Poor Ben Carson

The newsies have been talking up Ben's comment on Muslims.  Carson was asked if he would support  a Muslim for US president.  Carson said "no" which I agree with.  He went on to say that Islam  places the Koran, the Hadiths, and Sharia law above just about anything, especially above secular things like the US Constitution.  Which is quite true.  Personally I would not vote for a Muslim candidate, and I fully agree with Carson's position.  American presidents support and defend the Constitution, Federal statues and the Common Law, and place this duty far above any Islamic obligations. 

Downsizing, from boats to Buicks

I finally traded my trusty 2003 Mercury Grand Marquis, the last of the traditional Detroit boats, six passenger four door V8 sedan.  The body rot had broken thru the fenders, my friendly local mechanic told me he might not be able to give it an inspection sticker next year due to serious rust underneath, and it had 110K miles. 
   I found a low mileage 2003 Buick Le Sabre.  It's not too bad.  It's smaller than the boats, it's just a four passenger car with the old Chevy V6 for power.  It's the top of the line as far as bling and interior trim goes.  The engine isn't anything like as strong as the 4.6 liter V8 in the Merc, even pulling a smaller lighter car.  It has a tachometer, I really need that for those fast power shifts drag racing off the stop lights.  Right.  It has an amazingly tall front axle gear, the engine is only doing 1000 RPM at 50 miles an hour.  At least the transmission lets the engine wind up to the red line if you put your foot into it.  Passing power is OK, but nothing like the Merc. 
  Fuel economy is decent, I got 30 mpg on a trip down to Lebanon and back.  That's better, the Merc only did 22 mpg.  
   The dashboard is confusing.  I had to dig into the owner's manual to figure out how to turn the headlights off, and work the radio.  The damn manual is 300 pages long, the index sucks, and it's missing things like factory recommended tire pressure.  It's full of platitudes about seat belt usage and DUI.  Most of the buttons on the dash have two or three difference meanings, tap once ,double tap, press and hold and they all do different things.  You wouldn't believe what you have to do just to set bass and treble on the radio.  There is a single little hard to read digital display that can show oil pressure, battery voltage, fuel economy, tire pressure, coolant temperature, and the phase of the moon, after you press all the right buttons.  For all this digital fanciness, it lacks an outside temp thermometer, a winter driving necessity. 
   Styling is undistinguished, standard industry all rounded over look. 

Can "The Cloud" keep anything secret?

I'm not fully up to speed on how "The Cloud" works internally, but wanna bet it can be hacked?  And since it's on line 24/7, the hackers can keep hitting it until they get in.  Whereas I can unplug my computer from the internet, and nobody can get at it short of breaking and entering.  If I was really serious, I'd burn the stuff to DVD and hide the DVD's in the house.  And disable Windows auto run so a single thumb drive insertion doesn't put a root kit on my system.

Anti Virus Programs, major time suckers

Used to be anti virus just scanned the hard drive looking for virii files living there on and zapping them.  Now they have real time scanners, permanantly resident, running, and soaking up CPU time to the point that Trusty Desktop gets annoyingly sluggish.  I got into the control panels of MalwareBytes and tried to turn off the real time scanner.  Nothing much happened.  So I used Windows Task Manager to kill the "mbam.exe" process and the machine got more lively.  I ought to uninstall the damn thing and be done with it but maybe, next time I power up the mbam.exe time sucker won't be active.  If it is, bye-bye malwarebytes. 
  Did the same thing with Spybot Search and Destroy.  The real time scanner did shut down and seems to stay down. 
  

Republican debate on CNN

Well, it wasn't as good as the Fox debate last month.  The Donald survived the evening without taking a serious hit, despite the fact that everyone on stage was gunning for him and the "moderators" were egging them on with "Trump said this about you, what do you think" questions.   Carly came on strong, very convincing, eloquent, substantive.  Marco Rubio looked and sounded good.  JEB Bush showed more spunk than I've seen from him in the past.
   For us voters, we should be looking for a good winning candidate, who could govern effectively.  There is Trump.  I got big reservations about him.  I fear his blunt, rude manner would anger everyone in the country, and overseas.  It's hard to get anything done if everyone is trying to get even with you.  I also wonder about Trump's motives, what does he really want to do?  I'm thinking about  the incumbent who campaigned as a liberal democrat, but once elected he revealed his Communist agenda.  What is Trump's agenda, really?
  If we are not going Trump, then who is our best bet?  Carly looks good to me.  She has experience, she speaks plainly and well, she could get it done.  Marco Rubio looks and sounds good.  Ben Carson is polite and soft spoken, so soft spoken I wonder about his resolve in the clutch. 
   I don't like Rand Paul, he is an isolationist.  He wants to pull back to North America and let the rest of the world burn down. 
   Chris Christy came on strong and feisty, and he was the strongest defender of / warrior for  the drug war, which doesn't excite me.   Far as I am concerned, pot should be a states issue, decided by votes in the state legislature, not by judicial dictators.  It is no business of the Feds.
   The questions mostly sucked.  Way to go CNN.

US Healthcare is too damn expensive

The US puts 19% of GNP into health care.  That's incredible.  Nearly one dollar in five is spent on health care.  US made products are 19% more expensive than they ought to be, just to pay the worker's healthcare.  No other country in the world spends (wastes?) this much money on healthcare.  Other first world industrial countries pay one half what we do, and their health is every bit as good, in some cases a little better than in the US.  And their products bear only an 8 % healthcare markup compared the 19% in the US.  No wonder manufacturing is moving over seas.  Relocate and cut your healthcare costs in half.  Such a deal.  Who can resist?
   The media offers no information about where the lavish US health spending goes.  They don't know, and don't have a clue.
   I can tell one story, the rise of the fetal heartrate monitor.  I designed one of these goodies back when I worked at Analogic.   At this time, every single delivery room in the US is equipped with one of these $10,000 dollar devices.  Analogic made quite a bit of money selling them.  Today, to lack a fetal heart rate monitor is to invite a malpractice law suit.  Any hospital would far rather buy some $10K gizmos than face a million dollar lawsuit.
   Unfortunately, all this high price high tech did absolutely nothing to reduce infant mortality.  Several studies published in the medical journals showed that infant mortality rates did not change at all after the introduction of  fetal heart rate monitors.  The only effect of the new tech was a solid increase in the rate of C-sections.  Everytime the monitor trace looked a little funny some one would cry "Fetal Distress" and zap, off to the operating room.
   In short, a good deal of money was spent but results did not improve.  I wonder how many other expensive things get charged to the health insurance that look nice but don't actually do anything.
   The rest of the world  enjoys good health care while spending half as much.  Why cannot we learn how to do it too?
  Some one ought to ask the two doctors in the race what they think and what might be done.

