Small RVs

In the 1980's, for some bizarre reason, massively huge, gas sucking, monsterously huge station wagons had fake wood siding glued onto them, as if they were trying to make you think they were kinda like an old Woody. A woody is a classic car, mind you. These days you mock those fake plastic wood panel sided RVs, and wonder in awe at ones made of actual wood. The plastic ones are waterproof. The wood ones leak. Woody station wagons change size with humidity, and rattle a bit. Pretty, heavy, and rattling.

This is a Woody.

Got into a conversation with my buddy That Guy(tm) regarding, RVs. You see, he's come to conclude that sleeping in a tent, on the ground, is unpleasant at our age. This is true. Unless you're very experienced, and willing to carry a pretty thick inflatable ground pad, with an insulating pad on top of it, sleeping on the ground just leaves you sore and miserable. A bed is better. Turns out that in a nice long station wagon, like a woody, you can put a pretty comfy mattress in the back, so long as you don't sit up too fast. You can stretch out all the way.

 

The step up from that is the old 1970's Astro Van, one of those shag wagons that people long dead from STDs used to drive around in. The kind with the big mural on the side of a chick with a fur bikini crouching next to a wolf under a full moon? Like that. Inside will be a disco ball, shag carpet, and a foam pad bed. The unfortunate children spawned from these encounters may be serving your food or tending to your hospital today. The vans themselves were a bit cramped and visibility down the sides and back took some effort to learn how to back up with, but they were reasonably mobile and better than a tent. The big V8 engines were very quiet so these vans could easily drift into a community and out again without much audible notice. You got alarmed when you saw who was behind the wheel, and which girls were getting in for that ride, but that's as I say, history. It can't be worse than the saggy old ladies with blackened stretchmarked tattoos reeking of marijuana smoke I see at the local library. *shudder* Someday that vision will enable me to write comedy. Not quite yet. In any case, one of these vans is probably a reasonably comfortable place to bed down for the night. If they have a microwave and a jug and basin for handwashing, so much the better. You still have to get dressed and get out to pee, but better than a tent in a rainstorm. No plumbing means no particular rust problems. There are probably versions that have the plumbing, the bigger and much heavier ones, and maybe a kitchen down the side, probably with the stove next to the toilet for maximum irony. In this economy, poor college graduates are doing all they can to survive. If that means breaking the law, dealing drugs, and living in a shag wagon, then they do it. And around here they are. If you aren't born here, you won't be hired for the few retail jobs. Don't bother applying. You aren't welcome. You might get the worst jobs, the ones that cause injury at the lowest pay, and then have the employer deny they've ever heard of you when the inevitable happens. More and more, California is a retirement community. A real shame. It used to be such a serious and industrious state with so much going on.

 

Camper vans are mobile and cramped. Bigger things exist, including your classic Winnebago truck campers, and truck bed campers are a valuable class in and of themselves. Work trucks are typically big enough engines. Fitted with stiffer springs and really strong antisway bars and a properly geared transmission with additional cooling, as well as a bigger radiator, you can fit a van-sized shell you can stand up in on the back of a full sized pickup truck. This can go anywhere a pickup can go, and while top-heavy in the corners so care must be taken, they go lots of places and are reasonably easy to back up and maneuver down fire roads to remote locations. Cramped like a van they aren't very comfortable, but if you spend most of your time outside it won't be that noticeable, and these are a favored vehicle for fishermen, hunters, loggers, carpenters, people who build dams and log cabins on the cheap. They have a lot of utility. I have seen some made of wood, down from the Pot Fields of North San Juan. All were heavily caulked. Some were stained, many were painted OD green. Very "survivalist" motif, but that sort of thing is a lost mindset, diverted by religion or politics. I find proper camouflage means dressing like someone boring so nobody looks twice at you, or assumes this is just your neighborhood and doesn't think twice. That's good camouflage. Wearing woodland camo in public merely advertises you have guns and might be delusional or have PTSD. Just a tip there from someone with experience being a wallflower. You hear the funniest things when people forget you are there.

 

In any case, fake wood paneling on a fiberglass shell of a 1970's or 80's Winnebago truck top camper is probably your best deal today for rural boondock camping. It can get out of places much easier than even a lightweight trailer like a teardrop because you avoid the jackknife problem backing up. When I was in college, I drove a truck pulling a trailer for my college field trips, and I got to be okay at it because the truck had big mirrors and we didn't usually pile the back of the truck overly high so I could see it in the center mirror. The trailer was good too, with a wide stance. And I packed it so I could keep the weight right. There were expert trailer pullers with me, too. While you can technically pull a light trailer behind a sedan, you have to limit total weight to 1000 pounds. This is just about pointless and you'd be better off with car camping loads and a tent. Or go to the motel. Ironically, many very small cars, like a Toyota Corolla or Honda Civic will tow 1500 pounds but that still leaves you with a very light trailer. A teardrop without much inside, probably with its contents in the car for balance and enough weight over the rear axle of the car. Not ideal. Realistically, a truck or SUV is usually a better choice, and you can easily look up the tow capacity of your vehicle online. You may be surprised. Some tow a lot better than others. When you pass 3000 pounds you can start getting more serious about small trailers. If you want a big comfy Airstream, a dedicated tow vehicle may be needed, such as a modern turbo diesel powered truck or large V8. Those are thirsty engines, so people who do that often have a bicycle or motor scooter on the back, visible as you pass them on the highway. You also get into Cubic Money with these rigs. They get very luxurious and comfortable, though usually less than a common motel room. They only make real sense for full-time RVers who never go home at all, and for couples with the strongest relationships that don't shatter under the constant companionship. Having Cubic Money helps, apparently.

