It's The Little Things

     After that lovely breakfast yesterday, I slipped and fell while standing up from the bathtub.  Not very far; I'm careful these days.  But far enough: I came down with most of my weight on my injured left knee.

     Something gave way. It was painful.  Once that had faded. I pressed on -- much to do, after all, and so few hours in the day.  But I was limping worse than usual and gradually ran out of steam.  Denial only goes so far.  My knee had swollen back up in new and disturbing ways.  It was throbbing, too.  Eventually, I had to admit the day was not going to happen.

     I took to my bed still in work clothes, a gel-filled ice pack on my knee and a pillow under it.  I was asleep in minutes and woke only to swap the pack for a fresh one from the freezer.  Hours later, I helped out for trash night and watched a TV game show, then back to bed with ice.

     Today is better, so far.  I slept later than usual and I am hoping to get to work.  It's going to have to be mostly sedentary.

Cornbread Omelet

      The omelets I make probably don't fit everyone's definition.  I reinforce the egg with some cooked starch and water -- often breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs, or even cornmeal.  Frustrated by omelets that break when you fold them?  Try adding some strength.  (I'd love to tell you how much, but it varies.  Start with three or four saltines for a three-egg omelet in a 10" pan.  Mash 'em up and add enough water to form a paste, then beat or stir in the eggs. The gentler you are, the less air in the finished product, and this is a matter of personal preference.)

     Last night, I heated up "leftover stew" using the tri-tip pot roast from Sunday, and made microwave cornbread to go along with it, a box mix jazzed up with an extra egg, a little more milk, some arepa meal and a little pepper and chili powder on top.  It was good; a little denser than I would have liked, even after five minute's rest, but a tasty side to mop up the stew broth.

     This morning, there was cornbread left, so I crumbled a wedge of it into a small mixing bowl, added water and seasoning ("Italian blend" and Bragg's mix), let it set a spell and beat three medium eggs into it.  I'd fried a strip of bacon while the batter was waiting, and snipped it in, with some Fontina cheese and black olives as filling.  The end result was as good as any omelet I've made.  It ends up fairly thick, with an airy texture, and the cornbread notes blend nicely with the egg. 

A Nonlinear Process

     Healing up from the kind of fall I took is not a simple, smooth curve.  There are good days and bad ones.  My left knee had swollen to not quite twice normal size.  As the swelling drops, it uncovers new frontiers of pain and discomfort; likewise, as the bruises fade.  Today has not been one of the good ones.

     My kneecap was already kind of damaged (there appears to be a hole in it) and I'm not looking forward to what coming days may reveal.  But it's already done.  My job is to deal with it.

About Weapons

     In the Star Trek original series episode Amok Time, Captain James T. Kirk has to fight Spock with a Vulcan "lirpa," a spear-sized weapon with a heavy weight at one end and a fan-shaped blade on the other.  It's a nasty-looking thing, but consider: the weapons used by most cultures are hunting and farming tools, adapted for war.

     What good is a gadget with a hammer or bludgeon at one and and a slicer at the other?  Clearly, it's for a creature like a mussel or an oyster, but much larger: Spock's ancestors would hunt the dry and dusty bottoms of the dead seas of Vulcan until they found the buried lair of the Giant Vulcan Clam, dig down to it, give the beast a sharp rap on the shell with the heavy end and it either cracks or opens up to see what all the fuss is, at which point the hunter's helper pours in a bucket of salt and hot sauce (or possibly Worcestershire) while the hunter reverses the lirpa and scoops the thing out with the sharp end: dee-lish!

     Of course, Star Trek's Vulcans are vegetarians, and per the fictional future history, they have been for thousands of years.  The huge molluscs the lirpa was invented to hunt are probably extinct.  But once upon a time, long ago...!

Update: The Calutron

     My -- admittedly cursory -- reading had left me with the impression that nobody bothered with mass spectrometry to produce fissionables these days.  The process was still good for turning out research-level amounts of obscure isotopes, and maybe some medical ones, and that was it.  Real baddies went in for centrifugal separation, since it was relatively simple* and produced the greatest volume for a given amount of hardware and energy to run the system.

     Yeah, guess what?  Wrong.  At least one rogue state would-be member of the nuke club picked up bargain-priced calutrons, apparently of Chinese origin, and used them to crank out some measurable quantity of hot stuff.