And after three antivirus passes, they are still out there

Just for grins, I used Explorer to search my hard drive for the oddly named program (80454612.exe) I saw running in task manager yesterday.  Surprise, surprise, it was still hiding out on my hard drive, two copies in two obscure locations.  This after running three different anti virus programs.  Naturally I deleted both copies on general principles.
   Take away, if you have the name of a piece of malware, Explorer can find it and zap it.
Being on a roll, I then ran regedit and searched for the same name in the registry.  And, sure enough, on the "Run" key were three program names, one of them odd name.  The other two programs I recognized as my wireless card driver and my calendar program.  So I zapped the odd name just to make sure it was dead.
Take away, if you want to make sure something is gone, search the registry for it and delete any keys containing the name.
  Be careful with regedit.  It will do anything you tell it to.  Some of the stuff in the registry is essential to Windows and if you damage it, Windows will fail to boot up next time.
   There is a place in the registry called "MUIcache" which often contains the names of programs run in the past.  The purpose of MUIcache is not documented by Micro$oft.  Net rumor has it that MUIcache records stuff from the file header of every program ever run.  On my machine, MUIcache had the odd program name that I had been zapping.  I left the MUIcache registry  leaf alone on the majority of advice from the net.  I'm told that popular disk cleaner CCleaner zaps MUIcache, and there was a lively discussion as to whether this was a good idea or not.  I decided not to mess. 

Trashing Trump ain't gonna work

Trump is out there, trashing everyone in sight.  The Republican competition is beginning to trash back.  About time actually.  But I don't think it will work.  Trump appeals to the voters as a man who will go to Washington, take names, kick ass, and clean house.  To these voters, trashtalk is action, they like it, they want more of it.  And,  hearing other's trashing The Donald, just makes them get up and cheer The Donald on.  Counterproductive that is.
  What to do?  I suggest the competition take some stands on issues.  I haven't heard any of them saying much of substance.  They are all foursquare for motherhood and apple pie, but that ain't enough.  They have to take a stand on immigration, Obamacare, taxes, and other stuff.  Bush did have an Op Ed piece on tax reforms he wants in last Saturday's Wall St Journal, but that is about it.  And Bush's op ed was pretty tame stuff,  Did not list the loopholes he would close, did not call for everyone to pay income tax. 
  Whereas Trump was out denouncing high CEO pay the next day.  That's a real issue that people relate to.  Much more interesting than a tepid tax reform. 

They are still out there, computer virii that is.

Trusty Desktop started getting slow and then flaky.  After something killed off Firefox in the midst of making a post, I decided to get on it. I did the three finger salute and up came Task Manager.  The Applications Window only showed Task Manager running, but the Process Window showed something called 80454612.exe was active.  Never heard of that fellow before, and he is probably malware.  That and I had three instances of regsrv32.exe running.  Regsrv32 is a real Micro$oft program but I never saw him running before, and having three copies of him running is a bad sign.

 So, I run the Micro$oft Malicious Software Removal tool, a full scan.  Took 2 1/2 hours but it reported 11 hits.  All connected with something called win32/miuref.f.  So I told the tool to zap them all.  Then thinking that Micro$oft doesn't know as much as they think they know, I downloaded a fresh copy of the freeware Malwarebytes.  The freeware is still available, although they try real hard to sell you a payware version and it takes some snooping around to find the freeware.  Malwarebytes  found 33 hits.  A lot of 'em connected with something called Trojan.Miuref.THD, which sounds like the same thing the Malicious Software Removal Tool found, and apparently failed to clean up all the way.
  Guess I ought to try a couple of more anti virus programs, what one misses another may find.  But two runs getting hits is enough for today.  Trusty Desktop feels more lively. 

Whining vs Substance.

Bernie Sanders was on Meet the Press this morning.  He came out strongly against "income inequality".  Sounds good Bernie, but whatcha gonna DO about it?   Far as I can see, Bernie is just whining about a problem, he does even bother to quantifiy it, like just how bad is it right now?  Unless you can put numbers on the problem, you don't know squat about it.
   And, whatcha gonna DO about it?  Hike my taxes?  Increase federal regulation?  Howza about cutting the cost of US health care?  We are putting 19% of GNP into health care.  Our international competitors, places like Germany and Japan, and Britain, first world industrial countries,  only put 8% of GNP into health care.  For spending (wasting) twice as much money on health care, the US health is no better, in fact slightly worse than many first world countries.
   Howsabout killing the war on coal?   Howzabout  doing oil exploration leases off shore and on federal land?  Howsabout doing Keystone XL?
   Bernie,  until you say what you want to do about "income inequality" you ain't speaking to me. 

The Lore of the Battery

Car battery that is.  It's a fairly dependable gizmo, except in winter when your car fails to crank.  They last four winters on average.  A battery works like a bank account, you put juice in, and later you can take juice out.  If you fail to put enough juice back in after a hard winter start, the battery may not be there next time.  In winter you need to run the car engine for as much as a half hour after a cold weather start.
 Batteries are temperature dependent, they work much better when at room temperature than they do at - 40 F.   A cold winter morning might have the entire car chilled down to -40 F.  Wait until early afternoon and things might have warmed up to a mere 0 F.  This might not help if you gotta get to work at 8 AM, but if you just need to go the store, wait til things get warmer.  Brush the snow off the car and it will soak up sunshine and get surprisingly warm.  Keeping the car in even an unheated garage will keep it 20-30F warmer than parking it outdoors.  Starting is a lot easier at 0 F than at -40 F.  And after getting her started, be sure to run her long enough to charge the battery up.
   Lotta new cars now come with a battery voltage gauge or indicator.  A new fully charged battery might show 13.2 volts.  This "sulfation charge" will go away, dropping the battery voltage down to say 12.5 volts after just a whisper of discharge, say running the head lamps for 10 minutes.  Call 12.5 volts normal full charge.  As the battery discharges, the voltage drops.  By 11 volts, you have trouble, your car may not start next time.  At 10 volts it surely won't start.  
   When the engine is running, the alternator will maintain 14-15 volts on the electrical system, it has too, the battery won't accept charge unless the alternator voltage is a volt or two greater than battery voltage.  If  you don't have 14-15 volts with the engine running, you have alternator trouble, and shortly you will have a discharged (flat) battery and the car won't start.  If the alternator has been doing it's job, and the car won't crank, you have battery trouble.  They only last four winters, and maybe yours is just shot and needs replacement.  Last new battery I bought set me back $50. 
   Naturally, you need the engine off, to see the battery voltage.  With the engine running, you are seeing alternator voltage. 

Boeing going with flapping wings

Well, not quite.  The redesign on the 777 (big, twin aisle, twin engine) goes with a longer wingspan.  Presumable they wanted some more lift, to lower the landing speed.  If the wing is larger, it will generate enough lift to keep the plane in the air as it slows down to land.   A lower landing speed is safer, these are awfully big and heavy vehicles to go careening onto the runway at 150 mph. 
   Trouble is, air port taxiways, laid out years ago, are only so wide.  And so, Boeing is planning on folding the wingtips to ease the 777X into its gate..  Like WWII carrier airplanes.  Only the outer 11 feet of the wing is planned to fold, complete with hinges, actuators, and locking pins.  This opens variety of comedy moves, should the aircrew forget to fold the wingtips before taxing in and hit all sorts of things. 
  Wow.  talk about mechanical complexity.  Let's hope it works.  It probably will.  It's not more complicated than those wonderful Boeing flaps, which come out, and out, and full flaps actually converts the aircraft into a biplane. 

