That Missing Airman

 4/5/26 CNN:

Hiding alone in a mountain crevice behind enemy lines, the injured American airman knew exactly what to do: survive and evade.

For more than a day, the weapons systems officer whose F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down inside Iran avoided being captured by encroaching Iranian forces. At one point, he scaled the rugged terrain to a ridgeline 7,000 feet above sea level, equipped with little more than a pistol, a communication device and a tracking beacon.

It was into the high mountains that a team of American commandos, accompanied by US aircraft dropping bombs to clear the area, swarmed to locate the officer, bringing him and themselves to safety.

Fraud? No, Just Excellent Health Care

4/2/26 CBS News:

The FBI arrested a married couple Thursday accused of fraudulently billing Medicare for $7.45 million while running a hospice with a survival rate reported to be more than 97% after five years. They were the first in a series of arrests planned Thursday, federal officials told CBS News.

A high survival rate at a hospice provider is one of a series of red flags identified by state auditors for fraud because most people enter hospice care in the final stages of a terminal illness. In past cases of fraud, operators were found to be using false or stolen identities to collect federal reimbursements for palliative care.

This depressing chart shows more than $1 trillion dollars of Medicare spending in 2024. Other coverage reports that the task force examining this hospice fraud was named "Never Say Die."

You wonder how much of our hopeless deficits might disappear if the fraudsters were defanged.  Also, how many people in need of medical care are shunted aside by the fraudsters.

Project Hail Mary

The most pleasure I have had in a movie theater in many years. Thought-provoking, often funny, clever dialog and evidence that playing opposite an actor made of rock can work well.

No foul language, no gratuitous violence (some nasty bacteria have a bad end), and nothing that would you would not want your children to see or hear 

Trump’s Ballroom

4/3/26 New York Times article (behind a paywall, I opened the link in a private tab) reports the ballroom is really a shed for a very deep, very secure underground bunker.

Getting private sources to pay for the shed was clever. I doubt any of our enemies thought it was just a ballroom.

Just in Time for My Move to Tennessee

 The Post Office is requesting comment on allowing mailing of handguns. This has been banned since 1927. This will include:

Out-of-State Mailings by Non-FFL Owners: Non-FFL owners may mail Mailable Firearms to themselves or another person in another state for lawful activities under the following conditions. The mailpiece must: 1) Be addressed to the recipient. 2) Include the “in the care of” endorsement immediately preceding the name of the applicable temporary custodian. 3) Be opened by the recipient. 4) Be mailed using a class of mail, product, or Extra Service that provides tracking and signature capture at delivery. 

I will be able to mail all my firearms to my son-in-law to hold for me while flying there. Details on the procedures of the proposed rule changes are here.

Advantages of Having a CNC Mill

The part that holds the diagonal mirror in a Newtonian reflector is called a spider. (It has either three or four legs and a body in the middle.)

I replaced the 1960s antique Edmund Scientific spider (which had no collimation screws) a couple years ago with a very nice modern one that uses four 10-32 screws. I have never been very successful at collimation of the main mirror. When trying to diagnose the problem, i noticed that the round part through which the four 10-32 screws pass had a stripped thread.

The screws go through the round part to tip the mirror holder relative to the optical path. Obviously a stripped thread is not going to do that very well.

Fortunately, the round part with stripped screw hole was a pretty easier part to machine. The original was 1.53" diameter, .41" thick with five 10-32 tapped holes (four for adjustment; one to attach it to tge mirror holder). I had a piece of .5" thick Delrin which was easy to machine into a copy.

Once I put the new part in the spider, I discovered another nuisance: the torque to the adjustment screws was enough to repeatedly rotate the mirror holder so the laser beam would go everywhere it should except the center of the main mirror.  The only solutions would be to add a lock nut to the mirror holder where it connects to the shaft or figure out how to make the adjustment screws zero friction through the center piece. I already had it in the tube, so i adjusted for center on the mirror,:rotating the mirror holder back each time to get back to mirror center.  The final collimation step only requires turning wing nuts on the mirror cell. If I have occasion to remove this again, i may tackle one of these fixes. For now, the mirror is collimated.

Microplastics: How Much is There Really?

A recent study discovered that nitrile gloves were adding to the microplastics measurement. From Analytical Methods:

Quality assurance and control measures – including wearing gloves when handling laboratory materials and samples – seek to reduce overestimating microplastic abundance. However, commonly used laboratory gloves release non-volatile residues, including stearate salts, that exhibit vibrational spectra similar to microplastics. In this work, we illustrate that dry surface contact with nitrile and latex laboratory gloves can cause overestimations of microplastics (mean 2000 false positives per mm2) when using traditional library matching approaches.

Is there an actual problem with microplastics.  Likely less but how do we really know. A little panic goes a long ways