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2013 December 30-31
Old Year's Day
That's what I call December 31: Old Year's Day.
For us, 2013 was a year of subtraction. Much of the familiar world in which
we lived a year earlier is no longer with us. I retired from the University of
Georgia to do consulting. Melody's father died. My sister got divorced and
remarried. Our dog, Babbage, went blind suddenly.
On a more mundane level, our eye doctor and old friend, Jim Dillard,
retired and we have to find a new eye doctor. Our primary physician is on
extended sick leave but is planning to come back...
Still, we end the year with much to be thankful for. My consulting business
is going well, and I'm enjoying the lighter workload and higher income compared
to academia. Melody and I get to spend a lot of time together. She is preparing
for hip surgery, which will probably happen in the next couple of months.
Meanwhile, I am slowly getting over costochondritis (rib inflammation), which
became severe in October 2012 and improved only slowly until I stopped taking
pravastatin (a cholesterol-lowering drug) in September 2013. (I would not tell
everyone else to stop taking statins. Few people get muscle damage from them,
and they can lower your risk of a heart attack dramatically. But I was one of the
unlucky ones, suffering substantial muscle damage without realizing it.)
Here's to a better 2014! In the meantime, I'm going to write up two topics I had
had in mind for some time.
In 1974, as an undergraduate, I went to Québec with a student group. One of the
first things I noticed was that the Québecois had a kind of popular music all their own,
rather melodious, pleasant-sounding songs, not unlike folk music. Twenty years later, the rest of the world
came to know this kind of music via Céline Dion. But in 1974 it was provincial, literally.
I went into a Woolworth's and tried to ask someone to recommend a record or two that I
could buy. At the time I didn't know any useful amount of French. After a clumsy
conversation with a shopgirl about my own age, in no particular language, I emerged with
a vinyl record of Gilles Vigneault (who was popular as much for political as for musical reasons).
Of course, I wouldn't know what it sounded like
until I got home to Georgia and could play the record.
I came home and, in the next couple of years, learned a good bit of French and set out
to figure out what he was singing about. One song, "Le voyageur sédentaire" ("The armchair
traveler"), contained the puzzling lines:
Le voyageur se dit souvent
Que le (?) serai(ent?) jamais enfants
Literally, "The traveler often tells himself that the (???) would never be children."
Not quite right.
Fast-forward to 2013. We have Wikipedia and online lyrics and I've solved the mystery.
He was actually singing:
Le voyageur se dit souvent,
"Que laisserai-je à mes enfants?"
"The traveler often says to himself, 'What will I leave to my children?'"
Straightforward, now that it's decoded. French has so many words that sound alike
or nearly alike that it lends itself all too easily to mondegreens.
And there was I, outwitted once again by the impenetrable French language.
I hope I'm right in thinking I'm not a busybody, know-it-all, or what the Germans call a Besserwisser.
By that I mean I do not go around imagining that I know how other people should be living their lives
and I just need to tell them (to their faces or behind their backs).
If you want opinions about how you're raising your children, managing your money, decorating your house,
or dressing yourself,
go somewhere else. I don't spend my time thinking about these things.
The only exceptions are: (1) a specialized topic that I actually know something about, such as where
to go to graduate school in linguistics (in which case I'll give you advice if you ask for it);
(2) an obvious moral or legal failure (in that case I'll address the problem). In neither case will
I talk about you behind your back and say what you "really ought" to be doing.
I don't imagine that everybody's mind works like my own, or that they have the same likes,
dislikes, and tastes. Nor do I imagine that my own choices are the only rationally defensible ones.
For example, if you happen to need exactly the same kind of car as I do, but you chose a
Honda CR-V instead of a Ford Escape, I won't hold it against you. The two are very close equivalents
for most purposes. I don't cling with blind loyalty to the particular choices I made.
Most of all, I don't want to give people unsolicited advice when I know that I don't know all the
relevant facts. I hear other people doing this all the time, and it is often comically obvious
how little they know.
A day of electricianry (a word that ought to exist if it doesn't already) — or,
as Melody and I sometimes also call it, elec-trickery. I did two fairly major
projects, one planned and one unplanned.
The planned one was to replace bulbs in four of our kitchen overhead lights (which are
48-inch fluorescents above a plastic suspended ceiling) and convert one of them to
an electronic ballast. I thought two were due for conversion, but one turned out to
have been done and not labeled as such a few years ago, so I didn't have as much to
do as I thought.
