"Be Seeing You"

    Walter Koenig passed away earlier this week.  We're down to Kirk and Sulu from original Star Trek cast.  Koenig was an interesting guy -- gentle, kind, opinionated, a little geeky.  He was fun in Star Trek, but I came to appreciate his talents as the psi-cop "Bester" in Babylon 5.  Bester -- named after SF writer Alfred Bester, who dreamed up one of the first psi-cops in fiction -- was a truly chilling character, a guy with considerable power and authority who radiated menace and who, over time, proved to be an example of the principle that "hurt people hurt (other) people."

     And he was about as unlike Walter Koenig as could be.  Nevertheless, the character was unmistakable, as real-feeling as anyone you ever met, and not someone you'd ever want to get on the wrong side of.  (And he inevitably said "Be seeing you" in parting, an allusion to The Prisoner.)

     Koenig was 90.  In addition to acting, he directed and wrote screenplays and novels.  He lived a long life and did good work.  I'll miss him. 

Unexpected Physics

      Oldies TV network Me-TV has been running The Wizard of Oz film most of this month, along with various (old) behind-the-scenes shows about it.  And they've run The Wiz, the much later reinterpretation of the first Oz story (and one that correctly puts Dorothy in silver shoes -- the ruby slippers in the classic film were substituted because the red stands out wonderfully in Technicolor).

     The Wiz was playing this afternoon while I did my various chores, and I'd watch for a bit whenever I took a break.  I was doing just that when Dorothy (Diana Ross) and Toto (some nice stage dog) encountered an unrecognizable Micheal Jackson as The Scarecrow, being hounded by crows who were singing--  They were singing--  Oh, wow!

     What they were singing was social commentary, expressed in the informal or joking version of the laws of thermodynamics:
     1. You can't win.
     2. You can't break even.
     3. You can't quit the game. 
     Economics is known as "the dismal science," but let me tell you, thermodynamics is pretty dour, too.  In The Wiz, the Scarecrow is as crab-bucketed a character as ever was, literally pulling quotes by great thinkers out of his head while the crows caper around him, eating the products of the garden he's supposedly protecting and chortling about how stuck he is, unable to get ahead, unable to walk away.  I hope this isn't a spoiler for anyone: Dorothy eventually shoos them off and gets the scarecrow to walking, in a dance number that shows off Jackson's remarkable abilities.  And in the meantime, audiences have had one of the fundamental truths of the universe sung at them.

     Of course, humans are localized entropy-reversers.  We may not win at thermodymanics, but we can cheat a little.  We can push back, and that's what Dorothy does for the Scarecrow: helps him stand up and start pushing back.

     I am far from the first person to notice this.  One of the others is a huge physics geek, and dug into the history of the plain-language version of the three laws.  It's worth watching!

Vacuum Of Nope

      So, week before last, I dropped the motor unit of my "Amazon Basics" rechargeable, HEPA-rated stick vacuum by not realizing that I was holding on to the wrong part when I unlatched it from an accessory.  Bang! Down it went from waist height, striking the floor with the hinge over the dust receptacle cover and leaving me holding the business-end widget.  Of course hinge broke and the cover came off, leaving me with a nasty splash of hairballs and dust on the floor and a useless vacuum.

     Solvent glue didn't work -- wrong kind of plastic.  There's no way to build up tooth enough for epoxy to get a grip.  I might be able to use 2mm nuts and bolts to fasten a piece of aluminum across the break, but the size of the hardware is a clue to the scale of the thing: it was only strong and large enough to keep a small plastic cover in place.

     I liked that little vacuum a lot.  It was relatively light and didn't strain my back, plus it was quiet enough that Holden the big baby tomcat could (barely) tolerate it.  (My old upright sent him cowering behind the couch.) So I went looking for another one.  It was an inexpensive import and surely the big retailer still offered--  No.  There were some similar models from companies with imaginary names, some with good reviews, some not so good, none of which looked to use the same filters as my defunct Amazon.  After a couple of days spending spare time looking, I gave up and bought a name-brand, well-reviewed, line-powered stick vac.

     The box was pretty heavy.  I unpacked it today, put the big stick vac together, gave the floors a once-over and it's a nope.  Oh, it'll replace my ancient upright, which is overdue.  The roller design on the carpet attachment is great, and doesn't build up hair at all.  But it's too loud (Holden just reappeared as I started this paragraph, looking around for the dire howling Thing) and it's too darned heavy.  It can't be my daily driver.  And it turns out I dislike managing the cord.

