Tools Renewed

A few days back, on a hobby machining forum, I made an offhand remark about cordless tools. I said the more I used them, the less I liked them.

People adore their cordless tools, so my statement provoked a torrent of emotional argument, as though I had said people’s kids were ugly. I didn’t say cordless tools were bad, or that no one should use them. I just said my own infatuation with them was wearing thin, and I can back that up.

I believe the first two cordless tools I had experience with were screwdrivers. One, which was really primitive, was from Brookstone. The other, which came later, was a Black & Decker. They were nice to have, but the batteries didn’t last long, either short-term or long-term. They didn’t run very long on one charge, and they gave up the ghost completely after relatively short lives.

After that, I believe my next tool was a Panasonic impact driver. It came with a drill, which was silly, because once you have an impact driver, you don’t need a drill. You need a HAMMER drill, sure, but not a DRILL drill. The impact driver does everything the drill can do, better, while using less energy. Impact drivers run longer on a single charge, because of the way they generate torque.

I think I used the drill one time. I only bought it because the combination of the drill and impact driver was cheaper than the impact driver by itself.

The impact driver used NiMH batteries, which stands for, “Lame and Destined to Die Real Soon.” Okay, it doesn’t. Clearly. But it should. NiMH batteries don’t last long, and they have a memory effect, which means that if you top them off, you can end up with a situation in which the batteries will only hold a partial charge. Something like that. Look it up, because I’m on a roll right now.

I thought the impact driver was the greatest tool in existence. It magically turned fasteners without imparting the torque back to my wrist (drills can’t do that). It applied more torque than a drill. It gave much better control, so I didn’t have problems driving screws too far into things. It was much harder to strip screw heads with the impact driver. It ran longer than a drill. It had pretty LED’s.

I would have felt differently had I known the batteries were going to conk out while I was still getting to know the tool.

Before too long, the tool would only run a short time after a charge. I looked up the price of new batteries. I believe they are still sold, and they run about $85.

I also got a hammer drill. It was an 18-volt Bosch. I loved it. I used it to drive a 5/8″ bit through 12″ of aged concrete (concrete gets harder with time) without stopping. It was wonderful.

The drill had Nicad batteries. Like NiMH batteries, Nicads have serious issues. They die young, and they also discharge quickly when you’re not using them.

My love affair with the drill ended when the batteries stopped holding a useful charge. I can still use it for brief periods, but the batteries are not well at all.

Since then I have bought other cordless items. I got a top-rated hand vacuum for kitchen messes. It runs maybe four minutes, so you really need to have your sweeping planned out when you pick it up. I have a leaf blower. It runs long enough to blow crap off the porch, and then you’re done. It’s pretty weak, so when you use it, you have to choose your battles.

I got a screwdriver and a Jobmax as well. I also got a corded Jobmax. I don’t think I would have gotten the cordless one had I thought about the corded one sooner.

My newer tools have lithium-ion batteries, which are better than NiMH and Nicad, but they will still die and need replacement.

With this experience behind me, I will explain why I don’t love cordless tools.

1. They cost three times as much as real tools, and that doesn’t include replacement batteries.

The drill cost about $275. When I replaced it with a very good Bosch corded hammer drill, I paid about $90. I was flabbergasted. I didn’t really know what hammer drills cost when I got the cordless one. The Panasonic combo cost me about the same amount as the Bosch drill. I replaced it with an infinitely superior corded Makita for less than half the price.

2. Real tools are often better than cordless.

The Makita impact driver I bought is a lot stronger than the Panasonic it replaced. It doesn’t have as many toys on it, but then they’re not actually useful. You pull the trigger, and it turns. The corded hammer drill I bought has a real chuck, unlike the cordless one, with a real key. I paid less and got more.

3. In order to make cordless tools useful, you have to become a battery nursemaid.

You are things you can do to screw up tool batteries. You have to be careful. If you want to be safe, you have to make sure they never discharge too much. Also, you can’t tell how much time a charge has left on it by looking at the battery. You have to guess. A dead battery looks like a fresh one. So if you forget to charge a battery, it’s easy to get ambushed. You have to make sure you charge the batteries all the time, but not too much, because too much cycling wears them out.

If you screw up, you can find yourself holding a tool that insists on a 30-minute nap, right when you need it to finish a job.

The solution to this is to buy more batteries. That’s not cheap, and they’re heavy.

4. Tools use batteries that are incompatible with each other, so you have to have lots of batteries and chargers.

If you’re really confident that every one of a single company’s cordless tools are what you want, you can buy a huge combination kit that comes with two batteries. They won’t be the company’s best batteries, but let’s pretend that’s not true. You can get six tools, two batteries, and a charger for a grand or so. What if the kit comes with tools you don’t want? Tough. You take what they offer. What if you want the super-duper high-capacity batteries? You have to buy them separately, so instead of a grand, think about $1400.

If, like most people, you want a grinder from this company and a drill from that company, you will be stuck with incompatible batteries and multiple chargers. You won’t be able to prepare for a day of work by charging all four of your Milwaukee batteries. You’ll have to charge three Milwaukees, two Dewalts, a Ridgid, and four Bosches. You will have to keep all the chargers plugged in, and they will suck up room.

5. The need to buy new batteries will never, ever go away. Ever. Even if you break it down over time, it doesn’t feel good, paying $25 per year in perpetuity to use a tool worth $90.

