Not Surprising Pronouncement From Catholic Church But Still Good

3/4/26 Reuters reports the Catholic Church is warning its members not to let vanity cause them to engage in cosmetic surgery as part of the "Cult of the Body":

"Jesus will still love you as you age, even if you have ‌a few wrinkles on your face, according to a Vatican ‌document issued on Wednesday."

I would hope this was obvious.  But in crazy times, the obvious needs repeating.

Painful Learning Experience

Painful only on time. I tried to get around that problem that my mill vise could not hold the vise in an orientation for side milling the workpiece to .620" so I put so that I could face mill it to that width...

That should have been easy: slice .001" per pass at low speed.  But instead cutting on the 1/8" wall just bounced everything around enough to knock it out of the vise. So I went back to the chop saw and worked very had to make a slice. 625". I got .6".  Close enough.

As i was writing this is realized another method that I did not try but I might try tomorrow just to see if it works. Put the 4" wide piece in the vise with half of it above jaws. Side mill to width. Turn it upside down. Repeat.

If I do this again, I will use 1/4" wall.

PM Starmer

Now he is saying that they are deploying F35s to protect allies against Iranian attacks. Also the U.S. is again free to use bases in the U.K. for the Iran war 

No Gun? No Problem

 Absence of a gun is not usually a problem:

Rockville, Md. (1968)

01/25/1969: The son, 15, murdered his mother and three siblings with “a hatchet, knife, croquet mallet and kerchief garrot.”

Category: family

Suicide: no

Cause: unknown

Weapon: blunt, knife, hatchet, strangle[1]

---

[1] "4 In Family Slain; Hold Son, 15," [Waterloo, Ia.] Courier, Jan. 26, 1969, 2.

Iran Missed the Memo From the English Caliphate

3/3/26 Axios:

Cyprus: Drones struck the British Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri in Cyprus, pulling the U.K. and the European Union into the conflict. Cypriot press reported the strikes likely came from Hezbollah. 

And Starmer had refused to give U.S. permission to use bases in the U.K. Fat lot of good it did them. 

Article V Event?

 3/4/26 Washington Post:

NATO air defenses shot down an Iranian ballistic missile heading toward Turkish airspace, Turkey’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday. It was unclear whether the missile was targeting Turkey, a NATO member state bordering Iran.

An attack on Turkyie (or however they want it spelled now) seems unlikely. Perhaps the Iranians in their confusion are just pressing red buttons at random. But such an attack requires NATO members to come to their defense. 

ICE Arrest in Boise

It is fashionable to imagine that ICE is engaged in random arrests of people who it thinks are illegals. 3/3/26 KTVB:

BOISE, Idaho — Nearly a month after a father was taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) near a Boise daycare, the agency is responding publicly for the first time, saying the arrest was targeted and tied to a prior conviction.

In a statement to KTVB, ICE said the man has a 2024 conviction in Boise for “theft by alteration.”

The agency described the arrest as “targeted” and said officers were never at a preschool, adding that the man was detained about 200 yards away.

The man’s family has asked that his name not be released at this time for privacy reasons.

Attorney J.J. Despain said theft by alteration typically involves switching price tags in a store to pay a lower price, rather than removing merchandise without paying.

Despain said even relatively minor offenses can draw renewed attention from immigration authorities.

“It could be,  I haven’t seen this happen so much in Idaho, but in other places in the country, they really are just looking up old cases because they want to boost their numbers,” Despain said.

Or enforce the law. If you are here unlawfully, you get immediate deportation. Even if you do not break any other laws, you are here illegally and are subject to immediate deportation. 

 

When Was the Last Time, the U.S. Navy Sank an Enemy Vessel?

3/4/26 Reuters:

GALLE, Sri Lanka/WASHINGTON, March 4 (Reuters) - A U.S. submarine sank an Iranian warship off the southern coast of Sri Lanka, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on ​Wednesday, dramatically widening Washington's pursuit of the Iranian navy.

Sri Lanka's deputy foreign minister ​said at least 80 people were killed in the attack on the ⁠frigate IRIS Dena, which was heading back to Iranfrom an eastern Indian port.

I am sorry for the sailors aboard. I have no idea if they were conscripts or not. Unfortunately, Iran has been at war with us since 1979 and we are finally dealing with it.

According to Sec. Hegseth, this is the first submarine sinking since 1945.

The EQ1 Is Back to Its Original Rider

The 3" f/4.5 reflector i made some years ago.

Now when I go to start parties I can aim one at the Moon and one at objects that benefit from more magnification. 

Progress on Waiting Periods

 Ortega v. Grisham, 148 F. 4th 1134 (10 Cir. 2025):

New Mexico enacted a law in 2024 that imposes a categorical seven-day "cooling-off" period for nearly all consumer purchases of a firearm. No matter how urgent the need, or how much physical danger a prospective buyer might be in, buyers must wait seven days before New Mexico deems them safe to carry arms. Even buyers with previous firearms background checks or security clearances are not eligible for waivers from the prohibition. In short, the law requires no individualized reason to conclude that a prospective consumer is a danger to himself or the community, nor can anyone be excused from the waiting period because of personal danger.

Asserting their rights under the Second and Fourteenth Amendments, Samuel Ortega and Rebecca Scott sued the State of New Mexico to enjoin the Waiting Period Act, N.M. Stat. § 30-7-7.3. The district court declined to preliminarily enjoin the law. It found that a seven-day wait did not infringe on Second Amendment rights since the right to acquire a firearm does not impede the right to keep or bear a firearm, and, in any event, the Second Amendment tolerates cooling-off periods.

