The End of an Era?

I have to give Fred credit; he was able to continue caring much longer than I was. For most of human history, Fate ruled. Then the enlightenment gave man Free Will. I'm not sure I concur unless it is the free will over trivia. We complain endlessly about the moral defectives in Congress, the White House, our state legislatures, and our city and county governments. Yet we do nothing. We do worse than nothing; we send the same moral defectives back, essentially rewarding them for their moral defectiveness. Maybe that is because we cannot do otherwise.

A few parting thoughts from Fred:

People write columns in the (faint) hope of changing things. No, a web site will not alter the majestic course of the planets in their orbits. It was once possible, however, to believe that enough people hollering in the electronic town hall that is the web might push things in a desired direction. In the past, this has worked—not cleanly, nor quickly, nor quite as the senior-civics texts said. But it has sort of worked.

Now it doesn’t. Today the United States is politically and socially constipated. Nothing moves, or at least not in a desirable direction. Crooks, frauds, revivalists, the over-empowered under-brained, believers and mouth-breathers and unabashed lunatics—all of these have so firmly gummed up the gears that improvement founders. Someone seems to have poured glue into the political kaleidoscope. Little point exists in curmudgeing at the bastards....

A train wreck once started goes to completion....

The abolitions of the Bill of Rights, the ever increasing surveillance, the diminished recourse of citizens against the government.... The government keeps records of the books you read in the airport.....

People grow ever more docile, accustomed to intimidation, to searches without cause. Several writers of my acquaintance no longer question federal policy. They are afraid.

And we are going to see this show through to the end. In a dismal way it is funnier than Oprah.....

The country is shot. So what else is new?

Indeed. Thank you, Fred, for your many years in the trenches.

The New Definition of Poor

This is a description of a typical poor, uninsured family in the United States that qualifies for taxpayer-funded health insurance:

Annual income of $56,000
A pool
Cable TV
Internet access
A daughter in private school

Gee, I'm getting all choked up.

What Language Will be Spoken on the First Lunar Base?

Probably not English. I could have been, but we decided to throw away the chance to leap decades ahead of the rest of the world.

(shrug)

I suppose we can amuse ourselves by beating up on Arabs.

Hat Trick for Scott Adams

Scott Adams like to stir people up and make them insult him for saying things that he provably did not say. His latest round starts here (rated R for the sort of language common in any Jr. High locker room) with some very probing questions about our perceptions of both ourselves as a nation, as well as others. As is typical, his comments quickly filled up with people screeching at him for saying things he did not say. He posted a clarification which simply increased the screech volume, which is typical as well as entertaining. His third post posited a new disease to explain the twisted logic the majority of people use to reach an opinion on everything from soda to the President. I think it's safe to assume what his comments look like.

As Scott says, "And then they voted." Maybe universal suffrage wasn't such a great idea after all.

Pray the Can Opener Doesn't Break

Debbie is in Hawaii all week which means I'm on my own. Scary. I always have the cafe as a backup, but I spent most of my available cash on a iPod Nano 8 Gb in black. It's one of the new ones that do videos. I haven't tried that yet, but I did shove my favorites list onto it last night so I had something to listen to in the foundry today.

So I'm all set with music even if it means I starve to death. At least my corpse will be rockin' out (insert bad "Beethoven decomposing" joke here) when Debbie finds me rotting on the floor.

Priorities, man.

Rated R for Strong Language

Not this post, but this link which shows one of the big dangers of automated and/or idiomatic translations made by people with no working knowledge of one of the languages involved. Some of the links in the article are worth a chuckle as well. Note that the oddly-placed questions marks are embedded Chinese characters that your browser/operating system don't know what to do with.

"Bu Bye" and "Hello"

Well, it looks like Salon has buried Camille Paglia somewhere on the site I don't have the patience to dig out. I suspect that she is back in the subscriber area. I refuse to pay Salon to read nothing on their site other than Paglia's once-a-month column. So she is gone (again; I think this is add/remove cycle number three or four) and has been replaced with the Bad Astronomy Blog, (Thanks Matt!!) written by another fellow traveler who enjoys beating on Fred Phelps and Kent Hovind when he isn't blogging cool astronomy stuff.

[Update: A reader has shown me how to find Camille Paglia; she is back on the list of links.]

Not Quite a Replicator...

... but I still think this may have some sort of impact on manufacturing. People complain about what cheap Chinese labor has done to wages in the US, but I have this feeling that they ain't seen nothing yet. Please note that the price for one of these is exactly the same price my employer paid for a Xerox 300 dpi laser printer in 1987. Staples has an HP 1200 dpi laser for $200. That's in 20-year-inflated 2007 dollars. In non-inflated 1987 dollars that's like $75.

Homework: project the same price/capability price curve for 3-D printers and speculate on just how much we will be buying at a store in 20 years.

Those Wacky Brits!

Don't they know there is no reason to panic? Bank runs are so 19th century. Everyone knows that it's impossible for a nation's banking system to collapse. Come on, people! The government promises everything is OK. Besides, even if those Brits, who everyone knows are a little sketchy when it comes to money, can't keep it together, we Americans are just peachy!

Hey Sis!!

Wow. Almost a week without a post. I didn't realize how long it had been. I've been occupied off line ripping through some books. Since my last post, I finished up Joseph Cambell's The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology , read Wil Wheaton's Dancing Barefoot and Just a Geek, and read Rob the Bouncer's Clublife, so it's not like I've just been goofing off. I also received my knife and chisels for my Japanese carving (new hobby that has nothing to do with the internet), so I've been playing with those as well.

Anyway, the reason I started this post was this (click on the image to get a readable version):



For some reason, I started having flash-backs from my childhood.

Travel update

Sedona was gorgeous. The pictures do not do it justice....the reds were so much colorful. We did not have enough time to visit and tour all we wanted to here. The construction also slowed things down. We did hit a couple gallery areas -- very surprised in one place to see "life size" penguins. They were so cute! (except for the price) We found alot of things we would love to have if 1) we had the money to buy them and 2) had the space to put them to show them off. There was this one moving tall shelving thingy that was interesting. I told Ric we couldn't get it cuz I would get motion sick watching it or seeing it out of the corner of my eye. It was in constant motion. We will be visiting Sedona again and again I'm sure.

Disneyland. Wow --- this AAA FAM trip was fast and furious. We arrived late Friday night -- did dinner and some of us checked out some of Downtown Disney. We started Saturday morning bright and early with a working breakfast at 7am and toured and learned and toured more all three Disney hotels and both theme parks and some of Downtown Disney. We had a bit of "free time" that night from 8p until the parks closed. Got lost trying to find the ride I wanted to do -- gave up and went to Disneyland Park to watch the fireworks. Did some shopping in Downtown Disney and got back to the room around midnite. Next morning -- character breakfast with the critters at Chip N Dales, pack things up and hit the road for the LONG drive home. I did learn alot, but not enough to be really comfortable selling Disneyland yet. So....Ric and I are going to take a long weekend and go there in November. I should be getting free one pay park passes for both of us for two days, so we need to find a cheap hotel and will drive over.

Bright and early this Sunday morning I will be flying to Hawaii for another AAA FAM trip. This will be another fast and furious trip..... 3 islands in 6 nights. I get to visit Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island of Hawaii. I wish we were seeing Kauai. Oh well ... there is another trip for Ric and I sometime.

And if we didn't mention --- in April/May Ric and I will be flying over to Italy to do a cruise/tour. We do a 5 nt Italy pkg (Venice, Florence, and Rome) and then a 12nt Greek Isle/Med cruise. Our cruise has a stop in Egypt also.

Can't wait to see what is around the corner next for traveling!

Phinally; Photos!!

Get it? Phinally; Photos? Eh? Eh? See? Living here with all these right-brained artsy types is rubbing off! I'm just so edgy and hip!

(sorry)

Anyway, I know it isn't Sunday. It ain't even Monday. But hey; at least it's still 2007.

Our Sedona road trip is here.

I added the last couple rainbows I got pictures of to the Monsoon 2007 set. For a few weeks, they were a daily thing, but the monsoons seem to be blowing out now.

And just for Jen:



These are mostly harmless; they just like to get tangled up in people's hair.

