Destroy All Assets

A few weeks ago I received a pleading letter from the Charles River Museum of Industry.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

The CRMI is a small museum in downtown Waltham—a place people might know by the old Waltham watches built by the Waltham Watch Company.  Massachusetts was a hotbed of industrial production and innovation during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. In the 19^th century it was manufacturing or precision instruments, textiles, shoes—pretty much everything. The US was worried that Britain would have a stranglehold on manufacturing forever. First the Embargo Act of 1807 forbidding imports from Britain and then the War of 1812 forced America into the industrial revolution. 

 

This is what the CRMI is all about: charting how the US (as shown in Massachusetts) navigated this period. The Museum has example machinery, some of the Waltham Watch Company’s original precision tool and dies, example looms. Every year it has a Model Engineering show put on by the New England Model Engineering Society where steam engines, Stirling engines, pulse rocket devices—all manner of precision-built machines shown both full size and in miniature. It’s a cacophony of hisses, thumps, and bangs showing the chops of 19^th century engineers.

 

I’ve been going for years. 

 

The message from the Museum was regarding yet another destructive executive order. This one to defund and destroy the Institute of Museum and Library Services. That order is here.

 

The IMLS budget is under 300 million dollars—.003% of the federal budget. You can see it here. About three quarters of its money is block grants to the states for library support. A little goes towards research. Nine percent goes to general museums. About seven percent goes museums for Latino, African Americans, Native Americans, and Native Hawaiians. Seventy employees distribute these funds. 

 

Three million goes to support libraries in Tennessee. Three quarters of a million went to libraries in Nebraska. Half a million went to support a program in the Children’s Museum of Kansas City. A hundred-fifty thousand went to a children’s museum program in Montana. Along with the Council of American Jewish Museums, the IMLS supported creating resources to help fight against anti-semitism. 

 

Libraries and museums. If we’re going to put money anywhere—if there is a common good to be supported by our common tax revenue—why shouldn’t that be libraries and museums. (Or cancer research. Or heart disease.)

 

We can’t afford libraries and museums but we can afford huge tax cuts for billionaires? We can’t afford cancer research but we can afford a bigger defense department? 

 

I’ve worked in government departments both large and small. I’ve worked in corporations both large and small. Business doesn’t pursue opportunities where there’s no money. Critical problems that can’t be solved by private enterprise must be solved by government. That’s why public service exists.

 

I have seen civil servants do miraculous things with vanishingly small budgets. I have seen them help bring bird populations back where they were lost, nurture the innovation of amazing general aviation instrumentation, and enable me to bury my parents in Arlington National Cemetery. All with grace, honesty, attention to detail, and respect.

 

There may be civil servants out there that don’t do any work or take home two paychecks but I’ve never seen them. I have seen civil servants hobbled by bad legislation and worse leaders and then vilified for nothing more than doing the thankless job handed them by political government. Vilified for things that are completely out of their control.

 

This isn’t about efficiency or budget considerations or the deficit. If it were about efficiency, why take down social security one of the most efficient systems on the planet? If it were about budget considerations or the deficit, we wouldn’t be getting tax cuts or shutting down the IRS—what businessman cuts his own revenue stream? I’ll tell you: a businessman who can’t keep from going bankrupt. This isn’t about truth—truth is what you need to know whether you like it or not. This is about people fantasizing about an imaginary better time. This isn’t fixing the system. It’s breaking the system and then saying we have to scrap it because it doesn’t work—while transferring our money into the coffers of the ludicrously wealthy.

 

This is insane.

 

America used to be a shining beacon of innovation, science, and technology. That came largely from the investment the United States government—as allocated by Congress—made in United States institutions.

 

Not anymore.

 

I had a blog entry written but it got a little angry. While I’m thinking about that, let’s talk about some interesting science.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

 

Mars magnetic anomaly explained

Mars’ magnetic field is… weird. 

 

There’s a lot of evidence that Mars had a symmetrical magnetic field like ours. Earth’s magnetic field protects the planet from getting its atmosphere stripped by the solar wind. Presumably, a Martian symmetrical magnetic field would do the same. 

 

But Mars’ magnetic field is decidedly not symmetrical. It has only remnants and they are concentrated in the southern hemisphere. 

 

Plaintively, we ask why?

 

One hypothesis is that the core of Mars was never a solid core like Earth’s but liquid. This allows the asymmetry.

 

Can we make water on the Moon with solar wind? Maybe.

The Moon is dry. But it does have hydrogen and oxygen, mostly in the form of OH groups in the first few centimeters of soil. The oxygen is inherent in the regolith in the same way Earth has oxygen: it came along with the material. But hydrogen can hit escape velocity easily and leave unless it’s captured.

 

The solar wind is mostly protons—hydrogen without the electrons. Consequently, it can bind with the oxygen on the lunar surface to produce said OH. Add another hydrogen to that OH and you get H2O. 

 

But any hypothesis needs to be tested and a team at NASA Goddard did exactly that to see of lunar soil could produce water when struck by solar wind. 

 

They think it did.

