Silicon Valley Redneck

Offense, defense, counter-defense...

There was something on Slashdot a couple days back about arming drones with frickin' lasers.  Not for vaporizing targets on the ground, mind you, but so they could zap incoming anti-drone missiles out of the sky!

Only, as an early commenter pointed out, even the little excerpt mentioned that the lasers were for defense against "EO/IR guided surface-to-air missiles," so 'twas pretty clear that the idea was to blind optical seekers.

Now, if you know what type of lasers all the drones are equipped with, protecting your seeker against it is easy.  Even if not, or if they're equipped with different types of lasers, or even with tunable lasers: think auto-darkening welding helmet.  If it suddenly gets bright, make the filter enough darker to prevent damage.

In combination with which: if you're tracking a target, and suddenly get dazzled by coherent light, follow the coherent light.

Now, if the lasers were attached to "smart chaff" being dropped by the drones, following the light would be counterproductive... but chaff that can track an incoming missile and keep a laser pointed at it is going to be expensive and in short supply.  And you can keep firing dumb rockets at the drones until the dronemaster runs out of money.

In which I join the electronic age

Amazon having offered me the $60-off-a-Kindle deal, I decided it was finally time to get myself a Paperwhite.  The promised 2-day delivery ended up being next-day, and so I've just been loading my new pocket-stuffer up with Free Goodies.

Like, 5 volumes of Macaulay's The History of England From the Accession of James II, and a large volume of Machiavelli, and Through the Looking-Glass, and....

And, yes, Mr. NSA, I have works by Adam Smith and Eugene V. Debs on my new Kindle.  Already.

It lacks, however, a cover with the words "Don't Panic" in large friendly letters.  This is a terrible oversight on Amazon's part.

The size... is about right for holding and reading.  Doesn't fit in my shirt pocket, but that's full of cellphone, note paper, and writing sticks already.  It fits nicely, however, in the cargo pocket where I'd normally carry a paperback when heading to a waiting room.

Oh, and the Kindle-edition books that aren't free classics?  Them's mighty pricey, at least the new-and-popular ones.  Baen, though, has e-books at sane prices, and they're supposed to be Kindle-compatible.  Guess I'll buy one of Bujold's latest, sometime soon, and see how that plays.

Meanwhile, if I carry this thing around with me, I can occupy stray moments by stuffing my head with History and Literature, instead of playing The Birds Who Commandeer Neutral Transport.

Idea.

Weave shoes out of rattan.

Call them "Wickerpedia."

(Yeah, my brain's kinda fried this week.)

Prices.

Being intentionally nonspecific here, for Reasons.

Someone I know, who's been among the uninsured (not merely no comprehensive health plan, but no insurance of any sort, and... well, how things got this way is Complicated, but the process seems to have involved Obamacare dropping the "Portability" part of HIPAA immediately after passage, thereby adding to the pool of uninsured) for some time now, is taking one of those "one a day for the rest of your life" maintenance drugs.

It's pricey.  The name-brand product, if memory serves, had gone from around $100/month to $150/month over the last couple of years.  Fortunately, there's a generic now, at a still-outlandish $70/month.

And, now that there's a generic, does competition bring down the price of the name brand?  It does not.  The name brand now goes for well over $200/month.

Presumably this is because, as with so many other prescription drugs, no one actually pays list price.  Someone Else pays, and that Someone Else has negotiated a secret 90% discount.

But a huge jump in price, after competition enters?  Gotta be some other factor.  Like, perhaps, this is one of those categories of drugs that health plans are now required to cover 100%, with no substituting generics?  Another of those fine provisions added to Obamacare at the behest of Big Pharma?

Acronym.

So... Jim Sensenbrenner is planning to introduce an NSA-restricting "United and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet Collection, and Online Monitoring Act," or "USA Freedom Act."

Except: the acronym is more "USA Freed Coma."  Got that pesky "C" in it.

Dirt.

Turns out the USDA has this semi-handy-dandy on-line soil map thingy!