Long week so far in the foundry; Monday I was assigned 102's which are a bit of a problem bell, but I've done them before, so I wasn't too concerned going in. Then my first mold split in half when I took the flask off. OK, still no need to panic. Then my second mold split in half. OK; panic!! I switched to a different flask and made a few changes in how I was packing the sand. Somehow, I got everything out on time. At least the majority of the bells turned out. Tuesday, I was on the grinder in the morning and did assembly all afternoon. Today I was doing 101's, which just love to boil under the best of circumstances, and having a rookie molding them with too-wet sand ain't nothing like "best." My entire first heat boiled: 100% failure. I shoveled an entire pile of dry sand into my molding sand and started packing the cores (the part that makes the inside of the bell) so light they nearly crumbled when I pulled the pattern off. That seemed to do the trick. I still lost 5 of the twelve bells in my second heat; I was on tail with the boss man as usual, but for some reason, we were like a couple chimps out there, slopping bronze all over the place. We scored a direct hit on three cores, which as I mentioned were already pretty fragile, double-streamed the bronze on one, and had an interruption in the stream on another. Bottom line; seven out of 24. Not good.

We've Gone Mad

If this is the best use of law enforcement resources that a cop can come up with, then I think it's time to start laying them off.

Long Random Post

This is going to be another one of those long, rambling posts.

Still there?

OK, but don't say I didn't warn you.

I'm still working in the foundry, although after the last week I wonder why. We had some sand problems, namely too much water in the sand. That causes the bronze to boil when we pour it in the mold, which is dangerous for the guys on the shank because liquid bronze is flying up in the air and landing on feet, head, hands, etc. It also wrecks the bell. For the four-day week, I molded 40 135's, 16 103's, and 24 101's. The 135 bells survive boiling better than most, but I was still only able to save 15 or so. Only one of my 103's came out, and 7 of my 101's. Friday, the foundry staff started throwing massive amounts of dry sand into the pile we mold from, so we saved most of the second pour, otherwise, I wouldn't even have that much to show for three days of molding. Everyone is getting very frustrated. I'm doing a lot of experimenting, so I don't mind throwing my ugly bells back in the melt, so it isn't as bad for me as everyone else. It was hot and dry this weekend, so we'll see if things go a little better.

Jerry Pournelle has become embroiled in a nasty little fight over a writer's right to control his life's work. As one would expect of someone of Jerry's stature, it seems he will prevail in all this. Unfortunately, the Electronic Frontier Foundation seems to have chosen to side with a commercial web site whose business model consists of showing ads to people lured to the site by free electronic copies from well-known authors who were not aware that their work was being used in this way. Doctorow managed to make a complete ass of himself through all this (nothing new there), as did the nice folks over at ars technica (again, nothing new there). What surprised me was the EFF jumping to the aide of an organization that was not just illegal, which since DCMA means next to nothing, but also clearly unethical. In any case, you've probably heard bits of the story. Go here for the rest of the story. My view of the entire mess remains the same: Casual, non-commercial copying has always happened and will continue regardless of what any governmental or quasi-governmental organization thinks of it. Further, that casual copying is at worst neutral and probably a net benefit to artists and authors. But doing it for profit clearly steps over a line.

From time to time, I will make some comment that a college education is just an expensive way for your kids to learn how to shotgun beers. Paul Graham runs a company that invests in tech start-ups and, while not going as far as I do, seriously questions the importance of where someone goes to college. Money quotes:

What first set me thinking about this was the new trend of worrying obsessively about what kindergarten your kids go to. It seemed to me this couldn't possibly matter. Either it won't help your kid get into Harvard, or if it does, getting into Harvard won't mean much anymore. And then I thought: how much does it mean even now?
...
Practically everyone thinks that someone who went to MIT or Harvard or Stanford must be smart. Even people who hate you for it believe it.

But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elite college, how could this be true? We're talking about a decision made by admissions officers—basically, HR people—based on a cursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar applications submitted by seventeen year olds. And what do they have to go on? An easily gamed standardized test; a short essay telling you what the kid thinks you want to hear; an interview with a random alum; a high school record that's largely an index of obedience. Who would rely on such a test?

... you can't, without asking them, distinguish people who went to one school from those who went to another three times as far down the US News list.

... how much you learn in college depends a lot more on you than the college. A determined party animal can get through the best school without learning anything. And someone with a real thirst for knowledge will be able to find a few smart people to learn from at a school that isn't prestigious at all.
...
The unfortunate thing is not just that people are judged by such a superficial test, but that so many judge themselves by it. A lot of people, probably the majority of people in the America, have some amount of insecurity about where, or whether, they went to college. The tragedy of the situation is that by far the greatest liability of not having gone to the college you'd have liked is your own feeling that you're thereby lacking something. Colleges are a bit like exclusive clubs in this respect. There is only one real advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you wouldn't be missing much if you weren't. When you're excluded, you can only imagine the advantages of being an insider. But invariably they're larger in your imagination than in real life.

Of course, with more and more students being shoved through college that have no business being there (because, according to the governor of Michigan, every single high school graduate has a right to a college education), having a college degree means much less than it used to. Think of it this way; what if the gov decided to pimp, say, plumbing school the way she is pimping colleges. She could cook up all sorts of statistics about how trained plumbers make great money, which would be true at some gross level. But what happens to the rates a plumber can charge for his time in two years when everyone under the age of 21 is a licensed plumber? Why does anyone think it isn't the same with college degrees?

I've given up on Netflix. I canceled our account on Thursday when I received yet-another unplayable disc. Of course, over the weekend, I've been renting and ripping movies like crazy, and I don't seem to be doing much better at the local Hollywood Video. Friday, I rented four movies; once wasn't playable. Saturday, I went back, traded the bad movie in for a different copy and rented four more. The replacement disc was still bad, but only started skipping in the credits, so I wasn't concerned. But two of the four were also bad. Today, I went back, replaced those two and rented two more. All four are unplayable. I guess I'll just start buying DVD's from Amazon and just give up on the whole video rental thing.

Speaking of tech troubles, our laptop has been acting very strangely today. When we bought it, anti-virus and anti-spyware software was "included" (I was charged for them being installed, even though I didn't ask for them and they were already installed when the laptop came out of the box). As is typical, the license on those were only good for one year, after which I would need to pay money to keep them up to date. The total price was steep (nearly $100 for the two packages) so I went and looked at Microsoft's Live OneCare. It was free for 90 days and $50 per year after that. So I uninstalled what I had (reboot, reboot), installed OneCare (reboot), installed the update to IE that OneCare insisted I needed (reboot), and installed the two security updates to the just-updated IE that OneCare helpfully found for me (reboot, reboot). I let OneCare do its thing (called a Tune-Up) and set up automatic backups, scan everything, defrag the hard drive, etc. In all, about eight hours of my time, most of which was spent reading a book (Joseph Cambell's The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology) while the laptop trundled away at some task. So far, so good. Then today, I was clicking away on the web when everything froze. Not a blue screen; completely and totally locked up. Audio cut off; no response to keyboard or mouse; even the good ol' three-fingered salute had no effect. Power down, power up, get iTunes running again, get back into Firefox, work for about two minutes and BAM! Locked up tight again. Power down, power up; only this time, the machine wouldn't boot. Try a couple more times. No joy. I have seven USB devices plugged into this thing, so I unplugged everything and tried again. Windows came back up like nothing happened. I plugged everything back in and all seems well. Talk about ghosts in the machine....

I have a bunch of pictures, not just of rainbows, but more bug photos, Sedona photos, and other random stuff that has been piling up on the camera. I need to get those off the camera and up on Flickr. I'm shooting for tonight, but I don't know how far I will get. If not today, then definitely tomorrow. Which means I need to knock this off and get busy.

DEBBIE'S HOME!!

Bu bye.

Netflix Throttling

Today, after receiving my sixth damaged disc from Netflix in the last 60 days (plus two others "lost" in the mail), I sent the following e-mail to Netflix:

Maybe it's just me, but you seem to have a serious problem with your service. You seem to do everything you can to make sure that my "unlimited" account is anything but. (A quick Google search for the phrase "netflix throttling" shows 576 hits including an MSNBC article about your class-action settlement for throttling your customers, so it seems I have some company.)

Lets take a quick stroll through my account history, shall we? In the last 90 days, I have managed only 17 watchable discs ("pathetic is the first word that pops in my mind). In that same 90 days, I have returned 6 damaged discs and had two other discs "lost" in the mail.

Bottom line: my patience has run out. The next bad disc, "lost" disc or significantly delayed check in, you can consider this account canceled.

Anyone like to take any bets this being quickly resolved?

Yea, you're right. That's a sucker's bet if I ever saw one. Fun while it lasted, if you can call this fun.

