Maybe I should give up blogging

I started this blog for the express purpose of practicing my writing. I'm good at non-fiction, though I drift into political rants rather easily because the economy sucks and I know who to blame. Or rather who not to. I feel maladaptive in an economy without any moral center, without ethics beyond getting rich over any obstacles. Too many people I have met disturb my calm. And I'm finding it harder and harder to smile.

Maybe I need a break from this. From commenting, from expressing opinions online, from writing non-fiction. Maybe its time to get back to fiction because op-ed is making me more depressed. Because commenting on politics and world news and stuff I can't fix just makes me feel helpless.

I'm not making business connections. I'm not finding work. I'm not getting anywhere but depressed. And what I write here can be used against me. So I guess it is time to end this project as a failure and move on. Maybe do something useful instead.

US B-52 Bombers Fly Through Chinese Threat Zone

It seems we're going to see just how crazy China is. Will they fire on US military planes over international waters? The last time this happened, in Libya, US bombers blew up Kadaffi's brother and his family. It was an assassination attempt, and a message. And the plot of a blockbuster movie with Tom Cruise. And a popular flight simulator game called F-15 Strike Eagle. I had that game. It was fun.

All the Chinese nationals I've worked with over the years are hard working, self interested, and always looking to make a buck. Not always honestly, but they want to get paid. They never do volunteer work. Ever. Their time is too valuable, and their families are their priority. Loyalty to anyone else is ridiculous. So if there's an action and a threat, there has to be a personal financial advantage to either the guy making the threat and the people backing him, or the People's Revolutionary Party of China. So where is the advantage to China by threatening international relations? It isn't obvious.

Will China back down? Is this a good excuse for my begged-for Trade Tariffs to cut off Chinese goods and kickstart the US economy through demand for those manufactured goods? Does China realize that war with the US, or even fear of war through an act of war like shooting down US aircraft would dump contracts with China and thus Chinese manufacturing workers into the streets in winter time... would that be good for China? No. Unless they want to show those disloyal manufacturing workers they better get back to slaving on the People's Cooperative Farms. And maybe that's their point. What do you think?

Iran's Nuclear Program

Despite the quiet outrage over China declaring they will shoot down airplanes hundreds of miles from their own coastline, this news was eclipsed by the news the last couple days. Great Britain met with Iran in Switzerland and brokered an agreement, between Iran and the USA, to back off sanctions in exchange for a signed treaty to keep Uranium/Plutonium enrichment below 5% (less than weapons grade). This allows Iran to keep their nuclear program, to make electric power and probably ships, in exchange for them selling oil on the open market again rather than to the Greeks and Indians and Chinese for Gold at slightly discounted prices. They never stopped selling oil. They just weren't selling oil for dollars or euros. As its highly likely Iran already has a nuclear weapon stockpile, and the treaty is a piece of paper and unenforceable, this gives Iran carte blanche to openly join the world of nuclear powered Bond Villains nations. Pakistan, India, China, USA, Russia, Israel, probably North Korea, probably Japan, probably South Korea, France, Great Britain, probably Germany. The trouble with nuclear proliferation is those with weapons that can't hold their tempers, ones with leaders prone to threats, nuclear war is inevitable and the fallout is literally an international problem, which means that if the fallout lands somewhere that's also nuclear armed, they will retaliate with force on the offender. The other problem with proliferation is that America got The Bomb when most of our roads were unpaved, our population out of work and fighting two wars, and much of us suffering from hunger and the cold. We were a third world nation, and we built and used two atom bombs. Crappy modern third world nations can do this too. How do you feel about a nuclear armed El Salvador? How about Namibia with nuclear weapons? South Africa has them, and they're communists, so that probably means their nukes were sold for food. Africans display amazingly poor sense for maintenance. And nukes need very frequent and precise maintenance by extremely sober and careful men. Good luck finding those in sub-Saharan Africa.

Nuclear proliferation makes for nuclear accidents and even small spills can poison a lot of seafood. Look at Fukushima Reactor in Japan, where the energy minister kept insisting there was no problem, even after the youtube video of the steam explosion and leaks.

I think Japan lost a great deal of the world's respect with that denial. We already saw this and he's insisting everything is fine. Many workers died from radiation poisoning. They're now trying to freeze the ground to stop natural water flow pushing their leaking and highly radioactive reactor cooling pool into the sea, where its been leaking for a couple years now. As sea water is a good way to cool a reactor so it can make more steam, and thus more power, putting nuclear reactors on the coast is going to continue to be a normal thing. The two nuclear reactors in California are both on the coast, cooling themselves in the icy Pacific.

I feel glad that the US Navy is withdrawing from the Middle East and Indian Ocean and Mediterranean. We have no interests there anymore. We shouldn't be paying to keep it safe for our competition to benefit. Let them pay for their own security, and suffer the consequences of the wars caused by pretending "everything is A-Okay!". Between the ambivalent Europeans (and the failure of the European union in the southern nations) and the Chinese navy, they can deal with all that crap. Same with the Indian navy, such as it is. Let those two fight over patrolling the Persian Gulf and deal with pirates in the Indian Ocean. Not our problem. Not America's problem. While I'm sure there's good reasons to stay active in the Pacific, restraining Chinese ambitions to slaughter lead the world under its peaceful and benevolent rule, as a teacher leads a student, our real issues are closer to home and must be dealt with here. Not somewhere nebulous. US foreign policy has long been about fighting wars overseas so they aren't fought here. And with cheap oil, that works. The trouble is we have expensive oil and we're a bankrupt nation that's killing our youth in wars and refusing to give them jobs at home so they get into drugs, crime, and teen pregnancy to join the gravy train of entitlements. In the scale of things being told by the EU to butt out of Iran's nuclear program? Well, ESAD. This is not a victory for anyone but Iran.

I wonder if we'll relax restrictions on Cuba next? Its not like the Cuban expats in Florida vote for Democrats anyway. They're a known conservative quantity, so hurting them doesn't cost the Ruling Party its votes. And the president is a Lame Duck so can flap around doing whatever, insulting everybody. It's not like increasing the suffering of the public in Cuba has resulted in a revolution. At this point, its just sour grapes from those who had to flee their homes in Cuba. I wonder which nation will broker this secret agreement, and what neutral nation will host the secret conference? Maybe the US should go negotiate returning the Falkland Islands to Argentina? Would Britain like that? You know, just to be fair! Sigh.

America is giving up many of its treaty obligations. It just doesn't have the prestige to threaten anymore. Like our President from Hawaii, we're kind of a joke. May as well take our ball and go home.

Leaf Grinding

Fire Maples, a few days ago, before the gales hit. 

Many people are terrified of soil. Its scary. They think that since the tomato seed they planted didn't sprout, its bad soil. They think that predictions of mass starvation due to rainforest clearing reducing soil fertility is permanent rather than temporary. People, some people, like to panic. And then point fingers. And then justify violence. This is really not necessary. Soil can be improved.

Leaves are mostly done falling here in the Foothills. There's still some up, but the periods of gale and now cold have dropped many many leaves. You can fill big plastic yard waste bags with leaves and pay to have them hauled off or you can pay someone to do it for you or you can do what we do. Use a leaf grinder. Its a box with an engine and blades, like a lawnmower with metal parts to keep your stupid hands out of the blades and you dump the leaves into a funnel and leaf chips come out the side. Most of the chips are around half inch diameter so this helps it break down into the soil much faster, in weeks rather than months.

