This podcast was generated by a question asked to me. When you look at the definition in the dictionary, the result is circular. What is the appropriate response?
Page 52 of 138
November 10, 2023 – Anthem, Part 4-6
This was three quick chapters and in many ways not much has gone on. How could it, there are not many pages? If we try hard enough, then we can probably sift something out of this. That is what I am going to try and do.
I am not going to try and make something that it is not. Part 4 is and interaction between Equality 7-2521 and Liberty 5-3000. She is now calling him the ‘Unconquerable’. Part 5 has him discovering how a lightbulb works and keeping a secret and Part 6 is about Equality 7-2521 getting punished for staying in his secret lair too long. Unwilling to divulge the reason, he is beat severely. This causes him to have a plan and reveal the lightbulb at the Counsel of the Scholars who will meet shortly.
Suspending disbelief for a minute, how is it that this society has no modern utilities and yet somehow there is live power available for Equality 7-2521 to power a light bulb? When I was first reading the book, I thought that maybe he found a flashlight or something. To my knowledge, power needs continuous generation capability as well as infrastructure to deliver. Maybe some hydro-electric dam is generating power being used by the elites somewhere. At this point, we just don’t know.
So it is dystopian science fiction… alright then the bigger concept in these chapters is the ignorant messiah. Equality 7-2521 really believes that he is going to change the world by showing the Scholars what he has rediscovered. I think that we can see the foreshadowing of trouble ahead.
This reminds me of the famous historical figure Galileo Galilei. Today, he is a big name in science, particularly Astronomy, Physics and Math. We are probably all aware of his fate. Galileo promoted the idea of heliocentrism or better known as the planets revolve around the sun. This of course was labelled as anti-biblical and his ultimate fate was imprisonment until death.
I want to point out that many of these ideas were theories based on empirical observation. You see this is how science works. Perform an observation and then design an experiment to see if you can prove that your hypothesis is true or not. Galileo and other peers such as Brahe who worked to perform the mathematic supporting the observation. That was not quite good enough to keep him in the good graces of the church.
If you are going to play politics, then what side you are on is really more important than the truth. Galileo had a habit of backing the opposite side of who was in power. That really didn’t work out too well for him. Truth is not quite powerful enough when going against the state. The Catholic church has now changed it’s tune on on Galilei but who wants to be honored post-mortem, especially considering when a person was right all along?
I really don’t think that Equality 7-2521 is Ayn Rand’s Galilei but I suspect that his fate is going to end the same way. The establishment is going to come down on him like a house of cards and crush him. I suspect that some of these secrets like electricity are known by those that control society. Whether they use is or not is a different question, but don’t be surprised. Remember the mask mandates (you didnt think that was coming back did you).
End Your Programming Routine: It’s nice having a quick and short book to read. I am getting behind on my other reading and trying to catch up, this helps. Ignorance has its pluses and minuses and without it sometimes we don’t have heroes or huge scientific break throughs. WIth it, we often have martyrs.
November 9, 2023 – The Role of ‘Less Than Lethal’
I have finished my analysis of the Crossman 760. If you recall, this is my son’s BB gun that is multi-pump. Since you already know that I hate pumping, then you know that I don’t have a ton of interest in this platform. That being said, I got curious in the difference between this rifle and my Crossman Legacy when shooting BBs.
I am going to skip a lot of the technical information about this test and the results. But I will give you the bottom line. My initial hypothesis was that it took a certain velocity to stabilize BBs and therefore be more accurate. Unfortunately, even at the maximum number of pumps on the 760, the BB did not reach the same velocity as the most accurate number of pumps on the Legacy.
It does appear to me that there is one target slightly more accurate that the others. In this case it is the four pumps target. That correlates to an average velocity of 391 fps and energy of 0.7 ft/lbs. That is a far cry of difference from the Legacy that was most accurate at 608 fps and energy of 4.3 ft/lbs.