ROYGBIV

How many of you know what roygibv refers to? This is something I learned in school that I remember to this day -- along with dessert is spelled with 2 s's because we always would love 2 helpings of dessert. roygbiv ---- the colors of a rainbow in order -- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Wednesday on my way home from a seminar in Phoenix I saw for the first time the biv in a rainbow. Now I couldn't really distinguish the difference in the indigo and violet, but I definitely could see the blue and two more variations. As I got closer to Arcosanti, I had another first -- seeing the complete rainbow -- the whole arc in the sky. I called Ric and told him to run outside to see it -- it was raining where I was, but he said it wasn't raining at Arco yet. He got some pictures -- with our small digital -- it is hard to get the whole arc in one picture. But, he was able to see it himself. By the time I got here, the clouds had rolled in and covered most of the rainbow. The other interesting thing we notice out here with rainbows is the reflection rainbow next to the real one. The colors are a mirror image. I love seeing all the rainbows out here.

Well--- time to get going for my volunteer job at Arco. I'm now working in the bakery for the "lunch rush" on weekends when I've available. Today is my 3rd day. The new manager introduced sandwiches for lunch -- or make it a meal with a canned drink and chips.

After I am done in the bakery and Ric finishes his tour, we are headed to Sedona for the rest of the holiday weekend. We got a place just outside of Sedona "proper" for a great AAA rate for Sunday night. We will tell more later..........................

The Following is Rated R

Sorry. I just had to laugh when I read this.

Pournelle's Iron Law and Burning Man

This guy sounds like all of us down in the foundry after lunch complaining about Arcosanti. Pournelle's Iron Law rules over more than just government. Money quote:

Burning Man should stop the disingenuous Green Man immediately. It's all a lie. If you want to know how much a of a total lie it is, run a Google satellite photo of Burning Man right now and count the number of RVs there. And they're telling me it's an environmental movement? Bullshit. There are people sucking gas up there faster than they are passing it.

Ouch.

Slow Few Days

The last few days have been slow for us. I haven't molded bells since Thursday (Friday, I was on grinder, Monday we assembled and worked on furnaces, and today I made clappers for the 135 bells), and the weekend was mostly spent with me doing tours and Debbie working in the bakery. We went to Prescott on Saturday and just wandered around in the art galleries. I talked to another guy involved in the Prescott bronze scene and look at some very well-done bronze work, which was interesting. There was some sort of music festival in the park at the center of town that we didn't know about until we got there so we hung around until 9pm or so listening.

See? Told you it was a slow few days.

The most exciting thing that has happened recently was the Schwans guy showing up at Arcosanti last night. Woohoo!! Ice cream!! Well, actually it was hamburger patties and frozen fruit bars. The only ice cream he had left was the 2 1/2 gallon tubs. We had neither the freezer space nor the money. So for now, it's just, "woo. hamburgers. fruit bars. hoo." But he's coming back in two weeks! With ICE CREAM!!!

(ahem) Sorry. Didn't mean to shout.

PHB's Are Everywhere

Our PHB is female, but she also demands the final say in all things no matter how trivial. The difference is that Arcosanti isn't enough of a true organization to have anything like annual reviews. And the last merit raise I heard of was $.05/hour. That says all that needs to be said.

Iceland

I think this is a first: our Web-Stat page shows a visitor from Reykjavik, Iceland (the little yellow dot next to Greenland):



Not sure what interest there is in Iceland for our strange lives, but welcome to our blog, such as it is.

Why Bells?

Paul Graham talks about what makes a good programmer and why it is nearly impossible to be one in an organization of any size. Money quote:

...Any good programmer in a large organization is going to be at odds with it, because organizations are designed to prevent what programmers strive for.

Good programmers manage to get a lot done anyway. But often it requires practically an act of rebellion against the organizations that employ them....

Which just gets tiresome after a couple decades. So now I create actual, physical objects that I can see and show to others, stick my face very close to molten bronze, and spend my afternoons wearing nothing but shorts and sandals lounging in the sun while I twist copper wire into funny shapes.

Speaking of bells, today I was on tail again. A mold started leaking while we were pouring. It wasn't bad, but having hot bronze running towards your foot and not being able to do anything about it is a tad disconcerting. But I had good people on the shovels that quickly took care of things and I still have two feet.

The second pour was more exciting. I was one of the shovelers and a mold had a good-sized leak. It was on the opposite side, so the other shoveler tossed wet sand on it. For some reason, the bronze popped and flew everywhere. Both of us were scrambling around trying to corral hot bronze before it got under the feet of the two guys pouring. I have to give them credit; they just ignored us and kept on pouring like nothing was happening. I tell ya, when your hands are on that shank and you're staring into liquid bronze, it's a total Zen thing. The rest of the universe doesn't exist.

The third pour gave me a chance to redeem myself after last Tuesday's lesson in what 2,200 degree bronze does to concrete. I was on shovel again and we had another leak and a fire. This time, I got the fire completely out and the bronze broke up before it did any serious damage. Sweet.

And today was another new bell. I did 102's, which is a much bigger bell. Meaning that I had to modify my patterns and use different tools to make them work. It didn't go too well. A couple molds cracked which pretty much wrecks all four bells in the mold. I forgot to put feet on two boxes, then put too many on the next two. (Four instead of three; I told the boss I was trying to average things out. He took that about as you would expect....) I was breaking out chunks of the mold, messing up patterns, etc. I finally got is mostly together on the last pour, making eight bells that were merely ugly rather than being complete disasters.

Ah well. Tomorrow I'm grinding all day, so I get a bit of a break from molding. I just put on my headphones and drift off into my own little world for six hours or so.

Still Here

I survived my first tail today. It focuses the mind wonderfully to have your face about 10 inches from 2,200 degree molten bronze knowing that if you screw up, that bronze will be on you. I had a nice little Zen-like five minutes where nothing existed except me, the bronze, and the guy on the other end.

It was so cool. Well, OK; maybe "cool" isn't the right word for having your facial hair singed off, but you know what I mean....

And my prediction came true sooner than I thought. I was scheduled for five boxes (per pour) of 135 bells today. I managed to get them done in good time even though I was tailing (meaning I had to stop molding bells to put on all the protective gear, tail for the pour, take it all back off, then set very quietly for a few minutes recovering). I even worked on some new designs. The only problem was that my scrap rate today was over 20%. Luckily, it wasn't my fault. See, some bells work better if you pour them at the beginning of the pour when the bronze is hottest, others need to be poured near the end after it has cooled a bit. The 135 bells I mold like the bronze a little cooler, so my stuff tends to be near the middle of the pour. But today, most of the bells molded like cooler bronze, so my stuff got shoved earlier in the pour, hence the high scrap rate. But I did get to try out a bunch of new stuff. Each of the 10 boxes was a different pattern with my entire second pour being designs I have never done before. Still refining things down into what I do and don't like, but much happier with the results today than yesterday.

Sometimes Life Really Sucks

If you can read this with dry eyes, I don't think I want to know you.

Personal Update

Just a short note on what I've been up to. To start off, I'm still learning stuff in the foundry, although today is the first time that I've molded bells since last Wednesday. Thursday, I had a doctor appointment, so I had to take the day off. Friday, I was on grinder (everyone takes turns; technically I was on grinder Wednesday, but ended up molding instead). Then yesterday, the boss decided that we really needed to take a day to clean the place up. Today I was back on my usual bell, but with several new tools that people had given me, or that I had scavenged out of the tool box of a coworker that left the foundry last week. I seem to be getting faster, so I had some time with my last few boxes to experiment. Some were OK, some were butt-ugly, and one pattern I will definitely develop more. I only had to scrap 2 out the 32 bells I molded, so not too bad.

As a department, we are a bit behind. We had one person leave last week. one that is still out of the country on extended vacation, and one on vacation until Labor Day. Another will be leaving Thursday for ten days or so. In the mean time, Friday was a complete disaster due to furnace problems. The first pour was too hot, so the bronze boiled in the molds, which wrecks the bells. On the second pour, we overshot and the bronze was too cold and hardened before it got to the bottom of the molds. All day, we managed less than 20 bells (typical day is 80 to 100 bells). A couple guys had problems today (some bells just have a high scrap rate due to their shape), and the fifth person was making bronze tiles (something new for us) instead of bells. Bottom line is that the output from Friday and today combined barely makes a day's worth of bells.

But here is the best part of all: it ain't my problem!! I just crank out bells and let the people that make more money than me do the worrying. Sweet. The only direct effect on me will be when I get moved up to five boxes per pour, which I'm sure will be some time soon given how early I got done today even slowing down to work with new tools and patterns.

Things finally worked out today for me to practice being "on tail." I will be doing it for real tomorrow. In order to get low enough for the pour to work, my face will be less than a foot from the bronze. I don't expect that I will be needing to shave as the heat from the bronze burns the hair off my arms from several feet away when I'm doing the shoveling.

