John is back

Xenia’s boyfriend just came home on leave from his army training. Xenia has been anxiously awaiting his return after not seen him for months.

After saying, “Hi.” The first thing I asked him if he brought any hand grenades back for me. Alas, he says access is restricted.

Scott Amos–Eagle Scout

My nephew, Scott Amos, became an Eagle Scout today. We just got back from the ceremony. His name was engraved on a plaque that is kept in the local church. His was the 13th name on the plaque. The first one had the date of 1983. There have been just 13 Eagle Scouts in the town of Potlatch Idaho in the last 23 years.

I was surprised at how big a deal it was. The mayor was there, a city councilman, and our State Representative, Shirley Ringo. He got letters of congratulation from our U.S. Representative Butch Otter, our U.S. Senator Larry Craig, our Governor Jim Risch, Vice President Dick Cheney, and President George Bush.

Congratulations to Scott for acceptance into such an elite group.

Xenia took lots of pictures and I expect I’ll be getting one to put up with this post later today.

A gentle reminder

I don’t help people make bombs (exception given to the U.S. Military should they ask but that is exceedingly unlikely). And I don’t help idiots make explosives.

A case in point:

From: Andrewball20@aol.com
Sent: Saturday, September 30, 2006 5:48 AM
To: blog@joehuffman.org
Subject: Comments on: The View From North Central Idaho

i want 2 get some hydrogen peroxide beacause can u send me some and how much will it cost i live in england by the way.

Hydrogen peroxide is used for many things. But if someone doesn’t know where to get it then almost for certain they want it for making explosives. Otherwise they would go to a retailer that specializes in that particular legitimate use and ask for the substance that performed the function they wanted accomplished. For example you would get acetone for removing paint at the paint store and ask for “paint remover”. Or you would get acetone from the cosmetic department of the drug store by asking for fingernail polish remover.

And why else would he find me (actually boomershoot.org/general/bombhelp.htm and then to blog.joehuffman.org) via this google query:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=how+to+make+a+bomb

My response to this idiot:

From: Joe Huffman
Sent: Saturday, September 30, 2006 6:42 AM
To: ‘Andrewball20@aol.com’
Subject: RE: Comments on: The View From North Central Idaho

 
In particular this link should be of use to you: http://nobombs.net/brucel/explosivegraphics.html
 
And as near as I can tell you don’t live in England. You probably sent this message from NYC and certainly from within the U.S.
 
And furthermore if you can’t figure out how to get hydrogen peroxide on your own you are far too stupid to know how to build explosives without hurting some innocent person. I wouldn’t worry about you getting a Darwin Award but hurting innocent people I do worry about.
 
-joe-

I may be wrong about him being from NYC. His email appears to have come from a dialup in NYC. His browsing appears to come in from the U.K.

Quote of the day–‘Mike’ at GunGuys.com

Giving a friend or neighbor a firearm doesn’t help them– it puts them in danger. And re-releasing a firearm into the community instead of destroying it is, as Shaw rightly realizes, asking for trouble.

‘Mike’ at GunGuys.com
September 29, 2006
Gun Owner Can’t Get Rid of an Unwanted Gun
[One could surmise from this nut case that the gun, a bolt action .22 rifle, was caught in a trap while on the prowl for a victim. He uses language that would be more appropriate for a live rattlesnake than an inanimate object made of metal and wood. Either ‘Mike’ has mental problems or he is actually on our side and is mocking the anti-gun bigots.–Joe]

Trap and Skeet are *so* 20th century

From Sean and Wendell.

Sean says, “In the spirit of Boomershoot Adventures…”

Skeet shooting has been replaced.

I’m amazed by his excellent aim shooting the shotgun from the hip and what appears to be without sights with the machine gun.

Now if those cars had been filled with Boomerite…

I’ve had several requests to blow up cars but people always lost interest when I told them they would have to help clean up the mess.

Testing Boomershoot shooting position selection

I’m working on the web page(s) for reserving a Boomershoot 2007 shooting position. You can see it here. For test purposes only at this time. Let me know what you think.

The pictures were taken March of 2006 on a rather “gray” day. During the actual event the grass is green even if it’s snowing, you have 40 MPH winds, and the forecast is looking up because they are only predicting 20 MPH winds and rain.

Actually, some times it’s beautiful (from Ry, click on the picture for the video):

Now, isn’t that beautiful? One of my favorite quotes says it so well:

I don’t know why everyone does not share my delight with explosives. If they don’t, it has to be some abhorrent character defect.

Ragnar Benson
From: Ragnar’s Guide to Home and Recreational Use of High Explosives
Page 110, Copyright 1988.