Here is how corded tools work:

1. They are always, always, always ready to work, even if you just spent the last week in jail and could not get home to charge them.

2. They do not stop working because you forgot to feed them.

3. They almost never become obsolete.

4. You will never, ever have to worry about not being able to get new batteries or support from the manufacturers.

5. They generally work better.

6. They are lighter.

7. They cost a third as much. Not 75% as much. A third.

Does that mean I hate cordless tools? No. It just means I don’t need them badly enough to put up with the crap.

If I had to work far from electricity several times a week, I would get cordless tools. If I were a professional construction worker, I would get cordless tools. If I could deduct the prices of the tools and the never-ending cost of replacing batteries on my taxes, I might get cordless tools. None of those criteria apply to me. I do everything well within reach of electrical sockets, preferably with the air conditioning on and the stereo playing.

So anyway, I got the cordless guys going, and they seemed to feel like I was saying all cordless tools are evil and that no one should ever have one. Nuance. You know how that goes.

I will probably buy another cordless screwdriver if the one I have dies, and I do like the Jobmax, but I’m not in a hurry to get anything else.

With all that said, listening to the pro-cordless crowd got me thinking, and I decided to poke around on the web and look into cost-effective ways to save the drill and impact driver. I knew there were ways to get around the high cost of new batteries, so I Googled.

I saw some interesting options, so I got out the charger for the hammer drill and plugged it in. Nothing happened. So right away, I was off on a detour.

The charger is a Bosch BC130. I believe it’s the second one I’ve bought. They have a tendency to drop dead for no reason. There was no way in hell I was going to put down fifty or seventy bucks or whatever for a charger for a drill that doesn’t work, so I tried to find out what was wrong with it. I will relay that information here in case anyone else has the same problem in the future.

The BC130 has a resistor between the big main caps on the circuit board. It burns up. It’s said to be a 1/2-watt 180K resistor, and the solution is a 1-watt (minimum) resistor.

I’ll tell you what you need to know to get it fixed.

First, the case is held on by five Phillips screws. Take them out. Now you will find that the case sticks at one corner when you try to open it. Relax. There is a smaller circuit board that holds the charging prongs, and it’s attached to the upper part of the case. It is held in place by three black 20-gauge wires that are way too short.

You can pry the small board down out of its place. It’s held there by two plastic pins, and friction is the only thing that keeps it from coming off. Just pry carefully.

Don’t touch anything until you discharge the capacitors on the main circuit board. They hold lots of charge, and they can hang onto it for quite some time. The only sure way I saw to discharge them was to short their leads with a wire.

To get access to their leads, you need to get at the underside of the board. There are two plastic tabs you have to push back with a screwdriver, and they will release the board from the case bottom. The big problem here is that when you do this, you may short the caps with your fingers, so try not to do that, because you will die.

If your resistor is fried, you will probably see charring and so on when you examine it. To release it, you can attach a hemostat to one of the resistor’s leads and pull on it from above the board while you heat the soldered connection underneath the board. The lead will come out, and then you can do the other one. Don’t use too much heat, because the foil traces under the board are easy to melt loose.

Now all you have to do is stick a new resistor in there.

Unbelievably, I did not have a 2-watt 180K resistor, so I made an assembly using two 150K’s and a 470K. It comes out to almost exactly 180K, and because there are three resistors instead of one, the heat is spread out more. Hopefully it won’t fry like the resistor Bosch put in there. It was bigger than the old resistor, so I let it stand up on the leads in the space between the caps. I was thinking this might allow it to give off heat better, since it won’t be against the circuit board.

You might want to increase the lengths of the 3 black leads that go from the main board to the secondary board, to make reassembly easier. I didn’t have to.

That’s it. Hopefully your charger will work.

I did this today, and I charged up the old drill batteries. It may still be useful for short jobs.

I also looked around and found a Youtuber who has a video on replacing the guts of Nicad batteries with lithium. I may try that, just for fun. If I can have new batteries for $20 each instead of $100 each, I may want to keep the drill.

I don’t know much about lithium batteries, but supposedly they die permanently if you let them discharge too far. You can prevent this by monitoring the voltage while you use them. The Youtube guy found little meters that cost a few bucks each, and he stuck them in his modified batteries. Pretty cool. I suppose it would be bad if he dropped the tool and broke a meter; you probably lose some of the original battery’s toughness.

If you have the same batteries I have (Bosch BAT181), you may find them hard to open. The nice damen und herren at Bosch have decided that opening the case is VERBOTEN and NICHT for das konsumer. Because, hey, if you can open it, you can fix it, and then they can’t charge you a könig’s ransom for new batteries.

Bosch closes the battery case with five Torx screws (so intimidating, *yawn*). They try to make it look worse than it is by covering one screw with a piece of plastic that looks like metal. If you drill a small hole in the center of it, you can insert a sharp tool and yank it out. Then you can get at the Torx screw.

Good luck.

One more thing. I found out that Nicads often lose capacity due to whiskering. Because the green lunatics have gone way overboard in ridding the world of lead (one of the world’s most useful metals), electronic devices tend to grow metal whiskers on their soldered connections. These whiskers create shorts and do bad stuff.

