Recent items of interest (to me, not you)

Some of Conor's work is published in http://www.nytyrant.com/home.html (ny tyrant). I hate NY and people from it, but that has nothing to do with this magazine.
So whaddo we got. I can swallow 1/4 of a chicken in 10 seconds. Humans shouldn't swallow chicken bones. Otherwise I could do it faster.
Some machines in the shop died. Maybe it was the cold, maybe it was just time for them to go, or maybe they're Chinese made cast shit. I'll take China for $100, Alex.
Here's one of the problems: fractional horsepower single phase capacitor start/run AC inverter motors. Capacitors die. Cheap ones last between 1 hour and 3 years. Cheap ones tell you they're dead by exploding in a cloud of green smoke. Exploding is also their way of telling you they're too hot. They have a limited safe operating temperature range. Expensive, military spec capacitors are expected to last 30 or so years under a wide range of conditions without exploding.
You won't find anything like that on a typical inductionm motor. AC induction motors also depend on the freqency of the AC, unlike DC motors, which just spin faster as the current increases. You can't increase/decrease the current on an AC motor and expect anything good to happen.
1/3 hp @ 3450 rpms is too weak and too fast for steel work. Most ~$100 machines use a cheap motor like this to save money. The motor isn't rated for continuous duty. It's also not rated to handle the load typical operations generate.
High torque, lower RPM motors are ideal. Speed control is really nice, but that gets into more expensive electronics. Belt drives with stepped pulleys can provide a few different speeds using one motor. This can be done with much less expensive motors. Motors made for 115v/15 amp operation should be at least 3/4 HP and under 1700 RPM. A 1.5 hp 1700 RPM induction motor is good for most shop machines whether it be a saw, grinder, polisher etc.

Sprayed

The RRB is sprayed and decal'd. I found campy and super vitus decals in australia for $11. They are very good quality reprints. The frame is black and cream. Most of the components are around somewhere, but still waiting on a few Stronglight A9H 1" headsets and a big old chainring.
Also got another random French frame from Ron that was about 48cm. Painted that all Cream and detailed the lugs with a black stripe. It had a Shimano crank which wanted a polished finish. Nice beg aluminum crank arms should be bared, not dipped in grey paint. It also needs a big ass chainring. I don't reckon this paint will last more than a year. Not much to be done about that. Plain old spray enamel isn't as durable as the linear polyurethane that was originally on there. But it isn't as deadly toxic either.
Ok this post is pretty useless without pics.

RRB restore

I've just started restoring one of Ron R. Boi's frames. It's not in great shape, as it has been sitting somewhere on his farm for about 10 years. Ron sandblasted rust from the top tube where someone had removed the braze on cable tunnels. There is some minor rust on other areas, which I've mostly removed. The seat lug had been chipped and had a bunch of rust, so I filed that out and thinned it a little.
The bottom bracket shell is massive. It looks like it could be a plumbing fixture! It's contributing probably 40% of the frame's weight.
At least some of the lugs are Bocama of France (BCM) Professionals (short point). BCM happen to be my initials...

The tubes:
Super Vitus 971 tubeset
XC35 steel

I wasn't sure what XC35 was, besides being a carbon steel of some kind, obviously.
From the french AFNOR standards, I'd call it a medium carbon manganese steel.
Good mix of stiffness and durability.
C Si Mn Smax Pmax
TU XC 35 0,30-0,40 0,10-0,45 0,40-0,90 0,04 0,04

read

this

good read

DWR

Design Within Reach is a company which I have purchased items from. These items are currently being destroyed by cats, but that is my fault for buying attractive matching wool sofa and chair. Now there are some shitty, overpriced furniture manufacturers out there. There are also some very reasonably priced furniture manufactures out there. But nobody wants that shit.
I've always called DWR 'Design Beyond Reach' because of their consistent and unabashed overpriceage.
Take todays example: $650 for a rather small injection molded polyurethane rainwater collection tank.
Its green and funky looking, and it holds 47 gallons. Which is close to the capacity of a typical green plastic rain barrel. Considering it is designed by an architect from Sydney (no, I've never heard of her either), DWR thinks $650 is reasonable. If you want a wall bracket to mount it vertically, you can buy the specially made mild steel, possibly galvanized, channel bracket and a bolt. These normally $3 hardware store items will cost you $90. In addition, if you don't want leaves and other floaties in the tank, you should purchase a leaf filter screen, which is simply a cup of wire mesh. For $50.
This strikes me as outrageous enough to spend time to post this message into the ether, where it will only serve to remind me later that I spent the time to write it.

