My Courageous Battle, Day 18, Plus: my Prediction Holds Up!

Try not to praise me as I force myself to face the keyboard yet again, in the midst of the pestilence. I know I’m an inspiration, but let’s not glorify me too much.

Yesterday, paper towels disappeared from local stores. As luck would not have it, I was running out. I have one 90% roll in the kitchen and maybe the equivalent of two whole rolls in the shop and upstairs man room. Last night, I decided to find out how bad things were. I went online and checked Amazon and Ebay.

Is it okay for a Christian to say “scum of the earth”? I am not sure, but I will risk it. I am amazed at the sliminess and selfishness of the American people. Hoarding is everywhere, and people are trying to sell paper towels for $15 per roll online. Amazon and Ebay permit it, and that’s even more amazing.

I got sneaky. I checked the Office Depot website. They had a six-roll package at the normal price! I pounced. I ordered ONE package for pickup. I know I should have ordered all they had and then started a business, but I guess I lack the entrepreneurial spirit.

Office Depot texted me and said there was “a problem” with my order. Yeah, either an employee snagged the towels, or the inventory was wrong.

I kept looking, and I saw they had their weird recycled store-brand towels listed as available. I had to order a 15-roll package. Now they say they’re waiting for pickup. Wonder if it will happen. Maybe a dirtbag will come in and offer them more money.

I do not need 15 rolls of paper towels. Looks like I have no choice, however.

I went to the grocery yesterday and saw a fresh new pallet of purified water. I loaded up! To the tune of one case. Come on. They’re not going to turn the water off, especially in a county where many people have wells. There is no point in hoarding water.

I drink purified water because I have had kidney stones. My well’s water is full of calcium. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t want the water.

I told a friend I was going to post a photo of the water on a dating site and try to land a gold digger.

Yesterday, I ordered some .308 ammunition. I already have tons of it, but I needed some match-grade ammo for target shooting. I ordered a measly 200 rounds. Today the store called me and said their policy was to limit purchases. They said I could have 100. I told them to forget it. For target use, 100 rounds won’t get the job done. There is no point in buying fewer than 200, and 200 would not be much.

Panic nuts are loading up on ammo, so the rest of us suffer.

This stuff is going on while I happened to be upgrading my gun collection. Yesterday, I thought about reversing my anti-AR-15 position. I don’t particularly like the AR-15. I was reconsidering. I thought they were accurate, and I like low recoil. I thought it might be good to pick one up.

I found out AR-15’s are not accurate at all. If you get 2 MOA, you’re doing great. Forget that. I don’t understand it, because the AR-15 is based on the AR-10, which is crazy accurate if you buy a reputable brand. My AR-15 idea is now on hold.

While I was thinking about it, I went online, and I saw that people are buying up AR-15’s. What on earth are they thinking? You can’t shoot a disease.

Guess I’ll wait a month before shopping for ammo again. Unless I see a good deal.

Today I got up and checked my epidemic prediction equation. The actual total is considerably higher than my best prediction, although it’s still really tiny compared to a real plague. Not even close to being close.

Now I have to tickle the equation.

Is the equation itself fundamentally wrong? I don’t think it’s that bad. It ought to work fairly well. If it’s within an order of magnitude, it will be a victory, albeit not an impressive one.

It should not work for the very start of an epidemic, the late middle, or the end, but it ought to be pretty good for the early middle. My guess is that my first constant was too low. Will I ever be able to get the right constant? I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to get good data for the number of actual infections.

Another problem is that people who get over the disease eventually stop shedding viruses, so they drop out of the pool of individuals who can transmit the disease.

Whatever.

If you think about it, I’m not really predicting the number of infections. I’m actually predicting the number that will be recorded on the Johns Hopkins site, since that’s where the data comes from. But I consider it good enough for my hand-waving purposes. Lives do not depend on my blog.

Here’s what I have today. My new constant is 0.0643, and the initial value for infections is 90,000, on March 5. You can plug these figures in and play around if you want.

3/19: 214,585
3/20: 228,325
4/4: 579,249

My April 4 figure is up from 494,013.

What did my original equation predict for today? Let’s see. It’s 188,332.

You know what? That’s not bad at all. I’m off by less than 10% of the actual figure. That’s over two weeks, not two days. It’s very good. Dang! I didn’t realize the results were that accurate. I’m a genius! For now. Time to bow and run off the stage.

This is astonishing. I thought I was doing badly, but getting within 10% is better than the professionals. If it holds up, I’m going to look pretty good. I would have been thrilled with 30%.

The thing is, anyone with a math degree could do this. As much as I would like to be feted as a savant, there are probably 500,000 people in the United States who could have done what I’ve done. The C students could do it, no problem. An active math major at a minor university, in the middle of his class, could do a much better job. I hope, because those people end up designing bridges and elevators.

Today I looked at equations professionals use during epidemics, and they are not much different from mine. That was nice to see. They are a little more complicated, because they try to capture entire epidemics, including the inevitable plateaus and declines. I’m not interested in any of that. I just want to know how the disease will act while it’s ramping up.

Sooner or later, the disease will plateau. All of the susceptible people will have been infected, and the bug won’t be able to find new hosts. This is an important thing to think about. If you take my equation, or any equation describing a phenomenon that increases with time, and you don’t include a cap, it will go infinite. Obviously, coronavirus will not infect an infinite number of people. Even if my equation is perfected, it will only work for a few weeks or months.

I redid the math using a new constant: 0.0621. We’ll see how it works. I’ll show you some new predictions.

3/19: 214,585
3/20: 228,325
4/4: 579,249

If it’s way off for the next two days, I’ll have to go back over it.

One obvious problem with changing the constant over time is that if you do it enough, you’re just forcing the math to make you look like you’re right. We have a lot of time, though, so it seems safe to fiddle with it for at least a month.

The thing to keep in mind is that the total number of flu cases every year is on the order of 10 to the 9th power. Coronavirus is currently more like 10 to the 5th power. This is not a minor difference. It’s gigantic. And coronavirus has had ample time to mature into an epidemic. The flu only takes 100 days to peak, plateau, and end.

Of course, the mild nature of coronavirus is also very important.

The low infection total and the mildness of the disease are not going to be comforting to the outliers who get extremely sick or die, but they should be extremely soothing to the rest of us.

I suppose people will get angry with me for being lighthearted about the epidemic, but we joke about much worse things every day. We call cigarettes, which kill millions every year, “coffin nails.” Lighten up, Francis.

I guess I should get to Office Depot before they auction off my paper towels. It will be embarrassing to leave with 15 rolls. Maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll have a smaller package when I get there.

Update on my Amateur Coronavirus Predictions

My second coronavirus death toll prediction model is not doing very well. My total infection prediction model seems to be doing quite well indeed. While it should amaze anyone if either model works, I figured the death model would work better, based on the higher reliability of death numbers, but that hasn’t panned out.

Several days ago, I came up with a differential equation to predict the total number of infections that would occur. It says the total for today (morning, more or less) should be about 178,000. The actual total is 185,000. I call that a home run! Much better than I expected. Of course, the total may diverge wildly from my prediction in the future. It would be remarkable if I even came close.

Later on, I created an equation based on the death numbers, which I thought would be more accurate. The death total for today…well, I don’t know what it was, but it doesn’t matter, because it looks like we will pass the number for March 22 tonight or tomorrow.

So what does this mean?

1. Given my total lack of training in the area of epidemiology, combined with the lack of reliability of the data, maybe there was no way either prediction could work, and the good results we’re seeing from the A equation (total infections) are illusory. Maybe it will turn out to be a bad predictor, just like the D equation (total deaths).

2. Maybe the death figures are actually less reliable for prediction purposes than the total figures, because the death rate varies wildly depending on where the virus is.

These guesses top my list.

I suppose that with a very minor epidemic like this one, where the total numbers are very small (sorry, but it’s true), you end up with a situation in which death rates vary because the tiny infected populations in various countries have characteristics that make them much more or less likely to die.

Example which I just made up: what if the virus hits a big community of retirees in Thailand, and because they’re old, 10% die? In a tiny infection pool of 185,000, that would mess up the death data.

The Italians have a crazy death rate. Maybe they’re not detecting mild cases. That seems to be the only thing that could explain it, since the people in countries around them are doing better.

Scandinavians and Germans have low death rates. Given their rigidity and willingness to follow orders, maybe they’re getting tested more thoroughly.

I wonder if I could go back and apply my model to the flu. I don’t think I could get figures. I would have to apply it early in the season, because it doesn’t take saturation into account.

Do I still think the hysteria is utterly unrealistic? Of course. Don’t forget: we get something like 8 million flu cases per day during a global season, and right now we have 185,000 global cases for coronavirus after several months. There is just no way an honest, rational person can look at those numbers and think COVID-19 is worth the trouble we’re putting ourselves to.

I’m very blessed to live where I do. My poor cousin lives in the Chicago area, where the population density is high and the politicians are corrupt leftist authoritarians. She said the authorities are threatening to tell people they can’t leave their houses except to buy food and so on. Consider this: yesterday, the Chicago Tribune said there were 105 detected cases in Illinois.

I looked at the website for the local paper, and nothing like that is happening here. Events are closing, and schools are shut down, but if they are threatening to imprison people in their houses, the mighty Star-Banner is not saying so online. I would assume the would put that information on their site if it were in the paper.

Unless the people in the press room are just too weak to work their keyboards.

The terrible thing is that we are going to have the economic destruction of a plague, without a plague. Businesses are going to close permanently, all over the place. Stocks are in the toilet. All sorts of jobs will be lost. Jobs are important. Businesses are important. It’s not okay to throw them away over a disease that will probably kill fewer than 20,000 Americans.

We should be focusing on insulating old people and sick people. That’s it. Kids are nearly immune, and the rest of us are very, very unlikely to die even if we get infected. In other words, it’s a lot like the flu, except it affects way fewer people.

If you think 20,000 people is a big hit, you’re bad at math. You don’t understand how many people die here every year. Go look up the number of traffic deaths we suffer in one year. Look at the number of suicides. Look at tobacco deaths. There are over 300,000,000 people here, and you have to take that into account.

Doesn’t every life have infinite value? No. Never did. If a life had infinite value, we wouldn’t build skyscrapers or bridges. Every huge construction project costs lives. We would quarantine people who get colds and norovirus, because these diseases kill a small number of people. We don’t do that. The world has to keep turning. The value of keeping our economic system going, sorry to tell you, is very, very high, and before coronavirus, we accepted the fact that keeping America bustling would cost many thousands of lives every year. We just didn’t talk about it.

If lives had infinite value, we would drive $500,000 cars that provided 100% protection in crashes. We would force kids to be vaccinated. We would ban tobacco and scuba diving. We would build every house from reinforced concrete. We don’t do those things. An acceptable risk of death is something healthy societies accept. The alternative is economic paralysis. And we can’t really control death, anyway.

It’s okay to say money is important. It’s not something to be ashamed of. Money is housing. Money is clothing. Money is medical care for kids with cancer. For the leftists, let me say that money is tarot cards, dope, Molotov cocktail ingredients, and black ski masks. It’s Greenpeace donations.

Guess how many people die in New York City every year. The figure is over 154,000. That’s one city. One year. How many New Yorks can you fit in 7 billion? The global annual death figure is around 60 million, and many, many of those deaths are not from old age.

I just looked up the world’s population. I thought it was 7 billion, but I’m seeing 7.7. Is that really true? Man, there are a lot of us.

We are killing our economy over nothing. When the panic goes away, we will have a real problem: increased poverty.

Here is the total number of cases of coronavirus, expressed as a percentage of the world’s population: 0.0024%. Here is the total number of cases of Spanish flu, expressed as a percentage of the world’s population in 1981: 27%. Here is the number of seasonal flu cases in the US, expressed as a percentage of the nation’s population: 10%.

Sure, the coronavirus total will go up, but if it were going to get anywhere near flu numbers, which don’t upset us, why is it so far behind after several months? The flu gets the job done in 100 days.

There is really no point in my writing these things, except to vent and to commiserate with other people who understand the situation. People are not going to listen to common sense in large numbers. They’re under a mass delusion with a supernatural cause. This is what happens when people don’t get baptized with the Holy Spirit.

I have to go to the grocery store. I can’t believe it. I have to go look for purified water. I’m not buying it because of the virus. I buy it because I’ve had kidney stones. Will I find any water on the shelves? I wonder.

I would like to get sanitizing wipes, because I use them when I go to the dump, and I’m running out. Not sure I’ll be able to buy them.

Last night I wondered if I should buy a sack of rice and some dried beans. Then I snapped out of it. Food isn’t going away. Farmers aren’t going to let their crops rot. People are filling their houses with Pop-Tarts, potato chips, and other boxed food, and when the panic tapers off, they’ll be stuck at home, eating junk. Maybe I’ll have the store to myself for a while.

Time to leave the house. I plan to cover the entire car with toilet paper rolls, with a tiny hole I can look through to drive. This should give me protection from the juju.

God help people who live in cities. I am praying he will wake them up and help them move.

Addendum: in case anyone cares, Tom Hanks and his wife are out of quarantine after a lengthy one-week illness. Here’s the list of terrible symptoms they had: mild fever, chills, and some aches. I have to confess; when I was a kid, I would have chosen that over going to school. Hanks is over 60, and so is his wife. Was he lucky? Did Australian medicine, which was developed mostly on sheep, work a miracle? NO. Their cases are typical, even for old people.

I’m off to brave the panic. If I don’t make it back, my toilet paper stash is up for grabs.

You Know What Mark Twain Said About Statistics

I’ve been using calculus to try and guess how the coronavirus epidemic is going to go. I started out with figures for the total number of cases, taken from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus/Missile Command simulation site.

You’ll see why I call it that when I show you a screen shot. Does anyone remember Atari? Someone at Johns Hopkins does.

I guess some people will say I’m cold for making jokes during an epidemic, but we joke about the flu all the time, don’t we? Hmm.

While I was working on the math, I expressed disappointment because while I had taken note of infection totals in the past, I had not written down death totals. Death totals should be much more reliable, because a dead person will not be able to stay home and avoid being counted. If you die from coronavirus, someone is going to put your name in a database. Live people are different. They can stay home and avoid being counted, as I would.

Yesterday I found an old death toll figure, so I used it to come up with a new differential equation. It gave me new estimates for the future. Here they are.

March 22: 7,809
March 29: 10,456
April 4: 13,999
March 14 + 30 days: 18,743
March 14 + 60 days: 71,155
March 14 + 90 days: 248,521

My earlier estimate for the last date (mid-June) was about 150,000, so the toll now looks worse.

