Oh deer!

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After Thanksgiving dinner brothers Doug, Gary, Dad, and Uncle Darrell and I went for a drive and looked at various things at the place where Dad and Uncle Darrell had grown up. We then went for a drive “around the loop” to see other old landmarks Doug wanted some historical discussion on. I took video of most of the discussion about the place my grandfather and great uncle used to own.

When we were driving around we saw a herd of about a dozen whitetail deer. I had enough time to put on my telephoto lens and take some pictures. It’s interesting to see the deer in motion stopped by the camera:

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New equipment for Boomershoot 2013

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I’m always searching for new ways to improve Boomershoot. I recently ordered a OXO Good Grips Food Mill from Amazon in the hopes it could speed up the processing of the potassium chlorate  we use for making Boomerite.

Saturday I tried it out. I first used the smallest screen which is similar in size to the current strainers we use to remove the lump (and sometimes “rocks”) from the potassium chlorate.

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A strainer used in preparing potassium chlorate.

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Food mill used in preparing potassium chlorate.

The result was that I could process the chemical about 20% faster. I could get about 160 grams per minute through the mill. That was good but not great.

I next tried the medium screen. I got 310 grams/minute! That is a significant improvement and the quality of the result appeared to be just as good as what we have been using. This is probably close to the rate at which a single mixer can consume it in the production of Boomerite. We have two mixers that we sometimes put to use when have enough people.

I was running short of time but I will try the large screen the next time I get a chance.

Boomerite from cold packs

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Last April Rolf gave me three instant cold packs you buy at the drug or sporting goods store. Yesterday I opened them up:

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I poured the prills of ammonium nitrate into a bowl:

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The three packs combined gave me 370 grams of AN. I scaled the other components for Boomerite appropriately and mixed as usual:

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It made enough to almost fill a 4″ target box:

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I put it near the base of a tree and as usual it created a small “smoking” (it’s actually water vapor not smoke) crater when detonated by a .223 bullet:

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Update: I did a little poking around online and found that cold packs are not all made equal:

Depending upon which warehouse we fulfill your order from the Ingredients may be: Ammonium Nitrate, Water or Urea, Water. Express orders will be fulfilled with Urea, Water to avoid Hazardous Materials shipping fees. Both products work well for an exceptional quality cold therapy product.

Urea requires processing with some hazardous chemicals (strong acid IIRC) to be made into something that will go boom.

Did you vote?

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An infographic on the low voter turnout in the election. The verbal summary:

Voter turnout for 2012 fell to 118 million from 2008’s impressive turnout of 131 million, with only 60% of eligible voters actually exercising their right to choose their government. In an election where the difference in the popular vote was less than 5 million, the 78 million people who chose not to vote might have made a huge difference. So how did President Obama get out the vote? Tweets, likes and status updates.

Via an email from Chloe (sent two weeks ago and I am just now getting around to responding to).

Super moss!

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On November 11th Barb L. and I went on a hike to Wallace Falls. As usual it was an interesting hike. The falls are very pretty. The elevation gain is 1200 feet which is noticeable but not extreme. The trail starts out very wide and easy but gradually gets more difficult. Plan on spending about a half day to get in, enjoy the view, and back out. It takes about two hours each direction. A little than that getting in and a little less getting out if you don’t spend too much time resting and admiring the view. Take water (we didn’t and were sorry) and perhaps a snack.

On the way out my left knee started aching (from old tennis injuries) and it required some ibuprofen for a few days afterward.

This is in the Cascades and the area gets a lot of rainfall. I took some pictures of the moss to which Barb exclaimed, “Super Moss!” Yeah, I guess you could say that:

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The trail goes beyond the upper falls but hikers are strongly cautioned to be prepared if you continue:

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There were of course other interesting things to take pictures of:

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Middle Falls

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Upper Falls

Random thought of the day

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Ban handguns! They can and have shot planes out of the sky!