 

Downgrades from ultra-luxurious Airstream trailers are popular, though don't hold their value well. The curved aluminum shell of an airstream is iconic and thus valuable. The upside of lesser fiberglass trailers is they're much cheaper to buy used. While most aren't Top Gear'ed into wreckage by the owners, many get left parked and possibly moldy or full of mice. Restorations are going to require elbow grease and hanta virus immunizations and masks and goggles to keep the dust from your lungs. If you do have to strip down the interior, take the opportunity to install lots of insulation so they'll be warmer in the cold and thus more useful more of the year. Little point in owning a vehicle that requires you to go to Yuma in-season and pay premium prices for a space there with all the old swingers.

 

There are monster sized RVs based on bus frames. These are tricky to drive with the frantic words "small corrections" repeating endlessly from your copilot. They are also very slow, or much too fast when you need to stop or try and make that curve ahead. If you have any self respect as a driver, limit your vacations to motels and drive a fast car instead of a bus-sized RV. Just saying. As a compromise, then, the pickup truck shell camper is probably the best balance of mobility, cost, comfort, and value. Next down is the converted van, if done right. Just give yourself enough room to stretch out when you sleep. Sleeping cramped will make you cranky all day and that leads to bad behavior and eventually jail, I expect. Be sensible. Think hard about your minimum requirements, and recognize that without infinite money, you aren't going to want to be year round living in a vehicle. If its meant to be motivation to build a house, that will probably work really well.

Book: Snuff by Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett is a fantastic author. He's an expert story teller, and I envy his ability, his use of language and nearly constant wry humor. His writing partner in a couple books Neil Gaiman describes Terry Pratchett as a man of enduring fury, carefully bottled rage. Not the "funny old elf" casual observers think he is. He writes about very serious subjects. He writes about corruption, racism, madness, slavery, treachery, incompetence, evil, philosophy, justice and injustice. Its beautiful writing, deceptively humorous because all that rage drives it. A Terry Pratchett novel wins awards. And it deserves to. He's a great writer because he's been at it for decades and tries very hard to craft his very best. Not "good enough" but best. Imagine if Charles Dickens had been paid for quality rather than by the word so he said more in fewer words, carefully chosen? That is what Pratchett is like.

I envy his ability as a writer, but I know that he worked very hard at this. It wasn't talent that makes him a great writer. It was decades of hard work. To be a great writer, like a great guitarist, is practice, practice, practice. I really appreciate his efforts which is why I'm a fan. He makes me wonder if I can turn my anger and outrage at how things are, into humor the way he did. Because Terry Pratchett is slowly dying and in a year or two or three there won't be anymore books. And that will be terrible because he's become exquisitely good at it by this point.

The novel Snuff is about slavery, racism, and butchery of thinking people that smell terrible. It makes you ashamed of any racist thoughts you have had. Because Racism is as easy as it is wrong. All political parties commit this sin, and its human nature to divide people into Us and Them. Lots of experiments prove this. You can't stop it, either. I think this is one of the reasons that Communism always fails. "They weren't doing their share. We suffered, and they were lazing around. Why should We be the only ones to work? Maybe we should stop working too?" In the post 9/11 world those are easy thoughts to have, despite how shameful they are. Perhaps in a world without terrorism we could have proper social justice, but eliminating terrorism requires action by the police forces from the countries of origin to stop them, and arrest the seditious murderers recruiting them, who are mostly holy clerics of Islam running charity schools.

 

Snuff is about those police, and the trouble of convincing people to reject their racism and act to stop things, from your own side of responsibility. Snuff is also about tobacco, the kind that comes in little boxes and is sniffed up your nose and gives you cancer eventually. Tobacco plantations used to be tended by slaves here in the USA, after they stopped exporting debtors from England, in the days before it was banned. The English banned slavery before we did, because they didn't have any plantations in England and instead bought things grown on them, removing themselves from the morality of the cotton clothing they adored made from the labor of slaves here. Did you smell hypocrisy when you learned that? Yes, I do too. Slavery was never legal in California, btw. Pratchett pokes at the hypocrisy of the tobacco buyers pretending to be superior for buying the efforts of slaves, in exactly the same way that buyers of smart phones in the USA pretend to be superior despite the efforts of Chinese slaves. If you don't make it yourself, how do you know it isn't made by slaves? Ahem. Just a point to consider before you plant that smug look on your face.

 

I strongly recommend this book, both for humor and quality of writing as well as the moral message is provides. There's a lot of important truths in Snuff and I'm really going to miss Sir Terry when he dies. He's one of the good people, no matter how angry he really is.

If We're Lucky

As bad as the economy has been since China destroyed USA's manufacturing, it could be worse. We don't have constant rioting, we don't have many Free Fire Zones, and the murder rate in most places are pretty low, far lower than predicted by the FBI crime statistics due to First Person Shooter video games and widespread atheism. Its religious zealots that suicide bomb market places and ax-attack cops. If you think God is a hoax, a lot of crimes just don't happen. So that's an upside. Now we've got Doctors Without Borders Morals ignoring basic epidemiology and potentially infecting millions, half of whom will die from ebola. We might be lucky. They might be lucky. He might be an ineffective liberal bastard that didn't manage to kill the east coast 16 days from now. We'll see. Quarantine is something they even teach in high school biology classes. It's a simple concept. This Doctor Without Borders Morals ignored it, which is either incompetent or evil. Thousands might die in 3 weeks. And millions after that. Being an atheist, I can't exactly pray for good fortune. I can only wait for the consequences.

The Middle Class, according to James Burke in Connections, arose from the massive die-off of the Black Plague in the Middle Ages because it concentrated the minimal wealth of the poor into the survivors hands and freed up their efforts to do other things, like crafts and mechantile, and the normal human response to a die off is aggressive reproduction. If say, ebola kills 1/3 of the population of the world starting with the USA, there's going to be very complex inheritance as well as very complex collapse of economic activity and public utilities because technically skilled people also die off as easily as broom operators and clerks. Anybody who deals with the public is at risk, from grocery clerks and librarians to shop keepers and people who go to movie theaters. Enclosed rooms and shared furniture that doesn't see sunlight? That's a major risk for plague. Particularly since we DON'T KNOW just how easily it spreads, or if it has mutated into a version which is airborne and durable since that helps its reproduction. A few years ago there was an outbreak of swine flu and I worked in a place that made the biodetection kits. Everybody there got swine flu from the door handles, including me. One weekend with a fever, I was fine afterwards, but if it had been ebola? A serious number of bioworkers would be dead. Our managers met with people who met with doctors who dealt with swine flu and were infected without knowing it, and they put their virus on our door handles, all over the building. That's how it got us. And our UV glass also meant that sunlight couldn't kill the virus indoors, and the air conditioning kept it at ideal storage, everywhere. There were close to 1000 people, including families of the workers, impacted by this outbreak where I worked.