I will repeat the question I ask over and over. Does this mean I was wrong to say coronavirus wasn’t a big deal? NO. At least not yet.

This epidemic is not going to run all year, unless it’s very different from the other SARS we already know about. It’s going to peak and fall off. My equation doesn’t take that into consideration. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a death toll of 250,000 by June 15, but I don’t think we’re going to see a million later in the year. Look what happened in China. They had a whole bunch of cases, and then the rate of new infections dropped to the point where in intelligent person would say the Chinese epidemic is just about over. If this happened in China, where people have really dirty habits, I assume it will happen in other places.

In any case, 250,000 global deaths over 7 months do not constitute a plague. It’s bad, but it’s not THAT bad. Don’t forget: the common cold kills 5,000 people every year in the US, and we’re looking at a figure that might be twice that high. It’s very sad that these people die, but we don’t put on rubber suits because of it.

It would be nice to have better figures. The Chinese threw everything off. I’m thinking I’ll start over in a week, on the assumption that the available data will be better.

Here I am, talking like my uninformed amateur equation is reliable. I don’t know if it is or not. I am a layman. But I do know that a person who knows very little about math can look at the totals and tell this doesn’t look like the Spanish flu. That’s what I really rely on. The equation is just an interesting exercise.

The variation in death rates is very confusing. The Italians got hit hard, but the French are doing much better. Why? Are the statistics messed up because of bad testing regimes, or are Italians simply weaker?

In the US, the death rate based on the available facts is 2%, but at the same time, we know we’re not testing many people. The death rate is a quotient. The numerator is the number of people who have died, and the denominator is the number of people who have been infected. The denominator is probably a lot bigger than we realize. As testing becomes more widespread, the death rate should drop a lot, even though the death toll will not.

Maybe the Italians aren’t doing well at testing. That seems to be the only reasonable explanation for their death rate.

It just occurred to me that people will probably flip out even more when testing really gets going. They’ll find out the infection rate is higher than they thought, and they won’t consider the fact that the death rate hasn’t changed. People who think buying toilet paper will protect them are not going to get drawn into mathematical subtleties.

The death rate and toll are all that matters. No one cares about a cough and a mild fever. Obsessing on the number of infections is pointless. As long as the death toll stays low, it won’t matter if half of the world gets infected.

Look at it this way. Gonorrhea is a pandemic, right now. So is HPV, the genital wart disease, which supposedly infects something like 20% of Americans. The common cold is always a pandemic. No one cares. Until people start dying in very large numbers (percentage, not just absolute), a pandemic is not a plague. A high death toll is an essential requirement for a plague.

I’ve been assuming the coronavirus test has a low false-positive rate. I wonder if that’s true. If not, we may be piling flu casualties in the coronavirus bin.

Oh, man. I decided to check. This is unbelievable. According to the Chinese, over HALF of asymptomatic people who test positive may not have COVID-19. And they’ve been testing during flu season! That means they have tons of potential false-positives coming at them!

Now I don’t know what to think. If doctors all over the world are telling enough cold and flu patients they have coronavirus, the pandemic may turn out to be a joke.

At times like these, I’m really glad I rubbed my entire 700-pound stash of toilet paper with a lucky rabbit’s foot.

If there are a lot of false positives for living people, what about the dead? Maybe those figures are also inflated.

From the spiritual standpoint, I see some things about coronavirus that truly are scary.

People think the Beast is just one person, but that isn’t true. There will be a figurehead, but the body of the Beast will be billions of unsaved people, acting in concert, guided by demons and fallen angels. As I have often said, everyone is spirit-led; it’s not just Christians who have been baptized properly with the Holy Spirit. If you’re not led by the Holy Spirit, you’re led by spirits that work for Satan. You may not be completely controlled by them, but they have a big influence on you.

Before the Antichrist can do his thing, he will have to have a body prepared. I think that’s what’s happening now. Satan is using training exercises to get people used to obeying him. He’s getting them used to believing crazy things and behaving irrationally.

Look at the toilet paper shortage, which is absolutely real. No one with a grain of common sense would ordinarily hoard toilet paper, yet millions upon millions of people are doing it. Satan is conditioning them to obey him as a unit.

He’s also conditioning them to give control to the state. Satan is a statist. He loves government, because he is weak and can’t be everywhere at once. God can lead an infinite number of people with no earthly infrastructure, but Satan needs our help. He needs telephones, televisions, and the Internet. He needs the government.

People are now much more open to government power grabs. Coronavirus did that.

There is a wacky mayor in Illinois who just gave herself the power to stop the sale of guns, ammunition, and alcohol. She also gave herself the power to confiscate and use private property as she sees fit. And no one has stopped her! I’m sure what she’s doing is unconstitutional. Why aren’t people up in arms? We’re supposed to be connected with God, and we’re supposed to have his protection, but we’re not, so we run into the arms of Karl Marx and his father, Satan.

When I voted in mayoral elections in the Miami area, I didn’t think much about what the mayors could do to me. I just tried to pick the least-obviously-corrupt Cuban and left it at that. It never occurred to me that one of them might go nuts and try to break down my door and take my guns. Now I see that such things can happen in America, because of a manufactured panic. If you live in a place like Chicago or St. Louis, how do you know the Gestapo won’t barge into your house, just like they did in Germany and Austria? It used to seem impossible. Is it?

I’m not going to get coronavirus, but oppression is a certainty. It will take longer to get to some areas, but it will come. The only question is whether God will move me to a place where freedom will last as long as possible.

I can see why I keep feeling he wants me to move to Tennessee.

Here is how the world works: it’s like The Matrix. Remember how that worked? The rebels who went into the matrix were surrounded by ordinary people who didn’t know what was going on. They were generally harmless, but at a moment’s notice, agents could enter them and transform them into vicious enemies. That’s how the Beast will function. People around you will be transformed by demons, and they will do terrible things to you, claiming it’s their civic duty. This is what happened in Germany, Austria, Cambodia, Cuba, and so on. It can happen here, too.

Ordinary people who are generally nice can do astounding things. It has happened throughout history. Chinese crowds were known for cutting large pieces out of people, keeping them alive as long as possible. A crowd of religious Jews ridiculed Jesus while he was hanging from nails. Nice Germans bought the property of Jews at absurdly low prices and kept it. Consider lynchings. They weren’t performed by escaped convicts. They were performed by people who attended church and made their kids say their prayers before going to bed.

Christians won’t just be abused by people who are obviously evil. It will be ordinary individuals, just like the nice Dutch citizens who sold Jews to the Nazis during the occupation. It will be teachers, Walmart greeters, doctors, preachers, and so on. And many of them will do it in the name of Jesus.

The country looks better and better. I’m already in the country, but apparently not deep enough.

I plan to keep updating my equation, but I’m not buying a rubber suit. This thing will blow over.

Math v. Hysteria

In case anyone is interested, I constructed a differential equation to see if I could predict the spread of coronavirus over the next couple of months.

Is the equation right? Search me. If testing keeps improving, we will pick up a lot more cases mild and asymptomatic cases, and that will throw everything off. Also, I may not know what I’m doing.

I’m using a differential equation that predicts two things: the growth of bacteria in a culture, and the half-life of a radioactive substance. I’m assuming the human race will work like bacteria, and the world will be our Petri dish. I can’t even guess what kind of sophisticated equations epidemiologists use, and I’m not going to look it up. This is mostly for entertainment, although the message that the epidemic is overhyped is correct.

I hope I did this right. I’ve forgotten a huge percentage of what I used to know.

Anyway, here are some figures for the global totals. Two are rounded off. Sorry I can’t make it display as a nice table.

March 5: 90,000
March 14: 150,000
March 17: 177,845
March 21: 223,173
March 28: 332,040
30 days from 3/5: 494,013
60 days from 3/5: 2,711,653
90 days from 3/5: 14,884,355

I may be wrong about April 4. I didn’t do the math for the date. It’s whatever day is 3 weeks after March 14.

They’re talking about a possible death rate of 1% now, so 90 days out, I predict 148,884 or fewer deaths. Call it 150,000.

As detection gets better, the death rate (ratio) should plummet, as should the severity of the symptoms of average infections. It won’t mean fewer people will be dying. It will just mean they’re more exceptional than we thought.

The 90,000 and 150,000 figures from this month are known, and they are approximate.

I would expect this amateur equation to work reasonably well while the disease is still spreading rapidly. During that time, the transmission function should be pretty uniform. As we approach saturation, the curve will start to drop, and it will eventually go to zero. Far as I know, the only thing that can really throw the projection off is bad initial data.

I don’t know how long it will take for infection rates to drop. Maybe there is a big population of low-hanging fruit out there, and they will pump up the numbers very badly at first. Maybe dirty people will get hit very fast, and the rest of us will frustrate the disease by not living like monkeys. If this is how it works, maybe the transmission rate will drop off in a month or two. It seems to work that way with the flu. The infection rate shoots up fast, and then it drops fast.

If I had death figures from a couple of weeks ago, I could do much better, because death figures are reliable. We know when people die. It’s usually obvious without a test. A death equation would be more useful, because death is what worries people. We’re not that concerned about getting the sniffles.

In any case, I would expect to see about 600,000,000 global flu cases by the end of this season, and given a 0.01% death rate, that means 600,000 deaths.

I am too lazy to check the actual number of global flu deaths per year, but it should be somewhere close to 600,000, so probably somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000. In any case, a lot, compared to coronavirus.

Guess what? I decided to check after all. The correct figure is 650,000, so maybe I’m not so stupid.

Tobacco kills 8,000,000 people per year, according to WHO.

No one should be happy about 150,000 coronavirus deaths, but it’s important to know the difference between an epidemic and a plague. We don’t have a plague. It’s also important to realize that the death rate for healthy young people is miniscule. Kids are nearly immune.

Africa is a problem for anyone trying to predict what will happen. Health care there is abominable, as is hygiene, so maybe coronavirus will go nuts there and blow up the curve, just as AIDS did.

I can’t tell you my prediction is right, but I can tell you that coronavirus won’t even begin to rival the flu in number of infections, and it is extremely unlikely to kill as many people.

I wonder if anti-vaxxers are flipping out. That would be hypocritical, wouldn’t it? If you willingly expose your family to a known deadly disease every year, you shouldn’t be too concerned about a rarer and much less deadly disease.

What’s going to happen to the companies that make toilet paper when this is over? No one except me will buy it for at least a year. I guess I’ll get some bargains. I wish someone would tell me why people are buying toilet paper. I don’t get it at all. What is the connection between a respiratory infection and using 20 times as much toilet paper as usual?

It will be interesting to see how close my predictions are to the truth. They may be wrong by a wide margin, but the flu, which is something we can count on, will still beat coronavirus. That, you can bank on.

Before I quit, a question: why isn’t anyone talking about the flat transmission rate in China? Coronavirus is now at a near-standstill there, so why shouldn’t the same thing happen everywhere else?

Still no Plague

I feel obligated to post an update on COVID-19 and my continued opinion that it won’t amount to much.

The current number of known cases is still under 130,000, worldwide. No one with any degree of honesty could look at this figure and claim COVID-19 is in any way comparable to a real plague. It’s just not spreading fast enough to compare to things like smallpox, typhus, and the black death. The flu infects over 10% of Americans in a typical season, and COVID-19 will need a miracle to get anywhere close to that number. In addition to spreading very slowly, COVID-19 has a low death rate compared to real plagues.

I was under the impression that the death rate for those infected was going to be considerably lower than 3%, based on what I had read. Perhaps under 1%. Now they’re telling us 1% is the expected figure. Higher figures are coming in from some places, but it seems likely that these are skewed by terrible health care (China, Iran) and/or differing levels of disease detection. The 1% figure comes from the CDC, so evidently, they have seen through raw numbers such as the 7% we see in Italy. Apparently, Italians are failing to detect a high percentage of typical cases, which are mild, so the 7% that died are 7% of a group of atypical patients.

A 1% fatality rate is bad, but the overall infection rate is extremely low compared to the flu, and almost all of the dead will be older people who are already unhealthy, so it’s not like your neighborhood will be emptied of vigorous 40-year-olds and kids.

I’ll bet the rate drops below 1% as the disease spreads. We will get better at responding, and I’ve read that viruses usually become less lethal as epidemics progresses, so my money is on a lower rate.

Here’s what will happen. If you’re in America, you’re not going to get the disease unless you’re very unlucky. If you do get it, it will probably be so mild you won’t need a doctor. Unless you’re old and sick already, and then it could be bad, but in your case, a cold could easily be fatal. Not to rattle you. You’re probably more likely to die from a cold in 2020. And you’re not going to wear a mask to prevent that.

The youngest Italian who died was 60. That’s out of over 800 people. If you’re significantly younger than that, you should feel confident. If you’re 60, you should still feel pretty good. If you have kids, you should feel great, because this disease is barely touching them.

I still don’t get the panic. When my dad was alive, I knew he could die if he got the flu, and I knew flu shots weren’t 100% effective. I got him a shot every year, and we didn’t worry. We didn’t put on masks or hide in a plastic room. We didn’t buy a year’s worth of survival crackers and distilled water.

WHO is calling COVID-19 a pandemic. Does that mean I’m wrong? No, because a pandemic isn’t necessarily a plague, in the true sense of the word. Plagues cause a huge percentage of people to become infected, and a big percentage of those infected die. A pandemic is just a disease that spreads globally. It may or may not infect a high percentage of people, and it may not kill many.

I expect the panic to get worse, and I have a good reason: Trump is trying to calm people down. He’s downplaying the danger. If Trump says “black,” the press says “white,” so by trying to reassure us, Trump has spurred the press to fan the flames of cowardice. The best thing Trump could do to help us relax would be to have a screaming fit and run around the White House lawn in a surgical mask and a rubber suit. If Trump said COVID-19 was a deadly plague, the press would immediately start telling us he was hysterical over nothing, that it proved he was mentally unfit to serve, and that Nancy Pelosi should step in and take over. Rachel Maddow would run segments questioning the existence of COVID-19.

Look, look, look. If this was a plague, we would already know it. We can’t reserve judgment forever. The disease has had more than ample time to show us what it can do. It hasn’t lived up to the hype, and if it hasn’t happened by now, it never will.

Someone tried to scare me by saying crematoriums in Wuhan, China, were running around the clock. Okay, here is where being mathematically inclined and resistant to gossip comes in.

The Wuhan crematorium story emerged at a time when the China death toll stood at 490. You can talk about crematorium shifts all you want, but the number was 490, and the population is 11 million. Even if the story is true, which is extremely doubtful, it’s not like there are trains and trucks dumping bodies in the streets in front of crematoriums.