H/T David Hardy.

Quote of the day—Kit Carson

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The Left insists the Nazis are a great evil. It is misdirection. They are the same –Totalitarians. We must resist them both, communists and fascists. They will always be with us. We must never relent.

Kit Carson
November 22, 2012
Comment to The “Hollywood Holocaust” and Other Cold War Myths
[H/T to Glenn Reynolds who was going to get QOTD with his post but a lot of other people already quoted him.

Reynolds claim brings up an interesting thought:

Refusing to hire Communists is on the same moral plane as refusing to hire Nazis. Which is to say: It’s a good and admirable thing.

To the best of my knowledge it is not against the law in the U.S. to discriminate in hiring based on the politics of the job candidate. The communists and Nazis both used party membership in hiring to great effect. I wonder how much it is being used by the left now in jobs and if it can be openly used. I know one rabid Obama supporter who changed her name on Facebook because she believed it was making it difficult to get work.

If employers openly hired and purged existing employees based on their politics what would be the result? Could that turn our collapse into socialism around? Or would it inspire laws such that employers could not discriminate or even required discrimination based on loyalty to the socialists in this country?—Joe]

Quote of the day—Jeffrey Singer

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Health insurance will soon be extinct. Unlike other members of the species – property and casualty insurance, life insurance, liability insurance, auto insurance – political predators have been steadily killing off health insurance over the years. Soon it will cease to exist, allowing for more intrusive regulation of behavior.

Jeffrey Singer
November 16, 2012
Jeffrey Singer: Health insurance an endangered species
[H/T to Barb L. via email.

I’ve heard it claimed that Obama Care has to have been specifically designed to destroy the health care industry. Singer explains why the health insurance industry will be destroyed.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Larry Elder

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This battle for ‘common-sense’ gun control laws pits emotion and passion against logic and reason. All too often in such a contest, logic loses. So, expect more meaningless, if not harmful, ‘gun control‘ legislation. Good news – if you’re a crook.

Larry Elder
From Thinkexist.com.
[I have been unable to determine when he said this. While true 15 years ago expecting more gun control legislation is less and less a good bet. I’m skeptical it is because logic and reason suddenly are winning contests against emotion and passion. I expect it is because we are accumulating more emotion and passion on our side.—Joe]

Putting setbacks into perspective

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Whenever I think things are going badly, and I’m bummed about
the prospects on the political scene, I think the barbarians are
winning, and it’s all going to hell in a hand-basket, I take solace in history.
Rome was the most powerful empire the world had ever seen, had built amazing feats
of engineering, and been sustained by astonishing feats of logistics, and had
many stories of unimaginable bravery and personal strength. It has existed
nearly forever, it seemed. Rome Was Eternal.  

Until it was sacked. And repeatedly taken over by a
succession of military despots, kings, generals, armies, Senators, and foreigners,
and was sunken into the darkness of barbarism and illiteracy, even as each new replacement
empire claimed the mantel of “Rome’s successor.” Some people fled the invaders,
and hid in the nastiest and most inaccessible of the local swamps and fens,
amidst the islands and channels where cavalry and armies couldn’t go after them.
They fled the easy (but crime- and corruption- and invader-infested) life of the
hills and fertile soil of northern Italy. It was a hard life, with no powerful
protector, difficult farming, lots of places to wreck your boat, fetid water and disease, and no time
for anything as non-essential as high culture or art. They clung to life, remembered the best of Rome, and
did the best they could.

Nearly a thousand years later, the city-state of Venice was
one of the most powerful in the world, and its fleet (with help from Spain and
the Papal States) crushed and halted the fleet of the powerful Imperial Ottoman Turks at Lepanto. Ideas are powerful things, and humans are resilient. We may
not fight our way out of the darkness before we die, nor may our children, but
we pass on the good ideas and knowledge to them, and instill in them a sense of
history, and, one day, it WILL happen. Property rights, individual freedom, limited
government, and free markets work.
They will, eventually, take over, because they are more powerful than the
forces trying to limit them… but it may be a long, long slog, and will most assuredly
NOT be a straight line.

