Today's Stepper Motor Question

 I have a stepper controller, what I guess is sometimes called a stepper controller.  It has four pins that go to the stepper motor, and two that go to the DC power.  The stepper motor has four leads colored blue, green, red, and black. Looking at the online documents, I see nothing that identifies which color goes to which pin on the controller.  Any ideas?

In 1969...

My cousin Michael, recently returned from the all-expenses paid tour of Vietnam,  my sister Carolyn and I did one of the great trips of my life, although I did not fully appreciate it at the time.  

We backpacked from Agnew Meadows in the eastern Sierras to Thousand Islands Lake.  This is a place of spectacular beauty.  I was 12, and not used to serious hiking, much less carrying a 10 pound pack.  But in my memory,  it was awesome.   Ever since my 2014 stroke, I have regretted that I did not do that again.  My health just was not good enough to spend days out of contact with emergency medical services. 

If you want to see its beauty,  see this video of a guy's overnight backpacking trip there. He must be in great shape.  We needed three days to get there and three to get back.

I am healthy enough now that it no longer seems risky to do an overnight backpacking trip. 

Stress Your ISP

 This is a 2.5 GP image of the Andromeda Galaxy from Hubble.  Really a mosaic; I am sure Hubble cannot image something that many degrees wide in one image.

IFLScience has the background.

The Ice is Melting!

1/19/25 MSN reports on how rising temperatures are melting an ice field in the Rockies that is Exposing an as ancient forest:

Melting alpine ice in the Rocky Mountains has led to the discovery of a 5,900-year-old whitebark pine forest.

Over 30 trees are estimated to have been found by scientists during an archaeological survey on the Beartooth plateau in Wyoming.

The newly uncovered trees are located at 3,100 metres sea level which is 180 metres higher than the present tree line.

But what does this recent find mean for researchers?

According to Cathy Whitlock at Montana State University, it "offers us a window into past conditions at high elevations since you won't see Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) growing at this elevation today - that's because the climate was warmer back when these trees grew".

It is thought the trees lived 5950 to 5440 years ago when temperatures were gradually decreasing and to establish this timeline of the forest's history and age, the team analysed their rings and used carbon dating.

We are just now returning to temperatures of 4000 BC.  Obviously, this is because SUVs and jets are a problem.

Lovely Public Astronomy

Well, sort of public.  I invited a couple friends over,  one of whom brought a couple neighbor kids.

I used a bit more power on Venus and Saturn this time.   Saturn to show more detail on the rapidly shrinking rings.  Venus to spread the blinding brightness out making the more than 3/4 waning phase visible. 

Jupiter as usual satisfies.  I tried to get aimed at the Pleiades but the finderscope problem was making this hard; the 0x Telrad unit is great for aiming at naked eye objects,  but anything on the edge of visibility is not practical.   Getting the 9x50mm finder working again will do wonders for that.

I still need to disassemble this all to fix the recalcitrant clock drive.

This Works

Last year, two of my Lenovos started dropping WiFi connection and forgetting the password as well.  (Only at my house.  Other SparkLight WiFis worked finem)  Lenovo replaced WiFi adapter and motherboard.   Only Reset PC, with all that implies,  fixed it.  My big Lenovo was unaffected. 

The software fix was uninstalling the WiFi driver and restarting.

Great Instapundit.com Article

About Russian deployment of 1950s APCs.  But the comments are even better:

"I have a friend in Minsk
Who has a friend in Pinsk
Whose friend in Omsk
Has friend in Tomsk
With friend in Akmolinsk
His friend in Alexandrovsk
Has friend in Petropavlovsk
Whose friend somehow is solving now
The problem in Dnepropetrovsk '

And this depiction of Cosaack cavalry:

That would actually be scary 

They Are Very Upbeat Songs

1/16/25 BBC:

'Village People's YMCA is a high-energy disco hit that encourages young working-class men to meet like-minded individuals at Young Men's Christian Association hostels. It's been interpreted as an ode to the delights of picking up sexual partners at them – it appears on an album entitled Cruisin' – and it was first performed by a group of chiselled dancers sporting moustaches and figure-hugging fancy dress costumes. It's hardly surprising, then, that the song has been so closely associated with gay culture ever since its release in 1978. What is perhaps surprising is that it is now so closely associated with US President-elect Donald Trump."

The article suggests that Trump is appealing to nolstaga but also points out these are very upbeat tunes:

"That is, they want to relive certain moments that they have in their brains as when America was great; they just don't want to deal with the contradictions. Disco was problematic for a lot of kids at the time, but now the same people who used to be uncomfortable with it are saying, 'The 1970s were great! My back didn't hurt!'"'

Can anyone not sing along with "YMCA" or "In the Navy"?  (Did the Navy ever use this song in a recruiting ad?) Yes, they are double entendre rich, but even just at the written text, they are fun.

Do You Remember This Incident?

 I would ike to find the news story.

 am readingSusan B Sorenson and Richard A Berk, “Young Guns: An Empirical Study of Persons Who Use a Firearm in a Suicide or a Homicide,” Injury Prevention 5:282 (1999), https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1730567/pdf/v005p00280.pdf.

Given that federal law prohibits firearm purchase by minors, the source of the weapons themselves is of primary importance in preventing firearm suicide and homicide by juveniles. Some research has found that the parental home is the most common source of firearms that adolescents and young adults use to kill themselves. Family and friends and “off the street” are the two most common sources of guns for inner city high school students….  It appears that only a few corrupt dealers and unlicensed vendors are responsible for a substantial proportion of recovered guns.

By corrupt dealers, they are including people like the two guys who obtained an FFL and over a period of nine months sold hundreds of guns all over South Central LA out of their van, not even pretending to do California background checks or complete 4473s.  I recall that one of the guns was used either by, or against Cuba Gooding's brother.  They received sentences of 9 and 12 months in jail.  (Really showed them, huh?)  I would love to find this article.

Some Things Are Best Left Unsaid

From 1/17/25 KRON article about indictment of former Oakland mayor Sheng Thao:

"City contracts awarded to the Duong family’s recycling company were highly lucrative, according to the indictment. Text messages exchanged between Andy Duong and an unnamed co-conspirator show greed as an alleged motive.

"“So we may go to jail … But we are $100 million dollars richer,” the co-conspirator wrote in a text."

"They" Say

I saw this and I could not resist