JEB offers his tax plan

One of the first, maybe the first, to come out with a concrete proposal.  He posted it on the Op Ed page of Wednesday's Wall St Journal.  The "MSM"  (NYT and WaPo) probably won't carry it, but the Journal has four times the circulation of the NYT, and even a bigger lead over WaPo. 
   JEB proposes three personal income tax rates, 10%, 25%, and 28%, 20% on corporate profits, and 100% write off of capital improvements.  All decent ideas.  He proposed closing loopholes although he failed to get  specific and name loopholes.  He is happy to have 15 million people owe no federal income tax.  He will scrap the "alternate minimum tax".  He will increase the standard deduction, expand "earned income tax credit" and retains the charitable contributions deduction.
   Let's give JEB  credit for addressing a real issue, and proposing real reforms.
   However I would do it a little bit differently.  I believe that every one, no matter  how poor, ought to pay some tax, just to let them feel the pain.  It need not be much, 5% would do fine.  But everyone ought to pay something.  The "earned income tax credit" serves to zero out low income people's taxes, so long as they have some children.  The formula and rules for earned income tax credit are so complicated that nobody really understands what's going down.  Was it me, I'd scrap the entire thing, just to simply the tax code.  Set the bottom rate at 5%, and be done with it.
   While we are at it, outlaw all those "worksheets" the IRS puts in the 1040 instructions.  If they cannot state a tax rule in a single sentence of plain English, the rule is too complicated and we should scrap it outright.  Those little worksheets walk the taxpayer thru an indescribably complex rule.  We don't need indescribably complex rules. 
   Close loopholes.  Just about everything on Schedule A is a loophole.  Drop them all, medical, mortgage interest, state and local taxes, and the rest.  Set the middle tax bracket at 17%.  After deductions and hassling and rassling and loosing an entire weekend to doing my taxes, I always wound up paying 17% after all the mickey mouse. 

Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B)

This is a proposed US Air Force project. estimated at $80 billion, that Aviation Week thinks is close to contract award to either Boeing-Lockheed-Martin, or Northrup Grumman.  A think tank organized conference talked a lot about it.  One thing they didn't talk about was the mission such an aircraft might perform.  Is it supposed to penetrate Soviet or Chinese air defenses and nuke Moscow or Peiping?  Is it supposed to do maritime patrol in the Atlantic?  Is it supposed to carpet bomb ISIS held places in the Mid East?   Is it supposed to operate against defended airspace? 
   Since Viet Nam, USAF bombing missions have been flown by fighters, with bombs hung under their wings.  It seems to work, and it's not clear to me what the Long Range Strike Bomber could do to justify its $80 billion project cost. 
   The proposed aircraft does not seem all that formidable.  We are talking subsonic, 12,000-20000 pound bomb load and a range of only 2500 miles.  Where as the ancient B52 (still flying) could hoist 70000 pounds of bombs and could range out 4400 miles.  The WWII propeller driven single engine Douglas Skyraider could manage a 20,000 pound bomb load.   So we are talking  about a smallish aircraft with not much range.  Think about tanking in the way in, tanking again on the way out, and if you miss your tanker rendezvous you run out of gas.  That's the way we got the short legged F105 Thunderchiefs (Thuds)  to Hanoi and back. 
   The last successful bomber program USAF managed was the B52 program back 60 years ago.  Since then they did the supersonic B58 Hustler, which although fast, didn't carry enough bomb load to do anything worthwhile unless the bombs were nukes.  And we don't use nukes any more.  There was the B70 Valkyrie, big, supersonic, but never got into production.  Then the B1 Lancer project, supersonic, cool, but very expensive and lacking in range and payload.  And finally the B2 project, successful, good range and payload, really stealthy, but at $1 billion a copy, just too expensive.  They shut down production after building only 25 of them. 
   Given that sorry record, I think it behooves Congress and the MSM to raise some questions about the need for the LRS-B project.
    Consider taking a commercial jumbo airliner, taking out the seats, hanging missiles under the wings.  

It ain't the Hispanic vote that Republicans need

Not like they need the woman's vote. 
Romney lost the woman's vote by 10%.  Women are 50% of the voters.  He lost the Hispanic vote by a bigger percentage, but there are a lot fewer Hispanics than there are woman.  Yet the newsies are forever yakking about the importance of the Hispanic vote, they never talk about the woman's vote, or woman's issues.  In Romney's case, if he had cut Obama's margin among women down to 5%  from 10% he'd be president right now. 
    Aside from coverage of Democrats decrying a "war on women"   I don't hear much about woman's issues.  There was that "Julia" ad explaining how much free stuff the Obama administration is giving away.  That got roundly mocked in the blogosphere.  There was the female George Mason student (name escapes me now) that cried out for free contraceptives.  And now we have the push to defund Planned Parenthood over the fetal organ selling scandal. 
   How do women feel about all this?  I haven't seen any polling.  I'm a guy, and I'm old enough and wise enough to understand the women don't see things the way men do.  And that unless I ask the women, I don't know nothing.  Was I running for president I would do what ever it takes to get the women to vote for me.  It's just I don't really know what that might be.  We have done a lot of evening out in the labor market, in college, and employment and promotion.  I don't see that there is much more that can be done in those areas.
  How do women feel about abortion? Are they for it, agin it, or split 50-50?  Used to be they were split.  Is this still true?  Defunding Planned Parenthood is an anti abortion move.  Will it gain women's votes?  Or loose them?
   Where do Republicans stand on paid maternity leave?  Some companies have it, dunno how many.  Is this an election winning issue?  Obamacare promises to pay for contraceptives, should we support this as we talk about scrapping Obamacare?
    What other issues matter to women?

Looking for a platform? Try Patent Reform

My advice to all those running against Trump.  Offer some ideas, like what you would do if elected.  Trump does this, and it's one of the things that keeps him up in the polls.  Most pols these days go out of their way to avoid speaking out on issues, 'cause once you take a side on an issue, all the voters on the other side of that issue, will never forget or forgive.  The voters on your side, forget and do you no good.
   So, how about an issue that everyone is in favor of?  Sure winner, you get some free media, and you don't make enemies.  What issue might that be?
   Howsabout patent reform.  The current US patent system discourages innovation.  As soon as you bring a new product to market, you get a patent troll suing you for infringing some obscure patent that he, the troll, just happens to hold.  Who can not be in favor of fixing this?  Except for the patent trolls that is.  But there just ain't enough patent trolls in the world to matter. 
  What to do?  First clean up the patent application business.  Right now,  you can get a patent on anything, written as vaguely and as broadly as to be a barn door.  Anything will go thru it.  We ought to not allow any patents on software, nor any patents on "business methods", nor patents on arbitrary arrangements of things, like the QWERTY keyboard or the Morse code.   We should demand a working model of the patented idea.  If you cannot make a working model that works, you don't have a patentable idea.   We should demand that the idea be really new, not "obvious to anyone skilled in the art".   Which means the patent examiner needs to actually contact some of those skilled in the art and see what they think about the pending patent. Especially we should not grant a new patent on a minor change.  I hear big pharma has been granted new patents on existing drugs after they merely changed the size of the pill.
   Then we need to keep the trolls out.  To have the standing to sue for patent infringement, you need to be making and selling product yourself that uses the claimed patent.  You cannot just be a law office with a bunch of vague patents and some mouthy lawyers.  Unless you are actually making something useful, you don't get to sue.
   Any, make patents non transferable.  The patent rights are granted to the inventor, or the inventor's company.  The patent owner can collect royalties on his patent but he may not sell the patent to the trolls. 
  

