Month: July 2022

July 15, 2022 – Atlas Shrugged 1:2

July 15, 2022 /

I just finished reading the second chapter in Atlas Shrugged. This one features and industrialist and his conflict between the pull of his work and the obligation of the family.

Rand does a pretty good job of linking the chapter name to the theme of the chapter I have noticed. For that reason, I have started to include them in the tag names for future reference. This chapter is titled “The Chain” – the industrialist holding his family (and the world for that matter) in bondage. It is the industrialist’s wife that actually uses this symbolism in the last paragraph of the chapter.

For a little more context, this industrialist named Reardon has spent the last ten years of his career trying to invent/perfect a new alloy called Reardon Metal. As most successful people are, he is completely immersed in his work which makes him aloof to his family and friends. This day is the day where Reardon is working on fulfilling his first ever order. So he is happy, maybe even vindicated that this was worth the effort.

I can recognize the struggle to a bit. When you are so immersed in a problem and the solution that everything else is secondary. Even when you do experience success, the problem is too complicated or has gone on so long you have alienated or isolated others to the point that the victory is hollow. Is there anything to be happy about if it is not shared or have others to celebrate with?

I suppose the industrialist wife feels like this day is nothing to celebrate because it will just be a new problem or project. So, in some ways success is actually bondage because a business failure would ultimately end the problem, not perpetuate the situation.

End Your Programming Routine: This is something that I actually suffer from. It is part of my anti-social, entrepreneurial, moral character. I saw some Tik-Tok videos for the first time the other night. What a collection of mindless nonsense. I had to control my reaction to something that I thought was vain, petty and narcissistic because it makes my wife mad when I comment. Yet here I am trying to do something similar in my own way.

July 14, 2022 – ‘Tacticool’ Thursday

July 14, 2022 /

More math today, hurray! I hope that I am bringing this in an approachable fashion because I find it interesting. It’s one of the ways to sort of geek out in the area without spending a whole bunch of money. Math is essentially free after the experiment is done.

Today I want to talk about Standard Deviation (often represented by SD). You can get super in the weeds with the extra places you can take the math, but that we will not do. So what is it? Standard deviation is statistical modelling to predict the probability of values following within a calculated range. Or said another way, what can I expect my velocities to be based on the measurements that I have taken.

Let’s not get scared but there are a couple mathematical terms to discuss. The first is that this simple calculation is going to only look between the the first two divisions (called the Greek letter sigma). One sigma (or deviation) are values representing 68% of all the measurements (or the majority).

We will assume that the data is normal and distributed like the graph. In that case, we can just multiply the standard deviation we calculate by 2 to get 95%. Same with getting 3 sigma. The mathematical description of sigma is variance. The variance is the average distance between the calculated mean value. This is why we can simply multiply the variance by a factor.

One reason to do this is that you can create expected behavior. Another one is that you can validate that your equipment is working properly (using the higher level math). I will leave it at that since I feel like if you are not convinced already, me keeping on probably won’t help. Using my data from last Thursday, let’s get into the calculation.

To really get to what I am saying here is that 68% of the time, the velocity is going to fall between 945.7 and 965.9 feet per second. That translates to the mean minus the standard deviation (955.8 – 10.1 = 945.7) and the mean plus the standard deviation (955.8 + 10.1 = 965.9). And finally, 99.7% of the pellets will be 925.5 – 986.1 fps.

Of course, like the supreme court this is a very myopic look at things. This is a 7.56 grain pellet, velocity measured at the muzzle with no wind, 65 degree ambient temperature and 50% relative humidity. I am going to look at some of the other variables as time moves on.

End Your Programming Routine: Hopefully, that made some sense. You can also use excel to do this without understanding the formula if you can figure out how to make formulas work. My points today are 1) this is possible to do relatively simply 2) my rifle is pretty consistent 3) and now I have some data to compare other experiments against. Next week, I am going to look at velocity at the target.

July 13, 2022 – Screw Sickness, Let’s Get to Work

July 13, 2022 /

At some point, I am going to write an article about dealing with siding penetrations and other unforeseen problems. To be effective, I would like to have pictures (or video) to go along with it. Since I do not have that yet, it definitely doesn’t make sense to do today.

In lieu of actual content, I will fill space with worthless words (just kidding). I am on the mend, no fever the last couple of days and energy feels good. I still have junk in the throat but the show must go on. Monday, I got back to work and in two hours I had all of the siding off. Yesterday’s goal was to cut the compromised drywall and remove portions of the panels.

