One year ago today: April 8, 2024, Texas spuds.
Five years ago today: April 8, 2020, I don’t like Forex much.
Nine years ago today: April 8, 2016, they act surprised.
Random years ago today: April 8, 2008, we don’t see many.
Popular request, a qualified term. Suppose a hundred people said I should switch to Blues music. It would go nowhere. Could five people make a difference? Read today’s addendum. It’s already a blustery day and the birdies are stuffing themselves silly. If you like the aroma, I’m steaming a large batch of boneless chicken thighs in curried coconut milk, to be served with rice this week. More than a few people have mentioned the absolute silence around these days. To be certain, I walked out into the yard before dawn. Nothing.
You may recognize this photo, my first attempt to build am amplifier. After several months, I have to retire this project. I have tested it so many times and it is on the verge of working. I can get the speaker to click on input. My conclusion is that although I followed the directions closely, there is enough variation in component quality that cumulative error took the input signal our of the Q-zone. What was learned from this circuit? Foremost is that each component checked out yet the whole assembly did not function.
What would I change? I would spread the components out further. I would add a number LEDs where there is sufficient power to confirm that part of the circuit is working. And next time I will not dismantle the breadboard to steal the components for a working model. What you see here is pretty much hard-wired so nothing is salvageable. We’ll save it for our museum. If you are not an electronics person, the transistor is the little black dot just to the right of the center of the photo.
Nothing this morning to report except I looked at that Tampa historical boat cruise, just a spin around the city and old harbor. Advertised for $31, I figure why not? I’ll tell you why. It is that scumbag old airline rip-off, quoting the single price for double-occupancy. They can shove their tour. This prompted me to read the reviews and it was the usual. Last minute cancellations using social media, no clear directions, $50 parking fees, and get this: a rumor that the boat had all the seats facing a circle inwards. Hardly the best for a tour. We’ll find something else, since I am not getting any work done today.
I glanced at the ad for the Bishop Museum. At $25 a pop, I’ll pass. Today is the 4th anniversary of the Mars copter landing, but that turned out to be more of a NASA publicity stunt. While it may seem I’m taking it easy, I need a getaway break today. It is 11:00 AM. Check back on that.
Grabbing the bass, I played through as many of Roberto’s list as I remember. Most took a couple runs to come back, but those were the truly ancient tunes like “Secret Agent Man” and all three notes to “Okie From Muskogee”. Others like “Crazy Little Think Called Love” and “Never Been To Spain” will take a little more to shine. I’m surprised a bit my how he knows these tunes, which were old by time I was in my teens. But, he’s a combat vet and knows what his people like and I’m only too glad to get on that stage again.
Citroen Penthouse camper, 1981.
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An hour later found me at the Books-a-Million in Brandon. My GPS retains that feature of giving air miles, when I chose the route the distance leapt from 51 miles to 73. This air miles display cannot be turned off. That left not enough time to get back here for Festus Tuesday. I’d been in the Brandon Mall once before so the van knew the way. I scanned the magazine section to note all the standard electronic editions were no longer present, but one I had not seen before caught my eye, and only $6.50.
Opting for a coffee at the kiosk, I quickly noticed the wording in the magazine was off. It used outdated terminology and referenced A.I. as being new. That’s when I saw the cover on this publication had no date and it was not a new product. This was printed in 2022 and sold as new, way to go Books-a-Million. However, I got my money’s worth because the schematic shows a PWM circuit using only logic gates.
By chance, the server at the kiosk had an interest in computer science. This led to a discussion of where this Servo magazine fit into the big picture. We had a 15 minute convo on PWM, A.I., music, navigation, and he is around the same age as I was when I realized there was a lot more to be learned from experience than from classrooms. He confirmed that such experience is just as difficult to find today as it was long ago. I have already mentioned this young man’s interest in computer science and artificial intelligence to the robot club.
He could not have known I was talking about topics recently covered in this blog or that some of those topics have been in and out of focus for a lot of years. I gave him the link on his device and that revealed how much the search algorithms have strayed from accuracy. Until the blog title was keyed verbatim with no spaces, the full name did not appear in the results or the suggestions. In fact, it ignored what was keyed in and came back with wrong and misleading links.
It is a sad commentary on Google that it required two of us working his phone to find a site that we already knew existed. Google is not your friend. That, folks, is how channelized the world has become, you will find only what they want you to find even on a completely blind random search on a new criteria. But he’s a sharp dude and will quickly see the blog fills in the missing pieces, and if he wants more info he’ll figure out to leave a comment.
To wrap up the day, we watched Matt Dillon clean up a lawless town with another marshall who quit and got married. There’s a little more drama than western to all the later episodes. Word is China is playing hardball with the US tariffs, now at 104% and about to go into effect at midnight. My neighbor, the one who gets his news from the MSM, is convinced Trump is crashing the stock market. He’s convinced he has “lost” $300,000, so I asked him what he sold. He said nothing.
