Weather, Blow-guns and Nukes

This has been quite the year for "weather".

We are lucky. All we are getting is wind. Other parts of the state are got hammered with ice and deep snow. The last report I saw estimated 80,000 customers in Michigan are without electricity. Other states have been hit worse.

Spring

After a very warm first half of March, the second half of March is predicted to be "normal".

March daily high-low temperatures. Values on the left are actual and values on the right are predicted.

The first week of April is predicted to be close to normal and the last 20 days to be five-to-ten degrees F below average.

Homeschooling with Grandpa

 

11mm diameter "spit-wad" low and right-of-center.

Today's lesson was improvised weapons with an emphasis on blow-guns.

 

We started with tissue-paper softened with tap-water and will progress to 2" long bits of MIG wire in foam sabots repurposed from hearing-protection. The high school band will definitely put her in the brass section due to her enhanced lung capacity.

 

Wednesday's lesson will be the extraction of phytoalkaloids and insect-derived compounds using low-pH solvents.

Exit strategy

 

A very old bit of advice is to not enter a war in Asia before you have a robust exit strategy.

 

I hope our leaders in D.C. have given that some consideration.

 

In fairness to them, even though Afghanistan was a Goat Festival, especially the withdrawal; nobody has flown any airplanes into US landmarks since September 11, 2001. So maybe that counts as some kind of victory.

 

The leftists are claiming that Iran will eventually get nukes, so what is the point of our military action? Frankly, I would consider delaying their getting that capability by fifty years to be much more desirable than them having enough material to cobble together a Fat Boy in November of 2026. 

Rotting Cuttings and Building "sister" a house

The Hot-box report

The first flight of cuttings from the hot-box on the left. They are willow cuttings and I have a 20 Watt heating pad beneath it. Most of the cuttings are pushing leaves although the Crack Willow are lagging. I can see weeds sprouting which is a minor problem.

The second flight of cuttings are on the right. They came out of the box yesterday a couple hours before I took this photo. The buds are swelling. The bottom ends showed little sign of root development. I added wood-shavings on top of the potting media to provide insulation and to reduce evaporation from the potting media. There is another 20 Watt pad beneath it.

Both of these are covered with clear plastic and are underneath 4000K LED lamps.

The third flight of cuttings are in the box.  I am callousing cv. "Steuben", "GR-7", "V. riparia L50-s". I expect to add a few cuttings of "St Paul" later today. I expect to leave the grape cuttings in the box for two weeks.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to get large quantities of potting soil this time of year and the mix is wetter than I want it to be for grapes. (The misspelling in the title "Rotting Cuttings" was a Freudian slip that I decided to leave) They are not as tolerant of "wet" as willow or elderberries. I will probably lay some rags in the bottom of the box and poke some holes in the bottoms of the bags I placed around the cuttings in. 

Insulating a ceiling

The video where the older brothers insulate the roof of their sister's "house".

She came back to Ukraine after studying the German language in Germany. I get the impression that her arrival was sudden and unexpected.

Her "house" is a lean-to that was slapped together out of OSB and salvaged windows. They use old clothing that look like Goodwill Industry rejects to insulate the 12" between the ceiling and the roof.

This snippet is where the older brother makes her wood-stove. 

It is a case of making do with what is readily available. Adelaide, his sister, seems delighted with the effort.

At the 19:56 mark, if you read the subtitles you will learn about "Oleg", the youngest brother (9 years-old) who is a compulsive builder. He is a kid who can look at a pile of scrap-wood and see a castle...and then nail it all together. He must be the kind of kid who is unable to NOT build.

View inside her house as she finishes up the interior. This video is much faster moving the the one linked above.

Nothing new under the sun

William Shakespeare: Sonnet  IV 

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
And being frank, she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums yet canst not live?
For, having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
 Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
 Which usèd lives th’ executor to be.

 If you spend much time on Youtube (Alas, raising hand. Guilty as charged) you might run across videos of women taking men to task for not "wife-ing up" the "virtual goddesses" that inhabit our cities.

In fact, those same women are outraged that men are hardly paying any attention to those "virtual goddesses".

Their choice of words tells more than they know.

It seems as if many of these Instagram influencers have turned themselves into graven images that they themselves worship. "For, having traffic with thyself alone, thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive." Men sense that. They quickly figure out that they are a disposable accessory, like a handbag or a set of false eyelashes to the "virtual goddess".

Those graven images aren't getting too many takers. 

Tab Clearing

Satire

My apologies to Phil B and others who commented on the Fake News Friday post. It was intended to be satire. Phil B does make a good point, though. In some jurisdictions prosecutors will use any detail to make their case; examples include the color of your gun, bumper stickers on your vehicle and your posts on social media. In other, saner jurisdictions (Polk County, Florida comes to mind), the prosecutor is more likely to stick with the demonstrable evidence immediately before and during the event.

Hate Crime in West Bloomfield, Michigan

It was reported that a truck "filled with explosives" rammed into a synagogue in West Bloomfield Township. The armed driver later died of a self-inflicted wound. Fortunately for his intended targets, the perp was unable to exit the vehicle due to the doors being wedged shut during the crash-entry.

