June 22, 2014

Yesteryear
One year ago today: June 22, 2013, harmonization, money-style.
Five years ago today: June 22, 2009, count the buffalo.
Ten years ago today: June 22, 2004, free medical.

           Blog rules, the top picture of the last 24 hours makes the headlines. Here is the bar fight from last evening. I stopped in at the Triple B, the place that replaced My Buddy’s Place. A friend of mine is hosting the Karaoke show, I was there to see her when the ruckus began. I snapped this photo within seconds, but as you see, the fight assumed its natural position—on the floor. And just behind the edge of the bar, so you don’t see anything except the crowd all turning toward the action. I told you how the new place, despite all the renovations, was attracting a rough crowd from the beginning.

           On the other hand, my audience up the road is exceedingly well-behaved. I had them singing along the last half of the night, this time by playing the music so softly they could hear each other. Hey, Florida guitar players, that’s called working the room. There was no rehearsal today, which I don’t mind because we are just playing the same old songs in circles these days.
           Last day I quoted a few thousand dollars to build a robot and I meant something I would build and be proud of. I did not mean that [dollar figure] is what it would cost a novice to get something on the ground and moving.
           If you go buy an old toy chassis and convert it with standard motors and controls, you’ll get away with around $150. This is your line-following or obstacle avoiding contraption. And the price tag includes the category of “small tools you didn’t have”. You could build these useless robots to your heart’s content. I’m planning a robot which hopefully can figure a few things out before it starts bumping into things. And such rovers cost money. Lots of it.
           What was that? I believe my abode has just been struck by lightning without any side effects. It is one of those downpours that covers the streets four inches deep and fills the eaves troughs so full they spill over like a waterfall down the side of the buildings. Then ka-boom, right over my head and it sounded like all the lightbulbs in my house broke at once. Pop, then the tinkling sound of broken glass. So exact [was the sound] I thought, "There’s twenty bucks down the drain."
           But I got up and surveyed the place. Everything is in order. No damage.
           Harrumph.
           It was too rainy all day to go anywhere, though I did make it up to Starbucks looking for a stray copy of a 2014 Almanac [at the local pharmacies along the way]. No luck. And why do I go to Starbucks? I got an email about glued meat. I won’t provide links, but it is a fact that meat chunks can be glued back together to emulate prime cuts. It is legal in America and banned in Europe.
          Once cooked, the meat is impossible to distinguish from other cuts. If you have eaten beef in a restaurant, it is certain that at some point you have ingested glued meat. The glue is the coagulants from pig’s blood, really nasty stuff that cannot be touched without protective gloves.
           My new security system will not look through ordinary screen material at night. Like the screen on a door or window. I may have to mount the camera outdoors but that attracts attention. The sound is super sensitive, though. I can hear when my refrigerator kicks in.

ADDENDUM
           Ah, the morning at Senor Café, working on celestial navigation problems. Who wouldn’t leap at the opportunity? Um, hands down, guys, that was a rhetorical question. But if you crave attention in public, I can now report this brand of activity certainly gets the attention of strangers. And I was working on one tiny step, with a pencil and paper only. No instruments. Don’t underestimate me, I go there to relax and have my coffee served, not to mystify people. Besides, it is only men who wonder what you are doing, never women.

           To clarify the above, I regularly do my homework at the coffeeshop. That’s how I got through college. You may see me with sliderules, charts, schematics, and even small electronics projects, meaning I know precisely how much interest such things draw.
           But for some reason, working with these navigational computations garners extra attention. Nobody is looking over my shoulder and you can’t see what I’m writing otherwise. Why navigation tables get more interest than balancing your checkbook, I cannot say. But it does.
           Here is a scan of the work from this morning. I’m finding Greenwich offsets, the longitude that accounts for the fact you may not be at the centerline boundary of a time zone when you take a reading. The tables are set for that position and unless you want to do some hairy arithmetic, you'll take the shortcut of using the lookup tables. I’m adding values taken from the tables to calculate a figure needed for the next stage. If you enlarge the scan, you can see how my work went from wildly inaccurate to more accurate than the textbook in four trials.
           I’m taking this opportunity to describe where my studies have headed so far, and where I think I am. Since I remain a student, this overrides any errors or misconceptions from any earlier point. I believe I’ve entered a third phase toward actually plotting a position. First a quick recap and some extra information.
           We all have a sense of position from maps, we know that there are co-ordinates along the map edges that we can uniquely identify any point, and the point that concerns us most is where we are at this moment. You find your coordinates by reading to the edges of the map. The catch is you roughly know where you are--dead reckoning. What if you didn't know, in which case a map won't do you a lick of good? How do you determine where you are? I'm working on it, but I'll have to get back to you, boss. Er, I mean Cpt. Kirk.
           I read three different descriptions of this undertaking and not one of the books gives a clear account of the procedure. Furthermore, this was deep reading and deep thinking, so clearly we are up against something that is inherently too complicated for casual review. This realization, which takes a week or two, is what I call the first phase. You have to wrap your head around these concepts without much help from the teachers you thought you could rely on.
           The second stage, just past, is where you acquire some instruments and learn to use them. However, learning to use them is not a direct goal. The results you get are pretty useless without knowing how to interpret them. The sextant is where you encounter your first set of tables. These tables are used to “correct” the reading you take, all for the purpose of calculating the true height of the sun above the true horizon—two figures that you can’t see directly.
           Allow another week to learn this. However, this is only one step that you do not yet know how to utilize. Focus on getting accurate results, not the meaning of those results. I hate to put it quite that way, but it’s best in this case.
           Now, I enter a third stage, which is called determining the “meridian angle”. As near as I can figure, unless you want to lug around 30 pounds of books, the best thing to do is get a single publication called a sight reduction table named HO249. Instead of every possible position, this is a booklet that contains an abbreviated set of all terrestrial positions rounded off to the nearest full degree (an accuracy or "resolution" of about 55 miles). This [the meridian angle calculation] does not involve tables, but I met in it my first practical limitation. That is to learn only calculations west of Greenwich. Worry about east later, if you ever sail there.
           I do not know how many stages remain, but I’m about a third of the way through all three books I have on the topic. And that’s how I relax.
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