Bitney Springs Road

Drove the Porsche Boxster on the Bitney Springs road today. That is one for Top Gear. It is 2 lane, narrow, twisty, and like driving on a roller coaster. This is exactly the sort of road that Jeremy Clarkston would find nice things to say about California, for the first time.

Alexander Rossi Wins Indy 500

Nevada City (local) resident race car driver Alexander Rossi just won the Indy 500, then ran out of fuel after passing the finish line.

Reloading and Marksmanship

I used to be a rifle marksman. I enjoyed it. It was a technical skill, and helped me deal with my diabetes, which makes you shake from your sugars going up and down all the time. It isn't nice, but having something to focus on helps. In more modern times I'd recommend a driving simulator. That takes steady hands and requires smooth reactions and eye-hand coordination too.

Anyway, I got into the hobby, quickly realized that factory ammo is mostly bad, milsurp ammo is often really terrible, and accuracy comes from consistency, which you can only really get if you make your own ammo. Good news there. The press is cheap, around $120. You need primers and powder (the correct one) and a reloading manual is a good idea. The big surprise I found was that the manual points out that you don't have to load to the highest pressure to get a safe and accurate load. I studied lots of reloading data from Reloadbench, which only exists as archives now. It was a useful place though, and the two reloading manuals I used to stare at helped. While shooting .22LR is a good starting point, for what is a glorified pellet gun, when you get to a calibers with replaceable primers like 223 and 308, you learn more. For one thing, .223 is finicky. You get huge differences in accuracy from very small differences in powder, 0.2 grain. Larger calibers don't get much change in accuracy from that, but .223 does. I learned a lot of precision from .223. And I learned to respect the caliber, and its limitations. For instance, when some mall ninja tells me his 15 inch barrel air gauge stainless steel CQC model AR-15 will hit targets 3 inches across at 600 yards with .223 with a full magazine I am certain he is full of p00p. Here's all the problems with that.

1. You need a 69 grain bullet to hit at that range, which means you need a 1:7 twist, 
2. You need at least a 22-inch barrel to get full velocity out of the round. 
3. A 69-75 grain bullet in a 15 inch barrel is under 2000 feet per second, and won't get full terminal velocity effects, much less avoid serious rainbow-drop issues at even modest ranges. 
4. Stainless steel warps from heat, so you can't maintain point of aim after a couple rounds, nevermind 16-20. 
5. AR-15s have inperfect lockup, meaning that chamber pressures vary, meaning that from the first round to the last the tolerances are different, meaning you aren't getting consistency, meaning changing velocity round to round, and poor accuracy at range. 

My .223 was bolt action. It was a 24 inch heavy barrel. It gave very consistent accuracy, but I also notice that heat would still warp the carbon steel barrel, which is inherently more accurate than stainless steel. I didn't have an air gauged barrel. I couldn't afford that. I also didn't have a precision rifle action and gunsmithing. Those are $10K, realistically. One of the things you learn from precision shooting is you can get more finicky, and spend cubic money, and eventually get nearly as good as you want, but Hollywood Rifle Shots are fantasy, created by directors with no firearms experience. Becoming a rifle marksman ruined all Hollywood movies with snipers in them. All of them. 

The pinnacle of long distance civilian rifle marksmanship is at Black Rock Lake, same location as Burning Man, different date. They shoot .338 Lapua, 416 Super something or other, and .50 Browning, which is the precision version of the heavy machinegun round from WW2. Turns out you can load that for 2 miles. But the target area is 15 feet wide. And that's the realistic error. There's too many breezes and spin and concentricity and flexing errors that can screw up your aim. Everything after it leaves the muzzle is environmental  and metal distortion from the projectile, so the end result is a huge target area. Not people sized. There are some amazing shots at ridiculous 1.5 mile ranges, but there's a lot of luck involved to hit a human sized target. Luck and cubic money in the various components of accuracy. 

If I had kids, old enough, I'd teach them reloading and give them the experience to understand the absolute and infallible limitations of marksmanship, so they'd learn how to spot the BSers, the madmen, the loons and mall ninjas who insist their tiny CQC carbine is not, despite their claims, a 600 yard super-hollywood equalizer with magic beans power. Any time I hear an advertisement that claims their magnets with copper cladding can cure achy joints and venereal disease, I just call that Magic Beans and turn my attention elsewhere. It is the right answer to crazy. 

Functioning Steampunk

The G+ +steampunk_tendencies group is mostly pictures of attractive women in a bodice, a top hat with goggles and gears glued on.


They are often wrapped in buckles and frequently holding some kind of oversized plastic gun with a brass/bronze paintjob. Many of the guns are made out of nerf guns for that classic multibarrel effect. The girls are often wearing skirts too short, so they'e showing a lot of leg.

