Monthly Archives: June 2010

Sticks and (Rolling) Stones

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SWMBO and I have agreed to split the chores around here. She, for example, mows the dooryard with the little rotary mower every four or five days when the weather is like it is now; I mow the rest of the lawn with the diesel tractor. She does the laundry; I rebuild the back porches. She complains to her friends about all the things I have to do; I blog.

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She can fire me if I don’t take care of my responsibilities. She prolly can’t fire me if I mutter under my breath but things may get a bit chilly.

Muttering is time honored. There has never been a time that a soldier — or a husband — didn’t sit around a campfire and complain about working conditions.

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Sometimes, “I find myself on the receiving end of little burst of off-the-record trash talk,” David Brooks wrote in the NYTimes when he took a former Vermonter to task for reporting about Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s kvetching.
Imagine that. A soldier might complain about the yo-yos in his or her chain of command. Why, I simply can’t conceive the conversations between Hannibal (the Grace of Baal)’s conscripts when they had elephant duty. Except I reckon the language would have been … salted peanuts in nature. Used salted peanuts.

“General McChrystal was excellent at his job,” Mr. Brooks wrote. “He had outstanding relations with the White House and entirely proper relationships with his various civilian partners in the State Department and beyond. He set up a superb decision-making apparatus that deftly used military and civilian expertise.”

Then he called the boss a poopyhead.

Liberals, afraid of most dangers in their minds and unaware of most dangers in real life, have this mantra:

Words and poems can break my bones
But IEDs can never hurt me.

“I welcome debate among my team, but I won’t tolerate division,” Barack Obama said, showing his pettiness, his despottery, and his complete lack of understanding of either military or family life, as he relieved Gen. McChrystal as commander of American forces in Afghanistan. As an aside, I don’t think Mr. Obama or Mr. Bush before him fired enough generals. Generals need to be nervous. Generals need to work miracles or they need to get out of the way.

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So far, Gen. McChrystal did seem to be doing a better job than Gen. Bluggett. Doesn’t matter. The words around the campfire haven’t changed much.

But they will. Our army (every army) does two things very, very well: eat and gripe.

Mr. Obama had the opportunity to treat the General’s campfire griping with grace. By not doing so, he put every soldier on notice that the chain of command will punish them the first time they get caught griping.

Scary stuff, that. Scary that the Despot in Chief doesn’t understand morale in the ranks.

Mr. Brooks thinks, “The culture of exposure has triumphed, with results for all to see.”

He’s only half right.

If we all got fired for kvetching, there wouldn’t be a marriage — or a soldier — left standing.

Agreement?

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I am not a lawyer. Nor do I play one on TV. On the other hand, I am uniquely qualified to offer this legal advice because I wrote a rental contract while in college that the landlord’s lawyer could not break. Sam the Landlord learned from that experience (he never signed a contract again that his own lawyer hadn’t written) and I learned how much fun teaching can be.

[Editor’s Note: gekko and I are following in the footsteps of 60 Minutes’ Shana Alexander and James Kilpatrick in paired blog articles. After reading this article, please go read title for the counterpoint argument.]

Over on the other blog, gekko was spurred by a Safari program called Reader.

Reader is really neat. It strips the page of all the advertisements, sidebars, and inconsequential stuff, and pops up just the text in a translucent overlay. That scares the advertisers who believe they have a contract with the viewers, readers, or users on the site; seeing all the ads is the price they charge us to see the content.

gekko thinks the contract is not between us readers and the fodder provider. The contract, she says, is only between the content provider and the advertiser.

Contract is an important legal term. A contract is actually “just” an agreement between thee and me to trade something I have for something you have. To be valid, the contract must be (1) enforceable by law and (2) equitable.

Trade? That sounds like business and it is. I might have a book you want. You might have a dollar I want. We can contract to trade my book for your dollar and both walk away happy. Even if our contract is no more than this conversation:

“Hey, you got that book?”

“Yup, Cost you a buck.”

That fulfills the basis for a legal contract.

<pedantic mode> Both of us must be old enough and not impaired to buy or sell that book and the contract must be neither trifling, indeterminate, impossible, or illegal.

As long as the good or service we trade is legal, our oral agreement can constitute a binding legal contract. In practical terms, written contracts are more enforceable because they list all the terms we decided on at the time we made the agreement.

