The Cremation of Sam McGee

It has been that kind of winter.  Yup, I am ready for spring.

I think every kid who went through high school in the late 1960s and the 1970s studied this poem.

Pressure ridge on Lake Huron.  Picture from HERE

Snow cave on Lake Michigan. Picture from HERE

This year The Cremation of Sam McGee really speaks to me.

Three Metrics

Referring back to the post about Hizzoner's and the NYCHA: I am pondering what three metrics are most appropriate for the ERJ household economy.

Credit Card Balances

The one no-brainer is to drive credit card balances down to zero.  That is our normal state but the recent changes to our medical insurance are pounding us.

I recently read that more than half of US households have subprime credit.  One of our medical providers advised us to not pay the balance...nobody does.  It is part of their business model.

Part of the ERJ household economy model is to protect our integrity.  That means paying our bills or doing without.  It is a very quaint concept in certain quarters.

That means we are currently carrying a credit card balance....for now.  But we will beat that back down.

Eliminate Production Bottlenecks

Ten acres of farmland in the United States corn belt, albeit the northern fringe, has enormous production potential.  We ripened 10,000 pounds of fruit on our property in 2013.  And we harvested almost none of it.

One of the bottlenecks we ran into was being able to physically get to the fruit.  Eliminating that bottleneck entails opening up our orchards to get to the trees, and thinning out the trees so we can maneuver around to get to the fruit.  It also means getting appropriate baskets and bags and to have a way to cool them after picking.  Finally, it may mean having a phone tree to alert potential pickers that they will have a gleaning opportunity.

The third metric

This one is still up in the air.  I am leaning toward an alternative/backup energy project.  We are vulnerable to power interruptions.  The sump pump does not work without electricity.  Items stored in the basement are damaged when they get soaked.

The plug-and-play move would be to get an inverter with enough cajones to run our current sump pump.

A competing project would be to excavate a "daylight drain" to eliminate the need for power to drain the sump.

Picture from otherpower.com

Another project that is bumping around in my head is to create 100 Watts of generation capacity.  100 Watts does not sound like much but it will charge rechargeable batteries, cell phones, lap tops and wireless router. These are "command-and-control" functions.  It can also run a couple of compact fluorescent lights.  100 Watts will not run the refrigerator and freezers, the furnace and water pump, not even with aggressive load management.

I am leaning toward one or more wind turbines.  The events that typically cause grid-down (storms) are usually cloudy (bad for solar), and windy (good for wind power, in moderation).  Also, the wind blows well into the night.  Another factor tipping me toward wind power are my capital constraints.  I can buy 3, 10 foot 2-by-8s and whittle them into blade pretty inexpensively.  Solar panels....they are a lot more money out of pocket.  And yes, I know there are a bunch of extra pieces-parts between the primary collector and the wall plug.

One of my advantages is that I have an awesome brother-in-law who flies sail planes (gliders).  One of his projects involved re-profiling his glider's wings. I think he enjoys having somebody to talk aeronautical gack with.  He is schooling me on the relative advantages of Clark-Y and USA-35b airfoil profiles.

Picture from HERE

A final, capital intensive project is to set up half the upstairs for wood heat.  That entails stripping the paper-products faux-planking off the ceiling and replacing with plasterboard, relining the chimney, dropping the hearth to floor level, drilling a hole and thimbling the brick facing inside the house.  Oh, and buying a wood stove that meets Mrs ERJ's requirements for aesthetics.

Getting stuck in Driveways

Belladonna is demonstrating a singular talent for getting stuck in driveways.

A few days ago she got stuck in ours when she attempted to enter it from the west.  This evening she got stuck over at a friend's house.  We would not have known but she missed curfew and she had the foresight to text Mrs ERJ once she knew she was likely to be late.

Belladonna is a coachable kid. I think the idea of "preparedness" is snapping into focus for her.

The theme of this week has been "Wisdom".