 

(History geeks, take note: this is the simplified version of
things, where the essence is correct, in the interest of telling a good story
with a powerful idea to put current events in perspective.)

Quote of the day—Erma Bombeck

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What we’re really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?

Erma Bombeck
From Quote DB.
[I hope everyone had a nice turkey day. I spent it with son James, his wife Kelsey, my parents, brothers, Uncle Darrell, Aunt Alice, and brother Doug’s children Amy (and Nate and Jared), Lisa (and Kevin) and Brad.

We had way too much really good food and stuffed ourselves.—Joe]

Quote of the day—tdiinva

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Since nanny Bloomberg has chosen to limit his citizens self defense option his failure to call in the Guard is failure to live up to his obligations as their nanny.

tdiinva
November 19, 2012
Comment to Bloomberg F-Bombs Request for National Guard Aid.
[Via a link from Sebastian.

It’s a fundamental problem of being a nanny with a scope larger than a few children. Just because a nanny is an appropriate solution in some situations does not mean is is possible to scale it up and make it work at a much larger scale. If it did work we would see both biological and manmade systems organized much differently than we do. Both evolution and the free marketplace would have created systems with central control to dominate over those systems that pushed the decision making to the lower levels rather than pushing it up. Your brain doesn’t control the details of cell metabolism and your web browser doesn’t control how the mouse determines if it has been moved.

I’m channeling Thomas Sowell as best I can with the following.

The problem is one of information. You, a fully functional adult, know more than anyone else about your situation and what is best for you. You know a lot more about your family than people not in your family. You know more about how to do your job than people that don’t do your job. You know more about your community than people outside your community. And you know a lot more about your situation than does the mayor of your city, the governor of your state, and the president of the country. Central planning fails because the people with the most information about the situation are not making the decisions.

Even if it were possible for all the information needed for making optimal decisions were to be communicated to the central planners they cannot process the information nor come up with innovative alternatives that the individuals and small groups closer to the problem can.

One might be tempted to say that central planning failed in the past because of this fundamental problem but we have much better communication and processing power than we did even a decade or two ago. Central planning can work now that we have computers. Those people are wrong.

Even ignoring the obvious SkyNet dystopian scenarios look at the way engineers solve control problems in complex systems now. Heinlein was a visionary in many ways but “Mike” the computer in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress will never be implemented as Heinlein envisioned it—handling payroll, air flow, mass launchers, communications, and a thousand other things.

Whether it is a large software program, a cell phone network, or a sewage treatment plant the far cheaper, better performing, and feasible solution is to delegate “authority” to very small subsystems to solve the issues that are local. The video driver in your computer is given a command to set the background to a color and output text at certain coordinates on the display. The video driver “knows” how to control the chips of the graphics board to change the color of the display and what address in memory corresponds to the coordinates of the screen. The local cell tower “knows” signal strength of your phone, the number of other cell phones it is handling, and communicates with nearby cell towers to enable a clean handoff such that you don’t have a service interruption as you move from location to location. The components of the sewage system control air and water flow rates, agitation, and chemical balances without knowledge of the price of electricity or the growth rate of the town it serves.

At each subsystem level the information and the resources are available such that they can do the right thing to operate their area of responsibility in a manner that is a tradeoff of performance, time to implement, initial cost, and operating cost.

Bloomberg and other central planners do not and cannot have the information to even approximate optimal decisions and they deny resources to those that do have the information. The result is a dystopian world that has the potential to be just as catastrophic as one where “SkyNet” has all the information and resources to create Elysium but instead makes the decision to destroy humanity.—Joe]

Symbiotic Relationship of Metabolic Heat Generation Differences of Sexes

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The following text has been in one or more obscure and seldom visited directories of my computers for many years. The timestamp on the file is January 18, 1995 but most likely I put it on one of my computers shortly after it was posted in the UseNet newsgroup misc.kids. My kids were young then and I read the newsgroup regularly. Hence, this probably has been on my computers for over 20 years.