The unplanned one had to do with fixing the DSL, after dinner.
For months, our Internet connection has been just a bit unreliable
and we've done things like replace the modem and run all kinds of tests.
The problem wasn't very reproducible.
This evening (Dec. 28) it suddenly got worse; we would lose our Internet
connection every few minutes, and in addition, there was a lot of noise
on the (voice, POTS) telephone line.
Potentially big headache — this could be caused by a defect in any piece of telephone
equipment in the house, or the wiring out in the yard.
My next move was to go to the network interface (the place under the house where
Bellsouth's wiring joins ours) and look around. I was thinking I'd plug a telephone
directly into that and see how it sounded.
Well... at the slightest touch, our plug fell out of the socket (which was also
technically ours, connected to Bellsouth's wire).
Problem diagnosed. That plug had probably been getting gradually looser for years.
Next step: Build a dual outlet RJ-14 network interface out of parts
already on hand. Fortunately I have a well-stocked workshop, and exactly what
I needed was there. In fact, I built a better one than we had before.
After crawling around under the house for a bit, I got the
new network inferface installed. I also replaced the DSL filter (which is upstream
of all the house telephone wiring; the DSL modem has a separate wire). It wasn't
defective, but I figured it had been absorbing surges, humidity, and whatnot for
about fifteen years and deserved a dignified retirement.
Today's electrical work left me with four 48-inch fluorescent tubes to dispose of safely.
Because they contain mercury, I didn't want to put them in the garbage.
So I explored my options. Home Depot (nearby) doesn't take them, although it does take
CFL bulbs and batteries. Athens-Clarke County offers free, safe disposal if I will
carry them to the solid waste facility, 6 miles away, during business hours.
Should I spend half an hour or more and drive 12 miles to take them to the county facility?
It's easy to say, "Obviously, yes." But I think that is the wrong answer.
Driving 12 miles would itself impose a burden on the environment, as well as danger to
human life (small, but appreciable, whenever we use an automobile).
And that might well be more of a burden than the mercury would have been.
I looked it up, and we're talking about 22 milligrams of mercury per bulb.
That means it would take about 50 bulbs to equal one old thermometer.
These new-style, low-mercury bulbs are legal to put in landfills in most states,
including this one. That doesn't mean I advocate it, but it's legal.
So if I were to drive the 12 miles, it would be as a sacrifice to the Earth Goddess,
to show that I don't mind wasting time, money, and energy, and even polluting the
environment, to show that I can Make A Sacrifice For Mother Earth.
I balk at that. I'm a big recycler — my household outputs more recyclables
than garbage every week — but the infrastructure has to meet me halfway, or
at least a quarter of the way. About recycling I'm inclined to say what Ayn Rand
would probably have said: If you want it to happen, make it part of the economy.
If you can't do that, you've missed something important about costs versus benefits.
It is often said that environmental stewardship raises impossible moral dilemmas.
I would reply: This isn't impossible morality, it's straightforward economics.
We're talking about trade-offs, harms versus benefits, and that's what economics is
all about.
Putting it another way, the earth's ability to handle pollution is a finite resource,
and the allocation of finite resources is economics.
The earth does have some ability to handle pollution. The dose makes the poison,
and there really are levels of pollutants low enough to have no biological effect.
And remember, all that mercury was in the earth somewhere before it was mined — it's
not a man-made element.
Pollution is a problem in the first place because people can do it without paying the
cost. The impose the costs on other unwilling people (present or future). Economists
call this an externality. It's somewhat like overuse of a man-made resource,
such as clogging up a highway.
All pollution ought to be taxed. Anyone who can easily reduce pollution should be
able to save money by doing so. Present pollution laws are like speed limits; they
give you no incentive to go below the limit. That's what we need to change.
I'm annoyed at the way some environmentalists fail to think quantitatively.
They get fixated on one hazard — typically something that arouses fear
of the unknown, such as radioactivity or unfamiliar chemicals — and want
it totally eliminated at all costs. Their fear of their chosen hazard often
borders upon superstition. Meanwhile, big hazards, such as drunk drivers or
poorly designed roads, are neglected.
I mentioned the notion of sacrificing to the Earth Goddess, as if suffering inconvenience
for the sake of Mother Earth
were ipso facto meritorious. That's a point at which environmentalism becomes,
for some people, a substitute for religion. Allied to this is the curious notion that
Homo sapiens, alone of all species, has no right to impose any load on
the environment — perhaps because we're "out of harmony with nature." That, to me,
is an extremely crude, pagan-like substitute for the Judeo-Christian doctrine of
original sin.