Some brave people de-whisker their batteries using high currents. You find yourself a decent current supply at a fairly high voltage, and you apply it to your battery’s terminals. There may be stuff you have to bypass; I’m not sure. Anyway, if you have whiskers and you get rid of them by running jolts of current through them, you may find your batteries work again. You don’t want to leave the current on for a long time. You just want to whack the batteries briefly. Just pop them.

Speaking of “pop,” the down side is that sometimes the batteries explode. So you could die or be blinded or horribly disfigured. Things to think about.

I may try this on my batteries, after hiding behind a garage door.

You never know what I’ll do when I get bored.

Maybe this will be useful to someone. It kept me amused for a couple of hours.

As for cordless tools, yes, they have their place. But I’m glad I’m not sitting here trusting my work to a cordless compu

Sweet Freedom

I finally finished reading The Iliad. It happened yesterday. I feel like a runaway slave.

I got one good thing out of it: new empathy for my college-age self. I had forgotten how mind-numbingly boring liberal arts courses are, and The Iliad brought it all back to me. I criticize myself for being lazy in college, and I am correct to do so, but in my partial defense, college is really, really dull.

It’s not always dull. It’s mainly dull when you’re taking stupid the wrong courses.

I always did well at verbal tasks when I was a kid, winning the city spelling bee and so forth. I was an excellent writer. I understood literature without much help. I won a couple of statewide prizes in French.

When I was ready to apply to college, the head of the English department at Columbia College of Columbia University, a Mr. Carl Hovde, sent me a letter inviting me to apply. Columbia was top five, as American universities go. They claimed.

It was sort of assumed that I would be a liberal arts guy.

Further [seeming] confirmation came from my poor grades in math. I didn’t dislike math, but you can’t cram very well in math courses, so it’s an area where lazy students get eaten alive. I procrastinated doggedly, and my grades reflected it. My advisor “recommended” I stop taking math courses after the 11th grade.

It was bizarre, really. I got a D- in Algebra II, and then I got an A- in Geometry the class that followed it. Then I believe I failed the next course, which was called Math Analysis.

Why would anyone get an A- between a D- and an F?

In subjects like history and literature, you can do almost nothing until right before your exams and still get A’s or B’s. This is why most students gravitate toward them.

Incidentally, I always feel funny using the term “liberal arts” to describe the basket-weaving, distaffy side of the curriculum. Today we use it to mean anything except math, engineering, and science, but in reality, it’s supposed to include math and science. I don’t know where we lost track of that.

But I will persist in using the misnomer.

I thought of myself as someone not destined to be involved with math or science, and that was a big mistake. When I got to college and started taking classes in subjects like literature and philosophy, I did not have a good time. It was a lot like the past week. “I can’t believe how boring this is.” “I can’t believe they’re paying this guy to tell me about Don Quixote.” “Why does this book have to be so long?”

The literature courses I took were generally a complete waste of money and time. I am not saying that as a surly kid with a weed habit. I am saying that as a surly old person who actually knows.

Having graduated from college and ready many books, and having sat through many literature lectures, I can say with assurance that there is nothing, nothing, nothing you can learn from a literature professor that you can’t learn with a library card or an Internet connection. College runs around a thousand dollars per credit, so if you take a literature course, it will cost you several thousand dollars to have an old hippie explain Huckleberry Finn to you. There is no way in HELL you can convince a reasonable person that this makes sense.

I’ll bet there are literature lectures online for nothing, if you are really determined to suffer. I’ll check.

Of COURSE. There was no way I could have been wrong. Here’s a Harvard Shakespeare course, presented free of charge.

On top of the issue of waste, when you let other people charge you to explain books to you, you are very likely to be taught ancient, revered error few have the guts to correct.

I’ve been going through the Columbia College Literature Humanities syllabus, and today I read Sappho’s Lyrics. Don’t read it; trust me. I’m just mentioning it in order to make a point. Everyone thinks Sappho was a lesbian. The word “lesbian” comes from “Lesbos,” which is where she lived. “Sapphic” means “lesbian.” If you go to college, there’s a good chance your prof will tell you Sappho was a lesbian. I read her book today, and there is absolutely no way you can conclude that from the fragments of manic-depressive verse she left behind.

I went online and read up on her. Guess what? There is no proof that she was a lesbian. There are real scholars who say so. They must be lesbian deniers; they reject settled literary consensus.

Liberal arts professors generally aren’t all that smart, and they’re not original. They memorize and parrot. If one makes a mistake in 1100 A.D., another is likely to repeat it for money in 2016. Think about that while your life savings are paying for creaky, dubious insights on Dickens and Proust.

If you’re smart, you’re smart enough to make your own mistakes instead of swallowing someone else’s.

I realize our culture has to be preserved, and people have to take literature and art courses and pay for them. I’m just suggesting that you–the person reading this–would be smart to let someone else shoulder the burden. Take something useful instead. It doesn’t have to be math or science. Learn a language…well, Rosetta Stone software is probably better than college. Okay; study music. It’s tough to form a jazz orchestra on your own.

Some liberal arts professors are really good, but come on. No literature or history teacher is $3000-per-semester good. Especially not in the age of Youtube.

When I finally took some left-brain courses, it was a lot more fun than poring over the grey pages of Machiavelli and Joyce. I still did badly. I had never learned study habits, and I was perpetually depressed about the divorce-related drama going on in my family, so I didn’t have much energy. I had no self-confidence at all, as a result of growing up with abuse. But at least I enjoyed the lectures and labs.