     So there's still a degree of "security through obscurity" for these tricky widgets, and my curiosity will have to go unsatisfied.  Any ill intentioned start-up is going to have to work that stuff out the hard way, which takes time and leaves traces.
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* None of this is "Khyber Pass gunsmith" simple, thank heavens, requiring specialized, high-precision technology and skilled technicians working with chemical and radiological hazards that would curdle your hair -- in some cases, literally.  Even at that level, there are degrees of difficulty, and some processes are more efficient than others.  But they're all insanely inefficient.  The Manhattan Project tried every method they could manage (you'd never guess which one they couldn't make work) and ended up running them in sequence, gaseous and thermal diffusion plants feeding (via chemical processes of hair-raising danger) the calutrons, a system of vast industrial works employing tens of thousands of people that had, by the end of the war, produced slightly more than enough material for four bombs; they'd used three and didn't have the fourth ready to go.  This would be an amount of fissionable material that a moderately-good weightlifter could raise overhead.  It's a wheelbarrow load.

Bad Decisions

     Got together with my siblings Sunday, which is always stressful, for reasons that don't have all that much to do with them; they're nice enough.  We grew up in a difficult family dynamic and it's a challenge not to revert to old patterns of thought and feeling.

     It was my older sister's birthday, reason enough to mark the day.  And a nice day for it, too.  We dined outside, at a place not terribly far from my house.

     Parking is limited there.  I could have taken the bus, and walked a few blocks at each end, but with my injured knee?  No.  I'm clever: I rode my bicycle.

     Got down there okay, having dosed up on acetaminophen not long before leaving, had a fine meal and chat, and shortly into the ride home, realized it might not have been the best choice.

     By the time I got home, I was fairly well buzzed on pain endorphins, dizzy and unfocused.  I managed to get everything stowed, took more OTC pain meds, iced up my knee and got horizontal.  I was zonked out within minutes, and didn't wake up until Tamara got home, around cat-feeding time.  I did a few chores, checked the clock and took more pills (I've been alternating aspirin and acetaminophen, which gives me three hours between them), iced up again and went back to bed.

     This morning, my left knee is back down to being only a little swollen and merely kind of painful.  Bicycling is off until it heals.

--

     Comments elsewhere by atomic historian Alex Wellerstein had me, once again, looking up the controls the "calutron girls" of Oak Ridge were operating.  Famously, they they were not told anything about the why of large-scale isotope separation in a mass spectrometer, just sat down in front of a control panel loaded with meters, knobs and switches, told what range to keep the readings within and what knobs affected which readings, and left to it.*

     I have never been able to find an annotated description of the controls, a photo or a drawing with readable labels.  There's an obvious intercom panel, for talking with the techs working at the "racetrack" where the actual process happens; there are a few meters that are clearly at an elevated voltage, isolated behind glass, plus a dozen or more on the front panel, but working from the sketchy diagrams of the process and assuming it's looking at voltage and current for every element of the widget, there are still about twice as many meters as I can account for.  There are hints the "tanks" may operate in linked pairs, and that would work out. (And there are some whacking big vacuum tubes behind the front panel that appear to be water-cooled.  Thyratrons?  Rectifiers?  Conventional power tubes?  I don't know.)

     But I hope you will pardon me if I don't get more specific than that; parts of the Manhattan Project hardware are still classified, and I'd just as soon not have a conversation with our country's nuke spooks over my fascination with this important (though outmoded for the original purpose) hardware that bears a slight conceptual resemblance to the last big vacuum-tube transmitters I was responsible for.
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* The classic tale is that they did the task "much better than Ph.D. physicists," who "got distracted by every flicker of the meters," and I should hope so -- that's not a job for a physicist; it's not even a job for a repair tech.  It's a production job, and "turn this knob to keep that reading between the marked limits" was a pretty normal job description before automation.  A calutron is a complicated beast, though, with over a dozen meters and plenty of controls, and the operator is tracking a changing degree of ionization in a vacuum chamber throughout each batch-process "run." 

There's That

     That darned left knee is making it difficult to go to sleep, even with OTC painkillers and ice.  By the end of the day, it's pretty swollen and running warm.  It's loud, without making a sound.


     On the good side, physical discomfort means I don't sprawl there awake worrying about politics.  Restricting that fretting to the daytime is probably a good thing.  One thing I have figured out: in a de facto two-party Presidential system,* the reality that neither candidate is ever going to be a perfect fit for many voters of their own party means everyone is in the habit of justifying their choice: it's usually a process of picking the least-bad one, heavily influenced by notions of self-image: "I'm a [political party name] voter and I have been all my life/since Carter/since Reagan/since whoever."  So we have to sell ourselves on the notion that the not-ideal guy run by the party we favor is okay, and that the not-great guy the other party ran is a bad, bad choice.  We do it when the contest is between a couple of rich white guys who graduated from top-tier schools, spent years rising through various elective offices and have barely a dime's worth of difference in their policies, so of course we do it when the pairing includes a woman, a person almost entirely without political experience and/or someone dark-skinned.  And because it's our very own personal set of excuses -- oops, reasons -- why we're okay with how we voted or plan to vote, it's deeply entrenched.  Anyone challenging it is pushing back on not just our choices but our sense of who we are.