The rest of the story: Earth911.com told me falsely that Batteries Plus would take
the bulbs for safe disposal. They didn't, but they told me Lowe's would take them, which
turned out to be true. It pleases me that I can dispose of fluorescent tubes safely in the
course of normal shopping, rather than by having to make a sacrificial journey to a
special facility.
Today's Notebook entry is for my fellow Christians.
Those of you who came here for the astrophotography or even the occasional ventures
into politics or economics are welcome to skip it.
Also, I should warn everyone that in order to describe a problem adequately,
I have to exaggerate it. You may well think that I think things are worse than they are.
I consider myself an
evangelical
Christian. That means I think a personal commitment to Christ is vital,
the Bible is authoritative, and church organization is flexible — valid churches
don't have to be part of a single hierarchy. I belong to a Baptist church; Baptists are
largely evangelical in their approach to things.
What I want to do is point out a broad weakness in evangelical culture.
We seem to be allergic to great art, music, and literature.
I contend that the weakness extends further, and that we are actually
weak on worship. We are also infected with inverse snobbery.
I'll explain this in the next few paragraphs.
My old friend Don Williams has written an essay called "Why Evangelicals Can't Write"
(in this book).
He points out that the Catholics have Flannery O'Connor,
the Anglicans have T. S. Eliot, etc., etc., but we evangelicals "get Left
Behind" (alluding to a series of novels which, even if you like their eschatology,
can hardly be considered more than popular fiction).
I can add that in some evangelical churches there seems to be a complete ban on great music — no Bach,
no Palestrina, hardly anything composed before 1970 — and when I went to an evangelical bookstore
two weeks ago, I was struck by the absence of first-rate, or even traditional, visual art. Everything was
cartoon-like, and the only "big name" artist represented there was Thomas Kinkade.
Dr. Williams says that in order to foster great literature, art, or music, a Christian community needs three things:
a Christian worldview, a theology of art, and a sense of mystery (divine immanence and transcendence).
Evangelicals typically have only the first of these, and (I would argue) they are often weak on it:
evangelicals often treat the Gospel as a set of beliefs that you just need to graft onto a basically
godless worldview, and then you're OK, resulting in an overall outlook that runs far too close
to atheism.
As for theology of art, that's something Catholic philosophers have (and Eastern Orthodox theology is
positively immersed in) but evangelicals neglect.
But "sense of mystery" is the big one. I think part of the reason evangelicals are weak on art, music,
and literature, is that (strange to say) we are often very weak on worship.
That seems strange to say, since we put such a high value on churchgoing. But we use our church services
almost entirely for instruction — evangelization of outsiders and practical training of insiders —
and we don't pause to contemplate the immanence and transcendence of God.
We often have an excessively lightweight view of the Sacraments — we are so eager to get away from
Roman Catholicism that we find ourselves fleeing from ordinances instituted by Jesus Christ.
We sing about our own emotions rather than about the glory of the Almighty.
When we have musicians performing, we often turn the service into an Ed Sullivan show, pausing to
applaud each act.
And we seem to forget what worship is. Instead of an orderly, humble,
dignified approach to God, a church service becomes something like a Rotary Club meeting with a lecture.
We want sermons about practical topics ("Ten ways to improve your marriage") rather than fundamental
Christian doctrines.
(I want to emphasize that evangelization and practical instruction are important. But they are not the whole
point of a church service.)
So that's part of the problem. I think there are also two more problems: a tendency toward provincialism
and even inverse snobbery.
By provincialism I mean thinking that everyone who matters is a lot like ourselves, and God has never
been anywhere else, or at least it doesn't matter to us if He has. It reminds me of the way generation-gap kids
in the early 1970s (my contemporaries!) demanded that everything must be "relevant to My Generation." We want to
fit God into our suburban lifestyle and tastes and not care about anything He has done elsewhere in
space or time. We want to pretend that Christianity vanished at the end of the Apostolic Era and reappeared
in America in the 1950s, or maybe 1980s, and nothing in between matters. We demand that all art, music, and
literature must be made of things already familiar to us.
Provincialism is largely a manifestation of ignorance (possibly culpable ignorance) and laziness
("I don't want to bother with anything I'm not already familiar with"). Inverse snobbery is
something worse, especially because it is easily passed off as humility.
A snob, in the traditional sense, looks down on people and culture that he considers to be beneath him.