     Back to the internets, I guess.

Tired

     I have spent the entire work day -- 9:30 in the morning through 8:00 at night -- working with a very sharp factory support engineer to get a vital piece of equipment (okay, a small TV transmitter) functioning normally again.

     We succeeded.  Ten and a half hours of geekery in the constant roar of cold air and noise with no lunch, just a few snacks and sips of water and tea, is tiring.  I'm going to take the victory, however impermanent it might be, and go to bed.

Chilly Night

      This morning, a sign of the changing seasons: it was 61°F inside Roseholme Cottage and I ran the furnace for the first time this Fall.  

     Between the ancient thermosiphon (or "gravity") coal converted to gas forced-air furnaces* in my long-ago duplex and the smelly, cantankerous oil-burning furnace in my first Indianapolis home, the first furnace run of autumn always worries me.  It wasn't too many years ago that the furnace here had a cracked heat exchanger (which I smelled and then saw) and had to be replaced.  The process went okay this year.  Now it's a toasty 64° and I'm enjoying a plate of Breakfast Hash for lunch.

     It's a fancy variant of Breakfast Hash.  I don't make the stuff much, partially because I need to pick up a decent modern wok or deep cast-iron skillet, and because I've cut way back on potatoes and rice; the doc is right about enjoying that stuff sparingly.

     Still, every once in a great while is acceptable, and today's mixture of diced potatoes, scrambled eggs and a couple of strips of bacon is accompanied by sliced green olives, pickled okra and mild banana peppers, a hot piparra pepper,† a whole fire-roasted piquilla pepper and a half-dozen little peppedew peppers, all of them pickled and, except for the very last, chopped up.  
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* They were an education in the start-up process, with a large ring burner in the old coal combustion chamber and a candle-sized pilot flame in the center, all under a thick steel plate and with a thermocouple stuck in the pilot: if the pilot went out, the furnace couldn't open the gas valve, since the tiny current from the thermocouple powered the controls.  A normal start took nearly a minute, from the tiny click of the valve, the whoosh of gas, the long pause 'til the burner caught and a muted roar as it heated the air enough to trip the fan control.  The fans were different on each side of the duplex -- an external squirrel-cage unit in the cold air return on my side, but the other side had a much larger horizontal squirrel-cage fan inside the hot-air distribution octopus at the top of the furnace and an external motor hanging in a spring-loaded mount driving a set of belted pulleys to run the fan -- a little one on the motor and a large on top of the furnace.  When that system kicked on, the motor would bounce in the springs and the big pulley would wobble and yaw until the fan rotor came up to speed and stabilized.  The entire top of the furnace flexed; the bearing for the fan was in great shape but the sheet metal hadn't been designed to support a fan and the reinforcement wasn't enough to hold it steady.  My furnace guy -- the only one in town who would work on such historic contraptions -- swore it was perfectly normal behavior.  Still, knowing what was lurking down in the basement, I laid in bed on many a winter night, counting the seconds after the first click and rush of gas....twenty-two, twenty-three, twent- foomph, there's the fire, okay, one, two...fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seven--...click, whirrrrrrr, there's the fan, all right, I can go back to sleep.  Running big transmitters for work, I applied the lessons the furnaces taught me, learning the sounds of a normal start-up and often noticing when it stalled before my coworkers did.
 
† For my taste, these are hot enough that just one is plenty in this, and two or three in a big pot of chili.  However, they're very tasty and YMMV.

Wait, What?

      It's a cold, wet morning in Indianapolis, and checking on Indiana fuel prices has led to a chilling discovery: while the state has suspended the 37 cents-per-gallon gasoline road tax, the corresponding 63 cents-per-gallon tax on gas-station diesel* remains in effect.  The road tax money is earmarked to be spent on just that, and the reason for the disproportion will be found hauling freight trailers on the interstate.  The overall state budget has been running a surplus and it will supposedly be used to make up the lost revenue.  Indiana drivers will be well aware that our usual road spending is, um, thrifty, and so I'm not sure if this will make driving much worse.

     I was hoping to sweeten the pot for a field technician planning a swing through the state; we've got a widget he's far more qualified to look over than I am (the book for the thing is more of a user's manual) and we'd like to see him sooner rather than later.  You'd never guess what the powerplant in his service truck full of test equipment, replacement parts and tools runs on, not in a million, jillion years -- but it ain't ethyl.
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* "Red dye diesel" is not taxed by Indiana; it's intended for use in off-road farm machinery, though the Governor has decreed farmers can now use it in their on-road transportation.  Everyone else needs to stick with the undyed version and pay the tax.  If you pull up at the Co-Op in your Benz, they're going to send you on your way unfulfilled.

