My First Ever Tick

I was drifting off to sleep last night and I felt something odd on my belly. A little itchy lump like a small scab except it would not scratch off. Yes, a tick. We put in a plastic bag. From the pictures, it appeared to be a deer tick and a rash was beginning to bulls eye around it, so we ran off the an ER about 10:30. There was no waiting get in. They confirmed it was a deer tick. The doctor said Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever are pretty rare here from ticks (he has never seen either) but to be sure, I was given two doxycyclines and a tetanus shot. He used some lidocaine and a scalpel to remove the head which was still in my flesh. I had taken all my evening medications just before getting into bed so I was on the edge of sleep the entire time. 

Put Together Both Reflectors Today

It was also the day of discovery for broken parts, fortunately none optical. The amount of force involved in the moving truck guillotine our dining room table. It is no surprise other parts experienced unreasonable forces.

The upper cage of Big Bertha has a diagonal mirror assembly that reflects the light from the primary mirror into the eyepiece focuser. There are four screws at the top of the cage. Three are collimation screws for making very subtle adjustments of diagonal mirror position. Like half a turn of a 32 threads per inch screw (.031" per turn). There is also a center screw that positions the whole diagonal mirror holder fore and after in the tube.  This has an adjustment knurled nut. The screw was bent about 60 degrees.  One I extracted it from the diagonal holder, I put it in the vise wrapped.in rubber and clamped it in two axes until straight again. To my surprise,  it all worked perfectly. 

At the stern, there were several weights to improve balance, held in a 1/4-20 thumbscrew which was hideously bent. If i had another of these unusually long brass thumbscrews,  i would have just replaced it. It is a weird size and i picked brass to avoid chewing up thr aluminum mirror cell into which yhis  screws.This time I both straightened it rethreaded it by first two axis squeezing in a vise wrapped in rubber sheeting, then holding it by the thumb end in the vise and turning a steel hex nut down its length until any thread discrepancies were turned out. (I thought i took a picture of this. )

Another disappointment was that the 5" refractor got banged hard enough   through all the foam rubber for the diagonal and focus knob to get shoved into the tailpiece (thr human end of the tube) so hard that the thumb locking screw that prevents the diagonal from falling out was so hopelessly bent that the focus knobs would not move the focus tube out. When I tried to usei pliers to unscrew the locking screw it broke off where it turned into the focuse tube. Oh no 

The tailpiece is held in the tube by three machine screws. I removed them expecting that the broken locking screw could be removed with a screw extractor, which I hate to use. To my pleasure, just enough of the thread body was proud of the tube to get my fingernails on and unscrew it. Now the focuser tube comes out. The hideously expensive and clever Ukrainian chromatic aberration corrector was not damaged; it cost more than the rest of the refractor and made it equivalent in optical quality to some that cost $3000 

Problem solved, right? No. The rack and pinion assembly was also beaten up. Once I opened it, the shaft on which the pinion gear sits was bent as was the metal plate that holds the pinion gear at the right tension to the rack.

Back to the vise to straighten the shaft and bend the metal plate back to the original shape.  It looks right but it does not turn as smooth as it should. 

I had thought a while back of replacing the focuser with a dual speed focuser. These have different speeds on the ends of the shaft and are really nice for getting very sharp focus. Instead I replaced one of the focus knobs with one I turned in aluminum twice the diameter.  This almost the same result because you can make very tiny movements of that bigger knob to get almost the same result.

I guess i now have a reason to do that upgrade.  The GSO dual focus tailpiece has a 112.5mm outer diameter flange. The interior tube diameter is 125mm. I just need to turn a piece 112.6mm ID and 124.9mm OD to adapt it.

The final fun of the day was putting the 8" mirror back in its tube. This is hard for several reasons. 

1. The cell is perhaps 1/8" smaller diameter than the tube ID. If you are not exactly square going in. It will get stuck. 

2.The holes into which the machine screws turn that hold the cell in the tube are not easy to find once the cell is approximately the right position. 

3. When I drilled these holes in the 1990s, I had no terribly precise way to get holes exactly 120 degrees apart. I used a tape measure and I am very close. You still need to remember not to tighten down any screws until all are started. 

This is always a pain to do but Rhonda has the patience to help me do these hard tasks. 

The day was not over. Big Berrha is a half-Surrier truss Dobsonian.  There is an upper csge  with eyepiece and diagonal and a lower cage holding thr mirror. They are held at the right distance by 6 1" diameter aluminum poles forming three triangles for light stiffness. Unless you are eight feet tall, putting the upper cage on top of those poles is difficult especially poo especially because those six poles look like you are wrestling a confused insect. 

Rhonda has much better spatial reasoning than me so she figured out that it made more sense to put the upper cage on the poles and lower the poles into their lower cage receivers.  