There are however many factors that impact the analysis of the results. The first is that I couldn’t validate my hypothesis in the first place. The max velocity of the 760 was 514 fps versus the most accurate level of pumping on the Legacy was 608 fps. Second and possibly more vital was that I have a scope on the Legacy and only have the open sights on the 760. It is entirely possible that the inaccuracy was due to the sight picture. I was hoping that I would be good enough the way things were to get comparable results. I have to say that is a variable that should be considered.
This post is more focused on what to do with this information. Since I have already announced that I hate to pump and the number of pumps for follow-up is what drove me to purchase another rifle the Optimus, is there any place for the Crossman 760 at home or homestead? The answer is yes.
First of all, never have a BB gun fight with something that is really going to hurt you. If you can’t tell, that was very strong sarcasm, don’t ever do that. But, thinking along those lines, maybe you want to discourage uninvited visitors. When we were kids, we used to shoot deer with our Daisy 840s that hopped into the garden and wrecked havoc on beans and everything else. I also know from hearsay that pellet rifle can kill a deer.
Other animals may be either pets or fall under the furbearing game regulations. Killing animals just might be a crime, not to mention many municipalities prohibit discharge of air rifles and bows. That being said, I think that a stinging BB is a perfectly acceptable deterrent in the right circumstances. Even though that cat pooping in your yard drives you crazy, just wait until you have to face them when you have shot and killed beloved ‘Fluffy’.
This is a very contentions subject in rural America. As we have a right to property, if someone’s pet is causing or potentially causing harm particularly to livestock, then we have a right to defend our property. Lethal force is permitted in those cases. All that is a subject for another day. My point is that you might want to have less than lethal options to avoid unwanted drama, legalities and other situations that may be uncomfortable at the least.
I do not know the exact energy that it takes to kill animals so it should be said that using a BB gun may also be risky if you are looking at non-lethal deterrents. I shot a lot of birds as a youth with my Daisy 840 which I calculate around 0.6 ft/lbs. That same rifle had no penetration on deer and racoons. Possibly better options include pepper spray works well for dogs or something like Airsoft that shoots a larger projectile at lower velocity.
End Your Programming Routine: Adding a scope ($12) to my son’s BB gun is certainly a strong possibility. I have half a notion to move the scope that is on my Legacy over to my son’s 760 and upgrading my own rifle. It is really a terrible piece of kit but it just may be slightly better than open sights, I don’t know. For now, I am going with four pumps is the optimum accuracy with that rifle. That makes my new hypothesis something like pump rifles are most accurate at pumping slightly less than half the total of pump capacity.
November 8, 2023 – Boots and Scars
I never set out to be a fashion writer, but here we are. Some of my youngest memories had me wearing cowboy boots. I definitely wore them in grade school. My last pair of boots I bought in college and I got a lot of wear from them until I started getting ingrown toenails. I have worn them now and again, but having surgery on my toes was painful and so I stopped except for very infrequent occasions.
My wife had already decided that our casual renewal was going to involve me wearing western wear. I took it upon myself to buy some new boots so that I had a pair that I would wear more than a couple times a year. So far, it has been a rough go with these new boots.
The first time I wore the boots was my second proposal on the beach. We had already planned on spending the night to take our exchange student out whale watching. I figured that I should get started breaking these boots in so that I would have a nice night on the renewal.
Other than causing ingrown toenails which I attributed to the pointy steel toe, I never had any issues with my old boots rubbing. That is not the case with these new boots which I purchased as square toe to alleviate that problem. I wore my boots for two days and I couldn’t wait to get out of them due to the fact that the pull straps had rubbed my leg raw.
I figured that I was committed at this point, so on the night of our renewal, I put Band-Aids over the area that the pull straps rubbed. That solved that problem for the moment. I have worn the boots several times until we decided to go to Octoberfest. That night I spent about four hours on my feet walking around. My heel started hurting.
When I took my boot off, my heel was raw. I should mention that all of this is really a problem with the right boot, not the left. For that reason, I don’t know if the problem is my right leg or the right boot. I have had zero issues with the left to date. I tried to do research on what others have experienced, and from what I have read, a potential problem is today’s thread.