I did well at gut courses I hated, because they were easy. I did poorly in great courses I liked, because they were hard.

Liberal arts people love to say left-brain people are not smarter; just different. That’s a load. They’re smarter. No one ever graduates from college and says, “Man, Survey of American Cinema was tough.” Everyone complains about physics.

Left-brain people are usually less capable when it comes to verbal stuff, but they are not as stupid as right-brain people trying to do math.

I thought I was a right-brainer because I did well in that area, but in reality I was just a shocking left-brained underachiever.

I could never be a literature professor. I can read it. I can understand it. I can come up with BS insights with the best of them. It’s still dull. It’s fun to read for recreational purposes, but choking down boring tomes in 100-page daily doses in order to be prepared for mildewed lectures your prof wrote 50 years ago and never revised…that’s not my idea of stimulation.

I still plan to read these books, for the same reason kids memorize the alphabet. There are some things a civilized person should know, and also, I will feel like I’ve partially compensated for avoiding reading them when I was young.

I got started on The Odyssey today. It’s only 400 pages, and some of that is surely notes which I can ignore. After that comes Genesis, which I can skip for obvious reasons. Then Herodotus, which I skipped in high school as well as college. Herodotus isn’t literature, so I plan to get a translation I can read, not one that makes literature profs happy.

It looks like The Iliad is the real Sunday punch of first semester Literature Humanities. It’s the longest and presumably most boring book.

When this is over, my understanding of the classics will be not unlike the understanding of Europe you get from a ten-cities-in-three-days tour of Europe. But that will more than suffice.

I expect praise. People may even say this was my aristeia.

ASUS Deserves a Kick in the Butt

In 2012, I got myself an ASUS Transformer Prime tablet. The reviews said it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to the world.

I wanted to be able to read ebooks. That was all I cared about. I could have gotten a Kindle or some other dedicated reader, but I figured I might as well get something versatile in case I wanted apps or whatever. The Transformer seemed like the right move.

After I did all my research and got the tablet home, I discovered that it had major wifi and GPS problems. The case on the tablet is aluminum, not the usual plastic, and it (DUH) interferes with radio waves. The antennas are inside the box, and they do not communicate very well with…anything.

On top of that, the little card holding the antennas connects to the tablet using pogo pins. These are little nipply pins that hold circuit boards in place. My understanding is that they’re not intended to be used as connectors, but they’re metallic, so ASUS figured what the hell.

When you close the ASUS case, two pogo pins on one side push against two copper strips on the antenna card, and you have contact. Or not. If something isn’t aligned right, or if the contacts are dirty (mine were), you get squat.

The pogo problem is so stupid it can sometimes be fixed by squeezing the tablet while you use it. This pushes the pins into the copper and improves conduction.

That’s not a great solution. You don’t want to sit in Starbucks squeezing your tablet with one hand and holding your $7 latte in the other while you try to look at Scrib’d.

By the way, some applications are useless when your Wifi is bad, even if they claim you can use them offline. Scrib’d is a prime (pun or whatever not intended) example. It won’t save your place in books. It takes forever to open books you have supposedly saved to your device. It’s horrible.

I’m not sure what to do about GPS, and I’m not sure I care, but I can tell you want to do about the Wifi. First, install a free app called Wifi Analyzer and check your reception. Don’t rely on those stupid bars.

The Transformer opens very easily. No, seriously. You can find sites online that show you how to do it. Basically, you pull two rubber stoppers out of the side where the USB hole is, and inside you find two latches. You push them to the left using the tip of a tiny Phillips screwdriver, and that releases the case from the screen.

The screen has a gaskety thing under it, against the aluminum case, and it’s sticky. You separate it by shoving a guitar pick (only the tip) in the gap and sliding it around the case perimeter. It will try to close up behind the pick, so as you go, put shims in there to hold it open.

Eventually, the case opens. You open the USB side first, and the other side acts sort of like a hinge. Don’t rely on my instructions. Find pictures online.

Don’t use metal tools. You’ll gouge everything.

Once you’re inside, you’ll see the antenna card stuck to the underside of the screen side of the tablet. On the outside edge of the case, you’ll see two copper tabs labeled GPS and WLAN (Wifi) or something like that. I don’t have it in front of me.

On the other half of the tablet, opposite the card, you’ll see two gold pogo pins that touch the card when the case is closed.

I took a burnishing tool and polished the pins and the copper foil contacts on the card. A burnishing tool is a little stick with a very fine abrasive on it. You can probably use 2000-grit sandpaper if you have a light touch. Maybe this is a mistake, though, because it’s possible that the crap I removed from my foil was actually some sort of grease intended to prevent oxidation. We’ll see. You can always grease it again.

To fix the Wifi problem, cut a piece of insulated stranded (not solid) wire 2.75″ long. You want very thin wire. Expose about 1/4″. Yank the exposed portion so the other end of the wire sinks slightly into the insulation. This will hide it so it doesn’t touch anything conductive.

Flatten the exposed part of the wire. Then rest it on the WLAN foil and close the case. You want the metal to be pinched between the case halves. This holds the wire in place. Don’t let the insulation come between the halves, because it’s thick, and it will obstruct them when you close the case. I suppose this could crack the glass. If you’re a real man, take a diamond burr or a file and make a little notch in the aluminum side of the case so the insulation will have a place to go, and then close it. I did not find this necessary, because the case holds the metal strands very tightly.

