More on communication

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When I was a boy, out working the fields alone on my grandparents’ farm, I heard voices wafting in from the distance. Two men were standing next to a tractor, its engine running, and so they were shouting at each other to be heard over the engine noise. Two to three hundred yards away, I could hear nearly every word they were saying.

“Ah Hah! Unlike addition and multiplication, communication over a noise source can be asymetrical, or one way.” YOU may be able to hear ME just fine, but it may be utterly impossible for me you hear you, or vice versa. I knew that there was no possible way I could ever shout loud enough for those two men near the tractor to hear me, though I could hear them pretty well.

I’ve used this as an example on several occasions, trying to explain this as the reason why the frustrated fool on the other end of the conversation cannot get through to me. My wife, for example, has never understood this, and she will get angry when I tell her I can’t understand her as I’m washing my hands at the sink. SHE thinks I’M the dumb one, see.

Same goes for radio communication, when someone hears you booming in on a 100 watt repeater, but can’t understand why he isn’t being heard from his 3 watt handy-talkie (then he shouts into the microphone, which makes it worse, because his over modulation [FM} spreads out his three watts over more bandwidth, out toward the edges of the receive passband).

Then there are those who, when wearing ear muffs or headphones and you’re not, and you’re standing right next to them, will shout at you.

And we won’t even get in to the subject of those “low talkers” – those who will talk under their breath apparently as a means of irritating you or for some bizzare reason they want to use it as a means of feeling superior to you, because you’re struggling to hear them while they can hear you perfectly well, and so what’s wrong with you, Chump?

The Stars Came Back -040- Bad joke

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Fade in

INT – DAY – cargo bay

Harbin watches as a group of two dozen recruits run a simple obstacle course around the ship. They are jogging forward the mid-level passageway on one side, down the stairs, across the cargo bay, up the stairs on the other, then jogging aft through the other mid-level passageway. They are evenly spaced, and doing OK. Continue reading →

Quote of the day—Nina Knorr

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Quote of the day–William R Tonso & David B. Kopel

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According to Mr. Schindler’s wife Maria, when Schindler decided to liberate his Jewish workers, he handed them all semiautomatic weapons so they could fight the Nazis.

In today’s politically correct Hollywood, Steven Spielberg probably would have ruined his chances for an Oscar by telling the whole story about Oskar Schindler’s devotion to freedom.

William R Tonso & David B. Kopel
August 24, 1994
Gun Bans and “Schindler’s List”

TheStars Came Back -039- Onboard Power

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Fade in

INT – Bridge – Day

Helton stands at the command station, Stenson to one side in the main pilot station, Lag at the other (co-pilot) station. SGT Kaushik stands at one station, Allonia at the other, and Quinn stands wide-eyed in a corner to watch it all. The forward window shows the space-port, side “window” screens various readouts. Continue reading →

The Stars came Back -038- Plaque and Power

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EXT – Day – Ground near the stern of the ship.

The ramp is down, but the thick main cargo-bay doors are closed. Allonia and Helton are out for a walk around the ship together, to get some fresh air and stretch their legs. It’s sunny and bright, with the sun at a fairly low angle. Helton is wearing a pistol on a belt, and his cloths are somewhat simple steam-punkish in style. Allonia wears a conservative calf-length skirt and blouse, her hair is in a thick braid. They look like friends out for a stroll. The camera follows them from a distance as they head for the ramp, zooming in slowly. We can’t hear what they say, but it seem to be funny by the smiles and apparent laughter. They get to the foot of the ramp, and start walking up it. Continue reading →

The vortex of coincidence

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March 16th is the six month anniversary of the first date between Barb L. and I. It is also the birthday of my soon to be ex-wife. Our first date was on September 16th. This is the birthdate of Barb L’s soon to be ex-husband.

This is but a small part of what Barb L. calls, “The vortex of Joe Huffman coincidence”. That should be “JoeH/BarbL” instead of “Joe Huffman” but she named it months ago and we are kind of stuck with the name at this point.

As RobertaX and many others have pointed out our brains are pattern matching engines and find “interesting things” where there really isn’t anything of particular significance. But still it’s fun to look at the patterns sometimes.

