Category Archives: Technology

Quote of the day—Béla Nagy, et al

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A combination of an exponential decrease in cost and an exponential increase in production would make Moore’s law and Wright’s law indistinguishable, as originally pointed out by Sahal. We show for the first time that these regularities are observed in data to such a degree that the performance of these two laws is nearly the same. Our results show that technological progress is forecastable, with the square root of the logarithmic error growing linearly with the forecasting horizon at a typical rate of 2.5% per year. These results have implications for theories of technological change, and assessments of candidate technologies and policies for climate change mitigation.

Béla Nagy
J. Doyne Farmer
Quan M. Bui
Jessika E. Trancik
2012
Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress
[I have two observations.

One; This is awesome! A variation of Moore’s Law applies to, apparently, all technology.

Two; It looks as if they had to make a tie in “climate change” to get National Science Foundation grant money. That’s really messed up. Government grants should not exist. The politics of research should succeed or fail using the money of someone other than that taken by gunpoint via taxes.—Joe]

What we KNOW…. that isn’t true

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Mark Twain said: It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” I’ve seen a lot of examples of this in my life, and heard of more. I’m sure you have too. In fact, in installment 002 of “The Stars Came Back” Helton points out that a lot of time the so-called experts have really BAD plans, and that you can’t tell what the outcome of a lot of projects will be based on the credentials of the people starting it.(He is specifically talking about climate science, in fact)

The Climate debate is no different. There is a LOT of garbage out there (and I say this a a teacher with a cert that includes “Earth Science;” I’m in the “CO2 is plant food” camp) Then, along comes something from out of the dry fields that takes on directly one of those “common knowledge, common sense” things directly, and says, “We were wrong. The solution we have been pushing for decades is CAUSING the problem!” It takes some good sized balls, and a dose of humility the size of a Hollywood celeb’s coke habit, to make an admission like that. More so to take that fact, and a much better DEMONSTRATED solution, on the road.

We all know over-grazing causes land to turn into deserts, right?

Maybe not. Maybe the solution to desertification is to put MORE beef in the fields, and on the grill. It’s a win-win-win-win, meaning the lefties will HATE it, and fight it tooth and nail. But the guy makes a good case.

More on phonetics

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As often happens, I was talking to a customer over a poor cellular connection today. We have to exchange a lot of data to complete an order. He’s spelling the name of his street.

“Wait; that’s A, T, T as in alpha tango tango?” I say to confirm.
“No, it’s hotel echo papa”
“Wow!” I said “I really got that wrong” and I’m thinking to myself, “Bam! We’re home free– this guy knows standard phonetics.” Without it, we’d have had a hell of a frustrating time.

So, Young Grasshopper; learn your Standard Phonetics.

I’m still amazed and disgusted that most cop shops have their own systems, which makes it more difficult because for one, they don’t always use words that all sound completely different from one another, and too, if you know Standard Phonetics, their retarded cop phonetics don’t sound familiar and it therefore takes longer to comunicate. Moron phonetics.

Learning the standard system is easy. There are only twenty six of them, and as it happens, each one starts with a different letter of the alphabet (fancy that) so it’s really easy. It’s an international system, and most pilots, military and ham operators already know it hands down. Whaterya waitin’ for?

Practice. For example, if I look to my left on my desk, I can read off in my mind, “Hotel Papa…Delta echo sierra kilo julliette echo tango.” Stuff like that. Road signs, what have you. This should be taught in school, except for the fact that kids should know it before they get to school.

On a similar note; use text on your phone when the signal is too poor to use the more bandwidth-hogging voice communication. If you have only one bar on the s-meter it still works like a charm whereas vioce communication is two steps below impossible. I explained that to my daughter a while back, and was surprized that she hadn’t thought of it. I’d though it would have been obvious even to a teen-aged school girl– a few dew drops of bits verses a tsunami/torrent of bits, you know.

Charge imbalance

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WP_000525_2Web2013

The contents of the cottage cheese container is Boomerite surrounding a cardboard tube containing glass frit around a copper bar. The bottom of the cardboard tube makes contact with the bottom of the cottage cheese container.

Take a guess which direction the bar will travel when the Boomerite detonates.

IMG_3965Web2013

If you guessed slightly up and to the right you would be correct. See the red circle in the picture above.

The backstory is that Ry was trying to make a piece of art. It was mostly a failure.

IMG_3979Corrected

Next time it will be a five gallon bucket instead of a three pound cottage cheese container. Oh, and we will be about 250 yards away so Ry won’t have to worry about it coming out of orbit on top of him.

IMG_3977Corrected

It’s linear but does it scale?

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Paraphrasing Ry as we discuss the fireball for Boomershoot 2013:

One pound explosives one gallon gasoline, no problem. 14 pounds explosives, 14 gallons gasoline no problem. The gasoline is damping the explosion and it’s not breaking any windows. It’s linear! So, 1000 pounds of explosives and 1000 gallons of gasoline should be fine. Right? What could go wrong?