You want the wire to be slightly over 2.5″ long, because that’s a good length for wifi. The length affects the reception. The wavelength is 4.92″, so you want a nice even fraction, like ~2.5″ or ~1.25″. I am not an EE, so I may be wrong.

If you’re getting good contact, you should see a gigantic reception improvement when you turn on Wifi Analyzer. If not, maybe the pogo pin is too short, and you need to put a wad of foil or soldering braid between it and the antenna card.

I considered soldering a wire directly to the pogo pin, which would be the really manly move, but I decided to try the other way first, because it was easy to do and easy to reverse.

If you solder a wire to your pogo pin, you might lose the ability to remove the card (if you’re bad at removing solder), but come on. Do you plan to remove it?

Now you have a wire sticking out of your tablet. How will you live? It shouldn’t be a problem. Unless you’re crazy, you have a protective case on your tablet, and the wire will be easy to conceal.

Look, do you want wifi or not?

I used a 22-gauge black Teflon wire. It’s very thin and hard to see. I would guess that a thinner wire would work about as well.

The tablet works now. Very exciting.

I assume this will also work for GPS, but I haven’t tried it. I don’t know what the wavelength is or how long the wire should be. ASUS supplies a worthless attachment for improving the GPS performance. Everyone hates it, so I’m not trying it. They actually had a class-action suit and gave people a free attachment (“dongle”) and $17. I read that the dongle obstructs the USB port, so you can’t connect a charger. Yeah, that’s what you want. Power-sucking GPS and no DC supply.

I may to back in later and solder the wire to the pogo pin, but I probably won’t unless something blows up.

Enjoy your now-working tablet.

Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned

Yesterday I wrote something about how I studied calculus without having to read Newton’s notes, and I said I probably would not have understood them because only one bit of his mathematical notation survived. Today I decided to look it up, and I found out the story is not quite that simple.

Cambridge University has Newton’s papers. Some of them, at least. I am too lazy to check. Google and come back and look smarter than me. Cambridge has put images of the papers online, partly for reference purposes, but also partly to make the rest of us feel stupid.

I admit, the last phrase of the last paragraph is conjecture.

It turns out there are several reasons why I would not have understood his notes, and his notation is probably not among them. The biggest obstacle would have been his copious use of Latin and Greek. I was “educated” in American schools, so the only Latin I know is pig Latin. As for Greek, I’m halfway through The Iliad, and I use Windex as a topical antiseptic.

Actually, I took a semester of Latin in high school, but, following my strict policy, I did nearly nothing, so I got a D.

Latin is a horrible language. Like Russian, Latin is inflected. That means you have to change the endings of words depending on how you use them. If English worked this way, you might have to write things like, “I shot the cow,” and, “The coworum rolled over and died.”

Leo Tolstoy and his wife had different last names because he was male and she was female. Terrifying.

When I was studying physics, I got really handy with exponents. Typically, when you take the root of an expression (once you get past about the 21st grade, you have expressions instead of numbers), you put a radical around it.

It looks like I’m wrong. I checked, and it’s a “radical sign,” not a radical. It’s a little box sort of like a division box. A radical sign means “square root.”

Radical signs are stupid. A radical sign can’t mean anything other than “square root” unless you add a little superscript to the left of it. It’s sloppy and cumbersome. I didn’t like it.

“Square root” actually means “to the 1/2 power.” You can have any real number as an exponent. It doesn’t have to be 1/2 or an integer. It can be 2/3 or pi or whatever you like. It can be annoying, using a radical sign to express powers not involving multiples of 1/2.

I worked around that. I used to use parentheses with fractional exponents. For a square root, I used “1/2.”

This leads to all sorts of conveniences.

Say you want to put the square root of something in the denominator of a fraction. You just make the “1/2” negative. What if you want a cube root? Use “1/3.” What if you want the square root of the cube? Use “3/2.”

What if you have an equation with an expression with an exponent on one side, and you want to get rid of the exponent? You invert the exponent, squeeze it between the bars of the equal sign so it pops out on the other side, and apply it there. For example, if you have 4 = (16)^1/2, you turn it into 4^2 = 16. It works with any real number. For all I know it works with complex numbers and quaternions. Don’t ask me what a quaternion is.

Well…of COURSE it works for complex numbers. I’ve seen like a billion complex exponents.

This is exciting, isn’t it? This is what you come here for.

If you have a big string of expressions with exponents, multiplied by each other, you just add the exponents. If you want to move an expression from a denominator to a numerator, you multiply the exponent by -1.

This is really helpful, because it helps you put everything on the same line, and it turns multiplication and division into addition and subtraction.

Why tell you all this? Because Newton didn’t do it. If he wanted to take the sixth root of something, he put THREE radical signs around it. I would have lost my mind counting the brackets.

I guess if you’re Isaac Newton, you find all forms of notation unbearably simple, so it doesn’t matter what you do. Me, I get confused writing grocery lists.

If you look at Newton’s notes, you will see why he accomplished so much. Yes, he had a giant brain, but he also did tons of math. He filled page upon page. Much like the ancient Greeks, who put up with Homer’s endless droning and hour-long similes, Newton did not have TV. Also, when he invented calculus, he was hiding on a farm while the plague destroyed England. Talk about bored. Put me in Fargo, North Dakota with no broadband, a ream of paper, and a box of fresh pencils, and I might invent something, too.