We disagree, and REVERSE and REMAND. Cooling-off periods infringe on the Second Amendment by preventing the lawful acquisition of firearms. Cooling-off periods do not fit into any historically grounded exceptions to the right to keep and bear arms, and burden conduct within the Second Amendment's scope. In this preliminary posture, we conclude that New Mexico's Waiting Period Act is likely an unconstitutional burden on the Second Amendment rights of its citizens. We also conclude the other preliminary injunction factors are met and that Plaintiffs are entitled to an injunction.

Yes, waiting period laws are modern. My knowledge confirmed in this decision is that California imposed the first waiting period law in 1923 to give police time to do a background check. If New Mexico wanted a waiting period to do that, then completion of the FBI's background check should be enough time.  But really, what drives this is a belief that guns are icky and any barrier we put in the way, makes us righteous and pure. The alternative is admitting that there are people who are evil and need to be confined.

That Vixen I Wanted

Vixen lost its American distributor. This surprised me not at all. Vixen cannot compete on price with PRC-made mounts. I considered buying from a Japanese retailer. With the exchange rate, it woukd have been several hundred dollars cheaper than last retail price here. But the warranty would be useless in North America.  A $1000 paperweight would be useless.

Explore Scientific sells a very clever goto mount that is very light and costs $300. I am sure it is PRC made. My past encounters with Explore Scientific products have been very positive  

U.S. v. Hemani (2026)

I am listening to the oral arguments.  The Solictor-General's argument opens with a distinction between drug addict and occasional user of marijuana. 

She also pointed to vagrancy and involuntary commitment laws as an excuse for such laws. Justice Sotomayor then asked the S-G about the others punished by vagrancy laws, using the language about jugglers, nightwalkers that appears in the postbellum Black Codes.

When Justice Sotomayor is poking holes in your argument, I think we have a chance at a good result even though Hemani was a bad guy with ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Finally! Clear Night in the 40s!

I rolled Big Bertha out. I finally showed M42 to Rhonda. It is a pretty awesome sight with this much aperture.  For the first time, I used the 18mm 2" University Optics Orthoscopic that came with Big Bertha. You do not realize how constricted a view you get from a 1.25" eyepiece until do this.

Jupiter had plenty of cloud bands and the 2" eyepiece showed all four Galilean satellites along with enough magnification to see multiple cloud bands. 

I do wish that I did not to climb a ladder to get to the eyepiece. 

The 4"x 2" Aluminum Rectangular Tube Arrived

I should have considered this in advance " my mill vise is 3.8" wide at maximum opening. If i had a 4"+ long endmill I could just put the 4" side vertical and side mill it from the roughly 0.8" slice to 0.62". Endmills that long are expensive! (I should have ordered 3.5" x 2". This would have fit better to the ring anyway.)

This is not a Kurt vise or a Kurt clone so the jaws are not reversible.

Trying to use hold downs to lock the workpiece to the mill table did not work. You need something under the workpiece to sacrifice when the endmill reaches the bottom. I foolishly tried to use Delrin for this. Aluminum on Delrin is very slippery and you cannot tighten these hold downs down enough to hold them.

Supergrok suggested gluing the workpiece on something that will fit in the vise. I found a 3" piece of aluminum and Gorilla Glued the workpiece to it. Tomorrow it should be solid enough to try and mill it.

The Gorilla Glue was not strong enough. So I went back to my first approach face milling off the excess. Perhaps because the attempt at side milling evened up the surface enough, it seems to be cutting better

Ayatollah Khamenei Dead

It was apparently a pretty effective decapitation strike. Some are speculating that IRGC officers may have betrayed the leadership. 

I wish I could hope that whoever is still in charge will put the interests of the Iranian people ahead of their pursuit of power but the 30K+ killed by the government last month give me little hope for that.

I Have Had Questions About the Email Sending Problem

Thunderbird was not the problem. There are vendors of IP blacklists for either users or ISPs with systems that spam, or are infected. Somehow, Sparklight ended up blacklisted. This should surprise no one. Lots of people spam for a living; I know one person who did for a couple years before his conscience got in the way. My mail host relies on the blacklist services. They whitelisted my IP. The problem persisted.

Somewhere within their SMTP server, my now legitimate emails were getting stored in the Sent folder and then quietly, without warning, discarded. I do not why, but they fixed it.

Handling Something Scary

 One of the reasons that I do not pull my Televue-85 out and use it as often as I would like is that it is a very expensive telescope.  To put it on the mount requires holding the tube with one hand while putting it in the dovetail while using the other hand to tighten the clamping screw.

As I( was putting it on the mount last night I realized that I have a solution staring at me. This is the 3" Televue clamshell ring:

This ring both simplifies positioning it on a mount and attaching various finder attachments. Those are 10-32 screw holes. After a long useful chat with SuperGrok attempting to find a furniture handle with the right dimensions, I realized the solution is to buy a 4" x 2" x1/8" wall rectangular aluminum tube. Cut a .625" slice, then drill through holes 1.25" apart in one side. Sand everything smooth run it over the polishing wheel, and use some stainless steel socket head screws to lock it down. The hole will fit my hand comfortably and I will be far less afraid to mount it with a really solid grip on it.