Whirlwind, The American Revolution by John Ferling

It's just out this year.  It's a good read, Ferling writes well, and he does the footnote thing religiously so it's serious history.  It's got maps which make the story a bunch more understandable.  It tells the standard story of the revolution, no Marxist class warfare riffs, no brand new interpretations of events.  It's the right story, well told.  Ferling picks things up in 1763, right after the French and Indian War.  He goes thru the political buildup for independence.  He shows how it took 12 years to sell the colonists on the idea of kicking out  King George, bidding the British Empire farewell, and giving up their English citizenship.  The breach was egged on by Parliament, which spent those 12 years throwing their weight around and trying to show the Americans who was boss. 
    The British Army was more professional than the Americans, the British could do the Column Left, Halt, Right Face, maneuver to shake a marching column out into a fighting line, and their officers could read the terrain and find unprotected flanks the the green Americans didn't even know existed.
  But when the Americans could pick their spot, get set up, and had a good plan, they fought like tigers and inflicted dreadful casualties on the British.  Bunker Hill. Trenton, Kings Mountain, and Cowpens. all showed how to blow a lot of Redcoats away in very short order.   

EU Refugee Crisis

Refugees from various Mid East and North African disaster areas (Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya ) are pouring into the EU.  No EU country wants to accept any of them.  Nobody in the EU has the stones to deport them back to where they came from.  We are seeing horrendous pictures of dead and dying refugees, little kids dead on beaches, refugees clinging to train track, refridgerator trucks abandoned with the back of the truck full of dead refugees.
  It's a EU problem but we in the US caused the messes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.  And we shirked our responsibility in the case of Syria. 
   None of the Arab Gulf states (Saudi, Qatar, Emirates) wants anything to do with this Muslim, Arabic speaking crowd of refugees. 
   What the EU ought to do, is  take these people in, find them jobs, find them housing, and settle them down.  But the EU cannot find jobs for their existing citizens.  They are running 10% unemployment overall, with pest holes like Greece and Spain running better than 20%.   Any refugees let into an EU country just go on the welfare rolls, which are so big as to crush the EU economy.
   If we could clean up the source countries (Syria Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya) most of the refugees would happily go home.  We had a chance to do just that, not very long ago, but we pulled out and let those countries sink. 

More Fantasy Naval Warfare, Armor

The first serious improvement over wooden sailing warships, was the addition of steam engines and iron armor.  In fact, the vessels were called ironclads.  The first combat test, Hampton Roads in the US Civil War, had ironclad Merrimac engage and sink two traditional broadside wooden Federal warships.  Merrimac's armor made her impervious to Union guns, the cannon balls just bounced off her.  Yankee sailors on the two doomed wooden vessels stood to their guns and kept firing broadsides at Merrimac until their ships sank beneath their feet. 
   Following this success, all future warships carried as much armor as they could float.  As a rule of thumb, it takes as much armor thickness as the gun has bore to keep the shot out.  For instance a 4 inch gun can pierce 4 inches of armor.  US Civil War monitors carried 15 inch guns, which made everyone try for 15 inch armor, right up thru WWII.  Although both guns and armor improved a lot since the 1860's the ratio of armor thickness to gun bore stayed about the same.   Unfortunately, it was impossible to put 15 inches of armor all over a ship, the weight was just too great, the ship could not float that much armor.  So the armor was concentrated over the vitals, engines, guns, and ,magazines, and the rest of the ship was left to absorb hits as best it could.  Aircraft made the problem worse, against ships guns, all you needed was an armor belt along the sides, the decks remained un armored.  To provide deck armor thick enough to keep out aircraft bombs was just never doable.  Which is why battleships were mostly retired after WWII, they were just too vulnerable to bombing. 
   The one exception to the armored ship was the brainchild of Admiral Jackie Fisher, RN.  Fisher wanted a scout vessel, fast enough to locate the German battle line and strong enough to survive the contact.  His solution was a big ship (big ships are faster than small ships) with a battleship class battery of guns, but no armor to save weight and keep the speed up.  They called them battlecruisers.  Trouble is, the captains of battlecruisers had a vessel that looked like a battleship, was as big as a battleship, and the skippers got battleship ideas.  When the four British battlecruisers found the German High Seas fleet, instead of turning around and running, and radioing the enemy position back to Grand Fleet, they formed a battle line and opened fire.  The Germans fired back and sank three out of four battlecruisers in just a few minutes of action.
That diminished interest the the battlecruiser permanently.  The last battlecruiser, HMS Hood, launched after Jutland, lasted until she engaged Bismarck in WWII. A single hit from Bismarck and Hood blew up.   

The making of a Super Power

What makes a country a superpower?  A large population is right up there in importance.  A country of 100 million can overwhelm a country of 1 million in any field of endeavor, athletics, warfare, innovation, popular culture, manufacturing, you name it.  We have enjoyed superpower status since the beginning of the 20th century. 
  Part of  obtaining and holding onto a large population is political skill, skill to prevent the large country from breaking down into smaller parts.  Like what happened to the USSR in 1989, Czechoslovakia, what almost happened to the US in 1860.  And what is simmering under the surface in Canada and Britain and other places. 
  For the large population to be an element of strength, it has to be loyal, willing to make serious sacrifice to their country. Unhappy Muslim "youths" from the banlieus around Paris, rioting in the streets and setting fire to 1000 cars in one night, are not loyal, in fact they are traitors to France.  Japanese Americans enlisting during WWII and creating a heroic combat record, despite their families treatment in American concentration camps, are loyal. 
   Traditionally, native born and raised citizens are loyal.  Loyalties of immigrants are not so certain.  Here the US is fortunate,  immigrants come to the US because they like our liberties, our economic opportunities, our civil order,  and the vast amount of good America has done around the world for all of our history.  Immigrants to the US become astoundingly loyal to America, and pass this down to their children.  And immigration has grown our population from great power size to super power size.  Without the great 19th century immigration the US would be more like Canada, a worthy country, but hardly a super power. 
    The other method of keeping up the population is is natural increase.  In principal if each woman bore two children in her lifetime, she would have replaced herself and her husband and kept the population steady.  In practice, to make allowances for early death from disease, accident, crime, and warfare, the number is 2.1 children.  If  each woman were to bear three children, then the population grows rapidly, like 150% in a generation.   Right now,  US women are bearing just exactly 2.1 children, just enough to keep the population steady.  Places like the EU, Russia, and Japan are much worse, rates as low as 1.1 children have been reported from Russia. 
    So, we need immigrants to grow our population, especially with international competitors like China and India out there.  We especially need young, married immigrants, who will take jobs and grow the economy. 

