Given recent comments in some posts, I thought I would address a certain topic: high-speed rail.
Some people often criticize America for not having high-speed rail like other advanced nations.
They claim that we are too uneducated, corrupt, stupid, poorly governed, or just too much of a shithole to have a beautifully clean and efficient rail system like Japan.
The real reason America does not and will not have high-speed rail in my lifetime is because of a document that starts with these words: We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union…
For a Japanese bullet train to operate efficiently and comfortably at 200 mph, it accelerated and decelerates slowly and has to travel at high speed for an extended distance in a fairly straight line on very even track.
If you look at a map of Japan’s high-speed rail line with only a couple of exceptions near major population hubs like Tokyo and Kyoto, it only connects cities that are far apart.
It’s not that America can’t do this from a technical standpoint, it’s that when Japan wants to bulldoze a swath of land on which to pour a concrete slab and lay track, right through your home or farmland, they can. Fuck you.
In the US, if some quasi-public corporation like Amtrack wanted to run a high-speed rail from DC to NYC with no stops in between, or maybe one stop in Philadelphia, in order to keep the train moving efficiently, and needed to bulldoze a swath and pour concrete and lay track through your property to do so, they can’t. They either have to buy your land or use eminent domain to force you to sell it.
The fact is, our nation respects individual and property rights too much to make a high-speed rail feasible.
Personally, I’d rather it be this way than not.
Any government powerful enough to run a high-speed rail through your land against your will is powerful enough to put you in a cattle car for not wanting a high-speed rail run through your land.
This is why Leftists love rail so much, in the backs of their minds they always have a group of people they would like to force onto cattle cars to make the system run more efficiently.
Otis McDonald forever will be known as the man who brought down Chicago’s gun ban.
After a long illness, he died Friday, April 4, at the age of 80.
The landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that bears his name forced Chicago to fall in line with the rest of the country and allow citizens to keep firearms in their homes for self-defense. The justices’ 5-4 decision in 2010 said the Second Amendment did indeed apply to the states, effectively ending the city’s nearly three-decade handgun ban.
Those in the pro-gun movement called Mr. McDonald a hero. But regardless of where people stood in the tense battle over gun rights, many would say he was courageous.
I suspect that the inability of the Astronaut to repair the camera was due to the incorrect application of percussive maintenance, more specifically his choice of percussive tool.
The individual who taught me more about percussive maintenance than anyone else was one of my formers graduate advisors, a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and former nuclear propulsion chief.
When something broke in the lab, our first instruction was “tap on it with a wrench.”
The point cannot be stressed enough: do not hit things with a hammer!
A hammer is not the proper tool for percussive maintenance precisely because hitting things is exactly what a hammer is normally used for.
Under normal circumstances, you do not hit an advanced piece of technology or complex mechanical system, but when applying percussive maintenance you do. Since under normal circumstances you hit something with a hammer, under percussive maintenance you don’t.
These sorts of counter-intuitive ideas exist in engineering all the time. How do you put out an oil well fire? You blow it the fuck up with a shitload of explosives. One normally thinks about explosives causing fires, but when you already have a raging fire, explosives blow it out.
The same is true with percussive maintenance. The best tools for this are threaded fastener torque applying devices.
Wrenches and screwdrivers.
When light maintenance is required on delicate equipment, the handle of a screwdriver works best. Again, we see the counter-intuitive nature of percussive maintenance. Hold the screwdriver by the bit and apply a dynamic corrective action with the handle.
If more dynamic corrective action is required, a wrench works best. When using a wrench, an open-end wrench works best.
Note that standards here are critical.
Do not apply percussive maintenance to an SAE standard machine with a metric wrench or vise versa.
In the lab we had a huge Dewar of liquid argon, with a pressure release valve. If the valve opened up for too long, it would freeze the value open and continue to blow out argon. So when the valve started to vent, one of us would continue to tap on it with a wrench until it re-seated. One time one of the undergrads who was doing some work for us for credit tapped on the valve with the wrong standard wrench and causes to pop wide open. Only through a smart strike with a metric wrench were we able to get it to sea again.