And it seems the local dirt what we got here under SVR Central has a name:

Santa Clara Area, California, Western Part

145—Urbanland-Hangerone complex, 0 to 2 percent slopes, drained

Map Unit Setting

• Elevation: 0 to 220 feet
• Mean annual precipitation: 14 to 24 inches
• Mean annual air temperature: 57 to 61 degrees F
• Frost-free period: 275 to 325 days

Map Unit Composition

• Urban land: 70 percent
• Hangerone, drained, and similar soils: 25 percent
• Minor components: 5 percent

Description of Urban Land

Setting

• Landform: Basin floors
• Landform position (three-dimensional): Talf
• Down-slope shape: Linear
• Across-slope shape: Linear
• Parent material: Disturbed and human transported material

Description of Hangerone, Drained

Setting

• Landform: Basin floors
• Landform position (three-dimensional): Talf
• Down-slope shape: Linear
• Across-slope shape: Linear
• Parent material: Alluvium derived from metamorphic and sedimentary rock and/or alluvium derived from metavolcanics

Properties and qualities

• Slope: 0 to 2 percent
• Depth to restrictive feature: More than 80 inches
• Drainage class: Poorly drained
• Capacity of the most limiting layer to transmit water (Ksat):Moderately low to moderately high (0.06 to 0.20 in/hr)
• Depth to water table: More than 80 inches
• Frequency of flooding: None
• Frequency of ponding: None
• Calcium carbonate, maximum content: 25 percent
• Gypsum, maximum content: 2 percent
• Maximum salinity: Nonsaline to very slightly saline (0.2 to 4.0 mmhos/cm)
• Sodium adsorption ratio, maximum: 5.0
• Available water capacity: Moderate (about 8.3 inches)

Interpretive groups

• Farmland classification: Not prime farmland
• Land capability classification (irrigated): 2s
• Land capability (nonirrigated): 3s
• Hydrologic Soil Group: C

Typical profile

• 0 to 9 inches: Clay
• 9 to 17 inches: Clay
• 17 to 27 inches: Clay
• 27 to 35 inches: Clay
• 35 to 45 inches: Clay loam
• 45 to 72 inches: Gravelly loam
• 72 to 89 inches: Clay

Minor Components

Bayshore

• Percent of map unit: 2 percent
• Landform: Basin floors
• Landform position (three-dimensional): Talf
• Down-slope shape: Linear
• Across-slope shape: Linear

Clear lake

• Percent of map unit: 2 percent
• Landform: Basin floors
• Landform position (three-dimensional): Talf
• Down-slope shape: Linear
• Across-slope shape: Linear

Embarcadero

• Percent of map unit: 1 percent
• Landform: Basin floors
• Landform position (three-dimensional): Talf
• Down-slope shape: Linear
• Across-slope shape: Linear

Now, knowing that, I keep wanting to give "Hangerone" an Italian pronunciation... and I guess "Urbanland" must be the name of some English dude, right?

Anyway: heavy clay landfill.  Needs big additions of gypsum and compost to be usable for anything but putting stuff on.

The neighborhood in Palo Alto where I grew up is on the same stuff.

And this explains my mystification when I look at aerial views of Appalachia, see bald spots, and wonder, "What's that pale tan stuff?"  (Answer: silty loam.)

Er... no?

"Is 3D Printing the Future of Disaster Relief?"

Sure!  Let's 3D print drinking water, food, antibiotics, bandages, tents....

The referenced article does suggest some medical-related items that can be 3D printed... but...

...they're talking about 3D printing casts, splints, crutches, and the like.

Now, those are very large items.

For one thing, it takes an enormous 3D printer to create them, unless you do it in segments and snap/glue them together.  And the process would take for-freakin'-ever.

For another, it'll use up vast quantities of really expensive feedstock.  (We're not talking Diamond Age fabricators here, let alone Star Trek replicators that can work from just any old matter input.)

On the gripping hand, the technology for making casts, splints, and crutches on-site from locally-available materials is well established, requiring only cheap supplies and moderately-skilled labor.  Pre-positioning sticks, plaster, and cloth seems a lot more practical than pre-positioning large, finicky, environment-sensitive machinery and the associated environment-sensitive (and possibly limited-shelf-life) supplies.