St Paul's prep school rape case

The St Paul's prep school rape case has gotten a lot of coverage, partly 'cause the school is very tony, partly 'cause the defendant is a good looking teenager of good family, partly 'cause the media is on a school rape kick. 
   The facts of the case seem to be, the defendant (Owen Labrie) is accused of raping the un named accuser.  There are no other witnesses or evidence, so it gets down to a he-said she-said case.  In real life, the charge ought be simply rape.
   In lawyer life, they rummaged thru all the lawbooks and found a barrel of things to charge in addition to rape.  They  managed to charge the defendant with felony sexual assault, statutory sexual assault, and "using a computer to seduce a minor".  The jury waffled and acquitted some charges and convicted on others. 
   Fair and honest would have been a single charge of rape, and let the jury decide who to believe, he or she. Either acquit or convict.  As it is, they get away with a waffle. 
   In fact, I think courts would be fairer if the prosecution was allowed only one charge.  Arrest a perp for doing something.  Figure out which law he/she broke and prosecute on that one.  If the criminal action could be a violation of more than one law fine, pick one, just one, and go with it.  Slapping half a dozen charges on the perp for one criminal action is welfare for lawyers and unfair to the defendant.   For instance, arrest a guy for sticking up a liquor store.  They can charge him with armed robbery, but they cannot also charge him with unlawful possession of a firearm.  One charge is enough. 

Talky-talk college courses

"Women in Popular Culture", "Introduction to Comparative Ethnic Studies", "Introduction to Multicultural Literature" a bunch of worthwhile? useful? college courses.  They sure aren't STEM courses, and they aren't Liberal Arts courses, and I wouldn't even call them social science courses.  They surely won't help a graduate find a job. 
   But according to Instapundit, the professors teaching these courses have truly amazing policies regarding student language.  Prof  Selenas Lester Brekiss has banned the use of the words "male" and "female".  Professor Rebacca Fowler bans the phrase "illegal alien".  Professor John Streamas called a student "White shitbag" 
   Intelligent students should avoid these kinds of talky-talk courses, they have nothing to teach, they merely provide a platform for the professor to rant from.   They may be fun to attend to participate in class discussions, but you can have as much fun participating in dorm bull sessions.  You only get to take 32 courses in a four year two semester college.  Students are graduating owning $30,000, or about $1000 a course.  Don't blow $1000 on a talky-talk course. 

Fantasy Naval War

This article makes-a-case/discusses  bringing back the battleship.  It's a fun idea, battleships were cool, cooler than aircraft carriers, so cool that the US Navy was still operating WWII Iowa class battleships as late as the 1980's.  The writer stresses the ruggedness, due to foot thick armor plate, of the battleship which would allow it to survive hits that sink aircraft carriers and modern surface combatants. 
   All that is cool, but the writer apparently does not understand why battleships existed and why they were so big.  The purpose of a battle ship was to bring the biggest possible guns into action.  The big guns were heavy and needed a big ship simply to float them.  The huge caliber guns were extremely lethal, a single hit would sink just about anything.  And they had range.  By WWII, the battleship guns could reach out 20 miles, and the mechanical analog fire control computers of the 1940's could even get hits at that range.
   But, a carrier's aircraft can reach out 200 miles or more, and even in the 1920's  biplane bombers could carry bombs heavy enough to penetrate decks and sink battle ships.  Ostfresland, Bismark, Prince of Wales, Repulse, Yamato, the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, the Italian fleet at Taranto , all demonstrated the power of carrier aircraft and the vulnerability of battleships. 
   Since carrier aircraft outclass the heavy gun, if I am going to spend the money for a big warship, I'm going to equip it with aircraft rather than big guns.   Plus, I can put missiles on much smaller vessels that have plenty of punch, maybe not as much as 16 inch guns, but enough punch to deal with anything afloat today.  
   All things being equal, I'd druther have a fleet of smaller cheaper vessels than one big expensive vessel.  With a fleet, I'm likely to have some combat power left after taking battle damage.  With one big ship, if the enemy gets lucky, I loose the war. 
   So, I am not ready to build 21st century battleships, even if the idea is cool. 

The Donald is fun to watch on TV

I enjoy watching him put on a show.  He's a good showman, he has an audience, and he is going to town.  He is way ahead in the polls.  Even if he fails to get the nomination, he will still be the best known billionaire in the entire world. 
   The Donald is coming out of the business community, in fact, out of the in-your-face New York City business community.  In business the saying is "The customer is always right."  Doesn't matter that the customer offends you personally, has bad breath, bad manners, and holds with the wrong ideas.  You will take his money anyhow.   Somehow I don't think this works in politics like it does in business.  If the voters dislike you, they won't vote for you no matter what you promise to do for them. 
   As president, The Donald would go exactly no where.  He shoots off his mouth too much.  He is a bull in a china shop.  It would only take him two days to anger everyone in the country, and another two days to anger everyone over seas.  And you cannot get much done if everyone dislikes you and wants to get even with you. 

Nut Case Control Part II

This week's tragic shooting in West Virginia, on live TV, has brought the gun controllers out again in full cry.  It ain't the guns that need control, it's the nutcases.  This shooter was a homicidal maniac.  What should have happened, probably years ago, is someone, friend, family, physician, teacher, co-worker, clergyman, someone, should have noticed the shooter was acting crazy or saying crazy things.  He should have been examined by psychiatrists, who should have identified the shooter as a dangerous nutcase, and popped him into a mental hospital.
   Obviously that didn't happen.   And the gun controllers keep yacking about guns.  It isn't guns, it's loose nut cases. 

Un selling automobiles

Been out shopping for a car.  One thing I noticed, walking thru the dealer's lots.  The model name of the car is left off the front, only appears, very small, on the trunk lid in back.  Which makes it hard to figure out what you are looking at, since the last stylist died 20 years ago and the cars all look alike.  For that matter, they leave off the maker's name too.  You gotta know the icons, the Chevy bowtie, the Honda H the Ford blue oval, the Subaru constellation and so on.   I wonder how many car buyers know them all.  I have been a car buff since childhood, and I don't know them all.  
   Compare this with the power tool business.  I'm reading about routers, and the article has a picture of a router.  The maker's name (Porter Cable) is plastered all over the tool, once on the motor, once on the base casting, and once on the baseplate.  All three names show in the photograph. 
    Teaching customers the name of your product is half the battle in marketing.  Labeling your product is a good first step. 

Graphic Novels as College Reading??

A story made it onto NPR and the blogosphere about Duke University students unhappy with the contents of a reading assignment.  They were objecting to the gay marriage portrayed in the novel.  The work was described as a "graphic novel".  Which is same-same as comic book.  Since when were comic books assigned college reading assignments?  Or is it just Duke? 
   Or is it all over?  Certainly the reading assigned to my children in middle and high school varied between bad and worse.  Perhaps college is jumping on the terrible reading list bandwagon?  Certainly those decrying the decline of the liberal arts ought to look at the literature selected for college study.  Could it be that the selected literature is so bad as to drive students away? 

You can never have too many clamps

This is a small glue up.  Biggest ones need more clamps.

Mortises by Router

The traditional methods of cutting mortises require fancy tools, or a lot of hand work with chisels and mallets.   Routers will cut nearly anything, but they are grabby.  Freehand router work is beyond my skills. Freehand, in my hands, the router wavers back and forth, cutting wavy lines.  I need  a guide for the router to cut straight lines.  To guide the router I fit a "template guide" aka schnozzle.   The schzozzle is big enough to pass the router bit clean thru itself, should the router bit contact the schozzle, bad things happen.  The outside of the schozzle  follows a wooden template.

