One year ago today: September 17, 2016, yahoos everywhere.
Five years ago today: September 17, 2012, not in Kansas anymore.
Nine years ago today: September 17, 2008, the tinfoil bicycle.
Random years ago today: September 17, 2013, a generic Tuesday.
For openers, let’s take the day off and get some of the hurricane damage cleared off. Not that I was hit hard, but then that’s what you expect when the advance warning available these days is used to adequately prepare instead of downloading FEMA applications.. Did you people over in Tampa get that? And how about that dork Gary White who hack-writes for the Lakeland Ledger. Him and his article that “we” are all waiting for the federal government to get us out disaster aid. What a libtard, implying that responsible adults are included in his group of do-nothings who sit around with their hands out for public money. Listen to me, White, don’t you be including real men in your definition of “we”. You may feel at home associating with deadbeats and losers, but as for you and I? Same planet, different worlds.
This fascinates me more than most people, okay, but too many have said they understand it when I explain it for me to reject electronics as a major topic in my writing. This blog has something for everybody—everybody, that is, who has a brain. The rest get nothing. Except pissed off when they crawled half-way up the elephant’s leg of knowledge and stopped because they missed all their friends.
This photo is the marionoak, after the storm. Look at all that daylight where there used to be complete sky coverage. Yes, that’s broken limb up too high for me to get at it with my equipment. All the damage in town, including this, shows the storm came from the strongest direction, the northeast. That has something to do with how the heat convection works as the cycling arms slow down. I see now this tree has been hit before from this direction.
I also fired up the batbike but it still retains that nasty habit of overheating the battery terminals. That’s normally the result of a short, since none of the other wires could take such a heavy duty jolt without revealing themselves. I fear once I get the Taurus on the road, the batbike will suffer from neglect. It’s always a treat to take it for a sprint, since it is around three times as powerful as the original Ural motorcycle factory issue. The only thing I would change is getting an overdrive gear but they didn’t make such a thing that year.
Hospital.
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Who recalls that Jack & Jill house I first looked at over in Bartow? That’s the one lacking the bedroom hallway, so whoever has the back bedroom has to walk through the other bedroom. They sold it to somebody else for $32,000. Whenever I’m out that way, my route takes me past and I’ve been watching the slow and painful restoration of the property. It’s mentioned numerous times in this work. I’m glad I didn’t buy it.
Its potential is far away in the next decades, however, as nothing has changed in downtown Bartow in probably twenty or thirty years. There are no new buildings, no new construction. The hotel that was bought a few months ago shows no signs of anything beginning. It’s sitting there same as always. Termite fodder. I was barely touched by Hurricane Irma and I just put in another four long, sweaty hours on hauling deadfall off my yard. That includes stringing cable out to take the chainsaw against the larger logs. And the cable is now connected to the batbike battery charger, leaving me pondering why that went dead at precisely the worst time. That time being when the Rebel was destroyed.
By mid-afternoon, I took a break. That involved getting my laundry across town and ducking into the A/C at the donut shop. I’m so far in the toonies that my working the Sudoku puzzle draws stares of wonderment. Um, trivia time. We all know Sudoku is Japanese for “bachelor number” and how the puzzle became big over there before the world’s newspapers discovered the inventor had forgotten to patent the puzzle. But why did it get big? That’s the trivia. Because the puzzle involves symbols and the Japanese language does not lend itself at all well to word puzzles. You heard it here first.
The donut shop. Let’s get one thing straight about New Age types. I don’t buy into their behavior. That’s not their philosophy, but their behavior. I had ten minutes of my day wasted by some stupid New Ager who did not want MSG on her breakfast whatever. Nothing like holding up the line while you discuss the health merits of American fast food, yup, lady, that takes real brains. They should have asked her what MSG stood for. Wait, there is one situation in which I do abide by a New Ager. That’s when I meet one who is thoroughly educated in the classic hard sciences, but rejects those principles in favor of the New Age theory of how things came to be.
