AR16 doesn't get nearly as much traffic as the "biker roads" - 14, north 7, etc. It's not as tight, but it's good mountain road, runs halfway across the state, and has few intersecting roads or driveways. Also avoids towns, which means you need a full tank when you turn onto it, at leas when you're riding the Bandit, which sucks wind at 125 miles or so. There is a price for the cams, compression, 1216 big bore kit, and so forth.
One gas stop, something smelled bad. I thought it was a nearby dumpster. When I got home I smelled it again. Apparently I clipped the edge of some of the ton or so of roadkill I dodged around, and it's baked onto the header. Hell, I'll clean it off tomorrow.
One thing I noticed - a whole lot of new metal roofs on homes and businesses during the ride. A tornado ripped through that area about six months ago, which could account for it. Metal roofs are becoming common here, too, mostly on new/high end homes. Which annoys the crap out of me. Back in the 1980s we needed a new roof, and I wanted to use the enameled corrugated metal they use for the walls of steel buildings. That is apparently the exact same stuff they're using now... but State Farm, which was carrying our homeowner's policy at the time, nearly had a cardiac infarction when I happened to mention it. No way in hell would they insure a house with a nonflammable, leak-free metal roof. So we eventually wound up with new asphalt shingles... and now metal roofs are going on all around us. *ssholes...
I was coming back once via the mountain pass at Raton, New Mexico. (9500 feet? High, anyway.) I stopped at a fast food place to get a hot chocolate and warm up a bit; I'd only been on the road a few hours. A gaggle of Wingers were there, with their CB radios, stuffed animals, and riding suits. They were out for a day ride from Albuquerque. During the conversation, one wanted to know where I had come from. I told them Springs, which was a few hours north. They were shocked; wow, what a long ride! Where was I going? I told them Little Rock. All eight heads turned, looked at me, looked at the XJ. "On that?" one of them said. Like a 140mph, 900cc machine was a moped. "I'll be home tonight," I said.
They fired up their behemoths, engaged reverse to back out of their parking places, and lumbered off in the general direction of Albuquerque. I thumbed the 900 into life and headed east to Little Rock. And I slept in my own bed that night.
There's one little vignette I still remember from one trip. I'd taken the northern route, Interstate 70, that time. Lots more traffic, but still occasional long, empty stretches. I was closing in on Salina, Kansas (geographic center of the United States) when I saw a Kawasaki Ninja go by in the westbound lane. Mirrors folded in, feet on the rear pegs, tucked in behind the screen, giving it all it had. That memory stays with me, frozen in time.
I still wonder if he knew the next gas was over a hundred miles away...
I read "Hunting Badger" last night, copyright 1999. At the end of the book was a longish autobiography by Hillerman. I found it... disturbing. Well, to not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit.
Hillerman claimed he wrote his first book, "The Blessing Way", in 1969, and that when he was done, he printed it off on his Radio Shack TRS-80 computer. He mentions 1969 twice, and later mentions it didn't hit the bookstores until 1971.
There weren't any TRS-80 computers in 1969. Or 1971. Or any kind of personal computer, for that matter. The Altair kits, with 256 *bytes* of RAM, didn't come out until 1975(?). I had the issue of Popular Electronics with the Altair on the cover, and lusted for one, though it cost more than my Dad made in a month. And you weren't likely to write a book on one; they were pretty much limited to making the panel lights flash in sequence.
He also mentions the book was nominated for a "Best New Writer" award from the Mystery Writers of America, but he was beat out by Dick Francis' first book. As it so happens I have most of Dick Francis' stuff on the shelf, so I walked into the living room and pulled out one I knew was one of his earlier ones - "Dead Cert" was copyright 1962, and a quick check showed several others in the early '60s.
Hillerman's last few NTP books have been loose fluff; his little autobiography is a nice scoop of dung on top. I could be charitable and chalk it up to Alzheimer's or a stroke or something, but that little autobiography had to go through at least half a dozen editors. Now, I realize that most people's computer history stops with Windows 95, but there were editors involved, and Dick Francis is a major property; his books still take considerable shelf space in the stores, so it's something it should be their business to know.