Apparently, today’s thread contains synthetic material that is much more durable than previous versions. Because it is stronger and tougher, by proxy then it is more abrasive (at least that is what it said on the internet). If we accept that to be true, then it might be possible to add some kind of leather softener or treatment to potentially deal with the rubbing.
I tried these boot on when I walked through the store. It generally starts causing a problem after a couple of hours. If I knew then what I know today, these boots would have gone back to the store. I don’t think that they can be returned after several months of wear. This is something that I never considered to be a problem before these boots.
End Your Programming Routine: I still have my old boots. Part of my intent to buy new boots was to wear boots more, old and new. With these issues, I don’t know if I need to grit my teeth and keep wearing them, hoping that they will break in or give up. I will likely try to wear them more and hope that these are just starting point issues because they should last nearly the rest of my life. I don’t have much helpful advice but consider yourself warned if you are in the market for boots.
November 7, 2023 – Final AM Loop Antenna Results
Two worlds are colliding. The clean-up of the basement and my commitment to not leave things hanging have finally met. I wanted to get rid of this wire wrapped box that I have been hanging on to for almost two years now. But, I couldn’t get rid of it until I finally completed the modifications that I wanted to make.
One of the suggestions on my YouTube video was that my capacitor was not adequate. If you remember, it was an Aluminum foil wrapped card inside of an envelope. One of those was sandwiched between two others. The paper of the envelope acted as an insulator for the conductors and in theory, sliding the envelope back and forth was the fine tuning of the antenna.
I purchased an air capacitor that I see commonly used on DIY antenna videos. The plan was to replace the envelope capacitors with this relatively expensive component ($35) and hopefully this would be the trick. After the part arrived from Germany, I set about with this new round of experiments.
I decided to take what I thought was my worst AM tuner (an old Walkman… how about that) and the best AM tuner, my CCrane radio and test them outside and inside of the box. With the device inside the box, I would mess with the capacitor to see if there was any improvement in reception. Interestingly enough, the CCrane radio also has antenna inputs, so I tried that as well.
First of all, I will remind you that AM reception is directional. As far as I am concerned, I saw zero impact with respect to reception inside versus outside the box of either radio. It also appeared that any fiddling with the capacitor made no change to the reception. Orientation of the box with respect to the transmission tower did make a difference, but again there was no difference the radio itself.
What conclusion can I draw from this whole thing? The only thing that I can say conclusively is that this box antenna has no effect on reception. As a result I broke the whole thing down so that I could continue with my rampage of cleanup. I very well may try this again, but this time with different wire.
The wire I purchased was Aluminum at the second hand store. I wonder if changing from an insulated wire to a non-insulated one might help pick up signals. Buying a nice, new spool of wire kind of violates my principal of making this cheap or out of junk. To really get this dialed in on what components will work requires it to work in the first place. I just didn’t see that.
I don’t offer this enough, but if someone sees what I am doing wrong, by all means help me out. Now that I have outlaid the cash for a commercial antenna, I really don’t have any drive to put anymore energy into this endeavor. It is a good idea to learn from failure though.
End Your Programming Routine: When I first ran across the plans for this antenna, I had visions of young kids scavenging materials to gather around the radio and listen to a soccer game in some third world country. It may be that I don’t know what I don’t know but if that is the case, then this project is much more precise than I gave it (and I thought I followed the instructions to the letter). To be fair, I don’t have a full grasp of the science of antennas so it is possible that this can work, I have to say that my experience says it is not worth the time.
November 3, 2023 – Anthem, Part 1-3
I didn’t realize this when I picked this book up after “We”. But it almost feels like we are in the same universe. The characters have amorphous names and the language is strange (more on that later). Like We, the characters do not pick their career destinations and small talk is deemed subversive and deviant. There is no unstructured fraternizing and no individualism.