I can convert the rest of that 12" tube into 15 more handles for sale. There is almost no labor involved. Cut the slice, mill to .65" wide. Put in mill and drill two holes in one side, sand with 320 grit, then polish. I suspect that I will find vuyers.

One of My Favorite Jefferson quotes concerning the English Class System

 And of course, slavery as well: The peasants are not subhuman, just a lesser class of humans whose natural function is to work so that we may do important things that they barely understand. See Jefferson's description of this: "the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god."

In Case You Missed It, the Haggling With the Rug Merchants is Over

We have been at war with Iran since 1979. During that time, they have murdered Americans, executed rspe victims and homosexuals while America's leftists have made excuses or rewarded them with pallets of cash. 

Whatever his failures on breaking the Deep State, he is doing what no President has had the courage to do: attack a self-admiited enemy of the United States.

Pray for flight crews of America and Israel and the suffering Iranians who need to destroy what little will remain of the mullahocracy when this is over.

And note carefully: no ground troops. If the Iranian people cannot defeat their own oppressors, it is not our job.

Public Astronomy

I assisted Boise Astronomical Society with a star party at Future Public School in Garden City. The name sounds like someone had a planning map for a subdivision and wrote Future Public School in a box and someone assumed that was the name not a projection.

This was in late afternoon so we were limited to the Sun and the Moon. The Sun has a pretty decent sunspot right now that is very big, many Earth diameters and a few freckles right at the limb.

Lots of polite kids very excited to look. There is a future for America. A couple adults curious to know about solar cycles and Earth climate.

I took my Televue-85 sitting on an EQ1 mount. This is really a bit more scope than this meant was meant to carry. It clearly was unhappy. I am inclined to buy a Vixen AP-SM mount. They are about 3x as expensive as the Chinese mounts of comparable capacity and features. The CFC mount project started because i thought the Vixens were no longer available in the U.S.

The Vixen mount is fairly light for its capacity, about 14 pounds plus counterweights.  Something i can pick up and carry seperate from the scope. (A Televue-85 is pricy enough that you do not want to trip while carrying it.)

I expect a substantial inheritance soon and I may buy it when that comes into my account. The EQ1 mount is appropriate for the 3" f/4.5 reflector i built some years ago.

My Outgoing Email is Again Working

If you emailed a question and never heard back that is probably why.  It was a silent failure to send 

What a Great Healthcare System!

2/26/26 Globe and Mail (Canadian big newspaper):

1 in 4 Canadians in long-term care were given anti-psychotic drugs without diagnosis, report finds 

Self-Darwinizing

 2/25/26 Shooting News Weekly:

Darwin loves it when feloniously stupid thugs do feloniously stupid things…like trying to rob people who are walking out of a gun range. With guns on them. That’s right up there with juggling chainsaws or hand grenades with the pins pulled, but that’s what happened in Texas.

A trio of rocket surgeons apparently wanted to audition as the Three Stooges of Crime, watching for a guy to leave a gun store and live-fire range in Houston. They actually laid in wait outside a gun range looking for someone to rob. In Texas. Where “howdy” might as well as mean, “I’m packing, you packing too?”

What could possibly go wrong?

Dreamers

 2/25/26 CBS News:

ICE arrested 261 DACA recipients over 10 months last year, document shows

Deeper in, for those who read beyond the headline:

The statistics indicate the vast majority of DACA recipients taken into federal immigration custody during that period had criminal records. 

Low Power Wide Angle Finderscope

Rings

I ordered some rings to hold it in a Vixen finder base. Finding rings large enough for a 68mm OD tube was nearly impossible but these seem like they should do:

It turns out the tube, being a PVC pipe fitting is not exactly round; it has some odd bumps I think to get traction with a wrench. The solution was to buy some 58mm 3mm wall aluminum tube and machine this, thus making the finder be completely free of the PVC. 

Those rings are made in the PRC and like most stuff that I am seeing made there, it is beautifully and accurately made. (I bought and returned a camera telescope adapter that looked like it was designed from a photograph: beautiful but inverted in a hard to explain way). 

I have made a similar ring set in the past of white acetal. They made the same correct choices. The base, which uses a 75 degree dovetail for Vixen finder shoe compatibility, has slots across it that the rings fit into very precisely so they will never be not perpendicular to the base. It uses 1/4-20 screws through the base into the bottom of the rings. That means that a variety of ring sizes can use that same part. It also makes machining this into three separate parts, each of which is a simple part to machine.

I really wish there were Americans willing to make products like these. Antares builds smaller rings in Canada; I buy their stuff even though a bit more expensive. These rings cost $30. I am sure that these could be made profitably here and sold for $60 and there would be buyers at that price. If I had the time, I would organize this. I have the capital, the interest, but not the time.

Eyepiece

I bought a SVBONY 25mm Plossl for the finderscope. It gives 6x and 8.33 degrees of field which is fine. It is not a crosshairs reticle. It is a beautiful eyepiece. So I went looking for instructions on adding an illuminated reticle to an existing eyepiece and I found some for an Orion 25mm Plossl, which doubtless came from the same factory.

Okay, maybe it does not need an illuminated reticle. The skyglow here is so much that black crosshairs show just fine. But what if I get a really dark sky in Tennessee? More interestingly, I found this video touting SVBONY's 20mm illuminated reticle eyepiece.

20mm focal length means 7.6x. The 70 degree apparent field of view means 9.2 degree field.