This is a brass Porter Cable style template guide bushing (schozzle) mounted on my elderly Craftsman 1/4" router.  This clear acrylic base plate holding the guide bushing is shop made.  A 1/2" straight cutter pokes thru the schnozzle.   Here is the shop made template to guide the router in making a nice square mortise.

This is my shop made template.   The rectangular guide guide hole must be the size of the mortise, plus an allowance for the size of the schnozzle.  In this case the schnozzle is 0.75: in diameter covering a 0.50 inch cutter, so the template needs be 0.25 inches larger than the desired mortise size in both directions.  And, the template need be as thick as, or thicker than the schozzle is deep.  In this case I had to shim up my template to 5/8" to prevent the 5/8" schnozzle from getting stuck on the surface of the workpiece.  Rule: your template HAS to be thicker than the schnozzle is deep.  The bits of wood nailed to the template made a 1/2 plywood template thicker than the 5/8" schnozzle. 

And here is the final routed mortise.  Nice straight sidewalls, flat bottom.  I wanted a 0.50 inch deep mortise but settled for 0.47 inch, mostly because I didn't dare pull the cutter any further out of the chuck, lest it fly out and do evil things. 


  

That first hit. Why do addicts take it?

We have been having a sad increase in heroin addicts in NH.  I can understand how hard it can be to give it up once hooked.  The part I don't understand is why people take that first hit.  Surely every sentient creature on planet earth knows that a heroin habit is a life wrecker.  Everyone must have heard that word by now.  And they must believe it.  
  You would think that fear of sinking to the absolute muddy bottom of society, would make people resist taking that first step down the drain.  Surely they would stick with weed or booze before tossing their lives away with heroin addiction.  Apparently they do, but I don't understand why. 
   If we are to have effective public policies against heroin use, they need to focus on preventing people taking that first hit.  Unless we understand why people take that first hit, we won't be able to do much about preventing it.

CCleaner works good on Windows 8.1

CCleaner  (Crap Cleaner) has been around for a long time and is quite dependable.  I've been using it since Windows 2000.   This morning  Avast anti virus perked up and gave me the "optimize your PC" pitch.  So I tried it, and Avast reported all sorts of things to fix up, but then wanted money before it would do anything. 
   So I downloaded the latest version of CCleaner (v5.09) from File Hippo and let er rip.  Took awhile but it found and zapped 6.5 Gigs of  unneeded files.  
   I ran the registry clean feature and it found and zapped a bunch of unneeded registry keys. 
Not bad.  And, FlatBeast is noticeably more lively than before, so something good happened.

Splat Splat. Market falls further

Today it looked like the NYSE might recover from Monday's 588 point fall.  About lunch time the Dow was up 350 points from opening.  Then something happened, and most of the 350 points went away, leaving the Dow about where it was Monday night (in deep doo-doo).  Shepherd Smith on Fox said a rumor of Chinese troop movements swept across the trading floor about 3 PM causing a wave of selling.  Shep said the rumor was totally unconfirmed, but it did a job on the Dow before close at 4PM.
   Wall St Journal said the overall price/earnings ratio was 25 on Thursday before the s*** hit the fan on Friday.  As of Tuesday the price earning ratio was down but only to 23 which is still high.  Historically, going back to the Civil War, price earning was about 11.  Rule of thumb used to be buy stocks with a P/E less than 12, and sell anything with a P/E above 24.   It may be that this market disaster happened when all the computer programs decided to sell 'cause the P/E was as high as it could go, why not cash in? 
   Anyhow, with an average P/E of 23, the market can go down a long long way before it gets to 11.

Legion d'Honneur for Americans suppressing Train Terrorists.

TV shows the three Americans and one Brit  accepting France's highest honor, the Legion d'Honneur from the president of France.  The Americans are wearing knit polo shirts and khaki slacks.  To my way of  thinking, they should have been wearing coat and tie for such a ceremony.  We were required to wear coat and tie merely to go to dinner at my old prep school, let alone receive the Legion d'Honneur.  Oh well, they are heroes, and they make me proud to be an American. 

Splat. Market falls

The Dow Jones took a 500 point drop on Friday.  The market opened this morning and it dropped another 900 points in the first 10 minutes of trading. 
Scary.

Securing the Border

Everybody is in favor.  Nobody has spelled out just what they mean.  The Donald wants Mexico to pay for it.  Nobody has estimated the cost.  
   Let's ignore the problem of people who just drive up to a border checkpoint, show some paper work and drive on thru.  And neglect to go home.   That's another problem for another day.  I'm talking about preventing people walking or driving across the 1900 mile border that stretches from San Diego to Brownsville. 
   For me, I'd settle for a regulation chain link fence from sea to shining sea, backed up with a dirt road on our side of the fence, a few hundred yards back, to allow for jeep patrols.  And air surveillance, by two place light aircraft, say Cessna 172's.  No trendy but pricey drones, helicopters, electronics, camera's, and other welfare for contractors.  The fence stops vehicles, or at least the hole in the fence tells you someone crashed thru it.  The air reconnaissance spots people on the move and calls for agents to drive out and arrest them. 
  Costs for fence.  We need 1900 miles of chain link fence.  That's 10 million feet.  I haven't priced fence lately, but I bet you could put it up for $10 a foot.  So $100 million for the fence.  Guess that the road (dirt, just good enough to get thru with a jeep) might cost the same.   Buy twenty light aircraft at $100,000 apiece ($2 million)  and you could fly over every part of the fence every hour.   Let's assume the current ICE force can handle the arresting and patroling with their current appropriation. 
   So, we are talking  maybe $202 million startup costs.  Lets assume the ICE budget can handle manpower and maintenance. 
   Gee, we haven't every gotten to a $ billion yet.  "A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money" said Everett Dirksen a long time ago.  So far we only have a fifth of a billion.  Long way to go before we are talking real money. 