Been Quiet

     I had computer problems the last few days -- stumbled into a stupid trap link.  I think I rooted out the worst damage, but who can be sure?

     A different bug is making the rounds, especially on GMail, a fake "event invitation" that comes from the pwned account of a trusted contact.  I've received two of them and they're innocuous-looking enough that I hovered over the link before thinking better of it. It's easy to get so used to the routine spam and phishing that some of the old-time malware will bite you.

Stop Shouting!

     Alternative titles: "Get Off The Bus!" and "Partyline."

     It has nothing to do with politics.  I went to work on a transmitter yesterday; it's been behaving oddly, slow to "wake up" after power hits, and the first, simplest step was to replace the transient suppressors on the incoming power.  They're conveniently socketed, and somewhat inconveniently mounted -- you have to remove the front panel from a module and it exposes the incoming mains voltage, 208 Volt 3-phase.  So I had to shut it all the way off.

     I proceeded to do the task, transmitter off, breaker off, panel off, unplug and replace three little widgets, then put it all back together, look it over, flip the breaker, power up, wait for the hearts and brains of the thing to get happy (okay, the RF modulators and controllers, each nicely redundant) and then the ON switch, a little power-up cycle of yellow and green lights, and--  And--  And--

     And the darn green lights went nuts.  Multiple faults, amber and blinking red in the "Christmas tree" status lights down one side of each amplifier; on the other, where three power supplies should light up green and steady, instead it showed blinks, green and off, chasing one another down the front panel in waltz time, 1,23; 1,2,3; 1,2,3; 1,2,3.  One amplifier showed a few more faults than the other three.

     I started digging through the front-panel menus on the controllers.  They had apparently signed up with the Wobblies: one should be Active while its pal is on Standby.  Instead, they were both on Standby!  Checking the computer-screen GUI confirmed it.  They weren't a-gonna work.

     The manual recommends setting the power output to zero and rebooting.  So I did.  Nope.  The next step is to try shutting things off -- it will run with one controller and one exciter, after all -- and rebooting.  Nope.  At that point, I sat down and put in a request for tech support with the manufacturer,* then went back to trying things like shutting off each amplifier module one at a time, and trying to take off with one prop feathered.  No luck.

     Eventually, a note came back from the factory.  They were reaching out to their subject-matter expert -- who just happened to be the contract engineer who had supervised our installation.  I remembered him as a guy who'd known all the quirks of the transmitter.

     Back to trying things.  My phone lit up with a message: Their guy was deep in another crises, and suggested putting the old transient suppressors back in. That's right, he'd said those things could be flaky, back when we put the transmitter in.  So I did that.  No change.

     I tried a few other things, got a message saying a call to me was next in the queue, and spent some time going back through the manual.  There's no tutorial, but the English translation has all the drawings and implies quite a lot.  I rebooted the internal network switch, even though it mostly communicated with the outside world; internal communications uses a different system.

     Man, still no call.  It had been an hour and a half since the initial contact.  I sent another email to the factory support coordinator, suggesting I'd been waiting long enough to hire a truck and make a good start towards driving the thing back to their parking lot.  That got a reply.  "What?  He hasn't called you?"  By this point, I'd also told my bosses, and they were sending increasingly worried text messages.

     The expert eventually did call.  He was mystified by the symptoms.  We wasted a half-hour trying to connect to the amplifiers directly.  They've got USB jacks, but it takes a stone-simple terminal emulator; it pops up a blinking cursor and we got that far, at least.  From there, a menu should appear in response to a tap on the ENTER key, but none of 'em were answering the phone.

     This made no sense to me, and, at first, not much more to him.  Then he asked if I'd tried shutting things off and restarting.  I had.  "Have you tried shutting off two things?"  That, I had not. So, with the most-complaining amplifier and one of the controllers off, I did yet another reboot.

     It's a slow process, a power-up self-test that steps through each part.  Green lights came up, flickered amber, came back green one at a time.  Green lights that stayed green.  I tried turning up the output power and my analog meters flickered.  (They're external.  It bugged me that the thing didn't have a nice big "I'm happy!" indication I could see across the room, so I added them.)  I told the expert, and kept on turning up the power, a little at a time.  "You're not going to make full power, of course," he told me, "But it'll do at least fifty percent."