As Barb L. said when Ry and I were leaving for Idaho, “I suspect that you and Ry together equal trouble, sort of like Ruth and me together equal trouble. And it is Superbowl weekend again.

Ry has a history with Superbowl weekend.

Kelvin-Helmholtz Waves

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Or KH waves, or a KH instability. It’s a result of two distinct layers in a fluid traveling at different velocities. You’ll see it in rivers and streams, between bands in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, in your coffee cup, etc. In this case it’s made visible by the bottom layer being cloud, interacting with a clear layer above. The wave pattern extends from one side of the photo to the other. I had to darken the image a lot to bring out the detail. Through my polarizing glasses the waves could be seen curling in on themselves more dramatically. For really good detail in sky photos you need a polarizer, and probably a UV filter too, but my little point-and-shoot isn’t set up for such things. These KH waves are over the Clearwater River canyon above Lewiston, Idaho, seen from the south end of Moscow on my way to work the other day.

Kelvin-HelmholtzWaves

It isn’t complicated

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We occasionally get someone who wants to submit an idea for a new product. They’ll want us to evaluate it in hopes that we will help manufacture and market it for them.

Here’s the deal. If it happens to be something we’re already thinking about, I most certainly do NOT want to even know what you have. You can figure out why.

Somehow there has come to be this strange attitude, or belief, that if you’re a “little guy” with scant resources, that you must tug on someone else’s coat tails and convince them to “give you a chance” otherwise you have no chance.

It doesn’t work that way, or rather it certainly doesn’t need to work that way. If you have a little gizmo you want to turn into money, start searching for companies that do machining, or injection mold building, or casting, or whatever type of manufacturing you need, contact them, get some quotes for a few hundred or a thousand units. There are small shops that do these things in practically every town larger than a mere whistle stop. Many of them will not want to talk to you about such small numbers, but some will. Keep at it. Register yourself a domain name, take some nice photos, build a simple web site and get a web host for it, place a cheap ad in Shotgun News or what have you, and BAM! You’re in business. Just like that. What’s stopping you?

It probably will not cost more than the annual or twice annual beer and cigarette expense for the average, unemployed trailer park dweller. The rest is leg-work– finding people who can provide the specific services you need, and so I think that if you’re not willing to give yourself a chance, why should someone else give you that chance? Hmm? You won’t go out on a limb for your idea, but you want me to go out on a limb for your idea?

Supremacy clause

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An email exchange with lawyer/lobbyist Mike B. (with minor corrections and additions):

Joe: How about putting this on the agenda?
Mike: Won’t work: See supremacy clause.
Joe: Isn’t that the equivalent of saying, “The Fed can’t do that: See 2nd Amendment.”?
Mike: The 2nd Amendment doesn’t have its own tanks. See: Grant v. Lee (1865).
Joe: Vyacheslav Molotov mixes my cocktails: See Finland v. Soviet Union (1939).

You should know that Molotov cocktails have a difficult time with modern tanks. The proper application of Boomerite, thermite, and steel bars into the treads may also be required.

Conversations with special forces trained in improvised anti-tank methods are also useful. I kept my notes from the late 1990s.

Why there is no cell service in Westlake tunnel

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It has always annoyed me that I don’t have cell service while waiting for the bus at Westlake Station (downtown Seattle). Many times the bus or I will be late and I need to tell someone I’m not going to be on time but I have to wait until the bus arrives and gets me out of the tunnel. Or I could leave the tunnel on my own and risk missing the bus and being even later.

Yes, it’s in a tunnel 80 (?) feet underground but I put in my own microcell in the middle of a field in Idaho something like 30 miles from the nearest cell tower and have good service for myself and my Boomershoot “customers” using AT&T. Why couldn’t the cell companies get service 80 feet?

Now I know the answer:

The reason you don’t have cell coverage in Westlake Station is because the Three Stooges refused to allow the carriers to ride on the radio system without paying substantial fees for the privilege. Verizon, T-Mobil, Sprint, et al gave a collective “Eff You” to the Stooges when they demanded the fees, and now the populace is denied cell coverage.

Governments don’t have customers to make happy. They have subjects.

Careful with the whole stats argument…thing

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 We like to toss out statistics that bolster the pro second amendment position.  That’s something of an oxymoron, really.  I’ve done my share of it, certainly.

For example, there is the decline in our murder rate as gun ownership has gone up.  That’s nice and all, but I heard the other night that if our medical and response training and technology were that of the 1960s, our murder rate would be three times what it is today.  A person must actually die, you see, before it’s actually murder.  I haven’t looked it up (that’s your job – I’m not your servant) but it certainly sounded plausible.  If it’s true, then it means that there is in fact much more violence, but that yet more lives are being saved.  Gun owners couldn’t very well take credit for that.