Paul Van Dik

Paul van Dyk wasn’t always a producer. “I had the chance to work in the studio right at the end of ’91,” he says. “I didn’t know much about the whole thing, but I had a very clear idea of how my music should sound. I realized that in order to make my music I really had to learn everything about electronic music production. It doesn’t satisfy me to sit in the back and say, ‘yeah, that sounds good.’ I really wanted to know how things work. I learned a lot from my co-producers and pretty much the second half of my second album (Seven Ways) was when I was really getting into producing my own things.”


Oh where to begin? "Pretty much the second half of my second album was when I started producing my own things"

WOW. So what were you doing before that? Sitting in the back and saying "Yeah that sounds good" and doing blow off a doughy hookers tits? So who actually produces the crap for mr Van Dik's approval? Well not him anyway. It all sucks anyhow, so I still don't see what the big deal is. Oh, I should learn everything about electronic music production!! Maybe slapping my name on records that other people produce isn't going to cut it. No, it isn't you rabbit fucker.

Holocaust of the Peeps

One of the less enjoyable parts of being a chick sexer is knowing what happens to the male chicks once separated from their more fortunate sisters. Female peeps are whisked off to safe, warm, well-lit places to be looked after and nourished according to individual output maximization schedules. Male peeps, lacking any marketable skills, are promptly macerated, crushed, gassed, electrocuted, drowned, mechanically decapitated, liquefied, buried alive, or thrown into a wood chipper.

Spawn of Iron Maiden

Steve Harris' has a daughter who, being smokin hot as she aught to be, does a bit of singing.
Thats her. (On the left) Her Da's on the right, galloping away on the bass as he's known for.
Dg digga Dg digga Dg...

Now wait, there's a better photo.

Right? Yeah. Either she failed to inherit any of her dad's songwriting genes, or she's just coming of age and hasn't figured out what to write about yet.
She'd do much better to run around on stage screaming and growling like Angela Gossow for a while, at least until she figures out what makes her dad so awesome.

population density

Individual humans can't be relied on to participate in a population control program. Corporations (McDonalds, CocaCola corp, PhillipMorris, etc) provide a certain amount of population control by giving people what they want: instant pleasure followed by slow painful death, but this has not been completely effective due to efforts by well-meaning groups to increase awareness of the dangers of smoking and poor diet. Increased operational costs in addition to better informed consumers has impacted the profitability and effectiveness of corporations who provide products aimed at the self-destructive. Currently we are living in a society partially controlled by the profitability of such corporations, to the benefit of the corporations and their investors, at the cost of the consumers, with the side effects of human suffering and population reduction. It can be argued that these companies are not doing a very good job of population reduction, and it is probably in their interest not to. When called to court in some class action lawsuit, these corporations readily admit to neglecting their primary benefit to the world. After all, what good is a dead smoker? The dead don't buy cigarettes. Greed and consumer awareness prevents them from being effective at population control.