Speaking of shoveling, there is a new chunk missing from the concrete deck thanks to me. Besides the boiling problem, when the bronze is too hot, it tends to break out of the molds. One of the shovelers' jobs is to watch for leaks and break them up by mixing wet sand into the bronze. The bronze is so hot, it will literally burn the concrete and leave a hole if you don't move fast enough. Well, during the first pour on Friday, one got away from me. It was all pretty dramatic. When the bronze leaked, it ran under the mold, which sits on a piece of plywood screwed to a couple 2x4 feet. Of course, the wood immediately burst into flame. I threw a bunch of sand around the mold, which smothered the fire. I needed to move the mold so I could get at the puddle of bronze underneath, but I couldn't without getting in the way of the guys doing the pouring. If anyone has seen Backdraft, you know what happened as soon as the mold was moved: the wood flashed back into full flame. Between myself and the second shoveler, we got everything under control, but it was too late for the concrete deck. There is a nice new divot about five inches across and a quarter of an inch deep in the foundry floor.

And just for the record, that was more excitement in about three minutes than I had in 22 years of sitting in a cubicle.

And I am beginning to understand the logic behind the questions I was asked during my job interview for the foundry. There were exactly two:

"Have you ever had a back injury?"

"Have you ever been on fire?"

OK; enough for one post. Tomorrow, I will let everyone know how my first time on tail goes. That second question has me a little nervous....

Lego Car Factory

One from the "far too much time on his hands" file (and you just know that this was done by a male):

We Seem to have Arrived

Hang on to your bippies folks. It seems that the Fed's rescue plan of easing credit to fix a market suffering from too much credit may not work.

Good night and good luck.

Debbie update

Hey All! Sorry I've been so quiet on our blog. I'll try to update those who take the time to read our blog. Work first:
Our last day at the small, hard to find AAA office was June 8th. We then moved/unpacked/organized and counted EVERY inventoried thing on Monday and Tuesday. I helped mostly with the inventory, so I didn't get my desk organized. Oh -- the best thing about the new office is I have my OWN DESK and I am working full time. Anyways, we had our "soft opening" on Wed, June 13th. Lots of problems in the morning with the phones/internet going up and down. It was hard to help a client when the computers and phones were dead. Oh well -- we survived and the clients took it in stride. I had a couple at my desk when we lost power to the whole office -- good thing I am near the front where all the windows are. Our "grand opening" was Friday, July 6th. Boy that was a hectic day. I forgot the estimated total of how many people came thru the door -- I think it was over 400! Before the year is out we are scheduled to have a "red carpet event" and another "ribbon cutting event" (or something like that with area dignitaries. The new office is in a large shopping strip center. Lots of parking and very visible. (Although we need a larger sign outside -- problems with what we could put on the facade and such) Our normal low is about 100 people served in a day. Every person that comes in is signed into our computer -- so we have a good idea of how many we help. Average day is about 120 I believe. That is between travel/insurance/car buying/trip tiks/tour books and maps/ and other things AAA offers. AAA also has mandatory training down in Phoenix. I have had to head down to HOT Phoenix for training. I can't believe how bad it is when we walk out at the end of the day. I'm surprised the blacktop is not bubbling up!

Home: We are slowly arranging our room to use all the space to the best of its ability. We recently bought a slow cooker and that has helped out alot in the cooking department with no real kitchen. Tomorrow is a try with country style ribs -- they were on sale and look awesome. Should be great after slow cooking all day in BBQ sauce! Who wants to join us?! Next day I try my hand at homemade chicken noodle soup in the slow cooker.

We have our name in the housing list for another place that is opening up this weekend. One of the other couples decided to give this place up. I hate to see them leave. Dinah was another kindered spirit -- a hardworker and cared about others and trying to make this place nicer. Anyways -- they had a nice large apartment on the third floor of EC3 -- complete kitchen and all. One drawback is the heat up there during the summer. We might have to invest in a room air conditioner. Oh well -- I would gladly have that expense to have a real kitchen.

Ric, as you know got a new job in the foundry. He likes it so far. Some of his first bells are now in the gallery. I tried to buy one today and he told me to wait til he starts making ones he really likes. These first ones are just basic design with three lines and a dot. He is expirementing with some other tools a couple people gave him. I guess I will find out later when he is happy with his design that we can buy one for ourselves and others. I was going to buy one of his "first bells" for my Mom and his Mom, but guess not.

We finally put a deposit on a BIG TRIP for just us. We are doing a 17night cruise/tour of Italy and the eastern Mediterrean in April/May 2008. Next year will be our 20th anniversary -- so we will be celebrating a little early. We fly into Venice and hope to plan some time to see Andrea who was in our workshop and worked with Ric in maintanence until he left.

After I put deposit on that, I got the news I had been chosen for a couple of AAA FAM trips. Agent only of course. But in September I will be going to Disneyland for 2 nights and then 6 nights in Hawaii -- 3 islands to see -- the Big Island, Oahu, and Maui. I wish we going to Kauai, but that will have to be another time.

Whenever we leave Arcosanti, we will probably be staying in the area. We recently signed up for a private mail box at the UPS store near downtown Prescott. That is the area we will probably try to find a rental. We have been there a couple weekends, but never during the day when all the things are open and happening. Ric got to explore this past week after his dentist appointment and found a bunch of interesting places in downtown Prescott. After the new tour guide schedule gets hammered out, he plans on taking off every other Sat or Sun so we can go visit places around here. We have been here almost 10 months and have not seen diddley squat! We need to go see what is worth it to see, so when my Mom comes to visit in December we know where to take her.

The biggest thing I miss here are my friends. Those that know me know that it takes me awhile to make friends. I haven't found anyone out here yet that I consider a good friend. Maybe I got spoiled by the friends I made in Kalkaska. :-) Yesterday I was looking thru the book that Kim made me with pictures and notes and started crying. I miss you all! I wish I could be there for a fun night of games and talking and foundue. I miss the talking and companionship the most -- being myself with you -- I know the wall was still up, but it was getting chipped away by certain ones. Thank you for that. The wall is back up again, but not as tall or thick in places. Things are much better between Ric and me. I can now say the cliche that what doesn't kill you, will make you stronger. I believe our marriage is stronger now then it has ever been. I thank all my family and my friends that stuck be me during that rough time. I could not have made it without all of you.

Well ... sorry to get so mushy and long winded. As I mentioned it has been awhile since I've blogged and things just keep pouring out. Hope all is well with all of you out in ether land.

Quick note from Debbie

Hi All! Yes, I am still alive. Busy since the move to our new office and now working full time. I promise to do another post maybe this weekend or next with news. I have to finish getting ready to go to work today for a few hours. We have a booth at some business showcase center.

"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture."

Read it and weep.

"Somewhere along the line, we stopped rewarding intelligence with success and stopped equating intelligence with success," Olbermann says. We're all in the bar now, where everybody's an expert, where the Gut makes everyone so very sure. All opinions are of equal worth. No voice is more authoritative than any others; some are just louder. Of course, the problem in the bar is that sooner or later, for reasons that nobody will remember in the clear light of the next morning, some noisy asshole picks a fight. And it becomes clear that the rise of Idiot America has consequences.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, nobody in the American government knew more than Richard Clarke did on the subject of a shadowy terrorist network called Al Qaeda. He had watched it grow. He had watched it strike--in New York and in Africa and in the harbor in Yemen. That morning, in the Situation Room in the White House, Clarke watched the buildings burn and fall, and he recognized the organization's signature as well as he'd recognize his own. Instead, in the ensuing days a lot of people around him--people who didn't know enough about Al Qaeda to throw to a cat--wanted to talk about Iraq. What they believed trumped what Clarke knew, over and over again. He left the government.

Fed-onomics

Oops.

Uh-oh.

We're saved!!!

I wonder when the Fed will take off its crown and admit that the laws of economics are not subject to the edicts of bureaucrats?

Bells, Bells, Bells

Makin' bells. Makin' bells. Makin' bells.

This week got a little messed up, so I won't be on tail anytime soon. But today I did get to mold a new bell (the 111 for those playing at home) because one of the other foundry people called out sick. That means a bigger box full of wet sand to lug around the foundry, so my back and arms are feeling it big time. I was just getting used to the little box the 135's are molded in.

Other than that, not much going on.

Oh, yea; I was wrong about monsoon season being over. Now it's just hot and humid. By lunch time, I look like Debbie's dad and Uncle Leo at the end of a wedding reception: sweat literally pouring off my entire head, and my whole shirt and my pants about half-way to my knees soaked in sweat. I try not to stand upwind of anybody....