The death rate in New York City, which has around 8 million people, is about 420 per day. This is a statistic. It is a fact. It’s not a dodgy rumor I saw somewhere on the Internet. It’s the kind of thing you try to dig up when you hear a crazy story, instead of swallowing it headfirst.

Would it really be a problem if the rate went up to, say, 475 for a couple of months? No. It wouldn’t be a problem in China, either. The Wuhan story sounds pretty fishy.

It’s impossible to believe an area containing 11 million people can’t absorb 490 cremations over the course of several months. Did anyone ask how long the 24-hour burning lasted? Let’s pretend it actually happened and then look for an explanation. What if hospitals were holding bodies that died over several weeks, and the crematoriums were only overwhelmed briefly when the rule was made? Maybe hospitals dumped a large number of bodies over a couple of days, and then the stream leveled off. I would guess that any large city would be hard-pressed to deal with 490 bodies that arrived over a weekend. Even then, though, people wouldn’t have to work around the clock. Did they work around the clock for days after the mass shooting in Las Vegas?

The best reason for skepticism: the story came from The Epoch Times, which is a fringe-nut site known for conspiracy theories and propaganda. See if you can find a real news organization making the same claims. I think the story was a fable made up by a bored reporter. It makes no sense mathematically, it came from a source with no credibility, and it has not been corroborated by major news organizations.

I’m getting more confident by the hour. The facts keep rolling in to back me up.

Anyone who feels like giving me a condescending lecture should remember that a couple of months from now, the disease will have run its course. All the facts will be in, and you’ll have to own everything you said.

I may be wrong, but the chances of my being proven wrong, as Buck Turgidson would put it, are quickly being reduced to a very low order of probability.

If the plague does pan out, I sure hope we don’t have a mineshaft gap.

Coronavirus Pandemic Fizzling Nicely

Time for more annoying optimism RE the coronavirus outbreak.

Things continue to look bad for the nervous Nellies and tribulation fans. Right now, the number of detected cases, worldwide, is 111,362. This means we are detecting somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 cases per day, which appears to be a big drop from last week.

This is not how real plagues work. A real plague’s case total goes up exponentially until saturation is reached. UP. Not sort of sideways.

Will the picture change? What if a whole bunch of people have been exposed, and they’re going to develop symptoms and be reported in a nearly simultaneous statistical glob?

Doubtful. The average incubation period lasts 5 days. Assuming a reasonable distribution, that means around half of the cases pop up in 5 days or less. The virus has been in the US for a while now. We should have seen something by now. The US total is 565, which is probably lower than the number of Americans who found out they had tuberculosis last month.

Besides, how would a bunch of people get exposed all at once?

Maybe a bunch of Harbor Freight employees could cooperate to open a particularly nasty freight container.

I’m sticking to my prediction. The plague never happened, and it will not happen, barring a terrible mutation. Just guessing, but I’ve been right so far.

Does this mean COVID-19 won’t kill a bunch of people? No. Every year, trampolines kill a certain number of people. So do roller skates. So do coconuts, staplers, vacuum cleaners, and Beanie Babies. The world is a big place, and a lot of nutty things happen here, because that’s how probability works. Even a fairly tame epidemic like this one will take a toll when it has 7 billion people to work with. COVID-19 doesn’t have to be a plague to kill a few thousand elderly people. A real plague would infect millions or healthy people and kill a significant fraction of them.

I just read that the common cold kills 4500 people in the US every year. I’ll bet it’s true.

Now that I’m confident there will be no plague, I’m still annoyed, because there is no guarantee I won’t get sick. There are several cases in Florida, and I do not want to join them. I already had pink eye this year. That will suffice.

I don’t want to go on the cart. I feel happy.

Given the choice between the flu and COVID-19, I’d say COVID-19, all the way. The symptoms are typically much less unpleasant.

I read something interesting the other day, and it must be true, because it was on the Internet. I read that viruses tend to become less severe as they spread. I wonder if that explains what happened in Wuhan province, where COVID-19 was much worse than it is everywhere else. Maybe the disease changed, or maybe the dirty habits and poor response of the Chinese explain everything.

It’s not fashionable to say people in this country or that one are dirty, but–you know this–it’s frequently true. People in Arab countries are really dirty. The Germans are cleaner than the French. Hispanics tend to be less clean than other Americans. Black people seem to be cleaner than other Americans, as do Southerners. New Yorkers are really gross. A New Yorker will drop an ice cream cone on the sidewalk, pick it up, and eat it.

The Chinese are dirty. No two ways about it.

A friend of mine crossed China in 1983. He told of a horrifying experience there. He was on a riverboat, and meals were included with his ticket. He said there was a table, and at mealtimes, a big bowl would be placed on it. The passengers would then start grabbing food from the bowl, using chopsticks. One bowl. He said the toilet in his car on the Trans-Siberian railroad was a small hole in the floor of the restroom, and it was surrounded by rounds that had missed the target. Poo flyers. He also related a terrifying tale of a man who was employed by the state to clean people’s rear ends, with a giant swab, at a public toilet.

I hope things have improved, but current hygiene standards in China are still highly disturbing.

When I think about travel, I don’t worry about things like terrorism. I worry about encountering fecal material in every item of food and drink, and on every surface, I deal with. On the other hand, this is what happens whenever I visit someone who owns a cat.

I lived in Israel for 4 months, I visited Jerusalem maybe 3 times, and I got dysentery from Arab food twice. The Jewish food was awful; like prison food. But it was clean.

Jews can only make two things well: desserts and sandwiches. Steer clear of the other stuff. Even if it means dysentery.

I haven’t had a Nova bagel in ages. Man.

I wonder what will happen with COVID-19 in Thailand, where nose-picking in public is acceptable. They need to cut that out.

If my sunny coronavirus predictions are giving you heartburn, you should probably go away until the hubbub is over, because I don’t see myself not writing about it while the story is still in the news.

Don’t despair if you spent a lot of money on useless surgical masks. They should work pretty well for protecting you from dust in your workshop. Also, Purell is flammable, so if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to use napalm, now you may get your chance.

As for me, I am not yet ready to go about in public in a face-burqa.

I Feel so Competent

Today is a day of triumph. I completed a mobile base for my cutter grinder, and I mounted the grinder on it without killing myself. Although I came close.

My grinder is a Gorton 375-4. Wild guess based on what I’ve read: it’s about 50 years old. They say you can do just about anything with it, including making a fluted drill bit or end mill from scratch. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s supposed to be capable of many things, including sharpening the ends and sides of end mills.

When I started learning about these machines, I read various figures for their weight. Some people said they weighed 550 pounds. A guy on a forum claimed the real figure was below 300. He said he unloaded one from his vehicle by himself. The freight bill for my grinder listed a weight of 490, including a very heavy pallet.

When I began thinking about a mobile base, I thought, “One guy lifted a machine like this out of his truck and onto the ground. He has to be right about the weight.” Based on that misconception, I designed a very simple X-shaped base with casters. The base adds something like 5 inches to the height of the grinder.

The X design is extremely appealing for a number of reasons. First, it’s the cheapest, simplest, lightest way to create a base which is wider than a machine and can be installed using bolt holes at the machine’s corners. Second, it only requires 8 tubing welds, 4 of them short. Third, because of the small number of welds, it won’t have a lot of warpage issues to fix.

Tubing is smart because, unlike ever-popular angle iron, it’s extremely rigid. I made a base from heavy angle iron once, and it jiggled like Jell-O.

I decided to put 4 holes in the base for bolts. These would go through existing holes in the grinder’s stand. I chose to weld nuts to the underside of the base to receive the bolts. This made it unnecessary to struggle with loose bolts while trying to attach a dangling grinder to the base. It lowers the risk of death by crushing somewhat.

I chose to weld the casters to the tubing instead of bolting them in place. Welding is fast. Locating and drilling holes is very, very slow. Bolts also have heads which stick up in the way. I got the welding idea from Jimmy Diresta, a Youtube whiz. Sure, I marred up my new casters. So what? They cost something like $22 for a set, and anyway, no one will see the welds under the base.

It took me about 10 minutes to install the casters. It was wonderful. Bolts would have taken maybe 90 minutes.

Building an X-shaped rectangular base is much, much harder than building a square one. When I started out, I thought the grinder’s stand was square. When I measured it, I found that the bolt holes were on 20.5″ by 13″ centers. This drove me into the realm of trigonometry. For a former physicist, the math was simple, but doing the measurements was not. I had to make an angle jig on the band saw. I could not cut straight across the tubes to make recesses so they would fit together, so this limited my use of the milling machine and band saw. I had to use an angle grinder. Locating the holes was impossible using measuring tools. I had to lower the grinder onto the base, mark the base with a Sharpie, lift the machine off, and cut the holes.

Lifting the grinder was interesting. First of all, it does not weigh 250 pounds. The guy who believed that must have been posting from a mental hospital. I lifted it with my tractor, using a strap, and I can tell you it weighs a lot. I think the shipper’s number is correct. I think he actually weighed it. Subtracting about a hundred pounds for the packing and pallet, the grinder probably comes in at a little under 400 pounds.

The weight is concentrated on the right side, toward the front. This is bad, because it makes the grinder easy to pull over…on the operator. It also means that when you lift the grinder, it tilts sideways. When you put it down, it tries to lie on its face. You have to put one corner down and then swing the tractor to rock the grinder back on its feet.

I did not enjoy working on the grinder while it was in the air. My strap will hold 1200 pounds (working weight), but I don’t care. I was nervous with all that weight swinging around. Working around a lifted unsupported load is a good substitute for stool softener. It’s nerve-wracking. Besides, even if the strap holds, the tractor can always blow a hydraulic line, dropping the grinder in a hurry.

When I got the grinder onto the base, I found that my bolts weren’t long enough. I only had two bolts in the shop that were the correct length, so I put them in diagonal corners. When I lowered the grinder, it rolled around very well. The base is extremely strong, too. It doesn’t sway one bit. As for safety…I am not satisfied. You could not push this grinder over from a standing start, but a determined idiot could get it rolling, hit an obstruction at speed, and put it on the floor.

If the grinder weighed 250 pounds, I would not be concerned. It would be less top-heavy and easier to control. At 400 pounds, it’s harder to deal with.

I’m thinking I may redo the base. When I first started considering this, I thought I would have to start from scratch. Then an idea came to me. I can get two long pieces of tubing and run them across the short ends of the base, on top of the existing tubing. The long pieces can extend past the existing tubing. I can remove the casters from the old tubes and put them on the new ones. This will give me a much wider base, and it will also lower the grinder by an inch. If I want to, I can put tubing spacers between the old tubes and new tubes, lowering the grinder even more.

This mod would be very simple. I could do it in one day. I may go for it. The alternative is to make a really big rectangular base with room for a toolbox beside the grinder. Rectangles are less elegant and more work, though.

The base isn’t painted. It is impossible for one person to install it without destroying paint. Maybe truck bed coating will work. Also, I don’t want to paint it until I’m satisfied with it.

Even though I may make changes, I’m very happy with this project. It’s very good, and it only took three days. I’m getting much better at making things. In the past, I used to hear about people making things like welding carts, and I thought it wasn’t worth it to try, because I would do such a bad job. This week, I was thinking about buying a second Vulcan cart from Harbor Freight, and without thinking about the difficulty, I thought, “Why should I do that when I can make a better one in a couple of days?”

That’s nice.

Now that the grinder is mobile and therefore out of the way, I can move on to my next mobilization project: the dry saw. I’m always leaving it on my lift cart. That’s no good. It has to have its own cart. I already have the casters.

I have no idea how to run the grinder. I fixed the bearings, so I guess it’s time to start learning to grind things.

It Makes Perfect Sense

When I set up my majestic Harbor Freight miniature wood lathe, I needed some wood to test it. I used a mop handle from Home Depot. Past experience had taught me that these handles turned well, and they’re very cheap.

When I cut into the handle, I got a surprise. It was made from multiple pieces of wood glued together. There was an inner piece that was red in color, and it was rectangular in cross section.

Why would the mop handle maker in China work so hard to put a mop handle together?

Somebody had to plane and joint several pieces of wood, glue them together precisely, wait for the glue to set, and then turn the result on a lathe. How can that make good economic sense?

I can’t figure out how they did it, unless they made a big rectangular blank to start. That would waste a lot of wood, though.

I just finished making a file handle from this stuff. Here it is. It looks fantastic, considering what it is and how much I paid for the wood.

I bought the brass ferrule online. I got two bags of them. File handles are not as cheap as they should be, and they’re not that good. Making your own produces better results for less money.

Youtube woodturners are gung ho about making handles, but they don’t seem to discuss the big problem with it: you can’t mount a finished handle in a wood lathe in order to drill a straight hole for the file or chisel or whatever. Wood chucks aren’t made for holding long objects, and even if they were, chucking a finished piece would mar it. Unless you have a different tool or some kind of jig, you have to drill the holes by hand and hope for the best.

Today I tried to put my handle in the metal lathe. I wrapped thin aluminum around it to keep the chuck jaws from scratching it. I couldn’t get it to run true, so I quit and winged it on the drill press. I think it would work if I had a sheet of rubber to wrap around things.

I don’t know why I’m using the wood lathe. I made a banjo for the metal lathe so I can use it to turn wood. With 7.5 horsepower, I would not have to worry about bogging the motor down, which is a big concern with the Harbor Freight lathe. I still need to make a good arbor to make the wood chuck fit in the metal chuck, but I can turn things now if I don’t mind holding them in the metal chuck.

The Harbor Freight lathe is a totally legitimate tool of good quality. Things like that do happen. It belongs to a class of weak tools, however, so even though it’s a good machine for what it is, what it is is a tool without a lot of power. You have to be careful about applying too much pressure to the wood, because the spindle will stop turning and the belt will slip.

I don’t know what would happen if I applied too much pressure while using 7.5 horsepower. I’m afraid to find out. I guess the wood would fly out of the lathe.

That reminds me; I forgot to use a face shield today.

My shop finally has air. I was relying on a 4-CFM compressor until yesterday. Now I’m up to 17.3, which, while somewhat less than I would like, is much better. Most people get by with small compressors from Home Depot and Lowe’s, so I should not complain.

I opted for a Maxline system from Rapidair. This is a prefab system that comes with tubing made from polyethylene, which is the plastic used in 5-gallon pails. The plastic has a layer of aluminum in it, and I suppose this is why it stands up to high pressure.