Quote of the day–Alan Gottlieb

The time is overdue for a reassessment of such laws. All they have done is create target-rich, no-risk environments for monsters who have no fear of encountering an armed teacher or administrator, or a legally-armed private citizen who might happen to be in the building.

This sort of thing didn’t happen before the advent of gun-free school zone laws. You never saw such an outrage in the days when high schools typically had rifle teams, and — particularly in the West — where it was common in the fall to find both teachers and students with hunting rifles or shotguns locked in their cars.

Alan Gottlieb
Chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms
CO. ATTACK PROVES FALLACY OF ‘GUN FREE SCHOOL ZONE’ LAWS, SAYS CCRKBA
September 28, 2006

Barrett sales propaganda

Actually it is a Discovery Channel piece that I was pointed to by the anti gun bigot at “Freedom State Alliance”. This time I actually mostly agree with him when he says:

This shocking video might be the best demonstration of the lethality and power of the .50-caliber sniper rifle – YOU SIMPLY MUST WATCH IT.

Drop the words “shocking” and “YOU SIMPLY MUST” and we’ve come to agreement.

There is some false/misleading information in the video however. Bolt action rifles don’t take 15 to 20 seconds to cycle. And the AK round is seldom referred to as “308”.

Quote of the day–Daryl Metcalfe

Liberal gun-grabbing legislation is going to go down here… . And I’m going to continue to stand with some of my colleagues and reference those hundreds of thousands of Second Amendment supporters that want the gun-grabbing legislation to go down.

Daryl Metcalfe
Pennsylvania State Representative 
September 27, 2006
Mostly, a miss on gun control
The Philadelphia Enquirer September 28, 2006
[This particular gun grabbing special event attracted a lot of attention outside the state as well as inside. It’s good to see the anti-gun bigots stopped.–Joe]

Just like ‘no coloreds allowed’

The Utah Supreme court:

In the decision, the court ruled a University of Utah policy prohibiting students, faculty and staff from carrying weapons on campus violated Utah’s Uniform Firearms Act. The law, enacted in 2004, prevents any state entity from creating a rule which in “any way inhibits or restricts the possession or use of firearms on either public or private property,” according to the ruling.

So what are the schools doing?

Paul Murphy, spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, said the policies at both Weber State and USU raise legal concerns in light of the court’s recent ruling.

“Right now, the law is very clear that only the legislature can make laws concerning firearms,” Murphy said. “And if they [state schools] are out of sync with that, they will have to make changes.”

So far, however, USU and Weber State have no plans to permanently change their gun policies.

“I haven’t heard anything on our campus about making a change to this policy [prohibiting firearms],” said Travis Hampshire, a human resources generalist at Weber State. “I imagine if this was brought up to the president, they would look into it.”

“Look into it”? Yeah, right. They are going to do their best to ignore it and if necessary fight it every inch of the way. It’s just like 50 years ago with signs that said “no colored people allowed”. These bigots are defying the law, denying people their inalienable rights, and should be prosecuted, fined, and jailed under 18 USC 242.

Quad-core processors

When the Intel 386 came out tech pundits joked about the computers could then wait faster for the next keystroke while running your word processing program. But Bill Gates told the world that no matter how fast the computers were that Microsoft would be able to write software that would bring them to their knees. He wasn’t joking but I’m pretty sure it didn’t come out quite like he intended it.

The 386 ran at something like 15 to 25 MHz and required a separate math co-processor in order to compute the sum of two floating point numbers in anything less than dozens of clock cycles. Trig functions, square roots, or logarithms were hundreds of clock cycles without the co-processor.

Now Intel has announced quad-core processors with more cores on the way:

Intel will deliver the company’s first quad-core processors for high-performance PCs and servers in November, getting the jump on rival AMD in providing the next generation of chips designed to deliver the power needed to handle high-definition video, cutting-edge games, and math-intensive number-crunching.

Intel officials already have indicated that chips with dozens of cores might be possible by the end of this decade. The company hinted that, 10 years down the line, chips with hundreds of cores might be possible.

Mark Margevicius, a research director at Gartner, said that the move from single- to dual-core processors broke the barrier to such developments. “We’re now in a multicore world,” he said in a recent interview. “There’s no looking back.”

One of these quad-core processors can do more hard core (pardon the pun) math computing in a second than my first 386 could in five hours. Now I just have to write applications than can put that processing power to useful work.

Germans Retreat in Fear of Islamo-Nazis

A mere 70 some years after many Jews no doubt told each other, “Careful not to piss off the Nazis.  It might antagonize them” we see the German government ceding to the Jihadis’ wishes.  No doubt this will be a big help in bringing “Peace In Our Time”.

Mozart’s Idomeneo, re di Creta (K. 366) was written in 1780, and premiered in Munich in 1781.  225 years later, it has become politically incorrect– apparently banned in Germany until further notice.  My! How we have progressed.