When the railroad was finished the West rapidly shifted from ragged survivalists to newly arrived Victorians who quickly forced the Eastern standards of dress, buildings, and manners on those who'd actually been here for a while and built the houses and railroad. As you'd expect, the Victorians went over like a lead brick. However, frequent fires and required towns to be rebuilt every few years until they ended up with stone to stop them spreading, and many of the frontier towns were stone walls shared with the place next door so you got rows of shops down the main street as you see in Nevada City, Grass Valley, and Truckee. Sacramento also ended up this way, though it flooded every spring until they filled in the street to cover the first floor and everybody shifted their business to the second. This happened in Oakland too, for the same reason. If Venice had been more sensible and less prosaic they'd have done the same, filling in the canals and raising the streets. New Orleans ought to do this if they want to stay occupied, but its a lazy city, constantly drunk, so that's probably too much like work.

Marlin 1895 Guide Gun Lever Action 45-70 rifle

The upside to all this is there's still lots of Victorian era buildings around in the West, and life is easier. You don't have to pretend with your Victorian stuff. If you want a functioning Victorian era firearm, you can have one with modern materials and actually use it at a gun range. The Winchester 1864 Lever Action Rifle was designed by John Browning (I think) and you can buy one in .357 Magnum, to take advantage of the caliber properly with the barrel longer than any pistol and still be acceptable recoil for some skinny model with a top hat. Or you can do better with a Browning Lever Action in 7mm08, a fixed 4x scope painted in bronze finish. The pinion gear when you work the action is a thing of beauty. It would be ruined by a single piece of large sand, but its truly beautiful. And the rifle is very pointable and will kill deer and elk out to 300 yards.

There's also the falling block Ruger Number One model rifle, in a caliber like .270 Winchester or possibly something lighter like .243 Winchester. In stainless steel with light colored wood stock and silver finished scope its a ladies' weapon if ever one could be.

Ruger No. 1, Falling Block Single Shot Rifles

Another tool of that era was the bicycle. I'm sure you can't ride a bicycle in skirts, but women were trying to get out of the kitchen, to get the vote and have more choices in life. Yes, the first thing they used the vote for was to ban alcohol and create the mafia, so that utterly failed, but they had strong feelings about hooch. They should have thought things through. One of the great charms of bicycles is you can make them look all sorts of ways, though Penny Farthings were a great way to get badly injured and the modern bicycle was originally called a Safety Bicycle because they didn't face-plant very easily.

It was bicyclists that organized and passed laws to pave the streets so they could actually ride at any speed. Cars took advantage of their work, not the other way around. By the post-war period after WW2, leftover parts from the aircraft industry and collected from the invasion, literally a million cushman scooters air dropped for the GIs to advance across Italy left behind, powered the invention of the Vespa Scooter. With modern carbon fiber painted to look like OD green, brass, and bronze could give a proper Victorian lady her ride. Some attempts are being made with this by motorcycle designers, working from existing designs or new ones to try and capture the young woman's market. I wish them luck.

Smartphones are too useful to discard, but they can accept sleeves to dress them up, and software can be tweaked to adjust the colors and looks. These things are possible.

Boating can be made very steampunk, particularly if you stick to oars or small sailboats. Dingy sailing are the boats under about 16 feet long, big enough to carry two people on a date but small enough to fit on a light trailer for a trip to the lake. Perhaps skirts are not the best idea in a boat likely to tip over, but they're less work than rowing, though also less certain. A sailboat can be dressed up from the typical plastic when painted to look like plank strips, or it can be made from plywood and stained, then sealed with epoxy and fiberglass for full strength. A modern thin plywood boat can be built lighter than a modern plastic fiberglass and foam boat, and you can use the mast rig from a different boat if you build it right. Or build your own mast of wood if you want to.

Unfortunately I haven't had much luck finding any books on the MATH of sailboats to be able to design one that doesn't wallow or flip over. Most of the designers don't like people to know their tricks. The Peterson Project Weekender is an interesting little boat, built without a keel or ballast, yet able to carry two in its cabin and still fit on a trailer under 500 pounds. It takes advantage of curved plywood for its strength and still looks antique. Put some brass lamps with LEDs on the outside and paint the interior with cream and browns and give it some magenta or olive cushions, it would be great on the Great Lakes or sailing up the Columbia River.

As for homes, at the time of Victoria we were building these ornate, tall, wooden townhouses mocking castles but all too flammable and difficult to clean. By 1900, we were already shifting to Craftsman design, which was lighter, smaller, and used some new non-victorian materials like stained glass and glass brick. A craftsman house was meant to be built by a young single man with a day job, in his evenings and weekends, during the course of a single summer, with hand tools, by himself. When the house was done, he could get married. A nice idea and it worked at the time. Now we have too much complexity and expertise and need official county inspectors because of lawsuits over building standards getting responsibility shoved onto the county so they have a vested interest that no hovels are built or sold.