People are generally stupid or careless enough that they don't mind paying huge companies to kill them slowly and painfully. For example, I smoke either Camel or Marlborough cigarettes. Neither are very healthy. Both cost me about $7 per pack.
Humans are always screaming about how terrible these companies are for giving people what they want. They are afraid of becoming a race of weak, bloated, gouty, cancerous diabetics. Everywhere you look you see the sweaty-pale-sagging faces of the future: the ultra-consumer. But take their freedom to consume away, and they will scream and riot about that. We allow the corporations to provide people with what they want because that's what freedom is all about. Our great Capitalist Republics exist to provide a place where humans can be free to pursue happiness. Consumerism is meant for everyone; no race or class is exempt. However, the strongest population control measures are aimed at minorities. Exploitation is a major profitability driver; many corporations keep from crossing the line between profit and loss by some form of exploitation.
The above should be obvious. The idea that humans can rule their own destiny as a species goes against the natural order of the Universe. Simple minded optimists believe that eventually, something like democracy will provide a government that lasts forever. After all, the problem right now is that we just don't all have a say, right? Our votes don't really count! If only all our votes counted, We, as a whole, would make the right decisions.
Wrong. This is extremely naive. We may have some incredibly intelligent individuals, but combined we are less intelligent than some of the lowest lifeforms. As a whole, we function similarly to algae. As long as there is the right mix of radiation and nutrients, algae will continue to reproduce until it chokes itself and everything else near it to death.
Computers. Compared to our own brains, computers are primitive. However, they are evolving much faster than our own brains did. Since they are engineered by an intelligent creature, they can skip much of the extremely slow cycles of random mutation and natural selection.
So far we have not engineered anything that actually 'thinks' like higher functioning animals do.
Some people believe that computers could never think for themselves, never have a 'soul', never have desires or love or any kind of what we call 'feelings'. Almost nothing is completely improbable. Regardless, a computer can be considered to be much 'smarter' than the smartest human, even though they may need to be purpose built for specific tasks. No computer (yet) does everything better or faster than a human can.
Anyway, to get to the point: government can't be provided by human intelligence. No human is entirely impartial. No human can decide what is best for the human race. Currently the Earth and the Universe itself are the ultimate government. We exist at the mercy of the planet, which exists at the mercy of the universe. However improbable, some quantum phase shift could completely obliterate time and space as we know it in the next five minutes. Don't panic.
All probabilities aside, what is known is that we are responsible for destroying the surface of the planet on which we depend for our survival. Decisions regarding sustainability of the planet (including humans, birds, bees, fish, kangaroos, trees, flowers and all other things necessary for our survival) as influenced by the actions of humans should be calculated by computers. This includes pretty much everything we currently just kind of DO willy-nilly.
Reproduction:
If you've ever read Orwell or Huxley, the following will be very familiar:
Computers should be responsible for reproduction. Yes, I know, it sounds awful. Only a man would say something like that. I'm not saying All reproduction, just most of human reproduction. There would always be contingency groups of naturally reproducing humans as a fail-safe. All but a few humans would have their reproductive cells extracted at birth, incubated, analyzed and separated and stored. Reproduction would be performed as needed, based on unbiased criteria which computers create and adapt continuously.
This sounds like a nightmare to a lot of people. I realize that most people wouldn't want that kind of thing to happen. Freedom, etc.

Surface Mines in Alberta

Surface Extraction operation

These are strips of forest that have been mined for oil sands near the Syncrude processing facility in Northern Alberta.

Taskforce

Taskforce created to fart around for a few years

BP's response to outrage over its dumping permits was to create a Taskforce to explore new technologies for waste water treatment at its refineries. Throw some money at the University and people will STFU, right? Goes to show that politics won't alter big oil's business decisions at all.
They'll keep pumping at this rate until 2012, at which point they may re-evaluate their pollution controls. So in five years they might figure out how to get the waste water down up to 99.95% pure right? But they'll keep dumping it.

BP - Bad Petroleum

BP has been granted a permit to increase dumping in Lake Michigan at its Whiting oil refinery just south of Chicago.

The new dumping allowance:
Ammonia: 1584 lbs per day (54% increase)
Total Suspended Solids: 4925 lbs per day (35% increase)

The Whiting refinery has been getting upgrades to its equipment to allow refining of sour crude oil into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, asphalt etc. The plant expects the upgraded equipment to be operating at full capacity sometime in 2008. BP is making the upgrades because sour crude oil extracted from tar sands is becoming more abundant, while availability of light sweet crude is falling off.