An inverse snob looks down on people and culture that he considers to be above him.
Inverse snobbery is a combination of the deadly sins of Pride ("I'm better than them") and Envy ("I hold it against
them that they have something I don't").
In church, inverse snobbery is often expressed as something like, "We're plain country people and we
don't need that fancy stuff." Or even a false doctrine: "God objects to people offering anything too
fancy." (Did God ask for a plain, unadorned tabernacle?)
It would indeed be a mistake to think that God can be bribed by "fancy" offerings,
or that He holds it against us if we can't perform classical music,
or that great art or music is a substitute for personal holiness — but can't it be an
expression of, or even a help toward, personal holiness, at least for those who are
equipped to appreciate it?
In fact, my experience is that "plain country people" (genuinely humble ones, not inverse snobs)
routinely are edified by great Christian art and music even if they lack all historical and
technical knowledge of it. It seems that everyone wants to hear great Christian music at Christmas; why not the
rest of the time? Does anyone really look at the Canterbury Cathedral window
and turn away because it's "too fancy"? In its own time it was designed to teach the Bible to
complete beginners. It is beautiful but not, in that sense, "highbrow."
I am not objecting to the presence of things that are completely accessible to beginners.
That is vital if the church is ever going to reach anyone.
Nor am I objecting to new (as well as old) music and art.
But we don't go to church just to be
entertained in a culture we are already familiar with. We go to connect with two thousand years
of accumulated Christian wisdom and to humbly approach God Himself.
Let's not leave God in the church building. We need to take our humble awareness of
immanent and transcendent God everywhere we go.
For Christmas, my family gave me, inter alia, Alister McGrath's biography
of C. S. Lewis. It is excellent. As you know, I have been interested
in Lewis for a long time, long before Narnia became his best-known
achievement.
The author, Alister McGrath, is a prominent evangelical Christian
theologian and writer, and in this book he presents an impressive amount of new information and
critical thinking. Instead of just adding to what is already being said about Lewis, he did his own research,
from the ground up, and in the process, straightened out some minor chronological puzzles.
He also presented a lot of background information that would otherwise be hard to come by, especially
for people outside the Oxford and Cambridge milieu. (One detail that had eluded me was that Lewis's
"triple first" was not what we Americans would call a triple major; his first degree, in Humane Letters,
had two final examinations, so to get a triple first, he only added one more degree, in English.)
More importantly, McGrath depicts Lewis "warts and all," but without aiming to discredit him.
Perhaps for the first time, we get a biography that is neither adulatory nor hostile.
McGrath appreciates Lewis's formidable achievements but clearly points out his deficiencies —
ranging from theological arguments that don't quite hold up to expert scrutiny, all the way
to Lewis's odd relationships with women.
We didn't have time to set up a Christmas tree this year, so
Sharon's dolls
rose to the occasion and decorated a rosemary bush for us.
I should add that we planned a low-key Christmas because we expected
Melody to be in the hospital right about now; she's awaiting hip surgery,
but it has been postponed slightly. This is good news, not bad, because
it will mean the end of a painful problem that has been plaguing her
for years.
We wish you and yours a blessed Christmas and a prosperous New Year!
Below, I humbly present my last two Ektachrome astrophotographs, a 20-minute
exposure of Sagittarius and a 25-minute exposure of Cygnus, taken at Deerlick
on October 1 using a Canon EOS 10S and Canon 50/1.8 lens (wide open) on an
iOptron SkyTracker. Both were scanned with a Nikon LS-30 scanner and were adjusted
and sharpened digitally.
You can see various nebulae, but the picture quality is nowhere near the
eighteen megapixels of the Canon 60Da DSLR; in fact, there is probably less
than one megapixel of true image quality in each of these.
Film astrophotography was fun, but we live in a different era now.
Finally, here's the very last Ektachrome slide I ever took, a self-portrait
in late October. It is one of the few Ektachrome slides anyone will ever take with the new
Canon "pancake" lens, which came on the market after Ektachrome was discontinued.
The picture has been adjusted and flipped (mirrored) digitally.
DSLR spectral response compared to Ektachrome E100G
I published part of this back in October, but here's the picture you're really waiting for.
How does the late lamented Kodak Ektachrome film — known to be very good for photographing
nebulae — compare to ordinary and astronomy-modified DSLRs?
These pictures were taken by aiming a Project STAR spectrometer at a white
piece of paper illuminated by a tungsten-halogen bulb.