> > Knowing that nothing you do, say or call will resolve > > your issue, just yell "you F*CKING IRRELEVENT MONKEYS!!!Yesterday CenturyTel lost the 801 exchange where my ISP is. It happens periodically. It took six different "customer service representatives", each of whom had extreme trouble understanding the difference between an area code and an exchange, to deny any problems existed. A couple of hours later, 801 came back up again.
Southwestern Bell was the same way when the T1s at my former employer would go down. I'd call in, and they'd deny any troubles. A few minutes later, they'd start working again.
What pisses me off more than having to deal with the idiots is the way they automatically deny there's any problem on their end, even BEFORE I get a chance to explain the problem.
The LOUD advertising they played on hold annoyed me greatly. I explained my annoyance at length to several of the "representatives", which probably didn't help things. I thought about laying the phone down on the desk and shouting at it, just to increase their "customer service experience", though.
"WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
> > With any kind of ISP I've always gone out of my way to > > ferret the organization quickly, and find the third > > tier support people, and reach their manager.There was no ISP involved - it was purely a phone company problem. I could pick up the handset, dial, and there was just a hash of static.
My main problem, in retrospect, was answering their question "who are you trying to call." As soon as they heard "ISP", they stopped listening.
It seems my memory of films I saw that long ago is either unreliable, or my point of view has changed so much in the meantime I can no longer rely on what my impressions were back then.
Basically, the movie sucked. It was still the least bad of the lot, at least before "First Contact", but it was baaad. Besides the loooong periods of nothing much going on, reminescent of the first movie, it had the various characters behaving, well, out-of-character. There were a couple of concurrent plots, which was good, plot being something not all that common nowadays, but they quickly became ridiculous. I noticed that Khan, though one of the most powerful characters of the old series, and ostensibly the main bad guy in the movie, was only on-screen for a few minutes. The bulk of the rest of the time was Kirk's ex-girlfriend and her stupid Genesis magic dildo. Quite a few continuity problems, some so bad AB caught them. I also noticed, for some reason, that George Takei was on-screen for less than thirty seconds.
On the other hand, it has some really neat concepts. Stephenson's development of the 'burbclaves' as the ultimate extension of the gated community is downright chilling - we have one of those right *here* in Arkansas, and it's been around long before Stephenson's book. They have armed guards at the gates; no pass, no entry. They have their own police, their own fire, their own water and sewer, and supposedly they do their own roads; it's almost like an Army base, except it's only a pretentious housing project.
Stephenson's other hook was an extension of the then-newish idea of memetics - how ideas propagate through cultures. Since I've been avoiding the Videodrome signals, I see a *lot* of that sort of thing - within a day or two, everyone I know will pick up odd pronunciation patterns or misuse some word the same way; this comes from memes distributed by television. But *not one* of them can ever remember where they picked it up from... they pick it up as cultural 'background noise', and it slides in without going through their critical faculties. Press them, and they'll claim they've always said or known whatever it was. If you were prone to such thoughts, it would make you wonder about mind-control satellites...
What it looks like to me, is that Stephenson had some really neat ideas - some of them show signs of lots of thought and polishing - and cobbled together a story as best as he could to use as a vehicle to expound on them. It's worth reading, but it's not something that makes you sorry when you finish the last page.
William Gibson's "Neuromancer" is a better book, but not the first time you read it. Gibson didn't just pull it out of his hat; he lifted the entire setting and many of the characters right out of a decade's worth of short stories he'd written, which is why the background is so fully developed. It was a derivative work to start with, and it's twenty years old now; what freshness it had has been eclipsed by hundreds or maybe thousands of imitations. The book's only real problem is that it doesn't tell you enough about what's going on to be able to follow it. The first time I read it, I spent most of my time going "eh?" or "where the hell did *that* come from?" It was bad editing; it's obvious Gibson lost track of the sequence of events, and so did his editor. The *second* time you read it, if you can get up the nerve to pick it up again, it's an altogether different experience. Unfortunately it was Gibson's only work worthy of notice; he plagiarized it for a couple of sequels that sucked to various degrees, and he did some other stuff that made me wonder how it even got into print.