Bituminous Sands

Bituminous sands (oil sand) are a mixture of water, clay, sand and heavy crude oil. The mix can be around 90% water and mud from which a relatively small amount of low quality heavy crude can be extracted. Conventional oil wells can basically be drilled and tapped. The pressure in the oil fields itself provides the energy to push the oil to the surface for most of the lifetime of the well. Oil sands require much more energy and materials to process. The sands are either extracted by strip mining or processed in place with huge amounts of water and caustic chemicals to separate the hydrocarbons from inorganic wastes. Steam pipes can also be sunk into the oil sand ranges to liquefy the sands for easier pumping and separation, which requires massive steam generators and fresh water. Strip mined sands are loaded by the largest shovels ever made into the largest trucks ever made and moved to separator tanks and mixed with water and sodium hydroxide (lye). Crude oil is skimmed off the top of the separator tanks and the remaining sediments are allowed to settle. This consumes large amounts of energy and water, and produces tons of waste chemicals and sludge. I imagine some of the water and lye is reclaimed and reused in the separator tanks to save costs, but its probably easier and maybe cheaper to dump the wastes and sediments in mixing pools, where they are mixed and diluted with more fresh water and drained back into the water table via wetlands. Only about 80% of the water is currently reused.
Only about 20% of Canada's oil sands can be extracted by strip mining. The rest are too far below the surface and require alternate methods. Cold flow pumping uses progressive cavity pumps (a huge motorized screw in a elliptical cavity) to simply pump the oil up and through sand filters. This only works where the oil is viscous enough to flow through pumps and surrounding sediments. This allows ~5-8% of the oil in deep deposits to be recovered. Removing the sand filters allows the pumps to create 'wormholes' in the sand deposits, which allows slightly better extraction, but disposing of the sand is a problem. The Canadian government allowed oil companies to spread the oily sand on dirt roads for a while, but the road surfaces started getting so thick that this solution stopped being viable. You only have so many rural roads to pave. Various other methods combine pumping with steam injection, with higher recovery rates of around 20%, but eventually producing the amount of steam needed costs more than the oil being recovered. There is actually an ongoing project to use nuclear energy to produce steam for oil recovery in Canada. Ahh.. Er..

Surface Oil Extraction

Canada's oil sands are situated under boreal forests and peat bogs. The companies licensing this land for strip mining are required to implement recovery plans for these forests. Somehow the oil companies got away with the plan to let the boreal forests recover themselves. Their idea was that the forests would repopulate the recovered areas naturally. None of the 33,000 hectares that has been leveled has been certified as reclaimed.

Satellite image of the Syncrude oil sands processing facility in Northern Alberta. Zoom out to see the surrounding surface mining areas:

Syncrude facility, Alberta, Canada

Sour crude contains more carbon dioxide and sulphur/hydrogen compounds (mercaptans). This makes it more difficult to refine into what BP claims is 'cleaner fuel'. Some mercaptans (or thiols, compounds in the sulfhydryl group) are added to natural gas to make it smell bad for detectability. Most of the compounds in this group are waste products of refining crude.

Whiting Refinery

Anyone in any of the south shore refinery cities knows the odor of refinery waste. Driving through the area is pretty bad, but imagine living across the street. Mercaptans smell powerfully like rotten eggs. The vapors will give you headaches, make you dizzy and sometimes cause vomiting. Long term exposure causes liver and kidney damage. Another property of mercaptans is that they like to bind tightly to the element mercury. The term mercaptan comes from the Latin mercurius captans, which means 'laying hold of mercury'. Water removed from crude oil contains hydrogen sulphides and ammonia impurities which need to be steam stripped and cooled before dumping back into the water table. Steam stripping sour water doesn't remove all of the ammonia, hydrogen sulphides or sulfhydryl-mercury compounds. The steam stripped water is mixed with fresh water from Lake Michigan in mixing pools, where it is allowed to cool before being released back into the lake.

In an internal email, BP's chief says that the waste water mixed back into Lake Michigan is 99.9% pure. So, one part per thousand is contaminated. When it comes to water quality, that is a huge amount of contamination. So ~5000 lbs of suspended solids (various mercaptans, etc) and ~1600 lbs of ammonia is 1/1000th of a bit more than half a million pounds, or 80,000 gallons of water per day.