I’ve never met such a person. Every New Ager I’ve met uses the notion as an excuse to disguise their total lack of ability to understand what it is they are against. Can’t grasp grade school math? Stuck with kindergarten level reading skills? Stumped by your bank reconciliation form? Don’t study or improve, just become a New Ager and you can reject any topic sight unseen without the pain of learning a thing about it. Besides, “New Age” has a much better ring to it than “plain ignorant”.
“New York Times = monkeys write.”
~ another anagram
That drew my attention to the center photo, which shows the lens cover is still crystal clear. No, the previous owner did not have them replaced to enhance the sale value, because this assembly was designed by morons. To change the lens, or for that matter, to change a burned out light, you have to go in through the wheel well, which involves removing the tire and rim and entire fender skirt. True, you could get away with turning the tire out of the way and kind of pushing the skirt aside, but if you do that you’ll wish you hadn’t. By golly.
I further checked the car for cavities where I could place two additional 12-volt batteries. The concept here is to have enough separate electricity to power an overnight fan inside the rear compartment. We know from experience with the cPod that this has a luxurious effect inside the sleeping area. It also prevents the staleness that often accompanies crashing in your car. This is no rustic arrangement, I learned how to make the partition into a truly cozy experience. In 2013, I lived in the cPod for a record what was it, 29 days or 32 days? Much more than the 3 days I thought might be a maximum.
ADDENDUM
Banging your head against the wall uses 150 calories per hour. That’s a good description of this circuit, which some of you may spot as the NAND gate that perplexed me for six years. (Not continually, guys.) Like, why bother with such an elaborate system just to turn a light off and on? The answer to that is, maddeningly, also an excellent description of what is wrong with electronics textbooks and the people who write them these days. That second point is important because the world was full of these nincompoops before the wired-in age, and the Internet has given them a collective voice. They are freaking everywhere, despoiling the educational landscape.
The author said when the circuit is working right, when you press the switch (marked PB for push button) at the lower left, the light at upper right came on and stayed on until a moment after you release the switch. Some description, huh? He mentions offhandedly that this is a digital switch, but of course it is. It uses digital type switches called NAND gates. Then he goes into confusing detail of how each component works. The “D” shaped objects are the two NAND gates. The rest of this article is about what is really going on, so read it if you want to follow along how I figured it out.
The big concern with switches is that they “bounce”, that is, they don’t go instantly off and on. They sputter a bit during the change and this is undesirable, especially if you have a switch flipping off and on 16 million times a second, like in an old computer. Most input devices, such as your mouse and keyboard, are analog and the signal has to be changed to digital to operate as you have been. The above circuit is one such configuration. The other guy would have improved his presentation by several hundred percent if he had mentioned all this.
The confusion results from the way those doofs teach the subject. They learned it the wrong way and continue to pass that error on. If you look, there are two power supply points, at the top of the diagram, marked 9V+. See them? Now look at the two orange circles I put there. One is marked PB for pushbutton and the other is the standard symbol for small light called an LED. To the student, it looks like the volts on the left are what supplies electricity to the circuit through the contact points labeled 13 and 12. Can you see them?
It appears to the beginner that the power enters the circuit at those wires and comes out at the wire marked point 11. Except it is inverted because there is a little circle at point 11. That means when 13 and 12 are on, 11 is off. And when 13 and 12 are off, 11 is on. When you push PB, the electric goes direct to ground, which turns off 13 and 12, and turns on point 11. The snag is, if you turn point 11 on by turning points 13 and 12 off, where does point 11 continue to draw its power from? This took me a while.
Now I’ll explain. There are two gates, or electric logic switches in the diagram. They are the “D” shaped symbols marked with the Roman numerals “I” and “II”. Locate them. These are the NAND gates. If you peer at the gate marked “II”, you’ll notice it has two extra wires at top and bottom, labeled 14 and 7. These two wires are missing from the gate marked “I”, but they are present in the actual chip from the way these integrated circuit chips are manufactured. It is standard engineering practice to power 14-pin chips through pin 14 with a ground at pin 7. Sadly, this is often explained in an entirely different chapter of most textbooks.