When you watch big-time Youtubers who get free tools install this stuff, it seems about as hard as decorating a cake. In reality, the job was very unpleasant. I had to install the lines 12 feet up, so I had to move a ladder all over the shop. The tubing comes in a 100-foot roll (which isn’t enough), and it’s very stiff. Straightening it is not easy for one person. Finding ways to get long segments of tubing up over my trusses was not fun, either. I had to use the ladder to climb on top of my giant storage shelf unit. The kit comes with plastic clamps to hold it on the wall, and the clamps are pretty bad, so I had to buy 1″ conduit straps and use them instead. I had to buy a number of additional fittings because Rapidair doesn’t give you enough, and I also had to buy 50 additional feet of hose.

I had long periods when I couldn’t work on the system because I was waiting on additional parts to arrive. If you install a Maxline system, and your shop isn’t tiny, budget one month to get the job done. You will run into delays, believe me. I hoped to get things working in a couple of days, but I was dreaming.

If you’re a free tool guy, the system will install itself while you drink beer and watch TV.

It’s amazing how great tools are when they’re free. The guys who get free tools never seem to have problems. Everything they receive is wonderful. A cynical person might say they’re gushing over the free stuff because they want more of it, but I would never say such a thing. That’s just not me.

Now that the system is installed, it works beautifully. I have an air dryer, three drops, and two hose reels. Compressed air is all around me. I think the Maxline kit is very good, even if installation is harder than you may expect at first.

I’ve learned a few things about air systems. My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Rapidair and copper are the best choices. Many people have systems made from iron pipe, but I have read that iron pipe (now Chinese) is not what it used to be. The quality gets a lot of criticism. Copper doesn’t seem all that much more expensive than Rapidair tubing, but it comes in straight 10-foot lengths, so you have to deal with that instead of bending flexible tubes with your bare hands. You have to be willing to solder the fittings, and these days, solder is leftist garbage made without lead, so you may be in for some frustration. I assume you can get solder with lead if you look around. I have not checked. The lead-free stuff is a pain to use. Maybe it’s great after you’ve done a hundred practice joints. I don’t want to go through the learning experience on a ladder.

I would guess I have $350 in the Rapidair tubing and fittings. That is acceptable. I am guessing because I didn’t add everything up. I had to buy it, so why add it up? It would just make me feel bad about something I was going to buy no matter what.

Now that I have air, I am tempted to muffle my compressor. I’ve learned a few things about that. Compressor noise comes from air intakes. If you can muffle the intakes or relocate them, you can cut your noise way down. You can put hoses on your intakes and run them outside your shop. This is kind of mean to your neighbors, but it works. You can also run hoses to a simple container with baffles or even a car muffler. Factory-made compressor mufflers are ridiculously expensive, but you can make one yourself for a few dollars, so I can’t really see myself buying one.

Thing is, the compressor isn’t that loud. I put it in a corner of the shop, and it’s almost never closer than 12 feet from me. I have to decide if killing what little noise there is is worth it.

I hate noise.

What air tools should I get, now that I have air again? I’ve asked myself this. I have a pencil grinder, a stapler, two needle scalers, an air hammer, a planishing hammer, an air gun, an inflator, an impact wrench, and one or two other things. People have suggested a sheet metal nibbler, but I bought a cheap swiveling electric shear from Harbor Freight, and it’s great. I’ve considered getting a die grinder, but electric ones are really good now, and they don’t require the hassle of using a compressor and hose. A blast cabinet would be good, although most of the time, blasting is the bubba way of cleaning things. Generally, it’s not the best approach. It damages things.

I like the little narrow belt sanders they sell. That could be useful. An air ratchet might be good, but I have a Ridgid Jobmax ratchet. It’s not great, but it would do 95% of the work of an air ratchet, and it can be used with batteries, which makes it convenient.

Someone recommended a 90-degree air angle grinder. Sounds nice, but I have an attachment for a corded angle grinder that turns it into a 90-degree grinder. The electric grinder runs at 16,000 RPM and seems to work fine, so I’m not sure why I need an air version. I was planning to buy a grinder and leave the attachment on it all the time. You really can’t get by with a single angle grinder. You need at least 4.

Look how hard it is to think of useful air tools. Maybe I should just get rid of the compressor!

I kid.

The blow gun alone makes compressed air worth the hassle. There is nothing like blowing crud out of things with a blow gun. Not that I need a large compressor to do this.

I’m sure I need the big compressor. I’m sure of it. I’m taking it on faith.

Installing my big hose reel on the wall was a surreal experience. I am going to guess that it weighs 45 pounds with the hose attached, and it’s very awkward to handle. I had to climb up a ladder with it on my shoulder and screw it into the wall while holding it in place. Access to the screws was very bad, so I couldn’t just line an electric screwdriver up with it and shoot the screws into the wall. I had to turn them slowly with a wrench while trying not to drop the reel. Then I broke the reel’s swivel, so I had to fabricate a new stud and buy a swivel online. That meant I had to remove the hose and reinstall it…on the ladder. I had to do this at least three times. I can’t even describe how unpleasant this job is.

I need to put an extension on the compressor’s drain valve so I don’t have to crawl on the floor to drain it every day. The existing valve is really glued in there, so I’m not looking forward to trying to remove it. People have suggested I get an automatic valve, but it sounds like overkill. These things open periodically to let water out, and my guess is that the noise scares the life out of people. They cost something like $200, and turning a valve by hand isn’t really that hard.

With the compressor more or less fixed, I now have to get my tool grinder off the pallet it arrived on. The grinder saga is so long, complicated, and horrifying, I want to leave it for its own series of posts. I assume I already wrote about it here. I bought a Gorton 375 grinder. It’s about 4 feet tall, and it probably weighs between 250 and 300 pounds. I thought I might try to send it back, because it had bearing issues, but now that I have decided to be a man and fix it, it’s time to commit to removing it from the pallet. I just ordered casters so I can make a mobile base.

The pallet is sitting in the workshop doorway, and it’s about 4 feet square, so it’s a major obstacle.

I also need to make a base for my mini-lathe (metal, not wood) or take it to the dump. I never use it. I converted it to CNC, but I never fixed the step-loss problem, and it really needs to be converted to ball screws. It’s sitting in my shop, in the way, on a Workmate I now can’t use. Maybe I should just buy a Harbor Freight 26″ tool chest and put the lathe on it.

Anyway, once the grinder is mobile, I should have a shop again. It’s the biggest problem I have at the moment.

Things are going well. If I ever stop working on tools, maybe I’ll get a chance to use my tools on a real project.

Mr. Technology Explains it all to You

This may sound incredible, but I usually have a subject in mind when I sit down to blog. No, seriously; I do. Today is different. I’m blogging to kill time because I’m not feeling all that well.

It’s nothing serious, so don’t worry. I should be fine by tonight. Feel free to pray if you want, however. I would love that. All I’m willing to say right now is a) my condition proves it’s very important to pay close attention to eye protection when you weld, and b) my condition does not involve my eyes.

I’m trying to think of something interesting to write about.

I got some more neat tools, and I’ll tell you why I bought some of them.

I carry the 9mm Glock I bought for my dad years ago. When I bought it, I sprang for night sights, which your carry piece really ought to have unless it has the other accessory I got for him later: a Crimson Trace laser sight.

I am not an laser sight expert, but I know a little bit, so I will provide some information which will be extremely helpful to anyone who carries and doesn’t already have a way to aim quickly in low light.

When I bought this sight, there were two well-known companies making laser accessories for pistols: Crimson Trace and Lasermax. I have a Lasermax on my 10mm. A Lasermax is really a replacement guide rod with a laser on the front. I thought it would be a great sight because it’s always parallel to the barrel. Pistol guide rods are mounted that way.

The original Crimson Trace is different. It’s a somewhat bulky gadget that wraps around the upper part of a gun’s grip. The laser is situated to the right of the slide. You can’t pick up a gun that has this type of Crimson Trace on it without turning the laser on. The obvious benefit is that when you need to draw your gun, you won’t have to ask your murderer, rapist, or overly enthused Antifa kid for a time out while you turn your laser on. Not that Antifa kids are using guns yet. Guns are so cisgender. I think they’re still throwing bottles of THC-enhanced urine.

The Lasermax on my gun has a little button sort of thing you push to turn it on. For many people, this can be a problem. If you don’t practice, you won’t remember to turn the laser on when the fun starts. Also, the bar the button belongs to can move around and become dislodged.

Somewhere I got the idea that the Crimson Trace was not adjustable for windage and elevation. I was totally wrong, but that’s what I thought. This is why I got the Lasermax for myself. I thought it would work for me because I’m sufficiently familiar with my gun to be able to operate it in a hurry. I wanted an accurate sight, because I shoot well, and I want to hit what I aim at.

Some time last year, I started feeling something sharp poking me when I handled the gun with the Crimson Trace. I found a little pin sort of thing protruding from the right side of the sight. I made a very weak effort to figure out what it was, and I did not succeed. I put off fixing it.

Eventually, the pin (actually a screw) made a hole in the pocket of a pair of Carhartt jeans, and I knew I had to act. By Googling for more than three minutes (because this was an urgent matter), I learned that the protruding screw was there to adjust the windage. I also learned that I needed a 0.028″ Allen wrench to adjust it. Of course, I had lost or misplaced the original tool Crimson Trace thoughtfully provided with the sight.

Let me digress. I would not buy another Lasermax, and I wholeheartedly recommend the Crimson Trace. I have had an important part of my Lasermax wear out, and the part is too soft, so it will wear out again. Changing the batteries is harder with a Lasermax, too, and the batteries don’t last long at all (“Excuse me, Mr. Mateen…could you put your rifle down while I change my batteries?”). Finally, it’s not automatic.

The best thing about the Lasermax is that it replaces the Glock guide rod. The original rods tend to fail. It has happened to me twice. Maybe I can keep the Lasermax and use it as a guide rod while relying on a Crimson Trace for targeting.

My Crimson Trace works perfectly, and I’m still on the batteries it had in it when it was new. The windage screw can walk out over time, so you need to watch it, and a pin that holds the sight in place can also drift, so you may have to push it back in at some point. These are the only problems I’ve had, and they’re trivial.

To get back to my repair saga, I took the Glock out, activated the laser, and sure enough, the dot was off by maybe three inches at 10 feet.

No problem! I have a ton of tools. Several tons, actually. I have multiple sets of Allen keys. I have multiple sets of tamper-proof driver bits. There was absolutely no doubt that I had a 0.028″ Allen wrench somewhere.

Except I didn’t.

I could not believe it. What a void in my tool arsenal. How could it have happened?

As expected, I found there was no hope of buying the wrench locally, so I went to Amazon. I found a set of Bondhus metric and SAE Allen wrenches in tiny sizes. I also found something even neater: a set of Wiha SAE Allen wrenches in precision screwdriver format. Instead of L-shaped bars, the set contained little screwdrivers with Allen hexes machined into the ends.

You know I had to have that.

Precision screwdrivers come with caps that rotate, so you can put the tip of a driver in a fastener and turn the screwdriver while holding onto the cap. This is a great thing, and it’s why I leapt at the chance to get Wiha precision Allen drivers.

Some people say there are better precision drivers than the ones Wiha makes. As far as I know, the ones that get all the praise are all German.

Here is some useful information. Many Allen wrenches on the market today *cough cough China* are made from soft “steel.” This is bad. Allen screws *cough cough more China cough* also tend to be pretty soft, and, well, the whole business stinks to high heaven.

Whenever you buy a Chinese tool with Allen screws, you should check the screws for hardness. If they’re not hard, replace them before they get stripped out and make your life miserable.

Do I do this? Yes. Of course!

I did it once, I mean.

I think.

When you buy Allen wrenches, you really need to avoid the cheap ones unless you have solid evidence that the set you’re buying isn’t garbage. An easy way to avoid getting burned is to stick with top brands. Bondhus is a top brand, and Wiha makes great…everything. It’s a German company. Need I say more? Yes, BMW’s and Porches break down a lot, and our faith in Germany received a powerful blow when we found out about Milli Vanilli, but German tools are very nice.

I’ll be even more helpful. Buy German screwdrivers. They’re not that expensive, and they’re fantastic. I have Wera screwdrivers which are so tough the manufacturer put steel caps on them to receive hammer blows and named them “Chiseldrivers.” That’s just nuts.

If you want American screwdrivers, check out Grace. They look sort of crude, but they’re excellent. They have square wooden handles. Yes, they will stain, but they won’t roll away, and there is no solvent in your garage that will dissolve unfinished wood or make it slippery.

Grace makes screwdrivers that are especially good for gunsmithing.

I have Klein screwdrivers, and they’re American. I should not have bought them. I’m sure they’re wonderful for electrical work (Klein specializes in electrician tools), but when you get gasoline on them, the rubber on the handles starts to dissolve. Eventually, you are likely to find yourself working on something that runs on gas, improbable as it sounds.

My love affair with Klein is not what it once was. I have two pairs of expensive Klein pliers with handles that started falling off in big chunks. They have a lifetime warranty, but you have to pay for shipping, so it’s worthless. The shipping cost is about the same as the cost of new handle covers, and if Klein gives you the same covers you had to begin with, they’ll just fall off again.

Here’s something weird: Klein makes a different type of cover. The product is called “Klein-Koat.” You can buy them and install them yourself. They look a lot better than the originals.

I also bought myself a decimal chart. This is a poster-sized chart that tells you how big drill bits and other cutting tools are, in decimal inches.

As you surely know, SAE drill bits come in three types of sizes: fractional inch, letter, and wire gauge. They don’t come in decimal inch size as far as I know, and that’s bizarre. Very often, when you work with drill bits, you’ll need a bit in a certain size range, like 0.310″-0.320″. If you have a chart on your wall, you can just look up and get the information you need. If not, you may have to open a book or get out a dial caliper.

The Starrett company mails out free decimal charts as well as free pocket charts. This is pretty sweet, but the wall charts are paper, and you can guess what will happen to yours if you don’t enclose it somehow. In the old days, many companies put their names on charts, and they made them from metal. They’re very collectible now, unfortunately. MSC Industrial sells a 24″-wide chart which is either plastic or laminated, and I believe it also has holes so you can hang it without damaging it. It only costs a few dollars, and mine is arriving today.

You would be surprised how useful these charts are. There are also metric charts. I don’t know what kind of information is on them. I don’t do a lot of metric. I wish I did. The metric system is far superior to SAE or Imperial or whatever you want to call it.

Also among my recent scores: two Noga magnetic bases. These babies are magnificent. They stick like glue, they’re very tough, they have little adjustment knobs that make indicating a pleasure, and they’re made by Jews in Israel. What more could you want? They cost a lot, but how often do you buy magnetic bases? I’ve been machining for 12 years, and I only have 4.