Enforceable means that we each promise to do something for the other guy and that the other guy has specific legal remedies if we breach that promise. A “compensatory remedy” means the Sheriff will make me pay what I said I would and maybe more besides. An “equitable remedy” usually means the Sheriff will stand over me to make sure I perform what I agreed to do and reneged on.

Equitable means fair to both parties. A court would accept as equitable the sale of a used copy of Pocket Shakespear for a buck — both parties benefit more-or-less equally. A court ought not accept as equitable the sale of an original signed manuscript of Macbeth for a buck — here the seller takes it in the ear. </pedantic mode>

Back to the Safari Reader.

Reuters reports that “the Internet is [now] by far the most popular source of information and the preferred choice for news ahead of television, newspapers and radio, according to a new poll in the United States.”

There are two contracts in play. In the first, the advertiser contracts with the Internet content provider (the fodder we want to read) to place the ads and other links on the content page so the viewer/user will see them. gekko contends that’s The One. In the second, the viewer/user agrees to view the ads and other links on the page in order to see the fodder we want to read. I maintain that’s The Other One.

In many ways, this is exactly the same model we have used for “free” radio and television broadcasts since 1920 when KDKA went on the air in Pittsburgh.

gekko believes the second contract does not exist, partly because we the viewer/user never agreed to it.

<pedantic mode> An implicit contract (A.K.A. an “implied-in-fact contract”) is one agreed by our conduct, rather than by the words we say. The U.S. Supreme Court defines it as an agreement “founded upon a meeting of minds, which, although not embodied in an express contract, is inferred, as a fact, from conduct of the parties showing, in the light of the surrounding circumstances, their tacit understanding.” </pedantic mode>

So. Does watching American Idol on Fox or reading the New York Times online mean we agree to watch or read the commercials that support it?

Yes.

TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch). The writers and publishers of the information we absorb so easily offer it in exactly the same way I sold you the book and for exactly the same reason you go to work each day. Paying the writer is at least as important as paying your mechanic to tighten the lug nuts when he changes a tire on your car.

I traded the book for a buck. You trade your hours at desk or workbench for, I hope, more than a buck. You may have no written contract with your employer but your boss offered you the position, salary, and appropriate working conditions in return for your appearance on time and performance of the assigned duties. That’s an implicit contract.

VCRs, DVRs, other recording devices, and now Safari’s Reader allow us to breach that contract with the broadcaster or website. The fact that we can breach the contract does not mean we should breach the contract any more than we should rob the gas station down the street just because the President did.

The contract hinges on enforceability but in this day of a Democratic President and Congress ignoring the law or changing it to fit their whims, I would not be a bit surprised to find the Library police reassigned to ad watch duty.

[Editor’s Note: gekko and I have written paired blog articles. After reading this piece, please go read title for the counterpoint argument.]

I have no advertising on this page, so there is no implicit contract that you, dear reader, will pay for these words. OTOH, donations via the Tip Jar are always welcome.

Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters

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The networks made a big deal today of Tony Hayward sailing his yacht, Bob, in the clean waters of the English channel. There was one passing comment about President Obama playing golf. Yesterday the Prez visited a construction site in … OHIO.

“People here are not on their yachts today,” Senator Richard Shelby, R-AL, said. “I believe it’s the height of arrogance. He is the chief executive of BP, he was testifying in Washington and now he’s going out on his yacht in England.” Of course there were yachts sailing in the Gulf of Mexico today even if Sen. Shelby pretended not to know that.

Oddly, the networks didn’t show us a single image of Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer, Shepard Smith, or Brian Williams, all of whom were also enjoying a DAY OFF the job on a Saturday.

Mr. Obama called this the “biggest natural disaster” in the history of this country. Well, by golly, then he and Mr. Hayward should be out there personally scooping oil out of the water, shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t Ms. Couric, Ms. Sawyer, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Williams be out there, too?

I can understand that the people who live on or near the Gulf would get jacked up by the media with pictures of people relaxing on a day off. It really really irks me that the networks would send in their second team to stir up these troubled waters for no reason other than to sell toilet paper.

They all know better. And so, dear reader, do you.

Tanks. Tanks a Lot.

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I am well and truly blown. Or at least blowable. 36 gallons worth give or take and that’s a might big blow job. Way more than quarts.