But probably not.

I would definitely make a lot of paper airplanes.

Newton wrote out big, ponderous expressions, and they looked a lot alike, so he must have had tremendous powers of concentration in order to keep everything straight.

For tiny-brained mortals like me, clear notation matters.

I hated the way my old physics profs wrote things. For example, a professor talking about a function named A might call a variant of it A-prime, and then when he wanted to change it to make a point, he would call it A-double-prime, which was followed by A-triple-prime. Then he might combine them in one huge expression with about nine A’s in the numerator and fifteen in the denominator. I never understood that. It’s not like there’s a fee for using new letters.

I wrote a pretty insulting essay about it, claiming there actually was a fee, and that when professors used Greek letters, they had to pay royalties to the Greeks.

I was not popular in grad school.

If you feel like a thrill, Google and find Cambridge’s photos of Newton’s big notebook, known as the “Waste Book.” It’s a real page-turner, if you’re an alchemist and religious fanatic who reads ancient languages fluently.

Unfortunately, it’s math and science, so there are no Cliff’s Notes. Not that I’m saying the impossibility of writing Cliff’s Notes for math and science proves liberal arts subjects are a joke.

But I would not argue if you took it that way.

But Will the Global Warmers be Able to Swim When the Water of Truth Rises?

I want to add a couple of things about the global warming…I am looking for a word that doesn’t sound like “fundamentalists” or “Taliban”…adherents. Yes…adherents. I went with that before, and it worked.

The GWA’s (save me some typing) have done something scientists should never do. They have painted themselves into a corner and provided themselves with a compelling interest in seeing themselves proven right. To be more accurate, they have a compelling interest in not being proven wrong. It’s okay if they’re not proven right, but being proven wrong would be catastrophic. They would look like idiots and cultists, and their professional credentials would be cheapened considerably.

Because they have been so adamant and intolerant, the only way they can be sure of avoiding disaster is to force the rest of us to go along with their strange, draconian “reform” proposals, even if they don’t work.

I will explain.

Let’s say they get their way, which is likely. Let’s say they get us to spend astronomical sums, choking industry and crushing progress, putatively in order to reduce global warming.

By the way, I don’t call it “climate change,” because that’s weasel language. They used to call it global warming, and then certain places got very cold, appearing to disrupt the whole theory. They switched to “climate change” so they would be able to say that any change, cold or hot, was due to bad old greenhouse gases. I think that was disingenuous and contrived. I think they’re hedging their bets. So I will stick with global warming.

Say it’s going to warm up, or say it’s going to cool down. Man up and take a position, or admit you don’t know the truth.

To get back to our scenario, they get their way. They stuff socks in all our tailpipes. They make us ride bicycles and use abominable poisonous light bulbs that don’t work. They make us turn off our lights at 8 p.m. They remove the element carbon from all future periodic tables and replace it with an element called “Priusine.” Whatever it is they want, they get.

That gives us three possible outcomes.

Outcome 1: nothing happens. They can say they arrested the progress of global warming. Their grants are saved. Comrade Lysenko smiles down from atheist heaven, where he spends eternity waiting in line to buy toilet paper. All is well.

Outcome 2: the planet heats up. They can say we didn’t do enough. It’s still George Bush’s fault. We didn’t listen in time. We didn’t give them enough government money. We didn’t go to Burning Man and pray to Cthulhu with them. Our fault. They still look good.

Outcome 3: the planet cools down. It worked! They were right! It’s just amazing how smart they were. Time to put the rest of us in vegetarian gulags where everyone gets to use whatever bathroom they want, which was obviously the right move to begin with.

Now, what if we do nothing?

Outcome 1: nothing happens. They were wrong. They look stupid. People distance themselves from them. College students start demanding safe spaces to get away from them.

Outcome 2: the planet heats up. Thank Gaia. They were right. We should have listened. Now we need to give them more power, because it would be even hotter if they hadn’t gotten their way. Fire up the bongs with the special carbon traps and put on some Justin Bieber!

Outcome 3: the planet cools. Wow, do they look stupid. They risk being beaten to death by mobs swinging pillowcases full of coal.

If we do what they want, they can’t lose. If we don’t do what they want, the planet absolutely has to heat up, fast, or they’re toast.

Surely they’ve figured this out, so now we can count on them putting on a full-court press, not out of confidence that they’re right, but out of terror that they might be wrong.

Personally, I think they’re wrong. I am not a meteorologist or climatologist, but the people who are against them seem more credible than the liars and hysterical polemicists who get attention for backing them.

I was not favorably impressed by the famous global warming fraud scandal, nor am I impressed by the fake movie polar bears which were used to convince us that aquatic mammals, for the first time in history, can’t swim. I am not impressed by Al Gore, who, to me, appears to be mentally ill and incapable of telling the truth. He got rich off of global warming, after his family got rich from oil, and his house, which is clearly visible from Venus, uses more energy than the entire northeast power grid.

“Carbon credits” are not only silly, they’re an insult to my intelligence. If carbon credits made sense, wives would sell their husbands adultery credits, and the cops would sell angry people murder credits. When Leo Dicaprio travels to complain about fossil fuel, he uses a private jet. Come on. If you’re going to pull my leg, at least pretend you’re serious. When Bruce Jenner decided he was a woman, he grew breasts, wore makeup, and made sure he shaved every day. A quality hoax demands a certain level of commitment.

