BeigeJournal

Life on a Young Planet : The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth, by Andrew H. Knoll. Princeton University Press, 2003.

This is a fantastic overview of Precambrian paleontology. It is highly readable, with enough detail to be really interesting to someone with an interest in the details without getting bogged down in stable isotope nomenclature or arcane disagreements in taxonomy. Instead, we read of the big, interesting disagreements in taxonomy, the people involved, and the remote locations where the important rocks are found. It’s all here, from the earliest traces of life to the Cambrian, as shown by microfossils, chemical and isotopic signals of life, and genetic analysis of modern organisms.

Joyriding : a practical manual for learning the fundamentals of masterful driving, by Kenneth L. Zuber. Helios Institute, 1998.

This is a book about driving, intended for beginning drivers but useful to all drivers. The author frequently emphasizes the joy of, as the subtitle says, masterful driving, as opposed to just steering and hoping for the best. It is perhaps a message more likely to resonate with young people than just safety and law.

As you’d expect, the book is filled with drawings illustrating proper and improper driving. There are many photographs, most of them featuring rather exotic automobiles, which I suppose adds visual appeal to the book.

Joyriding contains the clearest explanation of proper parallel parking I’ve seen, something sure to be of use to people like me who grew up in suburbs and never got any practice at it.

Overall, an excellent book.

I found these, if I remember correctly, at Linens ‘n Things.

They are used to help squeeze tubes such as are used to contain toothpaste or many lotions and creams. It was not obvious, just from looking at the package in the store, if this was a useful item or just more plastic junk. It turns out, though, that they actually work just like you would hope they would. Recommended.

I’ve been using BlogLines.com for a few weeks now and I’ve been very happy with it. It is very handy to have an indication of what’s been updated since the last time I’ve read it, and how many new entries there are. A click on whatever looks interesting brings up the RSS/atom/whatever feed, which in some cases is easier to read than the actual web site, and if not, a middle click on the blog name at the top for the entire site, or on an entry title for just that article, will bring up the web site in a new tab (using Firefox). Since Bloglines is a web service there is no issue with keeping different computers synchronized.

There are, of course, potential privacy issues with bloglines.com knowing what you read, although if you have much of your list publicized on the side of your blog it is hard to imagine how it could be a big issue. It is something to keep in mind, though. One also has to wonder what they are going to do in the future to make money. For now, though, it is a very nice service.

You can add BeigeJournal to your Bloglines subscription list with the following magic link:

Sea Kayaker’s Deep Trouble: True Stories and Their Lessons from Sea Kayaker Magazine by by Matt Broze, George Gronseth, and Christopher Cunningham. International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press, 1997.

This is a collection of accounts of sea kayaker’s bad days (terminally bad, in some cases) and the lessons we can learn from other’s mistakes. As a big believer in learning from the mistakes of others and an eager reader of accident reports of all types, as well as a novice kayaker, I found this book interesting and useful.

Several issues appear repeatedly in the reports, particularly failure to get weather information and failure to dress for immersion. We see that even people who are well prepared can get into trouble, but the accounts of their trouble read very differently from the accounts of the trouble people who set out hoping for the best get into when the best fails to happen. I am amazed at the conditions some people set out in without dry suits or wet suits. Wear your PFD is another lesson we can learn, because it is going to be very hard to put it on if you wait until conditions are so bad that you think maybe you’ll need it.

Signaling potential rescuers is a whole lot easier if you have signaling equipment on your person. This book predates the modern 406 MHz personal locator beacons, but clearly a lot of the people in trouble would have been much better off if they could have had one. Handheld marine VHF radios can also be very handy. You might want to read the directions for your flares before you have to use them at night in a storm.

On the whole, the lessons learned are not that surprising, but it is interesting to see how events unfold in real emergencies. Paddlers would do well to read this book and think about their own practices.

On the topic of spoilers, there is a great Dr. Fun cartoon about spoilers, or possibly cars.

I understand that brand names are commonly mentioned in popular songs, particularly hip-hop songs. Looking around my place of employment, I see some brands unlikely to be so mentioned:

• Applied Biosystems
• Tektronix
• Amersham
• Sigma-Aldrich
• Mallinckrodt

There are a lot of brands that I don’t recognize in the 2003 Brandstand list, so I guess obscurity works both ways.