LONDON (Reuters)
Berlin security officials had warned that staging the opera “Idomeneo” would pose an “incalculable security risk.”

The controversy centered on a scene in which King Idomeneo is shown on stage with the severed heads of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad and the sea god Poseidon.

This Mozart was an unusual fellow.  Here’s a background of the offending opera.  You can see it performed for yourself, or arrange a community showing.

On a slightly interesting side note;  Mozart died in December of 1791– the same month in which our United States Bill of Rights was ratified.  Both, it seems, are unpopular today among idiots.

Quote of the day–Ross Perot

Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.

Ross Perot
[I was thinking of Jeff Cooper when I selected this quote. He did both.–Joe]

British sex archives

At first glance at the newspaper version I was only surprised by one statistic; “one in five men had homosexual experiences”. That seems a little bit high but it would depend on the exact question asked. Other bits of information include:

“Materials in our archive range from holiday makers enjoying themselves on the beach at Blackpool to the experiences of the Second World War when many people, fearing they may not survive the war, were more sexually active,” she said.

Despite the taboos of the time, the 1949 sex survey, originally meant for national newspapers but never published due to its content, found one in five men had homosexual experiences and a quarter admitted to having sex with prostitutes. One in five women confessed to extra-marital affairs.

Alan Crosby, a historian at Liverpool University, said the archives also show how attitudes to sex crimes have changed.

“Sexual offences in the past were recognized as serious crimes, just as they are today,” he said, but the punishment system was very different.

Documents detail how a man convicted of a sex crime in northern English town in 1630 was punished by being paraded through the streets and humiliated in front of fellow citizens.

Posted in Sex

Shaped charges

When I casually think of an explosion I think of a rapidly expanding sphere of gases. It turns out this is rarely the case. An explosion propagates from the point of detonation along a (typically expanding) “front”. Because the pressure at the front is much greater than both ahead and behind it the gases produced, which are behind the front, expand in a direction away from the front. This video from Ry demonstrates that. The exploding targets are 7″ x 7″ x 1.375″. The gases expand into the axis parallel to the 1.375″ dimension. Until this video we did not realize this.

Whatever shape of the explosive and whereever the point(s) of detonation are affects the directions of the explosion. This is used to great effect in the Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) which can, with a rather small amount of explosives, penetrate over 30 inches of renenforced concrete, or a foot of steel.

Boomershoot reminiscing

Ry gives us video from one of our tests for Boomershoot 2003–Project Fireball. And contrary to what Ry says at the end of the video it did tell us what we wanted to know. I just hadn’t told Ry the entirety of my test plan prior to pulling the trigger. It went like this:

The first target used diesel instead of gasoline for the fireball fuel. It’s safer to work with and has more energy per unit volume. We thought maybe it would work. It didn’t ignite. The second target used “farm gas” which no road tax had been paid. It was cheaper than the gas we got at the Moscow gas station and was the second choice for a fuel. It worked and hence it was what we used. The third and I think fourth targets were both the 10% ethanol gas that we had purchased from the Moscow gas station and had done all our previous development with. We didn’t know if the 10% ethanol was a critical component of our success and needed to know so dozens of shooters wouldn’t be disappointed (they weren’t).

What Ry was concerned about was that once a successful ignition occurred all the following ones were guaranteed. True, but once one of them ignited that was the one we were going to use. Had I shot them in a different order then it would have invalidated the tests and Ry would have been correct. 

The U.S. Attorney General’s homework

For those of you who think Second Amendment cases can’t be won in court don’t forget that the U.S. Attorney Generals office has commented on the Second Amendment. They concluded:

For the foregoing reasons, we conclude that the Second Amendment secures an individual right to keep and to bear arms. Current case law leaves open and unsettled the question of whose right is secured by the Amendment. Although we do not address the scope of the right, our examination of the original meaning of the Amendment provides extensive reasons to conclude that the Second Amendment secures an individual right, and no persuasive basis for either the collective-right or quasi-collective-right views. The text of the Amendment’s operative clause, setting out a “right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” is clear and is reinforced by the Constitution’s structure. The Amendment’s prefatory clause, properly understood, is fully consistent with this interpretation. The broader history of the Anglo-American right of individuals to have and use arms, from England’s Revolution of 1688-1689 to the ratification of the Second Amendment a hundred years later, leads to the same conclusion. Finally, the first hundred years of interpretations of the Amendment, and especially the commentaries and case law in the pre-Civil War period closest to the Amendment’s ratification, confirm what the text and history of the Second Amendment require.

Of course we can’t “take this to bank” but in the right circumstances it can be very useful to help “cash in” on the overconfidence of the anti-gun bigots. Look around for an appropriate application.