If they prove AGW (figure it out) exists, fine. I’ll be quiet. But the way they’re handling it now is a disgrace.

And Little Lambs Eat Ivy

I don’t get into politics much these days, and no one is interested in religion, so I do not attract trolls like I used to. They used to take up a good percentage of my waking life.

A wise man (clearly not me) once said that it is not absolutely necessary to gainsay everything you disagree with on the Internet. I wish I had thought about that in 2002, before I started blogging. I would never have gotten involved in whack-a-troll, and I would not have treated well-intentioned commenters like trolls, which I am sure I have done. Worse than that, I’m sure I have corrected people who were right when I was wrong.

Today I showed up to see if anything was going on here, and I saw a somewhat trolly comment in the approval bin. I don’t have it in front of me (it was accidentally deleted), but the first line was something about me being confused–not a sign of warmth or good intentions–and the commenter tried to correct me about the concept of escape velocity. He wrote some really strange things which just were not correct. They were so wrong I did not even understand them. It’s like the famous quip from physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who once disagreed with someone so intensely, he said, “That’s not even wrong.”

I hold comments for approval for good reasons, and one reason is to avoid getting into comment wars with people who are not able to understand the topic. There is nothing worse than arguing with a person who doesn’t know what’s going on.

How does he know when he loses?

I guess they just figure they’ve won when you stop responding.

I am not a real physicist, if a physicist is a person who can sit down with no preparation and do physics well enough to be paid for it. On the other hand, I am a real physicist by the definition of the people who sell magazines to former physics students! If you belonged to the national physics honor society at one time, and now you’re a realtor who can barely integrate 1/x^2, but you can pay for a subscription to Physics Today, you, my friend, are a physicist.

I studied for several years, I got a degree, and I went to grad school in physics for a year and a half, at the end of which my brain turned into a pork rind, and I had to quit. I remember little bits of what I learned. Don’t ask me to write out the Laplacian for spherical coordinates, and don’t even talk to me about quantum mechanics, but I know a couple of things.

I had to look “Laplacian” up just now to make sure I didn’t really mean “Lagrangian.”

Anyway, I didn’t pull my terrific explanation of escape velocity out of a bong. Here is how it works, and this time I actually looked at someone else’s web page to make sure I didn’t say anything crazy. Does that make me a plagiarist? No, because it would be like plagiarizing addition. And it agreed with what I said to begin with.

There are two kinds of energy in classical mechanics: kinetic and potential. To have kinetic energy, you have to be moving. To have potential energy, you have to be in a situation where something or other has the potential to make you move.

If you’re falling from a building, you have kinetic energy, which will be transferred to whatever you land on. If you’re on top of a building, you have potential energy, because if you fall off, you will rapidly start to move.

If you’re a rock in a slingshot, pulled back all the way, you have potential energy. If you’re released and start flying through the air, you have kinetic energy.

The energy in an object can go back and forth between kinetic and potential energy.

Think of a bouncing ball.

As the ball leaves the ground, it’s moving at its highest possible speed. It’s going as fast as it will ever go, because as it moves upward, gravity will slow it down. All of its energy is kinetic.

At the top of the bounce, the ball is not moving. It has no kinetic energy. All of its energy is potential energy. As it falls again, that energy will turn back into kinetic energy.

Balls don’t bounce forever, because energy is lost to air resistance and the force it takes to flex the ball and radio waves and God knows what else. In the real world, I mean. In physics books, balls bounce for eternity, because the problems take place in ideal worlds that don’t exist.

Are you with me?

Imagine an object on the surface of the earth. There is no air resistance, because OUR [fictional] earth is ideal. There is no friction. There is only gravity. There isn’t even any sales tax.

If you shoot the ball upward, it will return to earth, because it will be slowed down by gravity. In reality, it’s falling from the instant it leaves the ground. It’s falling AND rising. By “falling,” I mean it’s accelerating downward. If you don’t understand that, don’t worry about it. No one cares.

Satellites in orbit are always falling! They’re going sideways so fast it cancels out the fall!

Sorry. That just popped out. Ignore it.

As our ball goes up, it loses kinetic energy because it slows down. It gains potential energy. That potential energy is related to the distance the ball rises. It increases on the way up.

If you do the correct definite integral with the correct endpoints, you find that if the ball rises all the way to infinity, the amount of potential energy it gains will not be infinite. It has a cap. The potential energy a ball can gain as it leaves a planet is limited.

If, when you shoot the ball upward, you give it enough speed to give it kinetic energy greater than the total possible potential energy, you have given the ball what is known as escape velocity. It escapes from the planet’s pull. The planet can’t pull it back. It keeps going forever.

This only works on ideal planets, which are rare, although Bernie Sanders says he knows how to create one using other people’s money. It didn’t work too good in Cuba and North Korea, but we can always hope.

If this kind of thing actually interests you (stop laughing), you can find escape velocity explained, with integrals, all over the Internet. I’ll link to a page which lays it all out in a couple of paragraphs.

Gravitational Potential Energy, Explained

An interesting thing to observe, if you look at the integral, is that the smaller the radius of your planet is (for a given mass), the harder it is to leave. This is why it’s pretty hard to come home from a vacation on a black hole. Lots of mass means lots of gravity, and a small radius means it’s sort of crammed into a tiny area, so it’s strong.