I cut the bottom four feet off the offending panels. That should allow me to slap up new ones with the minimum of cuts. After that, I am going to add a Water Resistant Barrier (WRB in the lingo) which will actually be tar paper because that is what I have.

The key to fixing this failure is the details. Normally, T1-11 would not necessarily need a WRB between the panel and the sheetrock. But, because the HardiPlank was applied over the T1-11, water went between the two and stayed wet for an extended time which in turn rotted the T1-11 behind the lap siding. Proper products and flashing will resolve this permanently.

Before I do this, I have a couple of reservations. The first is I am not completely convinced that fire protection (the purpose of the drywall) is necessary. When nailing the HardiPlank back on, the only way to secure it is nailing through the studs. I have inspected the corner construction and there is no structure to nail the edges of the siding. This has me thinking that I should change the backing from drywall to sheathing.

Looking at the cost between OSB and drywall, they are nearly the same. And, HardiPlank is also fireproof. It will be the structure for nailing the lap that will help me decided how to proceed.

End Your Programming Routine: When this garage was built, I think it was done properly. I am pretty sure the lap siding was added later which is why the details were wrong. Or, at least that is what I want to tell myself. I guess we will all see as I go along, stay tuned for the proper way of doing things.

July 12, 2022 – Love of Game and Community

July 12, 2022 /

My son is a chess player. He started in grade school and plays outside of school now that he is in high school. He came up with this idea that he wanted to create a summertime chess get together colloquially called “Chess in the Park”. As the parents (and the responsible ones) we had a lot of debate about when, where, how long, what is your vision etc.

As driven as he is, some of those more etherical questions are probably a little more advanced then had been thought through. Still, we went for it. He did the talking (marketing) the asking to hang fliers (selling) the coordination with local supporters (management) and we had the first of six Saturdays last week.

Among the work that has been done was getting the city to sponsor (with a parks and rec grant), the middle school chess advisor is a sponsor, the library kicked in boards and timers. Local chess leagues from as far away as an hour promoted it on their social media sites. The city also did work to get the notice out to other groups within the town like Rotary and advertising on the website.

Since this occurred in the middle of my Covid, I was almost exclusively on the sidelines trying to stay away from people. I was there because I needed to be, not necessarily because I wanted to. Next week, I will help facilitate more and stand in play so that we don’t have people waiting for a game to end.

I think from a peak in the two hour session, we had twenty-two players. One guy said that he was taking the next six weeks off to do this. Not bad for a town that has a hard time getting participation in anything.

End Your Programming Routine: Chess is not really my thing. I respect the game and I know that there is some skill to it given that my son beats me every time. However, this has the makings of being something special. I could definitely see this becoming an Eagle Scout project if it gets to that point. And as much negative as I have to say about government, the city really did a lot to get the word out.

July 11, 2022 – The Voice of Covid

July 11, 2022 /

I am keeping it short today both in the writing and the podcast. You can hear in my voice that I am severely congested and feeling the effects of having Covid. You can hear all about it in my podcast.

End Your Programming Routine: The show must go on. Probably when I get a bigger library of content that I will probably skip podcasting when I get like this. But, this is about discipline!

July 8, 2022 – Atlas Shrugged 1:1

July 8, 2022 /

I said on Monday, this is going to be a big one. This book has the tiniest font I have ever seen in a novel and it is over 1000 pages long. At this point, I have no real expectations. I am reading it for two reasons 1) is a suggested compliment when you look up 1984 on Amazon and 2) it was suggested by a co-worker back in 2004.

Part of what has shied me away has been the length of the book. I didn’t want to check it out at the library because I know I would need months. I didn’t want to add to the volumes of books that I won’t ever read again either. I have a hard time keeping interest that long. But, now I have a cause. I am hoping that is the motivating factor.

Against better judgement, I read the introduction. I must say that I had a hard time concentrating on the subject matter. But, the one thing that I got out of it was Rand’s methods. She would think about situations and scenarios, then write a story (or chapter) about it. For that reason, she was anointed the title of philosopher.

Like the other books that I have reviewed, I am going to focus on the concepts of the chapters and not the plot or the characters. I guess we will see in the end if all the pieces and parts add up to the tome that it is supposed to be.

