoli, Sinai, you name it. If I was the general/admiral, that’s when I’d have my sentries out, for I cannot think of a single “surprise” attack that commenced in the early afternoon. I think it is one of those things they teach them at military academies. Like that idea of the flanking attack. These tactics have been around for 3,000 years and the only types they still catch is other soldiers. Like camouflage, these things work best on other people who think the same way.
           I was reading the transcripts of Kremlin (read Stalin) speaking to his people in 1941. This made me think, as I thought much like the rest of the world. You know, that the Soviets were being crushed by blitzkrieg and were about to surrender. Not if you read what I did. Stalin was cool-headed and pointed out some facts that showed he was darn good contact with the situation. You can follow up on your own, but he pointed out the Germans had already lost over a million men and could not keep up such pressure. That winter was about to slow the advances and that there were signs the German thrust was weakening all along the front. He clearly knew that Russian had better resources. There was only talk of eventual victory. I found that, for October 1941, four months after the invasion began, pretty amazing.
           My purpose at the library was to read up on capacitors, which I failed to find anything new, and to find some details about electromagnetism in practice. The Rick-Motor needs a piston but I have no way to calculated the parameters, so I will proceed to build something and see how it works. Think of the old nail with wire coiled around it. I now know the nail should be six inches long and the wire should be coiled at least one hundred times in three layers. Thinking through this in reverse, since there were no instructions at this point, what I do is make it so the nail can move within the coil.
           Then pull the nail out. When the electricity comes on, it makes sense to me the coil will try to pull the nail to the middle position. It will apparently attract the point of the nail the most. Again, this is conjecture I will test empirically. Why? Because there is not a single book on the topic I have ever seen that gets this “complicated”. They only explain the easy stuff to death.
           And here is a sculpture I saw downtown. It attracted me because it reminds me of the test patterns you sometimes see illustrating sonic booms. So I call this sonic art.