 

Solar panels from Moon dust

One of the reasons humans were able to colonize the New World twenty thousand years ago is they were able to live off the land. On the Moon, there’s not a lot of land to live on. Just dust, vacuum, and radiation.

 

Still, one of the needs for a lunar base is power and no one wants to send hundreds of tons of solar cells to the Moon if they don’t have to. 

 

Well, maybe they don’t have to.

 

Scientists at the University of Potsdam were able to fabricate the glass portion photovoltaic cells from glass generated from melting moondust—moonglass. This reduced a payload of solar cells by up to 99.4%. All we have to do is ship up the non-glass material.

 

AI has actual use: gravitational wave detector design

Gravitational waves are distortions in space-time caused by gravitational events. LIGO does it by having two laser beams interfering with one another over four kilometers. The idea is that once these detectors are stabilized so they don’t dance every time a truck passes by, they will respond to a space distortion. Since this would hit one arm of the detector before the other, the interference pattern changes with the distortion.

 

The Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) trained up an AI algorithm called “Urania” to help them design better detectors. Sure enough, Urania was able to design detectors with better theoretical sensitivity than current design. 

 

Go girl.

 

Another way to determine alien life

There have been a lot of attempts to define life in some rigorous way that we could detect at astronomical distances. Life, shall we say, has found a way to makes its definition more philosophical than sciencey. It’s there because we can see it but damned if we can define it.

 

Akshit Goyal and Mikhail Tikhonov thinks we have been asking the wrong question. Instead of trying to define life, define what it does. And what it does is manage energy.

 

Organisms use high energy compounds and break them down into smaller compounds for use. This gives them an energy gradient that can be detected—maybe not at astronomical distances but at least in a way that may be more or less independent of life on earth. 

 

The idea that a stratification of resources might be found in geologic formations like, say, on Mars.

 

(I recently saw a definition of life that described it as a chemical system that operated in terms of evolution. Try seeing that with the James Webb Telescope.)

 

Paleolithic Tools in Ukraine

Archeologists have uncovered an inscribed ivory tool in Ukraine that is about 400,000 years old. The article seems to presume these were Homo sapiens but doesn’t bother to actually state that. If verified, that has two interesting features: Homo sapiens were in Europe a long, long time ago and co-existed with Neanderthals for hundreds of thousands of years and they were inscribing ivory with mammoth pictures.

 

Ivory isn’t a good tool material so the authors seem to think it might have had some symbolic value rather than a real tool. 

 

Regardless, mammoth scrimshaw is cool.

 

Climate Change will make rice toxic

Turns out increasing the temperature and CO2 of rice in a paddy increases the uptake of arsenic. 

 

Yay.

 

Rice is the world’s most consumed grain. Increase of toxicity of even a small amount will result in a large number of people getting sick. 

 

It’s the scale problem. If, say, 1 person in 100,000 people get sick now from arsenic poisoning in rice, that’s 10,000/billion people. If it increases to 4, that’s 40,000/billion people. If it becomes sufficiently toxic that it puts people off eating rice, that’s billions of people with a reduced food supply.

 

Aaaand I’m back to being angry again.

 

Better luck next time.

 

State of the Farm, April 2025

Spring planting has begun.

 

We got the peas in over a week ago and the rest of the early cold crops (bok choy, kale, lettuce, radishes, etc.) a few days later. It’s been quite warm for about a week and only turned more “normal” today. 

 

I have to say, this Chinese global warming hoax is astonishingly powerful to bring in the growing season a month early and then let it go on an extra month in the fall. It was even strong enough to make the USDA move our zones a little further south. Pretty damned impressive for a global hoax. Maybe we could work that magic on peace and world hunger.

 

Anyway, last year we tried a mesh of straw tied together with what we thought was biodegradable twine. Surprise: it wasn’t. We left it in place to hold down the fresh manure we’d laid out. It did its job and wasn’t completely terrible to pull up and throw away. But it was a waste. Next year we’ll know better.

 

Meanwhile, we went back to the supplier from last year only to be told that there was no manure available this year. No explanation. Just that they were not supplying it. 

 

We cast around and found a supplier on Craig’s List. It was Very Not Cheap but it was good quality delivered—six yards worth. We’ve been using up the last of the wood chips from the fallen hickory and covering it over with the new manure. It looks very nice.

 

We’ve been laying out what we want to plant in the two main gardens and the raised beds. It’s still under discussion. But, at least, I’m going to try sugar beets and sorghum again this year. Last year we didn’t get enough yield to continue the experiment. This year may be different. I’ll have more next month.

 

We cut down two of the three apples that were most infected with cedar apple rust. I haven’t tackled the last one—the Granny Smith—yet. That’s next on the agenda.

 

I mentioned last time the wood processing. I managed to get rid of all of the old wood in the shop and started on the “new” wood—wood from last year. I did the persimmon wood. The apple, chestnut, and mulberry are next. Then, I’ll attack the big pieces of cherry and hickory, finishing off that area so we can do other things with it besides holding down the earth with heavy pieces of wood. I’ll do a full post about it eventually.