Normally, you spread this mulch on bare soil to slow or stop erosion, though you can till it in if you rent or own a rototiller and your soil allows for that. In California, rototillers can be destroyed by our hard clay soil, though once that soil is broken up and aerated, it will grow anything you plant. Its not coincidence that Idaho baking potatoes were developed here in California, in my home town. The weather and soil meant you could grow anything, provided it wasn't killed by frost. I even knew people who had orange trees, and date palms were common there. Up here its mostly apples and cherry trees, both sweet and pie making sour cherries. Slightly lower elevation are mandarin oranges, with almonds and walnuts on the Sacramento Valley floor, along with apricots. Local orchard coops buy the fruits and nuts and process them in small local factories, often for winter holiday gift basket sales.

Soils are only crap if they aren't cared for, or some jackass tilled sawdust into it. Sawdust is hard to fix. 12 times normal nitrogen fertilizer is usually needed. As that's uncontaminated with parasites, unlike manure, pellet fertilizer is best. If you put physical effort into amending them to where you want them, usually by adding things and tiling them for proper aeration, and planting nitrogen fixing cover crops, like beans or clover, and till in organic matter so plants have something to grow with, like mulched leaves, you aren't throwing away the summer's efforts (and paying someone to haul it somewhere else). The CO2, which many people are obsessed about, stays in solid format and goes back into the soil to grow more leaves next spring.

These mushrooms erupted in a single day from the remains of a dead oak tree's roots.

And possibly veggies for your garden, now that the soil is good. As someone who is still harvesting and eating ripe garden tomatoes, despite being Thanksgiving week, and had fresh zucchini all summer long, home grown cucumber (so tasty) on salads, and is considering growing lettuce in our greenhouse this winter, I'm reasonably excited about soil. Maybe more than you. Leaf grinding is the start in winter time. In spring, till that soil with gypsum and possibly lime to balance the pH, and if you're extra sticky, consider rice hulls. Easy to get in California and Arkansas, not so much in most states.

24 bags of leaves = 40 minutes of grinding

I just finished grinding 24 bags of leaves into one big pile of mulch with my Dad. This is not the first time we've done that this Fall. It's the third, and presumably final time of the year. Most of the leaves are down. The ones up there are probably going to stay. This is the most maintenance intensive aspect in living somewhere heavily treed, but the payoff is in summertime shade and good soil for garden veggies.

Despite looking pretty non-descript, this is what 24 bags of leaves actually turns into after shredding. Its about 12 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 2 feet high. This will cover a fair bit of dirt and vanish into the soil in a few weeks, providing nutrients. And due to the oak leaf tannins will make the azaleas grow extra well. They like acid soils. I hope everyone has a nice Thanksgiving. My ancestors were there, at the first Thanksgiving. On both sides of the table. That's America.

3D Printer and CNC

I'm a fan of Maker culture, an up-and-coming hobbyist approach to creating things, sometimes useful things, instead of buying them cheaply from China. The challenge is to make it yourself. This is not a time and money equation, but a life spent in achievement. Makers are big on stuff with electronics and low grade machining and the value of Dremel Tools. They solder LEDs into circuits, sometimes very silly things.

One of the gizmos I've been following for a couple decades is CNC, which used to cost around $1.5 million for a Haas CNC, the kind used in serious industrial mass machining for making things like formula 1 engines. CNC is for stuff that is not specialized enough to get its own multi-station line and instead uses one programmable robotic milling machine to make the needed parts. CNC programming is NOT easy. Its easily the hardest part of operating CNC, and the part most likely to damage the machine if done wrong. I have a friend who has spent 3 years learning all of that. Unfortunately, until the USA decides that CNC programmers are valuable within our borders, he's having a heck of a time getting a job that pays properly. If you are good at this, you should be making $50/hr. If you're using CNC to make tools, and handing those off to the heat treating and tempering guys for final hardening? You're totally worth that. The most important thing about CNC besides on-demand parts made to order and very good tolerances is that you can use the machines to build the machines to build the stations of an assembly line, creating a factory from an empty shed. With CNC, you can make jobs.

A proper machinist should know how to do CNC programming because once properly programmed and the part positioned, a good CNC operator can make just about anything. It still needs heat treating in many cases, but still, a final part is something they can do. This has extreme value in replacing crucial machines, valves, engine parts, bearings for your city's generator, bolts to clamp pipes together, you name it. Stuff that really matters whose manufacturer went under or retired and sold to Ze Germans years ago.

And CNC is getting cheaper. A decent 3 axis CNC can make a lot of parts, replacement parts or new designs. Five-axis CNC can make many more. CNC manufacturing moves technology forward or keeps it going until technology can fit that need better. There are CNC robots that cost less than a new car, now, and some which are considerably cheaper. I suspect we'll start seeing CNC programs traded around to make parts, maybe even by on-demand car parts shops. Got an obscure vehicle that needs a new fuel pump housing? Yeah, they can do that. Got an old Harley Panhead that needs a replacement wheel bearing? Yeah, they can make that. Got a Bugatti Veyron with a broken hydraulic pump for the rear spoiler? They can make that too. CNC is the ultimate tool of civilization. You can pass around the designs and turn blocks of metal into usable parts. I really like that.

The most important thing about the price of CNC dropping is this means mechanical engineers and machinists can start building their good ideas while their minimum wage jobs keep them alive, barely. They stop being underemployed and start being a small business owner or inventor, just in their off-hours. Few employers today reward innovation and pay in-house inventors real money for patents they create. They get their contract cited, told: "You're lucky to have a job at all." and kicked to the curb if they complain further. That's modern corporate cultures. You have every reason to keep your ideas secret rather than let your boss steal it and claim a bonus for himself but not share it with you. This is why the US economy is stagnant. Or one of the reasons, anyway.

Thanks to innovation being blocked by corporations that don't pay a fair wage or reward good employees, we are entering a collapse state of our economy where the only jobs are part time and minimum wage. We all sort of have to hunker down and get used to this level of dysfunction. CNC is great because it makes room for ideas to be tested without worry about economics or budget. It's just a guy at the bottom, where the employees work for a living. If the idea doesn't work out, it's still scrap metal. It can be recycled. So the cheaper CNC gets, the better the software will become, the more of these will be in home shops and garages and used by frustrated inventors to quietly change the world while the lawyers bicker over shrinking profits in their failed business model enterprises. CNC also means we don't need China anymore. We can make it here. We can rebuild the factories with the latest hardware instead of struggling with obsolete stuff.

The other nifty home tool is 3D printing, which started in polymer (plastic) pellets but has since gotten more interesting with metal powder sintered (welded) with laser beams. Such a metal part isn't really load bearing, and will need heat treating to become strong, but that can be done. Its not easy, but it can be. Even in a modest shop. The plastic parts can be housings for your electronics and metal parts, a nice cover to provide a pleasing exterior, perhaps needing finishing but its easier than building a metal mold with CNC to make one part. 3D printing is a big deal because it could, in theory, bring many products off the assembly line and into on-demand, perhaps paying a shop where a que of products are ordered from an online catalog, made by the 3D printer, checked by the operator for QA defects, and paid for when finished. Instead of storing it somewhere or paying dozens of people wages to make something. The delays will be annoying and the quality control key, but it might be a future worth having. It's certainly next generation rapid prototyping and a great tool to engineers and product designers.

I am happy that prices are coming down and software for CNC is improving. Right now, industrial CNC is capable of destroying itself because whoever did the software for the OS didn't program in sane stops in any access, or limit speeds, or do anything rational to protect the thing from ignorant users, which unfortunately is many of them. That's something which needs to be improved, without excuses.

