Thursday, April 3, 2025

Non Sequitur. What Am I Missing?

Article about a zoning decision involving lithium batteries to be used as a backstop for loss of Green energy after sunset:
"In 2008, a Boise State professor died and numerous homes in the area were destroyed after a fire ripped through the neighborhood. The fire was later said to be caused by an Idaho Power equipment failure, high winds, and a tree that hit a power line."
When I die, I hope it causes neighborhood's to burn?

Wednesday, April 2, 2025

Top Secret!

Val Kilmer passed.  His debut film, Top Secret! remains a reminder of what a skilled comic actor he was, and what skilled filmmakers Abraham's, Zucker, ans Abraham's were.  The opening sequence with the song Skeet Surfin' is so utterly unexpected.

After watching it again,  I realized that if you are under 50, many of the cultural references and movies may be incomprehensible gags: The Blue Lagoon, exploding Pintos, Casablanca, all World War Ii movies, the East German Women's Olympic Team (which were fiercely hormonal abused men, or severely roided up women).

If Monty Python Added This Scene to a Movie...

From a discussion of thr Battle of Lepanto (1571):
"Even after the battle had clearly turned against the Turks, groups of Janissaries still kept fighting with all they had. It is said that at some point the Janissaries ran out of weapons and started throwing oranges and lemons at their Christian adversaries, leading to awkward scenes of laughter among the general misery of battle."

Cutting Big Pieces

The Sherline vertical mill is so tiny that people with big boy mills sometimes call it a jeweler's mill.  The Y-axis has about four inches of travel.  Trying to cut stock approaching that dimension in Y is often a struggle because the mill vise will contact the column at the far end of travel.  The trick is also to get the cut line far enough off the position of the column that the mill vise goes to either side of the column.  



In addition, the mill vise back jaw is so deep that the quill needs to be quite some distance from the column.  The Sherline allows you to stack spacer blocks between quill and column to solve this.  It is not an elegant solution and I suspect Sherline would cringe at seeing this.

Monday, March 31, 2025

Perhaps Letting Europe Go Under is Less Silly Than It Sounds

J.K. Rowling linked to this 3/31/25 Daily Mail article:
"A toddler has been kicked out of nursery after being accused of transphobia, new figures reveal.

"The child, aged either three or four, was suspended for 'abuse against sexual orientation and gender identity', data from the Department for Education shows.

"The offences took place in the 2022-23 academic year at a state school, according to The Telegraph.

"Statistics indicate 94 pupils at similar primary institutions were suspended or permanently excluded for transphobia or homophobia in the same year.

"This included ten pupils from Year 1 and three from Year 2, where the maximum age was seven, and one child was of nursery age."

My Wife Ordered an Espresso Maker

Not PRC:
 Made in Ukraine, not PRC.

Does No One Make 6-32 Stainless Steel Hex Nuts Outside PRC?

 Amazon, Tacoma Screw, McMaster-Carr, no luck.  Tacoma Screw did have Taiwaneae made.