There are many good uses for 3D printers, but this seems entirely unlike any of them.

A cat of very little brain

Top Hat is so dumb, she thinks "CAT 5" means "this is for cats to chew on."

No, I didn't take a picture before evicting her from the workbench.

Now that you mention it...

Dzhanit does look like her Uncle Boris!

But does she have the drinking habits to match?

Cow-orking!

Apparently, for the up-and-coming dot-com tycoon, shared workspaces in Asia are the New Thing.

It's rather far from Sand Hill Road... but for those with no prospect of wheedling $10⁷ in seed money out of the Monied Powers, it's at least a setting where you don't need $10⁷ in seed money just to get started.

And, if your work requirements consist of a place to set your laptop and an Internet connection, that's all fine.

Wouldn't work for me, though.  I need a few hundred square feet of lab space where I can leave things set up.  Plus a couple of tons of equipment.  (OK, so if I farmed the metalwork out, I could get by with a quarter ton of equipment.  Or so.)

So, my idea of a workspace is more along the lines of a fair-sized barn, with electricity, air conditioning, and a concrete floor.  And an Internet connection.

And, given that a fair amount of what I work on is more or less secret (sometimes my secrets, usually other people's, occasionally gummint stuff), the shared-workspace thing is kind of a non-starter.

But, hey!  I could perhaps change to a different line of work... and have a workplace that's a few acres of land with plants and chickens growing on it.  Might not be very lucrative, but there'd always be food.

Damn.

Norman Geras has died.

And only about three-score-and-ten.

While his political alignment was far from my own, he could be counted on for informed and well-thought-out opinions, expressed civilly.

We need more of his kind in the world, not fewer.

Get the popcorn ready

Various stories point to a massive push by the U. S. Government to get the Obamacare web monstrosity all working and shiny in the next couple of weeks.

Hands up all those who have heard of Brooks's Law....

<reverb>
It's the BATTLE OF THE CENTURY!  Reserve your seats NOW!  Never to be repeated! It's GODZILLA versus SISYPHUS'S ROCK!  One time ONLY, from now to ETERNITY!!!
</reverb>

Another one notices the Potemkin economy

This time it's Joel Kotkin, over at Forbes, commenting on what passes for the Silicon Valley economy.

As I keep observing: the bottom has fallen out, and the middle is crumbling.

The real Silicon Valley, where the innovation happened, and (as Jordin Kare put it) fortunes grow from dreams, hasn't existed since the 1990s; the dot-com boom (v1.0), while seeming to mask its demise, was actually a symptom.

A few quick notes on scanning the article at hand:

Libertarians will celebrate the triumph of fast-paced greed and dismiss concerns over equity

Depends which breed of libertarian.  The current business climate is driven by a small number of people deciding how to invest vast amounts of other people's money, and that, in turn, is substantially driven by government policy, which the holders of the concentrated money are in a position to influence.  In any case, it's a positive-feedback loop of concentrated power, which this small-l libertarian considers a Bad Thing.

Another suggestion is that they can cut hair, walk dogs, and work on the houses of the digerati; given the extraordinary housing prices in the places where the anointed live, how they will afford to live anywhere near them is a bit of mystery.

Or get a job as a grocery clerk... Palo Alto still has full-service grocery stores, unlke the cities to the south, which are almost all self-checkout these days.  Still: it's not just the insane cost of housing.  The "progressives" in Sacramento and D.C. insist on adopting policies that drive up the price of everything.  (If you think the premium on your nice new Obamacare policy is outrageous, just wait until you get sick and find yourself paying 40% of list price for health care.  Remember, kids, list price for health care is ten times a reasonable price, so at 60% coverage you're paying four times what it should cost, plus the premiums.)

The people who settle in these places are not, as often asserted dummies stuck at the low rung of the meritocracy; the cities with the fastest-growing college-educated populations are primarily in the Sun Belt and Intermountain West, such as Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Nashville.

Although many of the new economists believe these areas are generating mainly “crummy” jobs, employment is expanding in higher-wage areas such as energy and manufacturing as well as services and even high-tech.