Maybe I am going to drag this out too long. Reading the first three parts puts us almost halfway through the book. I may speed up if it seems like there is nothing unique about my arbitrary divisions. That I will take as I go. There is some good nuggets in this book.
The story’s main character is named Equality 7-2521. Like all citizens, he is born into institutionalism. He is raised until the age of fifteen where he finds his ultimate assignment which is to be a street sweeper. This part seems a a lot like Brave New World. On the job, Equality 7-2521 finds an old tunnel, maybe a subway tunnel. This becomes a sacred space from which he writes his journal i.e. this story.
On the way to his job, Equality 7-2521 sees a girl, Liberty 5-3000 which he nicknamed the “Golden One” and falls in love with without meeting. Because his work is in the same area every day, he passes by her on his way to his job daily. Apparently, women of childbearing age are sent to reproduce at some point in their lives. We know how this civilization sustains itself by descriptions in chapter 2.
The big bang in this section is the dream that Equality 7-2521 has after seeing the Golden One. He dreams about the Unmentionable Times which sounds like some sort of revolution or pre-revolution. A character called the Transgressor is burned at the stake for using the word ‘I’ instead of all the plural pronouns that are used in the rest of the book. Apparently, that is the only crime that carries the death penalty.
Reading this book, it sometimes seems like I am reading a long soliloquy of Golem or Yoda or something. Maybe I got the analogy wrong, but anyway, all of the pronouns are plural. So, if I am not paying close attention to the words, I start to get confused about what is going on because the language is just too confusing.
Now, let us get to the heart of the matter, pronouns. How is it that a person writing 90 years ago understood that by undermining identity, undermines society? I guess maybe the better question is how is it that it is understood and it is still happening? It has to be either stupidity or ignorance.
I shouldn’t have to qualify that you should know that I have a live and let live attitude. But, I think that there is a problem that goes part and parcel with that is today’s pronoun fluidity. I will ignore what I consider normal. I can even kind of understand a he wanting to be called a she and vice versa. It is the they/them that makes no sense to me whatsoever.
I was listening to a podcast about gender identity in the “Art of Manliness” a few weeks ago. I don’t want to turn this into a review of that but the crux of it was that in the 1980s the ratio of males to females in college was roughly equal. Now is about 60% female to male. Corresponding to that, the number of people that identified as LBGQ etc was about 2% in the 1980s. Meanwhile, it is now more like 20%. The point was the feminization of the education system is corresponding to increasing gender turbidity.
I don’t want to get bogged down in analysis of that conclusion. I think that there were some poignant theories and definitely worth a listen. I cannot tell if this is a chicken or an egg scenario and it may be some of both. But, the reality is that this change is effecting ‘maleness’. They are increasingly not exceling in school and in proxy, life. ‘He’, the single, 40 year old living in the parents basement playing video games is a product of failing to thrive in a ‘they/them’ world.
Just like all great, uniformity activities, you have to break the old to build the new. The military does it, politics and cults do it as well. And these are all organizations that put some kind of objective ahead of the individual. Removing individualism and blurred identity are sure tickets to extended manipulation.
End Your Programming Routine: This seems like a good place to end. It also seems like Rand has created another strong work that we have just flat out ignored. But that is OK because it is illegal to be unhappy. And we all want to be good citizens don’t we. As long as authority tells me the right path, then everything is going to be good and I will be happy.
November 2, 2023 – I (used to) Love Clam Dip
We had a fall storm on the horizon. It has been an unusually pleasant October with highs most days in the 60-80s. Hence I still had the outdoor furniture out. In addition, we really hadn’t had many fires this year, if any. I developed this plan for a last hurrah before I put all the furniture in for the season. I was going to build a fire and we would roast sausages and make smores.
I wanted to keep the menu very simple. I wanted everything outside around the fire. So, what goes well with fire roasted sausages, but potato chips. I wanted some dip too so I picked some up at the store. Since my vegetarian son is in Taiwan, I could get clam dip and not feel guilty about not getting a second option.