Naturally, the transition from steampunk into art deco is rough. Steampunk wasn't aware of streamlining yet, and when that was discovered as the race to develop metal flying aircraft from wood and fabric designs, discarding the airship (blimps and zepplins are popular in steampunk) for the more flash Gordon design that grew into the 1930's Art Deco movement. Eventually WW2 minimalism spelled the end of Baroque style and began simple utilitarianism which continues today. Rejection of utilitarianism and shapeless grunge style returned under the name Steampunk. 

Obviously, we like the aesthetic of craftsmanship rather than the utility of mass produced identity suppressing sameness of modern civilization, which has managed to make the population resent all its advantages and simultaneously disemploying them so they can't afford them in the first place. Ornate and baroque craftsmanship, clothes that fit, tools with art rather than merely utility. These are things people want today. Girl Genius has done a great job providing more views of the ideal, the post-waif woman who is allowed to own a gun to defend herself from ruffians, beasts, and finds machinery and fine china to be necessities of progress. Communism has failed. Post-communist neo-Victorianism has more of a future, even if the commies suffer conniption fits when considering Victoria and Rand. 

Climate Change: What Do Scientists Say?

And here's a calm and less sarcastic version of what I've been trying to say from a professor at MIT on climate change. Bravo.



Climate Change: What Do Scientists Say?: Climate change is an urgent topic of discussion among politicians, journalists and celebrities...but what do scientists say about climate change? Does the data validate those who say humans are causing the earth to catastrophically warm? Richard Lindzen, an MIT atmospheric physicist and one of the world's leading climatologists, summarizes the science behind climate change.

Transgressive Living

Mobility in a broken economy with selfish voters is the right answer. Run away from bad people. Don't bother to change their minds. Just outlive the fools. Millenials mostly want to vote for the Communist from Vermont, while the older commies want Haggery. I despise these people. Rather than help a community that votes for poverty and racism (the communists), grab your stuff and leave town. They can die in place, alone and confused at why nobody loves them.

That said, mobility comes down to living space. While a tent can be folded up into your car its hardly secure storage while you're at work. Thus trailers make sense, provided you don't go insane living in one, and you can afford to live in one year round. Trailers are not perfect. Many are made of less durable materials. Most cost too much. All require a sturdy fuel-inefficient vehicle to tow them, and parking them where you sleep isn't free in many cases.

There are things to be desired to add to a standard RV or trailer currently missing.

1. Lighter weight
2. Solar panels on the roof, batteries to store the power for your use. 
3. LED interior lighting
4. Cleaning of gray water. 
5. Drying and extrusion of black water for easier handling, possibly into sterile pellets or possibly burned
6. Pellet stove for heating in winter months
7. Radiators for supplemental heating, though possibly irrelevant
8. Propane heat absorption from fridge. When you expand propane it absorbs heat. Use this to take the heat out of a fridge and keep it cold. 
9. Wifi and satellite TV antennas
10. Bigger kitchen, larger fridge, with foldable and storable counter workspaces. 
11. Steerable wheels, powered, and with power brakes
12. Low center of gravity
13. Active suspension with variable ride height. Failing that, a suspension that tilts the body into corners
14. Rear view cameras (webcams)
15. External security cameras in all directions. 
16. Sufficient insulation to heat or cool in either weather extreme. 
17. Fan for cooking. 
18. Hot water heater with inputs from several sources (solar panels, solar water heater tubes, immersion heater, scavenger heater from skin and pellet stove. 

But what does all this weigh? If it is light enough, skip the fancy wheels and suspension. And if the insulation is good enough, skip the various heating tricks. Body heat should be able to heat a trailer, which then gets down to cooling. How quiet can the compressor be on an A/C unit mounted on a roof? Replace with the latest when available. 

Then it gets down to maintenance. How often do you need to refill the water, and drain the waste? The dry waste trick would be useful. Distilling the grey water back to clean, or for flushing, would be useful, but probably very energy intensive.

What about hookups is difficult on some site? A sewer hookup and electric drop are typical, even at a rural location. I expect there are people who drill a well, hookup solar panels and a water tank to pump it, and batteries for the excess power if any. That would work anywhere there's ground water. Yes, putting that kind of money into a site is more sensible for multiple users, and that gets you a trailer park, however trailer park residents have a reputation. Mostly a bad one. Being away from those is generally considered a good idea. It is possible for a trailer park with better standards to exist, but I have no idea what they cost to stay in if you're working a 3-5 month long contract. Cheaper than a regular apartment? I don't know. 