We had a discussion between "intelligence" and "wisdom".  Intelligence is information that is bounded in time.  That is, the meat-and-potatoes of "intelligence" is perishable information. It is knowing which restaurant sells the best Philly Cheese Steak. 

Wisdom is information that is not perishable.  Whether it is packing a second pair of muklucks in the kayak or a pair of winter boots in the minivan is not the key point.  The key point is to have a backup plan that involves functional items.

The three readings at Mass yesterday also revolved around preparedness.  The Gospel reading was the segment of the Sermon on the Mount starting at Matt 5:17.  There are about four vignettes that have striking parallels.  Authors use parallelisms when they are trying to emphasize some over-arching metamessage.  The metamessage in Matt 5 is that we are responsible for the possible/logical/foreseeable consequences (of our actions) that might occur. 

Getting into a shouting match with your brother might result in things getting out of hand, fisticuffs and possible death of your brother.  Entertain "coveting" thoughts about a woman and you have already decided that adultery is "OK".  Divorce your wife and she may have to turn to prostitution to live.

Preparedness and Wisdom are siblings.  They share the same foundation, that we are responsible for possible/logical/foreseeable consequences that might happen.

 Preparedness

I have to commend Belladonna for having the foresight to get stuck in driveways where there are knights in shining armor.  Not that she needs one.

Boots

Boots get special mention in today's post.  Boots are where the rubber hits the road (or snow or mud or rocks).

Mrs ERJ's Uncle Bob died back in December.  He was 89, knew it was coming.  As a good, Christian man he was ready when the time came.  It was not a bad way to go.

His remains were cremated and he will be interred in a cemetery in Mobile, Alabama on March 3.  Mrs ERJ will be attending while I keep the home fires burning.

Mrs ERJ had a conversation with the Cemetery Director today.  The grounds are a soupy mess.  He highly advised that participants wear boots rather than high heels.

The fashion question of the day is, "Should Mrs ERJ wear her Swampers, Red Wellies or Uggs?"

House Flies

At one time, back in the late 1970s, the study of houseflies was big business in academia.  The reasoning was that the state-of-the-art computers that could fit in the head of a missile had computing power that was comparable to the brain of a housefly.  Houseflies are masters of finding food and evading flyswatters.   Why not reverse engineer a fly's cognitive processes and program those algorithms into the missile's controller?

Picnics

Have you ever been in the gazebo in the middle of a summer afternoon, stupified by the heat and food?  Your glazed eyes look upward at the buzzing and you observe flies circling overhead. 

But they are not quite circling.  They look like they are flying in a straight line for 10-to-15 inches and then  make a sharp turn of about 90 degrees, flies another 10-to-15 inches...and endlessly repeats.

A fly's eyes are too close for "binocular vision".  The fly is able to mimic a very large pupillary distance by flying short, jagged flight segments.  This is similar to Synthetic Aperture Radar.  The fly is using both sight and smell to calculate direction and distance to the most promising food sources.

The military investigated programming newly launched missiles to cork-screw upon launch.  Accelerometers provided data that was integrated to calculate the missile's velocity and position.  That information was combined with the information from the DVT camera in the nose of the missile and used to calculate the targets velocity and distance.  Just like the fly.

Hazard avoidance

Flies are the fair devil to swat.  There is a secret to killing them. Clap your hands together. While incredibly efficient when the threat is coming from only one direction, the fly algorithm thrashes and locks up when faced with near-equal threats from more than one direction.

The rebar pushpost was from an earlier, failed attempt to keep the dogs in.

Mrs ERJ and I went for a walk the other day.  She noticed that Hercules, our German Shepherd is taking advantage of the deep snow.  That fence is not what is keeping him in the kennel.

Mrs ERJ started figuring out what it would take to keep him in.  I suggested that it might be a good thing if Herc can get out when sufficiently motivated.  It would give the bad guys a second thing to think about.

Proof of Global Warming

President Obama is expected to sign an executive order requiring that televised and internet weather reports give ALL temperatures using the Rankine scale.  Highs of 472 R are expected in Eaton Rapids tomorrow.