I’ve been harping on this stats issue, and probably pissing off some people.  It may seem like a subtle point to some, but if so it is a subtle point of crucial importance.

Like Tam said, and I paraphrase; “Even if every other gun owner on the planet tried to kill someone last night; I didn’t, so leave me alone!”

And that’s really it, isn’t it?  As the story goes, Sodom and Gomorrah would have been spared for just one righteous person.

The concept of a right is a purely moral concept, and if you can find where the Bill of Rights was to be dependent on statistics, I’d like you to show me.

The communists hate the concept of unalienable rights, and will use stats as a way of changing the subject– of completely reframing the conversation.  I call them “tweakers” because all they care about is tweaking this and tweaking that, using the force of government ostensibly to get some predicted result in the statistics.

That’s a communist premise, and it stinks right from the get go.  It puts us into disparate groups, each being ruled according to its status.  Statistical arguments alone, either for or against a “right” imply the non-existence of rights by ignoring them.  Conversely, if rights truly exist, stats have no bearing on them, and the discussion is purely about morals– right verses wrong.

Our premise is, or should be, that justice demands the respect of all human rights, all the time, that rights belong only to individuals, just as criminal prosecutions are of individuals.  If you didn’t violate, or attempt to violate, someone else’s rights, you are to be held harmless in all regards.  If there were only one, that is the American principle.  If that ideal is not upheld, you have no rights and in that case your statistics won’t save you.

The communists know exactly how this works, and you all know that they know it, and of course they hate the very concept of rights.  They will ignore it and fall back on statistics.  It’s a pretty clever, evil trick.  I’ll give them that, but what else have they got, being that they’re on the wrong side?

That is where we (I hope) differ.  Not only is the moral rights concept all we need, it is all that can work in the long run to persuade good people.  If we rely on stats, we’re relying on the weather, essentially, because stats, like the weather, are not only very fickle but are subject to interpretation, while rights are eternal.

Sure; bring out the human interest stories– we probably don’t do near enough of that, all told, but start them, and finish them, with the moral Declaration.  There’s not a Republican alive, and very few in the NRA, who can do this, so it’s up to us.

Gun bans are impossible

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Via email from Cody R. Wilson, Managing Director of Defense Distributed:

Just a reminder, the lower is the regulated portion of the gun and is what is being printed. The uppers and the other parts have no serial numbers and are not tracked.

A suggestion to the Brady Campaign, VPC, CGSG, etc.: The game is over. Give up.

Grandchild

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Son James sent this to me yesterday:

GrandBabyUltrasound

And due to the “Vortex of Joe Huffman Coincidences” (a phrase coined by Barb L.) a couple hours later I was introduced to Bruce M. who has a bunch of patents in ultrasound imaging technology.

Imagine the implications

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Last week Ry came into my office and told me of an article he had read.

This is the “money quote”:

When the four molecules key to the smell of rose were combined with an olfactory white mixture, the rose smell was effectively obscured — showing that olfactory white could be used to mask odours, from the smell of public toilets to that of cocaine or explosives.

If that works on dogs as well as human the implications are very interesting.

Quote of the day—Rivrdog

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Isn’t looking for real or literary meaning in a Tweet the modern equivalent of mining for diamonds in a goat’s ass?

Rivrdog
November 19, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day—DarthWeiner75.
[He’s got a point there.—Joe]

I want a wheat farm on the moon

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It may be that we can mine the moon for hydrogen and oxygen. And to make it even more interesting is that it appears it is a renewable source. The sun creates the water on the moon:

The moon’s top layer of crushed rock and soil may hold far more water than previously estimated, according to a new study.

Most of that water can trace its origin to protons streaming from the sun, the researchers show, confirming in samples of lunar soil a mechanism for making lunar water that until now largely had been the province of theoretical models.

Getting water could be useful. Getting rocket fuel would be awesome!

The moon has an abundance of solar energy to break the water and/or hydroxyl down into H + O which is a great rocket fuel. The moon could be more than just a staging area for exploring and/or mining the asteroids and/or other planets. It could be a source of supplies.

The next question I want answered, “Is there a plentiful source of nitrogen and carbon available?” These are needed for an earth like atmosphere and as plant nutrients.

If N and C (and a bunch of other nutrients in smaller quantities) are readily available then crops can be grown for food. Once we have wheat farms on the moon we are snuggling distance from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

Parts and percentages

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When I got into bullet casting, I noticed right off that there was confusion over parts and percentages.  People tell you that 20 parts lead to one part tin equals 95% and 5%, but when you start adding your “parts” you put in 20 parts this and one part that, and you realize that you now have 21 parts, which isn’t 95:5.  It’s actually 1/21, which is more like 95.3% and 4.7%.  Not a big difference, and not enough to really matter in this case, but when mixing several ingredients, you can end up farther off.  If you use this oft repeated “method” of calculating for things that really do matter, you’re in trouble.