I while I was starting the fire, I opened the bag and scooped a few chips. We had a late breakfast and I was already planning on getting a late start to dinner. I was also doing some painting at the same time and I needed to get to a stopping point before dinner took over. That dip was terrible. It was bland and gelatinous.
When we finally settled down for dinner, I scooped a few more chips and no I wasn’t imagining it, the dip was downright disgusting. How can this be so bad? I flipped to the ingredients and then the answer was instantly clear. This is a toxic stew of garbage.
Here is an example recipe
- 8 oz cream cheese , softened
- 1/4 cup sour cream
- 1 clove garlic , minced
- 1/4 teaspoon dried parsley flakes (or 1 teaspoon fresh chopped parsley)
- 1/2 teaspoon worcestershire sauce
- Dash Tabasco or favorite hot sauce
- 1, 6.5 oz can minced clams drained but juice reserved
I realize that if I were to expand this list to the ingredients to include those in cream cheese and sour cream, it would become something different, slightly longer. But really there is not excuse for the number of thickeners, extenders and modifiers that is in this store bought dip. I would venture to say that this does not qualify as food even though it may be edible.
I should have known better. About six months ago I purchased a different brand French Onion dip. It was equally terrible. These were not the chip dips of my memory. They were smooth, tangy and slightly addictive, certainly not bland and repulsive.
We very rarely ever had chip dip growing up. When we did, it was Christmas or something like that. So, it could be that my memory of what it was and what it actually was are two different things. Honestly, I don’t think so because just looking at the dip in the container looks wrong. I guess I will never know, but I suspect the contents have changed significantly over the years.
End Your Programming Routine: Honestly, I am going to be polite if I see this stuff put out in other venues. That being said, this is one of those things that you are better off making it yourself or not at all. I am eating some instant noodles as I write this right now. They are also terrible. But I did not expect them to be good. Disappointment is a far stronger emotion than dislike. Don’t buy chip dip.
November 1, 2023 – Bluetooth… Who Knew?
I am in the midst of a network transition. I am going to talk about that next week. This old PC that I use day after day has a wireless card that I installed when it was new (we are talking 2012, how about that). I never use wireless because everything that I have that I can reach a wired internet connection is not on wireless.
This comes from a long standing reliability belief with wireless. The microwave interrupted it, the signal was spotty in being connected and not. The wireless n protocol on my old router was in draft form and only worked with devices from the same company. I just believe in bypassing all of that futzing and plug it in.
I was looking at Linux supported wireless network cards because I was was wondering why the wireless did not work on that particular computer. That is when I came to the realization that Bluetooth capability came with the wireless card. And, if I added a new wireless card, then I could broadcast from my computer to the stereo system without having a 20′ RCA cable.
You know that I think cable is superior. But then the problem is how to switch between the native audio output and the secondary output. I have tried it and it is kind of messy because one is labelled headphones and the other is not. It doesn’t always work like it is supposed to and then things get jumbled up with various programs taking precedent over output choice.
I made the leap to update the wireless card. I rationalized it to myself as another bolt on to manage the network that I have as well. Based on my success, I will also add one to my Linux machine. At $30, it is a pretty inexpensive add on for that flexibility and capability. That would also give me another operating system to help with troubleshooting.
I have disabled wireless administration to the router. It is one of the security measures that I have in place. That way, only machines physically plugged into my network have the capability of making changes. Wired will remain my primary connection, but it also gives me some additional troubleshooting capacity for faulty switches as well. There are plenty of devices that are only wired to the switches like TVs and X-box.
It has been quite a while since I was in the hardware game. I needed to educate myself as to what the system requirements actually were. I knew from the TV tuner foray that I had an extra PCIe slot. But I certainly didn’t know what a PCIe -1X versus a PCIe-16x slot was. Nor did I know if I had a spare USB connector on the motherboard. It turns out that I did and so the installation was pretty easy for a Windows machine and plug and play installation. I also needed to manually install an optional OS upgrade for Bluetooth to make it work. Once I figured that out, I was off and running.