While I'm on a roll, I'll put in a plug for what is probably the best-written piece of fiction I've ever picked up - Tim Powers' "The Anubis Gates." Powers has one other good book - "Dinner At Deviants' Palace" - so he didn't blow his entire wad on the Gates, but the rest of his stuff ranges from "mediocre" to "very bad." The Gates, though... it's old and hard to find, and apparently didn't sell well enough to stay in print for long. I've managed to coax a few other people into reading it, but their reactions were "well, it was okay but awfully long" or "it was okay, but it moved really slow." Well, it *is* a long book, and even with my reading speed, it took a whole day, a two pound bag of M&Ms, and a three-liter Coke to finish it. The going *is* slow for a while, because Powers keeps introducing new subplots, some of them so wildly different they seem to have no bearing on the main story. Frankly, I was put off too; I kept reading to see how bad a mess he would make of it. But he just kept weaving them together, bit by bit, while I was going "aha!" in amazement. Let's see, we'll start off with a physics lab in 1980s California that comes up with a method for time travel, and connect them up to a barking mad Egyptian alchemist in the 1800s as the other end of the link. The alchemist's stuff works, by the way. Set the other end in Victorian London and colonial Cairo. Jump back to 1600s England for a while. Introduce some more characters. Add some doppelgangers and clones. Add some werewolves. Toss in some Gypsies and a London beggar underground that would have made Dickens' or Conan Doyle's eyes bug out. Add some temporal paradoxes. Dose liberally with the big shaker labeled "HP Lovecraft." Stir in some Brothers Grimm, some Greek mythology, and some Egyptian mythology. Add some gruesome biological engineering. Dose with British colonial politics. How about mind transplants? Hell, add some *more* Lovecraft. Drag the Things out from the closet and under the bed and add them too. Shake, don't stir.
Sounds like a right mess, doesn't it? Powers ties *all* of it together; every piece, every plotline, every character; he does it in a way that, within the context of the story, is not only reasonable, but almost inevitable. Not just a good story, but the writing itself is excellent, and they're not the same thing. And though it's a bit trite in these days of depressed antiheroes, it ends in a way that makes you feel good when you finish it.
>> Ranch. Horse Ranch. One farms vegetable matter and owns a *ranch* for
>>livestock...
Sounds like the "beef growers" I keep hearing about nowadays.
Oh, and they don't count "heads of cattle" or "heads of beef" any more. Now they're "beeves."
The same people probably make telephone calls on their "cell", watch television on their "satellite", and send "emails" to other people.
>> Where they raise chickens here for meat, it is not called a chicken
>> ranch. I think it is a western thing.
Dudes come from dude ranches, right?
>> Help me here, Biguy. Why does this useage irritate ? I have a letter, I
>> have an email (do you really need that hyphen?:) what's the dif ?
"Here, take these mails down to the post office and mail them."
"Hey, these mails were in the box, I think they're for you."
> What's the correct usage, then, for an e-mail transmitted message?
It's a "message", same as if it was on paper, the phone, or whatever.
> I've always been proud to admit that I can be bought, and I'll sell out or > > swap allegiances for money.Well, as long as you don't sell out for cheap.
I still remember the FBI's ABSCAM sting operation, when they found out they could buy US Congressmen for under a thousand bucks. I was mortified. I mean, sure, they're politicians, they're for sale by default. But for the kind of money they were going for, I wouldn't have expected to buy a Panamanian dog license clerk, much less a Congressman.
> > So, tou would be in favour og Israel killing all the Palestinians, or of the > > Palestinians killing all the Israeli ?Kill them all and place the land back under the dominion of the British Empire, where it came from to start with.
Besides, why should the Jews and Palestinians have a "homeland" when the Gauls were disposessed of their homeland by the Romans in 200 BC? If you're going to be fair, someone needs to carve off a big chunk of northern Italy and southeastern France to return it to its rightful owners...
Of course the Gauls don't actually exist any more, as a culture, racial, ethnic, or religious group. But that's okay, for a modest fee I could be enticed to administer the new Gaulish homeland, which I'd call, oh, the Dominion of Dave would be catchy...
I tell you what; support me now, and I'll put in a good word for you
when we dicker with the UN for the restoration of the Etruscan and
Carthaginian homelands. Italy has a better climate, but Libya has oil,
and nobody says you actually have to live there, you know.
[weblog note: the Gauls were originally from central Italy; Roman expansion kept pushing them north and west, much like the Europeans did with the Amerinds. The Romans pushed them clean off the west side of Britain, declining to chase them to Ireland, and all the way up to what is now Scotland, where Hadrian decided it was too much trouble to chase them any further, and built his famous wall.]