I’m oddly fascinated by Gold Fever on the Outdoor Channel. Host Tom Massie spends a lot of time exploring, with camera crew, places that, as he constantly reminds us, are not really safe to explore, such as abandoned mines. He spends a lot of time in Alaska, as well, showing off the GPAA Alaska Expedition. I find it a bit more interesting than Prospecting America, which is mostly about more ordinary people engaged in recreational gold mining in less exotic locales.

There is certainly a bit of infomercial in both shows (a bit less so in Gold Fever), but they are far more interesting than a normal infomercial. The viewer can learn a lot about recreational mining from the shows. The first thing I learned, for example, is that there is such a thing as recreational mining.

One could say that stylistically there is a bit of C-SPAN in them, with the less exciting (that is, boring) bits left in rather than edited out. It is nice to see some TV where they will take the time to show what is actually happening rather than editing everything down to an incoherent minute-and-a-half plus car chase and explosion. They keep enough conversation going that even people shoveling dirt seems interesting, and, in their hands, gold panning is positively interesting. Though informal in style and, one imagines, low in budget, the technical quality is fine, with shots in focus, the camera stable, and clear audio. It isn’t home video,

The whole concept of recreational gold mining fascinates me. Now that technological progress has transformed work (for some of us) into an indoorsy thing, with lots of sitting and mouse-clicking, what was once backbreaking labor has become an outdoor recreational activity. It may seem odd, but since I think a sixty kilometer bike ride, a swim in chilly Lake Michigan, and then another sixty kilometer ride back home is fun, shoveling dirt into a sluice box really isn’t any stranger. It actually does sound like fun, kind-of. Maybe.

I received a piece of mail from Applied Biosystems informing me of their “Live Webinar!” Apparently, that’s a seminar on the Web. I think we need to admire the ABI marketing department for daring to consume the quantity of alcohol required to use a ‘word’ like “Webinar” repeatedly (always Capitalized) in their flier.

Apparently they did not invent the word. It seems to be in widespread use, though fortunately not, until now, among anyone I had contact with.

I tend to agree that “blog” in an ugly word, but compared to “webinar,” it’s poetry.

You might be thinking that I just converted normal color positives to gray scale in the Gimp, but these are black and white slides shot on Kodak T-MAX 100 and processed with the Kodak Direct Positive kit. The film is shot at 50 speed and reversal processed to give positive images made of silver. I shot and processed these back in 1997.

This is one of those scenes that looks best with a long exposure. This was on the shore of Lake Michigan in Milwaukee county.

This is one of those things that I find hard to understand. How did that shopping cart get to the Lake Michigan beach?

A tree’s nightmare.

As soon as I got a camera with a shutter that could be left open for a long time I became fascinated by low-light photography.

Speaking of antennas, I have some old photos, from 1999, taken by the Milwaukee River where the towers grow. I had forgotten that these were from so long ago. You can see that this tower was still under construction at the time.

Big hardware

I just discovered fybush.com, home of the Tower Site of the week. If you are a radio geek, you’ll love it. I do have some of my own photos of Phoenix, Arizona’s South Mountain, come to think of it:

It is quite a site.

73,
N9TNC

Last Saturday evening one of the occasional Milwaukee house filks took place in Barb’s basement. Barb now has heat in her basement, which is nice, particularly for those of use who are always cold, such as, for example, Barb.

Turnout was fairly large. Emory sang his latest creation, an amazing amalgamation of songs. We had singalongs. Guitars. A flute. Snack food. Backrubs. It was the usual fun time staying up late filking.

Thanks to Barb and Richard for hosting it.

There is an ad running on television currently for Crown Royal Whiskey in which a man walks into a bar and says something slightly garbled that sounds like, “Bumroll, on the rocks.” The bartender pours him a drink, and the olives in other people’s drinks all turn like little eyes to look longingly at the whiskey. Since it’s an ad for Crown Royal he presumably must actually be asking for a “Crown Royal on the rocks,” rather than a bumroll (a word with more than one definition), but somehow you’d think that after however many takes they shot they could have picked one in which the actor pronounced the name of the product clearly.

In the hallways of the basement of the Medical Education Building, where old junk goes to wait for its final disposition, we see an example of the old joke about throwing away a trash can. Several battered old cans have been sitting for some time, with signs stating, “This trash can is trash. Please take it away.” No one seems to be in a hurry to do so.