Speaking of Bluetooth and USB, the card I chose had Bluetooth 4.2 standard. There are options out there with Bluetooth 5.X and you may wonder what the difference is. Bluetooth 5 is better and faster with more range, but you do need a USB 3 connection on your motherboard. Defining all of that today is too technical but if you are in this position, seek research on the internet as to what ports and connections you have before ordering. I will say, having the the best versus none, go with what you can get. It also costs more for that extra bandwidth and range which is a big turn-off for me and techno junk.
Doing some advanced reading, I can’t say that the Linux installation will be as smooth. But that is OK. I need to continue to challenge myself in that operating system if I am to ever learn it. I finally got the software installed SDR/scanner. It took quite a while because I chose to watch baseball instead of working at it. It can be done, I am confident in that fact.
End Your Programming Routine: If you have some technology over ten years old, it may benefit you to update hardware if it makes sense. This was less about adding wireless network then getting Bluetooth. Honestly, I have tried both wired and wireless and things were pretty much the same except that I saw one hiccup streaming a song on wireless and several with the Bluetooth stream itself. This will continue to keep me wired but maybe in my lifetime it will get there.
October 31, 2023 – Reigning Horror King
Before there was binge watching TV shows, there was binge reading of authors. I guess that was always something that I have done. My earliest reading accomplishment was finishing the Hardy Boys series. In middle school, the author Dean Koontz came into fashion.
At one point, I had read every book that he had published. That count was fifty some odd books. When you read these serial authors, I find that the books are pretty easy, quick reads. Another author I have read a lot is James Patterson. An average is 300 – 400 pages and these are things that can be read in hours. I could often finish a book in an out and back plane ride (hence why I read so many).
I wouldn’t say that the books are formulaic exactly, it is just that the story line is simple. There isn’t a lot of thinking that is required to follow along. Reading those kind of stories is pleasurable but it starts to lose it zeal if that is all you ever do. Then you start to look around for what can last longer, has more pages or is more complicated. This leads to other authors.
Authors like Koontz and Patterson I would say write in the thriller genre. Thrillers involve action like murder and then all of a sudden murder kind of borders on horror. So what is the difference? In a lot of ways, not much. I would say the primary difference involves supernatural or urban legend aspects aside from just a lot of crime (and blood).
In my opinion, the king (sic) of horror today is Steven King. King’s career started in horror that lead into a more diverse body of work. I started to read King as a supplement to the quick reads of Koontz. One of the first books that I read was “It” and I did so because it was over 1000 pages.
The first published work from King was Carrie. But the 1970s and 1980s was a solid string of novels that really hit the bestsellers list: “Salem’s Lot, Pet Cemetery, Cujo, The Dead Zone, Christine” and probably his biggest hit “The Shining”. He also wrote and directed his own movie called “Maximum Overdrive” featuring a soundtrack exclusively from AC/DC, now that is cool.
I realize that King has ventured out of the horror genre exclusively and into his seventies now, his work is evolving. Yes, he is still putting out fiction but the burning drive has quelled somewhat. That being said, he is still active and has created a number persistent pop culture classics. I think that you would be hard pressed to meet someone older than 30 that doesn’t know “The Shining”.
I think that King has mastered creepy. Most of what he does is not gore like slasher films. This makes his movies a good choice to watch as a family for Halloween. We watched the movie “Misery” a couple months back and this is another good choice. There have been so many books adapted to movies, including non-horror movies like “Stand By Me” and “Shawshank Redemption”. For his classy and proliferation of content as well as versatility I have nominated him Today’s Horror King.
End Your Programming Routine: My favorite book from Steven King is actually “The Stand”. If you haven’t read it, this is a dystopian story more along the lines of “The Walking Dead”. Admittedly while that book makes my recommended reading list, horror is not really my favorite genre and by proxy, I do not really relish most of King’s work. I simply respect the quality and the uniqueness.
Recent Comments