Graham

Joel Moskowitz on Spear & Jackson's laser guided saw:

I already have a laser-guided pencil, what more does one need? -Ed

A laser guided laser. That way you can make sure your laser is pointed correctly.

I finally tested the new centers on my lathe (ground on a drill press) and they appear to work. I even get catches now. So now that the lathe is finally totally usable, I'm finally going to get started on making those chisel handles for Dad. Real Soon Now. Yeah.

From Talk is talk, kill is kill:

Knuth, 4.5.2, theorem D: If u and v are integers chosen at random, the probability that gcd(u,v)=1 is 6/pi^2

So if you give someone an infinite amount of random integers, they can use those to calculate pi by checking how many of those are prime to one another.

Yet another demonstration of the unreasonable rationality of the universe.

From Crypto-Gram's entry Friday Squid Blogging: Dissecting a Giant Squid:

In Santa Barbara.

Among other dissection highlights, Hochberg pulled out plastic-like pieces, which comprised what could be best described as a backbone, as well as a translucent brownish-yellow piece of the beak, which is made of fingernail-like material. The giant squid's anatomy features a mouth at the top of the head, which means the esophagus travels through the brain. "So you have to get very small chunks of food," said Hochberg, "or you'll blow your brains out." The sharp beaks, then, are used to chomp food into tiny pieces before sending it down the esophagus, through the brain, and into the gut.

Any of you bio folks heard about this? Seems up your alley.

Caltrans has announced that they will be repaving Highway 217 both directions from UCSB to Patterson Avenue.
Work will begin tomorrow, Thursday, September 18th, and will continue for approximately three weeks.

That's going to mean 217 is going to be closed for at least some of moving the new freshmen in, doesn't it? This promises to be an unmitigated disaster.

Cherry, my desktop machine, recompiles my thesis in about five seconds. It takes about a minute for my laptop to do this.

Time for a new laptop. Pity I'm broke.

The vending machine outside Engineering 1 is selling candy bars for $10.00. No fooling.

From Neal Stephenson's Anathem:

But after a while, she said: “Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?”

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”

It's the sheer casualness that gets to me. Such a master.

I made a box tonight! As of, about 12 hours ago, it was a board, and now it is gluing up. It is not a pretty box, nor does it serve any particular purpose in mind save education, but it is my box and it is the first object I have ever done dovetails in (as opposed to practicing them on scrap wood). Naturally, there are many important lessons I have learned today. But the most important one is this:

• Just because it came off a power panel saw does not mean that it is square.
( Other lessons )

I have no idea what I am going to do with my new box when it finishes gluing. It is not the prettiest thing in the world and I am tempted to burn it, but perhaps I can find something less pyromaniacal to do with it, like store my waterstones in it or something. I do like working with poplar, though; pity it's so ugly.

It occurs to me the only person who knows this story is vivianteddybear and others might want to hear about it. So this it the story of the last time I tried to chop a piece of oak in half across the grain.

I had borrowed an axe from dr_mrow (still have it) and the head was rusty and the handle was in terrible shape. I reground the head, sharpened it, put a new handle on it, and wanted to test it out. So I put a piece of oak lengthwise across my (plastic) sawhorses, took a breath, and whacked it as hard as I could.

A thunderous whack later and said piece of wood vanishes. I was very puzzled—this is not the expected outcome when you hit a piece of wood with an axe. I look around for a bit and then a few seconds later a clatter results as it hits the roof on its way down and falls into my yard. Near as I can tell, what happened was those stupid plastic sawhorses flexed and launched it straight up like it was on a trampoline.

I think I got my wooden sawhorses the next week or so after that…

From StupidFilter :: Main / About:

StupidFilter was conceived out of necessity. Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy.

I have no idea if this thing works, but that's a great introduction.

Well, I've sent my rough draft for my dissertation in. There's a couple of rough areas in one chapter and I need to write another one, but the rest seems pretty good to me. Yay for getting closer to graduating.

I just got the lumber in for a remake of my brother’s table (I concluded the old surface was too warped to be worth trying to rescue, and called it a $50 exercise in “face joint the lumber before you glue it up, moron”). I got it from Bell Forest Products, requested 10 board feet and could they please make the boards all about the same length, and thought nothing of it. It came in today. Each of the three boards is 10″ across; you usually pay a premium for this, so it has me really flabbergasted. And it's pretty, too.

Definitely no more shopping at Sabobo for me.

Three-minute dovetails with Frank Klausz. Seriously, it takes this guy less time to cut those out than it does for me to find my marking gauge to start. Most instructions for dovetailing involve farting around with a sliding bevel to make sure that all the angles are the same, but he just eyeballs it (and I should, too; the angle isn’t that critical). I want one of those bow saw blades with the 90° bend in it, but I’m under no illusions that one of them would let me do what he does here. Jesus.

If you haven’t seen him before, Klausz is a Hungarian (I think?) carpenter who immigrated and now does custom furniture here. He is one of the best known craftsmen in the field at the moment, and takes the job of teaching seriously.