The Ektachrome image isn't as sharp as I'd like, but, alas, there is
no way to re-do it; Ektachrome is no longer made.
Observations:
At hydrogen-alpha (656 nm), Ektachrome is in between the modified and
unmodified DSLRs. Data sheets indicate, actually, that Ektachrome is
strong at precisely that wavelength but does not extend appreciably past it.
The modified DSLR extends to 700 nm or so.
Ektachrome (like all color film) has gaps in its spectral response.
There is a gap around 590 nm, and another around 500 nm.
The latter corresponds to the blue-green color of comets that
shows up only with digital cameras.
Greens and purples to the right of about 420 nm in the picture
are reflections in the instrument.
Fuji slide film, as I understand it, does not have response extending
to 656 nm; nor do most black-and-white films.
My last two rolls of Ektachrome E100G were exposed in, respectively, my
Olympus OM-1 (a trusted friend from the 1970s) and my Canon EOS 10S (a 1990s
anachronism, a film camera that works like a digital camera).
This is the last astrophoto I took on Ektachrome with the Olympus.
It is a slightly cropped, digitally adjusted image from an
exposure of about 18 minutes with my Olympus 100-mm f/2.8 lens, wide open,
taken from my yard in Athens, Georgia, last March 8th.
How far we've come! This is, by present-day digital standards, not a
very good picture at all. Compare for example
this,
taken with the same lens!
I also took a few film images with the Canon 10S at Deerlick recently
and will be posting them soon.
I've just updated my
2004 notes
on astronomy and the Star of Bethlehem.
Click through if you're interested — and be sure
also read the 2007 sequel.
The bottom line is that there is no quick, simple astronomical identification
of the Star of Bethlehem.
That doesn't mean it didn't happen, only that we now have so little information that
we don't know much about it. We can't declare, "Oh, yes, it was the supernova of
3 B.C. that produced such-and-such a nebula," or even, "It was Comet So-and-so,
which reappeared in such-and-such a year." It may well have been something not
reconstructible, such as a nova (exploding star) or a one-time visit by a comet that
is otherwise unknown, or even a vision or mystical experience.
Most of you know already that I consider
young-earth creationism to be a mistake
which occasionally rises to the level of a heresy
in the hands of a few people who are more interested in leading
young-earth movements than in being good Christians.
Bottom line: I do not think God deceived us by creating false fossils of animals that never lived,
false light emissions from supernovae that never happened, etc.,
in order to "create with the appearance of age." I think that if you
accept such a proposition, you immediately find yourself holding a
very strange, non-Judeo-Christian theology.
Well... I thought of a good historical example of why Christians ought not to oppose
lines of scientific research that seem to contradict Christian doctrine
(the way some young-earthers seem to want to get rid of evolutionary biology).
A century and a half ago, astronomers were sure that the universe was
(or at least appeared) infinitely old, which contradicts (or at least fails
to support) Holy Scripture.
Fortunately, nobody managed to kill off astrophysics in the late 1800s.
If they had, the Big Bang would never have been discovered, nor eventually
confirmed by the discovery of microwave background radiation. We now have
confidence that the universe had a beginning, and that "Let there be light"
was a good description of what it looked like. This is not the last word,
of course; no scientific theory ever is; but if people had abandoned
astronomical research a century or so ago, it would never have been discovered
at all.
So what I tell young-earthers is that if you believe modern science is
completely on the wrong track (which I don't), you should want research to
continue, because that's the only thing that can be done about it. If a
scientific theory is wrong, the only way to find out is by pursuing it.
To do the opposite — to retreat in fear — makes it look as if
you are afraid of the truth, or, even worse, that you know that you're wrong
but don't want to face it. At the very least, if God wants to reveal something to
you through the Book of Nature, do you want Him to find you with your hands over
your eyes and ears?
My granddaughter, Mary Catherine Barrett, is now a baptized Eastern Orthodox Christian.
Here you see her studying iconography just before
her baptism, which took place today (December 21).
The title of this entry is a verse from
the New Testament in the original Greek: Ephesians 4:5, "One Lord, one faith, one baptism."
Photo by Charles G. Covington. Polaroid J66, Type 47 film.
I am now old enough to have distinct memories from half a century ago.
That is a frightening thought.
But half a century ago, the 1963-64 school term, was a very good, even
idyllic, time for me.
My parents had built their dream house diagonally opposite R. B. Wright
Elementary School in Moultrie, Georgia.