Warming Weirdness

Long discussion on my Facebook page about global warming and what causes it.  Two theories were advanced.  First theory is the Sun causes it. Second theory was "Chemtrails" .  Neither theory is worth a hoot.
  First let's talk about the Sun.  It's a huge fusion reactor, and it's perfectly conceivable that the reaction sometimes runs fast and sometimes runs slow.  From the ground it's hard to measure solar output, because your instruments are looking up thru clouds and air and stuff which comes and goes.  About forty years ago the first satellite equipped to measure solar output ("the solar constant") was launched. That first satellite wore out years ago, but others were launched.  Out on the Internet you can find plots of solar output from all the satellites going right back to the very first one.  The Sun is putting 1350 watts per square meter onto the top of the atmosphere.  And, that number hasn't changed over forty years.  The instruments are quite sensitive, you can actually eyeball the plots and see the 11 year sunspot cycle.  Solar output varies by maybe 10 watts (out of 1350)  from sunspot minumum to sunspot maximum.  But, try as you might, you cannot see any long term slope to the curves, they run flat across the graph, with only a little 11 year ripple from the sunspots. 
    Granted, if we keep watching for a much longer time, 400 or 4000 years, instead of the mere 40 years, we might be able to see a rise or fall in solar output.  But using the best measurements we have this year, we can say the solar output is very steady.  Unless we can measure a change in solar output (which we cannot) I cannot believe the sun as anything to do with global warming. 
   And then we come to "chemtrails"  Those long white streaks that trail behind jet airliners.  Flyers call them condensation trails or contrails for short.  You have all seen them.  Apparently some people think the streaks are mysterious chemicals deliberately sprayed into the air for nefarious purposes.  Actually, they are just water vapor formed when kerosine is burned in the engines.  Burn kerosine in air, and you get water vapor and carbon dioxide.  When the air temperature is right, the water vapor condenses and you can see it.
   Some years ago, Bob Guida, an airline pilot of my  acquaintance was campaigning for public office up here.  Someone asked him about "chemtrails" at a meeting.  The questioner said the chemtrails were deliberately produced.  "Not on my airline." was Bob's answer.
   I spent six years in the Air Force, working on the flight line, and I can assure you that no Air Force aircraft ever had any equipment for production of "chemtrails" anywhere on board.  The "chemtrail" idea is a joke, on a par with flying saucers. 
    So, the solar theory and the "chemtrail" theory are wrong.  If global warming is still happening (global temperature has been steady for the last 19 years)  something else is causing it. 

Carly Fiorina impresses

She gave a town hall event in Littleton last night.  The place was full, standing room only, 150-200 people.  Carly is a really good speaker, and the audience was behind all her words.  A lotta of NH professional politicians showed up.  I would call it a successful event for Carly.

Electronic is insecure

We had the Target Stores hack a couple of years ago.  We had the Bradley Manning hack of the Army and State Dept also a couple of years ago. We had the Edmund Snowdow hack of CIA.   We had the Office of Personnel Management hack last month.  We have the IRS hack this week.   We have the Ashley Madison hack this week.  The lesson to me is that electronic data bases are insecure.  Either a hacker coming in over the net, or a disloyal employee, and everything fits into a thumbdrive and and gets posted on the net. 
   Thanks Obama for ordering my medical records made electronic.  I'm sure they will be hacked in a year or two.  If they haven't already been. 
   As for email, that's so insecure that classified matter should never be emailed.  For that matter, high government officials (like Hillary) should never use email.  Every intelligence agency in the world wants to know what the Americans are thinking about, planning, doing.  Take a clue from Osama bin Laden who gave up on phones and high tech and ran his operations by couriered messages, which is what kept him alive for so many years. 

Bernie Sanders

He is making waves with democrats.  If Hillary flames out, Bernie might get the democratic nomination.  With luck, a Republican will be able to beat Bernie in the general election.  But don't count on it.  Last two times the democrats ran a far left screwball and he won.
  Trouble with Bernie, is he is a socialist (we used to call 'em communists).  He dislikes business and corporations, and he sees his duty to raise their taxes, regulate them more, and support unions.   Bernie stands for a war on business. 
   Which is shooting the country in the foot.  Business generates all the wealth that we enjoy.  Business employs most Americans, pays their health insurance, and pours forth a flood of product to fill the shelves of every store in the land.  Making life harder for business (an Obama specialty) just makes us all poorer.   Presidents should be thinking up ways to make things better for business, not worse. 
   Bernie does not understand that government is a drag on the economy.  Government spends a lot of money, money taken from citizens, but does not create any wealth.  Every dollar sucked into government makes us all poorer.  Dollars that should have been spent by individuals to improve their lives, or by business for economic growth.

Robert A Heinlein vs Andre Norton

There is a brouhaha going in the science fiction community, surrounding the Hugo awards.  The Hugo is a top award, given to the truly top drawer authors.  According to the flak coming out of the combat zone, the Hugo's used to be controlled by a New York publishing house,  Baen Books if I remember aright.  A movement in fandom arose to take over control of the Hugos and cut the Baen people out of it.  Sides were taken, flames were posted.  I am far enough from ground zero that I don't really know who is who and what is what, and the merits of either side.  But the fireworks are fun to watch.
   A long internet ramble got diverted into comparing Robert A. Heinlein with Andre Norton as writers.  I'm familiar with both writers, having encountered both of them them in grade school.  Liked both, have read all, or nearly all the books they ever published.  I was a little surprised to see all the comparisons.  I always thought Heinlein was the better writer of the two.  Heinlein's stories were always new and different, he seldom repeated a story, where Norton's stories were pretty much all coming of age stories with very young protagonists.  Heinlein invented strong new characters for each story and seldom reused them in later stories.  Friday, Oscar Gordon, Johnny Rico, Podkayne, Manny Davis, Michael Valentine Smith, and many others were all unique, interesting, but only appeared in one book and were replaced by other characters in later books.  Andre's character was pretty much the same book after book.  She gave him/her a new name in the new book, but as a reader I knew this character pretty well, he/she never did anything to surprise me. 
   And, a lot of people sign their Internet posts with Heinlein quotes.  I don't remember seeing any Norton quotes out there.
   Thus endeth today's bit of trivia.  

Obama's Iran nuclear deal

So what does the United States get out of this deal?  The Iranians get a lot, they get $150billion in assets unfrozen, they get to sell oil on the world market, and use the global banking system to pay for stuff they buy and sell.   They get the US and its allies to lift other economic sanctions. 
  What do we get out of the deal?   I haven't even heard the Iranians promise not to build a bomb.  They still hold American hostages.   The IAEC gets to inspect some sites, after a 24 day warning period. 
   This deal is not a treaty.  If it's not a treaty, then we are not bound by it, the next administration could denounce it.  I assume that same thing applies to the  Iranians.  Since it is not a treaty, they are not bound by it either. 

Reduce income inequality, Get the Economy growing again.

Loosing your job makes your income as unequal as it can get.  Get the economy to grow again, and hiring will pick up.  Just giving jobs to the unemployed will do more to reduce income inequality than anything else anyone can do. 
   Bernie Saunders is whining about income inequality but doesn't say what he plans to do about it.  I bet Bernie wants to pass a soak the rich tax.  It will punish people he dislikes, and give him more money to spend on free stuff.
   I think we would do more good by getting the economy growing again.  Build Keystone XL pipeline.  Reform corporate taxes to complete with the rest of the world.  Right now US tax is far higher than places like Britain, Mexico, Canada, and others.  US companies are just picking up stakes and moving overseas to get themselves a solid tax break.  Permit export of US crude oil, and in fact everything except maybe nuclear weapons.  Lease federal land for oil exploration.  Stop raiding places like Gibson Guitar on trumped up charges.  Drop the war on coal.  Sort out Wall St deals between investment for economic growth and plain old gambling.  Tax the bejesus out of the gambling deals. Repeal all federal regulations passed over the last few years. 