Jews are the best at science and technology. I’ll just say it. Has anyone else discovered relativity and developed the first atom and thermonuclear bombs? Didn’t think so. And I love knowing my money occasionally makes it to Israel without passing through the United States Department of the Treasury first.

Let’s see. I bought a small copy of The Engineers Black Book. This is a small, handy reference which serves the same purpose as Machinery’s Handbook except that it probably contains only the most useful 5% of that book’s staggering content. Unlike Machinery’s Handbook, which has flimsy paper pages, the Black Book has some sort of plastic pages you can wipe clean. That’s a huge thing in a metal shop.

The price of Machinery’s Handbook has gone through the roof lately. Because the information changes very slowly over the years, smart people buy used copies.

I bought a new copy.

Hey, it was years ago, before the jacked the price to Martin Shkreli levels.

Why is it so expensive now? Is it being printed by Snap-On?

A while back, I needed to chase the 1″-8 UNC threads on a tractor attachment, and I realized I did not have a suitable single-point indexed tool. A guy on a forum recommended one from Ebay, so I picked that up. It looks like it’s made very well. It came with a box of carbide inserts, and I got the whole shooting match for $18, shipped from…wait for it…China. I had already fixed the tractor part when the threading bar arrived, but it’s still an important tool to have.

Speaking of carbide, as in “indexed carbide tooling,” I heard a wild claim on Youtube today, and I’m really hoping it’s true. Two of the best-known Youtube tool guys are John Saunders (NYC CNC) and Stefan Gotteswinter, who, in spite of his Chinese-looking name, lives in Germany. Saunders visited…the other guy’s shop…(I am not typing that name again), and they agreed: HSS is obsolete! I should add that they didn’t mean it was obsolete for everything, but they believe it’s no good for end mills.

HSS, which means “High Speed Steel,” is a century-old invention used mainly for cutting tools that cut metal. It’s a wonderful material. In the distant past, carbon steel (or “plain old steel”…humorous initials not intended) was the best thing available. Carbon steel has a problem. When it gets hot, it gets soft fast, and it can permanently lose its hardness in an instant.

There are two reasons why steel that has these properties is inferior. First, when you sharpen steel, you are likely to get it hot enough to undo the hardening and tempering processes. Second, when you cut at high speeds, with a lot of pressure, or without generous lubricant, you can melt your cutting edges very quickly. This adds up to slower sharpening, more frequent sharpening, more discarded tools, and slower work. When you’re paying workers by the hour, you want a drill bit that can drill 20 holes a minute, not three holes, and you don’t want them wasting time on the sharpening machine.

HSS is a huge improvement over carbon steel, and it will always have lots of uses, but when it comes to end mills, it can’t compare to tungsten carbide, which is extremely hard and even more tolerant of heat.

A lot of noob machinists love carbide because it lasts a long time. They love it in lathe tools because you don’t have to shape carbide cutting edges yourself; you just buy new ones. Old codg…I mean “experienced machinists”…tend to look down on people who love carbide, because it takes much less skill to use it, and there are some things HSS does better. I have been taken to task for my love of carbide. I almost never grind my own HSS lathe tools.

There is also a widespread belief (which I held until an hour ago) that carbide can’t get as sharp as HSS. This matters when you want really nice finishes. Saunders and…the German guy…say this is not true. They say they sharpen carbide until you can shave with it, and they even say HSS does not have the sharpness potential of carbide.

That would be nice, if it were true. And because both of these guys are professional CNC machinists, my guess is that it is true.

Stefan–we are on a first-name basis because I don’t want to type “Gotteswinter”–had something else to say in the video. He says he sharpens carbide inserts. If true, this is a huge thing for home machinists. Carbide inserts often cost $10 or more per piece, and it’s not hard to screw them up. If you could touch them up (or just plain customize them) yourself, you could save a lot of cash, and you would be willing to try new things that had suddenly become easy and economical.

He also says you generally don’t need a chipbreaker on an insert in a home shop. A chipbreaker is a little groove that runs around the border of an insert. It would be nearly impossible to reproduce in a home shop. The purpose of a chipbreaker is to prevent chips (metal shavings) from getting so long they turn into dangerous, razor-sharp “birds’ nests.” Obviously, the smaller a job is, the smaller the nests will be, so they become inconsequential. I never thought about it until today.

I admit, it’s generally possible to find excellent inserts on Ebay for very little money. I don’t know why. Surplus, I guess. But finding sharp ones is not that easy. Most carbide inserts have rounded edges. Sometimes a sharp tool is better. It would be great to redeem worn inserts at home by adding sharp edges.

Even if you manage to find good inserts for a dollar apiece, the ability to renew and alter them would be a big plus.

Yesterday I blogged about the possibility of getting a Chinese tool grinder for my shop. Now that I have this new information about carbide, the grinder looks even more useful.

I’m feeling considerably better now, and it looks like I killed an hour or so. I’m having a great day in spite of the way I felt earlier. Hope you are, too.

Gay Firebrand Sounds the Alarm for Carnal Conservatives

It’s funny how little things indicating the end of the age pop up on your instruments.

Today I was looking at Youtube, and it recommended a ChuckE2009 video. I used to subscribe to his channel. He’s a young man who has worked very hard to build a career and a Youtube following. He came from a broken home. He managed to put himself through welding school, and he started working. He ended up with a farm in Texas. He posted a lot of great videos about welding, tools, farming, and traditional values. Then he started going to a crazy racist church, and now he’s a hard core white separatist. He talks about “precious European blood,” and he posts videos on Bitchute, which is a service I learned about today.

I learned about it by watching the video Youtube recommended. ChuckE2009 linked to Bitchute. When I went to Bitchute, I saw that he had made a bunch of bizarre videos about his odd beliefs. He thinks America is being overrun by non-white people, which is arguably true, and he seems to think that Brenton Tarrant, the guy who murdered Muslims in a New Zealand mosque, is a martyr.

The problem isn’t that the people who move here are not white. It’s that they don’t belong to Jesus. Give me non-white Christians over white leftists any day. I would much prefer life in an all-black country that served God to live in a place where white people serve Satan. I would rather see America become very dark-skinned if the alternative were to see it stay white and move farther from God. The white separatists don’t seem to understand that race is not the problem.

There are only two races, which are also nations and families. One is the children of God, and the other is the children of Satan.

I watched a little bit of one of ChuckE’s videos. It was not healthy stuff, but the comments were worse. They were packed with blatant, unapologetic, lugubrious racism. You really have to see it to understand what I mean. The people over there really hate blacks and Jews. I don’t mean they disagree with them on some issues and are therefore called “haters.” I mean they actually hate them, in the pre-snowflake sense of the word “hate.”

I went back to Youtube, looked for ChuckE2009 videos in my feed, and clicked “Do not recommend this channel.” Maybe they’ll get the message. Unsubscribing alone didn’t get me free.

While I was doing this, I came across a Steven Crowder video. Crowder is a gay conservative, which automatically makes him a treasure to the secular conservative establishment. He seems like a great guy (I don’t really know much about him), but he’s clearly not a child of God. He is not one of us at the moment. He may agree with us about a lot of political issues, but religion is not politics. They’re connected. You can’t be Holy-Spirit-led and be a leftist. But conservatism itself is not godliness, as ChuckE proves.

Crowder is huge as Youtubers go. He has millions of subscribers. People with that kind of traffic make millions of dollars per year from Youtube. Except for Crowder, who got demonetized. He said some mean things to a gay man, and the man complained. Youtube obeyed.

Oddly (not really), Youtube doesn’t mind making money from Crowder’s continued presence, even if they won’t give him any of it. They continue recommended his videos. Don’t argue that they’re not making money because they don’t put ads on his videos. They make money from him because he draws people to Youtube, where they see other videos that do have ads. Youtube is completely hypocritical, which is normal for a leftist…anything.

I don’t know what he said. My guess is that it was overblown, because had it been anything serious, even people like me, who avoid politics, would probably know.

Gays are always snippy to each other. This is not new. They love edgy, biting humor; remember Mr. Blackwell? They call each other fags and homos. Maybe Crowder did something like that. I don’t care; it’s a digression.

Crowder just posted a video warning of a “Youtube purge.” He says Youtube is about to change its social engineering/censorship guidelines again, “moving the goalposts,” in his words. He says that videos that were considered acceptable in the past may get people banned in the present. Bad news if you’ve posted a thousand videos, as some people have.

I looked at other sources, and here is what Youtube says. It’s going to go after anyone caught producing content that “maliciously insults someone based on protected attributes such as their race, gender expression, or sexual orientation.” That language comes from Youtube’s blog.

Youtube told the BBC, proudly, that they will not just consider individual acts of free speech. They will look at “patterns” of behavior when they ban people. In other words, if they can’t really prove you did anything wrong, they have a catch-all policy that will still get you banned.

Who decides what is offensive? Of course, the easily offended. Google is staffed by leftists. Who decides what a “malicious insult” is? The same demographic that thinks seeing a Republican win an election is a genuine trauma that warrants the creating of special rooms where victims can play with therapy puppies.

Not good.

This is a combination of things I’ve seen coming for years. The odd sensation I feel now is the surprise of not being surprised. I expected all this, but still…what a spectacle, when it actually comes to pass.

The Internet encouraged us to speak our minds in ways we never could in the past, and much of what we spoke was not nice. We thought Internet anonymity, which may or may not have ever existed, would keep us safe. We also published a lot of thought which was not popular enough make it into mainstream outlets. Conservatives got a lot of exposure.

Now all that stuff is out there, and it is subject to evaluation and punishment by people who keep changing the rules.

Saw it coming. Didn’t do much to protect myself. Still. Saw it coming. Wrote about it.

In the law, there is a doctrine called “ex post facto.” It means…something in Latin. “From after the fact,” I guess. The idea is that you can’t pass a law making past behavior illegal. It’s a very respected doctrine, and the reason is obvious. If we were all punished for things we did in the past which are now illegal, nearly everyone over the age of 10 would be in prison.

Youtube does not have to observe this doctrine. Neither do any of the other tech giants.

For a long time, I’ve been writing about the privatization of our outlets of expression. We used to rely on the First Amendment to protect us when we expressed ourselves. That protection had some power, but the First Amendment only applied to the government. Your local constable could not tell you not to curse, on pain of having your mouth washed out with soap, because he was a government agent. Your boss in the private sector, on the other hand, could control your speech. If you wrote screenplays, movie studios could control you. Businesses can forbid their employees to tell obnoxious customers how they actually feel about them. They can make them wear 37 pieces of flair. The Bill of Rights has very limited power over private entities.

Satan knew he would one day have to shut Christians up. The Bible says Jesus will not return until the gospel of the kingdom is taught to every people, and here we are with a medium that allows us to preach online, globally, for nothing or very little. He had to find a way to shut us down, so what did he do? He privatized the media and nullified the First Amendment. Why is it that no one but me talks about this?

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, and the others do not have to let you speak. They can ban you for any reason that pleases them. They can make a rule that no one who owns red socks can publish, and it will be completely legal.

It’s a wonderful thing for Satan. The Internet is used to spread all sorts of filth and idolatry, and these are powerful tools. If he can work it out so spreading truth is not so easy, he will have a monopoly on public thought, at least in many areas. The Internet will be able to infect but not cure.

Is there an answer? I suppose so. We could demand that the government buy Youtube. I don’t think that will happen, though. Of course, if it happened, Youtube would stop working, it would lose a great deal of money, and it would immediately stop hiring white males. It would turn into the Postal Service.

The disturbing thing is that people think they can fight this politically. It’s a bad idea. It seems like a political squabble, but it’s not. On the surface, it’s political. Underneath, it’s supernatural. Satan, the god of this world, is behind the censorship. The same spirit that got Popes to burn dissidents alive is still at work, and it still wants to keep the gospel quiet.

It’s fine to vote for conservatives, but you need to get to know God, right now. You need to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. You need to give your life to God and start hearing from him. He is helping his children move away from leftist-controlled areas. He is setting up little ark-like areas for us. We won’t live in complete bliss, and they will still come after us eventually, but we will be much better off than stubborn Christians who insist on living in places like Los Angeles and Miami.

We need to be transformed and become more effective in changing the hearts of people who are on the wrong side. They’re in much more trouble than we are. They will overcome us in the short term, but God is not mocked. They will pay terrible prices in the end.

People say they’re going to shoot FBI agents when things get bad. That’s not going to make God happy, and it won’t defeat the enemy’s troops, either. God commanded the Hebrews to kill their enemies in the Old Testament. That’s not how he works now. The human beings the Hebrews slaughtered back then represent the spirits we are supposed to defeat under the new covenant. Jesus said those who live by the sword will die by the sword, and he meant that people who rely on carnal solutions will not get as much help from God as his children. When you rely on carnal tools, you’re telling God, “Don’t help me. I can handle this.” You can’t do that all your life and then call on him to take over suddenly when your mess overwhelms you.

We have to get God’s love and forgiveness flowing through us so we will be prepared to forgive and refrain from violence when the temptation is at its worst.

All the things I foresaw are coming true! God really did show me these things, just as he showed them to others. We really are going to be treated like Jews in Nazi Germany. We really are going to be excluded from commerce. Our homes will be confiscated. We will be slaughtered. It’s really going to happen, here in America. We’re already getting the Nuremberg Law treatment. The parallels are obvious and undeniable.

I know a guy who insists he’s fixing Miami. God didn’t tell him to do that. He’s just stubborn. If he doesn’t watch it, he will still be there when the mobs rise up. Noah didn’t stay to fix his compatriots. Abraham didn’t stay to fix Haran. Lot didn’t stay to fix Sodom. Sometimes God tells you to leave, and you better do it.

Steven Crowder sounds like he’s advising people to get guns and fight. Startling advice from a modern homosexual. It’s not helpful. We’re going to lose, and we need to get God’s help on handling it the best way possible. Vote as you wish. Say what God tells you to say. Just don’t waste your time with political or violent solutions. They will just put you in the other camp, whether you know it or not.

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Commenters are pointing out an important fact: Steven Crowder is not gay.

I was positive he was gay. I had thought of him as a gay conservative for so long, it didn’t occur to me to check. I wish I could remember where I got this idea.

Anyway, correction posted.

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I think I have the answer.

I must have seen this and drawn the wrong conclusion.

It has Many Shiny Buttons

Christmas has arrived early in northern Florida.

Last month I started brushing up on complex analysis, which is an esoteric form of calculus based on complex numbers. For those who don’t know, a complex number is a combination of a real number and an imaginary number. An imaginary number is a multiple of i, which is the square root of -1. The word “imaginary” got attached to the class by Rene Descartes, who is said to have thought imaginary numbers were useless. Imaginary numbers are used in physics to calculate results that can be observed in the real world, so “imaginary” is, maybe, not the best word to use to describe them.