Software needs to be improved for CNC to get easier to learn and be more common. It needs to be easy enough that it gets used more, that CNC is a viable, cheap solution to machining parts or prototyping or restoration of critical equipment. It can keep our civilization going instead of letting us slip into a Dark Age because some Chinese General had a temper tantrum and claimed the whole Pacific as a no-fly zone without his permission. We don't need that. We need ways to keep our lights on without China. We need jobs for our people making housewares and car parts and water pumps and everything useful. And even those silly Twitter-phones and Face-pads that people keep buying to feel less lonely. Whatever. But we should make it here and pay Americans to build it instead of the Chinese. Let them sell to the rest of the world. Maybe they can get a trade imbalance with India instead of us.

I just wish CNC paid more than $13/hr. I would totally learn it if so.

China Threatens Japan Over East China Sea

So apparently if you're a commercial airline outside the borders of China, China thinks it can fire its anti-aircraft missiles at you. I realize that Japanese politicians can be real pricks, and there's potentially oil there, but c'mon.

Investor tip: Watch this story closely. If China doesn't retract this in the next day and a half, expect the world stock markets to drop a couple hundred points each, since threatening Acts of War by the world's manufacturing nation? Things go sideways fast and your Just In Time (JIT) based company that's trading with Chinese firms? You may have delays, and those delays make for failed delivery, broken contracts, excuses of Force Majeur, lawyers, fines, penalties, and all sorts of further badness. Worse, your stock values will decline.

If things go more sideways and the Chinese get their hackles up and blow up a Korean airlines 747 bound for Singapore or Taipei with 348 passengers on board? Well, that's act of war stuff, USA gets involved with our treaty to support them and suddenly we have a good excuse to block all trade with China. That will be expensive thanks to JIT and all the stupid consumer electronics and machine parts made in China while American machinists and assembly line workers sit idle, unemployed.

And keep in mind, China might blow up a Russian commercial airliner, an American or British or French one, even Singapore Airlines flies up there and back. The big guys have nukes and standing armies and battleships and missile cruisers. At what point is threatening to blow up planes that don't radio countries they aren't even passing through a good idea, China? America got hell for that over an Iran jet using the wrong radio band and got shot down after Gulf War 1. Bad deal, major black mark and a lot of dead people. We had nukes, Iran didn't, so that's as far as it went. If that happened today? Much worse. Iran has nukes. China has nukes, Japan has access to ours under treaty, so does Korea. France and Britain and ICBMs armed with nukes. Acts of war can escalate fast.

About the only good news there is most of the radioactive iodine from nuclear fallout is gone over the 10 days of half-lives crossing the ocean to the West Coast of the USA. So if it does escalate, we probably won't die immediately. You may want to give up seafood, however.

It's a terrible thing that we need to seriously consider this outcome. And Investors do. Money comes and goes based on risk, and if the Chinese don't retract their threat, then bond investors will downgrade that market as unstable. The international financial fallout from that will shut down Chinese banking, devaluate their currency, increase interest rates in all loans to China over risk factors and inflation, and basically kill their economic boom. The economic crash that's hit the rest of the world would hit China too. And with them producing most of the world's material manufactured goods? A crash in China means a Dark Age. Note the Capital Letters. It is that SERIOUS.

We really need to stop doing business with China in such a way that we place essential manufacturing in the control of temperamental foreigners with a long history of genocide. Not joking. Feel free to keep them as backup, but have your own at home, just in case things go sideways there and your business goes under without them. Put the machines you need in a warehouse. Maybe even have a skeleton crew trained to operate them and use the team at a loss, as a threat against your Chinese branch trying to up their profits by making you pay more for the next contract. But more importantly, as backup capacity so you'll have delays rather than complete failure and work stopped entirely. JIT is a bad idea if you want longevity.

Too much hinges on the continued sanity of Chinese communist military officials, and stuff like this suggests the sanity is waning. I really hope they retract that statement and arrest and shoot the general making the threats. A few billion lives are at risk for one man's temper tantrum. Seriously.

Politics of Lost Cultures

There's a good reason to care about Lost Cultures. They leave behind artifacts which can reveal how complex they became, and maybe explain why they failed. Time wounds all heels, after all, and since Democracy died this week, it is worth reviewing what we learned from our own culture when it failed.

I think the greatest destroyer of cultures has been drought. It is what killed off the Mayans, since they had no surface water, using wells coming from an underground river in the Yucatan instead. An El Nino directed the rain that usually fed that river elsewhere for 60 years and water levels fell till the Mayans, who were having problems with plant diseases which caused famine, couldn't irrigate their crops. And they wandered away from their nice stone buildings and less well known but equally cool aqueducts. El Ninos weakened many cultures in the Americas.

The Mississippi Mound Builders had a complex culture with trading which apparently ended with either drought or possibly a series of New Madrid Quakes 500 years before the ones our culture suffered.

The Hohokam were wiped out despite their complex culture centered where Phoenix Arizona is today, but an El Nino drought. It doesn't help that their basic adobe home required the cutting of beams from the local trees, which were also used for firewood. Those trees protected extremely fragile perched aquifers on the sides of mountains that concentrated abrupt and severe rains and captured the water at the base of canyons. Without the aquifers the water was lost and the ability to grow crops or survive extended drought wrecked the culture. The survivors went up hill, where it was colder and less food could be grown or they stayed behind and died of thirst and starvation.

Centuries later the Hohokam were replaced by the culture we know as the Anasazi, though that was not their name. Apparently Anasazi means "Ancient Enemy" and is the insult used by their survivors who really really hated them. The Anasazi were the famous cliff dwellers, hiding out of sight, sneaking out to fields and returning to cliff dwellings with one entrance defended by a guard with a stone ax and you'd better give the right password or get brained to death with it. This level of security was severe, but even that eventually failed. The indians that hated them got into most eventually and killed them off. The survivors are the Pueblo, the Navajo, and the Hopi. Today, most of the canyons that the Anasazi lived in are high, cold, have a little running water, but often little to show for it. They are hard to grow much food in and the general residents of New Mexico are very poor. Paved roads are only on highways and the richer towns where there's money for that. For most, its washboard dirt roads and food stamps because there's just not enough water for much farming.

In Europe, the Etruscans left behind lots of buildings, some amazing graveyards, and inspired the Romans to a complex culture with stone monuments to show they were better than the Etruscans. They did succeed eventually, though the base of Roman culture was the casting of useful household goods made of Bronze. To make bronze you need copper and tin. They could get those from Cyprus, but when those mine played out, they found more in Crimea, meaning they needed to go through the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. This supplied their secondary capitol Constantinople, now known as Istanbul. Unfortunately, being close to the Steppes, they got several surges of the Black Plague from those who traded with Mongols on the Silk Road and much of the population would be wiped out. It is alleged that the Mongols went on the move due to drought in Upper Mongolia, because their herds couldn't survive without grass, but the Mongol invasions of Asia were centuries later. The Crimea had copper but not much tin. Constantinople needed what was there and the empire quietly, or loudly, divided. It had gotten too big to manage.

The Romans needed more tin so they found it in Cornwall, in Southwest Britain, at the very tip of the peninsula. The mine, operated nearly 2000 years ago for the Romans, is literally perched on a cliff a hundred feet above the water and miners edged along wet planks in all sorts of weather following the ore. Horrible, and doomed. Without tin, the Romans couldn't offer the bronze-tupperware easy living and constant expansion needed. It grew too large, and large complex organizations are necessarily overextended and easily broken by external factors, like drought. When the Goths and Visigoths sacked Rome in 400 AD, the residents had been eating each other and were bemused the invaders weren't killing them. They expressed relief that the terror was over. After that, the Roman empire had little to offer and it sort of fell apart. People still lived there, they just weren't Romans in the sense of self identity. They had lost their drive and ambition to do more. They just wanted to get by.