The MSD-6 on TRX cost $75 a little over ten years ago. The going price seems to be $180-ish now. Well, that's inflation, I guess. And MSD doesn't have the competition it used to, now that so many companies have pulled out of the aftermarket ignition business.
The prices, though... the various "digital" boxes seem to be in the $300 range. MSD 7AL-3 ignition box is $600. The "programmable digital" box is $750, and the MSD-10 is $900! Mallory prices run about 20% lower, but that's still stratospheric territory.
MSD's "Pro Mag 12" magneto is $1300. The "12" stands for output amperage, apparently. Mongo like. But wait! There's more! The "Pro Mag 44" has FORTY-FOUR amps! That's enough for major wood. Of course, that's $2000 for the magneto, and another $700 for the matching coil. $2700 for ignition?
"Taylor Vertex" still sells the same old small block Chevy magneto for $800. This is the same magneto that's been in production for going on sixty years, so I guess we get a price break. Ronco, Joe Hunt, Scintilla-Vertex... also used in light aircraft, and I have a Czechoslovakian book showing 1940s Tatras with "Scintilla" clearly visible on their eddy-current fan drives, which look amazingly like magnetos...
-> Well, you're certainly up on your curmudgeon points this week. Bear -> in mind that it's ENTERTAINMENT, a fictional story, and, in theory, -> in the future.Even as a kid watching the original Star Trek episodes, I kept noticing how many times they'd run across things that weren't affected by phasers, and how many times a plain old .38 would probably have saved the day...
- Dave "BLAMM! You lose." Williams
After finishing "The Waste Makers", I thought it would be interesting to see what Google had. So after four or five tries to sync with the ISP's modems, not ten minutes later I was typing into the little googlebox... and returned a whole *bunch* of hits.
Apparently Packard wrote a whole bunch of stuff, and either none of it sold around here, or people didn't ever get rid of any of it. He seems to be regarded as a cross between Nikola Tesla and Isaac Asimov - worshipped by the borderline crazies and put down by academia. Hmm...
Kornbluth's SF novel "The Space Merchants" came right out of Packard, apparently. I've read at least a dozen other books whose authors mined that book heavily. I guess it made quite a splash in its day.
I have to use a CPAP machine to breathe while I'm asleep, otherwise I choke. So I spent the night awake in the dark. Fortunately my little Samsung MP3 player was charged up, so I listened to another three hours of the unabriged version of SM Stirling's "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings", set on an alternate-universe Mars. Some of Stirling's stuff bites, some of it rocks. This one rocks.
About dawn I went to the Wall-Mall and picked up a 400 watt DC-AC inverter with battery clips, so I could pull the battery out of one of the cars, lug it into the house, and run the CPAP, and since it had a 5V USB port, I could also charge the MP3 player. The cellphones could be charged from the car cord, so that was no problem. I also got an LED lantern that's supposed to run 7 hours on a full charge; it had a wall wart and a lighter plug. I plugged it into the Malibu to charge.
We got power back around 1700, just before dark. Back in '01 we lost power for five days in midwinter. "Boring" hardly describes sitting in the dark for sixteen hours at a time...
> And if that's not enough the Brits get their own line of incredible > Daewoos: Matiz, Kalos and Tacuma. The other Koreans aren't much better: > Kia's Sportage, Sorento, and the new Amanti! Hyundai's Elantra &. Tiburon! > > Please, someone make it stop, before my head explodes.Chevrolet was the first, as far as I know, with "Camaro", which was invented by their marketing people as a made-up word guaranteed not to infringe on any little-known trade marks whose holders might come out of the woodwork with lawsuits. Ford, as you might recall, had beaten off several nuisance suits about that time from people holding "Mustang" trade marks for toys, lawnmowers, and other non-automotive products.
> Now, if you want to start talking about two strokes or > electric valve actuation...Nothing wrong with two strokes; opposed-piston, uniflow scavenged Diesel two strokes are the kings of BSFC. Cooper-Bessemer, Fairbanks-Morse, Junkers, or for typically bizarro British fangleage, the Napier Deltic, well worth a web search for those not familiar with it.