 

Utilities workers tend to have good immune systems, but they also tend to have old fashioned managers who insist on in-person meetings rather than safely online and could potentially all get ebola while discussing what to do about ebola when it reaches their towns. If the utility workers die  after their managers visit with politicians who visited doctors with ebola, passing it along, our lights might not stay on. We'd do well to prepare for the potential power outages during storms, and consider the possibility they might not come back on soon. Over the last few years, blizzards have knocked out power for days at a time, even close to town. The locals around here rapidly became familiar with the entire gas powered generator market. Honda Generators are preferred because they work well and as reliably as diesel generators, with a much lower noise level and much shorter startup time. They cost twice as much because they're better.

 

Another thing to think about is water supply. Will ebola get into the water when the water treatment plant workers get too sick to mind the machines? Their bosses are going to those meetings with politicians as well. Even with really good immune systems, you are still at risk.

1918 Spanish Flu had the same kind of death rate as Ebola does, and our civilization pretty well ground to a halt until the flu mutated into its current low sub-1% death rate. Ebola is a 50% death rate. If we're lucky that will drastically decrease when its infection rate goes up. If Ebola drops to modern Flu level death rates we can stop panicking. Until then, we need to treat this seriously, and Doctors Without Borders Morals who come back from Africa and potentially contaminate subways, train stations, and tens of thousands of people in places without UV light and a union that never cleans the place, much less with bleach... this is an ideal case of bioterrorism. If I'd been on one of those trains in New York City, I'd be self quarantined and getting grocery deliveries dropped off at my door. Of course, Doctors Without Morals is TOO SUPERIOR TO FOLLOW QUARANTINE. And in 16 more days, we'll know if that whining nurse is clean or not. She wouldn't follow quarantine either. She broke quarantine, risked thousands or millions of lives, and should have her medical license yanked by the Medical Board. Doctors Without Borders Morals needs to be treated as a serious threat, and either denied entry or quarantined by armed troops since they don't do it properly, just like anyone with an Africa stamp on their passport. This is harsh, but there are too many unknowns and too many risks in a disease class that is well known to mutate and change. Viruses do this because they evolve quickly. How they were a few years ago, and were documented in various studies and papers, doesn't mean they will be like that tomorrow, or even yesterday. Self quarantine easily leads one to consider the survival value of not shaking hands, touching things in public, or associating with snide and superior twits who think Africa is a fabulous place to be better than everyone else. And yes, that describes all Liberal Jet Setters. I know far too many of them. Better than you, better than you. Nose in the air. Sigh. Human nature is disgusting. And perhaps if we aren't lucky, self limiting.

Racing an Audi TT

This ebola thing is already getting warning signs at the local medical establishments. So once I've finished the latest raking of fallen leaves, a daily chore, and my walk around the neighborhood hills, one of the few places in both towns that has continuous sidewalks, and gutters, and is fully paved. A good place to get exercise with a very low chance to be pounced by a cougar, the predatory cat I mean. The aging divorcee type is far more common but I am now past the age of their attentions, thankfully. To my good fortune.

 

So anyway, once I was tired enough I settle down with my Xbox and picked a car to drive from my digital garage, which is like Jay Leno's garage, only composed of bits and bytes rather than real cars and people to maintain them, in this case a 2004 Audi TT 3.2 turbo, which I've already upgraded with race valves and sticky tires and frame reinforcement. I drove it through various digital race tracks against other drivers, some of them quite mad. And I did well though the last of a dozen races I was getting tired and sloppy. Like anything, to be a really good driver you have to focus. And I'm not as sharp as I used to be.

 

Still, that car was incredibly good, planted as James May calls it. I could see owning one. Maybe not as quick as an older Evo, like a 6 or 7. Still, damned good. And civilized. It grips the road. There's sometimes tire chirps, but it holds steady in the corners and is difficult to get loose and kill you, unlike the Subaru which seems to let go all at once but not tell you for 20-30 seconds when you're sliding into a wall or tree. You have to appreciate being planted in a place like this, where heavy rains show up suddenly. We're only 5-6 hours from the Pacific here, after all. Storms in the Sierras blow up very suddenly, and those storms, which can turn to blizzards, can kill you if you don't adapt to them fast enough. A car that drives through those storms and is still fast in the dry is a good car to have.

 

Most of the local Subarus are Foresters, which sound a lot like tractors as they mutter up and down the street. That is not for me. I already have a slow car. I'm looking for something a bit quicker for those times when I want to go fast. I know that a 320i is fantastic, because I had one before they changed their name to "M3". Mine, a couple decades ago, was very quick. And grippy. Even in the wet. I had Pirelli tires. They laughed at rain when others were going round and round. Very important to laugh at rain without going into a tree. My new tires on my Honda are similarly competent, so that's good. Some Firestones are competent. Not all of them. But some.

 

Yes, that TT was fun. I run into fun cars in the Forza Motorsports simulator and that's a cost effective way to test drive, even if it doesn't show you the interior comforts or ride it will tell you the performance. I've learned that AWD can be quick and fun. There are rear wheel drives, like the M3 that are fun too, if a bit slippy on the throttle. I've learned that mid engine try to kill you, which is why TVR is gone and nobody seems to miss Noble or Lotus, but also that my old trainer car the Acura Integra is still as ridiculously quick as I remember. And you can do nutty things with an overpowered front wheel drive on a mountain road thanks to their grip, including four wheel drift if you're nutty enough with the throttle. I admit to having been a not entirely safe driver in my youth, and I'm very safe now because I feel like I used up my extra lives way back then. Still, I can  understand the appeal of something quick but overpriced like the Audi TT. It really is fun.