We're kind of there ourselves. If we were a great nation, we wouldn't think what we're doing these days is anything close to Great. Its muddling, mediocre, getting by. Like Rome after the Visigoths sacked it. We exported our jobs, we argue about bridges while our cities are falling apart, we feed people we know need to be killed and kill people we ought to bring home from foreign wars and put to work doing useful and productive things. We have no pride, no identity. This is a big failure of a culture that hasn't realized it has gone under and died. We're in what I call Cultural Inertia. We complete actions that make us feel comfortable because those actions led to a positive outcome in the past, but now they are disconnected and the outcomes are much more random and sometimes destructive, other times are merely wasted effort going nowhere. We aren't accepting that things have changed. That more radical solutions are needed.

Here's a bunch of videos with various levels of insanity, none of which are really driven by simple economics or rational about resources. Watch them or not, but be prepared to laugh at some of these statements.

Now, onto my own opinion. The American Empire is too big, and the East offers little to The West. We're not staying together for The Children. This is an abusive marriage and it needs to end. And it will end, one way or another, because since there's little positive from The East but hungry mouths and pointy knives, The West is likely to just lose interest in everything they have to say. When the planes stop flying because tickets cost too much, the exchange from West to East and back again will slow to a trickle. When stuff stops moving, we stop doing business with them, and we find local alternatives. Those local alternatives may cost more, but we'll be able to get them because they are already here. The East simply won't matter. They become a backwater festering in their preconceptions, mandates, demands, and mistakes while the West is refreshed by our own challenges in water supply, the distance between our cities, the failing infrastructure and how important those are to either be repaired or abandoned. Our problems become Our Problems, ones we own and must deal with, locally, because the East never helps us. They point and laugh and say OIC.

Yes, there's lots of dumb in California politics because our Legislature is useless, our Governor easily distracted, and people here are too busy making money to vote so extreme groups get signatures to create laws, which get voted on and become law, despite not requiring those laws be actually legally reviewed prior to the vote. They have to then get challenged in court and either struck down or defined by the courts, which slows everything down and makes for hilarious content on Morning radio stations in the rest of the country. This is what happens when you actually apply that inane phrase from the 1960s: "If the people lead, the leaders will follow." The corollary is if the people are nuts, the leaders are too. I like to think that insane politics leads to collapse, and excess tolerance instead of telling them to shut the hell up while we deal with real problems. We are getting distracted by bad ideas in Washington, unfunded ones, and ignoring bigger issues. Our Laser-like focus should be on jobs. And why systemically we're getting wrecked as less and less of them remain to be had.

People say that breaking up America is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but I contend there is no baby. We have fractious and unmanageable states and special interests which are taking every bit they can reach, exactly like a starving person hoards food in a famine. The big companies have exported our jobs overseas and pay politicians to ignore this with campaign contributions for loud causes that have little to do with what the company is really up to. This is about protecting their shrinking profits and wages, not anything valid or useful.

If our culture wasn't failing, we'd be fixing Detroit and Sandy. There would be families in the 9th ward in New Orleans instead of empty stinking shacks with their drywall ripped out and replaced by a contractor as if that fixed what was wrong, namely that the 9th ward is 10 feet below sea level so it will flood again. A viable culture would plan for the future rationally, and do useful things. We'd have our aqueducts being built from the Frasier River over to Montana and the injection wells for the Ogalalla Aquifer being prepared to refill a water supply for millions of farms that fed 2 billion people, and would again if the water is restored. This is a big thing that a civilization does. But we aren't doing that.

We're not a civilization anymore. We're squabbling over diminishing resources, ignoring the cause (evil CEOs, China, dirty politicians) of our bad economy, ignoring the needs of the population to pander to their lowest common denominator for votes. We are just as rotten as Rome in 390 AD. We'll topple. And I think that Peak Oil is that final nail in our coffin, when we stop thinking of ourselves as Americans of the United States and start thinking of ourselves as Nevadans or Idahoans or Montanans or Oregonians or Californians or Cascadians. The East has little to offer. We make our own stuff here. Why are we sending you tax dollars we could use here, and maybe save ourselves?

I dunno about you, but I'd rather join a new culture here than die with the last one. Why go down with the ship when you're already sitting in a lifeboat?

F1 Grand Prix of Brazil

Practice today in Brazil for Formula 1 cars found them in heavy rain. A tough time for professional drivers since the open wheel designs means no fenders and enormous rooster tails of water spray off the track in their hand cut rain tires. There's a 50% chance of rain for Saturday's qualifying and Sunday's race. Rain is very troublesome, since grip on a wet surface is minimal and speeds are lower, crashes more frequent and I don't watch racing to see crashes. That's for Nascar fans. I love the engineering, the strategy and precision of the drivers, the crews doing tire changes on all 4 wheels in 2.7 seconds or changing the front nose and wing assembly in 3.1 seconds. Its amazing. And I love it.

Formula 1 racing is a truly advanced technology sport, and discoveries perfected for racing eventually find their way into the cars we all drive on the road. Fuel Injection, aerodynamics, the inverted wings to add down-force and improve high speed cornering, tire compounds and steel belts all came from racing. Weight distribution and differentials, double wishbone suspension, even power disc brakes came from racing. Yes, the engine needs teardown after the race, but I will point out that 24 Hours At Lemans uses the more durable materials and tolerances to run an engine for a full day, at speed, and their tech starts in F1 and works its way down to us.

I'd like to show you a clip of the rain there, but nothing on YouTube yet. This is the last Grand Prix of the season and after this I'll be waiting months for 24 Hours at Daytona and possibly American Le Mans, which should have Mark Webber, who is retiring from F1 this year. His teammate Vettel is largely unbeatable, mostly because he's very very good, very smooth on his corners and throttle control. That's what you need to win. Webber makes more mistakes and has had some bad car issues, alternator failing, suspension parts breaking, and some crashes. Its been a tough season for the guy. I hope he does well in American Le Mans. Its an interesting race series and I really should follow it more closely. Watching a 6-24 hour race is asking a bit much, however.

Update Saturday November 23rd.
Heavy rains in qualifying are having a huge impact on times and its really jumbling up the race order based on when the cars go out, as slight improvement in dryness or following behind another car dries the track beneath it just enough to get a better time in successive laps... and then it rains some more, and not the same amount in all parts of the track, either. Interlagos is in Sao Paolo, and is a hilly course, which affects where the rain falls and how much. They are showing this race on Sunday on NBC at 11 AM Eastern Standard Time, so 8 AM Pacific. I'm looking forward to it, even if its really wet. Because that's driving skill too. Maybe Vettel won't win?