Electric valve actuation, on the other hand, requires repealing the laws of physics, or for someone to pull an engine-temperature superconductor out of their hat. People are so used to gigahertz electronics they forget that it takes time for magnetic flux to build and collapse. That's why the current delivered by a single-coil ignition system drops with RPM. And to move a valve like a camshaft does, you need a *much* bigger actuator than that; something the size of a medium soup can... except you'll start running into charge and decay times at a couple thousand RPM. Oh, and the efficiency is much less than mechanical operation, there ain't no free lunch.
I think I'll hold out for teleportation; at least that's within the realm of the theoretically possible, given new developments in physics.
The secrets to successful MIG welding:
1) clean workpieces. Grind or wire wheel down to clean metal, use carb cleaner or acetone to remove any oil, and it makes a *lot* of difference
2) good ground. Grounding through paint, hot-rolled steel skin, or rust will work enough to strike a spark, but it won't make a nice weld. One way to tell if you have a good ground is to feel the clamp - if it's hot, it's not making good electrical contact to the workpiece.
2a) clamp as close as possible to where you're welding
3) Go for it. Small, cheap MIGs (I don't know about the megabuck "professional" models) don't like to futz around at low power or low wire speeds. If you're welding clean metal and you have problems with spatter, cratering, or bubbles, reach over and turn the heat knob up. Four times out of five, your problem will go away. If you stick the wire to the part or burn it up into the handpiece, *then* adjust the wire speed.
4) most inexpensive welders have a range of wire speeds much wider than they can use. From .025 to .035 wire, flux or gas, highest to lowest power, the knob on my MIG moves from "4" to "6" on a scale of 10. Nothing at the ends of the ranges is useable. You just barely bump the knob and the wire speed changes a lot. Not all welders do this, but if you have one like mine that does, it's awkward to adjust the wire speed.
5) keep the gas shield on the handpiece clean. Once it starts getting steel boogers up the nozzle, the shielding gas goes off at odd angles and no longer protects the arc zone while you're welding.
6) if you have ugly welds and everything else looks okay, try increasing the shielding gas flow.
7) if #6 doesn't work, it might be the oxidized wire. Even an apparently-clean spool can be oxidized enough to cause trouble. Wipe with a clean paper towel; if you get anything on the towel, it's oxidized. Usually you can crank the power up enough to get by, but if it's really bad, it'll be ugly. I use the small spools of wire, just so I won't wind up with ten pounds of safety wire if the humidity gets it when I'm not welding much.
- Chuck Forsberg's DSZ documentation
"I took a course in Hegelian dialectic, and it was easier to understand than Forsberg's documentation."
- an old message from RelayNet
> > However I am alarmed at BMW adopting the Single Wire electrical > > system (not that I know how it works) because if that wire fractures > > surely everything stops?Ford was the OEM who made the most noise about that sort of thing, starting back in the late '70s. There have been, as usual, a whole raft of "standards" which few OEMs have paid attention to.
I don't have any problem with the single-wire idea in abstract, but I can see a whole lot of problems if there's not some type of *enforced* standard. Right now, I can take an 1157 taillight bulb or H4 headlight bulb and stick it in anything that has a socket to receive it, going back to the 1930s, and it'll work. There's a separate wire from every switch to every bulb.
Putting aside, for the moment, the mad proliferation of bulb types in recent years, the single-wire bus setups put all the smarts in the socket. When you flip the turn signal on, the body computer sends a signal out to the data bus, where that socket is listening; each and every socket is actually a network node. The datagram says, "hey, left front turn signal bulb, turn on", and the socket goes, "oh, sure" and the turn signal lights up until it gets at datagram telling it to turn off.
This is all well and good, except right now, that socket could be one of several competing standards, or it could be, say, a 2004 Blivit Deluxe. Only *that particular socket* will work correctly. There's no guarantee an '03 Blivit Deluxe socket would work, or even an '04 Blivit Minor.
Back when I used to restore antique cars, I ran into more than enough of that sort of thing, even without smart sockets. And even in the CarFleet, I have enough trouble with light bulbs without having to wonder if it's a bad bulb, bad connection, or having to drag out a laptop with a protocol analyzer whenever something doesn't work.
Now, if the USDOT or whatever Euro sanctioning body, or both, came up with some absolute standard for each and every socket in the car, and enforced it by sending a bunch of ex-STASI skinheads to the factory to draw the offenders' genitals through a 1/2" knothole and staple them to the other side should they deviate from the Holy Writ, I might think a little more kindly about the idea.