     With one of four amplifiers off, you might think 75 percent, but that's not how the math works; the combining uses clever physics tricks that only add up nicely when everything is balanced, and when it isn't, some energy is lost.  Fifty is still greater than zero, and that's where we ended up.

     So what happened?  The internal communications is a kind of "party line," a shared serial data bus.  The expert figures the bad amp has been yelling for help -- but not flagging any alarms -- for a long time.  That's why the transmitter's been so slow to recover from power hits.  When I shut the transmitter down for half an hour, that's longer than it has been off since we put it in, and one of the controllers woke up unhappy.   I'm told that's a known problem.  And the controller was spamming the party line, too.  That's way too much traffic: neither controller could promote itself to active, the good amplifier modules couldn't report themselves ready for duty, and that transmitter wasn't going nowhere nohow until we shut off all the racket on the line.

     If it's not one thing, it's two things.  And it was.  The amplifier modules -- eighty pounds or so! --  are factory repair only, so they're shipping me a box and we'll cycle it through the repair process.    
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* Or as close as I can get.  It's actually imported, then fitted out to U. S. standards by the importer.  But both the overseas manufacturer and the U.S. importer are owned by the same multinational, headquartered in yet another country, so they're actually doing business with themselves.  Happily, all three are mostly geek-driven.  Unhappily, all three got downsized as the last of the U.S. digital cutover process met the COVID-19 pandemic.  There are a handful of engineers and techs left, in three languages.

It's Junk Food

     It's junk science, too: "A.I.," which is certainly artificial but has yet to demonstrate actual intelligence, is going to kill us all, warn the....people working frantically to build ever larger versions of it.

     While it is true that the inhuman, hyperscaled fuzzy-logic might indeed do immense harm, all of it will require human actions -- being fool enough to connect it to critical systems, applying it to cybercrime (it's really, really well suited to that, which reveals quite a lot about the people promoting it) and treating its advice as if it was coming from another soft, vulnerable human being instead of generated by a big, clever next-likely-sequence-of-words machine.  Most of your fellow humans already don't give a flip about you, but a majority would still cringe if you suffered grievous bodily harm in front of them and started to bleed and scream.  A.I. would react to it in the precise same way as lump of mud: not at all.  There is no there there.|

     And of all the junk-food junk science, "Roko's Basilisk" is among the worst.  It's nonsense.  It's brainrot.  It assumes there's a ghost in the machine.  Might some future "A.I." punish anyone* who knew it could be brought into existence and didn't help (or fought against it)?  ...First, it presupposes that there's something to do the knowing; second, it absolves the humans who built and trained the thing, directly or indirectly, of blame.  This is "The lawnmower ran over the rabbit nest" levels of passive voice guilt-dodging: no, stupid, you ran over the baby bunnies with the lawnmower you were wielding, which is why there's blood all over your shoes.

     The basilisk isn't a thought experiment, it's a threat, from the same kind of irresponsible teen-aged thinker that shouldn't be allowed to use dangerous machinery around the powerless and vulnerable.  We've already run that experiment at scale, when DOGE dismantled USAID, and it has resulted in at least hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths so far, with some sources projecting tens of millions dead by 2030.  There's your creature, and it's humans pushing the button, same as always.

     Maybe we should stop them -- or at least stop pretending their imaginary playmate is real.
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* Or, in some versions of the fable, their simulacrum, which is brainrotted brainrot: a copy of you simulated in the machine will not be you, and the illusion of continuity of consciousness does not run in reverse: your copy may "remember" your joys and sorrows, but whatever simulation of suffering it might endure will never affect you.  Fretting this one is like laying awake at night worrying someone will tear up a photograph of you, and I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your ex already did.

The Spider

     It's not a metaphor.  A large Orb Weaver has set up shop in our side yard, between one wall of Roseholme Cottage and a skinny wooden post for the temporary fence around the tree-smashed house south of us.

     I noticed her weeks ago, initially with a medium-large web between one of the pillars holding up the roof of our porch and the front wall of the house.  A gold-kneed Orb Weaver!  She'd weave a new web every evening, seine the air all night and take it down each morning.  A few days later, I blundered into an anchor strand in broad daylight between our house and the wreck of our neighbors, and didn't give it much thought.