Politics

Democracy died on November 21st, 2013. I imagine that sounds a little dramatic, but hear me out. Congress is composed on the House and the Senate. Congress is all about numbers and there's little room for justice there if you can just overwhelm your enemies with superior numbers and push through any law you like. The Senate is trickier. There are options to block laws which offend your sense of justice and you need much higher numbers, and greater agreement of all involved, to end that action, that blockage called a Filibuster. We've had them since the beginning of the country, this option to force all sides to agree on less extreme options in order to make one Senator shut up. Both sides use this when they have to. And that's why this is a big deal. They changed the procedural rules to make it easier to end a filibuster, without getting all the senate to agree. The Democrat party things they've won a victory. They forget that they used Filibusters more than Republicans did. And should control of the senate shift in numbers to the Republican party, or those few votes needed are won, without that prior large majority, they can stomp the Democrats flat. This also means that Democrats can stomp Republicans flat, and screw over half the population in each vote. All sorts of things can be done like this, really bad things. Say, for instance, enslave all doctors to work for free, or execute all Gitmo Prisoners or Declare War on Syria. They can do that now. Nobody can stand up and say no you can't, not anymore. This is how Democracy dies. With cheering. I'm pretty sure there were huge demonstrations of party workers voicing their gratitude and joy when a certain chancellor was elevated to higher office in a struggling European nation about 80 years ago. Ahem. The trouble with the entire thing is this now makes Senate races actual battles for control of the actual laws of our nation, and that heavy weight, the power of effective Senate instead of the former useless senate, means senators votes, and thus lives, are at risk depending on their position before key votes. If you can't convince them to vote your way...this opens the door for a whole lot of political violence, like we often see in the Third World. I'm very glad I don't live in DC. Its going to get scary there. The News will love it. It'll be like Brazil in the 80's or Argentina in 2000.

Apparently my politics are a little too polarized for general consumption and is probably why I haven't been offered an interview for a Reporter job at the local paper, despite those buying the paper itself mostly having the same views I do, and those who don't pay for it having the opposite. Meh. I'm going to censor political opinion in posts except for ones I'll label opinion.

The Libs don't. I wanted them to see what its like getting repeatedly jabbed on a sore subject like the failure of Obamacare and his presidency in general. Considering my primary worries about energy depletion are directly linked to his foreign policy, and the price of oil to the wars he starts or continues despite promises to the contrary, it IS near and dear to my heart. The consequences of his choices, and I can't call them anything else since they serve no strategic purpose and make America look really bad internationally, his choices kill Americans and make us all pay more for basics, including food.

Energy is mostly based on fossil fuels, which means they were run out. Who gets the last of it is politics. Right now, it looks like the USA will get the last of it, both because we have the military to take a lot of it by force or threat of force (OPEC), and because we've got a lot of it buried in oil shale, which we're gradually learning how to extract. There's a Saudi Arabia (largest oil producer on earth) under California, and another two of them under western Colorado and Wyoming, and another one in Alberta's oil sands, though separating this oil and tar from its source rock is frequently expensive in energy and raw materials. If it gets more efficient and clean, great. As it stands, its an ecological and engineering problem that's become very political.

Appeasing OPEC publically when those nations are mostly run by crazy people bent on Bond-Villain level rants of world domination? Yeah, that's the best reason to get OUT of dealing with OPEC and getting domestic oil going again. And its happening, kinda slowly. And there's a lot of politics there too, here and overseas and who gets to pay who bribes to be the next billionaire. A lot of dirty money in this industry. A lot of dirty politics too. Neither side is clean.

The LiveScience website has been threatening us this week with the future of 11 billion people and world hunger and water shortages. The solutions require work and cooperation in various regions, or expensive local answers, probably both. The big reason we don't have cheap solar yet is solar companies get jerked around on their profits, which impacts how many go bankrupt, which is caused by ebbs and flows in the energy market. OPEC is the biggest enemy of solar power because price fluctuations there determine whether home owners install solar panels or not, and the answer is usually NOT. So far, its not cheap enough, and the political answer to getting some installed at all is all about subsidies and grants, which are often exploited for the money and the business is totally dependent on the margin. When the law expires, the business can't survive. This means that solar power is largely a govt smokescreen in hopes that it will become solid one day. So far, not. That's also politics.

Locally, here in the Gold Country, even with the price of Gold losing 1/4 its value from 1600 down to 1200 and still falling, there is reason to reopen the local gold mines. Many have begun processing tailings, which are leftover ore fragments usually still on the mine site, discarded previously as being too low grade to bother with. In many cases, they get sufficient gold to justify the effort now. One of the bigger mines in the area called the Idaho-Maryland Mine, south of Grass Valley but mostly below it, goes down 10,000 feet, which is unfortunately full of water since the mines shut down due to politics in 1934. There is believed to be around $5 billion in gold still down there. That's NOT small change. However, the tunnels are full of water, 10,000 feet of water, all of which is soaked in tin, silver, arsenic, potassium, and with a significant deviation from safe. Because its inside a mine, its considered industrial pollution and if they pump it out, that pollution is legally their problem and must be cleaned to California EPA standards, which are the highest in the nation. That water also presents a flood hazard since it would flow down the nearest creek, Wolf Creek, which goes right through town. I used to work next to that creek, right above it. Any pollutants would be a major lawsuit issue. It doesn't matter that they're naturally occurring or valuable metals. A French company bought the mine and wanted to reopen it, but debate over cleaning the water polarized everyone involved and after a few years of debate, the project was dropped. I think the real death blow is the French admitted to wanting to import miners from overseas rather than hire them locally. In a gold mining town with high unemployment that was a seriously stupid move. It was bad politics. Someone else, with a valid plan, will probably succeed at stripping the metals out of the mine water during pumping and get money from it before it drops into the creek, with full state permits and EPA standards met and monitored, before they can start getting into blasting out more ore and turning that into Gold. I hope they hire locally. Its good politics in a litigious state like this one. And the Gold is just worth too much to leave in the ground. That much gold is politics too.

Corn ethanol is politics. Its all about votes from corn growing states, tit for tat. Water is politics. Water is also life and pressure for or against birth control. Birth control is politics. Uncontrolled leads to unbalanced votes, to population shifts, to unfair taxation because those votes are political. Its especially nasty when you throw in religion and morality. People get hypocritical about that. That's also politics.

My background is science, and my best friends are engineers. Every morning I wake up angry, and then I drink coffee and write a blog post and lingering anger is there in my words. Usually its sarcastic and bitter. If I read the news, I enjoy responding to things with my opinions or experiences. Its funny how one political leaning considers their experiences to be vast wisdom, and the opponents experiences not to count unless documented in a book that's been peer reviewed. I hate hypocrites. And I hate people who tell me I can't have an opinion about something I've lived through. That's insulting on many levels. I suppose they hate me for expressing my experiences in front of them because they had comfortable opinions of their own, ones My experiences contradict and show baseless, false, and probably self-harming. That's politics too.

The nature of a blog is writing. My posts on non-political, or more neutral topics, such as engineering, get considerably more read hits. I will endeavor to focus my efforts there and hopefully drive up my numbers, rather than drive away people by pointing out they're wrong again. Honey, vinegar, and who wants to catch flies in the first place?

Weather: Gales

We're supposed to get strong, gale force, winds today in the Sierras and the Sacramento Valley down the hill. The snow storm that formed out of the rains yesterday now stretches from Tahoe to Nebraska, with snow falling over about a fifth of Nevada as I write this. The national weather service and the local broadcast TV news say we'll have 30 mph winds and 60 mph gusts today, and warn it could make the power go out from downed tree branches. It will also be cold, with an expected high of 55'F. They advise we stay indoors and off the roads so utility and emergency vehicles can deal with the storm. Good advice, I think. I have a bunch of paperbacks I can read if the power goes out while its still light today. I will probably walk in this weather later, since I enjoy wind and have the right clothes to keep warm through it.

This will be a good day for soup, I think. Thanks to having a gas range, I can cook whether the power works or not. Dad typically likes clam chowder on a day like this. Perhaps I'll ask him to pick up ingredients or just buy some canned and a fresh loaf of sourdough. Or maybe I'll surprise him and buy it myself.