 

The plan is to attack the remaining fallen wood tomorrow and cut it into manageable pieces. But that depends on the weather.

 

I’ve been on and off again on a lathe project (See here.) for some time. The short version is I got interested in larger lathe projects and bought a used Delta that promptly self-destructed. Twice. Frustrated, I ended up buying another lathe and, through a set of histrionic machinations, ended up with two lathes: a Jet and a Grizzly. Someday, I’ll write about it.

 

Anyway, that left the Delta as a boat anchor. I found this frustrating. Ninety percent of the Delta was still usable: the headstock, tailstock, tool rest, bed, and motor were fine. The only problem was the pulley system. 

 

One of the things I like to do is reuse old wood. I’ve talked about this before. But a problem with using old wood is taking a nine-pound log and turning it into a seven-pound piece of stock. Most lathes have a bottom speed of about 600 rpm—or 10 revolutions/second. This means that a nine (or ten or twenty) inch piece of irregular wood is turning in front of you ten times per second. 

 

It is bloody scary. 

 

What I decided to do was take the old delta and find the smallest motor pully I could find and the largest shaft pully and hook them together so that I’d have something turning much slower. This turned out to be a 1-inch motor pulley and an 8-inch shaft pulley, giving me a 1/8 ratio. The motor was set up at 1750 rpm, so the resulting RPS should have been about 4. There were flaws in my calculations so I ended up with about 5.5—still, a lot better than 10. I tried it out and it was fine. Still a bit scary but nice.

 

The lathe is now a fixed speed, which is curiously frustrating. When I’ve done this with multispeed lathes, it was run slow until the rough stuff was done, and then run faster to get the piece smooth. I may end up redoing the lathe into just a couple of speeds but for now, since it is for roughing only, I’m going to leave it. It does its job.

 

The last part of that project is to put usable wheels on it. I don’t have room for the lathe in the shop so the plan is to store it next to the outside door and when the weather cooperates, pull it out and rough out the logs. Then, pull the lathe back into the shop when I’m done. The wheels I got are levered. That is, there’s a lever to bring down the wheels to move the lathe and then lever them up to set the lathe down solidly. But I have to mount them. 

 

There’s a downside to this processing. If I just sawed the wood, I’d get rectangular boards. By turning them into rough blanks, I’ve turned them circular, losing a substantial part of the wood. For example, an 8x8 inch piece of wood has a cross-sectional area of 64 square inches. A circle of radius 4 inches (1/2 the 8 inches) has a cross-sectional area of 50.3 square inches—22% less wood.

 

But I don’t have a sawmill and my bandsaw doesn’t like wood much thicker than six inches. But I can rough turn a ten-inch log without much trouble. (Maybe twelve if it’s not too irregular and I’m feeling brave.) There are also length considerations. I can cut about four feet on the bandsaw without too much trouble but I can’t really turn more than three feet on the lathe. 

 

I have seen a video that shows a technique of milling wood up to about twelve inches thick (the length of my chainsaw.) I’m going to give that a go.

 

I’d like to be able to make lumber out of all this fallen wood. And more. My friend William has some good-sized cherry logs holding down his backyard from a fallen tree last year. Once I have flat stock, I can turn it into boards using the jointer/planer/table saw approach: jointer to get two flat sides. Planer to even them out. Table saw for the last edge.

 

Or maybe I’m being too ambitious. My jointer only takes eight-inch boards, anyway. And where do I dry it or store it? Up in Vermont, I have a field of perhaps ten or fifteen cherry trees. All of them need to be eventually taken down—up there, cherry seems to grow to a certain point and then start to fail for some reason. They’re going to fall down eventually. I’d rather harvest them and replant before the wood rots.

 

But that’s the same problem: cut, dry, and store. Where? Build a solar kiln up there and leave them for a year? Maybe. If the chainsaw method works out. Otherwise, I’ll need a sawmill and I just don’t have the trees to justify that. At that point, it has to become a business or it won’t get done. I don’t want to start another business. I’ve got enough projects. Also, you end up with two-inch-thick boards that need to be milled down to spec. Again, as I mentioned, I’m really only set up to handle eight-inch stock. 

 

And even if I do all of that, what projects do I have on hand to use the wood? How many menorahs, pill cups, spinning tops, and boxes can I make? 

 

But it hurts to see wood wasted. It’s just a wonderful, practical, and beautiful resource. There was a field of hemlocks on the property we have in Vermont. Before we ever got it, whatever rots hemlock got to them and there are fallen, rotting logs all over this one section of the property. Hemlock is lovely wood. Not a hardwood, like cherry, but a nice softwood sort of like pine. (See here.) 

 

Instead, the trunks are rotting into the ground releasing CO2 and methane into the air, doing their bit for global warming. I’m sure it’s helping microbes and small animals but the hemlock loss isn’t a natural process. It happened quickly—similar to the chestnut blight. If it were a natural loss, it would be different. I don’t want the same things to happen to the cherries.

 

So, I’m at a loss. Hopefully, I’ll figure something out.