     Thursday, Tam and I were taking the trash can to the curb.  The usual division of labor is that she wheels the bin and I stand watch;* it's large and heavy.  Even though it has wheels, it's an awkward thing and there are plenty of places to take a fall between the back yard and the curb out front.

     Tamara was in the lead, puffing with effort, and came to an abrupt stop.  "Uh-oh!"

     "What is it?  Are you okay?"  Our normal route follows the narrow sidewalk to the south of the house.  After the tree fell and was rapidly cleared up by a team of a half-dozen men, the usual bumps and little hollows were supplemented by more of the same, and they're big enough to catch a wheel.

     She paused before saying, "There's a huge spiderweb!"

     I walked around her, flashlight on.  There was indeed a huge spiderweb, at least a yard across and about five feet high, supported by a very heavy diagonal of silk from our gutter to a foot above the base of one of the neighbor's fence posts.  It was neatly signed with a white squiggle, and at the very center, a large, light-brown spider with pale knees, half again as big as last seen.  The fishing must be good.

     Tam was unhappy.  She's uncomfortable with spiders, especially big ones.  You know how some people who are nervous around cats or dogs seem to attract them?  She's like that for spiders.  If a spider's going to screw up rappelling, she's who it will fall on, panicked.  "We can't go this way."

     I like spiders.  They catch and eat noxious bugs, and often perform fancy dances (ever watch a zebra spider hunt?  They leap and spin like a cartoon ninja!) or weave elaborate nets in the process.  "I'll take the trash around the other side of the house," I said, "if you'll open the gate on that side."  I took the bin from her, backed it up and got it turned around, and horsed the heavy thing through the long detour.

     Once we'd got the bin to the curb, I went around to the south to see the spider and her web from the other side.  Her abdomen is marked with a pattern like snake scales, with a paler + right in the center.  She didn't seem to mind the attention -- an annoyed Orb Weaver will start to bob up and down while holding on to the web until the whole thing is rippling; they'll let you know when you're in the way.  I didn't want to spoil her fishing by getting too close.  The web is one of the largest I've seen in years, truly impressive work.

     When Tamara and I returned from our morning walk right before sunrise today, I had another look.  The anchor strand is still there, a good sign she still considers that spot her patch -- but she'd taken the web down.  There's plenty of room to walk under the anchor at the high end.

     I guess we've got a new helper!  Around here, the Orb Weavers usually fish a spot for a few weeks and then move on, folding their nets and slipping away.
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* While this may seem unfair, on Trash Day I clean out the fridge and change two of the three litterboxes, and usually buy the pizza as well.  It evens out.

Geeking Out

     Here's a whole series of pages with old General Radio publications!  Great stuff if you like that kind of thing; GR built a lot of parts and lab equipment from the very early days on.  Eventually, they were divvied up and parted out.

Rewrenched

     Nope, not my back -- my toolbox.

     Working on my off-center-fed dipole ham antenna in its post-treefall location, I was using a 3/8" combination "ignition" wrench.  I'd had to buy a new set; the set in my workshop either never had a 3/8" or I lost it (memory claims it arrived with two 5/16" and no 3/8").

     I'd done without.  You can't buy just one ignition wrench.*  Sized for fine work -- like the ignition systems of older cars -- they're sold in sets, usually sized from 5/32" through 7/16" in either open end/box end combinations, or with open-ended wrench jaws at each end, set at different angles.  A decent set is inexpensive; if you use them a lot, you might want something better, but twelve dollars or less buys a usable set.  Most have all-over plating or polishing, including the jaws; pay more and you can avoid it.

     The combination kind are the most generally useful in electronics, and that's what I'd had.  "Had," because I'd bought another set when I needed a 3/8" wrench, used it to tighten the antenna wire connections to the impedance-matching balun, attempted to put the wrench in my pocket while balancing on an extension ladder, and been distracted by the effort of getting down, taking the ladder down without straining my back or putting it through a window, and carefully carrying the ladder to its storage spot.  I didn't think about the wrench until doing laundry the next day.  "Better check these slacks, I don't want to wash a wrench by mistake."  Nothing.  The little wrench was gone.

     While the washer was running, I checked all the places where I might have set the wrench down.  Nope.

     Over the next few days, off and on, I retraced my path in the back yard multiple times.  No sign of that shiny little wrench, even while the sun was beating down and the sparkle would stand out.  I kept looking as I went about my normal routines.  Friday, it occurred to me that if I had dropped the wrench while aloft, I was working right over the fence that separates the patio from my narrow side yard, and it might be on the other side.  But that realization came after dark, and I promptly forgot.