I hope everyone is treating their weather with the proper respect. It can be really dangerous for those who don't.

10 AM Update. Went for a walk. The shadows where the breeze is gusting are COLD. The jacket is great at stopping it, but I'm glad I dressed in layers with a knit cap. Aren't those the greatest when its not raining? Came back, helped my elderly neighbor, turned down money but asked for cookies, as she likes to bake. Swept leaves off the walkway and then polished more spots off my car paint. The more you clean the paint, to more spots you can see. Its this terrible... thing. It does, however, make the paint resist water really well so it beads up once you're done polishing a place. This is extra special because when its super cold like this, any standing water will grow something awesome called Hoarfrost, a sort of tall patterned ice which grows up to an inch high and is actually sharp enough to cut you, like a serrated knife blade on edge. Fun stuff when you're trying to go to work in the morning. Yeah, that was a big motivator to move down the mountain, actually, last time I was here 10 years ago. We have brilliant, sharp blue skies, golden and red leaves falling off of trees, and great visibility. Compared to yesterday's slippery roads and misty rain soaking everyone and everything out in it? This is great. I just hope that falling limbs don't kill my electric power.

Friday AM update:
Winds died off when they were supposed to get stronger. No power outages, nothing much but cold clear air. The stupid Accuweather station claims there's an 18 mph east wind but the air is dead still. And its 7 degrees colder than they claim. They need to get that one replaced. Humidity is down to 32% next to my house, so it may actually be 11% out in the open. Its nosebleed weather. I had a bad one yesterday after dinner. Most of the rain soaked stuff is all dried up, at least what I can see. That's how our rains often go. Rain followed by icy air from Alaska. Usually dry so we don't get ice on the roads but rooftops would be common. Its still too warm for frost. I plan for a walk later, see if I can get some pictures.

Later AM update:
Wind came up and its blowing and gusting like yesterday.

2 PM Update:
Spotted remains of a 60 foot tall pine down and cut into logs on the side of East Main Street, next to Chapa De Indian Health Clinic. Not sure if that means local Indians, who were mostly genocided by miners 150 years ago, or Hindus so that's Ayurveda? Its baffling. Anyway, tree is down, pushed to the side of the road into the bike lane so I'm glad I was in my car. Gusts are surging from 10 mph hissing in the trees to 45 mph gusts blowing leaves into swirls, surging back and forth madly. I've already retrieved a downed branch from the lawn. I expect much of the remaining dead wood up there will fall today or tomorrow. I hope nothing important breaks. The weirdest part is its not cold, up to 66'F in the shade. But it's VERY dry, down to 18% humidity and my nose is tight after a short walk out there. Hell of a thing. This is the sort of weather that flips over sailboats in the bay and gets a Small Craft Advisory (meaning you'll capsize and drown so stay in the harbor with your sails down). Its also very pretty and sunny.

NASA Smackdown, and Long Pig Bacon Crisps

This makes me want to find the nearest NASA persona and smack them in the face with a wet newspaper, preferably an equivalent trash rag from the checkout line.

A million REMS of radiation, per hour, come from Jupiter. Inverse square law says you would be crispy sizzling bacon shortly after being able to see the dot of Jupiter with the naked eye. Sizzling, Crispy bacon.

That's you, super astronaut, getting close to Jupiter. It is a MASSIVE radiation source. Like The Sun. At no point is this funny. Why would we risk our Best and Brightest on a mission anywhere near Jupiter when we could send robots immune to the effects of cellular crisping in their own hot oils? If our goal is not to cook human beings into Extra Crispy, we're sending robots. Sorry if that bursts  your bubble, but BACON!!!

Bacon. That's what getting near Jupiter does.

FCC Chair to End Copper and Shift Phones to VOIP

The new FCC Chairmen announced he is in favor of phasing out copper in the phone network and switching to VOIP, which runs on fiber optic. This is already happening on a voluntary basis in many regions as part of your broadband upgrade. I am already aware that Verizon Communications has been offering a copper for DSL deal for years now. AT&T announced their plans to get out of copper over a year ago. And while copper is regulated as to how much the phone companies can charge you, broadband is not. Broadband has other services and its cheaper to maintain. They can make money on it.

So that's that, essentially. There will be some debate, but who really thinks it's going to get much attention? No phone company can afford to install or replace copper wires outside a house. It is too valuable and too easily stolen and there's no reason to continue using it when fiber optic is now cheap, if harder to install, and carries incredible amounts of data, easily. Fiber is also physically smaller, lighter weight, more durable and considerably cheaper. For a long time now, fiber was the next big thing that wasn't and most of it was Dark, or unused. Multiplexing switches meant you could just up the bandwidth of lit fiber and get what you need, however those ran on the trunks across the country. Now we're running fiber to the side of the house. Movie streaming services like Netflix justifies paying for higher bandwidth, as do many of the cable companies. Any on-demand streaming service is using lots of bits, and high resolution TV means even more. Multiple users, multiple streams of data, it all adds up. I've been using VOIP for years now, and its cheaper than a landline phone and a long distance plan. So I can talk for hours at a flat rate, no surprises, no worries, no airtime minutes or contracts. Lots of cable and broadband companies already offer TV, internet, and VOIP phone for a flat rate, and they're reasonably priced so popular. Why not, right?

So while there's probably a little boo-hoo for the deep boonies places which may find their phone service a little more creative as the copper is ripped down and sold for scrap, I can't really say if they'll end up with cheaper broadband or a set-top box to receive cellphone signal VOIP. Considering the govt is involved, it might be a great distracting scandal from some other political blunder.

Sweets For Winter

You may wonder why it is a cultural norm in Europe and America to offer sweets in Late Fall and Winter. The reason is Interesting. Beyond courtesy, it evolved to help people survive the cold. The Medieval Warm Period after the Dark Ages was a great time. Good crops, reasonable weather, even vineyards producing passable wine in England. Today England is too cold for wine. Too much rain in the summer. Not hot enough for sugars to develop and the juices to concentrate for good wine, such as you get in France.

During the Medieval Warm Period it was. Please note the absence of coal burning during that time, as well as a terrible shortage of Bugatti Veyrons. Humans weren't causing the warming. Yet it was warmer than today. Think on that for a little while. Ahem. Climate scientists are now attempting to rewrite history because the Medieval Warm period, well documented as it is, is an Inconvenient Truth which contradicts Anthropogenic Global Warming. LOL. The Cretaceous was about 20'C warmer than today. Also with a terrible shortage of coal burning and Bugatti Veyrons. Oops! Inconvenient Truth! Ahem.

After the warm period came the Little Ice Age, where terrible winter storms swept into Europe, killing vineyards and wiping out crops, freezing the Thames in London solid in winter for weeks, enough to walk on it and later go ice skating and sleighing and have winter festivals. Downside is it was really cold, and you burn a ton of calories staying warm. So folks started baking cookies, full of butter fat and honey and raisins if they could get them, and serving them to guests who might be on the verge of catching cold, spreading it to the whole village and everybody dying from it. If everyone is well fed and possibly fatter, they're also warmer, with their immune systems boosted against disease, and able to fight off infections. The community wins. So Christian hospitality brought about this tradition of fattening everyone up for the Winter. And every conceivable way to add fat to foods is tried. Sausages, sauces, meats, eggs, breads with butter eggs and honey in them, cakes, cookies made with butter, eggnog made with eggs and cream and honey (no sugar cane yet so no refined sugar sources but honey), roasted ham stuffed with apples, pears and figs. Many sources of fats and sugars so you'd put on good weight and hopefully survive the winter. You were worth more alive, having been raised this far, and the cold winters really did a number on food production.