Since I know at least some of you are here to learn about telescopes (no, really!), let me explain Apparent Field of View (AFOV). This is a measure of how much field of view is potentially available. You divide AFOV by magnification (70/7.6 in this case) to get the field of view your eye will see.

This is a big win. Another big win is that as magnification drops, the telescopes exit pupil falls. A dark-adapted young eye can expand to 7mm. If you supply a 10mm exit pupil, only (7/10)^2 of the light will be useable. This is why 7x50mm, 8x50mm, and 6x42mm binoculars are most common; optimizing the available light for young eyes. 

Us old guys are lucky to get 5mm. The 25mm eyepiece gave a 8.2mm exit pupil, so about 62% of the available light is useless. Instead of seeing 100x fainter stars (5 magnitudes), I would get about two magnitudes. At 7.6x, that is a 6.6mm exit pupil about 42% of the light is useless. This should be three to four magnitudes.

I Have Long Suspected Progressives Hate Black People

 2/23/26 The Hill:

Rapper Nicki Minaj and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) on Monday knocked California Gov. Gavin Newsom over his SAT remarks at an event in Atlanta previewing the release of his memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry.”

“I’m not trying to impress you. I’m just trying to impress upon you I’m like you. I’m no better than you. I’m a 960 SAT guy,” Newsom told Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens (D).

“I’m not trying to offend anyone — trying to act all there if you got 940,” he added.

The recorded clip quickly sparked backlash from the MAGA base from Minaj and Scott alike.

“His way of bonding with black ppl is to tell them how stupid he is & that he can’t read. This means my first read on him was correct. He’s been handed so many things & put in high positions he never earned or deserved,” Minaj wrote in a post on the social platform X.

Newsom is about my age so I suspect that he means his SAT Verbal and Math scores totaled 960. If so, it explains why he is the most likely Democratic candidate for President. I was not one of the smarter people in my social circles but I still managed 1390. Some of my friends achieved 1480.

Yes, tell black people that they are just as intellectually challenged as you are. That's a way to make friends!

You Can't Stop the Signal

 A press release from Colorado legislature Democrats:

The bill would also prohibit the possession of instructions and the sale or distribution of instructions on how to use a three-dimensional printer to create a firearm or a firearm component. HB26-1144 would not apply to federally licensed firearms manufacturers.

Why not prohibit having the knowledge of how to machine he parts on a conventional mill? Prepare to mail STL files for M16 lowers to members of the legislature after this passes.

My Email Problem Seems to That Thunderbird No Longer Works

 Outlook sends but I cannot get it to read from my IMAP server. There are days that I feel so stupid.

Outlook is now sending and reading. I hate Outlook.

Thunderbird on two different PCs is refusing to send and sometimes refusing to read.

It appears that Thunderbird is unable to open SMTP connections. CoPilot has taken me down multiple rabbit holes without success. 

This is beginning to look like Thunderbird has just stopped working.

I may need to just use webmail or my Android.

Thunderbird is sending the emails because they appear in my Sent folder at webmail.  They just get deleted before inbox.

It appears that my IP has been blacklisted.  Here. And here. And here. I think someone on my ISP was doing bad things and all of us were blacklisted.

Web Host Service Recommendations?

 Hostrocket has no idea how to get my outgoing emails working. This is frustrating. I have been hosting my webpage and email with them a couple decades.

Projection As the Best Way to Understand Progressive Thought

 5/21/25 Columbia Journalism Review:

Wesley Lowery—the winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award, and whose work in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, chronicled the organizing power of Black Lives Matter—is, at thirty-four, one of the most recognized journalists in America. He has reported for the Washington Post and CBS News. He is the author of two books: They Can’t Kill Us All (2016), about unarmed Black men killed by police, and American Whitelash (2023), a history of violent white resistance to people of color. Among young reporters, he is perhaps best known for questioning traditional journalistic objectivity, noting its failures to reckon with racism.

But for some women in journalism, his standing is more complicated. Imani Moise, a Wall Street Journal reporter, remembers that when she met up with him at a bar, in December of 2018, for what she thought would be a professional conversation, he’d ordered her a cocktail before she arrived. Olivia Messer—a journalist who is now the editor in chief of the Barbed Wire, an independent outlet focused on Texas—recalled that, in January of 2020, at a happy hour with Lowery, he was ready with more alcohol every time she returned to the table. In the spring of 2022, after two drinks, a journalist with whom Lowery matched on Bumble said that she had reached her limit, and he entreated her to get a third. (This journalist spoke on the condition of anonymity, because even a first name would make her easily identifiable, and she feared how her family would react.) A writer and researcher noticed that, in February of 2024, when she and Lowery went to a bar, he had a drink waiting for her whenever she got up to use the bathroom. (This woman, too, did not want to be named, because of the toll she said the experience has taken on her mental health.) In each case, these women wound up leaving with Lowery, who they said then sexually assaulted  them.

"I Will Unleash Angry Kittens On You": No, Not an SNL or Monty Python Skit

2/20/26 TWZ:

A group of Block 52 F-16CJ Vipers belonging to the South Carolina Air National Guard was recently spotted heading east across the Atlantic as part of a huge build-up of U.S. forces ahead of potential strikes on Iran. Each of the Vipers was notably seen carrying an Angry Kitten pod, a new electronic warfare system that helps defend against anti-air threats, and that may now be headed for its first use in real combat. Angry Kitten also has a very unique genesis, which we will dive into in a moment. These particular F-16s are primarily tasked with the Wild Weasel mission and are optimized for neutralizing enemy air defenses, something that would be crucial in any future operation aimed at the regime in Tehran. They can fulfill many other types of missions, as well.