     While cleaning up outdoors after dinner -- the grill trays I use get a first scrub-down with vinegar over a weedy patch  -- I remembered, and had a peek over the fence.  Though the sun was setting, there was a gleam from the grass.  I didn't have my keys, so after I had the trays soaking in a sink of soapy water, I went out the front door with a penlight and walked right to the tiny wrench, unhurt by nearly a week outside.  Victory!
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* Strictly speaking, that's not  true.  Snap-On will sell onesie replacements for their open-ended sets.  The 3/8" ones are about $28 and yes, the sets are well over $100.  They will undoubtedly last forever, the warranty is first-rate and I'll bet the jaws are ever so slightly roughened, for a secure grip.  If you need really good ignition wrenches, they'd be the ideal choice.  At work, the North Campus has a few ignition and full-size Snap-On wrenches remaining from the original set of tools and they're outstandingly good.  My personal needs along those lines are more modest.     

Free Philip Glass Concert!

     Okay, maybe it's not exactly his style, but if you're not claustrophobic -- and I most definitely am not -- and you put in the earplugs and remember to ask for a blanket -- which I certainly did -- there's something restful about relaxing cozily inside an MRI in a loose-fitting hospital gown and scrub pants with your eyes shut while the machine does its thing:

     CLACK! Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tock.
     Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)
      Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)
       Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)
        Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)

     CLACK. Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic, clunk.
     Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!  
     Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!  

     And so on, for nearly half an hour, while I drifted, toasty and half-asleep, trying to work out plot developments in a short story and counting repetitions.  This was all lower back, and while I did feel strangely warm from time to time, I didn't experience the thing that sometimes happens when they're looking at your skull: spinning rings of white light, apparently when the scanning RF beam intersects some part of the eye or optic nerve.  Anyway, I have been plenty magnetized to last me for awhile.

     MRI machines use a series of clever tricks to take a look at your innards, including the parts too soft and squishy to register in any detail on an X-ray, and while an MRI is generally louder and larger than an X-ray machine, the part that's actually scanning you is a little less intense.  The dodge is, the huge electromagnet you're inside has lined up each and every tiny proton in each tiny atom, and the detector is just looking to see how much they wiggle when the scanning beam zips by.  Each pass of the beam results in a series of data points, ρ (rho) much amplitude at an angle of φ (phi) over and over and over, and they slowly build an image in the form of a series of  "slices."  Smart processing software can turn that into a 3-D model or show flat projections at various angles, but it takes a lot of samples -- which is why it takes so long and you're not supposed to move while it's happening.

     If you're not much minded to panic, it's a good time to relax, half-dozing.  Might as well; you're not going anywhere until it is over.

     Despite my very best intentions, I walked to the room with a couple of metal clips in my hair.  The techs give you the once-over, twice, before you cross the threshold, and spotted them.  "Don't feel too bad about it," one of them told me, "I confiscated two lighters from a guy just last week.  I still can't figure out why he brought them."

     What they found out about my back, I don't know yet.  Maybe some time next week.

They're What?

     How knowledge fades: Tam was playing back an interview about storm damage in our a neighborhood a couple of weeks ago, as in the tree that fell and crushed a neighbor's house (empty at the time).  Another neighbor was interviewed about the event, saying the sound "...was like one of those energy boxes up on a pole? When they go out."

     A what, now?

     I suppose some of my reaction is curse-of-knowledge stuff: my work is power distribution adjacent, since we're out of business when the juice stops flowing (and maintain our own MegaWatt-sized backups); and some of it is age: when I was young, most people knew that humming thing up on the pole was a transformer, and no few even knew it by its nickname, "pole pig," fat and round, with small insulators sticking out the sides and a bigger one at the top.  Rotate it ninety degrees, and it is indeed shaped like some kind of robotic pig.  They are the magic that makes big power grids possible: it's a lot easier to ship electricity around at high voltage and low current, but it's more useful in your home at a lower voltage.  The transformer's the middleware that makes it possible.

     Or, you know, the energy box.  They work the same no matter what you call them. (If your wall-socket juice travels underground, you'll have a warm, humming cube hiding in an out-of-the-way spot every few houses instead.  They work the same way, but are all buttoned up to keep curious fingers away.) 

The B*stard Theory

     Still waiting on more examples, but so far, my theory about what it takes to run a successful human spaceflight program is holding water.