Big Bertha is reassembled; she collimated more easily than I expected. Tomorrow i will collimate the 8". I am hoping the concrete pad where the telescopes will roll in front of the shop will be done setting by Wednesday. 

This is Actually More Serious Than the Joke Below Suggests

10/26/26 Guardian:

The unintended actions flagged by Anthropic included a model submitting a fake tip about an unsolved murder to the Philadelphia police department. The US state department also revealed this month that Anthropic model had filed 19 visa applications in August.

So  did Claude also request naturalization for its agents? Or does birthright citizenship apply to clankers, too?

Some Days at the Office Are Better Than Others

 I am doing rebuttals of expert declarations again. One of the declarations make a claim about the absence of firearms in U.S. military hospitals in the Framing Era. This is not intrinsically absurd but the expert claims to have read James Thacher's Military Journal and found evidence contradicting her claim. It is 600 pages. I need to read it myself rather than rely on AI to characterize its contents. 

Requiring a historian to read a contemporaneous, often eye-witness account of the American Revolution is rather like being paid to taste test every pizza joint in your town.

This Could Be a Full-Time Job, Tracking Medicaid/Medicare Fraud

9/11/26 Department of Justice:

A Brooklyn woman was sentenced yesterday to 76 months in prison in connection with her leadership of a vast $64 million Medicaid fraud and illegal kickback scheme at her two social adult daycare centers and home health care company. The defendant was also ordered to pay over $56 million in restitution and to forfeit $5 million in fraud proceeds, including two properties, cash, and gold jewelry seized during a search of her home, as pictured below. 

 Again: if you stole $10 million and left the country, you could live like a king and leave that $10 million to your kids. Likely Uncle Sam would either never catch you, or not be able to get you. The greed is what sinks these idiots.

Here for more news reports than you can read.

How Many Different Categories of Medicaid/Medicare Fraud Are There?

10/21/26 Gothamist:

Two operators of a social adult daycare center on Staten Island have been arrested on charges they defrauded Medicaid out of more than $500,000, including billing for services to people who were dead, the Staten Island district attorney announced Wednesday.

Mother-and-daughter team Yangsim Oum and Juyoung Choe, the Staten Island Social Adult Day Care Center's owner and program director, allegedly billed Medicaid for providing services to people who didn’t show up — including some who were deceased or were out of the country at the time, Richmond County DA Michael McMahon said.

The pair could face up to 15 years in prison on more than 400 counts of healthcare fraud and falsifying business records, according to an indictment shared with Gothamist.

Social adult daycare centers across New York City are at the center of a sweeping fraud investigation by local, state and federal agencies. These centers provide activities and meals to seniors with cognitive impairments or disabilities and bill Medicaid based on daily attendance at their programs.

The arrests took place Tuesday as nearly a dozen other centers in Brooklyn and Queens were raided in actions that Gov. Kathy Hochul said were part of ongoing investigations into suspected Medicaid fraud. Interviews were conducted at 20 centers under investigation and another 80 received letters, according to the state Department of Health.

A Billion Here, A Billion There, After While It Adds Up to Trillions

10/22/26 New York Post:

Feds busted Los Angeles medical fraudsters accused of stealing $2 billion Thursday, cuffing white-collar thieves for unneeded surgeries, hunting the homeless for rehabs and billing the government for phony hospice care.

Department of Justice officials charged 15 defendants in all, including medical professionals, for making fraudulent claims to government and private health care programs – including $1.6 billion sham rehab case, the largest of its type ever.

The California Post was there as Federal SWAT teams sought their suspects in a series of predawn raids, targeting high-class criminals such as Dr. Hany Malek, 61, an allegedly armed-and-dangerous chiropractor accused of keeping an arsenal in his $2 million Tarzana mansion.

“Come out with your hands up,” called an FBI agent in the huge, gun-toting team of camouflaged officers who encircled Malek’s massive suburban home with a swarm of armed vehicles.

Agents cut Malek’s security gate and placed ladders against his tall fences, training guns on his home. Three flash-bang grenades exploded and sirens were activated.

After a few moments, the FBI brought their man down in handcuffs and placed in him an armored truck.

Worse than stealing billions from people who really needed treatment: 

Malek is accused of working with Dr. Harold Tabaie, 78, of Anaheim, a cardiothoracic surgeon, of stealing $134 million in fraudulently billed to Medicare claims for unnecessary atherectomy procedures that resulted in injury to patients.

Authorities say Malek posed as a medical doctor and diagnosed patients with arterial disease, recommending that they receive the invasive procedure in which a bladed catheter is used to clear plaque from arteries.

Tabaie then performed the procedures on patients who did not actually have disease, executing repeat atherectomies on some who he previously treated unsuccessfully with the procedure, prosecutors say.

Wow! Remember, if you or someone you know was planning to vote Democrat next month because you are pissed off about gas prices, this is probably a bigger financial burden.