Within a minute or two of our first date Barb L. and I started noticing a plethora of coincidences between us:

  • Her first and middle names are identical to that of my (soon to be ex-)wife.
  • Her (I can’t wait until he is my ex-)husband is not named “Joseph”. That is the name of his identical twin.
  • Her mother’s name was Josephine.
  • Her son’s middle name is Joseph.
  • She has a hand gesture that is identical to one used by daughter Xenia for the same circumstances.
  • She spent time on a farm when growing up and even milked cows by hand like I did.
  • She lives on the eastside of Lake Washington, as do I, and works in downtown Seattle about six blocks from where I work.
  • Her mother’s birthday is the same as my wife.
  • Her son’s birthday is the same as my wife’s sister.
  • Her birthday is one day after my brother’s birthday.
  • Her birthday is one day before my wife’s sister’s birthday.
  • Both her mother and my wife’s mother were teachers.
  • We both went to the University of Washington at the same time (but to be best of our knowledge we never saw each other).

Yes. I’m aware of the birthday paradox.

Anyway… we aren’t superstitious but every once in a while, we look around to see if there is someone filming us because it sure seems as if there is a script writer in the background someplace. And that guy that walked by as we were kissing around the corner at REI at one day at lunch time and said, “Don’t worry, no pictures were taken!” didn’t exactly reassure us that we aren’t acting out someone else’s script and we are being recorded on video for a reality show on Lifetime or something.

Quote of the day—Kevin Baker

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She should get a fucking Ferrari and a mansion to park it in.

Kevin Baker
March 15, 2013
Motherf*%&ers!
[I respectfully disagree. I think justice would be better served with a different settlement.

My suggestion is a truck from each of the police officers involved. The police officers involved would then drive her trucks at no charge, including fuel and maintenance, for the rest of their lives. They would be required to deliver whatever legal cargo she asked them to. It would be free income for life because of their massive screw up.

I would then offer her suggestions on particularly noxious farm waste that needed to be delivered to the cops homes once a month or so.—Joe]

Cast bullets for an auto pistol

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Down the rabbit hole into the esoteric. Before the current ammo shortage I decided to start casting bullets, just because I liked the idea of an extra level of independence. The 30-30 cast bullets worked OK but there’s more to do there. This time though its the 10 mm Auto.

I’ve been loading the Hornady 180 XTPs with good results, but I wanted a 200 grain cast bullet too. The RCBS 200 SWC has gotten good reviews so I got that two cavity mold a while back. The mold handles I use for the Lyman molds didn’t fit the new RCBS mold, and people were starting to run low on things. Buffalo Arms in Idaho sells a hand-fabricated-looking handle set that works like a pair of Vice-Grips. Pretty expensive and heavy, but they had them in stock. They’re great. You get VERY consistent closing pressure for each pour. I weighed 20 already lubed bullets tonight and the extreme spread was 1.5 grains, 201 gr +/- .75.

Of course, to “save money” casting bullets from one dollar per pound lead, I had to buy a lube sizer. Seating the lead bullets, I was shaving lead on the case mouths, so I bought a 10 mm M die. It expands deeper into the case than a regular expander die, plus it makes a wider spot at the mouth. I’d been seating crimping in one swipe with the jacketed bullets, but since that’s not really an option for cast, I had to readjust my otherwise permanently adjusted seating die. Now I figure I’ll buy another seat die in this “money saving” venture.

To prevent the case mouth shaving lead from the bullet upon seating, I had to put LOTS more flair on the cases. I tried chamfering the mouths a little and that didn’t help much, so now I’m working the brass a lot more, which means it will work harden sooner. The bullets aren’t getting shaved now, but the cases are so wide at the mouth that the seating die can’t be lowered nearly as much as normal or the crimp taper starts to erase that wide belling, shaving lead anyway. And that means that the seating stem is just a bit too short, so with the locking collar removed from the seating stem and the stem screwed in as far as it will go, I still have to screw the die body down to where it is narrowing the flair just a bit. That means there is no support on the case at all except at the very mouth. I noticed that if I nicely align the bullets on the case mouth by hand before seating, they now don’t get shaved. When the bullets shave, the lead that’s stuck in front of the case mouth interferes with head spacing. It’s not serious, but it is annoying.

Loading dies, at least for straight wall auto cases, are not made with cast bullets in mind. These are RCBS dies, but I doubt there’d be much difference. The whole paradigm is wrong. Since you apparently need much more flair at the mouth, and you’re shoving the case up into the die mouth-first, your die has to be too large to support any part of the case except for the very mouth, or else it will erase your mouth flair. Instead of going mouth-first into the seating die, the cases should be going head-first into a support die, and then up to a seating stem, with the bullet pre aligned before it touches the case. That way, much of the case, and all of the bullet’s drive bands, could be aligned prior to seating. It couldn’t be done “right”, in my opinion, any other way.

