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Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
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Other blogs you may enjoy:
My civilian gun defense use blog
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Pete Drum's Web Page
Gun Laws Don't Work
instapundit.com
Dissecting Leftism -- By John Ray
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Right Thoughts
Final Protective Fire
Amitai Etzioni's Blog
Scrappleface -- Dangerously Clever Satire
Michael Williams -- Master of None
Another Conservative Blogger
A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
An Iraqi dentist
Promoting children being raised by their own parents
A federal law clerk opines about the law
Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
Music, Politics, Motorcycles
Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
Click here for a FREE NEWSLETTER on Ohio Gun Rights from Buckeye Firearms Association!
Another conservative.
Neocon Blues
Conservative Oasis
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Bubbleheads is a retired submariner
An Idaho State University student. A Democrat. Someday, she'll start paying income taxes and change.
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A Town Named For A Saint Doesn't Want To Offend Anyone
Different River brought this to my attention. I couldn't make up a story this silly. St. Paul, Minnesota ordered removal of an Easter bunny from city property: ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - A small Easter display was removed from the City Hall lobby on Wednesday out of concern that it would offend non-Christians.
As Different River points out:
The display - a cloth Easter bunny, pastel-colored eggs and a sign with the words "Happy Easter'' - was put up by a City Council secretary. They were not purchased with city money.
Tyrone Terrill, the city's human rights director, asked that the decorations be removed. Terrill said no citizen had complained to him.
...
"As government, we have a different responsibility about advancing the cause of religion, which we are not going to do,'' she said.
It's not the first time a holiday symbol has been removed from City Hall. In 2001, red poinsettias were briefly banned from a holiday display because they were associated with Christmas. Let me get this straight: The city removes a toy rabbit and some plastic eggs and a “Happy Easter” sign because the mere existence of such objects in a government building might offend non-Christians – but the very name of that city is SAINT PAUL?
HELLO???
Don’t they know that their city was named after one of the main founders of Christianity? And that by calling that person a “Saint” one makes a specific religious claim about that individual?
They haven’t changed the name of their city, so obviously they don’t think a reference to the entire city as Saint Paul is offensive to non-Christians. But they think a little stuffed rabbit tucked away in a city office seen by no more than a few dozen, maybe a few hundred, of the city’s 275,000 residents – that is supposed to be offensive?
Regardless of what you think is the appropriate degree of church-state separation, this is simply preposterous. Hundreds of thousands of people have to acknowlege the recognition of the “sainthood” of Paul every time they write their return address or tell anyone where they live. No doubt at least tens of thousands of them are not Christians, and as such do not believe in the sainthood of Paul.
...
This is not “being sensitive” – this is implying that non-Christians are stupid and/or inconsistent and/or outright hypocrites, who are happy to live in a city named after a Christian saint, but offended by one little stuffed rabbit.
Frankly, as a non-Christian, I find that implication offensive. It’s an insult to my intelligence.
Kansas Legislature Overrides Governor's Veto of Concealed Carry Law
Yahoo! This is the first override of the governor's veto in Kansas in 12 years! The state House on Thursday overrode Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' veto of a concealed weapons bill, allowing it to become law this summer.
It is not a perfect bill, but it is a start--and this in a state that, to my knowledge, has never had even a discretionary issuance concealed carry permit system.
The vote was 91-33, giving supporters seven votes more than the required two-thirds majority. The Senate voted 30-10 for the override Wednesday night, three votes more than needed.
The new law, taking effect July 1, will permit Kansans who are U.S. citizens to apply for concealed-carry permits at their local sheriffs' offices. Applicants must be 21 and take firearms training, and hidden weapons still will be banned in some places, including schools, churches, libraries and courthouses. Applicants also must pay a fee up to $150 and undergo background checks.
As you might expect, packing.org, the authority to go to for information on various state concealed weapon permit laws, is swamped right now!
Just Not My Month For Domain Names...
I registered the domain name scoperoller.com last year as a subdomain of claytoncramer.com. Apparently it expired, and this time, I was not informed by the registering company about it, so for the moment, scoperoller.com goes to somewhere generic. Groan.
Anyway, it should be back in a day or two. I'm still getting orders, in spite of this.
Revisionist History--Really Revisionist
This is one of those reminders that the only thing more dangerous than a kook writing books is an expert in one field writing books in another field. Oh yes, the same publisher that published Michael Bellesiles' historical fraud Arming America, Knopf, published this bizarre work: Most historians don't believe that Jesus Christ was born 2,005 years ago this month, but they all accept that he lived around two millennia ago, and that his era was preceded by some ancient cultures and followed by others: the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages and successive modern eras. Just about everything we think we understand about how we got here from there is based on that sequence.