It didn't help that rains onto barley would cause a nasty fungus that released a potent toxin which wouldn't bake out and when eaten in small doses caused tremors and hallucinations (witch hunts came from this) and in larger doses would cause brain hemmorhage and death. An entire feast could die within a short time of eating it. Imagine a manor house with 120 people in the hall, munching barley bread, still warm from the oven, with fresh salted butter and the evening's stewed beef and people start twitching, then convulsing, then die right in front of you. And you ate the bread too. Nasty. Food poisoning was the #1 killer until 1914, when the icebox became widespread. In very small doses, that toxin is a standard treatment for migraines.

Once America was discovered and American foods came back to Europe, Turkey became a popular feast food (they ARE huge compared to Medieval Chickens or Partridge). It was an alternative to goose and venison (yuck) and roast boar (wild were dangerous, domestic far more fat and better tasting so long as it is thoroughly cooked because a common parasite called trichinosis killed people, the real reason Muslims and Jews do not eat pork). Trips to America also brought back potatoes, tomatoes, and quite a few tasty spices like chili peppers which changed the world and people's diets dramatically. Paprika and Curry both required American chili peppers to exist. Spicy sausages got a lot cheaper, not requiring black pepper which cost its weight in gold.

Better ships also access more kinds of fish, further away. Expansion into the Pacific discovered really great fisheries of sardines, which could be dried, salted, canned and eventually brought back to feed Ireland, England, and Europe. The English Kipper is a Pacific fish. I do not eat sardines on toast, but if I were hungry I imagine I would come to like the taste, since the oily fish is very good for you and full of useful calories. Not exactly a sweet, however, but sailing vessels with access to the Carribbean could carry refined sugar made from sugar cane, and that opened up a world of flavors in Europe. Plantations also got access to coffee, a bitter drink considered to be a wonder health tonic, or a dangerous vice depending who was talking. It also went well with fatty or sweet pastries, made from flour and butter and sugar and usually nuts which were also covered in sugar and full of nut oils, thus extra fattening. Throw on a dollop of whipped cream sweetened with that newfangled white sugar and life is good. And considerably longer than it was during the Little Ice Age, which finally petered out in 1850, having begun around 1200 AD. New spices meant new ways to preserve food at room temperatures, new flavors to enjoy, new things like Jam, made with so much sugar and pectin that many kinds of bacteria die of dehydration before multiplying many times, thus preserving it and the new name: preserves.

Cheeses are also very popular over the cold winter holidays, and feasts to use some of the bounty of Harvest were not just a way to show off but fatten up your neighbors so they stay healthy. Again, preventing sickness in the community helps you too. Most cheeses are preserved with salt and general dryness, often with bees wax covers or other kinds of rind, sometimes dipped in wine whose acid and alcohol kills the usual bacterias while yeasts continue their work inside the cheese. Cheese makers are dependent on access to cheap milk, meaning dairies and the ability to transport that milk inexpensively to the cheese factory. Plus cold storage for the cheeses once the rounds are produced. They make an excellent export item since they're reasonably well preserved and a way to access fats and proteins for months or even years. I am a big fan of cheese.

Finally, in winters it is traditional to serve wines, liquors, and dark beers. This has the advantage of working as a literal antifreeze. Not joking. Two Irishmen on the doomed Titanic ran into the 1st Class Lounge and downed a bottle of brandy. The high alcohol content kept their hands and feet from freezing when they jumped into the freezing north Atlantic, and were quickly fished out into lifeboats, which is why they actually lived. Drunk out of their gourds, but alive and without frostbite. True story. Separate God for Drunks and Children, indeed. Naturally, in the age of automobiles holiday drunks cause wrecks and kill people. If the Google Self Driving car ever happens, it will usher in a new age of drunk passengers and tipsy dinner guests instead of the dour purpose of deliberate sobriety for the designated driver, one of my jobs here at the homestead. A shame because these parties often have very good wines. Oh well. Dad enjoys them.

I am a fan of baking cookies. I am a fan of butter and seasonings. I easily bake more than I can eat. If I had a job where I could bake in small enough batches for proper care but large enough to sell, that would be okay. Alas, most cooking school graduates end up at Subway or your grocery store deli making sandwiches and cursing their student loans. I know because I've overheard them behind the counter. It seems difficult to get a proper job baking actual pastries you've made yourself, not a box of dough from a factory in SF or Sacramento. Many of those fresh french bread loaves? Yeah, dough from a factory, finish baked there in the store.

Add sugar to dough and deep fry, then coat the bread in icing made of more sugar and you have a doughnut, loaded with sugar, fat, and protein from the wheat flour. Serve with coffee loaded with cream and sugar too and you've got instant get up and go with a bit of longer power fats to keep you going. People who work outside in the winter are fond of those, and greasy sausages and eggs. All those fats and sugars and extra protein so you can work in the ice and blowing winds and be okay.

All the things that thin people in Florida and LA complain aren't good for you. Just remember that where you are, and how cold it is, are the real deciding factors for what you should be eating. Maybe a high fat, high sugar diet is the right answer. For you anyway. Let the skinny ones catch cold and end up wrapped in coats and lumpy clothing, shivering everywhere they go. That's not sexy. Storm in from outside, shaking melting snow from your collar with a big grin on your face, calling the weather "bracing", and demand a big cup of Joe and slice of that pie? Yeah, much better.

Enjoy your sweets. Bake more. It's all good. Even Fruitcake as a purpose when its cold out. Sugar soaked dried fruit, held together with a matrix of sweet cake, served in slices with a snifter of brandy? Okay. That's actually tasty.

Eggnog Mocha

Say the word "Eggnog" and your average response is "Ugh. No thank you."

Say the word Mocha and the average response is "Grande, extra shot, whip". There are even good variations of Mocha people like such as Pumpkin Spice Mocha or Peppermint Mocha. These are all sweet drinks that make the coffee have the calories to fuel your next surge of manic energy. Even I drink them, but the cost of a Starbucks mocha is rather high, particularly since I have a Moka Pot so can make extra strong coffee in a surprisingly slow method at 9 minutes per cup. It's not espresso, since that requires 9 barr, and the Moka Pot generates 1.5 barr, according to the Wikipedia article. Still, its a good strong cup of coffee. So strong that while you can certainly man up and drink it straight, you can easily taste how it would be improved with cream and sugar, or the various ingredients for a mocha, replacing the usual hot milk and espresso with cream and strong coffee. Its close enough if you aren't a complete coffee purist snob. Unfortunately, everyone who has worked at a Starbucks generally is.

It turns out that full fat, full calorie, seasonal eggnog is a great ingredient in a home-made mocha. And the seasonings are what you find in pumpkin pie, so it has most of the same flavors. I usually give the eggnog a good shake to make sure the seasonings and fats are all liquid and well mixed before pouring an inch into my coffee cup. When I add the coffee stir vigorously because the eggs will curdle in the heat, even if they're partially thinkening like a custard as it is. This improves the flavor, since the heat opens the spices so you can taste them, and the custard suspends them in the coffee. Starbucks works from syrups, which are fine, but I'm using real eggnog. In this form the flavor is not sickly sweet, the texture is not gruel, and the result is not nasty. This is the best use of eggnog, short of ice cream, I can find.