The HOT Is Back

During the monsoons, it was in the 80's, maybe the 90's. Today must mark the end of the monsoon season: it was 103 when I was doing my last tour. According to the local weather, we can pretty much expect 100+ for at least the next 10 days or so. I wasn't in the foundry for the last three-week stretch of 100+ weather, so the next week is my torture test.

A Heretic on Global Warming

Freeman Dyson is always worth listening to. In this article, he discusses what is and isn't science, the need for heretics, and, of course, global warming.

Over on Jerry Pournelle's Mail page, a reader sent in a link to an article on the difficulty in even defining Surface Air Temperature. There is more variation between the different ways of calculating the magic number than the total warming they are supposed to be measuring. Jerry's response pretty much reflects my personal views:

The referenced articles are certainly worth reading for anyone interested in "Human Global Warming", but they don't tell us much. The FAQ at Goddard (responsible official, James Hansen) admits that there is no standard "surface temperature" and gives no formal definition. This alone ought to be enough to cause us to reject the alarm warnings: they can't or won't tell us how they get the numbers they scare us with. They're sure they see Global Warming, but they can't tell us what the temperature is, or what it was on December 31 last year, or what it was three weeks ago. And more to the point, they have no precise -- within a couple of degrees -- measure of the Global Temperature as of 1900, or 2000, so when they tell us how much it has risen since some date certain, we don't really know what they are saying.

The fact is that you can get almost any trend you want from the data, and you can get a "Mean Surface Temperature" from any of a dozen methods -- and those will vary by considerably more than the projected "warming."

Does this mean the Earth is NOT warming? Of course not. We can be darned certain that the mean Earth temperature is higher today than it was in 1776. We can be certain that it was warmer in 1900 than it was in 1776. What we can't be certain of is this: is (Mean Temperature 1900 minus Mean Temperature 1776) greater or less than (Mean Temperature 2000 minus Mean Temperature 1900)? Or to put it another way, when did the obvious rise in temperature between 1776 and 2000 take place? Recently? In the 1800's? Between 1900 and 1950?

Once again, I welcome communication from those who tell us that the Earth is warming and it's human activity that's doing it; but rather than proof by repeated assertion, what I'd like to know is on what data they base their conclusions? And how do they obtain that data? Just what is the formal definition of the "Mean Annual Temperature"? What do we mean when we say that 1938 was warmer (or cooler) than 1998? And by that I mean: what operations were performed to obtain the two numbers? What data did you average and with what weights? Do you take a daily world temperature, add all those up, and divide by 365? And given that you do, how do you get the mean daily temperature? Do you take temperatures of sea surface, air at sea surface, land at surface, air at surface level, air ten meters above surface, weight each by the amount of surface area on the globe it represents (one assumes that there are fewer temperatures taken at the South Pole and McMurdo and the Ross shelf to represent Antarctica than are taken in the continental US), and average all that?

It's odd, but so far I can't find how it's done. Moreover, apparently Hansen doesn't tell people -- which is why McKintire had to reverse engineer the data, and thus discover the Y2K bug.

When I took Philosophy of Science from Gustav Bergmann, I was taught that one definition of science is this: you can write a letter to a colleague, describing how you got a result, and he can, following your description of the experiment, obtain the same results. If you don't tell people how you got your results it isn't science.

Now true, Bergmann was one of the last survivors of the Vienna Circle, and the Weiner Kreiss was deeply committed to what is called "operational philosophy", which is a fairly extreme empiricism; but that doesn't make Bergmann wrong. If Hansen and the Human Global Warming advocates -- who go so far as to group "Global Warming Deniers" with "Holocaust Deniers" and presumably would treat Global Warming Deniers as Holocaust Deniers are treated in Europe, namely jailed -- have a different definition of science that says they don't have to tell people how they got their results, surely they have some obligation to tell the public -- which funds their activities and on whose backs the costs of their "remedies" will fall -- just what they are doing?

How do we get an annual Global Temperature? I still can't find the answer to that. And the Goddard paper http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html says, to me at least, that they don't really have a formal definition, and raises many of the same questions I do.

And I'm fairly certain given the current cover on Newsweek that there is a vocal minority that would love to see "Global Warming Deniers" persecuted... er... prosecuted and imprisoned.

Y2K Bug

As someone that spent a great deal of time swatting Y2K bugs in the years prior to January 1, 2000 (your welcome), I knew that it could be serious. But now is seems to have caused global warming.

Money quote:

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.

Does this mean that the world can sue the a-hole James Hansen for damages? Understand, this is a guy who considers himself so smart that his precious algorithm didn't need peer review. In fact, according to him, no one in the world, other than the Great James Hansen could possibly be smart enough understand it. And it has a Y2K bug. Ye flippin' gods.

Details not coming to news media near you.

Whew!

We're saved!!

After all, what better way is there to fix a market made unstable by excessive loans made to people who have no ability or intention of repaying them (code word: "sub-prime lending") than loaning out even more money to people who have no ability or intention of repaying (code word: "adding liquidity").

See? Nothing to worry about.

Health Care

I had started working on a health care mega-post, but I hadn't looked at it in a couple weeks, then got busy with more important things, like watching movies and eating Pop-Tarts. So I deleted what little I had completed. But here is as good of a framing of the issue as any I have read, and likely much better than anything I could do myself.

My concern is this: every last one of the shortcomings of our current health care system is the result of government meddling in the free markets, government regulation of hospitals, doctors, pharmacies, etc., and Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law. Excuse me if I am not enthusiastic about turning the tattered remains of 1/6 of the United States economy over to the very people who screwed it up, with some wild-eyed hope that they will fix it.

In the business world, it is a well-known axiom that the longer you delay a decision, the fewer options you will have until you have just one. And that one will almost always be the least attractive of the options you had at the beginning. That is where we are with health care. This problem has been building for a long time. We had a lot of options 30 years ago. We had fewer, but still several less-than-horrifying options 15 years ago. Now we seem to have only one, and I can't think of a worse alternative. Health care in the US will decline under socialized medicine, just as it has in England and Canada. And Mary Sal Wooten will still be sitting in her "decaying trailer somewhere on 301 South, with her retinas peeling like wallpaper from diabetic retinopathy, ankles swollen and darkening toward gangrene." Only instead of being turned away at the hospital because it isn't an emergency, she will be welcomed with open arms. Onto a two-year waiting list. The gangrene will kill her in 18 months. The doctors at the hospital will be well aware of this. It's called health care rationing. Now if Mary had the potential to make a significant contribution to society as, say, a business person, academic, or politician (especially that), she could get moved up the list far enough to survive until her treatment. Social Darwinism indeed. But she doesn't, so she won't, and it won't matter if she "really, truly no-shit can’t afford it" or not. She won't have any other option because for socialized medicine to have any chance of functioning, purchasing health care in the free market will be made illegal.

Of course, because I say that, I must be one of those rich Republican bastards with health care that Fred seems to be bitching at. (I make the minimum wage mandated by Arizona law, I've never voted for a Republican for any office, my parents were happily married when I was conceived, and I have health insurance through Debbie's job. I guess one out of four isn't bad for a pundit.)

(shrug)

When the bottom falls out, this will all be a quaint little tempest in a teacup anyway.

Minor Aberration

Slight blip.

Minor problem.

Bit of a hiccup.

Oopsie!

Nothing to see here. Everything is fine. Go back to sleep.

The US News Media Learn Mathmatics!!!!

Here.

Lets see: White couples with birth rates below replacement + Unchecked Hispanic immigration (legal and illegal) + Tradition for large Hispanic families = Hispanic majority in the United States. The mind boggles that this is considered news. Anybody care to bet that Denver still considers Hispanics to be a minority when it comes to racial quotas and city contracts?

[Note: when I started this post, Drudge Report had three articles related to the growing Hispanic population in the US. They suddenly disappeared and were replaced with an article about how the Feds are stepping up immigration enforcement. I found the above article through Google. I didn't have enough key words from the other two to find them. Is it time to get paranoid yet?]

More Bells

Yesterday, I did six more boxes of bells. Today I did 10 boxes, one of which leaked (it happens; either I didn't line up the top and bottom part of the mold exactly, or the bronze was poured too hard, or the Greek god of hot bronze was having a little fun at my expense, or....), leaving me a net of nine boxes in three pours. I tried out a new design today, although I was less than thrilled with the results. I'll probably dedicate tomorrow to getting used to the new tool I used and experimenting with variations on the design. I don't know if we will be doing three heats tomorrow or not. We have one person going on vacation for a month starting tomorrow, one working in other departments for the rest of the week, and another leaving the site at the end of the week.