The 12 F-16CJs arrived at Lajes on the island of Terceira in the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago in the mid-Atlantic, on February 17 and left the next day. The Vipers are readily identifiable as ones assigned to the South Carolina Air National Guard’s 169th Fighter Wing by the “South Carolina” emblazoned on many of their tails, as well as distinctive markings reflecting the wing’s nickname, the “Swamp Foxes.” They were accompanied by at least one KC-46A Pegasus tanker. A substantial U.S. Air Force tanker force is now also forward-deployed in Lajes to support the ongoing build-up.

They Chose Poorly: I Hope They Do Better Next Time

2/21/26 Wall Street Journal:

 Months before Jesse Van Rootselaar became the suspect in the mass shooting that devastated a rural town in British Columbia, Canada, OpenAI considered alerting law enforcement about her interactions with its ChatGPT chatbot, the company said.

While using ChatGPT last June, Van Rootselaar described scenarios involving gun violence over the course of several days, according to people familiar with the matter.

Her posts, flagged by an automated review system, alarmed employees at OpenAI. Internally, about a dozen staffers debated whether to take action on Van Rootselaar’s posts. Some employees interpreted Van Rootselaar’s writings as an indication of potential real-world violence, and urged leaders to alert Canadian law enforcement about her behavior, the people familiar with the matter said. 

OpenAI leaders ultimately decided not to contact authorities.

A spokeswoman for OpenAI said the company banned Van Rootselaar’s account but determined that her activity didn’t meet the criteria for reporting to law enforcement, which would have required that it constituted a credible and imminent risk of serious physical harm to others.

I would not want the Department of Pre-Crime making decisions about gun rights, but certainly a mental evaluation could be justified. 

When NPR Reports It...

2/21/26 NPR:

Researchers analyzed health data on 460,000 teenagers in the Kaiser Permanente Health System in Northern California. The teens were followed until they were 25 years old. The data included annual screenings for substance use and any mental health diagnoses from the health records. Researchers excluded the adolescents who had symptoms of mental illnesses before using cannabis.

"We looked at kids using cannabis before they had any evidence of these psychiatric conditions and then followed them to understand if they were more likely or less likely to develop them," says Dr. Lynn Silver, a pediatrician and researcher at the Public Health Institute, and an author of the new study.

They found that the teens who reported using cannabis in the past year were at a higher risk of being diagnosed with several mental health conditions a few years later, compared to teens who didn't use cannabis.

Teens who reported using cannabis had twice the risk of developing two serious mental illnesses: bipolar, which manifests as alternating episodes of depression and mania, and psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia which involve a break with reality.

Now, only a small fraction — nearly 4,000 — of all teens in the study were diagnosed with each of these two disorders. Both bipolar and psychotic disorders are among the most serious and disabling of mental illnesses....

Silver points out these illnesses are expensive to treat and come at a high cost to society. The U.S. cannabis market is an industry with a value in the tens-of-billions — but the societal cost of schizophrenia has been calculated to be $350 billion a year. 

The Christchurch study also controlled for prodomal symptoms of mental illness (was this person showing signs that this was there first?) as well. While only "a small fraction" became mentally ill, these illnesses, especially schizophrenia, are terribly destructive to a society, along with the afflicted individuals. Hence, George Soros' funding of legalizing marijuana.

I Have Been Sending Emails From firstname @ firstnamelastname.com Which Do Not Seem to be Arriving

 If I have been unresponsive to an email, this is why.

My Wife Thought the Thumbscrews on the Wide Angle Finderscope Were Too Long

It looks much better now.

And you can see the packaging from Thumbscrew Depot (a US maker with a very narrow niche name).

More Evidence Fact-Checkers Are Statistically Ignorant

 2/20/26 Crime Prevention Research Center:

A widely cited February 2024 report by Politifact claimed: “No evidence of rising LGBTQ+ violent extremism or ‘trans terrorism.” A follow report by them in September 2025 that examined both the FBI’s definition of active shooting attacks and the notion of mass shootings concluded: “Are trans people ‘statistically’ more prone to commit gun violence? Data shows a different picture.” It looked at the period from 2018 to 2024 that we examine here.

Unfortunately, these and similar claims make a basic error: they look only at the share of attacks committed by transgender individuals and fail to adjust for transgender individuals’ share of the population. That is an obvious statistical mistake. If a group makes up just 1 percent of the population but commits 10 percent of the attacks, no one would dismiss that disparity simply because the group accounts for “only” 10 percent of active shooting attacks.

Excel and Access Do Not Play Well Together

I have been working on a spreadsheet that does some data analysis on what the antigunners now call "high-fatality mass shootings" (6 or more killed in one incident). Their expert submitted a declaration that plotted the number of incidents and deaths since 1974.  It was a scarily rising line but not adjusted for population growth (which was pretty substantial)  i have been using the data from my mass murder database to extend high-fatality mass shootings back to 1891. Adjusted for population growth, the trend lines for both incidents and dead slightly declined 1891-2023. 

This involves Excel querying the database and a bit of processing of data. I already had a spreadsheet that did this, but it was not entirely my work and if called to testify about the methodology, I might have had to admit that I was not as sure as I would like, so I am recreating it.