Of course, even first century writers who questioned the Christian accounts pointed out that the three hours of darkness could not have been caused by a solar eclipse, since Passover happens at the Full Moon--and I can guarantee you that a Full Moon and a solar eclipse are incompatible. The only time you can get a solar eclipse is at a New Moon.
So scholars tend to sputter when confronted, as they are in The Lost Millennium: History's Timetables Under Siege (Knopf) by University of Victoria mathematician Florin Diacu, with the ideas of a maverick Russian mathematician named Anatoli Fomenko. Having reworked the astronomical calculations that underlie standard chronology, Fomenko argues that time is out of joint. History as commonly reckoned is about 1,000 years too long, contends the mathematician. Most of those centuries should be carved out of the Middle Ages, which barely existed as a bridge between the ancient and modern worlds: Christ, Greek warriors and medieval knights all lived at the same time. It's an understatement to call this idea revolutionary, although lunacy is the more common assessment from historians.
Fomenko's assault on standard chronology is based on his specialty, celestial mechanics, which allows scientists to track the movements of stars and planets over time. That, in turn, provides precise dates for ancient events associated with those movements, especially eclipses. There's nothing new in the method: for 500 years scholars have used astronomy to fix such dates as we do know -- but Fomenko's calculations have radically shifted some of them. None more so than in the case of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, one of the few events in Ancient Greek history that can be given an exact date. It thereby functions as the hook on which much Greek chronology hangs. The Athenian historian Thucydides mentions three eclipses in the first 18 years of the war, a sequence that scholars have traditionally placed from 431 to 413 BCE. But Fomenko shows that those eclipses could not have been as Thucydides describes them. According to the mathematician, the only 18-year span of eclipses matching the historian's account occurred from 1039 to 1057 CE, almost 15 centuries later.
Startling as that scenario is, Fomenko doesn't -- quite -- visualize pagan warriors, worshippers of Apollo and Zeus, slugging it out in Christian Greece 1,000 years after the birth of Jesus. That's because he also cast his eye over the three-hour eclipse that Gospel accounts place at the hour of Christ's death. Fomenko's conclusion? Jesus was crucified in 1075. Those two re-datings convinced Fomenko of his millennium shift hypothesis, and he began looking over the Middle Ages for proof the era never was. He found it, to his satisfaction at least, in lists of popes that he thinks include the same individuals repeatedly, and through equating medieval rulers like Charlemagne with their Roman predecessors.
Fomenko, a 50-year-old professor at Moscow State University, is clearly a driven man, and he and his followers are respectable mathematicians. But he's one crackpot historian. Consider a rhetorical question from Diacu, who makes a heroic effort in his book to tiptoe through this surreal minefield as a neutral. Since there was a brief eclipse in 33 CE, and another in 368 that was as lengthy as the Gospels claim (though otherwise different), as well as Fomenko's choice in 1075: which best provides a date for the Crucifixion?
Well, how about none of them? The mathematician, master of a sophisticated and precise science, demonstrates a jaw-dropping naïveté when it comes to the messy business of human history. That Fomenko can't find an eclipse to closely match the Gospels' before the 11th century may be a problem for those who take every word of Scripture literally. But it's not a difficulty for secular historians, who are more inclined to think the evangelists wrote about the sky darkening at the Crucifixion because that's what the sky ought to do when the Son of God dies. Similarly, when given two choices about Thucydides -- that he exaggerated in his description of the eclipses or that he was a contemporary of William the Conqueror -- historians of Ancient Greece will, every time, take option No. 1.
Yeah, Yeah, I Know, One Bad Example Doesn't Mean Anything About The Whole Community
But you would think that someone in such an important and high-profile position within that community would know better than to engage in behavior that reinforces those nasty stereotypes: The state has suspended the medical license of a Seattle physician for five years for placing a graphic escort service advertisement on an Internet Web site.
My wife has been reading the play Angels in America of late, in preparation for teaching a class. For all the insistence that gay people are just like you and me, this play--which gets astonishing praise for its frank and honest portrayal of gay life--portrays what can only be called a pretty damaged bunch. One line in particular--which I won't repeat because of how vulgar it is--involves one gay man begging another to sexually use him until he is bleeding. Any straight woman who made a request like that would be correctly recognized as someone with a serious sexual trauma in her past that she had not adequately worked through. The author of the play, Tony Kushner, also describes the relationship between fathers and sons as sadomasochism.