     I don't have an answer for the problem that presents.  I can counsel making a dispassionate choice, sitting down and listing pros and cons, sticking to verifiable facts and not Internet rumor or what some pundit thinks a candidate might do.  Judge them based on what they have done, judge them on the definite promises they make in their platform and stump speeches and not on glittering or gloomy generalities about happy days to come and bad times now.  Wash off as much of the BS as you can and then decide.

     You still might not make the same choice I have, but at least you won't be voting for your pick because it makes that snoopy schoolteacher down the street furious or it will irk the jerk who drives a vehicle covered in bumper stickers.  Those reasons are foolish.  Find real ones.
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* In multiparty Parliamentary systems, voters don't even get an Electoral College-distance opportunity to elect the Chief Executive.  Instead, the elected legislators have to duke it out, especially if no party won a clear majority.  It's good and bad: nobody feels much obliged to like a leader they didn't personally vote for, the pick often represents a compromise choice and are constrained by whatever coalition put them in place, but "Westminster" systems produce real duds in the worry seat as least as often as "Washington" ones.  Both systems result in regular do-overs and maybe that's as much as we can hope for.

Annoyance

     Fine, I have badly bruised knees.  If I need to do any work near the floor, I have to sit on the floor.  Kneeling is obviously out, but it turns out that squatting pulls my slacks tight over my knees and it hurts like the dickens, even in the baggy, multi-pocket work pants I prefer.

     This is the weekend -- I can just slob around in a nightgown most of the day!  --Except my favorite summer sleepwear hits right at the knee.  That featherweight touch, touch, touch as I move is maddening and if it hits just wrong, surprisingly painful.

     The fall could have been worse.  I probably came close to breaking a wrist, I could have done far worse to my knees and I just missed smashing my face into a concrete curb.  But the aftermath is still unpleasant.

The Universal Campaign Yard Sign

     Here it is, one size fits all, suitable for every voter:

Like Ball Bearings

     Yesterday was a long and busy day.  One of the towers I'm responsible has white strobe lights.  This carries some advantages; since the lights run day and night, you don't have to paint the tower the usual red and white bands and can match the paint color to the surrounding structures.

     Until recently, it has also carried some disadvantages: the strobe fixture itself is an overgrown version of a professional photographer's flash: a strobe tube a foot and a half long and an array of electronics to light it up (at different intensities depending on sky illumination), time the flashes and keep them in sync with the other strobes, and to monitor and communicate the status of all that.  Operating several hundreds feet in the air means it is exposed to the full range of weather -- and producing the high voltages needed to make the thing flash generates copious amounts of ozone.  Electrical contacts that switch brightness levels arc and pit; exposed metal corrodes.  Wires and circuit-board traces eventually melt away into smears of green-blue slime.  The normal life of a strobe fixture is twenty-five years.  These were installed in 1981.  I've been keeping them going (with the help of a succession of skilled tower climbers) since 1987.

     Yeah, I'm pretty good.  So are the tower guys.  But nobody outruns rust.  And nobody outruns technological obsolescence.  These strobes lost manufacturer support fifteen years ago, and FAA rules mandate only OEM parts can be used to keep them running.  There's a thriving cottage industry of what I am sure are New Old Stock and refurbished used parts.  I'm sure of it because I have had to be: there was no budget to replace the old strobes and you can't just turn 'em off and hope the FAA doesn't notice.

     Over a decade ago, the first solid-state tower strobe systems came on the market.  It's a sealed-up widget, no user-serviceable parts inside.  They were fiendishly expensive, but came with a warranty good for the normal life of the system.  And they got a little less expensive every year.  Meanwhile, the cost of sending someone up the tower to do work kept going up, over a thousand dollars per technician: they have to be trained and insured, and fitted out with the right safety equipment.  (You can thank the cellphone industry for this: they kept hiring the lowest bidders and those crews kept having accidents, often fatal, and every time, local, state and Federal governments made moves intended to increase safety.  Now the low bidders are very nearly as safe as the best crews always were, so there's that.  Also, fewer dead guys, which I do count as a win.)

     The converging lines of old, worn-out strobe lights, falling hardware prices and increasing costs of getting anyone up there to swap out parts several times a year finally crossed this year.  We got on the wait list and this week, a crew has been hard at work on our strobed tower, taking down the old stuff and putting up the new.

     The sun was going down yesterday when they needed some semi-obscure conduit hardware to hook onto some existing wiring.  I had dug it out of our supplies and was carrying it to the tower base.  This tower sits next to a paved parking lot, surrounded by oak trees.