Anyway, still having fun. Next week, I start practicing for being on "tail" for the pours, using sand or water in a crucible so I can get used to the weight (total 100-120 pounds) and learning how to move with the person on the other end doing the actual pouring. The person with her back to the camera is on tail:



Her face is about 18 inches from a crucible full of 2200 degree molten bronze. Exciting stuff. Can't wait!!

My First Bell

As I type this, I'm looking at the first bronze bell I have ever molded. OK, technically it isn't the first, but rather one of the first. I molded six boxes today, and each box has four bells. The boxes are all broken out at once, so I have no idea if this is my first, fifth, or 24th bell. I didn't have as many problems as I expected. Of course, as you would expect, I was making very simple designs on one of the smallest bells we make (the 135 bell, for the curious). Here is a picture of mine right out of the mold. Other than brushing the foundry sand off with a wire brush, nothing has been done to this yet.





Tomorrow, the bottom edge will be ground flat, the outside wire-wheeled, the top drilled, the clapper installed, and chain attached to the top. Then it will get dunked in a muriatic acid bath, and left under wet burlap for a day or so until it has a red-green-blue patina finish.

Obviously, I still have more than plenty to learn, but I can say that I know more now than I did 24 hours ago.

The Weather and More Photos

Monsoon season in Arizona is sort of like Michigan would be if it only rained for an hour in the afternoon. The humidity has been running around 30-40% and the temps are in the high 80's to low 90's. Then sometime between lunch and 6pm, clouds roll in, the humidity spikes up to 70% or so, then lightning, thunder, and rain for a half hour or so. Then the clouds leave, the temperature drops 20 degrees, and the humidity goes away.

And still more photos. Last Sunday, we took a little day trip around central Arizona to see Montezuma Castle, Montezuma Well, an attempt to see the V Bar V Petroglyph (the road was washed out), Tuzigoot, and Prescott. The monsoons caught up to us in Prescott, so we only got one photo for now. I'm sure we will be back soon, and we will make sure we get there in the morning before the weather gets bad. Tuesday, Debbie had the day off and came down to the foundry for an hour or so to get some photos of what goes on there. (Nothing scary in these photos, Jen... ;-)

Other than that, not much going on. Just work and sleep.

Another Batch of Photos on Flickr

More photos. Sort of a grab bag this time around. A couple shots of a very faint rainbow in our Monsoon set. Our tarantula came back for a visit, only this time he was right next to our open door and a couple feet above where I keep my work shoes. I guarantee I shook them out the next morning before putting them on. There is also a set from Italian Night, which is Arcosanti's largest event of the year. We served dinner to around 400 people, gave them tours, a concert, and a light show. Debbie got a couple pictures of the foundry and me being a tour guide. There is also a new set for all the critters that keep crawling around this place. I included a couple bad photos of the centipede I had blogged about previously. They aren't very clear, but you get an idea of the size of this thing. There is also a couple photos of a giant black bug that invaded our room, and the tadpoles that have taken over one of the ponds here on site. The others all have gold fish in them that eat all the frog eggs, but this one is fish-less at the moment.

Interesting little story about the big black bug. Not the one in our room; that one came to a quick end at the business end of a shoe. But a couple days after those photos were taken, we were in another family's residence when another one just like the one in our room came out from under the couch. Understand, these things are four or five inches long, so this was no common scurrying little six-legger. This is a huge black bug strolling across the living room floor. It walks over to the door, then just stops and waits. The youngest son walks nonchalantly over to the door and opens it. The bug walks outside. Mom says, "Huh; guess he needed to go outside." I suppose when you are the mother of three boys between 7 and 13, this sort of thing is normal?

Finally!!!

It took over two weeks and not one, but two separate trips to both the physical Best Buy store and BestBuy.com, but the Terabyte Laptop (tm) is a reality. As I type this, Microsoft Computer Management is formating my second 500 GB hard drive (29% complete, it you care). This will be a mirror for my first 500 GB hard drive. Total drive space reported by Computer Management: 1,080.3 MB. It is interesting to note that the total drive spaced attached to my PC is 1,160 MB; the rest just vaporizes due to how Windows handles large drives. Under Linux, the "missing" drive space becomes visible.

But in any case, I now have a laptop with over a full terabyte of formatted disk space. Sweet. My first PC came with an 4.77 MHz CPU, 512 KB RAM, dual 360 KB floppy disk drives, and CGA 4-color graphics rendered in shades of green on a monochrome monitor. There was no sound capability other than some beeps and boops from the PC speakers. Price tag: $3,000+ That was in 1983 or 1984. The laptop I am typing this on is so far beyond that, it seems like violence to the English language to call them both PC's. The cache space alone on one of my new hard drives is over 20 times the total on-line storage on my first PC. And it cost less than $1,000. I love Moore's Law. May it ever reign.

Desegregation

Fred again.

Of course, what he suggests has already been tried. Washington DC has a nearly all-black political leadership, school board, school administration, teaching staff, and student body combined with with one of the highest per-student funding levels in the nation. As noted here previously, all that combines to produce the worst schools in the nation. And we all know it's because us honkies are oppressin' 'em.

Yep.

Speaking of Education....

OK, so I haven't actually posted anything about education in the last few days. But I have been thinking about it a great deal lately as one of the families here have decided to start homeschooling their eldest this fall. Someone else mentioned the Lays of Ancient Rome on Jerry Pournelle's site. I'm in the process of re-reading them for the nth time and still notice connections I hadn't made before. The oddest part of the experience is seeing lines coming out of the hero's mouth that would be right at home in any John Wayne movie. But Roman history is irrelevant to us because they are just a bunch of dead, white men.

Related to that, Scott Adams gives some free career advice. Now here is mine: don't get trapped into the whole "career" crap. I had one. It sucked. Now I don't have one. I'm happy for the first time in decades and the world goes on without me. The US economy hasn't noticed that my income has dropped to one fifth what it was a year ago. Walmart hasn't gone bankrupt and the Dow just stampeded into record territory. Do I have to say it again? Get small, get fast. When the bottom falls out (and it will) the less you have the better off you are.

Security Theater

Sigh.

And yet, I have to strip to my jock to get on a plane because we all know that middle-aged, white, paunchy men blow hundreds of airplanes out of the sky every day.

Anyone want to bet that Phoenix isn't the only airport with holes like this?

Pournelle's Lesson for Today

I know I have posted this before, but as Samuel Johnson said, "We often need reminding even if we do not often need educating." I realized I hadn't thought of this in a while myself when I read it on Jerry's site:

Luke 10:38-42:

Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus' feet, and heard his word.

But Martha was cumbered about with much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me.

And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: but one thing is needful; and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.

The Sons of Martha
Rudyard Kipling

The Sons of Mary seldom bother,
for they have inherited that good part;
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother
of the careful soul and the troubled heart.
And because she lost her temper once,
and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons,
world without end, reprieve, or rest.

It is their care in all the ages
to take the buffet and cushion the shock.
It is their care that the gear engages;
it is their care that the switches lock.
It is their care that the wheels run truly;
it is their care to embark and entrain,
Tally, transport, and deliver duly
the Sons of Mary by land and main.

They say to mountains ``Be ye removèd.''
They say to the lesser floods ``Be dry.''
Under their rods are the rocks reprovèd---
they are not afraid of that which is high.
Then do the hill-tops shake to the summit---
then is the bed of the deep laid bare,
That the Sons of Mary may overcome it,
pleasantly sleeping and unaware.

They finger Death at their gloves' end
where they piece and repiece the living wires.
He rears against the gates they tend:
they feed him hungry behind their fires.
Early at dawn, ere men see clear,
they stumble into his terrible stall,
And hale him forth like a haltered steer,
and goad and turn him till evenfall.

To these from birth is Belief forbidden;
from these till death is Relief afar.
They are concerned with matters hidden---
under the earthline their altars are---
The secret fountains to follow up,
waters withdrawn to restore to the mouth,
And gather the floods as in a cup,
and pour them again at a city's drouth.

They do not preach that their God will rouse them
a little before the nuts work loose.
They do not preach that His Pity allows them
to drop their job when they damn-well choose.
As in the thronged and the lighted ways,
so in the dark and the desert they stand,
Wary and watchful all their days
that their brethren's ways may be long in the land.

Raise ye the stone or cleave the wood
to make a path more fair or flat;
Lo, it is black already with the blood
some Son of Martha spilled for that!
Not as a ladder from earth to Heaven,
not as a witness to any creed,
But simple service simply given
to his own kind in their common need.