The Medical Quality Assurance Commission and the state Department of Health said Kevin C. Elliott can't practice medicine or appeal the suspension until March 2011.
Elliott posted an online ad in January 2005 offering his services as an escort for $300 an hour. The ad included nude photographs of himself and graphic descriptions of his physical characteristics and sexual capabilities.
Elliott's license had already been suspended in connection with two assaults in November 2003, when he was medical director of the Seattle Gay Clinic. The commission had stayed that suspension, but the online ad, placed while he was practicing privately, violated the terms.
Now, I'm sure that there are gay people out there who don't fit these terribly destructive stereotypes. But if they are the vast majority--and if the damaged crowd that this play portrays are atypical--why has Angels in America received such glowing praise? Yeah, it is well-written--but would a well-written play that portrayed Jews as controlling the world's governments be held in such high regard? Would a play that portrayed Muslims as bloodthirsty international terrorists be given this level of praise? I don't think so.
I Guess The Moderate Left Is About To Abandon Their Efforts To Call Bush A Liar
ABC News is admitting that some of the official documents from Hussein's government show cooperation between Iraq's government and al-Qaeda: A newly released pre-war Iraqi document indicates that an official representative of Saddam Hussein's government met with Osama bin Laden in Sudan on February 19, 1995 after approval by Saddam Hussein. Bin Laden asked that Iraq broadcast the lectures of Suleiman al Ouda, a radical Saudi preacher, and suggested "carrying out joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. According to the document, Saddam's presidency was informed of the details of the meeting on March 4, 1995 and Saddam agreed to dedicate a program for them on the radio. The document states that further "development of the relationship and cooperation between the two parties to be left according to what's open (in the future) based on dialogue and agreement on other ways of cooperation." The Sudanese were informed about the agreement to dedicate the program on the radio.
Here's a Washington Post article that indicates that an Iraqi diplomat was providing information to the CIA immediately before the war started that indicated that Iraq had chemical weapons:
The report then states that "Saudi opposition figure" bin Laden had to leave Sudan in July 1996 after it was accused of harboring terrorists. It says information indicated he was in Afghanistan. "The relationship with him is still through the Sudanese. We're currently working on activating this relationship through a new channel in light of his current location," it states.
(Editor's Note: This document is handwritten and has no official seal. Although contacts between bin Laden and the Iraqis have been reported in the 9/11 Commission report and elsewhere, (e.g. the 9/11 report states "Bin Ladn himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Khartoum in late 1994 or early 1995) this document indicates the contacts were approved personally by Saddam Hussein.
It also indicates the discussions were substantive, in particular that bin Laden was proposing an operational relationship, and that the Iraqis were, at a minimum, interested in exploring a potential relationship and prepared to show good faith by broadcasting the speeches of al Ouda, the radical cleric who was also a bin Laden mentor.
The document does not establish that the two parties did in fact enter into an operational relationship. Given that the document claims bin Laden was proposing to the Iraqis that they conduct "joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia, it is interesting to note that eight months after the meeting — on November 13, 1995 — terrorists attacked Saudi National Guard Headquarters in Riyadh, killing 5 U.S. military advisors. The militants later confessed on Saudi TV to having been trained by Osama bin Laden.) Deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's last foreign minister, Naji Sabri, was a paid spy for French intelligence, which later turned him over to the CIA to supply information about Iraq and its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs more than six months before the war began in March 2003, according to former senior intelligence officials.
Argue if you want that the pre-war intelligence about WMDs was wrong--but when you have Iraqi diplomats providing information like this, to call Bush a liar, or to suggest that he was shading the truth, simply isn't accurate.
Although some CIA officials met informally with Sabri, who traveled extensively outside Iraq, the French and the CIA used a third-country intermediary when attempting to get information from him about Hussein's inner circle and weapons programs, according to the retired officials who refused to be identified because the information is classified.
"It was never clear what he wanted," one former official familiar with the situation said of Sabri, "but we never paid him." Sabri's role in providing information to the United States was reported by NBC News on Tuesday.
...
Publicly Sabri was insisting that Iraq had no prohibited weapons of mass destruction. Privately, the sources said, he provided information that the Iraqi dictator had ambitions for a nuclear program but that it was not active, and that no biological weapons were being produced or stockpiled, although research was underway.