Anyway, I wanted Lyman #2, and Lyman states the actual percentages.  I use other alloys too, and several sources of metal, so I made up this alloy calculator.

I think my assumptions are right…

Alloy Calculator.xls (26.5 KB)

You can fiddle with the composition of your various metal sources, plug in the number of parts in each, and it gives you the makeup of your final alloy in percentages.  So I can make #2 alloy from wheelweights, pure tin and 70:30 antimonial lead, or from pure lead, tin, and 70:30, etc. and in theory get a pretty consistent product without having to do much calculating.

Fakers

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Sebastian gives us a report on Twitter fake followers so I used the tool to check out the followers of my Twitter feed.

The result were decent: 3% fake, 12% inactive, and 85% good.

Thanks guys!

ESS Boomershoot video

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Via Barron:



I highly recommend ESS products.

Time Travel

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I gotta tell ya’, time travel is a thing of beauty.

A week or ten days ago, I clicked on a link and got a
Microsoft Security Essentials warning about an attack from that web site. I
closed the window, and ran a full check. It found something, appeared to clean
it off, and things looked cool. Then, a few days later, I started to get some
weird behavior, such as doing a search that had OK looking results, and then ANY result I clicked on sent
me so some overseas site selling various things. “Ah, shit!” I said, and closed
the browser and everything else, then ran another full cleaning. A couple more
things found and removed. The OhShit!Ometer seemed to fade back from yellow into
green.

Then, a couple days ago, I decided I should to do a manual
“check for updates on Windows and MSE”, and I got an odd error. Crud. OhShit!Ometer
was up into the yellow. Dig, dig, dig. Update not working at all. And now I
can’t scan for problems because it says I don’t have security services running.
I check. It’s not even listed as a service. “Ah, shiiiiit!” Just pegged the
OhShit!Ometer hard over in the red.

Dig, dig, dig. Several
things are not listed as services that Update needs. Uninstall MSE,
download and install it again which also puts in the latest updates, run it,
clean out a bunch of un-cool stuff. Too much stuff. NOT GOOD. Can’t get
updates, MSE can’t update any more, not sure everything is off the system, so
there’s a bunch of stuff I can’t do, or at least can’t be sure of.

Try using the Win7 built-in System Restore to go back to an
earlier restore point. No dice, they are all bad.

Download the free SuperAntiSpyWare sweeper, and the free
ESET virus checker. Clean out some MORE stuff. Enough evil bits to gag TRON.
Well, I think it’s all gone, now, but
security and updates are still shot. Save my recent work off to the server,
then… Well, time to pull out the big guns.

Time Travel. Go back and Don’t
click that link!

I get out the Windows Home Server “Recovery” disk, pop it
in, planning on having my problems solved. It can’t find the server… “Ah,
@#$)(*&%$***!@!#$%!!” OhShit!Ometer just broke the peg.

Dig, dig, dig. I have Win7, my old WHS is based on an old
version of Win NT, it needs an older 32bit NIC driver. Dig, dig, dig,
eventually I find the right one, boot on the Recovery disk, with the 32-bit NIC
drivers on a USB flash drive, FINALLY find my Home server from the recovery
program, and tell it “pave the C: drive FLAT, turn back the clock and make it like it was two Saturdays
ago.”

The platters on the drive go ‘round and ‘round, ‘round and
‘round, ‘round and ‘round… Grind, grind, grind. Go to dinner. When I come back,
my C: drive is like it was two Saturdays ago. Run Virus scans. Get updates.
Uninstall Java. Get more updates. Scan more. Clean a couple of things out that
apparently were there before Update broke. Restore recent work files, get
better malware protection installed. Scan again. Scan with something else,
again. The meter appears to be edging cautiously back in the green again.

And I will NOT be clicking on that interesting looking link
again, because it took me too long to go back in time and straighten it all out
again.

But that fact is, that is more or less what happened,
because I have a WHS backing up my stuff every night, for every machine in the
house. An old HP EX470, the first official WHS model. And yet MSFT is doing
everything they can (product management-wise) to kill Windows Home Server for
some reason…. And yet, it’s the only product they have that is GOOD at home computer
time travel. It is something that I think EVERY home should have, if they have
more than one computer and any data of any value. It’s the second time it’s
saved my butt. Worth every penny I’ve spent on it. MSFT has really blown the marketing campaign for
their home server product.

And… virus writers who make stuff like what I just ran into need
to spend some serious time in jail.

BugASalt

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This is pretty cool:

I wouldn’t shoot it at any metal I wasn’t able to clean up almost immediately because of the risk of corrosion. But maybe granulated sugar would work almost as well.