Big, I tell you.

And ducky.

Almost 40 years ago I built a pretty useful compressor for ordinary tasks. I got a really good deal on a twin cylinder compressor head that someone had returned to Sears. Graingers gave me the industrial price for a 2 HP, 220 volt, motor that ended up as an “extra” on a business project. I welded up some steel plate and angle iron for a mounting base.

The only shortfall of this project was the storage tank.

It took a while to get the plumbing right since the compressor owners manual had no installation instructions, the controller I found had no labeling, and there was no Internet.

Air compressors are pretty simple: motor, pump, accumulator tank, pressure regulator, relief valve, and some plumbing connect the pump to the tank and the tank to your air tools. The compressor pump works like the engine in your car. A motor turns a crankshaft to push a piston up and down in a cylinder. As the crank pulls the piston down, the vacuum it creates draws air into the cylinder through an intake valve. As the crankshaft continues to rotate, it pushes the piston back to the top of the cylinder, compressing the air in the cylinder. Near the top of the stroke, the compressed air gets pushed out through the exhaust valve. You could simply connect an air tool or tire chuck to the pump but that means the motor has to run constantly. That wastes electricity and a lot of compressed air so an air tank holds the excess air until we need it.

I hate waste.

The bigger the tank, the more efficient a compressed air system is in a garage or production shop because, just like your household water well, the motor needs to run only to refill the tank.

The size of an air compressor is measured by its output, not by the motor. We need to know the volume, measured in cubic feet per minute (cfm), and the pressure, measured in pounds per square inch (psi), to know if the system will do the job we need. When I built race cars and boats, we needed to run air tools that have specific demands. Most $100-200 “home-shop” air compressors can produce 3-5 cfm at 90 to 100 psi.

A compressor with lots of capacity and an upright tank is handy because it takes up the least amount of floor space in the shop and is usually on wheels so it can be rolled to the job. My neighbor has a nice $375 Dewalt 15-gallon, upright compressor on wheels that delivers 5.4 cfm at 90 psi and can run up to 150 psi. It will run my board sander that requires 3 cfm at 90 psi or my air grinder that needs a little more but not both. My new framing nailer can suck down the typical 1 HP, 6 gallon home-shop compressor.

And nothing I own can run a commercial sandblaster.

Before we started trying to tip this rary, I said that my storage tank was too short. The pump and motor combination I assembled yields 5.6 cfm at 150 psi or 6.7 cfm at 100. That’s plenty. Unfortunately, I have always used my little 5 gallon portable racing tank for storage, so the motor cycles more than it should.

As an aside, I like the little 5 gallon tank when all I need to do is pump up the soft tire on the lawn tractor, a chore it needs each time we use it. It takes less than a minute and only a ha’penny’s worth of electricity to do that instead of a couple-three-four minutes and a whole penny’s worth. I dislike waste.

I have always wanted to replace the tank with something bigger.

I found a couple of interesting air tanks on Craigslist last week. Each one was listed at $20. The first, a “former dental office” fixed tank with feet was reputed to be about 20 gallons and the second was a light-duty 11 gallon portable. I wanted the first but could make do with the second. After all that one alone would triple my storage capacity.

We definitely drove over the river and through the woods to get to the first tank; it was halfway down the state on Mallard Road. The “turn onto dirt” should have clued me it would be an adventure. Down and up and down and up a looooooooooong dirt road and the only thing I could think of was, I wonder who has to plow this? I’ve been in Vermont too long. The owner had built a wonderful, cement floored barn and wood shop on top of a hill with great views. He built his house there, too. And, yes, he does have a plow truck as well as a chain-shod square-bodied woods truck.

He was consolidating tools so he also had for sale a lovely cast iron table Craftsman 10″ table saw with base and extension. I would have liked it if I didn’t already have a saw. The Air Techniques medical/dental tank does measure out to be about 19 or 20 gallons in size, liquid measure, and has an apparently good Square D pressure switch and a labeled working pressure of 150 psi. Sold.

The other seller lives closer to North Puffin where he had a Formula V under a tarp on a trailer as well as a 60s VW and a 356 Porsche coupe in primer and bondo in his garage. He raced Porsche Speedsters in E Production class about the time I was racing Camaros so we know a lot of the same people. It’s not often I find another SCCA guy near North Puffin so that was a treat.