80,000 gallons of warm, ammonia, nitrogen and sulfhydryl rich water per day, 30 million gallons per year. Along with it goes 2lbs of mercury and other heavy metals that can't be filtered out with current technology. Increased nitrogen leads to algae blooms and dead zones, which kills off fish and then birds and other wildlife that depend on clean, clear water. The USGS lists lakes Michigan, Erie, Huron and Ontario in mixed or deteriorating conditions.

BP's Whiting Facility. Located at the top on the shore is the cooling, mixing and waste water pumping station:

BP Petroleum, Whiting IN

whatthefuck

this is not worth watching unless you believe that you may live forever and don't care if a minute or two are completely lost forever.

Some chet atkins for yas



w/jerry reed

accountability? wtf that means?

Ac- count- a- bil- i- ty

n.
The state of being accountable; liability to be called on to render an account; the obligation to bear the consequences for failure to perform as expected; accountableness.
[-Webster 1913 ]

Webster provides one of the oldest modern definitions of the word, although the concept is probably as old as society. (In which we hunted, gathered, and held each other accountable). Things were simpler back in 1913. Nowadays words like 'accountability' take on divergent meanings and convey different ideas to different people.

"Accountability is a concept in ethics with several meanings. It is often used synonymously with such concepts as answerability, enforcement, responsibility, blameworthiness, liability...." (wikipedia)

Words with diverse or various meanings are not such fantastic things to throw around when you are attempting to clearly define and communicate a company vision.

Compared to transparency:

"Accountability differs from transparency in that it only enables negative feedback after a decision or action, while transparency also enables negative feedback before or during a decision or action" (wikipedia)

When everyone is working in integrity, everyone benefits even when mistakes are made. Everyone needs to take responsibility and be actively in integrity in all things all the time, not just at work but in society.
I don't think we should harbor the idea that mistakes are bad and wrong and should be punished in some way. An honest mistake is one that is made in integrity.
A dishonest mistake is an intentional wrongdoing disguised as an honest mistake. Dishonesty is the kind of thing we should be discouraging. Politics, power games, and similar wastes of time all come out of this negative, reactive mentality.

'In another view, accountability is a simple word that, at its root, means: "the willingness to stand up and be counted -- as part of a process, activity or game." In this sense, then, accountability is less something I'm held to, or something done to me; rather, it is a word reflecting personal choice and willingness to contribute to an expressed or implied outcome.' (wikipedia)

That's a very positive interpretation, far from words like liability, blameworthiness, enforcement, etc, which for me bring to mind things like punishment, prison, torture, execution. (Execution is another word that needs some clarification in the corporate context.)

I've been confused lately about the meaning of this word, and now I see why.
Like most words that become a part of corporate dialect, it can be interpreted in a handful of ways. A word with many meanings has no meaning.

 

Vertical Airships

http://www.airship.org/

Hmmm! Vertical airships! I like where they are going with that. The big problem with airships is wind. The other one is obstacles. Occasionally bumping into big buildings would not be a too much of a problem. An airframe should be able to withstand a collision at a reasonable speed without failing. A flexible frame that can deform significantly combined with an overpressure relief and recovery system would allow the gas envelope to survive hard landings and mid-air collisions. Semi rigid ships have no gas pressure in the envelope. There is no danger of an envelope popping like a balloon, and most of the time envelope punctures can be repaired in flight.
Airships are like big boats. They need to be able to follow headings that are close to the wind without slipping leeward. Variable envelope geometry provides the ability to change drag and lift properties in flight, and could also act much like a sail while using engine thrust as a kind of air keel. This may be more efficient than just powering directly into the wind, especially at lower altitudes where air density is greater.
I could just ramble on about how this stuff might work all day, but really it needs some testing. Lots of testing. But anyway, vertical ships shaped like sails looks like a good idea if the lift dynamics are correct. I think large horizontal envelopes provide more lifting power though. Like a barge.