England is about to exempt Muslims from military draft while simultaneously threatening war with Russia. Folks, England is now on the trash heap of history. They might yet find a Trump, but he’d have to unite the factions and that is about as likely as me taking up with a fat girl. There, I said it. A navy Vice-Admiral who disrespected Trump has been relieved of duty. Trump also hit illegals who won’t leave with a $1,000 per day fine and confiscation of property. Another 900,000 lose their protection for being here. The fines can be retroactive to when they were first told to leave, that is, up to five years ago. Sorry, illegals, the party is over.
Winter Haven, 20 miles from here, has been listed as one of three Florida cities most liable for a housing bust. Haptics. Looking to see if anything is new, I find no progress. Does this mean I have to wait even longer for the A.I. gloves that let me play Mozart on the piano?
It was a couple hours on the road today and I stopped at the Lighthouse Thrift in Brandon. Nothing for me today but a new work shirt that turns out nice enough I’m keeping it for casualwear. There was time to listen to a few more chapters of “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn”. It makes sense now why this story was acclaimed in its day. The main character, Francine, is your basic good kid in a bad environment. Myself, I find little entertainment value in that. Her father forges a letter to get her into a better school. The younger brother is becoming a mini-hoodlum. The father is taken to drinking and feeling sorry for himself, all of it predictable.
ADDENDUM
You bet five is a big number when it comes to academics. I know the ratios and I got five requests related to the Sun’s position (GP) calculation of last day. Three of them mentioned the finding of nearby land is an excellent feature. Actually, that was not my original idea, I read somewhere as a child that stamp collecting was supposed to spark the child’s interest in the place it came from—but I never say such interest. To find a line of position out in the open sea, one of the calculations is the measurement of the height of a known object in the sky above the horizon. All the stars and planets plus the Moon and Sun have that information logged in an Almanac.
That Almanac is arranged by date and hour, so it is important what time it is when you take the sextant reading. I have to tell you, for most people, that reading is the easy part. I said most, we have five people who were curious. Here are some details. Firstly, I am practicing the calculation and table look-ups, called “entering the table” in the text books. Next, I am using an outdated 2014 Almanac. But the calculations are nearly real, because an outdated Almanac comes back into line every four years and we are closer to 2026.
Navigation is not made easier by the way several disciplines are mixed into the process. Astronomers, cartographers, and navigators use different words for the same things. (And don’t get me started on those GPS bastards with their decimal points and minus signs.) Navigation is based on two triangles and the one that uses your GP can be imagined to be “flat” on the Earth’s surface. The three corners of that triangle are 1) the North Pole, 2) the Sun’s GP, and 3) where you think you are, called your dead reckoning position.
I’ll clear up one point of confusion right here. You do NOT have to be where you think you are. Huh? That is correct, because if you are wrong, no big deal because it only means your calculations will be less accurate—you will still be able to narrow down your location even if it is unknown to you. The so-called experts would be wise to learn they should explain this to newcomers. Where you are is not part of the process, it just helps keep you on track.
This is why I can calculate the position of the Sun without regard to the fact I am in Florida. The Sun does not care. It “circles” the Earth on a band 23°45’ north and south of the Equator, so that explains why it crosses so many places we never heard of before. Other than sub-Saharan Africa and the Amazon, it’s mostly ocean. I am calculating one figure and looking up another, that is the longitude and the latitude respectively. Since on an hourly basis the Sun does not move much north or south in its transit, we take the book figure as is. The longitude is the calculation, and longitude is the one that challenged mankind for so many centuries until Thomas Hooke invented the chronometer. See, I told you I was paying attention.
I mentioned the difference in terms and the Almanac word for the Sun’s latitude is “declination”. The term applies to all celestial bodies, that is, their latitude at a specific time, and while that time can be long into the past or future, you are mostly interested in where it is now. Now is 13:49:44 on this date. The Almanac says at 13:00 hours the Sun was at W59°20’ at a declination of N06°13’ (actually 12.7’, but the convention is to round off to 13’). Now I look at the back of the book to find the offset for 49 minutes and 44 seconds, which I will add to the longitude. It is 12°26’ past the hour mark.
This means at that point in time, the Sun was directly over W71°46’ and N06°13’. Here’s where things get a bit dicey. You can’t look that up on-line. You see, the GPS lobby uses decimals and calls East and West as positive and negative and minutes morph into decimals. So W71°20’ becomes -71.3333. You are “supposed to know” this. So, where on Earth is the Sun? We are in the Amazon again. Near a Columbian waterway called the Rio Casanare. The nearest I’ve been to there is San Cristobal on the Venezuelan frontier back in the mid-90s. I did not cross as I correctly surmised it would not be wise to have a Columbian stamp on my passport. The nearest settlement of note is Puerto Rondón, establish 101 years ago. Wiki says it has two mayors and 3,844 people live there.
They have a paved airstrip that runs almost down Main Street and I got this satellite picture of what appears to be an auto wreckers or graveyard on the southwest outskirts. Sorry, I cannot comment on anything that happened on television today.