     The oak trees produce acorns.  Any more, they produce a lot of acorns.  I was walking across the lot, both hands full, and managed to look one direction  while turning the other way.  I put my foot down on a mess of acorns, and it started to go out from under me.  I took a big step to get my balance back -- and put my other foot onto more acorns.  They might as well have been marbles.  Zip!  I was going over and I knew it.  I tossed the conduit parts away (a condulet and some 1" rigid couplers and locknuts), tried to get my hands up, managed to avoid smashing my face into a curb and came down hard and sliding on my right hand and left knee, followed by right knee and right breast.  Knocked the wind out of me and I laid there.

     The boss of the tower crew, who I'd been talking to at the time, leaned over: "Are you okay?"
     "I don't know.  Give me a second."  I was sore already.  I moved my arms and legs a little -- okay -- and sat up.  Both knees hurt, but no tears on my slacks.  Dirt and -- oh, damn -- a big abraded patch on the heel of my right hand.  I looked around for the conduit parts.  "Did you see where the LB went?"
     The crew boss shook his head. "No."
     I spotted it, stood up shakily, picked up my purse, went over and picked it up along with the other parts, which I gave to him.  "Here.  You take this.  I'm going to go inside and clean up."

     I did just that, walking through the (large) building to the breakroom where we keep the first aid kit while the cupped palm of my right hand slowly filled up with blood.  I washed all the damage (and dirt) with strong soap.  It hurts but it's worth it.  Got it dry, put a bandage on it and some other scratches, took a couple of Tylenol and went back out.  The crew had decided they were done for the day: not enough light left.  Yeah, I could have told them that when I failed to see the layer of dark acorns on the blacktop, right before I fell.

     Got home and discovered the damage to my left knee when I was getting ready for bed.  Washed that with hydrogen peroxide and slept with ice on it.  Today, the knee is much larger than my right one, and we'll see how that goes.

     They'd better have those new strobes working by the time I get in today.

Some Circus

     The ringmasters -- there were two -- mostly looked bored, except when a pie fight broke out between a clumsy magician and a fake strongman with cardboard weights.  A sad clown led out a poodle on a string, walking on its hind legs, but it didn't do any other tricks.  The Human Cannonball promised several times to launch himself the entire length of the Big Top, but he kept falling well short and missing the net.  He even complained about it, saying, "The rules were you guys weren't gonna fact-check."

     The acts didn't strike me as especially well-rehearsed.  Yes, I'm talking about the debate and while I think Senator Vance lost on facts, especially his refusal to admit Mr. Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election and in claiming the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio under Temporary Protected Status are "illegals" (they're not), I wasn't impressed.  I think Governor Walz would do okay if he had to step up to the big job; I'm not too sure J. D. Vance has the chops.  Tim Walz and his opponent would have both benefited from doing more interviews with neutral to hostile press -- and so would we.

     These two are what we have.  Their running mates are what we have.  Most voters have made their decision already.

Circus Comes To Television Tonight

     Tonight -- and for one night only -- the bearded dudebro in the gray flannel suit squares off against the grizzled Dad in a tartan flannel shirt.

     This promises to be interesting, since each man is the ostensible "folksy" member of their respective campaigns and they'll probably be fighting to be more centrist than the other guy, J. D. Vance's Yale degree and hobnobbing with high-roller venture capitalists notwithstanding, likewise Tim Walz's Upper Midwest progressivism.  Why, they're Just Plain Fellows who might live down the street -- surrounded by a phalanx of well-armed Secret Service.*

     Only one of them is yoked to a candidate who most recently promised stealing from businesses would go way down, if only, "You know, if you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day, one rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know, it'll end immediately."  That's former President Donald Trump, of course, and he's talking about allowing police to exercise extrajudicial violence without due process of law -- to control retail theft, based on a misstatement of California's moving the line between felony and misdemeanor theft up to $950.00, American.†  (Draconian punishment has been tried; England used hang people for shoplifting, picking pockets and theft, as late as 1832 for some offenses.  It was not a deterrent, though they did produce some of the most skilled purse-lifters in the world.)

     Senator Vance's challenge tonight is to not come off as a weirdo.  Governor Walz's is to resist the teacher/senior NCO impulse to chivvy his opponent to act normal.  Vance has been marinating in "manosphere" culture, a subset of the Trumpist Right largely divorced from reality; Walz has been enjoying nearly universal acclaim in Democratic circles.  For both of them, success in the debate will depend on how well their preparation has allowed them to look beyond those comforting horizons.

     We'll find out.
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* This is why I'm not chiding any of the candidates for avoiding the areas hardest hit by hurricane Helene and its aftermath: their unavoidable retinues place a big strain on resources wherever they go and any visit would do far more harm than good.
 
† Weirdly, this is the same guy who likes to talk about how bad inflation has become.  So if it costs more for the same stuff (and it does; the argument is over how much more), wouldn't that move the bar for the seriousness of crimes, too?  In 1789, Congress made sure you could get a jury trial if more than $20 was at stake -- about $715 in 2024.