New Plan

So I've been working 48 hours a month for the last 9 months at the library, getting a taste for being a librarian. And I like the work. I find shelving books relaxing. I'm good at polishing DVDs back into shape. I'm good at the job. Unfortunately, the librarians prefer to only work with the same gender, and as it stands the law isn't interested in correcting their bias. In the real world, some jobs just aren't allowed to men while women are in the position to insist or demand otherwise. The Personnel Dept follows their wishes and the threat of a male librarian is removed. So, what are the alternatives?

 

Meeting with a local company engineer there's the hint of a rumor of a job, maybe this time more than an interview a year ago. I'm calling this my final straw for this area. Either they hire me or I'm going down the mountain for work. I don't like that, but if the jobs are all in the lowlands I'm certainly not going to keep trying to find work up here with all the bright high school students fleeing as fast as they can graduate. That's the trouble with a region that has no industry but grocery retail and "medicine" and Medicine. One puts you in the ground and the other makes you not mind that's where you're going. I'll let you work out which is legal.

 

I wonder if all of rural California is just pot growing? If it were all legal, the price of the stuff will drop to nothing, or nearly nothing. Boutique value is probably not significant.

 

I read this week in the Sacramento Bee newspaper that a Grass Valley machinist company is bailing out of up here and moving to Rocklin (down the mountain) where there's a lot more machinists, and has a whole reality show about American manufacturing. The company founder is a vicious looking ex-con former boxer who is a master machinist with a stare that could peel paint. I don't think I would want to work for him, personally, but I approve of the pride in craftsmanship. He's got close to 20 years as a machinist, which is enough time to make mistakes and learn things and get some very firm ideas.

 

I wish I knew about being a machinist, but I'd want to start with a proper AutoCAD teacher, and then learn 3D CAD suitable for CNC part upload for manufacturing. I'd also like to learn about proper heat treating techniques and technology so that parts I made could be hardened properly into things like pistons and bearings etc. I want to build or improve engines and make vehicles. I despise the current choice for scooters and motorcycles. I want to build a motorcycle with the automatic transmission of a scooter, and I already figured out how to do it easily. Its so easy I am baffled why that isn't the normal way. Its one of those things where the words "are you stupid?" blurts out. Its never the right thing to say, and makes enemies rather than friends, but it still happens for the obvious reasons of shocked disbelief.

 

If I knew 3D CAD I could learn CNC, or at least enough as to know who to take it to for CNC manufacturing, and then off to heat treating and validation testing. I don't trust the quality of the Chinese, or rather I know the Chinese build to the exact specifications of the contract and I know engineering parts contracts are usually written by ignorant lawyers so the parts of often junk where it counts. I trust lawyers to be incompetent. I've dealt with their mistakes far too often industry, you see. All IT workers have. We know that lawyers are CYA jackasses. Quality comes from pride and better quality standards.

 

While I'm pretty sure there's a market for RVs, especially if you don't mind selling for bricks of marijuana, I'm someone who wants properly clean cash, not drugs. And while the American dream seems to be dead today, gnawed by brain eating zombies, I still want a paying job. There are many jobs I'd rather starve than do, including "inside sales" which is the current code phrase for telemarketing. Nearly the entire solar industry today is scammers. Tesla on examination is actually in the business of selling carbon offsets to other car companies, through trading lease-rights for electric cars to companies which don't make their own through complex schemes. One piece of investing advice from Warren Buffett, who was a geologist like me once upon a time, is "don't invest in any company whose product requires an accountant to understand". That's very good advice. This is why I stayed away from investing in housing derivatives and Enron. If its too complex, it is a scam. Also, any investment branch where its biggest fans say the phrase "You're crazy if you don't get into this!" is guaranteed to be a scam. There's even a Japanese version of the same phrase which caused their 25 year economic depression, still ongoing. I care about that because my investments typically make me a months wages a few times a month. Why do I still want a job? Well, retirement with compounding interest is nice and best to let that sit and grow. Better to have a job and maintain the low expectations. After all, the companies can crash, and then where would I be? If you can build a trailer to live inside you still have a roof over your head, even if that roof is on wheels. At least the floor comes with it.

 

It would be in my best interest to learn AutoCAD and 3D CAD in coming months. As much as I like being a librarian, and as welcoming as patrons make me feel because I answer their questions without stress or rancor unlike some I'd rather not name, the girls club will never allow me to be paid to do such an EASY job they pretend it SO DIFFICULT. No, its easy. Really it is. You don't even have to sell things. You just stand there, smile and operate the computer. Hardly any money changes hands. I deserve that kind of job because I am good at it and such an unstressful job should not be the sole domain of a gender that already avoids heart attacks. Mine needs it more. And I already do the work of three librarians. That's probably why they refuse to hire me. A threat, you see? The danger of being competent is you threaten those who aren't. They've NEVER allow a competent employee to make them look bad. Sigh. Unions. Oh well. It was nice work, time to move on.

 

I suppose I need to find a freeware version of CAD that uses the right commands, and a manual to teach me how to do it. Once I do climb that very steep slope into competence, I should have more options for employment in a field that has people who don't offend me.

No Time For Scooters

Normally, I'm all in favor of high fuel economy, cost effective transportation, and scalable transportation. Today it was pouring rain. I would NOT want to be out in that on a scooter, getting soaked, weakening my immune system for flu or cold or ebola (which is the new black plague). Since viruses are transferred on paper and book covers, shelving books might be just as dangerous as working a retail job in the coming plague, but that's another story.