When it came to chemical weapons, Sabri told his handler that some existed but they were not under military control, a former intelligence official familiar with the situation said. Another former official added: "He said he had been told Hussein had them dispersed among some of the loyal tribes."
Responsibility
Instapundit (to my surprise) points to this Jeff Jacoby column about a guy who is asserting a Constitutional right to not be responsible for fathering children: REAL MEN - good men - take responsibility for the children they father. If they get a woman pregnant, they do the right thing: They stand by her. They support their child. They don't try to weasel out of a situation they co-authored. They shoulder the obligations of fatherhood, even if they hadn't planned on becoming a father. Once upon a time, men confronted with news of an unintended pregnancy knew what was expected of them. Often they married the woman who was carrying their child; for those tempted to behave irresponsibly, society devised the shotgun wedding. Women, too, knew what was expected of them. They tended to be very careful about sex. If they didn't always wait until they were married, they waited for a relationship that seemed to be marriage-bound.
This brings back some memories. I used to work with a guy I'll call Mike. Mike was living with a gal. She wanted to get married. Mike, like much of his generation (the one now in their 30s and early 40s), grew up in a divorced home, and had some trouble with commitment.
It wasn't a perfect system, and it didn't guarantee perfect happiness, but on the whole it was realistic: It recognized that sex has consequences. It bound men to the women they impregnated and made sure that children had dads as well as moms.
...
A 25-year-old computer programmer in Michigan, Dubay wants to know why it is only women who have "reproductive rights." He is upset about having to pay child support for a baby he never wanted. Not only did his former girlfriend know he didn't want children, says Dubay, she had told him she was infertile. When she got pregnant nonetheless, he asked her to get an abortion or place the baby for adoption. She decided instead to keep her child and secured a court order requiring him to pay $500 a month in support.
Not fair, Dubay complains. His ex-girlfriend chose to become a mother. It was her choice not to have an abortion, her choice to carry the baby to term, her choice not to have the child adopted. She even had the option, under the "baby safe haven" laws most states have enacted, to simply leave her newborn at a hospital or police station. Roe v. Wade gives her and all women the right - the constitutional right! - to avoid parenthood and its responsibilities. Dubay argues that he should have the same right, and has filed a federal lawsuit that his supporters are calling "Roe v. Wade for men." Drafted by the National Center for Men, it contends that as a matter of equal rights, men who don't want a child should be permitted, early in pregnancy, to get "a financial abortion" releasing them from any future responsibility to the baby.
Well, one day, this gal announced, "Whoops! I'm pregnant! Let's get married!"
Mike didn't want to get married. Eventually, after much wrangling and discussion, she moved out.
Mike was now informed that he was going to be making child support payments for 18 years. Mike was not happy about this, and came by my office to complain and look for some emotional support. He was disappointed.
If you aren't prepared to wait until marriage, you better plan on either using condoms, or taking the risk that your girlfriend is going to have a birth control failure, or pretend to have a birth control failure as a method of getting you to marry her. This is one of the risks, and you better accept it. This is not new; as near as I can tell, some women have been using pregnancy as a way to rope guys into marriage for centuries. It takes two to make a baby, and if you don't want the responsibilities that go with sex--whether this is child support or using a condom--you need to abstain.
A lot of pro-choicers insist that opposition to abortion is just a method by which men control women, by forcing them to choose being sexually active or being mothers. No, this is really about whether there are consequences to your actions--just like the guy who wants to have sex without the nuisance of condoms, but then doesn't want to be responsibility for the life that he creates.
C++
The elegance of BASIC; the clarity of APL.
Many years ago, when I had my first exposure to C++, I coined the aphorism, "C++ is to C as lung cancer is to lung." The more time I spend trying to debug C++ code, the more I agree with those who think it was a practical joke played on C programmers that got completely out of hand.
Java is elegant. C++ is a reminder of what happens when you need to start with a clean sheet of paper designing a language--and you don't.
This Qualifies As Social Science?
Groan. A UC Berkeley professor has published a longitudinal study that claims that self-confident kids grow up to be liberals, and whiny kids grow up to be conservatives: Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.
Berkeley isn't representative of the whole country? It isn't even particularly representative of the very liberal San Francisco Bay Area! I have a relative who grew up in Bezerkeley (or as others in the Bay Area call it, "the unlocked ward"). When he was 12 years old, he made the decision to stop dropping acid, which had severe negative consequences in his peer group. I won't claim that he was an average kid in Bezerkely, but I don't think he was completely out of the ordinary, either. Can you imagine being a conservative kid growing up in Bezerkeley? You would have good reason to be fearful, uptight, and rigid.