Which I might be doing in 2015, in a DIY sort of way.  Emigrate to America in 2014, get settled in, healthy, and relaxed, then launch a high-tech company in my barn, and try to persuade other disgruntled engineers to follow.

The price of this enlightened progressive profit-taking largely falls on working class Californians, and traditional industries, which get stuck with exorbitant energy prices.

This.

There's much more to say, but I woke up late this morning and need to get going now.

The things you find on a trip through Amazon...

So there I was, on an expedition to Amazon in search of a corn sheller...

Hmmm, yeah.  One of these little guys.  At some point I'll get one of the cast-iron jobbies with a crank, but the current situation is not conducive to either buying or using one.

Anyway, what else should turn up in the search but a Do Not Throw Rotten Core Corn Sheller Thicker Heavier Hammer Establish Efficient Electric Household Bucket with Fan!

And only $500!  Such a deal!  How have I ever managed to live without a Do Not Throw Rotten Core Corn Sheller Thicker Heavier Hammer Establish Efficient Electric Household Bucket with Fan for all these years?

There's no description given.  I guess the name is supposed to be description enough.  And, I suppose, it might be... according as what, exactly, it's supposed to be describing.

"With fan" might, e.g., make sense if it means there's a built-in wind machine to ensure that light fluffy detritus, instead of ending up in the bucket with the kernels, instead gets blown all over your kitchen.

(I spent a goodly chunk of time yesterday evening shelling dry beans, i.e., green beans that I hadn't harvested in time.  Got about halfway through the Big Bag o' Beans before deciding that it wasn't a good thing to be attempting while the fuzzballs were awake.  There don't seem to be cheap household dry-bean shellers on the market, and it's probably not worth my time to try building one at this point.)

Waaaaaah!

My pizza stone is bust!

And I'd only had it about 30 years!

Just these past few weeks I'd started using it again, and cranking the oven up to Volcano Heat (545°F, rather than the wimpy 450°F or thereabouts I'd used in the past), and on this occasion, after depositing the pizza on it, I left the oven door open for a good fraction of a minute while retrieving an errant mushroom (which process didn't do my arm hair a lot of good).  All seemed well, but when I returned a few minutes later to claim the cooked pizza, the stone was as shown here (but still topped with a small pizza, with mushrooms, olives, and prosciutto).

Oh, well.  I've come to regard the pizza stone as Essential Cookware, so it's time to fork over $30 from my already depleted treasury for a bigger, heavier model that gets good reviews on Amazon.  Might use it for various sorts of non-pizza bread, too, if I get inspired.

One of these years, I'll build myself a proper pizza oven.  The wood-fired kind.

Some critters ya just can't take anywhere.

I needed to make a quick Anchor Electronics run for some odds'n'ends, and figured I'd take Top Hat along, 'cause she hadn't been anywhere in a long time.

She cried - a mournful "meow" sound, and she normally doesn't make any sound that's remotely meowish - the whole way in the car.

In the store, she seemed pretty much OK for the few minutes I was browsing, even looking around and being inquisitive.  When I proceeded to the counter...

First, she peed on my shirt.  Oh, well: so much for stopping by AeroMicro on the way home.

Then she got restless about being on the counter.  Well, that's maybe OK.  I put her on the floor and held her leash so she couldn't crawl under the nearest shelving.

Oopsie!  Another customer tripped over her leash!  Neither of them was injured, but Top Hat went wild.  Running, climbing, thrashing around, hissing and showing her teeth: I hadn't seen her so feral since her blueberry-patch days... and now she's a lot bigger, with big sharp claws.

Yes, my hands got a bit torn up retrieving her.  She was in full panic mode there, and waving her claws around indiscriminately.

So: home, change shirts, wash and disinfect hands, apply liquid-bandage stuff....

Now she's all recovered, and being a cute little buzzy nuisance while I'm trying to type.

Sometimes I Read Things

ESR has an interesting bit on Hearing Things, and the ability to distinguish between voices inside one's head and actual voices coming from outside.

