One year ago today: December 4, 2022, crippled by jargon.
Five years ago today: December 4, 2018, the loss is minimal.
Nine years ago today: December 4, 2014, the college hired strippers.
Random years ago today: December 4, 2010 it's Steve or Stan.
I’m greeted with a barrage of medical notices. This is the annual window they allow changes, but damn, what gobble-de-gook. I understand people’s health and lives are in focus here, but how in hell does anyone follow that mass of legislation, paperwork, and flow-charts of coverage options. When I want my blood pressure checked, I don’t automatically consult a dictionary-sized rule book to find out what is “previously not post-exempt” from the latest supplier list. Here’s a photo of Trump going viral on-line for obvious reasons.
Now that I’m back at the cabin, I feel guilty as hell. Why? Because I just know there is nobody but nobody, no matter how well-intentioned, that can provide for the situation like I can, and I left her there. It would be somewhat possible if I was there to [at least] tell the help “do this do that”.
Tell you what. The stitches come out next week and they say she will be able to flex her elbow. Let’s wait until we know how she fares with that before any decisions. This event was an alert that I can’t really drop everything like I said [I could]. The place held together while I was away, so that’s a plus. Yet, it happened so because I had enough money tucked away to keep things going. But that's here, not there. In a way, that’s a big signal of how the system works against you. There is no difference than if they were lurking to grab your cash during any emergency. I didn’t say they do it intentionally, just that there is no difference.
How about some politics? The Democrat party has seen an almost complete dry-up of small donations, leaving them dependent on corporate money. Polls show Trump would win in the Bronx. (I don’t even know where the Bronx are.) Now economics, it seems fractional jet ownership is on the rise. Those that can afford it are turning to jet cards and fractionals as a way to avoid airport hassles. I’m of the opinion airports are a corrupt mafia front that needs to be taken down. Ancestry websites who openly sold users information now claim the data was stolen. Military, the Swedish S-Tank is now designed so if all electronics and other crew are incapacitate, the whole tank including the weapon can be operated by one man. Mind you, people who have used it say the interior hoses are always leaking fluid into the cabin.
I’m hearing reports that the Left is about to launch a campaign to create fear of a “looming Trump dictatorship”. They are, it seems, admitting they don’t stand a chance. I still predict that as the time nears, the unimaginative Left will try to reach into their old bag of tricks, but Trump will hit them with a curve or two just before the election. He knows they are too inefficient and cumbersome to react to any new situations. They will cause Trump harm, but not enough to stop what’s coming.
You may not of heard of Roundup Ready, a GMO sugar-beet from Monsanto. The company claimed they did not need permission to test plant the seeds and now it has gone wild. Since 2007, the modified strains have been cross-breeding with natural beets to the point where as of May this year, it is impossible to find pure beet sugar any more. For the record, I use only cane sugar, never beet sugar. And I use the less refined turbinado, imported.
Canadian anti-homeless grating.
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Ray-B contacts to say he’s come down with a case of tinnitus. That’s job-affecting for a musician, so I’m leaving my bugle at home on Saturday. We plan to grab breakfast and go over his latest remote work ventures. Ray-B remains the only contact I have left with the techie world. Fred’s long retired and I don’t know even one person left alive, well, except Mitch, but he went mainframe long ago, poor fellow. Here he is, with his trikke near Banff, Alberta, writing “no snowflakes yet!” That’s an opinion, Mitch.
Let’s talk about Block 10. This is the huge oil discovery in Iran, largest in 20 years. That clarification is because with the oil numbering system, there can be any number of Block 10s around the world. In a couple years, it will be producing around a quarter million barrels per day. With oil just over $70 per barrel, how much does Iran get? It’s called remuneration per barrel and normally it’s around $6. That’s right, all the rest is production, transport, distribution, and taxes. By the time they sell it to you, it goes for around $485 per barrel, as of today.
The significance is that the contract was sold in a manner to avoid any American influence in the oilfield. Actually, that is a misnomer, a “block” is can be a number of oil fields or oil wells. The only tenders accepted were from China and Russia, despite reputed better American offers, but America is not talking. That’s because they’d have nobody to blame but themselves for their despicable behavior over time.
Add me to the growing list of people who question how on earth any such huge discoveries can still be made in the Arabian peninsula. How could the countless explorers of the entire previous century possibly overlook something that big? By now you’d think they’d have drilled an oil well grid over the entire country just to see if they don’t find anything. Or better yet, strike water. It’s been announced the contract went to Russia, but the Chinese are in on it. It’s a joke, the slogans they provide, “Best New Deal Oil” and “Oil For Reconstruction”.
Block 10 is another giant step in the Sino-Russian plan to shunt the US out of the Middle East oil business entirely. A lot of this oil is in the traditional boundaries of Kurdistan, so watch for that to start up again. Kurdistan, if it became independent, would pose real competition to any other oil interests in the area. And there is no lost love between the Kurds and all other Arabs.