At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.
...
In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it's unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.
A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.
The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.
Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country. But within his sample, he says, the results hold.
Using Bezerkeley kids as a representative sample of Americans makes about as much sense as doing a study of violence and aggression in South Central Los Angeles. Or studying attitudes about poverty in Beverly Hills. Or examining skin cancer rates by sampling people on Santa Monica Beach. Or understanding how Jews feel about their place in the world with a survey of Jews in northern Idaho. We would all laugh at anyone that tried to pass off a study of such highly atypical populations as serious science.
Killing The Defectives...Where Have We Seen This Before?
It seems that there is no evil beyond North Korea. I've previously mentioned the widespread reports of cannibalism, and people reduced to eating grass. Now this flashback to Nazi Germany's program of "euthanizing" those with serious defects: SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea has no people with physical disabilities because they are killed almost as soon as they are born, a physician who defected from the communist state said on Wednesday.
Ri Kwang-chol, who fled to the South last year, told a forum of rights activists that the practice of killing newborns was widespread but denied he himself took part in it.
"There are no people with physical defects in North Korea," Ri told members of the New Right Union, which groups local activists and North Korean refugees.
He said babies born with physical disabilities were killed in infancy in hospitals or in homes and were quickly buried.
The practice is encouraged by the state, Ri said, as a way of purifying the masses and eliminating people who might be considered "different."
The group urged the South Korean government to change course away from "silent diplomacy" and immediately begin taking action to pressure the North to improve its human rights record.
A Little Behind In Responding To Email
It was a busy weekend moving furniture and books, making ScopeRoller products and shipping them out the door, and then struggling to get my domain name operational again. I apologize to those who have emailed me and noticed that I have not been getting back to you.
House Project: Moving Bigger Furniture
We rented a U-Haul Saturday afternoon to move some of the bigger furniture up to the new house, since the tile guy had come through and repaired all the tiles and grout that cracked because of settling.
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I hate driving trucks this big. This one had more than 158,000 miles on it--and it felt it. Unfortunately, I didn't notice until I was returning it to the U-Haul place that the electric overdrive had been on the entire time, explaining its gutlessness, even with the light load of bookshelves, a bed, and several boxes of books.
At least there's a place to sleep if I stay up there observing and I decide it is too late to drive back!
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Bookshelves and books are now invading every room!
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There are still a few issues. The pressurization pump in the garage is dripping water, so the well pump people need to come back and figure out why.
We are still trying to figure out a solution to the pretty serious crack in the back driveway. It is a bit expensive to tear up this much concrete, and then repour it. The builder is thinking that putting in another drain at that part of the driveway might be a way to both disguise it, and make sure that water doesn't pool there.
No mailbox yet--so the first two bills from the phone company ended up going...who knows? They didn't bounce back to the phone company.
Still waiting on consistently warm enough weather for the builder to finish the exterior trim paint, and grade the rest of the platform and road.
The good news is that two different wireless internet providers are now offering me service, the cheaper of which will charge me $200 installation and $70 per month for 800 Kbps upstream and downstream. Citizens Communications, who could not give me DSL when I asked for phone service several months ago, now says that they will be installing more remote terminals in my area "soon" and will be able to offer DSL. If they can do so before I commit to installing a wireless antenna, that would be very nice, but phone companies move glacially.
Last house project entry.
Spring
Spring officially started on Monday, and I can feel the difference. For the last couple weeks, the increased sunlight and warmth has been readily apparent. Still, there was one last heavy snow on Monday morning, and when we reach the dry heat of July, these pictures will help me hang on!
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This Isn't Really About Machining, In Spite of the Pictures
It is about how the things you learn as a child stick with you. When I was a child, my father was a tinkerer. He fixed cars, appliances--you name it. When my sister's TR6 needed a transmission rebuild to make it saleable--no problem. It was a major project, but he dropped the transmission, took it apart, and replaced the damaged gears.
It was memorable. One gear was missing 40% of its teeth--it became a candlestick holder in our house for many years. The experience of replacing these parts was a learning experience about British automobiles. At one point, he found out that the concept of "interchangeable parts" had apparently not taken hold very well in the British automobile industry. When he took back a transmission part that didn't fit, the auto parts store explained that he had received the right part--but even in the same year, there was considerable variation in parts, and they gladly exchanged it for another supposedly identical part--and this one fit.