     Of course, it takes talented engineers, and plenty of them; of course it takes access to resources -- money will do, but money and actual materiel is even better.  And it takes a decent manufacturing base.  Countries with those things, and a will to send stuff into space, can and do run space programs: Japan, the European Union, India.

     To successfully send humans into space, and bring most of them back, you need one more thing: an utter bastard at the top.  Three of the four entities that have done so demonstrate this: The Soviet Union, the United States, and SpaceX.  Two of the principals were trained engineers, though the details of their spacecraft were designed by others; the third is a coder (or was; it takes about fifteen minutes away from that work to get out of date, and he's been a business promoter for decades now).  All three were or are relentless promoters.  All three accommodated the political environments in which they operated, without regard to moral hazard.  And all three were or are pretty much bastards.  They're not the precise same kinds of bastards: raw and relentless, charming and driven, or weird and unflagging, but they're all relatively amoral.  They all chugged on through anything that got between them and their goal.  And though they all got people into space, none of them quite got to where they wanted to be.

     I'm waiting on another example.  Obscurity still conceals China's guy(s); India's manned space program is supposedly still on track, but they're quiet about it.  But there's almost certainly some kind of bastard behind the scenes, driving the detail people, navigating bureaucracy, moving with little regard to the feelings and careers of others.

     I'm deeply skeptical of "Great Man" theories of history.  Getting human spaceflight programs up and running may be an exception. 

First Day Back

     And, oh shucks, nobody missed me.  (Well, hardly anyone.)  This, in my kind of Engineering Department, counts as a success: if we do our jobs right, fixing most things before they break, we're nearly invisible.

     On the other hand, nobody from Engineering has been to the North Campus for nearly ten weeks and I have no idea what I might find.  It's on a pretty wet patch of land, in an area that's had even more rain than we received in Broad Ripple, so I may end up taking the old entrance, which travels over higher ground to reach the slightly elevated spot where the building stands.

     I was pretty beat at the end of the day, but not in pain.  Tired enough to be grumpy, which I'm going to have to get used to and compensate for.

...And The Waters Receded. Very Slowly.

     The White River peaked through Indianapolis last night, having set new records at several measuring stations -- but never quite overtopped the levees.

     That was scant comfort to the people on the river side.  Oh, they knew the bet, but when it's your home, a once-in-a-century flood still feels unfair.  Ravenswood, Rocky Ripple and few other locations will be a long time drying out and taking stock of what they've lost.

     Successive waves of heavy rain keep sweeping through, keeping the flood higher than predicted.  It's still dropping, just not as fast as we'd all prefer.

     On the personal hobby front, I decided I could string my off-center-fed dipole ham antenna on the other side of the house from where I had planned, away from the neighboring house that got partially crushed.  There's going to be a lot of activity over there by and by, and one end of that antenna would have been barely inside the fence line.  It was a possible complication nobody needs -- especially not me.  I managed to get the antenna in place in the new location, but I haven't run coaxial cable to it yet.  That will take a little planning and a new hole in the wall with a special fitting.

     Tomorrow, I plan to go back to work.  Way back in June when all of this started, I tried twice on successive Mondays to go back, and had to give up before putting in a full day each time: too much pain, too little energy.  I'm doing better now.  Maybe not a hundred percent, but I may not get that again.  85%? 90?  I'll take it.

Not Much Today

     About all I did today was struggle with paperwork.  The extended leave time and medical stuff involves two big and doctrinaire insurance companies; a large medical practice that includes hospitals, all manner of specialists, physical therapists and imaging specialists, and is singularly stubborn and uncooperative when it comes to filling out forms; and the very large and procedure-bound company I have ended up working for, after decades of working for a much smaller one in the same business where you could solve most problems by finding the one or two people who knew how to deal with it and having a short conversation.

     There are no short conversations now, and nobody's interested in helping solve someone else's problems.  There are only rules, and if they don't make sense, tough luck.

     At present, I need a form filled out by licensed experts so I can be allowed to return to work; or they can fill out another form that says I shouldn't.  I have to turn the form in five days before I return.  I can't come back without the form -- and if I don't come back, even if I don't have the form, they will assume I'm playing hooky and I'll be in quite a lot of trouble.  Nevertheless, I won't be allowed to return unless I have the form, and it needs to be filled out and signed by a doctor familiar with my treatment.  (No, I can't just find a shiny new MD who needs a chrome-plated dingus for his or her Benz and offer 'em $500 to fill the damn thing out.)  And there's no direct number or email for either the doctor or the form-filling-out center (yes, they have one), only voicemail and a frustratingly indirect messaging system.  Multiple messages over multiple days have gone without answer.