Via Dave Barry’s blog, and thanks to Mike Zlotnick, the world has now been alerted to Heather Firth’s Earth Erotica photography of rock formations and the like that just happen bear a striking resemblance to certain highly interesting portions of the human body. It’s really quite beautiful photography, and shows the wonder of erosion and human imagination working together.

Thanks to Philip Greenspun’s pointer to an MIT example, I’m now aware of James Howard Kunstler’s Eyesore of the Month. Now you are aware of it, too. Hilarious.

I recently bought some ghs corporation René Martinez’ GraphitALL guitar lube, which is intended to lubricate, among other things, the nut slots, to aid tuning by preventing the strings from binding. A tiny little bottle is just under $5, but a tiny bit goes a long, long way. Powdered graphite is apparently the traditional solution to this problem, but it is messy. This stuff is a white viscous liquid that is easy to apply without making a mess and which blends in with the traditional white colored nut.

It seems to work. For some reason my B string has always been sticky and hard to tune, but GraphitAll has greatly improved it and noticeably improved tuning of the other strings as well. So, assuming long-term use doesn’t cause guitar rot or or guitarist death, I recommend it.

Apparently cell phone ring tones is a large industry. My old phone just rang. My newer one has a few choices, some of them musical in the beeping tones category of music. Nowadays people have actual hi-fi (as they used to say) music. Which they pay extra for. On a continuing basis. I can’t quite understand paying for the ringing sound for your phone. I really don’t. Maybe some people would, but apparently large amounts of money are being spent on this. Probably by the same people who run up huge bills playing video games on their phones, using the tiny screen and little buttons. I mean, Project Blinkenlights games, sure, but not just lame games on the phone.

I just use my phone to talk. What do I say? Mostly I inform people that they have the wrong number.

Carroll Smith’s Nuts, Bolts and Fasteners and Plumbing Handbook by Carroll Smith. Motorbooks International, 1990.

I learned of this book from Kevin Kelly’s wonderful Cool Tools website. The title pretty well explains what the book is about. Carroll Smith was a race car builder, and so to some extent the book is race oriented, but anyone who uses fasteners for critical jobs will find the book informative. Quite a bit of the book ends up describing how things are done in aerospace or structural engineering, largely for the purpose of explaining how things are done when they really need to be done right and cost is not important. Smith frequently mentions the very expensive fasteners used on fighter aircraft or rockets to show what is possible even as he dismisses them as far too expensive and hard to obtain for race car use. Those of us who’ve heard a lot about the right way, the wrong way, and the FAA way might find his endless praise of the virtues of aerospace techniques a bit different from what we are used to hearing, but certainly most of the approved fastening methods are very safe and reliable even if sometimes awkward and expensive. Certainly more thought, attention, and money generally goes into aircraft fasteners than goes into what you see on bicycles or street cars, and we can learn a lot from that.

The book starts with a brief introduction to metallurgy to explain stress and strain, elastic limits, yield points, stress raisers, fatigue and the like sufficiently for those not familiar with the basics to understand the rest of the book. Nuts and bolts are a major part of the book, of course, followed by traditional and blind rivets, quick-release fasteners, and flexible hoses and their connectors.

The book is written in a chatty, conversational style. There is always the risk of going to far when using that sort of style, and perhaps he did go a tiny bit too far, but overall I found it very engaging and readable. It is certainly much more fun to read than the written by committee style often found in technical material. Praise for good products and scorn for bad is abundant. There are a great many photographs, drawings, graphs, and tables. At times it would be helpful if the figures were numbered so that the text could refer to them specifically rather than leaving the reader to hunt around for the figure being discussed in the text.

This is a fantastic guide to how and why do things right when bolting, riveting, or plumbing. Highly recommended.

Yesterday, on 03-01, I received an e-mail that began:

When you signed up for the Members Only Web site, you asked us to remind you by e-mail when your membership was about to expire. That time is coming. Our records indicate that your ARRL membership will expire on Jun 30, 2004, and in about a week we will prepare a renewal notice to send you in the mail.

Hmmmm. My membership is about to expire—in 121 days, or one-third of a year. I’m sure happy that they alerted me to this matter urgently requiring my attention.

Oddly, Consumer’s Union seems to be the very worst offender. They start begging for renewals the moment they get the check. Renew now, only 11.5 months left.