Mike Soja just wired up his barn based on “a decade old How-To wiring book, and with a few websites…(electricity is pretty easy to understand with just a little study)”.
He has pictures of the sub-panels he wired up.
He did a neater job than most “professionally” wired boxes I’ve looked in to over the past twenty years or so. Some of those were outright horror shows.
Do-it-yourself doesn’t mean incompetent. State licensing doesn’t mean competent.
Oh, this is going up on blogs, bulletin boards, office doors, and hospital bed stands all over the world, damn betcha. This is one of the great classics.
Transcript, because this is important:
Hat Guy: So, has this sickness opened you up to looking for answers beyond science?
Other Guy: …No, not really.
We’ve groped for comfort before the slings and arrows of fortune for millenia, and I begrudge nobody their sources of solace.
But science provides tools.
$100 Billion a year in scientific studies and medical R&D has bought us some pretty damn powerful slings and arrows of our own.
This world is amazing, and I’m going to live to experience more of it thanks to people who refused to gracefully accept the ineffability of reality.
I find my courage where I can, but I take my weapons from science.
Because they work, bitches.
May the Powers bless and keep you, Randall Munroe. That is something that desperately needs to be said and remembered.
“The Impending Doom of the Human Species”
Acceleration of perversions
Initially, all FACA[Female Anatomically Correct Androids] had been designed as young adult versions of their human counterparts. However, emboldened by their sweeping victories in the courts, FACA were soon designed as young girls and boys, and even animals, to meet every possible sexual perversion of their intended markets. Even those men who bought the adult FACA versions found their attitudes changing, since there were no consequences to anything they did with their FACA. After all, it didn’t matter if you swore at your FACA or spoke harshly to it, since it always did exactly what you wanted. Over time, men who owned FACA became more and more rude to their human counterparts as the degradation of society accelerated. Men who owned a FACA disdained the company of real women, with all their incessant demands and mood swings. The sexual revolution was complete and we were all the victims.
Actually, an argument against pornography.
Frink is a calculator/programming language that keeps track of units. It also has a huge library of custom defined units to cover common calculations. For instance, the unit “water” stands for the density of water.
Here’s one of the example calculations from the documentation:
Fart Jokes
I received one of those endlessly-forwarded e-mails of dubious but “interesting facts” which said “if you fart continuously for 6 years and 9 months, you’ll have enough gas to create the equivalent of an atomic bomb.” Hee hee. Cute. (Thanks to Heather May Howard… being unable to easily calculate the veracity of this statement was one of the primary influences that showed how existing programs were too limited and inspired the creation of Frink.) But I didn’t believe it and wanted to check it. The Hiroshima bomb had a yield of 12.5 kilotons of TNT, which is a very small bomb by today’s standards. How many horsepower would that be?
12.5 kilotons TNT / (6 years + 9 months) -> horsepower
329.26013859711395Can you produce a 329-horsepower blowtorch of a fart? I doubt it. That’s the power produced by a Corvette engine running just at its melting point. A one-second fart with that much power could blow me 1000 feet straight up. To produce that kind of energy, how much food would you have to eat a day?
12.5 kilotons TNT / (6 years + 9 months) -> Calories/day
5066811.55086559Ummm… can you eat over 5 million Calories a day? (Again, note that these are food Calories with a capital ‘c’ which are equal to 1000 calories with a small ‘c’.) If you were a perfect fart factory, converting food energy into farts with 100% efficiency, and ate a normal 2000 Calories/day, how many years would it really take?
12.5 kilotons TNT / (2000 Calories/day) -> years
17100.48898417136717,000 years is still a huge underestimate; I don’t know how much of your energy actually goes into fart production. Oh well. To continue the calculations, let’s guess your butthole has a diameter of 1 inch (no, you go measure it.) Let’s also guess that the gas you actually produce in a fart is only 1/10 as combustible as pure natural gas. What would be the velocity of the gas coming out?
12.5 kilotons TNT / natural_gas / (6 years + 9 months) / (pi (.5 in)^2) 10 -> mph
280.1590446203110Nobody likes sitting next to a 280-mile-per-hour fart-machine. Lesson: Even the smallest atomic bombs are really unbelievably powerful and whoever originally calculated this isn’t any fun to be around if they really fart that much.
Fart jokes. Sheesh. If Frink isn’t a huge success, it’s not because I didn’t pander to the Lowest Common Denominator.
Frink is the 280-mile-per-hour fart-machine of calculators.
Frink makes it easy to think precisely.
My mom’s book club watched this today, and she loved it. I saw it when it first came out, and am surprised to find I don’t have it here on the blog. It’s a wonderful piece, well worth watching. In any event, I wanted to save references to it so we could find it again.
Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture website is here. There’s a book, and you get the lecture on DVD. There are class and book group study guides.
I just watched the whole thing again, and folks, this is something everybody needs to watch, and hear.
There’s a lot of gloom and doom on this site — in my heart and mind, to tell the truth. Things are about to get really, really, bad.
“The best gold,” says Pausch, “is at the bottom of a barrel of crap.”
We’re about to be swimming in oceans of crap.
The gold at the bottom is going to be just fabulous.
Every once in a while, Fail Blog posts a picture alleged to be a Fail, but which I consider to be a Win.
This is the best one I’ve seen: manly ingenuity, persistence, construction equipment used inappropriately — this has got it all.
Fail? How is this even remotely a Fail?
Glenn Reynolds put out a call to his readers for introductory texts on electronics, aimed especially at children.
This gives me the chance to recommend my favorite text on any subject [emailed to Reynolds, but a day late. Don't know if he'll get around to posting it.]
Stuart Hoenig and Leland Payne, How to Build & Use Electronic Devices Without Frustration, Panic, Mountains of Money, or an Engineering Degree
A very gentle introduction centered on wonderful little doodads called op amps, which vastly simplify the design of just about anything that handles analog signals. This was written just after IC op amps became widely and cheaply available at Radio Shack. Many chapters on various kinds of sensors, including some biomedical stuff.There’s a chapter on discrete devices, such as naked transistors, “if you must use them”.
There’s a brief intro to digital interfacing, but this was before PCs became widely available, so the digital world gets very short shrift — and this is, in my opinion, a good thing. It trains you to deal with the real signals, the actual measurements. Digital should properly only be introduced after you have a solid grounding in analog. [Insert obvious CRU snark.]
HtBaUEDWFPMoMoaED is shamefully out of print, but many used copies are available. They shouldn’t be; they should all be grabbed up and militantly hoarded.
Hoenig and Payne need to either authorize a reprinting, or just put it on line. Yeah, it’s a bit out of date, but everything here still works.
This is my wilderness backpacking electronics text (you never know when you may need to fabricate a telemetry pack from a handful of bark, pebbles, and bear droppings) because it’s much smaller and lighter than the rightfully famous Art of Electronics, which is my preferred desktop reference as well, but which would be pretty heavy slogging for any but a fairly advanced teen.
“Here’s a thing,” from David Thompson:
The Eigenharp looks the kind of thing you’d see in a Mos Eisley bar.
It seems to be an almost infinitely adaptable synth interface in a very convenient package. I’m not a musician, so I can’t speak authoritatively, but I’m guessing it takes a long time just to figure out how to control what kind of sound you get out of it.
One very interesting point: it can be used as a wind instrument, via a bassoon-mouthpiece-looking “breath pipe”.
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