He sold me the $20 tank for $15 because I showed him the real $20 super tank in the back of the truck.

So now I have three tanks, two sets of controls, one compressor head, one motor, and a project. I saved two tanks from the recycler by reusing them for a cost of $35 and 135 miles on the truck. My next trick is to manifold it all up to get them to work either into one little, one big, or even all three tanks at once.

Of course Craigslist also had another nice used horizontal tank with a two 15 hp 3-phase motors turning two different 4-piston/compound pumps for about $1000. I’m not sure how I would have moved it, much less where to put it but a boy can dream…

What a Freaking Difference!

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“I missed fucking Asbestos Dust?” Rufus said. He was amazed. The rest of us about died.

For those just whooshed, Asbestos Dust is the nom-de-Net of a writer from Texas or Arkansas or maybe Alaska. I met him at a party in Pennsylvania to which Rufus was invited but did not attend.

Word choice makes a difference. Even word position makes a difference. “I fucking missed Asbestos Dust?” has a very different meaning than what Rufus actually said.

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be,” Mark Twain wrote. Regular readers will realize that I use little profanity in real life and even less in my writings. I will not use any of the other seven dirty words here today; younger readers need not tune to a different channel.

On the other hand, I will take issue with how the anti-science crowd uses its words.

NPR’s Science Friday focused on new nuclear technologies in the episode broadcast March 5, 2010 . Guests included Earth Policy Institute founder Lester Brown, Scott Burnell, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission public affairs officer, John Deal, CEO of Hyperion Power Generation, and Professor Richard Lester who heads the Nuclear Science and Engineering Department at MIT.

“What is the future of nuclear power,” Mr. Brown asked himself. “It’s cost cost cost.”

Waste could kill nuclear power, he said. “Imagine if the billion dollar price tag [the per plant cost of the Yucca Mountain project] had been on the table when they were being considered, most of them would never have gotten off the ground.”

A billion dollar “extra” cost per plant sounds excessive, doesn’t it? It is exceptionally expensive if all you know is that one partial factoid.

“The volume of waste produced is very, very small,” Professor Lester said. A nuclear plant produces a couple of ounces of waste per person per year; a coal plant produces about 10 tons of waste per person per year. “We can afford to spend a lot of money on safely storing this material. The impact on the cost of nuclear electricity is actually very small.”

“Our cost … is just under 10 cents per KW-hour,” Mr. Deal said later. That includes the waste.

“What we have in this country, and that’s not going to help with the image of nuclear power, is the discovery that there are now 27 older plants with underground pipes that are leaking tritium, and tritium is a carcinogen,” Mr. Brown said. “In Vermont, as I recall, with the most recent instance occurring at Vermont Yankee.”

Tritium leaks sound pretty dangerous, don’t they? They are excruciatingly dangerous if all you know is one partial factoid.

The hydrogen isotope tritium is a by-product of modern nuclear reactor operations. It combines easily with oxygen to form “tritiated water” which can be ingested by drinking or eating organic foods. It is a radiation hazard when inhaled, ingested via food, water, or absorbed through the skin but, since tritium is not much of a beta emitter, it is not dangerous when simply nearby. It has a 7 to 14 day half life in the human body. That means a single-incident ingestion is not usually dangerous and it precludes accumulating tritium from the environment in your body long-term.

“There have been 27 instances … [but] they are not all ongoing,” Mr. Burnell said. “In the case of Vermont Yankee … the contamination is not reaching any drinking water sources; it’s not reaching the nearby Connecticut River. So it is not presenting any public health issue and we, at the NRC, are closely watching how Vermont Yankee is evaluating the situation to discover where the leak is coming from. We will make sure that they do identify it properly, that they fix it properly, and that in every instance they are doing what is necessary to operate the plant safely and in accordance with our regulations.”

“I’m not a geologist or an engineer,” Mr. Brown said as he evaluated the complex dance of creating and running a nuclear power plant. Ya think?

Word choice — what we actually say — makes a difference in what listeners understand. Mr. Brown certainly knows that. This is a real example of choosing words to propagandize rather than choosing to disclose the facts.

So, did we fucking miss A.D. or did we miss fucking him?

“It’s been too long since I had a taste of the Dust,” Rufus said.

There is no hope.