It's Late Night With Bobbi!

     Early morning, actually. I started early Saturday. The Data Viking visited and we walked through the Tri-State Gun Show, out at Stout Field National Guard Armory.  It was unusually crowded; it's generally more of a collector/hunter show but this one had a considerable number of what Tamara Keel calls "gen. pop.," the gun-owning Everyman.  This may be due to recent White House mentions -- or it may have simply been that the weather was unseasonably pleasant, upper 40s to low 50s and sunny, and people were motivated to get out.  We saw any number of interesting things and many familiar faces.

     One of the more interesting things at the show was a Spanish .32-20, a relatively close copy of a Colt that was made in Eibar;* another was a lovely nickle or chrome-plated High-Standard "Sentinel Deluxe" .22 revolver.  Fit and finish was unusually good and the (factory) plating was both bright and warm, which is why I'm not quite sure what metal it was.  The Deluxe versions look to run about $300; this was marked a dollar less.  I own three non-Deluxe Sentinels and it's a long time between paydays, or I would have been tempted -- this is still a "sleeper" among .22 revolvers, with very good stocks, light weight, smooth double-action and modern, large sights.  Other than the Deluxe, prices range around $200 - $250.  They shoot as nicely as any .22 revolver from Colt, Smith & Wesson or H&R and you'll have plenty left over to buy enough ammunition to get good with it.

     We ran a few errands and I was running out of steam; he left, I went to bed early and managed to get a full eight hours before my early shift.  Perhaps I won't have to fight quite as hard to stay awake.
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* Eibar was a major center of gun-making activity in Spain.  It's also in just about the center of Basque country, which has enjoyed at least a degree of autonomy in Spain since 1979.  Make of that what you will.

An Interesting Class

     Other than some useful review of the modular Incident Management structure, it was hardly a class at all.  Instead, it was a very useful bit of touching-base with county- and state-level Emergency Management people, along with a cameo appearance by a couple of Indiana State Police Troopers.

     The purpose of the class is enable technical personnel -- Engineering and IT -- in my line of work to get to locations where we have necessary equipment, but no regular staff, during various emergencies and natural disasters (or to get to work at all; during some kinds of Snow Emergency, for instance, when the roads are deemed closed and driver risk a ticket just for operating a motor vehicle on public thoroughfares).  At the end of the class, we walk away with some understanding of command structure (i.e., who to ask for, who not to bother and how to stay out of the way), some basic safety gear (hardhat, visibility vest -- we have to buy own own but that stuff s cheap) and a better understanding of how to handle interaction with emergency workers (see below) while they have picked up a little insight into who these crazy people are and why we might need past a roadblock, across a flooded stretch of road, or to be out driving in a blizzard.

     One of the better quotes: "The scene of a disaster is not the place to be meeting for the first time and exchanging business cards!"  In Indiana, the IDHS is the state-level coordinating agency for emergency response and they have periodic conferences of county Emergency Managers; one purpose of those is simply to get them in contact with one another before they need to go borrow a cup of snowplows or whatever.  It's a good idea.

     I found the class useful and the IDHS and EMA people were exactly the type I hope to see in such jobs: serious about the work, sincere in the belief the can make a positive difference.  It's easy to gripe about government, especially at the bureaucrat level and even more so when it's a wrestling-smoke job like managing emergencies.  Even the description borders on an oxymoron!  Maybe in An-Cap Libertopia, there's a market solution to disaster; maybe all your neighbors will pitch in (just as they often do in emergencies in this world.)  Here in the world of what is, these government agencies do exist.  They're not going away and given that, I would rather see them in the hands of competent folks who think the job is worth doing than some tired, cynical timeserver.

     For the people who moan, "Where were the Feds?  Where was the state?" when things go wrong, here's how it works: emergency response happens from the bottom up; first response is coordinated and supported at the county level if it needs it.  If the county finds it too big, they get help from the state.  If the state needs help, they yell for the Feds.  FEMA -- the good handing-out-water-and-blankets side, not the tinfoil hat fantasy seen in YouTube videos of rail yards -- is by definition the last on the scene.

