September 4, 2014

Yesteryear
One year ago today: September 4, 2013, written hurriedly.
Five years ago today: September 4, 2009, Pinecrest Mall.
Ten years ago today: September 4, 2004, goodbye T-Bird.

           Saint Nick. Nope, not the fat guy who wastes your credit card, but the island. It's become a habit when I practice calculating the Sun's position, if I randomly hit an island, I read up on it. And a "navigation" error today found me 53 miles off the California coast, where for reasons unknown, a set of islands have never been turned into condo farms. Worse, people seem to not like taking pictures (except for Santa Catalina where I have not been since 1985). Here is the only photo I can find of San Nicholas, now a military base.

           The island was "heavily populated" when discovered, but not so by the time the Russian fur traders left. The Russians didn't do much of the seal hunting themselves. They brought in Aleut Kodiaks for the dirty work who promptly considered the local woman fair game. The island was evacuated in the 1830s, always of course, leaving behind one inhabitant. They did that a lot in those days, maybe to give historians something to write about. Eighteen years later, the "Lone Lady" was rescued and died in less than two months from eating California food.
           Today, the Russian agenda includes the eastern Ukraine and the Crimea. I don't follow the news much but neither does PRI, Public Radio International, same station as NPR. No matter what question they pose their "foreign correspondent", some half-crazy middle-aged lady with a really grating Urdu accent gets on the air and off topic.
           Well, I may be uninformed but one look at the map tells us there is no way the Ukraine is going to give up that territory and Moscow can't seriously think otherwise. I find the NPR news more amusing than the pseudo-jazz they play. You know, where the DJ recounts the piano player's life history first. NPR presents jazz as sophisticated music, but it is really only music that went extinct 75 years ago. It contains too much "sax and violins".
           I may have found the fan belt for my drill press. Over at Grainger, and it ain't cheap. The alternative is to go another month with no drill press and you cannot expect the robot man to do that. I expect by the next Nova meet, on the 25th, to be the first and only member to actually have built a working robot, no matter how basic. My plan is to build something so simple that possibly it will perform a dumb task without needing a microcontroller.
           No chips? This would amount to a demonstration of technological superiority, if only because some think it cannot be done. The fact is, I could, with the right tools, build a robot right now using nothing but gears, transistors, and a box full of old contact switches on my shelf. If I decide to go with a microcontroller, I would have to work like mad up to the deadline--you see, I know what is involved. Here's good advice. All newcomers think to modify a toy chassis.

           You'll find the plastic toy is too weak to support a robot battery and the motors are the wrong kind. You must learn the considerably more difficult stepper motors. You might want to read the bottom half of the page in that link. I've heard that stepper motors have been controlled by methods other than the microchip, but I'm glad I didn't have to to it. But if I was young and considering a career, I would single out the motor control technology and learn the dickens out of it.
           The Rolls of stepper motors is the Faulhaber. You can't afford them. This is the company that builds the gear boxes for European wind turbines and such. If you've ever had an MRI, that's as close as you've likely been to these motors. Faulhaver also into electricity generation from kites. Apparently the concept is quite serious. The kite moves up and away in figure-eights, pulling a turbine round.

ADDENDUM
           There are many "new" books on the market that detail why the US is an empire in decline. They have one thing in common. They all say the same thing I did when I first found out about immigration "policy" when I was 19 years old. Oh, I knew there was immigration, I just didn't know it was controlled for political agendas.
           I said after one look, immigration is wrong. There is unemployment here. The reason there are jobs Americans won't do is because those jobs don't pay a fair wage, that is, the jobs should not exist in the first place. When people came here before the 1900s, there were no social programs (vote-buying-schemes), there was tremendous incentive to Americanize, and by and large the immigrants were rural folk. New York provided an early example of the peril of allowing immigrants to "preserve" their cultures at public expense.
           Nor do I buy that nonsense that more expensive locally-made goods are bad for the consumer. In reality, the cheap goods at WalMart come at a terrible cost to society. Most Walmart employees qualify for food stamps. Also, when the US had high tariffs on imported goods, we were the wealthiest nation in history, had no competition, and never thought about trade deficits because the nation was self-sufficient.
           We cut off immigration for 40 years and won two world wars. We allow immigration and have to start arming our police with tanks. The solution is cut off immigration again and heavily fine anyone who says that is racist. We must start deporting illegals and build that border fence along the south. That's south. Canadians whose grandparents were citizens should be allowed to enter the USA and remain as political refugees.