In other news....

The piles of snow left by global warming and the snow plows make an excellent backstop for shooting the $99 Mouser.  I have been shooting milk jugs laid on their sides.  The brightly colored caps make fine, high definition targets.

I was a bummed to find I am hitting 3/4" above point-of-aim at 25 yards.  My expectation was that I would be hitting on the money with a second zero of 200 yards.

The $99 (a month) Mouser wears a Lyman globe front sight.  The line of sight is about 3/4" above the bore.  Making use of Hornady's fine ballistic calculator shows 0.8" high at 25 yards can be expected to hit 2.5" high at 100 yards with a second zero at 170 yards. 

The rule-of-thumb about being "on" at 25 yards is great advice for rifles with scopes.  They typically have a line-of-sight 1.5 inches above the bore.  It is a great starting point.  As always, Your Mileage Will Vary and it pays to check how your weapon performs with your ammo when shot by you.  It pays to repeatedly check.

Out of Touch

There is a survey going around Facebook "What State are you From".

It has you answer a battery of questions regarding TV shows you watch, movies you identify with, music stars and sports teams that you admire.

The quiz might as well have been written in Kiswahili.

I monitor Fox, CNN and Google news and see headlines about the latest celebrity who "came out".  Their names mean nothing to me.

I read about a loud-mouthed drunk whose career has been on the ropes for the last 10 years marrying for the fourth time.  He is marrying a porn star.  That makes sense to me, after all the abuse he has heaped on his body it is likely that he will need more than butterfly kisses before he feels anything.  But why is this guy news?  If his brain cells were were chihuahuas he would be more reviled than Michael Vick.

 Attention is oxygen to celebrities.  I don't have any to spare.  Celebrities are "celebrities" because they are needy, not because of any innate talent.  There are a hundred more talented people for every celebrity, but those hundred people are not willing to make a deal with the devil.

A case in point:  The woman with the most beautiful singing voice I have ever heard is Marcella Jones.  Who is she?  She is a beautiful, church-going, young lady who lives in Detroit.  She has her head screwed on straight.  It is highly unlikely that she will ever be "a celebrity".

Maybe it is cabin fever

It is snowing again.

I live inside my head much of the time.  I ponder the merits of marketing Lucky Charms with Adderall, Fruit Loops with Ritalin, Poptarts with Caffeine.

Time to go to church.  I will pray for the celebrities.  That is the only attention they will get from me today.  I will pray for them because they are needy humans with bruised souls, not because somebody told me "they are important".

Fun with PLCs

One of my secret desires is get good at programming PLCs (Programable Logic Controllers).  I know that I could have a huge amount of fun.  PLCs are the way to integrate all that cool computer stuff with the nuts-and-bolts of the mechanical world.

The first project in my bucket list is to mock up a ZPU-4, outfit it with servos on axis one and two and teach it to track the "hot spot" from a NIR video aligned down the axis of the barrels.

I think this would look mighty spiffy mounted on the peak of my garage roof, pointing down the length of my driveway, tracking the vehicles of the young men coming to date my daughter....and have it continue to track them as they zoomed down the road heading away from my house.

It would also be a swell after-market sales item for pickup trucks.  Notice how the recoil rocks the full sized Chevy at 51 seconds.  The 14.5mm Soviet round has twice the muzzle energy of Ma Deuce's (.50 BMG) round and this dude can fire forty rounds a second.  This is the weapon that gave Huey pilots in Vietnam the most nightmares.  Look at the muzzle flash that becomes visible in low light...good examples between 2:20 and 2:30 in the video.  It would give me nightmares as well.

Heck, I might even offer an option that incorporates four Ruger 10/22s triggered with cordless drills turning a bicycle crank.  I believe that there are many fathers who have beautiful daughters that would be interested in one of these toys.

I would have a glorious amount of fun learning to program PLCs.