But we make it work, somehow, with what we have. There’s still more testing to do, but initially I got two groups of just under 5 inches at 20 yards standing unsupported. Lots more recoil than the 180 XTP loads, but my chrono got lost along a 20 mile stretch of highway in a snowstorm so no vel data. A third group was MUCH larger, so I quit. There was leading in the Lone Wolf barrel. That was before I eliminated the lead shaving at seating. We’ll see later whether the shaving verses not shaving makes any difference.

The load is 9.4 grains Blue Dot, CCI 300, OAL 1.255, #2 alloy, Super Molly lube that came with the Lyman sizer. Still don’t know if it’s a keeper, but I do know I can get off at least 10 decent shots. Whoopie, eh?

The Stars Came Back -037- Rules of battle contracts

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Fade in

EXT – Day – grounds next to the ship

The recruits, SGT Kaushik, Cpl Kaminski, and Harbin stand in the morning sun. The recruits in formation (two rows), with Kaushik and Kaminski as the squad leaders. They are all dressed in simple camo fatigue uniforms. Arrayed before the formation are a series of mannequins, each clad in a different style. In order from left to right there are: Continue reading →

Gun Song – Ennio Morricone – Guns Don’t Argue

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Classic spaghetti-western soundtrack stuff, here. You can smell the horse-sweat, the gun smoke, and the cattle, feel the mounting tension, hear the clink of spurs, see the MEN riding into the action.


Ennio Morricone – Guns Don’t Argue

Morricone thought of the soundtracks he wrote as being “working music,” what he did to pay the bills, not “real” music. But he did a LOT of that working music – he wrote the scores for more than 500 movies and TV series during his life. His name is listed as the music dude on a seemingly endless list of classic and/or infamous movies, from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and The Thing to Kill Bill.

Quote of the day—Todd Vandermyde

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We think it’s a civil right that deserves a single uniform standard across the state. No matter whether you’re from Decatur, or from Chicago or from Moline to Lansing, it’s a fundamental right.

Todd Vandermyde
February 22, 2013
Heated testimony at hearing on state’s concealed carry law
See this and much, much more at Video Weekend, Part II: Todd Vandermyde.
[I found it enlightening that no matter how many times and how many ways Vandermyde explained this the legislators, most, if not all of them lawyers, questioning him couldn’t seem to get it. They would even say, “We respect the Second Amendment” then in the next breath say they had an obligation to deny that right to the people they were representing in the interests of protecting them.

Vandermyde would ask questions like, “Well then do you think you should let the police search people without a warrant? Or should the police be able to ignore their Fifth Amendment rights?” Apparently these people could not understand the point he was making.

These people are bigots and should be treated as such. They, as Federal judges have said, are thumbing their noses at the U.S. Constitution, the Federal judges, and the rights of the people they supposedly represent. This is no different that the people in the deep south that abused the rights of people of color 50 years ago and I would not feel the slightest bit of sympathy for them if the Feds used similar methods to enforce their rulings upon them. Send in the National Guard to protect a parade of individuals openly carrying guns down the main streets of Chicago and Federal Marshalls arresting any city or state government employee that attempted to interfere with people peaceably exercising their right to bear arms in public.—Joe]

Five year plan?

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From Tyler Durden:

Yesterday Senator Tom Harkin introduced S. 544, “a bill to require the President to develop a comprehensive national manufacturing strategy.”

In effect, Senator Harkin wants the President to centrally plan the economy. Never mind that the President has zero experience in business or manufacturing. But hey, this worked out so well for Stalinist Russia, it’s no wonder Mr. Harkin wants to copy that model.

If I were emperor of the U.S. I could come up with a plan that outperform anything the President could accomplish in five years and have it implemented in five days. It’s really simple:

Government shall make no law restricting the free association of people other than a tax on retail sales not to exceed 5% and to enforce contracts freely entered into by people and companies.

All waste products shall be safely contained or returned to the natural environment in such a manner that those people responsible for producer of said waste are willing to build their own homes on, eat, breath, or drink said waste products.

In five years there would so much wealth generated there would be private companies with terraforming Mars, robots bringing mining products back from the asteroid belt, and sex tourists going on vacations to the resorts in low earth orbit.

“The economic AND the personal sphere.”

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Those are Rand Paul’s words from CPAC, and as much as a like what I see in Rand Paul, that phraseology really bugs me. That’s like saying we must pay attention to the weather AND the temperature, humidity, pressure, precipitation, cloud cover and wind as though the term “weather” doesn’t already take those other things into account.

As a business owner, that attempt to separate the economic from the personal has never made any sense at all.

In fact, it is impossible to separate the economic from the personal. Name any “personal” subject or issue and tell me it has no economic implications whatsoever. Name any economic subject or issue and then tell me it has nothing whatsoever to do with personal choice.