Note that this dynamic works even works on Russian equipment in space.
Percussive maintenance is a time-honored way of fixing things, but be sure to do it correctly, by applying the right too, which is actually the wrong tool for the usual job of hitting things.
I’m really tired of all the bad news, so I’m taking a break and writing something positive for a change. I think I’ve told this story before, but because of the nature of this post, I’ll tell it again.
I come from a long family history of bowel disease. Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis runs in my family.
Starting in my early 20’s I started to have symptoms. Having seen how bad this disease could be in family members, I got very depressed. Fortunately for me, I didn’t get it that bad. I’m still mostly fully functioning without surgery and only oral medication.
However, my attitude shifted on this about 10 years go.
I hurt on the inside more than I’ve ever hurt before. My wife drove me to the hospital curled up in the truck of the SUV, because I couldn’t sit in a seat.
I ended up seeing a specialist who ordered among other things an abdominal CT with IV contrast.
At 8:00 PM the night after my CT, she called me, which is always a bad sign. My bowel looked fine but there was a spot on my kidney that should not be there and she set up an appointment with a friend who is a urologist, the next day.
I saw him, he looked at my chart and said “I don’t know what that is, but it shouldn’t be there, we’re going to cut it out and biopsy it later. Be back the day after tomorrow.”
In 48 hours I had surgery. What was pulled out of me, besides a rib, was a very malignant cancer the size of a walnut. Very malignant.
I was told that the type of cancer that I had was a death sentence if it had progressed far enough for me to become symptomatic, such as seeing blood in my urine. To drive this point home, my mother’s best friend’s brother was diagnosed with the same type of cancer that I was, about the same time that I was, but he was symptomatic, which is why they found it. Despite very aggressive chemo and radiation, he died about six months later.
I’ve been cancer-free for 10 years and never had to go through chemo.
I would be dead right now, if not for my bowel disease because it was that CT scan that found my cancer before it hat progressed to the point where it was both symptomatic and terminal.
The Lord works in mysterious ways.
I was laid off in December from a job that I loved. I cannot describe how much I loved that job, except to say that it fit me like it was made for me. There was only one problem, the salary was not great. The entire industry I worked in was like that.
Some military contractors get paid huge bucks for developing advanced technology (aerospace). Others get squeezed on margin by bean-counters. I worked for the latter. It didn’t bother me at the time because I loved what I did so I really didn’t care about the money.
The layoff prompted a job search, and I am happy to announce I signed on with a new company on the other side of the defense contracting word and that job comes with a 20% increase in base salary.
The Lord works in mysterious ways.
I have a friend, he’s almost a brother, I’ve known him since the 7th grade. He worked for one of the “too big to fail” banks on Wall Street. He was downsized the same day that I was. I know it’s been tough for him. I completely understand that.
But… he used to commute from Connecticut to NYC. He would have to drive from his home to one train to get to NY, then take another train to get to NYC, then the subway to get to his office. It was a two-and-a-half-hour commute each way. (Also a reason why I’m glad I don’t work in finance and/or NYC)
I talked to my buddy. He hasn’t had to go into the city since he cleaned out his office in December.
The Lord works in mysterious ways.
I know that what is going on right now sucks, and sucks hard for the lot of us, however, it is at this moment that I am reminded of the words that President Abraham Lincoln spoke on September 30, 1859, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the Wisconsin State Fair:
It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentiment to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride; how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.” And yet, let us hope, it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us, and the intellectual and moral worlds within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.
Or for a little bonus Sunday music, this song by Danny Schmidt:
This too shall pass, and I cannot help but believe, that at the end of this we will find that we were better off for one reason or another and that what we need to do is that although we can only see these things in hindsight, we must trust that the Lord works in mysterious ways.
I never had the chance to see Evita with this cast. Patty Lupone is just magnificent. I saw the Spanish version in Madrid with Paloma San Basilio doing the role and I was floored. Both selections made the character a myth above mere mortals playing a role for a living.
It made me mad when Weber and Rice prostituted themselves and allowed Madonna to make that atrocious movie.