I also started browsing through a new mechanics book: Introduction to Classical Mechanics: With Problems and Solutions by David Morin. People on the web wrote very highly of the book, and I could not resist taking a look at it. I’m always trying to find time to recapture the knowledge I lost after college, and most physics books are useful only as instruments of torture, so it’s good to find anything that can actually be understood.

While I was poking through problems in complex analysis and mechanics, I found to my horror that I had to deal with…I hate to write the filthy word…numerals. I mean what most people call “numbers.” Things like 5, 354, and 42. Nasty little things. To a physicist, being forced to deal with numerals is insulting. I can only imagine how offended a mathematician would be. It would be like asking him to do a calculation that isn’t totally useless.

I could not restrict myself to clean, shiny, odorless variables. I had to find arcsines, resultant forces, and so on, so I needed a calculator.

I already had a TI calculator of recent vintage, plus a Hewlett-Packard 35S I got a couple of years back, plus my ancient HP 32S. The 32S used to be an extension of my arm. I could more or less think calculations into it. My mind worked in reverse Polish notation. Unfortunately, the screen on the 32S pooped out and could not be made to work well enough to bear. This is why I got the 35S and the TI.

Hewlett-Packard used to make great calculators. They cost hundreds of dollars, and HP liked to tell people you could run over them with cars without hurting them. The 35S was not like that. It had a cheap case and floppy buttons that rolled when I pushed them. On top of that, there was no manual. The booklet that came with the calculator said HP would mail me a manual for nothing if I called, but when I called, HP told me to drop dead. They simply decided not to honor their promise. I didn’t feel like using their PDF manual, which required printing out something like 500 pages, so I was disenchanted with the whole thing.

Also, and to be more honest, I can’t find the 35S. I’m sure it’s here somewhere. Or maybe I got mad at it and threw it out.

Hewlett-Packard was once a neat company that made all sorts of electronic equipment. They made power sources, frequency generators, bench meters, and lots of other things. Something happened to them. Now they make cheap junk that belongs in Wal-Mart.

I went to Ebay to look for a 32S in good condition. I discovered the 32S II. People seemed to like it better. Also, it had a “II” in the name, so obviously, it was superior. I found a good deal on one somebody had used very little, and I ordered it. It arrived yesterday. I just took it out of the envelope and disinfected it. It looks new.

Now I can relax again, until the screen on this one goes bad. I’m actually considering buying two more, taking the batteries out, storing them, and waiting for the days when I need them.

I learned complex analysis from a book by two men named Ruel Churchill and James “the Godfather of Complex Variables” Brown. It’s a standard, but it could be better. I still have it. I also have a differential equations book by a man named Raymond Redheffer. It’s fantastic. It reads almost as though a human being wrote it. I decided to see if Redheffer had written anything else, and that’s how I found out he had written a complex analysis text.

I looked at the book on Open Library, and sure enough, it was very good. I found myself a copy in “like-new” condition and ordered it. That was weeks ago. It still hasn’t arrived.

I ordered it from Abe Books, which is a good resource. I pestered the seller, and they told me they could not find a record of the shipment. They gave up and refunded my money. That was annoying, because similar copies were selling for $30 more. After a few days of wishful thinking, hoping the book would still make it, I ordered another one, and the replacement is supposedly brand new. We will see. Book sellers have a tendency to send scuffed-up review copies and call them new.

The main thing is that it has to be in good repair and free of notes and so forth. That’s what I’m hoping for.

Redheffer also wrote a book on math for physicists. I found a copy selling really cheap, so I ordered it. Haven’t seen it yet.

I tried to replace one of my reference books a few weeks back. It’s called Mathematical Methods for Physicists, or, as physicists call it, “Mathews and Walker.” It’s a very popular book, so, of course, the publisher refuses to print it any more, and they have not licensed it to Dover Books, which prints paperback copies of old technical books major publishers are tired of. My copy is basically in excellent condition, but ants ate part of the spine, and it bothers me.

Do I use the book? Of course not. I just hate seeing my old STEM stuff destroyed, and I do plan to use it in the future.

I found a “new” “hardback” copy online for an unbelievable price, so I ordered it. I received a horrible, mashed-up paperback which was probably printed for the Indian market. I had to send it back, and then the seller didn’t refund my money. I had to sic Amazon on him. He had the gall to charge nearly $90 for that piece of junk.

I’m now considering buying book-repair tape and doing a fancy repair job. I’m sure Youtube University can help me.

It occurred to me that I was running into what appeared to be supernatural resistance in my STEM pursuits, so I asked God about it, and I believe he said the problem was coming from Satan, not him. I started using my supernatural tools to overcome it.

At first, I was thinking maybe God wanted me to leave STEM things alone. Scientists tend to take a dim view of Christianity. The folks at CERN made a comedy video (I assume it was comedy) showing robed figures sacrificing a woman at their headquarters, which shows that scientists are aware of the tension between Christians and scientists.

I thought maybe God wanted me to forget all about that part of my life. It appears that this is not the case, however.

The CERN video was filmed before a statue of Shiva, a form of the Hindu “god” Vishnu. In the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu becomes Shiva in order to impress someone. Robert Oppenheimer quoted this book while reminiscing about the first atom bomb blast. In the book, Shiva says, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

CERN’s people say the video was a prank, and they also say CERN is full of artwork. They say the Shiva statue is just one of many works. Naturally, one has to ask: how many statues of Jesus and Moses are there at CERN? How many crosses are there?

Here is the video. Lots of profanity in the soundtrack.

The best evidence that this is a fake video is the presence of the woman who is offered as a sacrifice. How would a group of physicists manage to find a woman? They’re usually at home studying, watching science fiction and anime, or reading books like The Modern Physicist’s Guide to Avoiding Eye Contact.

Today I read that Paul Dirac hated religion. He was a towering figure in quantum mechanics. My alma mater, the University of Miami, almost snagged him for their theoretical physics group. I remember a story one of my profs told. Dirac was on campus, and my professor took him a copy of Dirac’s book. He wanted an autograph. Dirac apparently collected stamps, and he had some fresh acquisitions with him. He stuck a couple in the front of the book along with his signature.

Funny; I can’t recall which professor told me that.

Here is what Dirac said:

I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can’t for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.

My suggestion: learn to use paragraphs.

It’s remarkable that Dirac thought rich and powerful people were the force behind the perpetuation of Christianity. Powerful people who agreed with Dirac politically did their best to destroy Christianity during the last century, and they are still at it. The communists have done everything they could to get rid of Christianity, and they certainly wanted “quiet people.” They liked quiet people so much they shot loud ones and pushed their bodies into mass graves. The gulags and Castro’s prisons were built for people who were not quiet.

Before slavery was abolished, many slave owners refused to let their slaves own Bibles or go to church. Dirac would have found that confusing.

Dirac’s positions are another illustration of a simple fact: top STEM people tend to know very little about the way human beings work. In their understanding of human nature, they are often like slow children, no matter how well they can do math. It’s a shame ordinary people think physicists have anything intelligent to say about politics and religion. You might as well ask a chicken.

Dirac was famous for his social ineptitude. He married the wife of physicist Eugene Wigner, and he was once heard to introduce her as follows: “Allow me to present Wigner’s sister, who is now my wife.” When Werner Heisenberg told him dancing was fun as long as the girls were nice, Dirac said, “But, Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?”

This was not the guy to talk to about anything involving spirituality.

Niels Bohr supposedly thought Dirac was onto something, so, clearly, he was not a great source of spiritual wisdom, either.

Wolfgang Pauli, who was very funny, supposedly said this: “Well, our friend Dirac has got a religion and its guiding principle is ‘There is no God, and Paul Dirac is His prophet.'”

It makes sense that the best STEM thinkers would be inept about people, because top performance in their fields doesn’t just come from intelligence; it comes from a willingness to sacrifice everything but math and science. They don’t get where they are by working 40 hours per week and having normal lives, regardless of how bright they are. People in other fields work hard, too, but most fields involve a lot more human interaction and require more application of social intelligence. A mathematician can be successful while living in a dog kennel, naked, and refusing to speak except to the people who throw him his food.

Anyway, I have my calculator, and I assume my complex analysis book will get here soon, so I am happy.

MORE

I said something was resisting my efforts to work on STEM pursuits. That was on December 11. It is now December 13. Yesterday, I received a package from a seller who was supposed to send me a manual for the used calculator I bought. I opened the package, and it actually contained a spelling and handwriting pamphlet for elementary school students!

Maybe someone is trying to tell me something. Of course, no one on the Internet has seen my handwriting, so I don’t see what the problem is.

Still waiting for some other books I ordered. Will they make it, or will the forces of darkness send me more books for first-grade students? I almost hope so, because I could KILL first-grade math problems.

I received my copy of the solutions manual for Ruel Churchill’s complex analysis book, but this is a pretty unimportant part of my collection.

Libertarians Will be Disarmed Wholesale

I saw an interesting story on the web. I found out what happened to the host of FPSRussia.

If you don’t know what FPSRussia is, you must be a woman or a liberal. FPSRussia is a Youtube channel featuring automatic weapons and explosives. The star, who no longer produces videos for the site, called himself “Dmitri Potapoff.” He spoke with a Russian accent and fooled a lot of people, although smart viewers realized it wasn’t all that likely that a Russian was able to get ahold of machine guns and make videos without being imprisoned immediately.

Here’s a video. Language alert.

The host’s real name is Kyle Lamar, and he’s from Georgia. Our Georgia. He has had some trouble with the law.

In 2013, his house was raided by the ATF and the state of Georgia. The justification was that he was making money using explosives on Youtube. He continued making videos after that raid, so I suppose it didn’t amount to anything. In 2015, he was raided again, and he had to take a plea and spend a short time in what he calls “federal prison.” Other sources call it a halfway house, but I guess he knows where he was.

It’s a weird story. He had a pal who had a gun business, and one day, his pal turned up dead. He was in his office, and his surveillance equipment was gone. Someone had shot him in the back of the head. Some people thought Lamar did it. Conspiracy theories abounded. I suppose it makes sense that when a person gets shot in the head from behind, in his own secure office with a surveillance system, you would assume he was murdered by someone he knew, but I think that’s about all the theorists have.

It was not long after the murder that the 2013 raid took place.

The 2015 raid involved drug trafficking, if you believe the prosecution. They were monitoring his mail, and they found a small package of hash oil in a mailbox he rented. The total amount was 25 grams, which is just under one ounce.

He says the Georgia side of the 2015 case was dismissed because the warrant was bad. The feds, however, had a better case. They based their search on the fact that he appeared to be a marijuana user and owned guns.

To me, this is what’s interesting about the story.

When you fill out a 4473 form during a background check, you have to say you don’t use illegal drugs. You can probably guess how many people lie on the form. Maybe 40%? Weed is really popular.

Even if weed is legal under the laws of your state, it’s still illegal to the feds, so yes, if you smoke a doobie once a week while floating in your pool, you are a federal criminal. If you didn’t mention it when you bought your guns, you are a felon.

How about that?

I’ve filled out more than one of these forms. I have never admitted that I use weed. I haven’t admitted it because I don’t use weed. I never liked it, and by the time I bought my first gun under the background check law, I was years past my last effort to try to like it. I have no interest whatsoever in drugs.

Lamar says he was charged with possession with intent to distribute. In other words, he is a convicted drug dealer as far as the feds are concerned. When you have certain amounts of certain drugs on hand, the law presumes you’re a dealer.

I have no idea how much hash oil you need to get high, but it’s hard for me to believe that a person who buys less than an ounce online is planning to sell any of it.

The other day, I saw a photo of Billy Ray Cyrus’s wife standing in front of their open weed safe. There were bags and bags of weed in it. I don’t know if they’re insane or what. I can’t see any reason to own that much dope. How much can two people smoke? Here’s the thing to think about: why haven’t the Cyruses been arrested? I don’t know how much weed a weed store keeps on hand, but I’ll bet you could run one for a month on what the Cyruses have in their safe.

Another question: why haven’t the feds closed down all the “legal” marijuana stores in states that have changed their laws? What could be easier? You don’t have to tap phones. You don’t have to get warrants. You just go in during business hours and arrest everyone.

There must be a reason. I see something online about the Supreme Court making it illegal for the feds to shut down medical marijuana stores, but what about stores that don’t hide behind medicine? I’m too lazy to look it up.

I looked around online (welcome to the federal list, me), and there are sites advertising weed extracts for sale. I guess Lamar didn’t have a hard time finding what he wanted. Did the feds shut down the company that sold him the dope? I don’t know.

Here’s what I wonder: how many Americans who own guns have set themselves up for drug-based searches and confiscation? The number must be in the tens of millions.

It’s a dream scenario for someone like Elizabeth Warren. When the political timing seems right, you tell the DOJ you want the drug laws enforced, and they send the FBI around, knocking on doors. First thing you know, tens of millions of guns are behind locked doors and slated for destruction, and millions of Americans are felony defendants who are likely to take pleas and give up their gun rights.

Lamar thinks he had around $400,000 worth of guns. Now they’re scrap metal. He can’t have a gun again, under federal law, until the laws of Georgia say he can.

I am suspicious of the federal claim that Lamar was believed to be using illegal explosives. These days, anyone can go to a gun store and buy explosives legally. You can get exploding targets made with a composition called Tannerite. One target won’t hurt anyone, but you can buy a lot of Tannerite, concentrate it, and create an explosion strong enough to throw a refrigerator the length of an NFL pass. Youtube is full of Tannerite videos. The fact that you blew something up doesn’t mean you made explosives.

Maybe misusing Tannerite is a crime, but if so, why would you need to search someone’s house? Finding boxes of Tannerite wouldn’t prove anything. The videos would be the proof.

Message for the DOJ: I do not use Tannerite.

I get it. It’s neat to blow things up. It’s just not my bag. I like to shoot for accuracy. You can’t really tell how well you’re shooting when every shot blows a target up.

I guess there are people in power who think I’m part of a dangerous movement because I pray in tongues and enjoy shooting. I’m also the proprietor of a DoD-banned “hate site,” although I have never been told what the basis for that strange honor is. My guess is that a heavyset female soldier with a short haircut and no makeup read my site one day, saw that I was a Christian, and put me on the ban list with a couple of mouse clicks. I don’t think they have educated people or highly ranked officers looking at blogs. They probably farm the work out to privates or civilian hipsters. I’m sure no one over the rank of private has any idea my site is banned, except for military people who used to visit.

