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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I'm running for Idaho state senate I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, December 30, 2006
Saddam Hussein's Execution I have never been a big fan of the death penalty, but if there is anyone that deserves it, it is a monster like Saddam Hussein. I can understand how Hussein persuaded himself that he was Iraq--and any challenge to his authority was therefore treason, deserving execution. A government might, under certain circumstances, feel that there was a need to kill enemies--to engage in self-defense. Megalomania has its consequences, and this is one of them. What moved Hussein beyond that understandable reaction was his willingness to torture people to death. Raping family members and sending a videotape to their relatives? Cutting out someone's tongue and leaving them to bleed to death? Forcing people to drink gasoline and then shooting them? Running conscious people through meat grinders, feet first? When you understand how Hussein operated, you can see why prominent and influential Democrats like Michael Moore were prepared to make excuses for Saddam Hussein. It is doubtless how they would operate in the United States if they could get away with it. (It is certainly how their ideological soul mates in the Soviet Union did things.) One more reason that the right to keep and bear arms is not negotiable. Armed America Is Shipping Instapundit mentions that my new book is shipping at Amazon, and observes: I expect it will be quite good.Thanks for the vote of confidence, Glenn! I also notice that: Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,978This has risen from about 3100 earlier this evening, so I would expect that some of this reflects Instapundit's praise. I don't know exactly how many sales are needed to rise into the top 3000 sales rank, but I think this is a very good sign, especially since I have not yet done any interviews to promote the book, and no print advertising or book excerpts have appeared yet in magazines. However, I rather doubt that I'll be quiting my day job this week. I am a little irritated that some out of date institutional affiliations (Boise State and George Fox University) are mentioned in the excerpt from Publishers Weekly, but hey, at least the title and my name are spelled correctly, and that's what's most important. Photovoltaics: Experimental Results I was at the store this afternoon, and saw a photovoltaic panel on sale for $39.95. The box promised 12 volts, 350 milliamps--the target was for recharging car batteries. While this isn't a particularly impressive price/performance ratio, I thought it would be sufficient to do some experimentation. You see, as much as I like the idea of using a photovoltaic system to supply electricity, my big concern has been whether there was enough sunlight here in winter to justify the capital investment. I've been working on the assumption that there would only be about 3.5 hours of bright enough sunlight to fully power a solar panel. We're just past the shortest day of the year (the winter solstice); today was only about sixteen minutes longer. I put the panel out on the front porch, and hooked it up to the multimeter.  Click to enlarge When I first put it outside about 3:45 PM, the multimeter reported more than twenty-four volts. (This is not under load--from reading the specs on these panels, it appears that open circuit voltage is typically about twice what you would get from being under load.) Within a few minutes, the Sun was partly in clouds, and it was about 4:10 PM--not too far from sunset. The multimeter reported 22.3 volts.  Click to enlarge As the clouds moved out of the way a few minutes later, the Sun was just on the edge of hitting the mountains--and the voltage was now up to 22.8.  Click to enlarge Unfortunately, the multimeter isn't reporting amps because of a blown fuse. I'm not sure if amperage varies with light change, but certainly voltage does. Oddly enough, even inside the house, with just the indirect light of the Sun coming in through the northern windows, the panel was producing thirteen volts. I'll be doing so more measurements over the next few days (especially of amperage), but I am beginning to suspect that instead of 3.5 hours a day (on sunny days), I might be able to get as much as seven or eight hours a day of full power--especially because I doubt this Chinese-made panel is as efficient as the higher end panels intended for home power generation. At seven hours a day in the depths of winter--and probably thirteen or fourteen hours in summer--this is beginning to look economically feasible. I am also suspecting that cloudy days may not be such a problem, either, since a 100 watt incandescent bulb provides enough light to produce about sixteen volts. Friday, December 29, 2006