What I wrote is not advanced physics. I guess it would be in the first semester of university physics, which is the low-level class your doctor took. It’s not controversial or complicated.

Now, if you ask Bernie Sanders what he thinks, you may get a different answer. I can’t be responsible for his interesting notions.

I don’t plan to start publishing trolly-looking comments. Life is too short. My advice to irritated commenters is this: put them on your own blog, where they will actually see the light of day. I delete them permanently.

I apologize if the comment I dumped was not intended to be a troll swipe, but really, I could not see any way to make it mesh with reality, so I assumed the worst. Another bad Internet habit.

Maybe I misunderstood the commenter’s jargon, but in any case, it’s clear that what I wrote initially was correct. If anyone else wants to come by and challenge trivial results of undergraduate physics problems, please don’t.

Free Knowledge for Nerds

I’m back.

I haven’t written anything here lately, but I have had all sorts of remarkable experiences. The practice of praying in tongues keeps paying off, not just for me, but for people I have encouraged.

My young friend who got a music scholarship at the University of Miami is in the neighborhood most weekdays because of class, and we meet and spend long sessions in prayer. You wouldn’t believe the revelation he gets. It’s tremendous.

That’s not what drove me here to write, though. I had a wonderful experience over the last couple of weeks, and I really don’t know anyone who would appreciate it, so here I am.

I have always regretted burning out on physics and quitting school. I could not do anything about it. I’m sure the people I worked with at the University of Texas think I just wasn’t smart enough, and that I was a typical washout, but that’s not true. I got a physics degree in three years, and when I started, I didn’t really know algebra, and then I got accepted by a top grad program. You can’t be stupid and do that. I just got burned out, and nothing I did helped. I panicked and resorted to ADD drugs, and they made things worse. And the people who ran the UT physics department didn’t care at all. They did give me one or two breaks, but they were small, and the impression I got was that they wanted me out of there fast, without an ADA lawsuit.

Before I was admitted, I was warned that UT didn’t care about students, but I didn’t know how true it was. And I saw my lab students get the same treatment. I guess that’s Texas for you. There seems to be something about the high percentage of Germans there that makes Texas different from other Southerners. They can be extremely rigid and cold.

I believe the real reason I failed was that I was out of line with God’s will. Every Christian is on the enemy’s radar, and the enemy is real, and he will make bad things happen to you if you’re an idiot, which I was. These days I have supernatural tools to put my enemies in my place, but back then, I was defenseless, so I lost to jerks and creeps who probably spent their entire childhood and adolescent years receiving wedgies from younger kids and being pushed in the mud by Brownies.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed online education opportunities, but they have taken a while to develop into something useful, and I didn’t really work hard to take advantage, so it wasn’t until recently that things started to click.

In February, I felt like I absolutely had to find a good online electronics course. I build tube amps, and I took two electronics courses in college, but I have no idea what I’m doing. The first course I took was somewhat practical. The second was all theory, and it was about things like the photoelectric principle, which is not going to get anyone a job designing computers. I’ve forgotten a lot of what I learned, and I didn’t learn that much to begin with.

I Googled and came across EDx.org, which is a site started by Harvard and MIT. You can go there and take courses from excellent professors at various universities, and you can even get certificates of completion. You can submit homework assignments, do labs with virtual equipment, and take tests.

I signed up to audit 6.002x, which is MIT’s basic electronics course. They provided an online version of the textbook for nothing. It was too late in the year to take the course for credit, but I already have credit for a similar course, and I don’t have any use for a certificate anyway.

The online textbook was nearly impossible to read, but I found the real book on Ebay. The American-market hardcover version runs $90, but I found the Indian edition, which is paperback, for about $20. I ordered it.

Near as I can tell, you can’t get the lecture videos unless you start from the beginning of the semester. That’s bad. But today I found the answer to that problem, and in doing so, I found the mother lode of free nerd classes. MIT has a site that provides a huge number of classes, for the princely sum of nothing. And the lectures are all on Youtube!

They even provide PDF lecture notes.

You can’t get credit, but on the other hand, you don’t have to submit a 1500 SAT or pay $60,000 per year (I checked) in tuition and costs. And if you ever have to get credit, you can take the MIT online class first and then show up at your local college and blow everyone out of the water.

This is wonderful. I feel like I’ll finally have a tiny bit of the knowledge you need to be competent with electronic devices. And the structure makes it easy to stick with it.

If you wish you could improve your brain, but you can’t go to college right now, this is a great resource.

I’ve already written about other providers, such as Khan Academy and NPTEL, but MIT is a cut above, because they provide real courses with real materials.

It’s incredible, really. Twenty years ago, I had zero chance of ever attending an MIT lecture. Now I can attend as many as I can stand, in my garage.

I’m sure there is stuff out there for liberal arts people, too. Truthfully, though, do you really need a professor to teach you about art history and novels? I’ve had plenty of liberal arts courses, and I learned absolutely nothing–nothing–I could not have figured out on my own with a library card.

Check it out if you want. If you’re technically inclined, you will never see a better bargain than this: MIT Open Courseware.

If you have a brainy kid who wants to get a head start on college, remember, taking courses online before you take them in person isn’t cheating. It’s just smart thinking.