Focus on gate “I”. The point of confusion is that the power that operates pins 13 and 12 is NOT the same power that exits at pin 11 on gate “I”. (The same applies to gate “II”. The power that enters the gate at points 1 and 2 is NOT the same power that supplies output point 3.) The input contact points on the left only operate the switch, they are not internally attached to the output point on the right.
For clarity, the electricity that is connected to the input pins takes a separate path from the one that supplies the power to the output pin and this is NOT made clear by the way those dorks teach. The input pins do not provide the power that comes out of the gate. The output power comes from pin 14. This diagram shows the pin 14 entering the top of chip “II” but not chip “I”. The first sign of a total ass-clown is that they are not consistent so you can’t work around them. He should have put the leads on both gates or on neither.
When I went back to read the instructions, the guy didn’t make any mistakes, but he failed to spell it out for the pupil. That makes him a bad teacher. The way the circuit works is that each segment has a separate power supply, so even if the push button sparks a lot, it will not cause any poor connections to the light. The circuit works by taking advantage of how electronic components often switch off and on when they detect half the circuit voltage present at the input leads. Thus, when you operate the pushbutton of a 9 volt circuit, the power (very rapidly) falls or rises past the 4.5 volt point at pins 13 and 12, causing a nice smooth change of off or on at pin 11. This is the central idea of this whole circuit—getting rid of switch bounce.
Now for an explanation of how the circuit works. Grasp the concept that if you have two identical voltages entering a light, it will stay unlit. The light needs a path to flow and two voltages pushing against each other will do nothing. It’s wasteful, but it works and you know it because electric equipment gets hot just sitting there. Note, to operate the light, it is not good enough to simply take one of the voltages away. It will stay unlit. You must also provide a path to ground. A lot of people learn this the hard way. Um, or so I’ve heard.
Thus, when a logic gate is off, it is not simply 0 volts, it makes a path to ground. That’s important. If you examine the schematic, you can see that NAND gate “I” lets electricity through the (one-way) diode D1 into an ordinary RC (resistor-capacitor) trap, marked C1and R2. This quickly charges up the capacitor C1 to full voltage, which then slowly drains through resistor R2. While it is above the gate threshold, it turns NAND gate “II” off, providing a path to ground via pin 7. As long as NAND gate “II” sees more than half the total circuit voltage, the light goes on.
When you release the push button, the RC charge begins to fall and as soon as it is below the threshold, NAND gate “II” turns back on, which stops it from grounding and puts voltage back to pin 3. The light goes out. The amount of delay until the light goes off is determined by the relative sizes of your resistor and capacitor. To any eagle-eyed buffs out there, yes, there is an obvious flaw in the design. If you look closely, there is a resistor labeled R1 in the upper left. This is known as a safety resistor, to stop the 9V+ from shorting directly to ground when the pushbutton is operated.
There should also be an R3 on the light circuit to stop it from shorting directly to ground. In this instance, it is okay because there is an inherent resistance inside the NAND gate, but it is foolish to rely on such circumstances. When in doubt, put your own resistor.
In conclusion, my criticism of the way these “experts” teach is that they are presumptuous. They are guilty of “engineer-think” and that is never good enough to be an effective instructor. They are responsible for spelling out the how and why and too many teachers fail on this account for me to consider it a profession. In case you are wondering, the gates in this example are from a 4011 chip. That’s where the pin numbers in the diagram come from. Said author further fails to point out that the input contacts 13, 12, 1, and 2 do NOT ever put any power through the NAND gates. They only operate the gates. Any power that actually goes through the gates comes from line 14 and grounds via line 7.
I understand there is no standard way to show that input contact points are not power supplies. That is why the student is compelled to read the accompanying article. But when that article expects the student to remember things not so recently mentioned, it does one poor job of teaching. Overall, the article another typical example of yet another millennial author who did not proofread his own work. He will never invent a blessed thing in his life because he plainly does not understand the importance of the “how and why” part.
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