I Guess My Book Armed America Actually Exists! My editor at Shotgun News received a review copy Thursday, and A Second Hand Conjecture reports: I just received my review copy of Clayton Cramer’s “Armed America.” It is at least in part a response to the discredited work of Michael Bellisile’s “Arming America.” I’ll have a review up in the next couple of weeks, maybe even sooner. Logic Failure A friend pointed me to this article from Scientific American, in which one of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) skeptics changes sides. What impresses me is the weakness of his reason for doing so: Four books eventually brought me to the flipping point. Archaeologist Brian Fagan's The Long Summer (Basic, 2004) explicates how civilization is the gift of a temporary period of mild climate.Yup. As many of the skeptics are pointing out--the Medieval Warm Period--an entirely natural event--caused a dramatic florescence of European civilization, and the Little Ice Age moved the focus to Southern Europe. I've speculated in the past that the warming of Europe at the end of the Little Ice Age, by improving crop yields, may have caused enough of an agricultural surplus in Britain to fund development of the Industrial Revolution. As crop yields go up, so does wealth, and the number of hands required to work the fields declines. Let's see: natural environmental catastrophes destroy civilizations--and this is an argument for why the AGW claim must be right? Huh? Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006) is a page-turning account of her journeys around the world with environmental scientists who are documenting species extinction and climate change unmistakably linked to human action.Huh? Since we don't know how much (if any) of global warming is anthropogenic, and how much is solar cycle induced, how can "climate change" be "unmistakably linked to human action"? Species extinction linked to human action, no argument. We have plenty of examples. But to claim that "climate change" is "unmistakably linked to human action" is an assumption, not a proven fact. Labels: global warming Islam in Decline in Russia? Power and Control and Western Resistance are reporting that a recent survey in Russia finds that there are less Muslims there than the sum of the traditionally Muslim ethnic groups: A recent social survey by one of Russia's most prominent polling organizations puts the country's Muslim population at 6 percent, far below the 15 percent claimed by Russian Muslim leaders. This smashes the myth that Russia is on its way to becoming a `Muslim' country, and it serves as ammunition to stop the incessant attacks by Russian Muslim leaders on the country's political establishment by which they hope to establish Muslim law in the country.I've gone to the article in Izvestiya that Western Resistance cites. Unfortunately, my Russian has just about completely faded away, but from what little I can read, it would appear that the article there does show these sort of figures. I'm going to make a wild guess that Islam was something of a proxy for nationalism under the fiercely atheist Soviet Union, and that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of the non-Russians of traditionally Muslim ethnic groups no longer felt any need to identify with Islam. Thursday, December 28, 2006
Maybe I Do Need An All-Wheel Drive Tuesday morning, I decided to drive down to town to buy some Delrin. It had snowed for several days (although you Michiganders would call it a light dusting), but it rained Christmas night--and everything turned from snow to ice. I took this picture from the southeast corner of the house.  Click to enlarge What is that red speck down there, far, far away?  Click to enlarge Yup, that's the Corvette. The ice was beginning to melt--but not enough to actually flow away, but to make the world's least tasty slushy. I reached a point where the ice was slushy enough, and there was enough of a slope, that it was not possible to make any progress up the shared road of the subdivision. I couldn't even back up, so I decided that the spot on the side of the road where it came to rest was a parking spot, and walked back up to the house. The Equinox handled the conditions just fine, and while it has some winter tires on it, I think the real issue was all-wheel drive. Eventually, after letting everything sit for a while, the surface froze up solidly enough for me to at least back the Corvette down the road, climb my driveway, and get it back into the garage. I really don't want to give up the Corvette for the other three seasons--and my wife has vetoed me buying a cheap four wheel drive, for fear that it will strand me on the 55 some night. Perhaps I can find some way to avoid driving the Corvette most days for the next several months. The Meaning of Yom I mentioned a while back the dangers of Old Testament literalism in translation, and that the word yom, which is translated as "day" in the Genesis account, has a variety of meanings. Here you can read some observations by an Orthodox Jew on the subject that show that the plural is used in a number of contexts in the Old Testament to cover substantially longer periods than just a day or a small group of days. Climate Change & Carbon Dioxide Power and Control has links to a variety of interesting items about atmospheric carbon dioxide; they are devastating to Al Gore and the rest of the environmental panic crowd. This chart (located at University of California San Diego, that well known Big Oil lobbying organization) shows the range of atmospheric carbon dioxide over geologic time, and discusses some of the factors that determine it. Most important of all is the enormous uncertainties involved. Here's another example: a devastating account of the many problems with the famous "hockey stick" projection of climate change: The “Hockey Stick” is dead. This once-feared icon of global warming purported to show annual average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere for the past 1,000 years. It was derived from the climatic information that is stored in a variety of climate-sensitive or climate “proxy” data records—things such as tree rings, coral banding records, and sediment cores. It’s called the “hockey stick” because its long handle corresponds to 900 years (from 1000 to 1900) of little temperature variation, and its blade represents 100 years (1900 to 1999) of rapid temperature rise (Figure 1). The “hockey stick” made its debut in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in 1999 in a paper by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes that built upon a 1998 paper by the same authors in the journal Nature which detailed the methodology for creating a proxy temperature reconstruction.My experience is that a lot of environmentalists, even when you show them that their claims are, at best, overstated, don't care. They are so intent on being good stewards of Mother Earth that they don't really care that anthropogenic global warming is, at worst, a minor component causing climate change. It is really about feeling guilty that we aren't living like the Third World. Labels: global warming Pentax Shoots For The Moon These are all 1/90th of a second with the 8" f/7 reflector. It is cold, crisp, and clear--and if I can stay warm enough (more hot chocolate, Rhonda!), I'll try this with Big Bertha next. We're past first quarter, so contrast is a bit low, especially on the sections where the Sun is already high in the sky.  Click to enlarge Here's a more detailed image from within this. Obviously, I don't have the focus quite as crisp as I should yet.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge Labels: astrophotography, telescopes Boring Aluminum I've been making the sleeve caster assemblies out of Delrin for some time. I've been thinking of making them out of aluminum partly because the aluminum is slightly cheaper than the Delrin in the same length, and because I can use somewhat smaller diameter stock if I make them out of aluminum, which reduces length, weight, and cost even more. I use my lathe to mark the center of the cylinder, then use a drill press and a Forstner bit to make a rough cut in the Delrin. Delrin is soft enough for me to make a 1 3/8" bore on one pass, and then use the lathe and a boring bit to even it out to 1.40". Aluminum isn't dramatically harder than Delrin, but because it doesn't self-lubricate, a single pass cut with the drill press won't do the job--and Forstner bits aren't intended for cutting metal. They don't do it well, and in the long run, the bits won't last. Fortunately, I have a 1 3/8" drill bit. But even with a 1/2" pilot hole, a 1 3/8" drill bit shakes the workpiece loose, no matter how tightly I clamp it. So, I went out and bought some more intermediate drill bit sizes. I was able to bore starting with 1/4", and then working my way up: 3/8", 1/2", 25/32", 1", 1 1/4", 1 3/8". It turns out that as the drill bits get larger, the step up in size has to get smaller. This is no surprise. As you increase the diameter, the surface area that the drill bit is cutting goes up with the square of the diameter change. The 1" to 1 1/4" step was substantially more difficult than the 25/32" to 1" step; the 1 1/4" to 1 3/8" step was not much easier than the 1" to 1 1/4" step. It appears that I need to get a 1 1/8" drill bit--and perhaps even a 7/8" and 1 5/16" drill bit as well. This should make the rough bore quite a bit more precisely cut. The downside is that all of these boring operations, even with the drill press, are pretty slow. Delrin produces light, fluffy shavings that go flying out as soon as I lift the cutting tool out. Aluminum produces long strings of aluminum that hold onto the drill bit, and require much more frequent clearing of the work area. Replacing Delrin with aluminum is tempting, especially because it looks so much nicer when sanded and polished; I'm just not persuaded that the reduced costs for materials justify the substantial increase in labor. Improved Lighting The sky cleared last night with a massive wind storm, and we have blue sky today. I have some more pictures that I took with the K10D and zoom lens and telescope. I've cut these down a bit on size, which is really something of an advantage with these sort of magnifications. This is the zoom lens at 80mm (equivalent to 120mm for 35mm size):  Click to enlarge And at 205mm (equivalent to 307mm for 35mm size):  Click to enlarge Here are a couple of pictures of downtown Horseshoe Bend, about six miles away, using the 8" f/7 reflector:  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge Labels: telescopes Wednesday, December 27, 2006
More About the Pentax K10D The K10D normally saves images in JPG format, but there is also a button on the side of the camera labeled "RAW." (No, it isn't optimized for WWE events.) Especially because JPG is a "lossy" format, there are times that it might be tempting to use RAW instead. What is a "lossy" format? That means that in the interests of creating a smaller file, JPG may diminish the quality of the image, depending on what quality setting you use. Many picture processing programs give you an option to control the compression level, all the way from, "I can't see the difference" to "It's a tiny file, but it's really ugly." Repeatedly loading JPG images into photo processing programs, making minor changes, then saving them (especially if the programs are using different JPG compression implementations) over time may degrade image quality, in the same way that a fifth generation photocopy isn't quite as nice as the original. Here's an example. I took the picture below, and reduced it to a 1280x857 pixel image, saved at 75% compression quality with LViewPro, then saved it again at 20% compression quality with LViewPro. The 75% compression quality image takes up 110 kilobytes; the 20% compression quality image takes up 36 kilobytes.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge TIF is a lossless image format. I'm not sure if Pentax RAW format is lossless as well, although if it is, it seems to be remarkably efficient. The camera's sensor is 10.2 megapixels; the RAW format for the picture below is 10.5 megabytes. By comparison, in the highest JPG quality mode (labeled as high quality) the camera produces, the same image below takes up 2.4 megabytes. If I use Pentax's Photo Laboratory program to save the RAW format file as TIF, it takes up 58.9 megabytes, and saved in Photo Laboratory's highest quality JPG, it takes up 5.06 megabytes--or slightly more than twice as large the JPG produced by the camera. Whether the extra hassle of downloading RAW format pictures (which take up a lot more space on the SD memory card) and using Photo Laboratory to convert them into something that other programs understand is a tradeoff that every user will have to decide for themselves. Some of these pictures are pretty big, so ask yourself: how badly do you need to see these? There's no thumbnails on these. They aren't terribly interesting in themselves. Camera's JPG format: Click to load Highest quality JPG format produced by Photo Laboratory from RAW format: Click to load 16-bit TIF format produced by Photo Laboratory from RAW format: Click to load UPDATE: A reader tells me that RAW mode is useful for dealing with severe underexposure or overexposure problems; apparently, RAW mode carries a lot more information and the Photo Laboratory program probably lets you fiddle with this. Pentax Camera Zoom We've had less than optimal lighting conditions for several days because of cloud cover, but I've been able to take some pictures with the Pentax K10D and both an older, non-autofocus telephoto zoom lens, and using an adapter to mount it on my 8" f/7 reflector. (For those of you who think in camera, that's a 1414mm f/7.) These pictures were taken with an 80-205mm zoom (equivalent to 120-307mm, because of the difference in sensor size relative to 35mm film size). As you can see, at the high end, the image quality degrades substantially.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge This picture is of downtown Horseshoe Bend, using the 8" f/7 reflector. I'm not sure how much of the lack of crispness was failure to get a proper focus (although the camera though it was as sharp as it could get), and how much was the limitations of distance and atmosphere. The target here is six miles away from me, and down.  Click to enlarge Labels: telescopes Imagine The Coverage If This Guy Were Pro-Embryonic Stem Cell Research I'm always a bit skeptical of claims by academics that racism against blacks drives academic actions, but I don't find it hard to believe that this guy's opposition to embryonic stem cell research might be driving his denial of tenure: A professor who was denied tenure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has vowed to start a hunger strike on February 5 outside the provost’s office. Monday, December 25, 2006
You Can Find Anything On Ebay I realized that I needed some larger drills to rough out some aluminum for boring (5/8", 3/4", 7/8", 1", 1.25") with 5/8" or smaller shanks, so I started searching around. The price for new drill bits at McMaster-Carr and MSC Industrial Supply were high--about $200 or so each. So I went to eBay, and rapidly found what I needed for typically $7 to $10. I muttered to one of my friends who is visiting from California, "You can find anything on eBay. I bet I could find mammoth tusks there." And sure enough--it's true! I searched for "mammoth tusk" and there were 71 items returned. Not all of them were mammoth tusk, but most were--including this 65 pound tusk found in Alaska, with a "Buy It Now" price of $6500. Most incongruously, this item: Mammoth Tusk Ivory Star of David Earrings 14KT Earpost Merry Christmas Don't expect much activity today here. We're down at my daughter's place in Boise, having a lovely Christmas. |