Either I have suddenly acquired two spiders, one of whom is dead, or my spider has molted again successfully. I've been wondering when he was going to do that.

… Or perhaps I have spoken too soon; one of his legs appears to have come in really weird. He's pretty uncertain moving around, so it might just be part of the normal process, but he's shoved himself into a corner in a weird position and I'm fretting a little. He's still moving around and his abdomen shows he still has a decent amount of reserves, but I've had him like two years now, he was mature before I had him, and Chilean Rose males usually only live to four years.

Found on Wikipedia's article concerning the campaign history of the Roman military:

The history of Rome's campaigning is, if nothing else, a history of obstinate persistence overcoming appalling losses.

…

Rome took to naval warfare "like a brick to water"…

…

Perseus initially had greater military success against the Romans than his father, winning the Battle of Callicinus against a Roman consular army. However, as with all such ventures in this period, Rome responded by simply sending another army.

…

Despite being the only clear champion of the Empire at this point Aëtius was slain by the Emperor Valentinian III's own hand, leading Sidonius Apollinaris to observe, "I am ignorant, sir, of your motives or provocations; I only know that you have acted like a man who has cut off his right hand with his left".

From Stefan’s Florilegium Archive, specifically the section on alphabets and Terry Nutter’s message of 10 May 1997:

If you work from the Pegge edition of Forme of Curye, you will find therein a recipe for Viande of Cypres that calls for oatmeal. Taken by itself, this is one heck of a puzzle. There are lots of other recipes in other collections for the same dish, none of which call for oatmeal. Virtually all do call for dates, which this one doesn’t.

Go to Hieatt and Butler, Cury on Inglysch, where this is recipe 100.

They worked from a bunch of surviving related manuscripts, of which eight (including one that Constance Hieatt found after publication, and described, along with a list of errata and additions to CoI, in a separate article). Of the eight, four call for ‘ootmele’ or ‘mele’ or something similar; one (fairly far removed from the original) calls for damsin plums, and the other three call for dates. At the same position.

What the heck happened?

It’s impossible to know, but here’s a simple conjecture. At one point in this collection’s history, a scribe was copying a manuscript. The recipe he was copying was supposed to say “Take dates”; but the “d” on “dates” had lost its ascender (either through aging of the MS, or by an error of the previous scribe), so he found himself looking at “Take oates…”

“Take oats?” says our scribe to himself — not a cook, and knowing just enough to get future generations into trouble. “They can’t mean fodder. Surely it should be oatmeal.” And he ‘corrects’.

…

A couple of other quick ones: there’s a recipe in Laud 553 (published in Austin, on page 113) titled “Cyuele”. This, by itself, is not particularly odd. (The medial “u” represents a “v” in this context, so it’s not a particularly implausible word.) The problem: there is no other recipe in the corpus titled anything like that — but there are two surviving recipes (in Diuersa Cibaria, published in _CoI_, and in an Anglo-Norman collection) called “Emeles” — and they’re clearly the same recipe as this one.

What’s going on? Someone who has studied the Laud manuscript directly tells me that it certainly does say “Cyuele” — and it’s hard to see how Austin could have misread “m” as “yu”. But look at it from the other direction: the Emeles recipes are earlier, after all.

In this general time frame, an upper case E is easy to misread as C. A lower case m is virtually indistinguishable from either in or iu. A scribe looked as “Em”, and saw “Ciu”, giving him “Ciueles”. That being (as he well recognized!) hard to read, he “simplified” orthographically by substituting a “y” for the “i”. And voila. Again, we can’t know; but it’s far more likely than the assumption that this dish had two distinct names that are so similar from a paleographic standpoint and so dissimilar from any other.

…

When the scribes of Europe discarded the beautiful, legible, and above all clear Carolingian minuscule for the increasingly terrible blackletters, terminating in Quadrata Texturalis, they imposed a totally artificial barrier to effective communication for hundreds of years hence. You know why we have a dot on top of our i? Because those idiots kept writing it in a way that made ‘minim’ a forest of indistinguishable vertical strokes, that’s why.

Grr.

Interesting. According to this, I type 76 wpm.

76 words

Speed test

I have as of now completed my spring-pole lathe. As it happens my initial design for both the pedal and the poppets was flawed; an alternate design made everything better. All I can think of that it really needs now is maybe a leather strap for drive instead of the rope I’m currently using. Pictures when I have the energy (i.e. not now). I have tested it, of course (which is how I discovered the above flaws); I suck, but that’s expected for it being my first couple of hours ever.

Turning on a spring pole lathe is apparently quite different from using a normal lathe. For one thing, catches aren’t as big a deal because the thing can only rotate so far in one direction. At the same time planing a cylinder isn’t trivial. I suspect my books are only going to be so useful in learning how to do this thing, and that I’m going to have to teach myself most of it (which is fine, honestly).

(Grr: posted now because Cox is being moronic; I finished it last night)