My new tires worked great, and my car has working windshield wipers, for which I am grateful. I got from there to there with no problems, no slips and no squeaks or danger. I am glad for that. I don't think it would have been a safe commute on a motorcycle or scooter with all the standing water on the road, and the rain obscuring vision. Its also pinecone season. I have to think that hitting a pinecone in the road, when it is wet like this, might drop the bike and maybe kill you on the spot.

I think most people who eventually end up with a scooter as their only way to get around will find themselves calling in and getting fired, rather than blow their savings on a weather-related traffic accident. And managers who insist workers risk their lives getting there are going to end up stabbed in their offices by the survivors or their families. Managers really need to understand the risks they take when they smirk at other's suffering. It can really kill you, and you'll deserve it. Sometimes you have to accept production slowdowns due to weather. And if you get fired over it, well that's better than getting someone killed and being stabbed by their angry brother, isn't it?

Another Fusion Scam

I'm sorry, but the goddamned diagram includes the words "superconducting magnets". FAIL.

 

FAIL FAIL FAIL. Was this published as a joke?

 

They should have saved this for April 1st. Real superconductors have to be supercold, a few kelvin, to work. High temperature superconductors do not exist.

 

Unobtanium, which is what high temperature superconducting magnets are made from, is never supposed to be in real things. Its a comic book element. You can tell from the name that its completely made up. This is a fantasy, exactly like the Princeton toroid. Which keeps being rebuilt to get some distance between the magnets in the torus and the supercooling system which is supposed to prevent the metal donut from melting despite the need for the magnets to contain the star-hot fusion reaction and if the cooling fails, even a little, the entire thing explodes because its a nuclear reaction, complete with plasma and neutrons and radiation. And the magnets require exotic elements to work better, but those absorb the neutrons from the reaction and become different elements with completely different chemical properties. Good thing it never worked or it would be a smoking hole in the ground which glows from the radiation. And the whole place would be listed as a national disaster area, permanently. All those dead liberals.

 

And the Nova Laser Ignition Center at Livermore Labs. It didn't work as predicted to cause molecular fusion so they doubled the power supply which ALSO didn't work. Then everybody working on it lost their jobs because it cost so much to build they had to sell Livermore labs itself. These huge sheds of batteries continue to not be useful, though the laser itself is a weird way to test nuclear weapons without actually blowing them up. Pretty sure there's easier ways. Livermore Labs deserved to lose its funding decades ago. And the sort have after that debacle.

 

Remember Cold Fusion? Back in 1989. Turned out that all the "positive results" were accidents caused by using the same contaminated source of Palladium electrodes. Total accident, and since they didn't check it BEFORE running their experiment, they found something after which suggested success, even though it wasn't. I have run into absolute lunatics who claimed to have Cold Fusion on their desktops. They were ignorant liars. Cold Fusion, if it had worked, would have generated incredibly lethal levels of neutrons and gamma rays because fusion does that, even at the molecular level. I researched it for the news story I wrote for my school paper back when this was new. And followed up in Physics Today when they figured out what went wrong.

 

Again, people are always ready to believe things which aren't true. This is why Snake Oil sold so well. And why people think that Marijuana Smoke cures cancer instead of giving it to you. People like being ignorant. They love embracing and celebrating stupidity. That's just how people are, and a large part of why I love libraries. They are the opposite of ignorance, and everybody who goes inside is seeking knowledge. They are leaving their ignorance behind.

 

I don't understand why the Lockheed Martin Skunkworks is willing to publish such an easily disproven fantasy and wreck their reputation for serious engineering projects. This doesn't fit their decades of steady service to America. Flipping out for Snake Oil is bizarre. Allowing this scam to be associated with their good name is likely to cause their stock value to crash. Why, oh why, would they do that?

Leaf Grinding

You know you live in the mountains when Fall comes around. You find yourself raking bags full of leaves as the oaks drop them, one after another, every few seconds, day after day. You get used to the sharp report a 1-2 ounce acorn hitting your roof or deck or greenhouse after falling 30-40 feet out of one of the towering oaks that provided that crucial shade all summer. You sweep leaves off the decking and driveway because the iron is so rich in the soil that if those leaves get WET, they leach enough iron to actually stain the concrete, and car paint as well. It doesn't take long either. I swear you could build a car from the iron extracted from all the leaves falling in this neighborhood.

The other thing about the leaves is it is fire season. And wind season. The wind comes up, sometimes down from Nevada and causes fires. Sometimes from Hawaii, bringing thunderstorms associated with hurricanes that spin apart a thousand miles away but still bring dry lightning, virga, and perhaps brief intense rain and hail. The lightning is the important bit. That's where most of our fires come from. We also get evil Fskers throwing lit cigarettes out the window, even today people do that on purpose. Very much on purpose. Remember that 5% of the population are psychopaths. That's MEN and WOMEN, and little evil Damian type children as well. They're quite distributed but often land in positions of power where they can hurt more people because they get things done, so if you think your boss is EVIL, you might be right.

The wind is blowing today, noisily rustling trees and dropping leaves all over the place and blowing them across rooftops and into gutters and catching in bushes and in the dead spaces up against fences. Its a mess. And tonight it is going to rain. Perhaps not a lot, but perhaps for 6-12 hours, which would be nice. It would damp down the soil and stop future fires. I can hope.

With all those leaves, I have been raking them daily for the last couple weeks, accumulating bag after bag full of leaves, each 5-8 inches across. These are deciduous oaks, not maples. I stack the bags up in the semi-basement under the house until we run out of bags, around 20 of them. Then haul them out and Dad, who is 73, and I grind them up. Its not hard work, shaking them the grinder and the other person stirring a sacrificial stick down there to keep them moving. After we're done we use a wheelbarrow to spread them around the yard and return the folic and humic acid back to the soil by restoring the Organic layer with this leaf grindage. Once it gets wet, there it goes. All that iron too.