And the Sons of Mary smile and are blessèd---
they know the Angels are on their side.
They know in them is the Grace confessèd,
and for them are the Mercies multiplied.
They sit at the feet---they hear the Word---
they see how truly the Promise runs.
They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and---
the Lord He lays it on Martha's Sons!

If you are a Son of Mary, snap out of your blessed sleep long enough to thank all the Sons of Martha around you.

Assignment: how does the above relate to this? Hint: Some of the work performed by Sons of Martha reaches across generations.

What To Do With $27 Million

Well, you can provide clean drinking water for 900,000 people for their entire lives. Or you can build a faux natural history museum that espouses a position that is contrary to all evidence or common sense, and let 6,000 people a day, mostly children, die from a lack of clean drinking water.

Now, which do you suppose is the "Christian" thing to do? And which do you suppose those that consider themselves The Only True Christians (tm) actually did?

I hope Ken Ham and his supporters like it hot. If there is a god, they will spend eternity slowly dying of thirst.

"The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds."

Not much I can think to say other than "Wow!" Take thirty seconds to watch this. The artist/engineer has a website here. I think "eccentric" may be a good term, although it's tough getting a handle on the man behind the machine translations into English. ("Hanging at his cord between to high buildings" is one example where the automated translation had a slight hiccup. But I suppose the point isn't that the bear doesn't dance well, but that it dances at all.)

Nearly a Week

Tomorrow will be the end of my first week in the foundry. So far, so good. I'm not having a problem with the heavy lifting and such. I've already been doing that since we arrived here. What is killing me is the assembly work; lots of bending and manipulating various gauges of copper wire to put in the clappers, build the hangers, etc., grinder and wire wheel work, and drill press work. Fingers, wrists, arms, shoulders, back; all sore from unfamiliar work. But every day gets easier and I'm a little less stiff when I get out of bed. I expect the worse is already over, and in a couple weeks, it will all be routine.

I won't be actually molding bells for a couple more weeks at least. In the meantime, I spend all morning on the grinder/wire wheel, then all afternoon on the drill press and putting the bells together. It is still rather easy to spot my bells; they are the ones with the malformed loops on top and crooked clappers. But they are getting better. My first attempt at assembly had everyone rolling on the ground; now it's just a stifled giggle and a "not bad."

I also had some more EWWWW GROSS! pictures. This time it was a giant desert centipede. It was only 6 or 7 inches long, not the foot-long they can get to. Way creepier than the tarantula. But I don't have any good pictures of it, because it had been captured in a clear plastic container. No matter what I did, the pictures only show my camera's reflection in the plastic instead of the centipede. In any case, the picture at the above link looks exactly like it and is approximately the same length.

Oh, and if you are interested, it was found cruising the women's bathroom, not outside like the tarantula. Anyone like to come out for a visit?

First Day in the Foundry

Today was my first day in the foundry. I've learned several important things already:

1. Bronze is heavy.
2. Molten bronze is really hot.
3. The little chunks of bronze that fly off the grinding wheel leave neat little holes in skin.
3. A wire wheel turning at several thousand rpm is an effective way to remove fingerprints.
4. Foundry sand gets everywhere.

So far, so good. Best of all, I don't have to worry about being accosted every time I walk out of our room to fix some problem, which more often than not is the result of either poor design, poor execution, or both. Now I just smile and tell them to call maintenance. Which is not me.

Worst Schools in the Country

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If the moral defectives in Washington DC want me to give any credence to anything they say, then they can clean up their own back yard.

What frightens me is that it seems we are destined to turn 15% of the nation's economy over to these fools in the form of a national health care plan.

Douglas Adams on Intelligent Design

My favorite Douglas Adams quote:

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.

Not that Intelligent Design will disappear any time soon as long as they have millions pouring in from Christian Reconstructionist Howard Ahmanson, but one can always dream. (You do know about these guys, right? The ones that want to take over our government, execute all the queers, Jews, Commies, and other undesirables? By stoning, of course.)

"It's alive!!! It's alive, it's alive, it's alive!"

I have sound on my laptop. I have no idea why. Of course, I have no idea why it ever stopped, so the symmetry of the universe is intact.

The time I've spent working with the various flavors of Ubuntu linux has been interesting. The Kubuntu installer ignores where you tell it to install and sticks you in an infinite loop until you let it have its way. Xubuntu seems to work the best, but the interface is pretty primitive. Ubuntu I haven't tried, but I've been told that ex-Windows users generally hate it. In any case, the emergency is over so I can take some time to play with all of them. I now have a 50G partition on the main drive of my laptop that is just for linux. None of this has changed my opinion of linux and unix in general; it is a guru full-employment product. I know a lot about systems, but unfortunately, all the wrong ones having spent my formative years on IBM mid-range systems (System 34/36/38/AS-400 for anyone who cares). So I missed to whole unix thing and now I find myself helpless. OS-X is a possibility, and it still may be the best option for me if I don't want to spend the rest of my life on the web trying to figure out what the hell a mount point is or why Xubuntu can't find USB drives or why Kubuntu thinks my Western Digital USB drive is a digital camera and keeps nattering at me to download my photos. But while Apple's DRM is less obnoxious than Microsoft's, it is still telling me what I can and cannot do with my own damn data. And Apple requires a full commitment, heart and soul to The Apple Way and all that implies. But I do have to give it to Apple; they have made a killer OS that is miles beyond anything coming out of Redmond.

Speaking of USB hard drives, I picked up a new toy while we were kicking around in town Wednesday for dentist and doctor appointments. Bob Thompson mentioned that Antec, who makes some of the best computer cases in the industry, recently began shipping an external hard drive enclosure that makes any internal SATA drive into a USB 2.0 drive. Well I now have one with a 500GB Seagate drive spinning away inside it. It is the backup point for my massive xcopy jobs that take a snapshot of my entire Documents and Settings folder on the laptop and my entire Western Digital USB drive, and a home for my movie rips. I mentioned a while back we drank the red Kool-Aid and signed up for Netflix's one-movie-at-a-time, unlimited-movies-a-month option. To speed turn-around, as soon as a movie shows up in the mail, I have been ripping it to the laptop's internal 100GB drive and sending it back the next morning. Then we watch it whenever we get A Round Toit (tm). It didn't take long at 6-7GB per movie to deplete the laptop's hard drive. So I now have a laptop with a total of 660GB of hard drive space (100GB internal, 60GB Western Digital, 500GB Seagate/Antec). This weekend, I'm going back to Best Buy to pick up a second enclosure and 500GB Seagate, so I will have more than one terabyte of online storage for my laptop.

(And in case you think this retched excess, 500GB is only about 70-75 movies, or about one year of movie rentals at our current pace, and the second 500GB drive will be a mirror for the first. I know of nothing else that I can back up that much data to other than another hard drive. I could go to tape backup, but I've never had any luck with PC-connected tape drives.)

Expendable

This is classic geek, all the way.

Gotta get me one of those....

More Windows vs. Linux Issues

I swore many years ago that Win2K would be the last Microsoft product I would own. Then the Big Move came. If Debbie was to continue her employment as an outside agent she had to have a computer with WinXP. No other option was supported by the IS department. So off we go to Best Buy to pick up a cheap laptop with WinXP Pro (Toshiba Satellite). Debbie ended up employed out here and dropped her affiliation with the travel agency back in Michigan, leaving us with a somewhat-unwanted WinXP laptop. But it just worked.

At least until a couple weeks ago.

I have no idea what created the problem, or even if it has only a single cause. But our computer has become increasingly unstable with periodic crashes of Windows Explorer, software refusing to load unless we reboot first, error messages from XP complaining about applications that aren't even running, etc.

But the latest is the killer: we lost all audio. The software runs like there is no problem, but nothing we can think to do will cause a sound to come out of our PC. This is all audio from all applications including Windows system sounds. Neither the internal sound card and integrated speakers nor the USB dongle that allows us to connect the laptop to our stereo will utter the merest of a peep, pop, or click.

So I'm back shopping around the Linux world. Again. Everyone swears that Ubuntu is Just Like Windows and while the setup requires some technical skill, the day-to-day operation is as easy or easier than Windows. Of course these same people swore the same thing about Xandros, which was about 90% true. The problem is that last 10%; it contained two of the five functions I use a PC for (watching/ripping DVD's and listening to/ripping CD's; the other functions are web use with full support for AJAX and other Web 2.0 content, pulling photos from my digital camera, editing them, and posting them on Flickr). Then Xandros seems to have gone to the dark side.