There are some characters introduced. It is hard to know who is going to important and who is not at this point. So, I will skip the names, roles and descriptions at this point. There were two things that stuck out at this chapter. One was simple and the other more inciteful. Let us start with the simple.

“Who is John Galt?” Random characters keep uttering this phrase throughout the chapter. From what I know, this is foreshadowing to the hero character later in the book. We are going to have to wait to see what this is all about. But, using the phrase seems like an analog to ‘What is going to happen?’ or “Does this make any sense?’ It does seem like the world of the book has some things that don’t really add up. This leads us to concept two.

There are a couple exchanges in the book where people are doing things that they don’t really understand why they are doing them. There is a scene where train that stops. Characters get off the train to understand the purpose of the stoppage and the people that run the train are just staring at the stop signal. The net of communication was that they didn’t know why they were instructed to stop, how long the stoppage would be and how to proceed.

The short of it was people were doing as they were trained. It took leadership to get the train going again. If this is a persistent theme, then I am going to be really into this book.

End Your Programming Routine: This might be a mistake to analyze this book as we go, but I guess we will see. I envision doing a chapter a week unless for some reason I get way ahead or it makes sense to combine chapters. It does look like they average around 30 pages a week, so that seems pretty reasonable

July 7, 2022 – ‘Tacticool’ Thursday

July 7, 2022 /

During the holiday weekend, I finally got some time to mess around with my chronograph. My initial test was not very favorable. I wasn’t able to get any readings the first time I messed with it (before vacation). But, I spent some time last Saturday to try and figure out what was wrong.

Today, I am going to talk about math again. I know, I know it is less fun than watching paint dry. I want to talk about looking at the dataset, calculating average with standard deviation and energy as a result of my velocity measurements. Should be fun.

A quick aside about math. We use math to describe physical behavior. I am not just solving problems for problem sake, like sudoku. I am looking at the data so that I can compare certain behaviors like 1) how consistent is the rifle 2) is a lighter faster pellet better than a heavier and slower pellet (when I look at the energy)? 3) Does pellet shape make a difference with the same weight?

Maybe it is the cold medicine talking but I came up with this idea this morning. Art and math are very similar. Both are attempting to describe life in different ways. One is by representation and the other is by description. One is subjective by interpretation and the other is deterministic, using concrete laws and methods. What I am trying to say is that you don’t have to know how to do math (like art) to appreciate what it does for us. Unlike art, I can show you how I got to my final numbers.

I went about this in a pseudo scientific way. I shot a bunch of times and recorded the data that I liked the best. In all seriousness, I need to spend more time with this device to understand what a good reading looks like. However, I had a lot of readings that were similar and some that were way off the reservation. I threw out those measurements as outliers. In science, those would have qualified reasons to be excluded. There are mathematical ways of proving those outliers, but that is super advanced math. That being said, I am just going to ignore them as bad measurements.

Here is the dataset I ended up with (feet per second or fps). I think you can see why excluded the results in the images above.

  1. 942
  2. 946
  3. 966
  4. 959
  5. 953
  6. 952
  7. 973
  8. 947
  9. 951
  10. 966

The first thing that we need to calculate is the mean. Another word for that is average.

What I have calculated is the average pellet velocity is 955.8 fps. We will need that number to calculate the standard deviation. It looks reasonable so far but I think that I will save that calculation for next week. Before I end, I will plug the average velocity into the energy calculation because that is the number I am looking for to compare everything in the future.

End Your Programming Routine: If I assume that the outlier measurements were problems measuring and not exactly irregularities firing the rifle, I am pretty impressed with the consistency of the velocities. I did ignore values that did not change after firing. Again, I don’t know if the velocities were the same, but I assume that the pellet did not measure. Give me some time with this device and I can have more confidence in the actual results.

July 6, 2022 – My Project Begins In Earnest

July 6, 2022 /

I spent a couple hours on Sunday doing some demo. I was dragging my feet a bit because I was waiting for driveway work to be done. The reason being is that I have stuff in my trailer that I just want to move out of the way and I didn’t want to pile garbage on top of it. Nevertheless, I cannot wait any longer to start. I am going to have to work around the other things and focus on what I can control. That is my project.

I got the lap siding off. Most of it came off in one piece so I am thinking that I can re-use it and save myself some money. The T1-11 siding that was under the lap siding was nearly completely rotten. I also found what I suspected, there is 5/8″ drywall as sheeting. I have some pictures below.