We are fortunate that we do not live in one of the many places in this town with either mercury or arsenic in the soil. The mercury is from mining runoff. The arsenic is natural. It makes the soil a particular shade of bluish red, unlike the red and yellows of iron. For those of us who can see into the UV spectrum (work a night job, you gain the ability after a few weeks), the blues are more obvious. Also, UV light makes certain flowers look really bizarre. And birds too. This a natural thing, btw. Normal daylight tends to make the UV sensing eye cells overwhelmed and they stop noticing the frequencies. Its working nights and sleeping in that reduces daylight exposure and restores the spectrum to our eyes. I used to really freak out about this until it turned up in the New England Journal Of Medicine and the Lancet. Thank goodness I wasn't hallucinating.

In any case, the rains are coming this evening or tonight. The winds flowing out the Pacific are lovely and the sun is warm but the weather is fantastic. I've got new rain tires, at the proper pressures, so I'll be fine driving to the other libraries tomorrow. Good times.

Ender's Game

Decades ago, as a teenager, I read the new bestselling scifi novel, Enders Game by Orson Scott Card. I was familiar with Heinlein and Niven and would someday discover Gibson, but I was exactly the right age and mindset to enjoy Andrew Wiggin's tribulations. The first of the series remains my favorite. There have been rumors of the movie getting made since 1989. Its bounced around with fantasy cast lists, debates about the requirements of depicting the Zero-Gee battle rooms, and the morality of Demosthenes and Locke's debates and eventual takeover of Earth's govt by his brother and sister. They were an important counterpoint to the war itself, and the entire morality of what they were doing, creating and using child soldiers engineered and trained as tactical geniuses attempting to defeat an alien foe that already showed it was capable of genocide. Its a grim story, and not meant to be taken lightly.

 

The movie grabbed as much of this as it could, comfortably include. However, it made a few mistakes which would have improved it a great deal to leave in. For one thing, in the book, Ender, when attacked, kills. He comments he was winning the battles in the future too, but he killed his tormentors. Bonzo DIED. So did the bigger kid from his earthside school. Nose into his brain. Ender was a murderer, even if he wasn't told. I thought the movie did a good job with battle school. The debate between the psychologist and the school director, including the flashes of the alien fleet driving him on probably could have been improved with a moment's explanation that FTL doesn't exist in the Enderverse. Ansibles exist, so you have quantum entanglement communications instantaneously across any distance, thanks to Special Relativity's other party trick. In the book they were operating on Pluto or Ceres.

 

There was no mention in the movie of the notice Ender and company took to the battle room entrance since it implied gravity fields that could be turned on and off, which is also how the Little Doctor worked, in a related way. Or that it was Ender who figured out you could destroy a planet with the Molecular Destabilizer (Little Doctor). In the movie they show it frying the planet surface. In the book, ships hit by the initial blast spread it to the atmosphere and there to the surface and turned the entire planet into gas. It wasn't burnt crispy. It was literally vaporized.

 

Killed the entire fleet too. People who'd built their fleet immediately after the attack and launched decades earlier. Folks who were family to the 100,000,000 dead in the initial Bugger attack. They called them Formics in the movie. At the time, hivemind aliens were cutting edge ideas not explored yet. By now, everybody has seen Alien and Aliens so its not so visually horrifying.

 

In the book, the battle school commander goes to prison for war crimes, despite winning the war. There were no drone ships. They had pilots. They reveal this in both, after the battle is won. They also reveal that the two boys Ender fought died, the first time he learned this secret, and devastating to his fragile feelings after being used as a child soldier. In the real world, Child Soldiers get really messed up and few survive long as adults. I knew a survivor of the civil war in Ethiopia, a child soldier who ended up marrying the woman he was ordered to rape. They have several kids. He tended to drift off in the middle of a sentence sometimes. Haunted by bad memories, I think. In context Ender's response to the attempt to blame him for the xenocide while simultaneously calling him the hero of the war.

 

I liked the Maori tattoos on Mazer Rackham. I don't remember that in the book, but it was a nice detail. In successive novels in the series, Ender is called the Xenocide, tried in interstellar court by the various human colony governments centuries after the fact, so they could feel smug about how superior they were to him, despite only existing because of his terrible choices, unknowing as they were.

 

In the novel, Ender retrieves the queen's egg, he hops into a sleeper colony ship to escape his brother, now supreme ruler of Earth despite being a murdering psychopath who enjoyed torturing animals and nearly killed his brother and sister many times when they were children. His sister joins him 30 years into the future and at the end of his brother's life, begging for forgiveness, which he does NOT receive, they flee into space for a distant colony world on a 150 year trip (relativistic trips involve time compression) and into the next story. I never cared for that one much, called Speaker For The Dead, which was also about aliens, just not warfare and lacked the edge of Ender's Game. In the movie, they merely show him in a sleeper pod with a timer clicking by but no explanation as to what that means. I doubt they'd make the sequel, though the side stories of the others were interesting to read at least.

 

Ender's Game the movie is flawed. I wish they'd included the Demosthenes and Locke debates by his brother and sister, and the collapse of Petra, who is victorious in the movie but actually goes insane in the books from stress. I'm still glad the movie was made. I waited 25 years to see it.

Conservative Atheist Volunteering

Being a Conservative Atheist is a bit challenging. For one thing, most Conservatives are religious, and I'm an polite but hardcore atheist. I don't openly mock people's religions unless they are the more obvious cultists that are aggressive about their recruiting: Jehovah's Witnesses surprisingly do understand "No thank you. I am not interested." Far better than telephone evangelists. In most Western States you better belong to the right church or you will be facing all sorts of social trouble. The one exception is California, where it is okay to be an Atheist and treat Sundays as a day for hikes, cycling, or fancy breakfast. So I sort of have to live here.

I volunteer, as a Conservative Atheist, because I like books. I also have a strong work ethic, which is valuable around here. I also don't smoke dope, which is rare around here. It means my head is together and I notice things and I don't stink. But it is rare. Many library patrons here in the Sierras are either potheads or growers. We don't get many religious folk at the library because books have ideas and straying from God is dangerous. Might invent something new, and new things upset the delicate balance that the preacher has created, wherein he is necessary. Ahem.