I’m not thrilled with the way our rights have been destroyed, but I don’t want anything to do with insurrection or any type of armed resistance. When they find a way to take my guns legally, my plan is to stack the guns by the front door, invite the feds in, offer them donuts, and help them carry my guns to their van. I have more important things to think about. If a Christian is going to give up his life and go to prison, it should be because he did something like smuggling a Bible or casting a demon out of a sick kid. You shouldn’t go out shooting because you want to keep two Glocks and a Taurus .38.

I don’t think Lamar was making illegal explosives. He wasn’t convicted of that. I have to doubt that Obama’s FBI suspected it. My hunch is that they saw all those guns, as well as his wild videos, and wanted to shut him down. Maybe they were also trying to get information on the murder of his friend. The drug thing was incidental. It was just the key that opened the door for them. They would never have gone after him just for buying hash oil. Think how many Democrats would in federal prison today if they routinely went after people who bought hash oil.

Speaking of our rights, it’s remarkable how the noose is tightening. On Sunday, I drove to Sanford, Florida, as the government already knows from recording my toll payments, credit card transactions, and cell phone locations. I drove to the same area several months ago to buy a buffer. This time, there were new cell towers everywhere. There were so many, the landscape was defaced. They looked positively sinister. It was as if they were looking down on us and monitoring us, like giant concentration camp guards. And, of course, they were!

I visited Sanford in June and then again in November. During the short interim, telephone/surveillance towers sprang up like ragweed. Things are changing much more quickly than I expected, even though I’m one of the people who keep saying things are going to change more quickly than we expect.

I used to worry about creeping totalitarianism, but now I don’t, because I know we can’t stop it. I pay for everything electronically, leaving a digital trail. I don’t use a VPN service. I don’t keep a hundred pounds of gold under the floor. I can’t grow my own food. I don’t even have a decent generator, which would be useless anyway if I couldn’t get gas. I trust God to protect me as well as possible, and I accept the fact that Christians are going to lose. Americans are going to lose all of their rights, except for those relating to things like sexual perversion, obscenity, and drug use, and America will be just as scary as Cambodia used to be. Hoarding guns, buying Bitcoin and shooting FBI agents will not change that. The important thing is to get aligned with God and prepare for the rapture.

The other day God told me the rapture was going to be a hypocrite filter.

I know someone who lives in total denial. This person always pretends everything is going fine in his walk. He even teaches others and holds himself out to be a man of God. When you try to give him useful information, he says he already knows about it. He wants people to think he’s doing great. In reality, he needs to get real and stop bluffing. He needs prayer in tongues. He needs deliverance and confession. He needs to quit trying to tell people his carnal efforts at ministry were ordained by God.

Christians who are living that way will be able to pull it off for a time, but what will they say when solid Christians are taken and they’re still here? “Jesus lost my boarding pass”?

I used to wonder if the rapture would actually be a wave of executions, but I have looked at the Bible, and it makes it clear that people will literally vanish. When Jesus “meets us in the air,” it won’t be because our bodies have been shot in the head. It will be a supernatural event. If it happens and you’re still here, you will be in real trouble, and you will have no possible defense for the decisions you’ve made. You will be exposed. I hope to avoid that.

Fighting the government in the streets is pointless. Jesus isn’t for it, and it will not do anyone any good. People who know Jesus won’t be involved. If a war takes place, it will be between various factions, all of which belong to Satan.

Jesus will have a political reign, but it won’t happen during this age.

What an interesting time to be alive. Me, I would have preferred to be born in 1930.

I Only Need ONE More Math Book…

Against my better judgment, I am stirring the moldy stew of my abandoned STEM education some more.

I’ve been watching videos made by a physics grad student. Today I watched one in which he listed the math courses he had taken. He always sounds extremely smart, and sometimes I have wondered if he was a much better student than I was, so I am curious to find out what he actually knows. I don’t want to think I was a complete idiot back when I was part of the shared agony of the physics community.

This morning I thought about something my undergrad advisor said. He told me I was “weak in math.” I don’t recall when he said that. Maybe he said it before I got it together, or maybe it was something he said to fill me with confidence right after I told him I had been accepted by the University of Texas.

I don’t know what “weak in math” meant to him, either. Maybe he thought John von Neumann was weak in math. After I recalled his remark, I remembered that four of my math professors had been pretty impressed with me. I wonder what they thought about people who were strong in math.

I remember messing with my PDE professor’s mind. He gave us a problem to solve, and I used a contour integral. I didn’t know he wanted us to use another method. He was pretty surprised. At first, he just said I was wrong. Then I talked to him about it. He took my work home, looked at it, and returned the next day and confirmed that I was right. It wasn’t obvious to him right away. He was impressed. That was one of my math glory moments.

But maybe I really was weak in math, and the math professors were so used to people so incompetent, I just looked good.

I looked at the video, and I was surprised to find out that the video guy had taken fewer math courses than I had. He didn’t take a complex analysis course. I didn’t even know it was possible to get a physics degree without complex variables.

I guess it was, though, because this guy did it, and when my advisor told me to take the course, he spoke as though it were optional.

Let’s see.

Calc I
Calc II
Multivariable Calc
ODE
PDE
Complex Analysis
Mathematical Methods for Physicists
Linear Algebra
Real Analysis

That’s all I remember. The course for physicists was taught by a physicist. Very useful. They used Arfken’s book, which wasn’t bad at all.

I don’t think I took a statistics and probability course, because I don’t know anything about probability.

Needless to say, I also took a ton of physics courses, every single one involved calculus and other types of advanced math, and sometimes I had to learn math that wasn’t covered in my math courses.

When I was a grad student, my mechanics prof taught us differential geometry in about a week. Did anyone actually learn it? I doubt it. The name is deceptive. It’s not trigonometry. It’s calculus on weird spaces. It’s a very demanding subject to which entire courses are dedicated.

I never got a grip on it. Ordinarily, when professors slammed us with new math during physics lectures, we picked it up. Differential geometry was the only exception for me.

The class started with a full room, and at the end of the semester, there were five people, including Dr. Matzner, a quiet and pleasant man who had written the thin but scary textbook. I got an A, and I didn’t really use differential geometry. Sometimes I think I got an A for not dropping the course.

I had taken…let’s see…three mechanics courses as an undergrad, so presumably, I knew a couple of things before I showed up.

The graduate program was very hard. Most people dropped that particular mechanics class because it was so hard. We were expected to teach two labs and take three courses. Teaching assistants in other departments had to take three courses, so we did, too, even though one physics course is as hard as about 50 history courses. Liberal arts majors don’t like to hear that their work is easy, but BOY, is it easy.

UT gave us an escape hatch, which is ridiculous. We could use “the colloquium” as our third course. They pretended it was a physics course. I think the course name was 398T, but I’m probably wrong. The colloquium was a weekly informal lecture given by a guest. I recall watching a guy from the Electrosource battery company, telling us about his lead-and-fiberglass composite batteries.

The colloquium was a joke, but it was necessary, because otherwise we would have been so buried in work there would have been no time for things like bathing and eating, and participating in research would have been unthinkable.

UT was like a machine that made French fries. Student/potatoes went in one end, they were forced through the array of sharpened blades, and they fell out as fries at the other end. There was no pity or flexibility. Had intelligent people run the place, the requirements for physics students would have been different from those for people who were taking drama classes, learning how to be convincing trees, but you could not bend the rules at UT. Not when it was so much easier to bend students.

Here’s how sensitive UT was to students. I went to the gym once to look it over. They had a row of toilets against a wall. Not stalls. Toilets. There must have been 20 of them. French fries don’t need privacy! Man up and poop in front of your professors, your fellow students, and anyone else who walks in! Audie Murphy didn’t have a stall when he was fighting the Nazis!

Maybe they were trying to discourage gay trysts, for which bathroom stalls have traditionally been prime venues, although having no privacy at all certainly encouraged voyeurism.

Anyway, I did not learn much about differential geometry, and it has always bothered me. I am sorely tempted to get a book and see what I can do with the subject.

If anyone else is interested in this brand of self-torture, I think I’ve found the correct book. A guy named John Lee wrote a text called Introduction to Smooth Manifolds, and it’s supposed to be “wordy,” “readable,” and “suitable for self-study.” To a physicists, those are fighting words, because physicists are crazy, but to a student, they are dog whistles of hope.

People in STEM fields often criticize books that explain things, which is bizarre. Explanation is the primary purpose of a book. The only other purpose is reference, and reference is only useful to people WHO ALREADY KNOW THE MATERIAL. I’ve seen people insult books that explain things well yet don’t cover their subjects exhaustively. Hello? You’re not supposed to cover a subject exhaustively in one book or course. It’s okay to write two separate books.

I made it through graduate electrodynamics (with a weak B) but that certainly didn’t mean I knew everything in the horrible, exhaustive textbook. My professor didn’t know it all, either. If no one could possibly learn everything in the book, how was its exhaustiveness helpful to anyone, EXCEPT people who wanted a reference book?

“Reference” and “instruction.” Two totally different concepts a person with an IQ of 170 ought to be able to comprehend. But then these are verbal concepts, so maybe it’s not fair to expect STEM people to get it.

I think maybe STEM people should swing their heads in a circle for a few minutes every day, so some of the brains slosh over into the language/emotion/common sense areas.

If I get this book, I’ll probably read it for two days, put it down, and forget about it. Still tempting, though.

It’s a bad idea. There is no reason to buy it.

Still might, though.

Smoke Signals from a Kindred Spirit

I feel like writing something that isn’t about Christianity or tools.

I have never completely given up my interest in math and physics. I quit graduate school in 1996 because the University of Texas and ADD drugs had pretty much crushed my soul, but I have kept all my texts, other than the ones ants ate in Miami, and I still do problems from time to time. I remember about 5% of what I learned. I can’t understand a lot of my old homework papers. Still, I am way ahead of a typical college graduate, and I like to use what remains of my old skills.

If you told me I had to take the midterm and final for a calculus class, I could be ready to nail them in a month. Same should go for what is known as “University Physics.” That’s about the best I can say for myself. I wouldn’t even be able to read a graduate-level quantum exam.

Sometimes I watch science videos on Youtube. There are some excellent lectures available. It’s no exaggeration to say that a smart person could use Youtube and Amazon to get the equivalent of a Ph.D. without ever applying to graduate school. A really disciplined person could copy down the curricula from a couple of good institutions, go through the courses online, and end up just as able as someone who studied at a university.

Because I occasionally watch this stuff, Youtube suggests STEM videos from time to time. The other day, it suggested videos by Andrew Dotson, a man who is currently in graduate school. His videos are about the physics grad school experience, which, I hope, is like no other. I hope medical students and math students and so on are not as miserable as physics students. Law students aren’t; I can tell you that. I did virtually nothing in law school, had a great time, and graduated cum laude.

A high percentage of physicists are incredibly bad teachers. There is no way to make you understand how bad they are unless you’ve been there. There are some wonderful instructors out there, but many professors, especially those who write textbooks, are really obstacles to your success. They hurt more than they help.

Here’s a story I like to tell people about my experience. I took Quantum Mechanics at UT. The undergrad version is very hard. The graduate version is exponentially worse. My professor gave us a set of homework problems one week. One of the problems was so hard, I refused to try to write out the endless pages of vector mathematics that gushed out of it. I knew it would be so cumbersome it would be nearly impossible to write or read. I got so desperate, I splurged on Mathematica, a math program which, I hoped, would spew out and print the math for me.

It was a nightmare.

At some point, I talked to my professor about it. He said, “I couldn’t solve that one. How did you do with it?”

This is not an exceptional physics story. It’s totally normal.

Physics is very hard even when you have good teachers. At the University of Miami, my undergrad teachers were generally good. Some were fantastic. I had one guy, Harry Robertson, who was so bad he actually caused a riot in the 1950’s. He gave an exam and failed most of an undergrad class, and they drove their cars around campus, honking their horns to protest. This was long before protesting was cool. I always thought he was sadistic. He never showed any sympathy when people complained. I took his Mechanics class (because I didn’t know about him), and nearly everyone, including grad students, pretty much died on the first exam. We talked to him as a group. He actually laughed at my entire class as if we were complaining about a pea under a mattress. Our futures were on the line, and he truly thought our distress was amusing. Strange guy.

You would think that once a professor causes a riot, his university would take some sort of action to improve his teaching methods, but I took his class around 35 years after the riot, and he hadn’t changed. He just smirked at us. Smirking was just about the only facial expression we saw from him. He was in his seventies and looked ten years older, so it was strange to see such apparent immaturity.

Here’s a fact: when most of a class fails a test, the professor is the problem. You can lose 10% of your class because they’re lazy or simply not smart enough. You can’t lose most of them. In order to get into the class, they had to prove they were qualified, and they were not failing all of their other classes.

He used a book written by a couple of guys named Fetter and Walecka. There are lots of great mechanics books out there, notably Goldstein’s Classical Mechanics, but he picked the worst one in existence. It was not much better than having no book at all. My wild guess is that either Fetter or Walecka was one of his buddies. Or maybe he hadn’t bothered to read it because he cared so little about his students. The book was total garbage, so between the instructor and the book, we were really up against it.

When my Mechanics class bombed on the first test, Robertson’s defense was that one Chinese guy got a good grade. He didn’t ask himself how much help this student got from the Chinese government, which was paying his tuition and expenses. For all he knew, this student was faxing his homework to China so government employees could help him do well. Or maybe he was a true genius. But you don’t flunk most of a class simply because Norbert Wiener strolls in and aces your test.

There is no such thing as an independent Chinese exchange student. They are government projects from a collectivist culture. They don’t just send them over here and let them flounder, or rebel, on their own.

Regarding Robertson’s demeanor and behavior, it’s not exactly rare for STEM people to have no social skills, and sadism is not unusual, either. My undergrad advisor had a touch of it. Most people don’t get a brain with two big halves. If you’re a mathematical genius, you probably won’t break the 60th percentile on the verbal SAT, and you will probably have trouble forming normal relationships. Of course, there are many exceptions. I was one of them. I’m not saying I was a math genius, but I was capable of doing physics well, and I also had a very high verbal aptitude. In physics, I got to know (or at least be acquainted with) a lot of guys who were missing some important psychological components.

You may need to click the gif to make it work.

It’s disturbing to realize that technology, which rules our lives, is in the hands of people who are generally somewhat maladjusted and often extremely hostile. Nothing can be done about it, though.

I quit physics, and it hurt a lot, because I knew I could succeed with a little time and rest. It’s a good thing I quit, because physicists are generally unhappy in their careers, not just in graduate school. But no one likes to fly close to the sun and then plummet to the sidewalk.