I occasionally get somewhat the sort of verbal hallucinations he recounts... but not in voices.  A couple of days ago, for example, I woke with the vivid sensation of having read various headlines, and a few detailed paragraphs of stories, in some out-of-area newspaper which had somehow turned up in my driveway.

No, I didn't retain the details.  Those particular stories haven't turned up in real life, nor even in the local paper nor on the Internet.

I think the out-of-area aspect of the newspaper may be a reality-differentiating mechanism, related to another aspect of my half-waking dreams: they're often set in specific known locations, but the location in the dream looks almost entirely unlike the location in reality.  This is a big help in sorting out real information from dream "information".

Oy. Similar-looking languages.

So here I've got this simple little MCU application to try out, and it seems an opportunity to play with one o' these here Aard-wino boards and the associated software.

I've actually done a couple of trivial things with Arduino over the past year, mostly several months ago.  This is marginally less trivial: monitor events as they go past (interrupt-driven), and periodically report status over the serial port.

First try at this was a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't get it playing within the first hour, then I ran out of time.

This evening I dusted it off.  Confusion from last time: I got no output on the serial port unless the event interrupts were happening, and then the output happened in bursts.  This makes no sense, given that the output was in the main loop, with a delay(500), so it should have been happening at regular intervals.

After a bit of futzing around, including blinking the LED to confirm that the main loop was in fact running at the programmed interval, I noticed something: my printf statement wasn't being colorized by the editor.  Hmmm, how's the syntax highlighting supposed to work, anyway?

Then I identified the problem: printf() ain't valid Arduino/whatever.  Yer supposed to use Serial.print() or Serial.println().  How very Pascal-With-Objects.

Which points to an issue with Arduino, for those coming from other platforms.  Note:

• I didn't get a compilation error.
• I didn't get a link error.
• I did get output to the serial port... sometimes.

This leads to frustrating debug sessions, which makes learning the platform more annoying than it needs to be - and would seem to make common typing errors difficult to track down.

No, Mr. Mylar, I expect you to die.

Off to TechShop to strap down sheets of polyester film and inflict intense beams of coherent light upon them with the Mighty 45 Watt Epilog*.

If all goes well, the parts I need for this afternoon's work will be found among the debris.

Must remember the earmuffs this time.  The screams are most distracting.

Update: Mr. Mylar was most uncooperative.  I spent nearly all of my 2-hour time slot trying to get the parameters dialed in.  Then... just at the end of the process... I realized that the solid bits between the little slots were much smaller than they should have been.  Turns out that, when I made a batch of the previous iteration of this little part, back in June, I left the final artwork on my thumb drive instead of copying it back onto the laptop and thence to Subversion.  So, I was carefully making revisions to faulty artwork that simply couldn't be successfully cut on that machine.

Oh, well.  The revised artwork having been found, I've applied the June fix to the latest version, and I should be able to get some cutter time tomorrow.

Update 2: I'm unpleasantly reminded that the process of cutting Mylar film in raster mode on the Epilog, while it works a heck of a lot better than vector mode, is distinctly anisotropic.  And here I am trying to produce a pattern involving narrow radial slots that are all supposed to come out exactly the same size.

Grrr.  Well, that explains another of the persistent Issues with this project.  I've cobbled together another sheet of artwork with various fudge factors applied, and a fairly quick session should product a bunch of things to test.  If I can schedule some cutter time today, I should have a handle on the correct fudge factor (as well as several usable parts, hope hope) by closing time.

 

* A laser cutter, not a giant Epilady used to strip bark from tree trunks.

Will life imitate my deranged imagination?

A couple of years back, I had an Idea - I don't recall whether I shared here, but since there's no prospect of my pursuing it, I'll go ahead and describe it.

The idea, see, is that you'd engineer strains of bacteria that (a) could live just beneath the surface of human skin, and (b) were bioluminescent, in a variety of colors.

Now put little colonies of them in itty-bitty cages so they'll stay where they're put.

Glow-in-the-dark tattoo ink!

And now... someone's gone and put bacteria in cages.

Though I'd assumed the cages would look more like buckyballs and less like serving dishes for monkey brains.