Working with the North San Juan library patrons can be disconcerting when they are really stinky potheads. The eye-watering reek of pot smoke is exactly as painful as it sound. They compound this by needing a long bath with soap, a shave, a haircut, and that stuff called shampoo. Dreadlocks are often multiple colors and generally indicate a subhuman interest in simple courtesy. They sometimes ask for help when their question would be easy to answer themselves if they weren't so high they didn't notice the big signs above the library catalog computers. I suspect CATALOG is incomprehensible when really high. But they use the library so I help them or direct them to the librarians for a more in-depth search, as required by law. I'm not allowed to type it in for them. Some weenie lawyer had to justify his position. This, btw, is a very easy job. About as unstressful as you can get. This is one of the reasons I like it. Job stress really hurts me.

It can also be interesting shelving books in the non-fiction section for both religious texts, cults, fantasy medical witchdoctoring con-games, snake oil, and Apologist Biographies for Treasonous Politicians who indifferently demand: "What difference does it make?". I shelve these things and laugh at the nonsense people believe enough to both publish a book, and for someone else to buy it, and someone else to read it. Reflexology? Amulets? Eating Bugs? Hillary Clinton? Hilarious nonsense.

There is an unlimited amount of ignorance. Still, going into a library you will eventually learn some more mainstream truths, and sometimes people unlearn their ignorance. Other times, ignorance is deliberate and fatal. We get lots of Darwin Awards in the Sierras. Usually in the form of drug overdose, exposure, arrest, or single car accidents on the curvy roads. Usually the driver is drunk or high. Sometimes there's other people in the car that die with them. And I'm okay with that. I grew up in the place where wine tasting is a drunk driving game. Its ridiculous that you would ban the entire point of the tourism just because the drunks wreck their cars. They're mostly a threat to themselves. Headon collisions were rare. Driving off of corners and into fields or trees or rocks and the bloody mess they sometimes turned into, or more commonly the ditch the car had to be pulled out of, was just part of life. There's no Jesus involved. No Buddha or Allah or Loki or Coyote either. Just driving too fast.

There's a lot of hypocrisy too. I laugh hard, inside, when I meet stinking hippies who can't find soap but own an iPhone with apps, though they don't believe in technology like that which keeps their AWD Subaru running, and never read the manual for their phone but want help to use it. Hypocrisy from the older generations is so very willful. At least they're consistent. They were useless spoiled children that grew into useless spoiled teenagers that got all the STDs and did a bad job raising children who themselves grew up useless and spoiled until they either grew out of it or died from Darwin award behavior. I'm astonished so many of my generation survived Baby Boomer parents.

It's weird being part of the generation that gave us the internet. I spent a couple decades teaching people how to use it. The Internet is everywhere. Its useful. It cuts down on stupid questions because looking stuff up is so easy. And people still come to libraries to learn more, from printed books. They aren't obsolete yet. Even with Kindle Fire HD being down to $90 right now. That's less than I paid for my Kindle Paperwhite, but my paperwhite has very long battery life and I still enjoy it. My generation loved the Sony Walkman, and we got MP3 players (or iPods) and listen that way. I was one of those people talking on a cellphone in a supermarket before everybody else did it, via headset that looked so weird. And then I stopped. I don't really carry a phone, not one turned on, anymore. When you sell smartphones, and you notice your customers are all DUMB, you start to connect the two and not wanting to be dumb, I don't have a smartphone. QED.

My life is way simpler, and rather than require constant opinion polling from friends like the Millenials, I prefer reflecting and observing life from my own position, or listening to comedy audiobooks that wryly describe the ignorance and hypocrisy around me in funnier ways. Because you can't force people to think. And many of them will die from deliberate ignorance. I refuse to feel guilty about surviving their asinine behavior when life and death are going to happen regardless, and not getting dead is often a matter of looking both ways before crossing the street, and waiting for that one car with backup lights engaged and huge clouds of acrid smoke right before they jam the throttle open and then fumble for the brake. Because its that kind of world, and those kinds of Liberals, still thinking they're superior despite forgetting that even the discount grocery sells soap for a very reasonable price.

Honestly: North San Juan would do itself a favor if it built a serious water supply system and a bathhouse with very cheap hot showers. Do that and it wouldn't stink so bad. Please North San Juan. Teach your people to bathe!

Acorn Season

After the rains and general chills last week, it warmed up over the weekend and is hot enough for A/C most days. This is what we in California call: Indian Summer. It comes after the first rains, usually in October, and goes away again in a few weeks. Nights are cool enough to sleep, mornings are chilly, and leaves fall all day, even if the breeze is hot. We also get Acorns. The house where I live is surrounded by deciduous oak trees, not to be confused with live oaks such as where I grew up near the coast. These trees produce serious acorns a couple inches long and an inch across, weighing an ounce each. The POP when the hit the roof or back deck. We're getting those falling every twenty or thirty minutes now. The squirrels go nuts over this, hiding them everywhere, then forgetting. This hiding behavior includes lifting up the gutter guards, which in theory allows water into the rain gutters but allows acorns and leaves to roll off to the ground, and cram acorns in the gutter. Those float, then completely plug the downspouts. This is a common problem around here, and if you have pines instead, you get pine needles and even bigger pinecones, large enough to brain you. Yes, around here pinecones are over a foot long and weigh up to 5 pounds when full of nuts. Usually they fall when they're empty, thankfully, and the squirrels tear them open to get the pine nuts. Still, this being fall the critters are doing fall things. I'm hearing migrating geese more often, and hopefully there's enough in the high country to keep the bears up there for hibernation, rather than breaking into homes down in Nevada City, which is only 5 miles away.

The big upside of this time of year? Time for stews, soup, breads, baking, slow cooked foods like roasts, red wine, dark beer, cheeses, squash, tomato sauces, and once it rains again, clam chowder. Good foods to eat that suit the season. And its cool enough in the mornings I can exercise hard without getting all sweaty. So that's a plus as well. Might go for a bicycle ride tomorrow. Good for the heart and respiration rate.

