Rumor is that ethanol is the reason corn is a dollar a cob and that it costs more energy to grow the Frankencorn than it creates when burned. Then again, so does gasoline from the Athabasca Tar Sands, but there is so much of the goop out there the producers hardly care. Ethanol is a byproduct of the digestion of sugar and itself has an interesting history. Residue on clay pots show that cavemen got just as juiced up after the mammoth hunt as our Neanderthal types do at the Super Bowl.
Ethanol, to be useful as fuel, must be distilled. This produces flammable gasses as well as the liquid alcohol. It is denatured, or rendered unfit to consume by the addition of impurities. But looked at another way, the entire dissimilarity between beer and wine is that they have different impurities. Red wine gets color from the crushed grape skins. And yes, wine will “burn” if you do it right. (Heat the wine to 126F and hold a match to it. If you survive, you know it actually burns quite well.)
To any chemistry students out there, denaturing, when applied to alcohol, is totally different than term when used in the laboratory. Alcohol burns more efficiently than gasoline but produces more ozone. Brazil probably has the highest ratio of cars running on pure alcohol, since they manufacture the ethanol from sugarcane. Don’t expect that to happen in the USA as sugarcane needs lots of water and the growers around Lake Okeechobee are very jealous about their investments. They control the water supply and have successfully blocked the importation of cheap Brazilian sugar, preferring to sell domestic brands to the unsuspecting US consumer by the spoonful.
Strange as you may take it, I know very little about the innards of Windows XP. But I can easily repair it and adjust it for my needs. It’s like a car. You can drive it without knowing a thing about mechanics. That’s why I’m still working hard to get my non-Internet XP computer in perfect condition. “Support” for this product ends this April, basically meaning that MicroSoft has finally given up trying to make another one of their products actually work like they claimed it would. (And people wonder why Gates is still spending millions to polish up his reputation.) No support really means they will not be creating any more security patches. The user base is so huge, I’m surprised someone has not created a system that works like mine, but easy to use for all computers.
Essentially, my important and sensitive work is done on a computer that is not directly connected to the Internet. When needed, only relevant files are transferred and even then, only when off-line. A clever kill-switch system that ensures the private computer is kept off-line. Nothing can get back to the isolated unit for I physically broke off the receiver pins. The only files that go the other way are walked over on a flash drive. If it works as planned, I will still be using XP for my secure files ten years from now. Anyone who knows how to do these things will tell you that MicroSoft did all they could to make the two systems incompatible. To force you to use their new system, which is no improvement at all for getting work done.
How did I re-learn to look at dice? That’s a tough question. At first thoughts, it would seem dice are an easy draw, a square with some dots on it. Six diagrams are need to represent all six faces. I advise the reader that at this time all of this work is only a learning exercise. You see, these dice are drawn in hi-res, which is not compatible with the lo-res setting of the dice-throwing program published last day. It took me three hours to get these dice looking right.
Want some mental exercise? Let’s re-learn it together, with me guiding the way. Count your blessings; there was nobody here to help me. Shown here is my pencil nib pointing at a missing dot. This is Qbasic programming, not a screen painting tool. I know the upper left co-ordinates of those white squares are all at row 100, columns 9, 59, 109, 159, 209, and 259. With 10 pixels of black screen between each square.
I have half a scribbler on the floor, thrown away pages of design work on getting things to appear as shown. That was soon to show itself as the easy part. FYI, these are not called squares in programming talk, rather they are known as “filled boxes”. I nearly went bonkers figuring out how to position the dots, which are really circles with a radius of three pixels. And each one had to be programmed independently as I could not convince my poor brain around how to create a matrix to do the job.
One does not naturally examine dice and notice that there is a nine-point grid of three horizontal and three vertical intersections on each face. On die number one, only the middle intersection is occupied. Die six had to be treated separately as the six intersections can be arranged two ways—vertically or horizontally. And man, is it easy to get them mixed up. Another dot went missing and I thought I’d nailed the problem after solving the situation above. Nope, I had think “inside the box”. It took half a headache to solve, for the dot was there, but coincidentally in the exact same position above another dot, covering it up and looking for all the world like nothing was wrong. Argh!
At several times, I did see some nearly readable numbers appear on the high-res screen. So all is not lost. I said the two modes (high and low resolution) are incompatible, but what if one could flip the pages fast enough to fool the eye? I programmed the Arduino to do it all the time. So I’m not giving up on this yet.
The sad part is all this work will likely go to waste when I die. There are no professional societies or clubs in Florida to share any of it. These projects are just as much experiments as a laboratory but I have never found an association in this area which is motivated by inquisitiveness. Those with facilities, like that joint in Miami, are in it for the money, either via by renting the space and gear, or hoping to cash in on an invention. Not so over here. Anyone with a legitimate interest in research is free to use my equipment.
Well, as long as they don’t destroy half of it every time, there, Agt. M.