I had a legitimate medical problem which made studying very difficult. I was full of drugs that made sleep impossible and had all sorts of powerful emotional effects. UT was not helpful. Their main concern was getting sued. A professor named David Gavenda had had some kind of run-in with an undergrad who was being treated for ADD, and when I went to the department for help, they mentioned Gavenda more than once. They processed students the way a Perdue plant processes chickens, and they did not want any grit in the machinery. If students dedicated years of undergrad study to physics and then moved across the country to study at UT, and if the school’s unwillingness to provide any assistance when they were in need caused them great hardship, it was not important. It wasn’t that UT wanted to hurt them. It was just the inconvenience to the list, as the Nazi officer in Schindler’s List said concerning his unwillingness to help Itzhak Stern get off the train to Auschwitz.

The professor who was supposed to be helping me was Tom Griffy. He was an avuncular Oklahoman who seemed like a great guy at first, but the impression I got whenever I probed for signs of support was that his only concern was to do the least he could do for me in order to prevent an ADA lawsuit. It was extremely obvious that he was being advised by attorneys, not educators.

I was sleeping one or two hours per day at best, and I was under tremendous stress. I asked to be allowed to drop a course and concentrate on another course I felt I could do well in. His response was to force me to take a D in the course I wanted to drop. In the end, after I had to take a medical leave because a misguided doctor tried to treat my ADD with Prozac, he took away my teaching job and said I could only stay if I agreed to settle for a master’s degree.

He did do me one favor. He gave his E&M class a take-home exam, and my computer crashed while I was working on it, so I had to start over by hand. After I submitted the result, my computer functioned again, and I printed out the answer I had originally intended to give him. I put it in his faculty mail box just so he would realize I was not a moron. To my amazement, he accepted it even though it was late. That was a grand gesture by UT standards, and I did appreciate it.

Dealing with the school showed me, repeatedly, exactly how I measured up in the ecosystem. I was getting $15 per hour to tutor students privately. UT contacted the grad students and asked us if we wanted to tutor their athletes for less than half of that. Bag boys at the grocery a few blocks from my apartment made more. Kaplan was paying $12.

When I went to the student pharmacy to get my Ritalin prescription filled, a lady who worked there told me they had it, but I couldn’t have it. She said it was discrimination. That’s the word she used. She said they had a female athlete who was taking huge doses, and she got all the Ritalin. You know how that works. The athlete probably didn’t graduate, and if she did, she’s probably stocking shelves at a store somewhere. She was still important, because UT was all about sports.

It was truly bizarre. Like any university, UT had a socialist mindset, so they provided inexpensive medical insurance which was supposed to cover just about any need I had. And I could not use it. I had to go to pharmacies and pay full retail for drugs. They never tried to explain this. Good thing I didn’t have cancer. Maybe Bevo, UT’s mascot, might have come down with bovine leukemia, and he would have gotten my chemotherapy drugs.

UT had a reputation for treating students like worthless and fungible objects, so I could not say I had not been warned.

There is no way to make other people understand how miserable I was after things went sour at UT. I did not have a single friend, which is not unusual for grad students in physics. I couldn’t even get away from my stress by sleeping, because the pills would not permit it. I actually found myself lying in bed making a sort of rocking motion to distract myself, like a zoo animal that had been kept isolated for 20 years. It was the best I could do.

I had pinned all my hopes on physics, so I had no other plan for my life. Law school wasn’t a tantalizing, prestigious alternative. To me, it was like running home and flipping burgers.

I was away from God, so when I prayed, I felt as though I were in a concrete cistern and the prayers bounced off the ceiling.

When you don’t even have God to talk to, you have serious problems.

Since leaving UT, I have had no one to talk to about my experience. I can tell people about it, but they can’t understand.

Youtube surprised me with promoting Andrew Dotson’s videos, and I’ve watched several. It’s crazy to see how right I was about grad school. People have gaslighted me, trying to make me feel I wasn’t physics material, and some have said the teaching and books weren’t the problem. Now I have someone who confirms what I’ve said. I’ve never really had that before. For some reason, many people defend the physics education apparatus, and that’s completely nuts.

The other day, I saw a thumbnail for one of his videos, and I saw that it was supposedly about the most infamous graduate text. I knew instantly what he had to be talking about! Classical Electrodynamics, by J.D. Jackson. This was the book Tom Griffy used. Behind the scenes, the graduate students advised each other to read books by people like Leonard Eyges.

I don’t know where to start criticizing Jackson.

Jackson had a hard act to follow. My undergrad E&M book was written by a man named Griffiths. His book was extraordinary. It started with pages of mathematical preparation. Then he explained physics pretty well. His problems were chosen wisely, too. Someone must not have told him the proper way to write a physics book.

Jackson abandoned mks units for cgs (centimeter-gram-second). Why? I had been using mks (meter-kilogram-second) for several years. Every other class I took used mks. There is nothing wrong with mks. Griffiths used it. Someone tried to tell me it was because centimeters were more useful for the small measurements in E&M. Seriously? Can you really “see” a light wavelength in your mind’s eye? They’re measured in nanometers. Is it really helpful to measure them in nanometers times a hundred? You can’t imagine either measurement, so why not stick to the system every other course uses?

The big issue was that Jackson didn’t explain anything. Also, his problems were diabolically hard.

If you’re not going to explain anything, what is the purpose of your textbook?

There is no satisfactory answer to that question.

Here are some snippets from glowing reviews on the book’s Amazon page:

“[A]lmost no exposition is given for the concepts presented in the book.”

“Pedagogically, the book is about as bad as it gets.”

“[I]t doesn’t teach it at all, it just holds you accountable for it.”

“Sometimes he skips about 20 steps and tells you it’s obvious how he got to the next equation. Even my professor and TA could not explain how Jackson arrived at some of his equations.”

“Folks, find something else to use for education! This book is for someone who knows EM and needs a reference. It has no place in a classroom.”

“wtf some one write a new book.”

“There’s got to be a better way. But I’m told this is the best out there. Very depressing.”

“This is without a doubt the absolute worst textbook I have ever used. The material is presented is a random illogical order, as if it were written with the sole purpose to confuse readers.”

“The only reason this stinking rotting pile of crap is used in American universities is because the professors themselves were forced to use this book.”

Perhaps the best comment, from a physics professor:

“As a course text it is a bad choice and the tradition of using it is akin to hazing. Those who continue to teach lecture courses using Jackson are lazy.”

I always say math is much easier than physics. That’s not really true, of course. Math seems much easier than physics when you’re studying it. Why? Several reasons.

First, when you study an area of math, and you get homework problems, you know what kind of math you’re going to be using. If you’re studying calculus I, you know you’re not going to have to do a contour integral. Physics…not the same. You can’t even guess what kind of math you’re going to need until you see the problem.

Second, physics requires you to understand how the physical world works. If you can’t draw a picture and come up with a physical model that makes sense, you can’t even define the problem. Math doesn’t work like that. They just give you an expression or two and tell you what to do to them. It’s all handed to you.

Third, math problems generally have answers. I’ve never had a math professor give me a problem he knew had no answer. Physics professors do that all the time. Not helpful, when you’re already doing 30 hours of homework a week. You start in on a problem at 5 p.m., assuming it will take 45 minutes, and at 3 a.m., you’re still banging away at it, ignoring other problems you can actually solve, because you think that if it was assigned to you, there has to be an answer.

I had a professor assign a problem with an integral that diverged, and he didn’t tell us the answer was nonsense. What’s the point?

Fourth, math professors and their books explain things. I can’t understand why physics people are different. A math book will give you a long derivation to study. Someone like Jackson will omit it and tell you to figure it out yourself as an exercise.

Fifth, physics professors think it’s perfectly fine to give an exam on which a 30 is an A. Everyone in the class walks out thinking they’ve failed, they feel depressed until the grades come in, and then they find out the only guy who got a high score is the Chinese guy who never leaves his Chinese-government-subsidized dorm room.

Here’s something funny about physics: when a math instructor teaches a subject, he gives it a week or a month or a semester. If a physics professor knows you need to have a certain skill AND he condescends to show it to you, he will slap it on the board and devote maybe 20 minutes to it. What a math student learns over a period of days, you have to absorb in a few minutes.

Math isn’t always easier than physics. It’s as hard as you want to make it, and…you don’t have to make it hard. You can get an undergrad degree in math, taking courses that are much easier than physics courses, but if you deliberately look for hard subjects, you can torment yourself pretty badly.

I have a math minor, which means I have all the credits for a math degree, except that I was advised to take a certain course instead of another course that would have made me a math major. I don’t know how many credits I have, but if a math major was required to have 45, for example, that’s how many I have. I used to do maybe 4 hours of math homework per week, and I never had a problem. Undergrad physics took up at least three times that long.

I’m sure there were math courses that would have been more challenging. Graduate-level course, I would imagine. I didn’t take them.

I never took one hard math course, and I did complex variables, real analysis, partial differential equations…the works. Physics made everything seem easy.

To get back to the videos, here is Andrew Dotson’s video on J.D. Jackson. If you’re still reading, you may find it amusing. For me, it was vindication. There may be profanity; I can’t remember.

Here’s his video on the difference between undergrad and graduate courses in physics. It’s 100% true.

I was a little intimidated when I heard him talking about his work. I didn’t understand a lot of what he said. Then I looked him up. He got his degree from Old Dominion, which is not quite Harvard, and he’s studying at New Mexico State University. I looked the school up, and it’s ranked 124 by US News and World Report. When I studied at UT, it was ranked 22. He got rejected by lots of places. He can’t be any better than I was. I guess I just don’t remember all the things he talks about in his videos, so I feel as though I’ve never studied them.

I cannot remember anything about Bessel functions. Not for the life of me. I assume I must have encountered them.

Why am I writing this? I suppose it’s because it’s so rare for anyone to touch these particular nerves.

I’m going to try to quit watching his videos, but I did break down and buy a new copy of Mathews and Walker, to replace the one the ants ate. I don’t know if I’ll use it. I’m just mad at the ants. RE the ants, I want closure.

I hope this young man does well. He has chosen a very hard road which pays very poorly considering how long it takes to become qualified and how extreme the qualifications are.

Getting Ahead by Copying Other People’s Work

I think I have the answer to my latest welding puzzle.

To complete my Offroad Swag finger brake kit, I have to weld a big angle iron into a channel. The angle iron will open upward, and the outer edges will be welded to the upper edges of the channel. Other people who have done this have gotten warped projects.

I now have a copy of Design of Weldments, which is a useful book a Youtuber recommended. You don’t have to be a welder to find it useful. I don’t think the Youtuber welds. It’s useful for anyone who builds stuff. This morning I checked the book to see if it could help me, and I found the answer in chapter 6.

The correct procedure for my welds is to preset. This means I need to clamp the work down so it can’t bend during or after welding. I can clamp it down as it is, or I can put a slight bend in it, away from the anticipated warp. Presetting is what the pros do.

I thought about peening the welds. This means beating them with a hammer to flatten and lengthen them while they’re still hot. The book says this is a waste of time.

It says I should do the welds in small segments, and I should wait for each set of segments to cool before welding the next set. I say “set” because I plan to do one segment on each side of the project at a time, so they will balance each other. The project can warp back-to-front as well as vertically, so you can’t just weld the front and then turn it around and weld the back. Funny how no one on Youtube has checked to see if he has warpage in the horizontal plane! It’s surprising that I figured that out and they didn’t.

I can clamp the project to my table saw, with sheet metal on the saw table to keep spatter off, or I can put it in the press and weld it. The press would be better, but it may be hard to do, because I’ll need something longer than arbor plates to support the project.

I can use the table saw easily because I now have a 25-foot extension cord for my welders and plasma cutter. I won’t have to shove the 700-pound saw across the shop.

Incidentally, Harbor Freight provides good arbor plates with its presses. They used to use cast iron, which is brittle and snaps suddenly. Now they’re steel. Good thing to know. If you have cast iron, you should get new plates. It’s dangerous when a plate snaps.

Right now, I have two jobs on my mind. One is to practice MIG until I feel good about doing the welding, and the other is to rearrange the workshop so I can make a final decision about where to put my machine tools. Right now, I’m leaning toward putting them out there instead of in the garage. I would need some serious electrical work.

If you think your shop is too small, spend a whole day rearranging it. It will expand by at least a third. Trust me.

I should be able to finish my tractor front end loader brace today, except for the paint, which takes a while to cure. Then I have to decide what to do with the tractor. I intended to park it inside with the loader up, but maybe it’s okay to park it outside with a sturdy cover over the seat. It is, after all, a tractor, and I will probably have another solution in a year or so, so it would not be out there long.

I’ll bet someone sells tractor seat covers. I’ll check.

I can’t find temporary covers, like grill covers, for tractor seats. There are a lot of permanent covers which would probably be a hassle to take off when I mow. You can’t sit in a wet seat cover.

A small tarp will work fine. That’s what I should get.

I’m still making the brace. I want to be able to walk under the loader and work on the tractor.

God told me three great things the other day.

1. All strength comes from inheritance.

2. There is no strength without inheritance.

3. Satan hates inheritance.

When you inherit, you don’t earn. You just receive. Other people do the work for you. This works with knowledge as well as wealth. When you inherit knowledge, other people make the mistakes and suffer the resulting problems. You come along later and get the knowledge that works, so you don’t suffer or waste time.

When you get knowledge from other people by any method, it’s like inheriting. They do the work, and you get the benefit.

I could sit around and theorize about how to weld things, and that would be my natural inclination, but it’s a lot better to open a book and get the truth–BAM–like that.

Think how rich and informed you would be if your all of your ancestors had understood and applied the principles of inheritance. Every generation would have made the next one stronger. You would have been born into a life of privilege and power. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way. People forget and waste, and their kids have to start with little or nothing.

Fred Trump was rich. Donald Trump is rich. Eric Trump is rich. His kids are too young to have jobs, but they’re rich, too. This is how life is supposed to be. The Trump patriarchs pass on wealth and knowledge so their kids hit the ground running. Making your children grovel and toil like mules in order to get where you are is stupid and often based in a sick desire to see them fail.

I could never figure out all the things in the book on my own. I like coming up with my own solutions to problems, but it’s smarter to find out what other people have done.

You can see why physicists are so useless compared to engineers. When a physicist has a problem involving building something, his skills will only help him to write equations and work from scratch. An engineer will pick up a book, look at a table, and copy the answer. Or he’ll stand up and ask the guy in the next cubicle. Some engineers complain that they never get to do math or design anything at work. Everything is laid out for them. That’s a good problem to have.

Engineers inherit things physicists have to build.

Interesting stuff.