Lessons From F1 GP Japan

A typhoon was bearing down on Tokyo, east of Suzuka where the F1 Grand Prix of Japan was taking place. Various delays for the fans to arrive meant that the race was delayed half an hour, and started behind the pace car with very heavy spray off the wheels, meaning only the pole position driver could actually see where he was going. The Ferrari died after 3 laps, with the steering wheel, a computer with many buttons, shorted out and died. This is not the first time a computer on an F1 car has died, and the fact that these cars have trouble in wet weather is not exactly a positive advertisement for Hybrid Cars, which was the primary reason for this season's design. Trying to show that Hybrids can be fast. What they've actually shown is that hybrids are unreliable, and require millions of dollars a drive to keep them running. That's NOT a positive spin on Hybrid technology.

Dad had more suggestions, watching cars die in the wet. Lose the battery entirely. No more ERS. Narrower tires so they really have to pay attention to braking on corners. Without the battery, they'll be 400 pounds lighter, so braking should be easier too. Lose the radio. All the telemetry and pit data was fine on pit wall boards hung over the side for decades. Remove distractions so the driver can just drive. Return the clutch, and reduce the number of gears to 4 or 5. With a gear lever. No more paddle shifters. They're a bit too easy, and making a shift properly is part of the challenge. This also requires the driver to be more skilled, managing 3 pedals with 2 feet.

And dropping the engines to 2.0L 4-cylinder Turbo, like all Rally cars, and a V6 normally aspirated 2.5 to 3.0 L would be far more like real cars and real drivers use. And you'd be able to hear them. In this Grand Prix only the pace car engine made any real noise, with its supercharged V8 musclecar sound. Ironic that Ze Germans make cars that sound like the 1970's in Detroit.

No fancy battery braking. Just brakes. The batteries get hot, the electric motor loses grip because the power isn't going into a battery so the dynamo doesn't work and all the brake energy falls onto the front brakes which is why SO MANY CARS are running off at the end of the straights this season. This is a direct result of battery overheating and electrical brake failure. This is a DANGEROUS FLAW. It should not be part of the formula. Eventually this is going to kill a driver, or worse, fans. They're going 160-200 mph on those straightaways, with only partial braking working. That's like a 2000 pound missile. This is an engineering safety catastrophe.

Adjusting front and rear wing is part of the challenge, balancing speed against cornering. Having much narrower tires also makes corners more tricky because you won't get unreal levels of Gee force without using lots of wing, which slows you on the straightaway and makes passing there impossible, but opens passing in the turns instead. The different strategies while staying on the road makes it a lot more fun again. Reducing distractions from driving the car, and making it about actual manual car skill rather than a video game console? That's better.

Also, less extreme, more manual cars wouldn't be shutting down because they got wet in the rain.

Beautiful Day

I've had a couple weeks now, driving my car with the new transmission and axels. It works great. As good as new. I'm very happy with it.

The sky is blue, crystal clear, and on my walk this morning I could clearly see the Sierra Buttes up at the Sierra Crest (top) and the Sutter Buttes (extinct volcano north of Sacramento) and the Coast Range mountains beyond, which are tall enough to get consistent snow on them in the winter time and generate their own weather, and have a banana belt (warm dry air) on this side of them, which looks like a grassy desert most of the year. John Muir wanted to build a Grand Staircase park there from one side of the mountain to the other, since it shows of some biomes which interests botanists but largely nobody else.

I would like to live up on those mountains. Maybe with a trailer I could move around for the best views. Weather being what it is, the colder the night, the better the view the next day. And it was 50'F last night. I could feel it with my window cracked open a couple inches. Up there? It probably froze last night, and from the mountaintop I should be able to see Mount Lassen, Mount Shasta, Mount Diablo, San Francisco, and the Pacific Ocean, complete with fog banks and the various storms that roll in across Northern California, producing the usual hundred twenty inches of rain that area gets, but generally misses us down here. Despite the earthquakes, that area really deserves development, with retirement homes and proper full service hospitals with cardiac and cancer treatment so old people will move there and spend their money. Eureka has some of that, but the real hospital still ends up sending its patients to Santa Rosa, my home town, rather than the local clinic, which kills patients, apparently, with anything more serious than a broken bone. I don't know that as fact, only that their reputation, even today, is terrible. Perhaps if there were a medical school at Humboldt State this wouldn't happen anymore. The NW part of California is avoided by tourists who spend weeks cruising the Oregon Coast, largely because NW California is nasty and unfriendly, while Oregon Coast loves tourists and welcomes them. What will it take to make the California Coast friendly? Probably better roads, paying jobs, and a future worth having. Tricky when all the money in California gets spent in LA and San Francisco. This is exactly why Jefferson has so much traction. They want to develop the North, long ignored by LA and Sacramento, and make something of the resources through tourism and retirement communities. If you can have fantastic gardens in Portland and Bellevue, which are colder and wetter, why not Eureka? That whole area should be rose gardens and flowers and fantastic houses where the rainfall becomes beautiful. It really should. This is sane and far more useful than building in deserts like Patterson.

Also, I want to say thank you to Grocery Outlet for your low prices. Shopping there means rubbing elbows with the welfare coupon crowd and the pot growers, but at least they can afford soap and toilet paper, despite being off-brand. Also, they have decent prices for things like eggs and crackers and wines. A great wine selection. So many Lodi Zinfandels, and a fair number of Napa ones too. Their lunch meats are a reasonable price, so you can afford to make a proper sandwich. Just don't expect the brand you buy today to be there tomorrow. Stuff comes and goes. Its not dented cans either, btw. Those are illegal to sell. These are just stuff that doesn't sell well at major grocery chains so it gets auctioned off and arrives there. When you're a good cook like me, you can make something of it.

Anyway, back to my novel editing project. If I can really polish it up properly, back into a sparkling gem, it will be ready to Publish for Money, very important detail, the money.