This has been a booger to do.  I have been Microsoft CoPilot to help me and I am glad that I did. There are so many aspects of the interaction that are error-prone as even CoPilot admits that i would likely never have gotten as far as I have. At least it is something that I understand, but I find the nature of its failings overwhelming. 

Yes, if a field contains 1890 is formatted as text not number, i can see why VLOOOKUP might be unable to use it to do a numeric match. The obvious solution would be for VLOOKUP to be smart enough recognize and make the conversion.

Worse, 1891 converted to Number formatted cell apparently automatically converts to floating point, so VLOOKUP does recognize that the lookup of an integer 1891 should match 1891.00000.

The way that Excel does Access queries is also stupid. If you change the query in Access and refresh the query, it does not run the query against the named query but refuses a cached copy of the SQL from the last time. Fixing this is not as simple as saying to clear the cache or just making a fresh call to Access with that named query. What a mess.

Property Liens

This was one of the scams by the Freemen, a check fraud scam with pretensions of antigovernment political sect some years back.  They would file property liens alleging unpaid bills against...it seemed anybody they wanted to harrass.

So this 2/14/26 New York Post article about someone filing hundreds of millions in property liens for cleaning and financial services against Benedict Canyon homes surprised me not much except for the scale of the chutzpah.  The person filing the liens is a "life coach" who speaks very broken English.

Perhaps she needs an ICE visit.  

We Rescued a Chicken

A Polish White Crested which looks like a visit to the hairdresser went badly. It was in the field in front of our house driving our dogs nuts. (They like chicken even though it am sure that though I am sure they do not connect sautéed chicken Breast with that silly bird outside the fence.)

It was getting cold and the chicken probably could not call Uber. Rhonda knew of a house that had this particular breed so we drove it over there, where disclaimed knowledge of it, but happily put in the branches of a tree with the other chickens. 

As Rhonda was getting out of the car, the chicken thanked us by laying an egg. It went into an omelet this morning. 

Free AI Reputed to be Inferior to Paid AI

 This article asserts that the paid versions of AI are far superior to the free versions and the speed of improvement is accelerating:

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I'll tell the AI: "I want to build this app. Here's what it should do, here's roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it." And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn't like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it's satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: "It's ready for you to test." And when I test it, it's usually perfect....

How fast this is actually moving

Let me make the pace of improvement concrete, because I think this is the part that's hardest to believe if you're not watching it closely.

In 2022, AI couldn't do basic arithmetic reliably. It would confidently tell you that 7 × 8 = 54.

By 2023, it could pass the bar exam.

By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science.

By late 2025, some of the best engineers in the world said they had handed over most of their coding work to AI.

On February 5th, 2026, new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era.

If you haven't tried AI in the last few months, what exists today would be unrecognizable to you....

What you should actually do

I'm not writing this to make you feel helpless. I'm writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.

Start using AI seriously, not just as a search engine. Sign up for the paid version of Claude or ChatGPT. It's $20 a month. But two things matter right away. First: make sure you're using the best model available, not just the default. These apps often default to a faster, dumber model. Dig into the settings or the model picker and select the most capable option. Right now that's GPT-5.2 on ChatGPT or Claude Opus 4.6 on Claude, but it changes every couple of months. If you want to stay current on which model is best at any given time, you can follow me on X (@mattshumer_). I test every major release and share what's actually worth using.

Second, and more important: don't just ask it quick questions. That's the mistake most people make. They treat it like Google and then wonder what the fuss is about. Instead, push it into your actual work. If you're a lawyer, feed it a contract and ask it to find every clause that could hurt your client. If you're in finance, give it a messy spreadsheet and ask it to build the model. If you're a manager, paste in your team's quarterly data and ask it to find the story. The people who are getting ahead aren't using AI casually. They're actively looking for ways to automate parts of their job that used to take hours. Start with the thing you spend the most time on and see what happens.

I am going to ask the subscription Grok to review a spreadsheet that I created to evaluate it for errors in assumptions and math. Yes, it found errors.  It is not perfect but it is getting me where the data is something that I can say that I understand.

Even SuperGrok has some resource limits and I reached them trying to get Excel charts to make sense. So I switched to CoPilot figuring it would understand a Microsoft product. After several hours trying to get data that plots fine as a line chart to become an XY scatter plot because trendline is only valid with XY scatter plot even though Excel will let you add a trendline to a line chart. I do not see how anyone uses Excel charting without AI.

"That Thing That Never Happens is Now Happening Every Day"

Small Dead Animals exaggerates but still.  2/17/26 CTV News reports on a shooting at a Rhode Island hockey game that left three dead including the murderer:

"Goncalves identified the shooter as Robert Dorgan, who she said also went by the name Roberta Esposito and was born in 1969."

MT3 Arbor Question

I have a 13" Harbor Freight floor drill press which uses, I think, an MT3 arbor for the chuck. 

I also have a Tapmatic reversing tapping tool.  This is a marvelous tool. You lower the tap into the pilot hole and it slowly taps the threads. You release it and it reverses direction backing out of the hole. For most tapping operations it is a joy to use. I have only tapped relatively thin aluminum and sometimes fairly thick Delrin where it is elegant. It has a 1/2" shaft which fits in the 5/8" drill chuck and works just fine. There is supposedly an MT3 arbor that accepts a 1/2" shaft and likely is held in place by a nut or lock screw.

