Words of the Weasel Part 11

"Exit strategy" as in a way out of a war. There are only two ways out of a war. Victory or defeat. If it isn't victory. it is a defeat. Like Viet Nam, where the US executed an exit strategy, (helicopters lifting off from the Saigon embassy) the enemy won the war. Today's Sunday pundits are talking about exit strategies as I type this. Exit strategy is a weasel phrase for pulling out US troops and handing victory to the enemy.

President Pantywaist?

British newspaper calls Obama "President Pantywaist" over dropping the Polish and Czech missile defense system. Ouch.

Words for Wood Working

Names change. Used to be, a scroll saw was a hand tool, a bowsaw with a very deep bow to allow cuts far in from the edge of the wood. Now a days on the web, scroll saw seems to mean a stationary power tool, the one we used to call a jigsaw. As in the tool that made jigsaw puzzles. The jigsaw name has largely migrated over to the handheld power tool that has a short stiff reciprocating blade. Back then the portable tool was called a saber saw. And the big brother of the saber saw doesn't really have a universally agreed on name. Most folk still call that tool a Tigersaw or a Sawzall, which are the brand names of two of the leading makers of the tool. Some call them reciprocating saws but that name is just too cumbersome for everyday use.
Then consider the poor circular saw name. Again, way back, a circular saw was a stationary tool with a flat iron table up thru which a circular blade protruded. Now a days the stationary saw is called a table saw, and the circular saw name has moved over to the portable tool that I still call a skilsaw, the brand name of the first such tool. It's the portable tool that house carpenters use to quickly cut 2*4's to length on the job site.
Actually it would make more sense to use the circular saw name as a class name covering all saws with a rotating blade (table saws, radial arm saws, chop saws, sliding compound miter saws, and skilsaws), and find another name for the skilsaw. Or do the scotch tape thing and just keep calling them skilsaws.
While we are at it, changing names all around, find a new name for the radial arm saw. That name is so cumbersome that most folk use the acronym (RAS) when writing or speaking about the tool. Us woodworkers understand, but non wood workers find the acronym obscure.

The dog ate my homework

According to this, a laborious gathered archive of global temperature has been lost. Apparently some Brits, with US government funding gathered up temperature readings from all over the world going back to the invention of the thermometer. The project has refused to show their raw data to other scientists for years. Now as Freedom of Information Act queries have demanded to see their data, they claim to have lost it.
The matter is more than academic. The IPCC used this data to claim the world was getting hotter. Despite a good deal of correction of the data to account for the rise of well heated cities around the older weather stations, the IPCC was only able to claim a warming of a fraction of a degree. Thermometers are only accurate to two degrees, so the amount of warming is so small that thermometers can't really see it. The IPCC warming was detected only after a lot of statistical averaging on corrected data. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics Mark Twain once said. A fraction of a degree of warming might come from the statistics or the corrections, or both.
Naturally other scientists want to check the numbers. And the global warmers don't want to let them see the data that was used sell the Cap and Tax bill to the US Congress.

Tools, at auction

The local auctioneers have all the tools from two local home workshops (estate sales both). I visited the preview and was impressed. First of all, there was enough stuff for about 10 home shops. How they found space in just two shops for all this stuff was a miracle. There were a few brand new made-in-taiwan tools but most of it was vintage American makes, Powermatic, Atlas, Delta, ShopSmith and Craftsman. Lotta Craftsman, from the old days when Craftsman was a name that commanded respect. All of it a bit worn and dirty but perfectly servicable.
I'm going over to bid on a few things tommorrow.

"If I could amend the Constitution"

Interesting list of changes here. They missed a couple of my favorites. Laws passing Congress these days are so long, so wordy, and written in legal gobbledgook so dense that no one, not congressmen, not congressional staff, not reporters, and certainly not citizens understand what the new law means. Take the current 1100 page health care bills. The Congressmen themselves admitted that they hadn't read them.
With giant unreadable bills, the citizens are being sold a pig in a poke. We don't know what's going down, and we don't know if we should support it or oppose it. Plus, bills so wordy are in fact micromanagement of the the government. Congressional laws should spell out general principles, in language citizens can under stand, in documents short enough to be read in less than 6 months.
Was is just me, I'd limit the length of bills to a single page, type written, single spaced. That might be a little extreme. As a compromise we might be more generous and state that no bill shall exceed the length of the US Constitution.
Or, an incentive to brevity, we could require that all bills be read aloud before a quorum of House and Senate before a vote can be taken.
My second improvement is taken from the old Confederate States of America constitution. Bills shall address one, and just one, topic, that topic to be in the title of the bill. This would prevent the underhanded business of "riders", the attachment of some special favor legislation to a "must pass" bill such as a defense appropriation bill in wartime. The rider by itself lacks the votes to pass, so it gets lashed to something that has to pass as a way of getting it thru. The old time Confederates understood this trickery and outlawed it.

Nuts to metric

Brought back four bolts and nuts from Franconia Hardware for a home project. A 5/8 inch wrench is too small and a 3/4 inch wrench is too big. Arrgh. Metric fasteners have infiltrated America. A warning of the decline and fall of practically everything. I go out to the car and open the the toolbox I keep in the trunk. Sure enough, a 17 mm wrench fits. Detroit converted to metric years ago and I now keep metric wrenches in the car tool box. Trusty old SAE fractional inch wrenches live in a box in my wood shop. Looks like I'll have to put them out to pasture and buy more metric wrenches or move the car tool box into the wood shop. It's a shame. I still have a set of SAE deep well sockets I purchased from Sears in 1965 to get the nuts off the leaf spring shackles of a '53 Chevy pickup truck. Breaks my heart to think they are obsolete after all these years.
May be I need to go out and get that 1959 Buick I always wanted to restore. Back then, Detroit cars didn't use metric fasteners. Only continental imports like VW were metric in the good old days.