Before I let you go today, I would like to point out something about celestial navigation. When taking sextant readings of the nearby planets, you use solar time, but for the stars, change to sidereal time. Why? Because the sidereal year is one day longer. Why? Because noon each day on Earth is a little longer than 24 hours. Why? Because the Earth is orbiting the Sun, and it is no longer in the same place at noon the next day. The Earth has to rotate just a little more each day to get the Sun directly overhead.
This is a classic math problem. The stars are so far away, they don’t see the difference. But up close, you are looking from the surface of the Earth to the surface of the Sun, and it is really their centers that are orbiting each other. So each year you have to add that slight extra distance and it equals exactly one Earth rotation, that is, one day.
ADDENDUM
Hmmm, why did 562 extra people view my blog y’day? Finland and Germany mostly. Am I in “dutch” for calling Greta a little ogress? (If so, I’d be forgiven for using that last word, which most have never seen before.) Nor are they likely here to review my latest readings on servo motors, but that is what you get today. Our real quest is the study of PWM, pulse width modulation. Think of it as “speed control” of small DC motors. Using a switching transistor (as opposed to a power transistor) to flip a current off and on at various “duty cycles”, you can vary the speed of a DC motor. This cannot efficiently be done by varying the voltage as most people think. Instead you flick the total voltage off and on really fast, so a duty cycle of on 50% of the time makes the motor run at half speed.
In the past, this was accomplished by using a potentiometer. This is a physical device and response varied with age, wear, and dirt. The speed varied because you were changing the resistance, which wastes heat. With PWM, you are not varying the current, you are switching it off and on very rapidly—and that is the focus of today’s reading. There are other uses for PWM and one of them is to control a servo motor. These are the little motors that work the ailerons of model airplanes. They also use PWM, but applied differently. Here is a picture of a bunch of servos connected to a single controller, I’ll let you figure out what is wrong with this arrangement. So, are you ready?
The sensors that produce an analog voltage must be converted to digital. This is done by the microcontroller “sampling” the signal at 1023 times per second, known as a resolution of 2^10 power. If you want finer readings, expect to pay more but 2^10 is plenty accurate for most of us. This is how digital voltage gets translated which is necessary because most of the devices being controlled are built to a different standard, such as a speedometer that goes from 0 to 120 mph on a digital dashboard. The process of changing voltage into some other parameter is called “mapping”. (Oops on the 2^10 spreadsheed notation as I could not get this stupid Google format to superscript.)
And that is why I was looking at servo motors. They operate not by turning, but by using the input signal to turn a motor to a fixed position. Anybody who has first flown a drone knows that the response is anything but rapid and accurate. In fact, I instantly recognized the biggest part of the problem is the handheld controllers used potentiometers rather than digital readers. It crossed my mind that PWM could replace that “pot” and get better results. Since I’m hardly the first person who thought this, I also thought it would be easy to find information. Wrong, once again, I ask a question that the entire genius staff of the Internet world cannot answer. Every source I found showed how to hook it up, the dumb-ass part, but none of the important information I was seeking.
Here’s what I came up with. The servo motor I chose to examine could vary between 0° and 180° by interpreting the input signal’s duty cycle. It turns out there is a “library” for the Arduino, but you know how much intelligent people trust libraries, even if they [libraries] did not use the retarded “dot notation”. They do, however, accurately reflect much of the millennial mentality of blindly using somebody else’s code. Put another way, they took some stranger’s word that he understood what I’m about to explain.
For the servo to work, the input signal must be constantly refreshed usually between 50Hz , and 400hz, or cycles per second. Trivia, 50Hz is standard European house A/C and 400Hz is the frequency used for aircraft electronics and most military guidance systems. With servos, if this signal is removed, the motor returns to zero position. If you can see how both these frequencies can be subject to PWM, good for you. To a motor, a PWM duty cycle of 50Hz or 400Hz would not matter, but with 400Hz you would have much finer control. It’s that resolution thing again.
I finally found what I wanted. What is the pulse width that a generic servo needs to operate? For a position of 0°, the signal for Arduino (which is 50Hz or one pulse every 20ms) must be 544 microseconds long and for 180° it must be 2400 microseconds long. That’s 0.544 milliseconds and 2.4 milliseconds in Arduino talk. Everybody loves changing milliseconds to microseconds, do they not? Anybody who has ever tried to get a straight answer out of an engineer can appreciate what I had to go through to find this data.
Just remember, the people who wrote the material I read were, well, you-know, wearing leotards. How I would approach that potentially disastrous level of trust is to hard-code the microcontroller. Shove the library up the millennial’s nostril and turn the Arduino pin HIGH, then program a proper delay, then turn the pin LO with another delay, and repeat. Oddly, I may never build such a circuit, as my curiosity is now satisfied.
But not your curiosity, if you wonder what is wrong in that last picture. I’ve grown truly wary of modern product claims and one is the often repeated number of servos that can be controlled by a single Arduino. It’s a half-truth with no answer provided, there I go, again asking the questions they went through such advertising pains to avoid. The picture shows a group of servos all turned to the same position. So technically, their advertising is true, if you ever need a group of servos all doing the same thing at the same time. After you fish your expensive model airplane out of the lake, you may wonder how many servos can be independently controlled. I suspect it is a smaller number.
