MORNING
Dan Lewis gets top billing this morning. He’s the lawyer who writes “Now I know” and he most definitely does his research. While others repeat and redact tired old material and try to sound original, Dan does his homework. Today’s item concerns the goat eradication program on the Galapagos. Three original goats got loose and destroyed most of the habitat. They could not capture the goats as their mass of ingested nutrients was too great to export off the islands. So the carcasses were left to recycle, as it were.
These photos, from the link, show the effect of the goats before and after eradication. Several outbreaks of giant African snails have been reported in Florida. I'll see if I can't run a short description of that situation some day soon. I heard that their shells are so sharp and tough, they will puncture a tire. Remember, people who import snails as pets have just as much right as you do to keep a pet, even if the pet is poisonous or dangerous. Isn't equality such a wonderful thing?
One of the new neighbors has Australian plates on his jeep. Must be nice, people from Australian and Mexico traveling here on holidays. Used to be the other way around, but then we had the credit generations (I mean baby-boomers) to take care of that.
Paying back borrowed is not suffering, though from what I hear, it sure must feel like it. And I also hear young Barb is coming back from Europe to stay a few months. She could be here before March. Just you watch out. I make plenty of mistakes, but except for certain types of women, I'm not known for making the same mistake twice.
NOON
And screw the Australian. When I left for coffee I saw him struggling with a fitting. Three hours later as I went to load some laundry, he was still at it. I saw the ring he couldn’t get to stay and, being neighborly, I offered if he needed to make a new unit, I had a complete array of metric tools he’s welcome to borrow. Harumph, he doesn’t even look up and gives me the “get lost” grunt. He growls he’s got “lotsa tools”. I thought fine, you old cuss, die under there. I got me socks to wash.
So, I did a search on “485th Bomber Squadron” to find at least three variations, including “bombardment group”, “bomb group association”, and “bombardment squadron”. All indications are the base was in Texas, so it would be a well-photographed organization. Rule out the squadron, it was based in the Pacific and flew only B-29s from 1944-1945. I’ve got the 485th Bomb Group Association in Venosa, Italy, but they flew the shorter range B-24 Liberators.
It is now 3:00PM, I went to take my clothes out of the dryer and our Aussie pal is still squirming in the heat wave. Today is 90+ humdidity, so it is freaking misery out there. G’day, mate. I don’t even like Foster’s.
Author's note: As I returned to get my last load, one of the French guys came over and thanked me for offering to help. I guess all the people at the swimming pool saw it all. I said it was forgotten, but I found out the Frenchies call me the "Good Guy". Why? Not because I'm good, heck they don't even know me. But because I always wear a motorcycle helmet.
AFTERNOON
I stayed near my A/C and worked on projects and one was the potential wind generator. Another field where I have zero background, this is intended to use the onrushing wind to keep my cPod lights working, never drawing any current from the Honda except the 10mA needed to operate the relays. And I did that successfully in 2013. This type of fan is called a hamster cage. Shown here is one of the hubs being fitted and yes, you could say that looks a lot like a gear sprocket.
The programming part I can do. And I see right now that encoders will not work. Each tankette tread is driven by a separate motor. It would seem easy to put a detector on each tread and say when both read the same, the tankette has traveled a calculable distance in a straight line. Where there is variation, have one motor change speed until things are back in line. Conceptually very easy.
Not so fast. Even if I devise a way to slice each wheel rotation into 1,024 bits, which is the maximum the Arduino can handle, the most I can guarantee a variance of less than 5% is a maximum of 310.47 inches. Not even nine yards. There are other methods of guidance, including a winch, but of course, one wants an autonomous robot system.
But not at any price. At what point would it become cheaper to put a vibrating rake on the front of a golf cart or dune buggy and sift all the sand down to 14”? True, the beach authorities would probably have a conniption fit. This is the purpose of brainstorming, to bring out the solution that has the best chance of success. Once more, GPS looms up. It is just a stream of data and very simple “plain text” at that. Contrary to popular belief, GPS is not difficult to parse at all. It even uses commas as delimiters and each string ends with a carriage return. It’s building the antenna that would scare my pants off.
NIGHT
I watched a weird movie called “The Moth”, or shall I say I tried to watch it. The plot was too trite for me, but I recognized a lot of what was going on from my own life. Yes, I have used a scythe to harvest grain. I was ten years old by then and all other farms had long since been using combine harvesters. It was obvious by then that the family farm was a dying way of life, that crops could not be grown economically without expensive machinery. Unless. Unless the “family” had legal access to forced, unpaid, demeaning manual labor. I did not specifically mention children.
And the message was clear decades before. The so-called family farms grew monoculture cash crops, often with fields leased to commercial growers. Thus, by 1965, all the farmers near us were basically renting out four-fifths of the farm to keep a good show on the small patch about the farm house. But there were no eggs except on the chicken farms. No cows except on the beef operations. The concept of the self-contained “feudal” farm was long gone. Successful farmers were expected to put their sons through school to become anything else [but a farmer].
Plus, the picture of the farmer out in his field, that is baloney. Most were busy at planting and harvest time, but all winter they had town jobs. They loved school teaching, because you had two months of summer off. It is true some farm kids had time off the help with the harvest, but they worked with tractors and balers, not scythes. For the most part, however, all the farmers bought their butter in town like the rest of us.
The “Moth” is the nickname of a woman in the movie. I did not like the value system portrayed. It is too cute in the wrong way. That same value system was used to trick me throughout my youth to believe things that were not true and accept things that today gets parents arrested. Another departure is the movie scenes where you are supposed to be surprised to learn somebody plays the piano. Duh, in my day,piano took years of practice and that could hardly be kept a secret.
Yes, I took piano lessons, for almost four years. But by end of year two, I was organizing my first rock band, age twelve. The only guitar players in town were a couple of hicks who could play “Peter Gunn”, or at least the beginning part. I had a guitar when I was eleven, but there was no such thing as lessons and I finally sold it to Eddie Johnson because I needed the five dollars. I remember learning a G and a D chord and giving up. Sometimes I can't help thinking what might have happened if I’d had a little help with that.
Last Laugh
It says: "We Love America. We love Harley-Davidson.
But most of all we love pancakes."
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