I’m posting it here because every once in a while I want to share it and I have difficulty finding it. I think this will be an easier place to find it and more likely to be permanent.

From: berkery@emsun1.crd.ge.com Wed Oct 17 05:33:39 1990
Newsgroups: misc.kids
Subject: Cold Feet
Organization: General Electric Corporate R&D Center

A few people have asked me to elaborate on that last statement in my previous posting. You know, the one about women and cold feet. So, ok, here’s yet another note from Jack’s compendium of little known scientific theories.
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“Symbiotic Relationship of Metabolic Heat Generation Differences of Sexes.”
by Berke Jackery

Darwin and his successors have tried to explain physiological traits in animal species as the result of adaptation to environmental effects. There is one such proof for a certain trait in the human species which is obvious to even the most casual observer. That no one has heretofore published this fact is quite amazing since it is so immediately obvious. I’m talking about COLD FEET in females of the species homo sapiens.

It is a fact that women’s metabolism levels are not sufficient to generate enough heat to keep all their extremities warm. Over the millennia they have found that the agony of de feet can be alleviated by finding a suitable male who’s heat generation capacity can satisfy their needs. Males of the same species have metabolic rates which produce an overabundance of energy in the form of radiated heat. (Often their bodies produce excesses which are not converted to energy but are expressed as large quantities of methane gas.) This uneven heat generative difference between the sexes has evolved a symbiotic relationship where those who require it will attempt to attract the services of those who can produce it. The result is that when the two get between the sheets, the female will contrive to move her icy toes (some have been measured at temperatures close to absolute zero) toward and even under some part of the male’s anatomy thereby stealing his heat.

The male however, seldom even notices this stealthy behavior since whenever any portion of the female anatomy rubs up against any portion of his, his temperature immediately rises several hundred degrees to balance the process. The procreation process of the species is likewise related to this need to exchange heat. When the female feels the need for some whole-body heat rather than a simple toe-job, or when the male on the other hand has such an excess of heat that he must have a receptive heat-sink to take it from him, the relationship requires that far more body parts be rubbed together. The symbiosis is then complete and the male – female bonding remains intact solely because of this need for an interchange of body heat.

The alternative would have been to evolve a system similar to many insects where the female gets some hapless male to satisfy her needs then summarily bites his head off thereby severing the relationship altogether. Luckily for human males, their mate still has that all-consuming need for warmth whether or not he has ever fully satisfied her. So he is kept around as long as he continues to provide some convenient spot to warm her toes.

That, at any rate is the theory, but I think it’s a very solid one. How else can you explain why women would want to sleep next to a large hairy beast that sweats and snores and farts and grinds its teeth all night. Let’s face it guys, we’re really nothing more than giant heating pads for these females. But, well, when one considers the payment for services rendered, I can live with that. I’ve got lots of excess body heat to spare.
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Jack Berkery, Computer Scientist, GE Research, Schenectady NY

Because cowering like rabbits under the desk works so well

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Paul C. Duffy has the strangest thoughts. And then he shares them with a letter to the editor:

I was disheartened beyond words to read about a program that offers would-be victims of school shootings alternatives to the traditional lock-down reaction to such crimes.

…

Canton police Detective Chip Yeaton, who sounds like a caring citizen and father, spoke in support of the proposed school program, called ALICE, which stands for alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate. Yeaton said that “school shootings continue to happen, and young people are dying. We need to change the philosophy.”

Yeaton is right, but his focus is wrong. Our philosophy does indeed need to change: We need to find the real and moral courage to stand down the gun lobbies — the National Rifle Association and other Second Amendment zealots — whose reckless defense of gun rights has led to a society where almost anyone can acquire a Glock 9mm and the ammunition needed to ruin lives and communities in seconds.