The truck caught fire at some point which totally sucked for the driver...trapped in the cab with containers of liquid gasoline and explosives.

Kudos to the security team for keeping the perp too busy to figure out how to exit his vehicle through the side windows and continue his attack.

Kudos to the investigation team who traced back the purchase records on the explosives. 

A fragment of data on mutation rate of ancient, written texts

A reader who identified himself as Recent Lurker asked about drift in written text over time in the post about "Turn the other cheek".

This is one of those cases where looking at a work that is not the Bible is useful because it blanks-out the emotional energy in the question.

There has been peer-reviewed research on that very question on the works of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Like the Bible, it first propagated via oral tradition, then a combination of oral tradition supplemented by hand-transcribed written text and finally almost solely by written text.

The papyri reveal a transmissional watershed in the 2nd century B.C., a sort of textual standardization, delimiting the contours of the text inasmuch as it stabilized the number and sequence of verses and quite drastically cut down current variants. Just what kind of intervention this reflects is unclear. Thereafter the text continued to move in a constant state of flux, but a less volatile one; variants were multitudinous but minor, accretion was virtually confined to simple one-line additions, losses were strictly local and ephemeral. 

The text was much copied (the Iliad always more than the Odyssey) collation was fairly wide-spread (protecting against loss and disseminating accrual), and we have substantial pieces of manuscripts from every century down to the 7th: much activity, little change. Passage through the bottle-neck to the 9th and 10th centuries seems to have entailed overall relatively little loss of what had been current in the Roman period; the medieval tradition is a direct continuation of the ancient, inevitably attenuated but in its totality showing unusually good catchment of ancient readings (better for the Iliad than for the Odyssey),promiscuously distributed.

Before we proceed further with its shifting constitution, a few words are in order on the changing nature of its physical form. Modem readers, and even post-modern ones, read texts which present them with a succession of words and of sentences. Readers in the 3rd century B.C. faced merely a succession of letters, uninterrupted except by verse-termini   Source

For Leigh and her masonry stove

Source

I realize that people who post videos on Youtube "spin" the story to make it more entertaining or more "sticky".

However, this young lady in Ukraine appears to be very grateful for the "house" that her brothers built for her on the family compound and the wood-stove that one of them fabricated out of sheet metal and the masonry "mass" another one built to calm down the temperature swings.

In this video, the young lady is painting, free-hand, a design she saw on her phone (Pinterest?).  She is clearly looking at her phone for reference at the 2:35 mark. Nothing wrong with that.

If I had to guess, I would estimate that it has a footprint of about 12' wide by less than 15' long. 

Dire Straights (of Hormuz)

Overheard

I was at the Lenten Friday Fish  Fry yesterday and I overheard a woman insisting that Europe was going to weather the Straights of Hormuz situation better than the US because "They have so many more electric cars and have wisely invested in so much renewable energy." 

I clammed up. I was doubtful but until I see data my opinion is worth no more than anybody else's opinion.

A quick look around the world suggests that in decreasing order of impact the list of countries that will be injured by the stoppage of oil from the Persian Gulf are

1. Japan and Korea (about 70% of their oil is shipped through the Straights of Hormuz) 
2. India (between 50% and 90% of their oil imported from the Persian Gulf states). More critically, large numbers of Indians use bottled gas for cooking since electrification is sketchy in many areas.
3. China (40%-to-50% from the Persian Gulf) which is about 7% of their national energy use. Coal is going to save their bacon.
4. European Union (12%, less than I expected)
5. US (7%) 

Who benefits?

1. Russia
2. Kazakhstan  
3. Nigeria 
4. Norway
5. United Kingdom
6. Brazil 
7. United States
8. Egypt (fees associated with SUMED pipeline and increased Suez Canal shipping) 

Regarding the number of electric vehicles:

The EU has one electric vehicle for every 44 people while the US has approximately one electric vehicle for every 85. In neither case is that enough to sideline all of the IC vehicles and run the economy.

Kicking the can down the road

There is never an elegant time to stop kicking the can down the road. However, there are times when a confluence of events create an instant in time when it is less-worse to address a difficult issue than others.

Frankly, we have many issues we have been kicking-the-can on: Social Security, Demographic collapse, Erosion of educational standards, Ballooning screen-time and the attendant decline in physical health, Immigration, Election Integrity. Some are being addressed. Others are still in free-fall.

Fake News Friday

Discount shooting supplies outlet, MiddlewayUSA announced that they contracted with Starliner Brass for a run of custom-headstamped 9mm Luger brass.

The vanity headstamp, FAFO, sold out within the first 48 hours. Apparently, it has been very popular with various Law Enforcement Agencies (Fine Action lead to Fine Outcomes).

Please send MiddlewayUSA an email to get on their waiting list for the next run. The more orders they have, the sooner they will make the second run.

Home-schooling with Grandpa: Day 147

 

Practice with caps and det-cord. Her blouse reads "Made of Sparkle" which seems particularly appropriate.

Grandma thinks we will be making bird-nests with Play-Doh next week. Little does she know that it is actually a class in the fundamentals of shaped-charges with additional classes on the use of mass-tamping to enhance yield.