Scary Sharp works good

Doing woodwork as I do, I do quite a bit of sharpening of chisels and plane irons and the like.  For years, I did the obvious thing, use an oil stone, with a drop of 3 in 1 oil on it.  It's a synthetic silicon carbide stone with a coarse side and a fine side.   I never got into the mystic of natural Arkansas stones or Japanese waterstones  or Tormek machines, all of which get a lot of coverage in the enthusiast press.
    I just did pick up on the Scary Sharp technique.  This does away with stones and recommends using sandpaper, stuck down on a piece of glass.  And it works.  You can get some really fine sandpaper, 600 grit and finer, often from an auto parts store.  I stuck a piece of 600 grit down on a piece of glass and gave it a whirl.  I lubricated the sand paper with a few drops of water.  A little polishing takes all the scratches off the edge and gives it a nice shine.  And the tools do cut better. 
   I now make three passes on a tool, once on the coarse side of the oilstone, one on the fine side of the  oilstone, and the last pass on the 600 grit sandpaper.  I suppose I could use a few more grades of sand paper and omit the stones completely, but I don't see the point.  The 600 grit is close to stropping, which requires a thick leather pad or strop, charged with some really fine grit abrasive.  Local stores up here don't carry strops or the abrasive, but they do carry sandpaper.

   I have a bench grinder but I only use that for really heavy duty blade reshaping, say grinding out a nick.  Or on lathe chisels which get really worn down doing lathe work. 

Extraordinarily ugly fashion ad.

The Saturday WSJ comes in extra thick, due to a huge slick paper fashion magazine tucked inside.  It's 3/8 inch thick and weighs about a pound.  Hefty it is.  Back cover has a really truly ugly ad.  The model is one of those rail thin stick figures.  She is modeling a skirt suit, jacket plus mini skirt, made from a "super tweed" synthetic fabric in brown and black, extra nubbly.  Her face is OK but her expression  is off putting.  Her stance is weird, and awkward.  She has her legs spread wide, and her hands are clasped in front of her crotch. And she is wearing black combat boots.  And her handbag is a cartoon.   Louis Vuitton "Series 3"
   What sort of woman would buy that outfit, let alone appear in public wearing it?

Buying a laptop with the WSJ

It was one of those Wall St Journal lifestyle articles.  Mentioned favorite laptop brands.  The mac books got top rating at $2000 or so.  After nattering on for half a page, the closing advice was to pay at least $600 for a laptop to avoid unspecified problems.   I chuckled to myself.  I got my HP Pavilion for $300 down at Staples 6 months ago.  Works fine, keyboard has decent touch and feel.  Bags of room on hard drive, runs Firefox, Office, Picassa, Orcad, C++ compiler, and other stuff just fine.  I'm not a gamer so I don't stress the processor much.
   Anyhow, I'm thinking that particular WSJ column was more sales pitch for pricey laptops than real practical advice

Environmental Pollution Agency Spill

I hear the EPA administrator wringing her hands on TV about the spill.  Not a word about finding the person[s] responsible and firing them. 
    According to the Wall St Journal all that soup had been sitting in that mine, not hurting anything for better than 100 years.  EPA brought in a backhoe to clear away the opening to the mine, and knocked down a dam that have been holding the soup inside the abandoned mine, letting it flood into the river.

Improving Display readability in Windows 8,1

Windows 8 specializes in hard to read displays.  The text is faint and low contrast, and hard to read even until ideal lighting.  Micro$oft in its wisdom decided to omit a display contrast control, or at least hide it so deep that I haven't found it yet.
   Some inprovement can be had in an obscure place.  Go to control panel.  Select "Display". Select Calibrate Color.  Go thru the song and dance.  At the end select "Text Tuner.  Go thru the Text Tuner song and dance.  And the end I found my text a little darker and clearer, a worthwhile improvement.  Nearly as good a good old Trusty Desktop running XP. 

Lack of women in tech caused by lack of math

This article claims that girls don't take enough math in middle school and high school to take a STEM major in college.  I can believe this.  The Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM) fields all require calculus.  You cannot understand the STEM courses unless you know calculus, the homework problems are calculus based,  the explanations of how things work and what's going on won't make sense to you unless you have taken integral calculus first semester of your freshman college year. 
   To take calculus in college , you need a fair amount of math before you get to college.  You must have algebra, probably two years of algebra, and a year of trigonometry.  A year of plane geometry is very helpful although not mandatory. 
   If you get to college without the necessary algebra and trig, it will take you two years (four semesters) to pick it up, by which time you are a junior.  Which is too late usually to take a STEM major, most of which start in sophomore year. 
   The big attraction of STEM majors, is they make you truly employable,  upon graduation, and for the rest of your life, unlike majors in political science, art history, sociology, and any kind of  ethnic or gender "studies".   STEM majors are fun, the subjects  have right answers that can be proven to be right, and not subject to the political whims of the professor.  They offer understanding of the real world, as opposed to the ivory tower world of academia.   You don't want to lock your self out of a STEM major at age 15, before you have clue as to what you want to be when you grow up. 
   So take the necessary math in high school and middle school.  Keep your options open. 
   Back when I was in high school, the girls were always ahead of the boys in math classes.  There is no gender based math incapacity.  Math is not hard, and you don't have to memorize very much to do well in it. 

Hillary has a plan to make college affordable

Hillary wants to have tax payers subsidize college education even more heavily than they do now.   Maybe another $350 billion.  To be paid for with by a soak-the-rich tax. 
I got a better plan.
First.  Lay off all college administrators except perhaps one (1) college president per college.  The administrators don't  contribute to student education, they just collect their pay.
Second.  Lay off all the janitors and buildings and grounds workers.  Students can sweep the halls, set the tables, clear the tables, wash the dishes, mow the grass, shovel the snow, sweep the gym, clean the lavatories, and do any campus chores that don't require a professional engineer license.  Students do this in return for getting an education, they don't get paid in cash.
Third.  Colleges are  required to pay off the student loans of any and all students who fail to graduate.  The admissions office should not admit students who won't be able to hack the curriculum just to take their student loan money.  No degree, no tuition money. 

Do US military officers need college degrees?

Op Ed piece in today's Wall St Journal.  Probably not, the author says.  Mostly because a 2015 college degree isn't worth much he says.  He goes on to reccomend promoting successful enlisted men to officer rank.
   I did ROTC in college and then put in six years on active duty in USAF.  In those days we had a fair number of "mustang" officers, guys who started out as enlisted men and then went thru OCS and got commissioned.   It was generally accepted that a mustang officer was as good as any and better than most, and we needed more of them.  
  Of course, after achieving a commission, the mustangs mostly started working on a college degree via correspondence courses and night school.  The WSJ writer may have his doubts about the need for a college degree, but the mustang officers had no such doubts.
   The real and effective leadership of the troops came from the non-commissioned officers, the sergeants.  These men were all senior enlisted men, who had decided they liked the service, and after re enlisting, they had the experience gained on their first hitch, they knew their jobs, and knew the mission better than anyone else on base.  As a company grade officer,  I had to win the confidence of the unit NCO's to get any thing done.  This was not unduly difficult, the NCO's were always overjoyed to find a company grade officer who they could trust, and who would go to bat for them in hassles with other base organizations, (supply, base civil engineering, personnel, maintenance control, etc).   Success as a company grade officer was largely based on interpersonal skills.  In my case I drew more heavily upon things learned at Quaker prep school than upon things learned at college.  The benefit of doing college before going in the service was simply that as a 22 year old college graduate I was more effective than I had been as an 18 year old high school graduate.