A cow is a completely automated milk-manufacturing machine. It is encased in untanned leather and mounted on four vertical, movable supports, one at each corner. The front end of the machine, or input, contains the cutting and grinding mechanism, utilizing a unique feedback device. Here also are the headlights, air inlet and exhaust, a bumper and a foghorn.
At the rear, the machine carries the milk-dispensing equipment as well as a built-in flyswatter and insect repeller. The central portion houses a hydro- chemical-conversion unit. Briefly, this consists of four fermentation and storage tanks connected in series by an intricate network of flexible plumbing. This assembly also contains the central heating plant complete with automatic temperature controls, pumping station and main ventilating system. The waste disposal apparatus is located to the rear of this central section.
Cows are available fully-assembled in an assortment of sizes and colors. Production output ranges from 2 to 20 tons of milk per year. In brief, the main external visible features of the cow are: two lookers, two hookers, four stander-uppers, four hanger-downers, and a swishy-wishy.
> Right now The Histopry channel has a "Blunders" episode on, about > Chernobyl. Nice video showing the glowing core in the rubble....AB tried to get me to watch something on that channel the other day. A big chunk of the screen was taken up with a "History Channel" overlay ad that never went away, and there were these animated ads that would pop up, zoom back and forth, dance, and then scroll their ad text.
It was some WWII footage that I'd seen before; one of the famous gunport films of carpet bombing over Berlin. They'd cropped it way down so they could do the MTV basketball-motion thing. The originals were wide angle and stable.
The original clip was probably an hour long; they kept showing the same five or six second loop over and over. I've noticed this in some of the movies we've rented recently; it's like a built-in instant replay, and it's extremely annoying.
So, basically, my plan to have her tape some of that stuff is out the window, since the "content" level is both small and adulterated.
When analog service went away, I had to downgrade to a digital phone, and I *still* had bits of other conversations mixed in with mine, when the phone didn't just stop in the middle of a conversation.
This morning, I made a call on the cellphone, and some minutes into the conversation, it was suddenly giving me one side of someone else's conversation. After a few moments, I took the phone to AB and had her listen in. The guy couldn't hear us, but we were locked on to him. I finally hung up.
Feh.
Heck, in the 1970s there were four Plymouth Superbirds running around this little town of 20,000. One didn't have the giant wing on the back; I remember thinking it was a fake, but later I found out the wing came separately and not all owners chose to install it.
Which brings me to... exactly how many Honda Insights are out there, anyway? I drove 20 miles today, and saw three. Which is about average, for the last few weeks since I noticed there seemed to be a heckuva lot of those things running around.
> > I suppose I was thinking of a super-lightweight > > motorcycle equivalent of a jeep or quad, but it would > > probably end up as the FF parallel to the Mini Moke!Yeah. We call those "dune buggies" here. At the Baja and other big offroad races, motorcycles cross the finish line first, then the buggies, then the "real" cars and trucks.
The US military decided the Jeep was impractical and dangerous after 40 years of service, and replaced it with the HMMV, which met all of the Pentagon's new specifications, except the HMMV is a huge truck, and it simply won't go the places and do the things a Jeep could.
The Army needed "Rat Patrol" Jeeps in Desert Storm, but Jeeps were doubleplus ungood badthink. I remember my jaw dropping in amazement when I saw footage of what some wizard in Procurement came up with as a substitute - dune buggies in desert camo, with .30 cal ring mounts, and "CHENOWTH" (one of the larger manufacturers) proudly blazoned alongside the Army unit markings. Some pencil-pusher at the Pentagon actually came up with something *better* than a Jeep, at least for combat... some of those buggies will run 120mph over the desert.
> "Do it or Don't...There is no Try" > -Yoda-Which, if examined critically, translates to "if there's any chance of failure, don't even bother."
Adherence to that philosophy is probably why that particular jedi master spent his time hiding out in a swamp instead of doing something useful.
> I always translated Yoda's statement as, "Give everything you do 100% or > don't bother".That might be what he *meant*, but that's not what he *said*.
I still come across mice, firearms, and other everyday items carefully "designed" so as to be operable only with the right hand. Which is one reason that when I become Dictator of the World, all the right-handers will be sent to extermination camps, other than a modest pool kept for slave labor...