I started first grade, but then, within just a few weeks, was moved
to second grade, along with another student. The whole year was one of
the high points of my education, with plenty of interesting things to learn
and do. In fact, that's when I first became interested in linguistics,
by way of the spelling and pronunciation rules we were being taught as
part of "phonics."
It was the year of the Kennedy assassination, although they chose not
to tell us about it at school; the news was just breaking when it was
time for the second grade to get out, and the adults were not quite sure
of the facts yet.
Other things I remember include a classroom fish tank; French lessons from
Mme. Ball; someone passing around a British newspaper printed
on what seemed to be tissue paper (presumably the overseas edition
of the Manchester Guardian); learning about the X-15 high-altitude
jet; the flag going to half-mast for General MacArthur; and, most of all, lots of good
times with friends. The class was unusually friendly and cohesive.
As I recall, it was also small by 1960s standards, with about
26 students.
Amazingly, on Facebook I have reconnected with the teacher (Myrtle Lofton,
now 90 years old) and more than half a dozen of the students, many of whom
I would have had no trouble recognizing at sight — they look the same!
(Allowing for growth and maturity, of course.)
When the school year ended, my father got transferred to Valdosta (after just
one year in the dream house) and that was the last I saw of the old crowd.
In Valdosta, my parents built the same house again, on
Lake Drive. The move to Valdosta opened up some opportunities
for my father and me to pursue our interest in technology together; in general,
there was more of everything; but the school system didn't serve me as well,
and the community seemed less friendly. Tragedy struck just two years
after the move, in October 1966, when my father was
killed in the line of duty.
But back to my main point: What's it like to remember life 50 years ago?
Mainly that there was much less change in the past 50 years than in the 50 years before that.
In 1964, we didn't have the Internet or personal computers, but we definitely had
radio, TV, automobiles, air conditioning, telephones (not mobile!), and plenty of up-to-date
information about the world around us, and the expectation of going to college.
Apart from the lack of computers and cell phones,
the main change you'd notice if you suddenly went back to 1964 is that the details of the
cars and kitchen appliances were different. Also, personal finance worked a little
differently: credit cards were used only at gas stations, and you paid for major
purchases by writing a check on the spot, possibly using a pad of blank checks provided
by the merchant. Shopping had not totally moved out of "downtown," although there were
starting to be shopping centers (strips, not enclosed malls).
Contrast that with 50 years earlier. In 1914, neither of the World Wars had happened yet;
automobiles, radios, telephones, and college-educated people were scarce, and even indoor plumbing wasn't universal;
and architecture was totally different — no split-levels, ranch houses, or shopping
centers.
I'm glad to have been born when I was, brought up by a generation that was determined to treat
its children better than any children had ever been treated before. Yes, we were pampered.
I think it paid off. We grew up to create a society in which — for all its passing
difficulties — we want to treat everyone well, and we do not tell people that adversity
is an inevitable part of life. Our parents stared down the Great Depression and Hitler;
we, even the most conservative of us, have a determination to solve society's problems that
was unheard-of a century earlier.
I think that is hogwash. But suppose "affluenza" is real. Consider the consequences.
In effect, the court has agreed with the psychologist that he is a danger to others because he is mentally
incapable of handling the responsibilities of an ordinary citizen.
Doesn't that mean he should be locked away in an institution in order to
protect the rest of us? "Danger to oneself or others" is exactly the criterion
for doing that.
Be careful what you ask a court for. You may get it. And in this case, I hope he does.
(Our legal expert, who is my daughter Cathy, points out that because of the confidentiality
associated with juvenile cases, we may be hearing a very incomplete account of what happened.
It may be that the judge gave a light penalty for other reasons and didn't actually accept
the psychologist's claim. I hope more details come out as this is discussed publicly.)
To my considerable surprise, the Carver-Tripp water-based wood stains that we bought
twenty years ago are still usable, including one custom-mixed by Sharon on August 5, 1993,
when she was less than five years old.
So we can still do small craft projects with materials from the last century.
These products are no longer made, and I'm not aware of any modern substitute
for the Danish wax, which is wax in a glycol mixture.
I really enjoyed being able to finish small pieces of wood in just a couple
of hours, without odor and without toxicity. I seldom build full-size furniture;
these are for small things such as wooden bases for electronic equipment, and
for repairs.
By the way, water-based stain is handy for fixing scratches on furniture;
it only sticks to bare wood, not to the existing finish.