I have just put the 1/2" shaft in the drill chuck until now, but using an arbor reduces the vertical clearance required and may have better concentricity. Am I imagining such an adapter? I am not finding it on Amazon. 

When Their Lawyers Show They Do Not Know the Law Very Well

 I mentioned a few days ago, that California is suing a Florida company for distributing 3D printer files for firearms.  They filed the suit in San Francisco Superior Court. But they are suing citizens of Florida. U.S. Const., Art. III, sec. 2 provides that federal courts have jurisdiction in cases "between a State and Citizens of another State," because of Amendment 12 (1795). This matters why? Where are the defendants more likely to get a friendly judge and jury. They are moving the suit to Middle District of Florida federal court.

Please Explain Why This is Derogatory

In 2015, I quoted a Washington Post story about rising death rates among whites and I was just notified that ads could not appear there because it was derogatory. To who?

Stories That Are Heart-Warming to Engineers Everywhere

The video was so heart-warming that I did some searching to verify the story.

Mass Murders That Make No Sense

 Carlinville, Ill. (1968)

12/18/1968: The public welfare office was the scene of a planned family reunion party. The father of ten, 35, brought two pistols, shot to death his wife, a caseworker at whom he had shot some months before, and two other workers at the agency. He also wounded four of the seven children at the planned party. The murderer then went to his brother’s house and confessed his crime. While waiting for police, he left and shot himself to death.

Category: public

Suicide: yes

Cause: unknown

Weapon: pistol[1]

---

[1] "Father Of Broken Family Kills Wife, 3 Others, Self," [Brownsville, Tex.] Brownsville Herald, Dec. 19, 1968, 10.

If there was no prospect of reunion, this might have a sad logic to it. But this was a family reuniting. There are no indications that he had a mental illness. People do the dumbest things.

Lost History

When I think of black militants in the 1960s, I think Black Panthers.  Imagine my surprise at how the Boston police characterized this group.

Boston, Mass. (1968)

11/13/1968: Three men forced their way into the offices of a black civil rights group, described by police as “a responsible militant,” yelling, “Where’s the money?” and shot to death the blind director and two other officials. They also wounded two others. It does not appear that there was any money.

Category: public

Suicide: no

Cause: robbery

Weapon: firearm[1]

---

[1] "Boston Civil Rights Group Founder Slain," [Longview, Wash.] Longview Daily News, Nov. 13, 1968, 1.

And yes, militants. They had a group with walkie-talkies acting as buffer between blacks and police.

If Godzilla Owned a Machine Shop

 I have a benchtop lathe:

Here is a big lathe:

Entertaining Explanation for Why Coal is Not Going Away

 And particularly why China, India, and Indonesia are not giving It up. Listen carefully while Mother Earth and Greta Thunberg cry. Hint: where we buy our products just exports coal burning.

Wide Angle Finderscope Complete

I still to need to touch up the paint.  I am waiting for some glossy white touchup paint.  The thumbscrews are longer than they need to be. I have ordered 3/8" and 1/2" long versions to replace them.  The battle to get the helical focuser is complete.  

In case you are unfamiliar with helical focuser, they provide a way to get very precise focus. They have a very limited range, but that is why it is inserted in that extension tube which provides coarse focus.  I am expecting a clear sky tonight for faintness of star checking. 

This has the Svbony 25mm Plossl eyepiece.   It is a beautiful 48 degree appparent field of view eyepiece.  I am expecting an 8 degree field of view.

I needed a dustcap at the front. That thing at the end is threaded to fit on the tube.  I saw that at Home Depot and decided that was better than the usual crummy dustcaps.

We had a rare clear night. Fifth magnitude stars immediately above Orion's belt are clearly visible even with my not night-adapted eyes.  I suspect this probably takes me down to magnitude 6 which was my goal 

When You've Lost the Atlantic

2/12/26 The Atlantic admits that the argument for transgender mutilation has collapsed, pointing out the ACLU's defense of child sexual mutilation before the Court admitted that there was no evidence this barbarism reduced suicide, only "suicidal thoughts."

Elon Musk's Sense of Humor is Fully Nerd

He responded to this picture:

With:

"Still kinda hot tbh."

My Fingers Are Grateful

I bought a parting tool for the lathe.  This is a very sharp thin blade that mounts on the cross-slide for cutting off pieces of the victim at precise locations. 

In the past, if i need to cut a small amount off of a tube, I had to either hold the tube closer to the blade than I preferred or if the amount was small enough, use the lathe to slowly plane off a few thousandths of an inch, again and again.

In this case, I needed to remove 1.85" from the PVC tube.  It was so elegant. 

Why I Think The World-Shattering Nature of AI is Hype

This is not the first time a new technology has appeared with the fear that existing workers will soon be unemployed in vast numbers.  Remember that in 1790, 98%+ of Americans worked on farms. Yet we do not have a 98% unemployment rate.

The development of machine tools and other elements of the Industrial Revolution did not cause mass unemployment. Instead, there was something called "de-skilling." What had been highly skilled craftsmen were replaced by lesser skilled operatives using mills, lathes, and similar tools to mass produce identical parts that other lesser skilled workers assembled into clocks, guns, then eventually cars, aircraft, and houses. All these less skilled workers were paid far better than their craftsmen predecessors because the highly efficient factories were so profitable that employers could afford to pay high wages to attract workers.