Tax me, limit my business activities, my investments, get between me and my bank, and you are directly attacking my personal choices. Try to tell me who I must or must not associate with, how I must interact with others, or what I can do with my body, and that is a direct attack on my economic liberty. One equals the other. There is no moral or logical separation between them.

Yes yes, I know that we’re supposed to separate the personal from the economic, as though they’re different, for political reasons, but that’s a ruse. A trick. I will not step over the line into Crazyland just to make someone else’s politics easier, or to assuage their guilt. No, Young Grasshopper; there is just the one word that matters, the one that encompasses everything, and you’re either for it or against it – liberty.

The Stars Came Back -036- The Book

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Fade in

INT – night – back in Helton’s cabin on the Tajemnica

Allonia comes up to the open door. A couple of the many computer screens that double as lights are on “dim”, providing a low, diffused light to the room. The bed is made. She looks around and doesn’t see him. Continue reading →

Quote of the day—Geoffrey Canada

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The Wild West was never as wild as many communities in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, (and on and on) are.

Geoffrey Canada
Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence
[I haven’t looked up the actual numbers but I suspect his statement is true as long as you don’t regard the Hollywood Western as the definition of “Wild West”. In which case we have a good comeback for those anti-gun people who claim we don’t need guns anymore because “the Wild West doesn’t exist anymore.”

I finished this book recently and need to review/fisk it. I believe Canada has some excellent insights, is a good person, is making a positive difference in the lives of countless people, and came to his anti-gun views honestly. But I think his conclusions about guns are incorrect and misguided.—Joe]

Pure plutonium

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That’s a John Ross term, for something that “nukes” the enemies of freedom. Tonight’s episode of the Glenn Beck program is pure plutonium. The fastest hour you’ll spend this week is the March 13 episode of the Glenn Beck program.

Call in sick, take a vacation, whatever it takes; watch this episode. Hang on every word. Even the commercials, most of them anyway, will have you up, out of your seat. It’s on theBlazeTV.

THIS IS THE (new) MAIN STREAM MEDIA, or medium. If you are not a subscriber, you are missing out. I don’t care who you are, you are missing out. They have a free trial membership, so you have no excuse. Support them.

Tonight’s guests include one Starr Parker. I’ve read two of her books. The other guests are very good also, and it is clear that they love each other. You will get hope from this.

If there was any doubt before tonight, there is no longer any doubt– Glenn Beck is slated for death. Keep an eye out. I think he knows this and he can take care of himself, but keep an eye on it.

This is what can happen when you own your own network, and it’s beautiful. What you may not know are the things Glenn could NOT say when he was on someone else’s network. That’s a story unto itself, but I digress. Go watch, and for that matter spend your sick day, or your vacation day, watching this whole week’s worth of shows.

It’s is an addendum to Joe’s latest post.

To you Progressives out there, and you know who you are, weep. You cannot escape the truth forever. We are WATCHING YOU.

Doesn’t fit the narrative

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Via Stanley on the gun email list from work:

It’s unlikely you will be hearing this viewpoint from the mainstream media.

Unintended consequences

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Or; Action, Reaction, Synthesis
Or; Thesis, Antitheses, Synthesis
Or; “I’m not sure that it means what you think it means.”

Refusing to sell to government entities that attack the second amendment is fairly popular, it certainly has made good press, and I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but I’m not sure people are thinking things through.

Oskar Schindler was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, and he had extensive business dealings with the Nazis. Just keep that in mind.

Let’s say we all refuse to sell to any government entity that even infringes (literally; “touches around the fringes”) on second amendment rights. That would be all of them. Just keep that in mind; we are talking ONLY about degrees of violation when we say that New York or Chicago is bad and OUR jurisdiction is…what…a bit less egregious? Or does your state and local .gov commit zero infringements? So we all refuse to sell to any government entities. What will be their obvious reaction, for 100% sure and for certain? Taxpayer funded, government owned munitions factories of course, with union workers, full benefits and a retirement plan, and now they are, one way or another, competing with the private industry. Good luck with that. OR, you know all it takes is for one individual company to sell to your worst violators, they will become the next General Electric, i.e. a pet company for the tyrants, funneling their profits via multiple channels into the Democrat Party. They’ll arrange it that way just for that purpose. It’s what Progressives do.

How to make a mortar

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I played with some metal working equipment last weekend after not touching anything for several decades. While mostly successful I “learned a lot” without any permanent damage to the item I was working on and without leaving any of my blood or body parts behind.

Then yesterday I was looking for something else and saw this video of how professionals do things these days: