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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 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).
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Saturday, March 17, 2007
Do You Know Who Judi Bari Was? She was an "environmental activist" in the 1980s and 1990s in Northern California--whose career was seriously impaired when a car bomb went off in her car. She, of course, claimed that nefarious government agencies were involved. Police were more inclined to suspect that she and her fellow peace-loving friends suffered a premature detonation. Anyway, there's a new book out about her, Kate Coleman, The Secret Wars of Judi Bari. One of my readers, D.R. Sykes, submits this book review: This is a book that really lives up to its title, "Secret Wars". Journalist Kate Coleman takes her readers inside the little known stuggles by a woman who some recall as an environmental activist, the late Judi Bari. As Coleman makes ever so clear, Bari's main battles were not the well publicized efforts to save or restore the splendid coastal Redwood trees which remain in California's northwest - but instead constituted a wide-ranging campaign of personal aggrandizement on Bari's part. Bari's media seeking tactics were coupled with a more secretive and vastly more successful strategy on the part of Bari and her inner circle to achieve not only fame but vast personal wealth. Coleman shows how Judi Bari ruthlessly used persons around her as props and tools only so long as they did not challenge or criticize her often questionable and unethical tactics. Labels: enviromental lunacy Dirty Laundry This recent news story from the Sydney Morning Herald suggests that Kennedy had ways to solve problems with "bimbo eruptions" a bit more severe than smearing their character: BOBBY KENNEDY'S affair with the screen idol Marilyn Monroe has been documented, but a secret FBI file suggests the late US attorney-general was aware of - and perhaps even a participant in - a plan "to induce" her suicide. BBC Channel 4 Documentary About Global Warming You can see it here. It is called The Great Global Warming Swindle, and interviews a number of scientists (including those on the IPCC) who argue that what is happening is more of a swindle and a religion than science. This is among the finest pieces of documentary film I've seen in a long time. Labels: global warming Focus Is Everything I believe that I have the exposure period figured out for Saturn, and the magnification. I just need to get the focus right. This is cropped, so the image was actually pretty tiny, 1/3 second exposure, ASA 1600:  I think I need to focus on something bright and easy, like the Moon, and then mark that location on the eyepiece tube. Labels: astrophotography It Isn't Officially Spring Yet But I don't care! The sun is out; the sky is blue; I was out doing astrophotography last night, and it wasn't the cold that drove me in, but the need for sleep. No good pictures yet; I still don't quite have the mount perfectly aligned with north yet, and the Saturn pictures, while big enough, weren't adequately focused. I'm going to have to find some way to achieve perfect critical focus. Perilously Close to an Episode of Home Improvement I use a drill press to rough out the interior of the ScopeRoller sleeve assemblies for casters before I use the lathe to get them a little smoother and more precisely sized on the inside. Here you can see some lumps of Delrin that I have marked on the lathe to get the bore holes properly centered.  Click to enlarge Because I use Forstner bits to do the rough boring of the hole, and these do almost all their cutting on the outside of the bit, I have to move up slowly, starting with a relatively small bit, and working my way up. Or so I thought. You see, because I was originally using this drill press to work steel (when not using it to mangle my finger), I had the belts set at a very slow speed. I had some occasion to set it to the higher speed a few days ago, and I was impressed how quickly I was able to cut through some aluminum. So I thought, "let's put it up to the highest speed for boring through this Delrin." And my like Tim Taylor on Home Improvement put a jet turbine on a lawnmower, the results were dramatic (but at least no visit to the Emergency Room was required). The 3/4" Forstner bit went down through 1 1/2" of Delrin in one fluid motion--throwing fragments everywhere. Ditto for the 1 1/2" Forstner bit. Instead of having to wait for the bit to come to a complete stop, and pull the wrapped up Delrin from the bit, letting the tool come up and out of the hole usually spun most of the scrap off the bit--and for quite a distance in all directions!  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge Fortunately, my wife is away this evening, taking care of our sick daughter (who was briefly in the Emergency Room, because she was exhibiting all of the symptoms of appendicitis, and her husband is away at a church men's retreat), so I was able to get the incredible mess cleaned up before she saw it. The quantity of material that wraps itself around the Forstner bit is astonishing--and this 1/30th of second exposure shows it operating as the world's most dangerous fan!  Click to enlarge The last step up--a 2 3/8" Forstner bit--finally gave me reason to adjust the speed downward to 2560 rpm, and I probably should have knocked it down some more, because it was having a little trouble operating at that speed. This experience does incline to me to think that in the future, I might be able to go directly to the 1 1/2" bit or even larger, by just running at a higher speed. Labels: machining Friday, March 16, 2007
Not to Worry! Islamic Terror Suspects Want To Drive Our Kids To School! After the Beslan hostage taking, rape, and murder orgy by al-Qaeda associated terrorists, my only reaction to this news story's reassuring words from the FBI is, "What is the FBI smoking?" WASHINGTON (AP) - Suspected members of extremist groups have signed up as school bus drivers in the United States, counterterror officials said Friday, in a cautionary bulletin to police. An FBI spokesman said, "Parents and children have nothing to fear."I'm sure that's the case. It's not like anyone would drive a school bus filled with children into a mall to maximize deaths or anything. Has the FBI learned nothing from 9/11? Labels: terrorism Nauseating--But Hey, It's All Consenting Adults I mentioned this horrifying story last year, calling it evidence that the Bible Belt had ruptured. The judge has decided that castration is no big deal: WAYNESVILLE — The six men castrated in a sadomasochistic dungeon fashioned from an enclosed carport all told prosecutors they saw no need for criminal charges.I won't quote many other parts of the article--they were just too nauseating. But let's just say that all sorts of "extreme body modification" were being done. As Sciara's brother, clinical psychologist Anthony Sciara explained: Anthony Sciara said he accepted his brother’s gay lifestyle and even encouraged him to move to Western North Carolina with Mendez when he retired from the VA in 1999.Sciara had some limits to what he was prepared to do--the men who wanted their legs amputated above the knee as an expression of their love for each other--well, that was a bit too much. I mean, what consenting adults do in private is none of the government's business, is it? Labels: homosexuality Thursday, March 15, 2007
Astrophotography I am still not quite there, but I'm getting closer. These were prime focus photographs (using the 8" f/7 as the lens, so to speak). As should be obvious from the first photograph, I have not yet mastered getting my mount aimed exactly at true north. I may also have to take these pictures in raw mode so that I can fiddle with the noise settings to get a blacker sky. I've cut down the pictures a bit so that they don't take so long to download--and it is not like they are exactly worth a long download at this point! This is the Orion Nebula (M42), 40 second exposure, ASA 1600:  Click to enlarge This is Saturn, a bit overexposed at 4 seconds, ASA 1600--but the result is that while the planet and rings are lost in the glare, you can see several of Saturn's larger satellites:  Click to enlarge Labels: astrophotography Boring Tools I mentioned recently that I needed a tool that I couldn't find. As is often the case, knowing what it is called is often the first step towards finding it. The tool is called a "back rake boring bar." But in the meantime, I made one that while not beautiful, works--and there is the pride of having made it myself!  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge I started out with a .812" diameter piece of aluminum (the mill and lathe aren't so good for making one out of steel), and turned a 1.25" length down to .375", the diameter of the circle in the lathe's tool holder. Then I turned the rest of it down to .75", mostly to get the finish even and beautiful. The next step was to mill a 1/4" x 1/4" slot in the fat end, using a 0.25" end mill. This creates the slot for the cutting tool to sit in. As is usually the case when trying to hold a round workpiece, the standard mill vise doesn't do the job, because it can't hold a round workpiece tightly, and I don't have a V-block small enough to fit into the mill vise. The solution was to use the lathe's 3-jaw chuck, which has an adapter that lets it slide into the T-slots on the mill table--and then clamp the jaws very tightly! Even then, you have to take very small passes with the vertical mill to avoid turning the workpiece. Then I milled flat spots parallel to the slot so that i could make a reasonably perpendicular set of holes for the set screws that hold the cutting tool in position. Same holding strategy. Now I had a flat spot parallel to the slot, so I drilled two holes, and tapped them 6-32 for the stainless steel set screws. (These were $0.50 for two at Home Depot.) Last step--and perhaps not really necessary--is to mill a flat side on the .375" part. The reason is that the socket head screws of the tool holder will work better if if they have a flat surface to grab. So I put the workpiece in the mill vise, clamped it down as hard as I could, and used the end mill to remove little slices at the side of the shaft. If you put downward force with an end mill, it can (and in my experience, does) dislodge the workpiece from the vise. There's still some vibration when you do the milling on the side of the shaft, but you just do very small slices--a few thousandths of an inch at a time--and the deficiencies of the mill vise on a round object are reduced. This wasn't perfect; a couple of times when I was too aggressive, it pulled the workpiece right out of the vise, and put some nasty marks on it. The final step was putting it back in the lathe, and giving it a good thorough sanding, #80, #180, #400, and then #800. Most of it looks and feels very good, and the parts that don't are hidden by the cutting tool! I may take one more step, and that's to use the small end mill that I have to scribe 0.1" divisions on it relative to the approximate location of the cutting edge of the tool in the end. This isn't a substitute for using the indicators on the lathe, but they can give you a rough feel for where you are. Labels: machining Telephoto Lens I mentioned yesterday that I was planning to get a modern, autofocus telephoto lens for the Pentax K10D. It is beginning to look the Tamron 28-200 zoom will be the way to go. Reviews are quite positive about it, with much of the criticism being softness at the two extremes of the range--and even then, most reviewers suspect that the problem at the long end is because you have to be really steady (tripod mounted) to take a good sharp picture out there. The Tamron 18-200 would be even nicer--but instead of $150 - $200, the 18-200 is more like $350-$400--a lot of money for the ability to take relatively wide angle pictures. I can swap lenses or back up a bit for those few occasions when I need 18-28mm focal length. Similarly, the Tamron 28-300 might be attractive--but $350 and up (and some of the low end prices I suspect are more of the Brooklyn camera crooks I've run into before) is a lot of money for something that is getting into telescope territory. (Remember that because of the CCD size on the Pentax K10D, 300mm is equivalent to 450mm on a 35mm film camera.) The number of times that I will be using that kind of focal length for anything non-astronomical is pretty small. UPDATE: One of my readers has the Tamron 18-200 for the Canon mount, and says it works well, except if there's not much light, it tends to hunt for the focus point, more so than other lens he's used. Labels: photography Wednesday, March 14, 2007
More Fun With Wasps We had two in the master bathroom--so the assumption is that some of them got into the crawlspace above the house, and found an opening into the ductwork. It can't be a large opening, or we would have had more than two. So we set off two bug bombs in the crawlspace. No more in the house--but they are beginning to fly around outside. There's no visible nest--so we decide to seal off a couple of holes at the end of the house where the satellite dish cables enter the house. Yesterday, my wife was out on a bug hunt, spraying them out of the air with an aerosol wasp killer--and she sees a couple of them crawl out of these gaps:  Click to enlarge It turns out that the siding, presumably for appearance reasons, is scalloped at the top--and where it meets the vertical pieces, there is a triangular gap about .8" high, and .25" at the top end of the triangle. We have also noticed a number of other gaps around the house where the builder didn't caulk over some sizable openings. Some of the larger ones we have carefully cut trim pieces to cover, and we have caulked the smaller ones. But these gaps in the siding--there's a lot of them. One possibility is to use 1/4" and 3/16" dowel rods, inserted into the gap, so they aren't visible except by getting parallel to the wall. These will leave so little space that the wasps can't get in or out. I might squirt a small quantity of clear caulk in as well, to make sure that no other bugs can get in or out. Labels: house project Mountain Blue Bird & Why I Need a Better Long Telephoto Lens My wife called me to the window yesterday with great excitement; at first she wondered if she was hallucinating because of how blue the birds were that she saw outside. Remember that being from California, any brightly colored bird is either an escaped pet, or works for Disney. But this bird was intensely blue!  Click to enlarge Now, you are saying, "Why is Clayton's fancy camera taking such a bad picture?" The answer is that I was using an older 85-205mm zoom lens that I had received when I bought my first SLR, a Pentax ME Super, some years ago. It doesn't have autofocus--hence the bird is intensely blue, but not very sharp--and I don't think it is the highest quality glass, because of the chromatic aberration that you can see when you run it up to the highest magnification. I really need to get a good autofocus lens for the Pentax K10D. There are 18-200mm zooms available, and even 18-300mm. The trade-off, as usual, is price and weight. On the other hand, if you have an 18-300mm zoom, you don't need to carry a bunch of other lens with you, and that's worth quite a bit right there. Labels: house project Fun With Machining It turns out that a boring tool for the lathe can make a nice clean 90 degree angle at the far end of the bore--but what if you want to make a little "pocket" part way down the bore? This isn't so easy, because boring tools are designed to bore things out, not make two 90 degree cuts. The near end of the cut slopes. So I am building a tool that plugs into the tool holder, and holds a 1/4" cutting tool at a right angle. This way I can use the boring tool for making most of the pocket, and then use the tool I built to turn what would otherwise be a slope at the top of the pocket into a 90 degree cut. I'm not quite done--I still need a couple of small set screws to hold the cutter into the tool, so I'll pick those up tomorrow at Home Depot. I may or may not post a picture of it. Be glad that the tools we use to make beautiful stuff don't have to be as beautiful as the product. Labels: machining Gun Control Myths Over at Volokh Conspiracy, in the midst of a vigorous discussion of what "arms" are protected by the Second Amendment, there was this classic gun control myth remark: The founding fathers may have wanted to encourage armed riots, but I doubt it, and certainly I don't want it. We have been successful because we have been able to avoid domestic violence, civil war excepted. One need only to look at Iraqi to see the real effect of a fully armed population. They kill a few of our soldiers, but mostly they kill themselves. Our guns kill mostly family members. Frequently by accident and sometimes in anger. You have a greater chance being killed by your wife, than an intruder. Get real and quit living some frontier fantasy.And my response was this: ambrose writes:Our guns kill mostly family members. Frequently by accident and sometimes in anger. Labels: gun rights Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Religious Fanaticism It takes enormous faith to believe something when all the evidence is telling you the opposite: MINNEAPOLIS - A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.How can you tell that this is what you are seeing? I think the frostbite might qualify as a clue to be a bit more skeptical. Labels: global warming Monday, March 12, 2007
How Can You Tell That You Are a Serious Telescope Geek? When you mark on your calendar that the Travel Channel series Made in America has an episode where they visit the Astro-Physics manufacturing plant in Illinois. Labels: telescopes It Is Not Okay to Leave Post-Fetal Tissue on the Streets, I Guess From Oakland, one of those reminders that some people are evidence of evolution--and that some have not evolved far from the lower mammals: (03-09) 22:43 PST OAKLAND -- After giving birth to a premature baby on an East Oakland street, police say the mother ripped the umbilical cord and walked away Friday afternoon, leaving the newborn boy dead or dying in a puddle of blood.It's just post-fetal tissue. What's the big deal? Littering? Labels: decline and fall of Western civilization Gee, I'm So Surprised There's a lawsuit under way against the University of California, alleging that they are discriminating against Christian high schools by refusing to recognize certain courses that they regard as not academically demanding enough, or too narrow: The lawsuit contends the system discriminates against private, Christian schools by rejecting some proposed courses for college-entrance credit because they include or are based upon Christian viewpoints.My wife taught at a Christian school in California and if the biology textbooks that the school had used before she arrived were typical of Christian schools, I might understand a certain skepticism. But I know that this was not typical of Christian schools, and the courses that University of California is accepting do suggest a certain anti-Christian bias in their standards. I understand that some of my wife's students, when they moved up to a public high school, rather astonished the teachers at how well she had prepared them for serious discussions of Shakespeare. UPDATE: A reader notes that C.S. Lewis was included in an American literature class. Yup, that's a pretty serious error. I would hope that whoever teaches the class knows better--or perhaps the reporter scrambled the title of the class. Labels: freedom of religion, political correctness Time To Write Review of My New Book Remember that historians, for the most part, are going to not write reviews of Armed America, in the hopes that it will silently disappear. If you have some experience writing book reviews, now's the time to write them and submit them to your favorite magazine or newspaper--even if it is the Adams County Gazette & Sheep Shearing Quarterly. You can get a pretty good idea of how the academic community is responding to the Parker decision by reading Professor Michael Dorf's criticisms here and the far less thoughtful comments by Professor Robert Spitzer here. I'll be charitable and assume that Spitzer is working off a Brady Campaign summary of the 19th century Supreme Court precedents that he mentions, because if he actually had read them, it would be obvious that he's suffering creeping Bellesilesism. Labels: my books Sunday, March 11, 2007
Brass Compression Rings What, you ask, is a brass compression ring? My first telescope eyepiece focuser was a cheap Edmunds rack-and-pinion unit that was a press fit. To put an eyepiece into the focuser, you pressed it in, and the split in the upper part of the focuser tube spread just enough to hold the eyepiece. This wasn't ideal, because it tended to scratch the eyepiece barrel, and the force required often moved the telescope. My first focuser upgrade was to a University Optics focuser that used a set screw in the side of the focuser tube to hold the eyepiece. Typically these were a 4-40 set screw that grabbed the side of the eyepiece barrel. They were zero effort to insert and remove (once you loosened the screw), but the set screw approach had two annoying side effects: the set screw, being steel, often scratched the finish of the eyepiece barrel; because the friction holding the eyepiece in place is exerted over a very small contact patch, very, very heavy eyepieces, or camera assemblies, might not be held in as tightly as they should. And so, a few years ago, I started to see focusers that offered a "brass compression ring" instead. What was it? I thought that you turned something on the outside of the focuser tube, and it squeezed down against the eyepiece barrel. Nope! Instead, you still have a set screw (or perhaps two of them) on the outside of the focuser tube, but instead of directly squeezing on the eyepiece barrel in just one spot, the set screw (or screws) press down on a piece of brass that sets in a channel inside the focuser tube. The brass started out straight, and was bent to fit into the channel. It is not a complete ring; perhaps it is an 1/8" or 1/4" short of making a complete circle inside the channel. The brass ring's desire to straighten out again prevents it from easily slipping out of the channel. When you put pressure on the brass ring with a set screw, the set screw presses the brass ring against the eyepiece barrel--and because of the confining channel, the ring is pressing against the eyepiece barrel across a big chunk of the circumference of the eyepiece barrel. Because the pressure is spread out across perhaps 1/4" by 2" of area, you don't have a single point that cuts through the chrome surface of the eyepiece barrel. Because the total contact area is substantially larger than a single set screw (even though the pressure per square inch is less), a brass compression ring can exert more force to hold an eyepiece in place than a single 4-40 set screw. Anyway, why am I yammering on about brass compression rings? One of my customers has a very high end Takahashi mount, and he doesn't want the 1/4"-20 bolts that hold the ScopeRoller caster assembly onto the legs to scratch up the surface. My solution? I'm going to bore a channel perhaps 1/8" or 1/4" deep inside of the sleeve that goes over the leg, and put a brass compression ring in that channel. The 1/4"-20 screws will not be directly impinging on the legs. Instead, the brass compression ring (which is softer than steel) will be doing the pressing. Of course, along with ordering some 3" Delrin stock tomorrow (why aren't these ever a size that I already have around?), I have to go brass hunting. Labels: machining, telescopes Those Narrow-Minded People in Rapid City, South Dakota They just don't appreciate true art. Warning: you may find the description a bit disturbing: RAPID CITY --Two French performance artists’ nudity, simulated violence and sex acts, and use of faux-urine and feces, shocked the crowd and even the promoter at Dahl Arts Center on Wednesday.There was a time that instead of having their sound cut off, they would have been arrested or sent to a mental hospital for observation for doing something like this in public. Thanks (I think) to Michelle Malkin for bringing this to my attention. Labels: decline and fall of Western civilization |