Engineering: Thumpers

Your basic small car is usually an Inline 4 cylinder. The most popular one, in a Honda Civic was actually based on a motorcycle engine, with water cooling added. A 4 can get vibration at certain revs, so if you want luxury you need a V6 or V8 to smooth it back down again. However, the more cylinders you have, the more torque you're losing at Lower RPMs. In a ground vehicle that's expected to climb hills, that's a problem, which is why Jeeps tend to be big 4 cylinder engines, and Harley Davidsons are big two-cylinder engines. Lots of lower RPM torque. However, when you get to true offroad bikes and tiny engines, you get down to a single cylinder, what's called a Thumper.

It is worth mentioning that a thumper can be 2-stroke or 4-stroke. A 2 stroke has twice the power, but has issues with burning its own oil due to some particular design decisions to save weight, such as venting hot exhaust inside the crankcase, where the heat literally cooks the lubricating oil. Not only does this damage the oil, it also damages the moving parts and requires you to put oil in the fuel and to change the oil in the crankcase, as well as replace rings on a schedule based on hours, not miles. Not to say that a 2-stroke MUST vent exhaust into the crankcase, nor is it absolutely necessary to ignore oil injection instead of mixing oil and fuel, and a Master Valve solves the blowback issue the crankcase venting is doing on purpose. There are good available mechanical solutions to making a 2-stroke more reliable and efficient and cleaner running, fairly easy to do. Easy enough that I wonder why the insistence on hundreds of millions invested in Eco Motors to solve this 2-stroke air pollution problem since ignored to make truck motors at a huge profit AFTER collecting big funds from Green contributors. Ahem. I'm sure that's not breaking the law (it is called Fraud). Their alleged 2-stroke diesel would be great, if it really works and really does scale down.. however you could easily make a replacement 2-stroke scooter motor that has a regular exhaust port into a pipe with expansion chamber, like on race bikes, with a master valve sliding baffle to keep the resonance in the right value, and use oil injection and drastically cut maintenance, wear and tear, and pollution all at once. Totally the way to go with a 2-stroke. Hell, put an oil cooler on the crankcase, just to help. Why not?

The more common option, with half the horsepower of a 2-stroke of the same size, is a 4-stroke. There are a number of these on the road, though you might not notice them. Most 250cc motorcycles, all scooters (except Maxi scooter), all Enduro bikes are single cylinder thumpers. So is your lawnmower and the very pretty Enfield motorcycle, currently made in India with highly questionable reliability according to reviews I've read. The newer ones have better engines and transmissions shipped from Austria, but the rest is still Indian so is a bit... MEH? The Enfield even suffers damaging resonance due to the vibration of the thumping against the pretty cooling fins, which can actually break off. Instead of reshape the fins to avoid this problem, like a good engineer would, the Indians instead ship the bikes with black rubber inserts to damp the fins... which fall off. This is bad engineering. They make Harley look really progressive. A damn shame, too, since the Enfield really is a beautiful bike, built of metal, not plastic, and repairable for generations. Its just the machining tolerances are whatever the thing put out this week, the QA is the 2nd worst in motor sports (Tomos is worst of all), and that's a really hard thing to correct in the minds of riders who want to go places and see things, not get broken down on the side of the road. If you want to break down, ride an English bike.

Speaking of Harley, they are now going to make a 500 and 750cc model starter bike instead of the usual 800cc Sportster alone. I'm not quite sure why the Sportster gets panned so hard, being an $8500 "starter Harley" and therefore not good enough to ride with the clubs with the $19500 real hogs with 1300cc V-twin engines etc. Meh. Its a club thing. I can't possibly understand. Anyway, which the 500cc is being built in India for Indian sales, it is being built in America for American sales, so that's good. Reviews I've heard are that its narrow, and aiming for the bad boy poor biker. Rat bike scene I guess.

Eric Buell, one of the engineers for Harley, built a very odd and progressive series of large displacement Thumpers for street riding. They weren't very popular, due to bad vibration and other reasons, but I sometimes see them on the road (Hwy 49), though I hear them first. The bikes didn't sell well, or rather most sold several times each because riders didn't like them for long. They vibrate a LOT. So after that bankruptcy, Buell has gone into racing and is focused on that. His fans online hope that a few of those bikes will trickle down to public. For their sake and his, I hope that happens.

Thumpers are the only real engine type in offroad bikes. You get the most torque with one cylinder, and you want that at low speeds to tractor up hills, across scree slopes (loose stones), and through sand at speed. Torque is key. The big ones for torque are the KTM 450, the Kawasaki KLR-650, the Suzuki DR-650, and the Suzuki DRZ-400 (beloved of farmers). There are also smaller engine models, and many of those ATV's are running thumper engines, though some are multi-cylinder engines. I've even read of a triple designed by an Australian Cafe Racer's specifications by an American motorcycle engineering team in the Deep South, that got built by the Chinese for export and then the Housing bubble burst and who knows where the engine is now? A pity. Would make a great noise and was the ideal 375cc's instead of the typical 650 or 1300 that Triumph makes. Which is weird to me. A scaled down 375cc Triple, like a Ninja, would be a good seller.

I guess the cost of labor prevents these loss-leader bikes? A shame. I'm hoping that in time, CNC machining and makers will offer a scaled down Triple suitable for an upgrade to various bikes that aren't so great right now but could be with the right engine. Upgrade a 250cc twin road bike to a 375cc Triple and fix a problem you didn't know you had.

Not to say there aren't some dandy road thumpers. The Suzuki TU-250 is a lovely bike, for those few people who actually found one to buy. I think most stay in Thailand rather than get over here. They aren't sold in California at all, due to a feud between Suzuki and CARB, the smog agency. Suzuki changed the paint and CARB insists the new color needs a new crash test. Someone needs to get fired at CARB. This might be a consequence of bizarre legal restriction, but it smells like retaliation and some improper personal vendetta. A real shame. Its a lovely bike with fuel injection and upright seating position. Looks like something from the 1960's and will do 50 mph all day long, according to reviewers. The bike is beautiful. Like the old Triumph Lightning.

Now, compare that to Honda's Thumper, their CBR-250. Also fuel injected single cylinder with lots of usable torque, that muffler makes me feel actually sick to the stomach. What WERE they thinking?

Who is this designed for? The engineering on the engine and EFI are great, and the brakes are good and the suspension gives it a safe ride. Yet it looks awful. It's kinda like the mistakes of the Suzuki SV-650, which despite being a competent bike with a 90-degree V-twin, very smooth power band, had a high saddle difficult to swing your leg over and is famous for a fat woman's naked behind in traffic. Do your own search for that. There isn't enough brain bleach to remove that image. Ugh.

Still, the bike is solid and good, so good it was cancelled. It needed that engine in a different frame. As I understand it, the Bandit 650 was that. A small frame twin with great ergonomics for medium sized riders and excellent balance for a sport bike. I've seen them up on Donner Pass Road, old Hwy 40, and it was smooth and competent. A good bike if you must ride on freeways some of the time.

Now, compare that to the Suzuki DRZ400-SM, a supermoto (smooth tires) version of their farmer motorcycle. With all that suspension it makes for a smooth ride with the progressive shocks and having both kinds of tires means its a bike that you can go through the Apocalypse, or even Obamacare's inspired defunding of state treasuries for things like road repairs. More and more potholes out there. Yes, 4 wheels is inherently safer. And yes, you can build a kit-car from the ground up with carbon fiber and aluminum if you want, and if you're a good welder or can pay one that is. Its just that these bikes are a lot cheaper and if you don't ride like a crazy fool and keep your speeds down, you can do this safely. Its the speed insanity that leads to wrecks. If you must go really fast, consider getting a pilots license. There's neat stuff happening in that too, its just really expensive and annoyingly controlled. I don't think they use thumper engines in planes, however.