How many Americans in 1790 owned a click or a watch.  Far fewer than today.  None could own modern marvels such as cars, revolvers, semiautomatic rifles, or dishwashers. Yes, none of those existed in 1790. That is my point. Each step forward created unimaginable wealth and creativity that allowed for new technologies and jobs to go with them. 

There are jobs that AI will destroy, the equivalent of individual flintlock rifle makers. Such makers continue to work into the mid-1800s. What they did was obsolete but they soldiered on and retired. I doubt many young men in 1840 looked for a chance to apprentice to one of these old-fashioned craftsmen,'who retired or died.

More Evidence AI Is Mostly Hype

2/10/26 Ars Technica:

Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year.

As others have observed, few companies from 1926 have survived 100 years without completely evaporating (e.g., Texaco) or defaulting on their bonds (GM).  How many tech companies of 2000 are anything like their former importance?  A few. Many others are either gone or of such limited importance as to be unrealistic payers of bond interest.

For You Materials Science Nerds

 Why 304 stainless steel is less corrosion resistant than you may assume:

And if, like me, you have ever wondered what distinguishes 304 from 18/8 stainless steel.

It Is Still in Need of Some Editing and Paint Touch-Up, But It Works

That is a 25mm eyepiece in it, not what I will use in it for the wide angle, high brightness finder.  

.

The tube needs to be shortened another inch to get more infocus distance for the helical focuser to go between extension tube and eyepiece. Then a little touch up paint on the PVC. I am pleased with the optical quality of what was a $15 objective lens. This has not received much of a test; chromatic aberration is more of an issue as magnification and brightness go up 

With the 25mm eyepiece, I get 6x, 7.5 degree field of view. The exit pupil is 10mm so roughly 75% of the light gathering capacity is lost going into a 5mm human pupil.  That is still more than three magnitude deeper into the sky than the naked eye.  I have no stars available for testing but used outdoors, the image is noticeably brighter than naked eye.

A couple possible choices of eyepiece for finder. The Svbony 25mm Plossl is cheap. It would give me 6x, but the Plossl design has a slightly wider apparent field of view, so i would get 8.2 degrees of sky. The Svbony 40mm Plossl would get me 3.8x and more than 10 degrees of sky. AstroMania 40mm is a bit wider so 12 degrees of sky. I am not sure that the extra field of view is really necessary and lower magnification means giving away light 

Cutting Off Oil to Cuba

Are they not on board with reducing greenhouse gases?

What AI Is Good For

Define the problem.

For a 6" diameter 6061 aluminum disc supported at three edges with a 20 pound weight at center how thick should it be?

After showing how it calculated it. Grok said 0.04" then said triple that to avoid any problems with the various ways to interpret support positions. This is really quite a bit thinner than I expected. I had planned on 1/8" thick for CFC.

Switching to Aluminum Has Some Advantages

I had planned to cut a 6" disc from CFC.  Aluminum disc's 6" diameter are readily available. 

FreeCAD Tutor

Grok has been helping me figure out how to replace CFC with aluminum tube with minimal weight increase. It appears that .5" OD .035" wall is slightly stiffer than the CFC tube that I now use for the axes. This lets me reuse my existing polar and declination housings, bearings, and drive gears.

I have been attempting to learn to use FreeCAD and no tutorial seems to get me over the first step of converting a two dimensional drawing into a 3D object.  I know at least one of you has admitted FreeCAD experience. I would be quite happy to pay someone to use Remote Desktop Connection and help me past this obstacle.

UPDATE: Just realized that I do not need to replace existing housing and axes  They are already cut 

Bad Bunny's Performance

 It was widely claimed that he was going to wear a dress.  I asked Grok:

The idea that Bad Bunny was going to wear a dress during his Super Bowl halftime show (at Super Bowl LX on February 8, 2026) originated as a rumor circulating online in late January 2026, shortly after his selection as the headliner was confirmed.

Reports from outlets like Radar Online (cited in various articles) claimed anonymous sources close to his team—including a stylist and a "pal"—said he planned to wear a dress as a bold statement honoring queer/LGBTQ+ icons from Puerto Rico or drag culture, with quotes like "He is 100 percent going to wear a dress. A political thunderbolt disguised as couture" and "The dress is already being sewn." This fueled speculation and backlash, particularly among conservative circles on social media, where it sparked boycott calls and tied into broader culture-war complaints about the performance.

The rumor gained traction through viral posts on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), including amplified claims that Bad Bunny himself said things like "I'm wearing the dress, if that bothers you… don’t watch." Some posts shared fabricated or satirical images (e.g., AI-generated ones from accounts like Qbanguy on Facebook showing him in a dress in provocative scenarios, later debunked by Snopes)....

The rumor appears to have stemmed from Bad Bunny's well-documented history of gender-fluid fashion (e.g., wearing skirts, dresses, or non-traditional outfits in videos, red carpets, and performances), combined with speculation about a provocative halftime statement amid his cultural significance as the first primarily Spanish-language headliner. It spread rapidly in politically polarized online spaces but was never confirmed by Bad Bunny or his team.

That this reported rumor was amplified by conservatives is no surprise. (I mean what would you expect the Colin Kaepernick league to do except offend their audience?) But where did Radar Online get this rumor? Many possible explanations:

 1. Someone with Bad Bunny floated this as a way to get publicity. (There is no such thing as bad publicity; people are talking about you.) Someone misunderstand an overheard conversation and filled it in based on previous clothing choices. "How will you be dressed?"

2. Someone just made it up. Reporters do that, especially when chasing the Almighty Clicks.