     The medical care I'm receiving is fine.  The doctor and physical therapists are, as near as I can tell, all competent and highly qualified.  But the whole outfit is not real big on other people's paperwork, especially when it's the patient asking.  And the insurance company who require the form before they will give my employer the all-clear won't ask them to fill out this one, even though they have already requested and received a lot of other documentation from the same medical practice.  Why?  I don't know, and apparently damn me for asking; they acted (politely) like I was trying to get them to cheat when I asked them to ask the medical practice to fill out the form, since they weren't responding to me.

     I have no idea how any of this will work out.  I went home with a gimpy back thinking I'd be out a week or two at the most, and I left my main toolbag in a cabinet at the North Campus with a few thousand dollars worth of my personal hand tools in it, some of them irreplaceable.  I left more of my tools in my desk at the Main Campus.  (I'm kind of picky about tools, and I'm even more picky about being able to do the job without having to wait for some other geek to remember to return the tools he got out of the company toolbox to work on his project.  I'm not going to impugn my peers over poor toolbox discipline, but it's not impossible that one or two of them might be a tiny bit forgetful about returning tools to the box after use.*)

     Presently, all this soap-opera stuff is up in the air, despite my having a letter from my back specialist on the practice's letterhead that says I can return to normal duty at a date in the not-too-distant future.  It's not the actual form, you see, and so therefore -- medical license and specialist certifications notwithstanding -- it may not count.

     I'll bet all of them just leave screwdrivers and staplers, etc. lying where the gadgets were last used, too.  I know the doctor does -- but he's got people whose job it is to clean them up and put them away.
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* One of the things I routinely do -- when I'm working -- is walk through the technical areas and see that all the widgets are lit up properly, picking up abandoned tools and materials as I go and putting them them back in their normal storage places where the next desperate slob can find them.  I don't know why other people don't do this, but I'm not the boss of them; I'm only in charge of how I deal with it, so I do.

Slow Going

     Other than routine -- laundry, dishes and the network politics shows -- I spent today on antenna projects.  Between heat, humidity and my bad back, it's not quick.  I measured and assembled the long side of an off-center-fed dipole antenna, having already done the short side, made with heavy solid wire.  I'm not sure how well it will hold up, but I've always wanted to try, and I had a small stock of what once passed for industrial scrap, accumulated over decades.  It's cut for the 40 meter ham band, which means about 66 feet of wire overall -- some "scrap!"

     I'd had an older version once, taken down years ago when we had tree work done, coiled up and stashed in the flowerbed it used to hang above.  The insulators survived, and maybe the homemade matching transformer, but the stranded wire was greenish and the coaxial cable looked iffy once I located my antenna analyzer and tested it.  (My YouKits imported antenna analyzer is at least ten years old; modern "nano vector network analyzers" will run rings around it* for about what I paid, but it's simple and gives a quick indication if you've got an antenna or a lump, a good coaxial cable or a bad one.)

     This week promises rain, so progress may be even slower.  That's okay -- stringing up an antenna in a hurry is never a good idea, and that goes double when trying to avoid back strain.
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* Almost literally "rings," since they'll do the useful Smith Chart display, while mine only gives a plot of impedance and SWR over a selected frequency range, around a selected center frequency. 

Doc Savage Flashlight

     I've got my Doc Savage flashlight -- and they work just the way Lester Dent described!  Of course, he was writing pulp magazine stories in the 1930s, long before high-strength magnets, light-emitting diodes and supercapacitors.  Whatever kinds of dynamo flashlights were available in his time would have been bulky, clumsy things, eking out extra life from carbon-zinc batteries.

     The iFixit people sell an inexpensive hand-powered flashlight that is small and charged by squeezing a little lever whenever the beam starts to dim.  They're far from the only source -- the various big online retailers list a wide variety, from basic squeeze-charged units to fancy ones with a hand-crank, a radio receiver and a jack to charge your phone.  None of them are high-end tactical lights, but if you're looking for something to leave in useful places for jobs like finding your way to the basement when the lights go out, a few of these wouldn't be a bad choice.  The supercapacitor "battery" on most of them isn't going to turn crusty after a year or two of neglect, though it may need a quick charge by the lever.

     You've already got a better portable communications device than Doc and his associates ever had -- or even Dick Tracy! -- so why not add a flashlight like theirs, too?