What is that all about? It is definitely not structural. Based on what I was reading, it seems that sometimes drywall is used on the exterior when the setback (distance) between two buildings is too close. In case of fire, it is less likely to spread between the two buildings because of the hour burn drywall.

I think I am going to have to cut the bottom 4 feet off. It has been wet too long and no longer has any integrity to it. Due to the fact that I am changing the construction on the siding, I need to make sure that it doesn’t get wet again. So, I am mulling about how to protect the new drywall and whether building paper will be enough or do I need to go to a rain screen.

Yesterday and today there is rain so that is crimping my plans. This was the weather that was suppose to be here on the 4th, so I guess I can be thankful for that. It does look like summer is coming after this short rain spell. It is dry and temps in the 80’s and 90’s. To top it off, my wife has Covid and I am starting to feel like I have caught some of it too. I hope this doesn’t derail my week.

End Your Programming Routine: I am not saying that I am going to drag this out. But, I might have built up how much work it will be in my head. I still have a couple of sheets T1-11 to remove but I got what I needed to see which was the extent of the damage. I am confident that a couple good weeks of deliberate focus will get this project done.

July 5, 2022 – My Antenna Fetish Continues

July 5, 2022 /

In my quest to get better AM reception, I ran across this very affordable antenna setup. First, I am going to beta test this versus the traditional loop antenna (the one that came with the receiver). If all goes well, I will permanently mount this outside. If this setup doesn’t work, I have one more play, there is another antenna available from CCrane that I might try.

I actually didn’t really realize this, but the AM band is the same frequency of some shortwave bands. Signals on the AM band range from 530 – 1710 kHz. This antenna is rated for 0.5 – 30 mHz (or 500 – 30,000 kHz) so it should work beautifully. This antenna is specifically intended for shortwave reception, conveniently AM radio is in the appropriate range.

My first test was to simply assemble the antenna and connect it. I did a quick scan through the spectrum and picked up 20 or so channels. That was a positive sign.

Now that I knew it was going to work, I started researching cable extensions. This particular antenna is built with a 10m (33ish feet) of cable. I haven’t measured anything, but I am probably going to need 100 feet or more. In this case, my preference would be to build my own cable but I need the proper tools to do that. The connection is called an RJ-476 which looks like a miniature TV cable end.

Another problem that I had to solve for is my radio has two wire connector input, not an RJ-476. As you might know, with a cable there is a conductor and a ground. The conductor is the center wire but the ground comes off the shielding. Typically, the ground connection is made when you screw the connector in place. Now we are talking about solder and other things. Fortunately I found a cable that splits for appropriate use. The lesson is know how your are going to connect to your radio.

It’s going to be awhile before my priorities are going to align and I actually mount this antenna on the roof. I would hope to get it done before the end of summer. Regardless, I built a frame for the antenna because the loop is so floppy. Since AM signals are directional, the frame allows for a much easier ‘tuning’ of the antenna since it is so floppy.

My hope is that I get the antenna out of the basement and up on the roof I won’t have as much as a need for directional tuning. If that turns out to not be the case, then I have a couple stations in mind that I have not been able to get with any current antenna setup and I will be happy.

End Your Programming Routine: It must be that nobody listens to AM radio through their stereo tuner. I am speculating that the majority of AM listening must be in the car. I am rather surprised by the lack of antenna choices (or information) anywhere. Maybe there is a business opportunity here? I will be happy to eventually tune into the local university sports though.

July 4, 2022 – Episode 5; Happy Birthday America, Featuring the American Idiot

July 4, 2022 /

I feel like going off a little like I did on Memorial Day. It has more to do with people’s ridiculous reaction to recent Supreme Court verdicts. People are so up in arms about things that they really have no idea about what they are talking about.

Normally, I would take today as a holiday. However, I do have some things to say on this subject. In addition to that, I am making a move to switch podcasts to Monday rather than Friday so that Friday’s can be focused more on book analysis. I am getting ready to start a series on Atlas Shrugged. This book is tremendously long. Remember, this forum is about changing your programming.

End Your Programming Routine: I am completely fine if you don’t agree with me. I feel that it is my responsibility to do what I can to create a world that has the potential to be great. In my opinion, freedom and choice are the number one way to do that. Despite what all of the celebrities say, all three of these rulings create both.