     To close, here's a hot tip from the Indiana State Police: "Do not tiptoe up behind an officer at a roadblock and tap him or her on the shoulder!"
     (Entire class laughs.)
     "No, this really happens, and more than you'd think.  You don't know what that officer was just doing, helping pull a mangled body out of a car wreck, looking for an armed suspect -- they are making split-second decisions."
       The other officer added, "And please, for your sake -- can I borrow this smartphone? -- do not be doing this." He'd palmed the phone and put his hand behind his right hip; as he said "this," he brought his hand back into sight just above his holster and smoothly upward, and many of us flinched: it looked for all the world as if he was drawing his sidearm.  An effective lesson.

Another Hasty Morning

     I have a class to attend and it starts an hour earlier than my usual -- and at a location father away.  But it may serve double duty: I'm hoping to get a Hidden Frontier vignette out if it.

     Actually made some progress yesterday, and on the "Robinson Crusoe" project at that!  (Just in time for Friday?)  Despite a frustrating start -- described below -- and a bad scare thanks to a backwards-functioning bypass switch -- "on" means "device online," not "bypass on!" it all worked out in the end, last I knew.  There may be forty-'leven e-mails on my work account complaining otherwise.

     Network issues ate up my day and not the solving of most of them; not only is that "by others," most of it was happening hundreds of miles away at Corporate HQ, where very frustrated IS/IT types recently discovered they had ad-hocked and extemporized themselves into a serious, ugly tangle and have been struggling to untangle it ever since, with occasional deleterious effects on access to e-mail, the external Internet and other unsubtle issues.

     My networking puzzle was simpler: the device I needed to bootstrap (along with my laptop, back and forth) in order to upgrade can be accessed via a modem over dial-up ("What's that funny noise?"*), a direct serial connection, or a network port.  Naturally, you want the fattest pipe, so once I had everything to the point where I could connect, I plugged them both into a dumb hub and fired up the software.  I'd skimmed through the manual and expected smooth sailing.  Nope.  Would not connect.  The default address in the software was 127.0.0.0 (!) and there was no clue what it ought to be anywhere in the manual when I sat down and read through.
     Finally gave up and went to serial (after a hunt for the one "transparent" USB-to-RS232 adaptor), getting the job done at a crawl with a few glitches but succeeding eventually.  Poking around, I discovered the "default address" in the device itself wasn't.  It's blank.  E-mail from the manufacturer confirms this is normal: you have to connect via one of the other two methods and set the ip address.  Good to know.

     Over the top again today, what-what?
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* A long, long time ago, when everything was amazing and Usenet wasn't a forgotten spam-sump, the Internet went "bong-ba-bong-screeeeeeeee...." when you connected to it.  No, really, it did. 

Out Of Time This Morning

     I made a tasty pesto omelet this morning -- yes, they're green -- then bragged about it on the Book of Face and used up all my writing time!

     Must get in the shower.  More later today.

I Am Profoundly Thankful

     And more than a little humbled by the reader who decided that my short-term financial woes were best resolved immediately.  You know who you are and you've lifted quite a burden.  Thank you.

And Here We Are

     I let my bosses talk me off the ledge last week.  I was feeling really burned-out but one does have to go on.  At least we're a little more on the same page with some of the deadlines.

     One of the most deadline-driven projects keeps growing on me, not all for the worse.  It started out as an improvised answer to a government mandate and as they have added requirements, I've added layer after layer of gadgetry.  The latest addition was the last straw and not jut for me; there are times of day when the thing can be bypassed and we're going to do so.  This is all well outside the function of our core devices, so I have had to put the thing together from various functional blocks.  With a bypass added, I will be able to check and adjust them offline.

     Project number two is a "Robinson Crusoe" project.  The goal is, say, "build a canoe."  But you can't build a canoe without a tree.  You find a tree, but you haven't got an axe.  So you find flint, knap a hand-axe and chop off a suitable branch for a handle, but now you need some way to fasten the axe head to the handle.  So you find fibrous plants, bind the head to the handle, and cut down the tree.  You can rough shape it with the axe but you need an adze to scoop out the inside, so you go back to the flint and make one, and so on and so on.  This project, I need to make some changes to a device, but to do so, I must update the firmware.  But I can't update the firmware without the interface program, and that must be downloaded from the manufacturer.  They sent me e-mail with a "download now" button, but my employer's security software suppresses the link....  And this is all before I load it onto an available Engineering laptop (IS has most of our desktops screwed down tight: users can't add or remove software, period) and try to get it work.  I got as far as getting the interface software from their ftp site, after a little "what do you mean, the button doesn't work?" with the support guys.  Any day now, I'll have that canoe finished!