I cannot count on better trailer parks to exist in the places likely to have work for me. I cannot count on safe places to park. I can count on people to be bad. That is natural. I cannot count on free travel. I cannot count on civil rights. Those are being destroyed by the Socialists and the Autocrats. Bad people, basically. Driving away from them is sensible. And when their darkness destroys a community, like Detroit collapsed, you hitch up the trailer and leave town. Its only sensible. I will probably not be able to afford a good and comfortable trailer I can live in year round at the outset of my career. More likely I will buy something like the Rpod above and make it work for me. There are many places that want librarians and can't pay them much. Its hard to accept this when investing serious money in the education, but life isn't nice. Life is nasty and brutish and often short, and as long as communists are given power, this is how things will be. What you want is irrelevant, and people who tell you to follow your dreams are just trying to harm you. 

Tall Trees and Crazy

I live in the Sierras. We grow oaks and pines and such here. A neighbor about 100 feet away had a 100 foot tall pine tree in front of his house. Approximately 100. It had been raining hard for a couple days. 8 inches of rain fell. The ground was pretty soft.

I heard a chainsaw. Its Sunday, late morning. Why is there a chainsaw? Look out window. A man, by himself, is chainsawing this 100 foot tall tree. Then he cuts the safety notch. I can see this because it is pointed exactly our way. He is cutting this 100 foot tall tree down and its going to fall on us, 100 feet away, approximately. A maniac with a chainsaw and no crew is cutting down a tree to fall on our house. We call the police.

The police say they don't care about trees. They don't care about chainsaws. They say get off the phone. They say the city only cares about after the disaster. So logically speaking, if you shoot at a city employee and miss, its okay because you didn't hit them. I shall remember that. I now understand why the city cops have a bad reputation with the county. The Deputies actually care about preventing crime. The city just wants to document it.

The tree comes down and slams its top into the driveway of my neighbors house, about 5 feet from my property line, missing their phone box by 8 feet, crinkling the gutter on the front of the garage and bouncing wood off the garage door but not breaking it. My neighbor normally has his truck, full of gasoline, parked in a spot that is now full of two thousand pounds of pine tree that dropped at 100 mph. If it were 5 feet taller it would have hit the natural gas regulator and lit his house on fire in a huge explosion, and the tree was now on top of the shutoff valve and the electrical panel is right next to the gas, providing the spark. It would have burned down our next door neighbors house, and then ours because the gas was only 20 feet from us and the flames get big.

I'm amazed that the tree missed the neighbors house. It ripped branches off his fire maple, and will take expert trimming to save. I haven't seen if the pavement is cracked, or the sidewalk. Missing the house is expertise and luck in equal measure. The tree, 100 feet long, is now across the street. There's ways around it, but the police finally roll up, lights off, the beat cop annoyed that we'd call the cops for a mere madman cutting down trees. Then other crew members appear from nowhere and a work truck shows up. So do all our neighbors.

The owner of the tree across the street eventually comes up the street to explain that the tree had moved two inches due to the wet ground, suggesting it was going to tip over and fall, and that he was very afraid it would fall on his house or one of the neighbors so called in the emergency tree cutting crew. He did not THINK to tell any of us why, not even the man next door. I can see that would make it an emergency. Not telling the neighbors and hiring a lumberjack with a 5 foot long chainsaw, with no safety crew to indicate this was something other can a panicked homeowner about to make things horribly worse and destroy a neighbors house to save his own? D1ck move.

After the tree came down more people showed up and they started to saw off branches 16 inches across and 20 feet long. This was a big tree. They spent the rest of daylight cutting the branches back to the central trunk, then cut that up and brought in a logging truck to pick up the logs and carry them off. I doubt the crew knew or cared that the neighbors weren't told. That wasn't their job. That was the homeowner's job. He didn't call or walk across the street or next door and just watched this crew drop the tree away from his house. He was saved. Screw his neighbors.

This is the downside to dealing with retired people in a place full of heavy metal poisoning and dementia. The crazy is strong here. This is why I want to get a trailer and move elsewhere, frequently. Crazy is funny when you don't have to live with it. When its as simple as paying off your debts and hitching the trailer to the truck and pulling out of there for the next vacation spot and temporary job. I think that Community is reserved for people born there and never left. If you weren't born there, you can't be part of the Community, and community only extends as far as tiny towns (like here) where it is possible to know the same people for decades. If you aren't born there, you aren't one of us. You're just a Them, an exploitable resource. I will always be a Them everywhere I go. Small towns are always desperate and scheming so welcome Them for their money, until the money and goodwill runs out. Sacrificing myself for a community which plans to curb-stomp me when the time is right is incredibly stupid and self destructive.

I really wish people would think a bit more, but they don't. I am constantly disappointed by the actions of my species and my survival strategy is to keep moving. Staying in one place is asking for it.

UPDATE: We paced it off. The tree was 4 feet diameter at the base and 165 feet tall/long. We were 25 feet further. Considering we thought it was 100 feet tall and it was 65% larger (error), we were completely justified to be upset about this maniac dropping it without notice or consideration.