What Duffy totally ignores or does not comprehend is that people can acquire a 9mm Glock and the ammunition to defend lives. I realized I’m biased as I have a handgun on my hip as I type this but handguns are designed for and used millions of times each year to defend innocent life. Duffy’s brain is stuck in “prey” mode.

Read Columbine by Dave Cullen. When violent predators attack students at a school cowering under the desk this behavior gives the predator feelings of even greater power and control. They feel justified in killing those who cower beneath them. One of the prime motivators of the Columbine predators was that they believed people were so stupid they didn’t deserve to live. We don’t know what their thoughts were the last couple of hours but it would seem to me their opinions of human intelligence could not have improved as they saw people “hiding” underneath desks and tables and they strolled from person to person and shot them.

I kept wondering if the Boston Globe got the letter writers name wrong. Maybe it was actually “Fluffy” instead of “Duffy”. And the ‘C’ stands for Cottontail.

Duffy advocates being a coward in the face of a single criminal predator but “courage” while advocating people “stand down the gun lobbies”. He should think this through. Suppose he does “stand down the gun lobbies”. Then what? Is he going to start confiscating firearms from people? I would like to point out that Fluffy Duffy should be happy he has the gun lobby. They are what separate him from the 80 million gun owners in this country. Rabbits are no match for hunters.

Update: Sebastian also comments with Oh Noes! Freedom!

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]

The First Amendment was supposed to protect…

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…your right to speech, religion, assembly and redress of grievances.  The Second amendment was supposed to protect the First.  Both will be tested in ways you are not expecting.  You will be blindsided.  Expect it.


When someone doesn’t like what you’re saying and tries to do something about it, your Second amendment right says, “I don’t think so, Skippy”.


Uncle’s post here, if you listen to the broadcast, reveal a looming contest.  There is an on-going attempt to marginalize you, through legal, economic, social and bureaucratic pressures.  Pay attention.  Pay attention also to who stands their ground and who caves.  Don’t bother with the rationalizations, but stay focused on principles.

Quote of the day—DarthWeiner75

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I guess since you can’t walk around with your dick hanging out #opencarry is the next best thing. #juvenile

DarthWeiner75
Tweeted on November 17, 2012.
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a Tweet from Linoge.

It’s “interesting” that someone would consider the exercise of a constitutionally protected right “juvenile”. Would he consider exercise of your right to not incriminate yourself “being a sissy”? Or maybe “freedom of speech is for crybabies”.—Joe]

I found a new use for a KitchenAid mixer

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For several years I have been using KitchenAid mixers for Boomershoot. We have made several tons of explosives with them. They work great.

Today I bought another mixer and brought it home to my clock tower. It turns out they can be used for other things as well as explosives:

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I made a big batch of lentil chocolate chip cookies this afternoon with it. It’s not Boomerite but it still did a great job.

If they were roses I would understand

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Thursday morning I found this on the stairway to my clock tower:

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Those are six taco shells carefully placed on six steps. I have no idea what the story on those were. Had they been roses I kinda sorta would have guessed what they meant. But since they look like burnt taco shells I’m baffled.

Quote of the day—Henry Louis Mencken

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Of all the classes of men, I dislike most those who make their livings by talking—actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. All of them participate in the shallow false pretenses of the actor who is their archetype. It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause of the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric.

Henry Louis Mencken
From Minority Report, H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, Knopf, 1956.
[It would seem to me that the appreciation of the applause is an important item. If the talker causes the listener to think and contemplate it would seem to me that you have an entirely different species than if the talker stirs the emotions with the intent to generate applause.

Still, I understand his point. I get particularly annoyed at actors and politicians that know how to “work a crowd” but know next to nothing about the topic they are pontificating on.—Joe]