Exploding Headwire

     I was watching Manh(A)ttan last night, the not at all real story of U.S. development of atomic weapons during WW II, when a major character just tossed out the line, "We'll use exploding-bridgewire detonators...," as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, been around forever, yadda-yadda--

     Except it's not.  It was brand-spanking new and seriously classified.  These characters have been wrestling with the problems of building an implosion-type device for a year or more, including running explosive experiments akin to RaLa (only without the radiation hazard) and one of the major problems is setting off all the implosion charges at the same time.  It's a huge big deal -- conventional detonators, then and now, are sloppy things, three or four orders of magnitude* slower than EBW, and you can expect that order-of-magnitude variation within a single batch. Use them to fire off your implosion-type bomb and there's a very loud "bang!" with farty overtones as it barfs out one or more plumes of vaporized radioactive material at the low-pressure points -- a fairly slow plume, as such things go: it's not a bomb, just a very nasty mess.

     The need for rapid and synchronous detonation became obvious during the development of the implosion-type atom bomb; Dr. Luis W. Alvarez and his student Lawrence H. Johnston invented (or possibly re-invented) them at Los Alamos, probably in 1944: it was a very big deal.  It would not have been taken for granted.

     Then again, that same series of episodes has the Nazis send the severed head of an Allied spy in the German nuclear program to the President Roosevelt, and I'm irked about exploding-bridgewire detonators?  Yes; after spending so much time on the very real technical challenges of  building a implosion-type bomb, the show throws away a major problem to concentrate on the fictional issue of not having a supply of primers for experimental work.  It completely misses the point.

     There has been, by the way, all manner of soap-opera interaction between the characters; diagramming who's-doing-who would be crowded on a whole sheet of paper.  This builds dramatic tension and engages the viewer, just as it should -- is it too much to ask that they not bugger the technological history while they're at it?

     (A much smaller quibble: most of the pencils seen onscreen have been Mirado "Black Warriors," a plausible choice since they were in wide use at the time [as Eagle "Black Warrior"] and are still made today; the black body and brass [probably anodized aluminum these days] ferrule with a maroon strip are very recognizable.  Now I'm seeing some aluminum-ferrule versions, and I think that's an anachronism. [ETA: is it ever! Plastic ferrules replaced metal during WW II. We can safely assume Uncle Sam might be using up existing stock but silvery-metal ferrules were still rare.]  Given the show's tendency to use "scientist-calculating-away-with-pencil" as a recurring image, it can be jarring. In an historical film, there's someone on the Internet who knows the history of every single class of object seen on the screen.  With a lot of time and a huge budget, it can all look right.  In reality, close often has to be good enough.)  
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* These would be engineering orders of magnitude, each 10ⁿ per step, and not astronomical ones, which I'm not going to be able to explain in a footnote.

I Have A Dream. A Presidential Dream

     Says here The Bloomberg is thinking about making an independant run for President, no doubt because us poor, ignorant hilljacks are still not seeing the light, and keep on keeping and bearing arms, using slt, and even buying the occasional Big Gulp.*


     If The Donald doesn't get the GOP's blessing, he may try going it alone, too.  This sets the stage for the Perfect Storm: [Clinton or Sanders] vs.Bloomberg vs. [Cruz, Rubio or a Player To Be Named Later] vs. Trump.  Their mutual popularity results in a four-way tie in the Electoral College and they're all four exiled to Antarctica with a pallet-load of Spam, four matches and a Boy Scout tent, while we start the whole mess over from scratch with an entire new slate on all sides.

     Sure, the choices won't be any better, but we'll be rid of everybody's headaches.  Yeah, yeah, and some people's Great Bloated Hope, but hey, it's all about compromise, right?
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* Not me!  --Why don't they make bigger coffee cups?

Happy Birthday Tamara!

     The Snarkmistress herself is having a birthday today!  Yes, she's fifteen.  Just like last year.  And the year before last.  And the year before that. And.... 

I Slept In

     I deserved to sleep in.  The donut place is open until two or three, and that's my main deadline for the day: go buy and consume a couple of sinkers.  Maybe a late lunch with Tam later.

Manh(A)ttan

     So, I stumbled into this TV series, ostensibly set in Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.  The critics raved about it; one even said something about a "pitch-perfect eye for period detail."