> > Umm, right. No wonder American industrial design is (by and large) so > > far behind the rest of the world.Try reading "The Design of Everyday Things," (?) by Don Norman. The book would be funny, if it didn't hurt so much. He lives in some fantasy world where engineers are always free to optimize their designs without having to recycle all the tooling from the last widgit, don't have to add more features for less money, don't have to do it in a week, and don't have arbitrary, counterproductive, mandatory input to the design process from idiots in marketing and management. Oh, and they don't have someone else do major hacking and slashing on their designs after they're supposedly finished...
In any industrial design process, the guy with the pencil or CAD station is at the *bottom* of the chain; unless he's very lucky, he's stuck with a bunch of irrelevant constraints come down from above.
> > Re ColorTune; Ian, care to describe how this thing works? I remember seeing > > them advertised but never knew anyone who'd used one.Flame color is directly related to air/fuel ratio during the early part of the combustion process. After the spark kicks off the avalanche, there are dozens of stages of combustion which either release no great amount of heat, or are actually endothermic and *take* heat. This is known as "lag time" in Diesels, and though it's not usually specifically broken out in most Otto cycle texts, it's the same thing. This is also the zone known as "luminous combustion", and by watching it, you can monitor the air/fuel ratio, just like with your propane torch.
> > How on earth does it > > sense mixture via spark??? Isn't that what it does, via the small glass > > chamber? Obviously led you in the correct direction, that's super.It's fused quartz. You can't run them for a long period of time since they'll soot up, and they're not in any particular heat range. But they're great for setting idle mix and low speed chassis dyno work.
> > Talking of which, I've just been commissioned to inspect and report on the > > actual hearse in which Winston Churchill was carried to wherever it was. > > Coo.Upscale! Roosevelt only got a horse-drawn wagon.
WSC outlived the other principals of WWII by a considerable margin; he could seen the Beatles, if he paid attention to that sort of thing.
Funeral processions and rites, particularly of statesmen, have often been grand affairs; ritual sacrifice, suicide, the destruction of wealth, and other expressions of anguish; extended holidays, grand memorials... still, the grandest I'm aware of is the procession of Edward VII in 1910, as described by Barbara Tuchman in "The Guns of August." It was led by the new king, George V, Edward's only surviving brother, the Duke of Connaught, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. Behind them were King Frederick of Denmark, King George of Greece, King Haakon of Norway, King Alfonso of Spain, King Manuel of Portugal, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, and King Albert of Belgium. Then came the lesser ranks: Archduke Franz Josef of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prince Yussuf, heir to the throne of Turkey, Grand Duke Michael, brother of the Tsar of Russia, the Duke of Aosta, brother of the King of Italy, Prince Fushimi, brother of the Emperor of Japan, Prince Carl, brother of the King of Sweden, Prince Henry, Consort of the Queen of Holland, and the crown princes of Serbia, Rumania, and Montenegro.
The next group contained forty imperial or royal highnesses, four reigning queens, three dowager queens, a former President Theodore Roosevelt of the USA, an army of Grand Dukes of Germany, the Prince of Siam, the Prince of Persia, the Stuart Pretender to the Throne, the higher ranks of the former French ruling house of Orleans, the Khedive of Egypt, Prince Tsia-Tao of China, the Foreign Minister of France, and the Dowager Empress of Russia.
The third group was merely dukes, lords, admirals, field marshals, and ordinary politicians.
The fourth group were representatives of many of the major British military units - the Coldstreams, the Gordons, and so forth.
You have to admit, the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha had *style*... they didn't change the name to "Windsor" until WWI.
This time they stacked all the cut wood on top of the fire hydrant and water meter, and underneath the cable TV wire. No way the city knuckle-boom truck is going to get to it there, so I spent the rest of the afternoon moving the pile. [sigh]
I'm looking forward to not having a thick coating of sap all over the cars, or the ants that live off the sap, or the stickerballs, or the piles of leaves, or the 30-foot branches that would occasionally drop fifty feet or so and leave a big dent in the ground.
There were a lot of people whose jobs it was for this sort of thing not to happen - from the Treasury to the various banking associations to the individual clerks who wrote the paperwork. It's the same basic deal as the "S&L" collapse of the 1980s, which we were assured couldn't happen again.
Ri-ight.
So far it looks like a "perpetratorless crime"; that is, no indication anyone is going to lose their job, much less go to jail.