Water-based acrylic sanding sealer: handy, but no longer made?
You can tell that I'm getting back into my workshop, at least a little,
as this notebook gets more like Popular Mechanics.
Today's topic is sanding sealer. That is a kind of thin varnish that is
often applied to wood before the final sanding, so that if the varnish is
going to raise the grain, it will do so and you can sand it back down flat.
However, sanding sealer has other uses.
Oil-based sanding sealer has always been widely used. Back in the mid-1990s,
when my daughters and I were doing a lot of woodworking, there was also
an abundant line of water-based wood finishes, most of which have vanished
from the market. One of them was Parks (I think) acrylic sanding sealer.
I bought a couple of quarts of it, and since I only make small things, it has lasted
me until now. In fact, I still have nearly a quart of it in a Mason jar.
Unfortunately, I don't have the original can, with the manufacturer's information.
Water-based sanding sealer dries in 15 to 60 minutes, and the brush cleans up
with soap and water.
I've used a lot of it as an overcoat on top of other finishes, even paint.
It is especially good for turning flat interior paint into a glossy, scrubbable
surface. Since I have a lot of leftover interior paint, that's something I've
done many times. It can even be used as the only finish on a piece of wood
that just needs a light varnishing.
Well... The product that I'm using may still be available, in gallons
only, as this.
(Rust-Oleum bought out Parks.)
There are also heavier water-base varnishes from both companies. A word to the wise:
Choose a satin or semi-gloss surface, not high gloss; glossy surfaces are hard to
get sufficiently uniform.
And there's a line of very well-regarded water-based wood finishes from
General Finishes,
including a sanding sealer, but they're expensive.
These are the nearest thing to the Carver-Tripp products that we used in the late 1990s.
Then there's shellac, a time-honored coating that is fast-drying and totally nontoxic
(some animals will even eat it). Zinsser makes regular shellac and also a shellac-based
sanding sealer. The distinctive properties of shellac are: (1) brushes must be cleaned
with pure (water-free) alcohol, not water or mineral spirits; (2) shellac sticks well
both to oil paint and to water-based paint, so it makes a good bonding layer when something
is being repainted with a different kind of coating.
But the bottom line seems to be that there's a lot more oil-based wood finishing in my
future, with disposable foam brushes. I don't know why water-based finishes came and
went away again. Maybe they weren't durable enough when used on furniture. I used them
on small gadgets, such as bases for electronic equipment, and never really tested their
durability. They certainly were easy to apply, and odorless, and they dried quickly.
Speaking of Popular Mechanics,they quoted me recently,
about Wolfram's new programming language.
I said, in essence, that from the early announcement, I couldn't tell what it was.
I'm still here, just not spending my time writing Notebook entries...
Casualties of the recession: Has anyone noticed how many things you could buy in 1995 or 2005
but not (easily) today? In electronics, a number of handy integrated circuits have gone away, such
as the UA2240 timer; the expectation today, I think, is that we'll use microcontrollers. And down at
Home Depot, I note that water-based wood stains and wood finishes are almost gone.
(We had them circa 1995 and they worked well! What happened?) The other thing that seems to
have vanished is 12-inch-square stick-on carpet tiles, just when I needed a few...
Odd news story: I continue to be puzzled by reports of the
sign-language
interpreter at Mandela's funeral
who produced gibberish. (At the time, everybody thought he was using
the sign language of some other country; there are several ways of signing English.)
Today's reports are that he has schizophrenia. That doesn't really explain
anything... who gave him the job, and on the basis of what qualifications?
Not a hint of leisure this weekend, as my church
recruits a new pastor, and, meanwhile, my nephew, Aaron Paul, celebrates his graduation
from the University of Georgia.
Lots of hobby-related activities — not only electronic explorations, but also
scanning and posting my last batch of Ektachrome slides — will have to wait.
As if there weren't anything else going on, I have plenty of consulting work
to do.
Ordinary household carbon monoxide detectors aren't good enough for me;
read what I wrote
back in 2008.
Today's news is that the sensor in a detector of this type lasts 5 years and
then reports "Sensor End Of Life," so it's time for a new one.
Again, the place to get them is Aeromedix,
but now there's a new model.
Interestingly, the old detector had not run down its 9-volt battery (Kodak Ultralife),
which I'll use somewhere else now. The batteries removed from smoke detectors, too,
are often good enough to continue using in radios and the like, as long as they
aren't safety-critical.