     I dispute that -- the frequently-seen spring-loaded boom light (Luxo L-1) isn't a total anachronism but "gooseneck" lamps were much more common at the time and you'll look in vain for a single example on someone's desk; and then there's the matter of bright-pastel foam-plastic hair rollers, referring to a meteor wiping out the dinosaurs* and so on and on -- but that's not my biggest objection.

     The story, you see, is a quite competently-told soap opera in a heavy science-becoming-engineering setting.  The actors are good in their roles, they're dressed well and, my quibbles aside, the sets and props are good.  It's just not the actual damn story of the development of the atomic bomb! And I'm not comfortable with that at all.  So far, I'm hanging on by telling myself it's an alternate-history tale, but the overall theme with the plucky underdogs of implosion standing up to arrogant frat-boys running the gun-type design is incredibly overplayed; the implosion-type was never disfavored and ran as a backup to the gun-type from the outset: the engineering was more difficult but the physics and chemistry were better, since plutonium was easier and quicker to come by than U-235. (With this last statement, I, too, am drinking the handwavium; it's that easy.  See below.†)

     So, we'll see.  Taken as fiction, Manh(A)ttan is not so bad.  As history?  Not just no but Hell no!

 P.S.: And the episode I watched last night managed to mis-tell the story of the neutron poisoning problem in the reactors at the Hanford site.  Um, make that completely mis-tell; I recognized bits from Fermi's actual experience at Hanford, from Richard Feynman's story of double-checking the gaseous diffusion uranium plant at Oak Ridge and found Chien-Shiung Wu's and Leona Woods' actual role in solving the problem split between three other and quite different characters. Oh, and a possible melt-down, which is odd, since xenon poisoning shuts down the chain reaction.  But it's all very exciting, in that alternate-history timeline where physics is different and Enrico Femi never existed.
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* Readers may not get how fractally wrong this is from my passing mention.  Luckily, Dr. Walter Alvarez can explain. While he was indeed instrumental in developing the Alvarez hypothesis, it also required the work of his geologist son, who was learning to walk, talk and not soil himself during the Manhattan Project. Oh, and they published it in 19-frikkin-80.  (If you like your science skillfully fictionalized, you'll find some of the elder Alvarez's other wartime work in Arthur C. Clarke's Glide Path.)

 † It's not quite that simple.  As the science turned into engineering, both the implosion and the gun-type bombs were designed around plutonium which was only screamin' difficult to get, rather than uranium-235 which was insanely hard to separate from U-238.  This decision was made early on, when there was less than a teaspoon of plutonium around (churned out in a cyclotron, it says here) and maybe not even that much U-235.  Work to produce both -- belt and suspenders! -- on a large scale was barely underway at Oak Ridge.  As reactor-produced plutonium started to be made -- slowly at first, with another big pile of problems to be solved (pun intentional) -- the isotopic composition of the stuff was substantially different to the first tiny samples.  The difference was such that it was a bit "hotter," and therefore more likely to start a chain reaction.  Good news?  Not for the gun design, which relies on rapid mechanical assembly of a critical mass: move the pieces together too slowly, and your bomb may fizzle, "burning" itself a little but not, in fact, exploding with much force.  And they were already moving slugs of dense radioactive metal about as fast as possible: there was no way to make the "gun" design work with the available plutonium.  On the other hand, the stuff would work fine in an implosion design.  At that point (April-June of 1944), the Manhattan Project swapped priorities; by July, implosion was the main focus and the gun-type, with the basic engineering either well-solved or relatively trivial (!) redesigned around U-235 and became the backup plan.  Meanwhile, gargantuan works at Oak Ridge produced a trickle of uranium 235: when "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima, most of the world's then-available supply of U-235 was consumed.

Money Talks

     Especially money you owe and don't have.  Went to pay one medical bill last night and found two more, all from my eye problem when the glob of clear gel in my left eye decided to pull away from the retina.  After insurance, it's about $1000.

     Meanwhile, the "bad spot" on my left upper jaw has flared up again, with the skin opened up and a lot of swelling and pain.

     All this tells me I'm going to go into work and suck it up.  Gotta pay the bills.  Gotta keep the animal running.  I'm damned if I know why, other than it's lousy to be sleeping in a cardboard box under a bridge, but I hate being cold at least that much.