I never liked being involved in these projects. My father would have me help him, but I always resented it, because I wanted to be reading. Getting your hands dirty making stuff just didn't do anything for me, except bore me silly.
Somehow or another, I ended up learning a lot from watching him, especially when he was doing something that mattered to me. For example, by junior high, I needed a bookshelf--a big bookshelf. We built one--and he taught me that you use screws, not nails, for anything you might ever have to repair. You can remove and replace screws without damaging the wood--unlike nails. I still have that bookshelf today--very solid, and in no danger of getting creaky.
When I wanted a big telescope, my father knew exactly where to go to find parts intended for that purpose--and parts not intended for that purpose! We built a serviceable mount from plumbing parts and a rolling tripod that we found in a junkyard.
Finder scopes too expensive for our limited budget? He found a right angle telescope originally intended for some military application. There were no cross lines on the reticle--only horizontal lines. So we disassembled it, used a glass cutter to scribe a vertical line, and then put it back together again. No illuminated reticle? He drilled a small hole in the side of the tube, and by holding up a very small red light bulb, we achieved the desired result. It looked very retro, but it worked well.
I learned a lot from my father about tools and making things (usually against my will), and in recent years, I have been using some of that knowledge. For example, the ScopeRoller manufacturing operation requires me to turn cylinders of plastic to a particular diameter. You can't just put the cylinder in a three-jaw chuck, and then move the cutting tool down the entire length of the cylinder. Where the cylinder sits in the chuck, the jaws get in the way of the cutting tool. You can't turn the cylinder most of its length, and then turn it around, and complete the process--the cylinder doesn't end up in quite the same position, and you get a discontinuity where the turning operation ends.
So here's the solution that I made, starting with a round rod of aluminum.
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The female end is 3/4"-16 threaded to screw onto the headstock of the lathe. The male end is 3/8"-16 threaded. I face the two ends of the plastic cylinder, and then drill a small hole in the exact center of each end. then I drill and tap a 3/8"-16 hole in one end of the cylinder. This threads onto the 3/8"-16 male end of the adapter. Then I use a live center in the tailstock to suspend the cylinder, and now I can turn the entire length of the cylinder to a precise diameter in one smooth operation.
The art of making this adapter was relatively simple.
1. Face the two ends of a piece of aluminum rod so that they are exactly square.
2. Drill a hole in one end with a 1/2" drill bit.
3. Use a boring bit to enlarge the hole to .673" diameter (the size that the 3/4"-16 tap requires).
4. Use a 3/4"-16 tap to thread the hole.
5. Mount this on the headstock, so that it can now be turned exactly on axis.
6. Because tapping a hole often ends up slightly off exactly perpendicular (and this needs to be a very precise part), I then refaced the end of the aluminum, put the part back in the 3-jaw chuck, and refaced the end with the 3/4"-16 hole.
7. Remount the workpiece on the headstock's 3/4"-16 threads.
8. Cut away the unmounted end of the cylinder until you have a .39" diameter by .5" long stem.
9. Use a 3/8"-16 die to thread the stem.
10. Drill three holes perpendicular to the sides of the workpiece, so that if it gets stuck on the headstock threads (which it did, at one point), I can stick metal rods into them to get more leverage for loosening it.
11. Polish everything up nicely.
Whenever you start to wonder if the things that you are teaching your children--and not just useful skills, like use of tools, but the important things, like right and wrong, compassion, and justice, think back to the things you learned from your parents--and see how often you are putting those ideas to work today.
My Domain Expired A Few Days Ago
I never received a renewal notice, so I now scrambling to get it renewed. If you can read this today (March 20), I'm surprised.
UPDATE: Actually, I may have received notification from Network Solutions, but when I checked my account, I noticed that the contact information (email, SnailMail, and phone number) were all unchanged from when I first registered the domain claytoncramer.com, when I still lived in California. I never updated them--and not surprisingly, they had a hard time informing of imminent expiration of my domain. (Consider this a word to the wise.)
Oddly enough, when I blogged the first part of this entry, I could not get access to anything associated with the domain claytoncramer.com--but Blogger managed to get the entry put in the right place, probably because it was using either the actual IP address (you know, the four numbers separated by periods that are what domain names end up resolving to), or more likely, Blogger's DNS (Domain Name Service) tables had not been updated yet to make claytoncrame.com disappear.
It may still be a few hours before everyone in the world can see my web page--and my email is still down--but that's one of the consequences of the distributed nature of DNS. It can take hours to days for all of the DNS servers to get updates with the correct IP address again for claytoncramer.com.