Starting with Quicken 2014 release 3, the "reminder" window won't stay minimized —
it opens up every time you look at an account, even if there are no reminders.
Quicken acknowledges the problem
and I can tell you that they did not fix it in Quicken 2014 Release 4, which I obtained today.
Consulting business is picking up, to the point where I am apparently more than fully
occupied for the next 2 years or so, and both the Daily Notebook and my Facebook presence
may become a bit scant. But I'm expecting to still have time for astronomy and gadgeteering
(see next item, below).
By the way, the hardware section at the local Lowe's has gotten more interesting lately.
In drawers labeled "Hobby" and "Science project parts," they are selling things like battery
holders, motors, and ersatz Erector set or Meccano parts (not the full line, but a good many useful
angle brackets and the like).
Other people play chess or build ships in bottles; I dabble in analog electronic design.
In particular,
I've always enjoyed experimenting with oscillator circuits because they seem to give you
something for nothing. Just apply power, and a waveform comes out.
When I was younger, it bothered me that both of the major types of LC oscillators,
Hartley and Colpitts, required either a split capacitor or a split inductor.
Why wasn't there one that operated with a simple LC tuned circuit?
Well, there is, and you see it above. But first, back to Hartley and Colpitts.
The reason for the split (either the double capacitor or the tapped inductor) is
either phase inversion, or impedance matching, or both.
If the transistor is used in common-emitter mode, it is an inverting amplifier
and the polarity of the output has to be flipped in order to provide positive
feedback. In emitter-follower or common-base mode, there is a low-impedance output
or input, respectively, and a parallel tuned circuit would be detuned (or rather de-Q'd)
by a low impedance connected to it. The split in
the tuned circuit provides a place where a low-impedance connection can be made
without spoiling the resonance.
Above you see an emitter-coupled oscillator. It requires two transistors, which,
in my example, are PNP units arranged "upside down" so that the tuned circuit can
be grounded. The tuned circuit is connected to a high-impedance output (a collector)
and a high-impedance input (the base of a transistor with an emitter resistor).
I've built several versions of this over the years, and I want to breadboard it
again to try out my new oscilloscope. According to TINA simulations, it oscillates
with a very wide variety of L and C values. Note also that it has no RC time
constants that could cause squegging. However, two transistor electrode capacitances
are across the tuned circuit, which means that at high frequencies, you will need
a smaller C than simple calculations suggest.
One bit of TINA trivia: If a simulated oscillator does not run, be sure to
check "Zero initial values" under Analysis, Transient, and also try varying
the length of time for the simulation; if it's too long, the points calculated
will be too far apart and oscillation will not be detected.
Speaking of electronics puzzles,
remember Garner's mysterious oscillator,
which I was writing about five years ago?
I found that his circuit, as published, worked with germanium transistors but
not silicon transistors. (Germanium transistors "leak" slightly and bias themselves
into conduction.) But I breadboarded it in sixth grade with silicon transistors,
and it worked.
The question remained open whether Garner made a mistake in his published
circuit diagram (besides one mistake that is obvious), and I may have corrected
the mistake, by a mixture of accident and common sense, without realizing it.
(The same thing happens to mathematicians reading published proofs with mistakes
in them; if the mistake is easily correctable, it often gets corrected in the
reader's head, without awareness that there was a mistake in the first place.)
Well, the question is still open, and the plot thickens.
I found two versions of the circuit in Popular Electronics,
1957, in articles by Garner. Both use germanium transistors.
One uses his published version of the circuit (with minor changes),
and the other uses my corrected version of it.
I've been fixing up things today... here are a couple of notes:
Problem:
Windows 7 PC shuts down or hibernates the moment it switches to UPS power, even though
the battery has plenty of run time left. I experienced this with a server connected
to an APC uninterruptible power supply, using Windows' battery management (which sees the APC UPS just fine,
without needing to install APC's software).
Solution: Disable ACPI in the BIOS setup. (Press DEL, F2, or whatever you're supposed to
press while booting, to get to the setup screen.) Apparently, the BIOS was responding to the UPS
and was overriding what Windows had been told to do. I'm not sure I understand this, but it
worked.
Problem:
Tektronix oscilloscope refuses to use an 8- or 16-gigabyte USB flash drive.
I experienced this with my new Tek 2014B.
Solutions:
(1) Download and install the latest firmware update from Tektronix.
(2) Make sure the flash drive is formatted as FAT32, not NTFS. When in doubt, let the
oscilloscope format it.
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