So now I'm looking at the different flavors of Ubuntu. Xubuntu is very lightweight but seems to have a primitive interface. I'm also concerned about what is left out. Kubuntu is supposed to be the preferred home for ex-Windows users. The nice thing is that I can download ISO images for the Live CD of each version, boot my laptop from the CD, and poke around a bit without committing to a full install. I've already tried Xubuntu, and will take a look at Kubuntu tonight assuming the IS gods cast a smile my way.

Anyway, more when I know more.

Meanwhile, over at Redmond, Microsoft seems to not be doing well without Bill at the controls. Vista was years late, shipped stripped of its most-touted features, and now even the most die-hard Microsoft users are telling people to wait for SP-1, which will be out sometime next year. If the Linux camp can improve as much in the next 12 months as it has in the last 12, will anyone bother?

First Post from the New Me

Like most people on the internet, I accumulate identities the way a Louisiana windshield accumulates bug guts. Through some accident of history (or, more likely my increasing forgetfulness) I wound up with two Google ID's; one that owns this site, and a different one that contains pretty much the rest of my life. As Google takes over more and more of the universe, this split personality has been getting progressively more irritating until I finally decided to take action. I have now invited myself to be a contributor to my own blog. No one should notice any difference, which is certainly no guarantee there won't be. But the process was somewhat disturbing in retrospect:

1. Log into Google/Blogger as me.
2. Invite my other me to be a contributor.
3. Log into Yahoo! Mail as my other-other me to acknowledge my invitation to myself.
4. Realize I'm still logged into Google as me.
5. Log me out of Google.
6. Log my other me into Google.
7. Acknowledge my invitation to myself to post on my own blog.
8. Log back out of Google as my other me and back into Google as me.
9. Go into the Blogger administrative tools to give my other me admin rights to my own blog.
10. Sit quietly for 10 minutes so my head doesn't explode.

Am I the only one having these issues?

EEEEEEEEK!!!!!

A friend came to visit last night while we were sitting outside. The monsoon had knocked out the power, so a group of residents were hanging around behind our residence trying to cool off. Someone happened to look up the wall we were leaning against and noticed something hairy. Given that we have a lot of Italians around here, that wasn't too surprising, but it had too many legs.




This is the third tarantula we've seen here, but it was also the largest one. It still isn't a big one, but big enough. Debbie also got to see her first scorpion last night. I run across them every day handling building materials and such at work, but before last night, all Debbie has seen was a couple smashed ones on the sidewalks.

I See Stupid People

When a stupid person is doing something he knows is stupid, he will always, always, insist that he is just following orders.

I've been saying for years that moral defectives and morons run our public schools. This is just one more example. Why would any parent with any concern about the well-being of their children put them in the charge of people like this? And if you tell me your public school doesn't subscribe to such stupidity, my response is that you are simply uninformed.

Freaking Out

I just read on Wil Wheaton's blog that he was in Stand by Me. I never knew that. I've seen that movie about a dozen times, as well as every episode of ST-TNG at least as many times, and never connected geeky little Wesley Crusher with geeky little Gordie.

And according to his mini-bio on IMDB, he was in one of those Bill Cosby Jell-O Pudding Pops commercials. And his parents names' are Rick and Debbie.

OK, now all the hair on the back of my neck is standing up. Too weird.

A Fourth of July Message

OK, so I'm 24 hours late. Sue me.



Good luck and good night, indeed.

Publishing in 2007

I just stumbled across lulu.com. I'm sure this is old news to a lot of people, but I found it very interesting in two senses. First, it is interesting as in exciting. A cheap way for anyone to self-publish most anything without a sizable investment in potential paperweights (everything is print-on-demand). I see this site and others like it as a huge benefit to schools publishing yearbooks, for example. I was on the yearbook staff my junior and senior years in high school. Something like this would have saved untold hours of work, saved the school hundreds of dollars, and resulted in a far better product.

I also find it interesting as in the Chinese curse. Editors and publishers serve a valuable filtering function. If you want to see what the world of the written word looks like without that filter, spend some time on Blogger. I think it is safe to say that the quality of the writing is somewhat... er... uneven. But all I waste on Blogger is my time. On lulu.com, I'd be wasting my time and my money to find out that a really interesting-sounding author is a worse writer than the typical middle-school blogger. Yes, it is true that the publishing industry misuses its filter function to suppress dissenting viewpoints, without which a republic cannot survive. But a lot of what lands on an editors desk just plain sucks. I suspect some time on lulu.com would easily confirm that statement.

Having said all that, I just bought a book from lulu.com. I know the author and his work from other sources (Flickr), so I feel reasonably safe that I didn't just throw $25 down a rat hole.

May we live in interesting times.

From Pool Boy to Bell Boy

On July 16, I start working in the foundry making bronze bells. And just in time. I expect the next seven work days to be the longest I have ever endured. Either it's just the heat, or there is a small group of people here that are just trying to piss me off. I was going to work in bakery tonight doing some painting so it wouldn't have to be closed tomorrow, but the manager pissed me off so bad that I'm not going to bother. Tomorrow I only work a half-day in maintenance because I do tours in the afternoon, and Friday I'll be in the foundry for my orientation day (basically wandering around in the foundry watching other people work). So maybe I'll get to it before I leave maintenance, maybe I won't. Right now I could care less if it ever gets done. I have other projects that are more important anyway, so I will be spending my time in maintenance working on those.

Once I'm in the foundry, I will be going to work, then going straight to my apartment. I am now here for one reason and one reason only; learn how to do stuff I would never have a chance to learn any other way. Once I have milked this place for all I can, we leave.

Jerry Pournelle invented what he calls Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

The stated goal of Arcosanti is to build a test arcology for 5,000 residents. Those who share that goal, assuming they ever existed, seem to be very thin on the ground and are completely missing from the ranks of anyone who makes decisions. This place is a lot like a certain Baptist church in northern Michigan I could name, including the group of key participants who publicly state that they will leave if the organization ever grows much above 100.

"'Bout Time, Ya Bum"

I finally got it into gear and got Tristan's open house pictures on our Flickr page.

Hey; I might be slow, but I'm... er... OK, fine. I'm just slow.

Addressing the Hard Questions

Here is a basic outline of a 25-sermon series. No tilting at straw men. No circular logic. No arguments from authority. No argumentum ad hominem. Honestly engage those you disagree with rather than dismissing them out of hand because their conclusions make you or your congregation uncomfortable. If anyone wants to take this on, be prepared for a couple year's worth of reading just to cover the sources used by the author.

Any takers?



The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

— Mark Twain

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY

Happy 4th to everyone!

We are going to try to find the place where they do fireworks tonite in Prescott Valley -- it will be interesting to see fireworks out here -- not over water and with the mountains/mesas in the background. We are hoping they don't cancel them due to very high fire danger. We haven't had any rain to speak of for a very long time.

Beware of Red Shirts

Every Trekkie knows that a red shirt is the kiss of death. Wil Wheaton pulls some red shirt stats from Wikipedia. I agree with one of Wil's commentors; 74 red-shirt deaths feels too low. It seems like red shirts dropped like flies. Of course the most popular reruns are probably the episodes with one or more red-shirt deaths.

(And just to point out the obvious: if you know what I'm talking about, you are dangerously close to being a geek. If you can quote the entire scene the quote in Wil's blog post title comes from, you are a geek.)

(And yes, I can.)

What We Know, What We Don't Know.

Uncle Al has called for the end of distorting and making up facts to supports ones position. Tell you what, Al; you go first.

And yet another example of how vast our ignorance of the climate is. But we must Do Something, even if Something is financially ruinous and does little or nothing to fix a problem that may not even exist.

It's for the children, you know.

The Plague of Diversity

Fred notices it. So does at least one black woman.

But diversity is a great thing, at least according to our over-lords. For some reason, I'm not entirely convinced, but saying so would earn me the dreaded "racist" label.

Human Stupidity Causes Global Warming

Not in the way Uncle Al would like us to believe, but because of this. Compare the temperature graphs of these sites with the Orland, CA site on the home page. Notice anything odd? Which of these two categories do you suppose the majority of weather stations in the third world fall into?

Do you suppose that before we Just Do Something, we should figure out exactly what is happening and what it is that we think we are preventing?

Nah. Uncle Al is right. Better to jump all over Kyoto which will destroy the Western economy while exempting the 1/4 of the world's population that lives in China.

Someone at the RIAA Needs to be Kneecapped

I don't care how much is being lost by music "piracy," this is simply unacceptable.

This is another one of those tests I keep yapping about. Due to the fact that stupidity like this has been going on for years, I don't hold out much hope of our passing it.