Two Days

I just received some shocking news.

My sister developed a problem in her lung, and she was afraid to have it treated locally. There was a small possibility that it could be cancer, and she was afraid a clumsy biopsy would cause it to spread. So she went to the Mayo Clinic to have it done. The overwhelming likelihood was that it was a fungal infection, but she did not want to take a chance.

She has been gone since Friday. As part of her diagnostic treatment, they biopsied a lymph node in her shoulder. While it appears that her lung problem is a relatively harmless and completely curable fungus, the doctors now believe she probably has lymphoma. She had no symptoms whatsoever, and it does not appear to be related to her lung issue. She is devastated. You have to imagine how this worked. She went to her doctor today to get a report on a fungal infection, and instead, he told her she probably has cancer. The oddest thing about it is that she has smoked heavily since she was a teenager, and our family has a history of lung cancer, yet she may have a cancer which is not in her lung and which is unrelated to smoking.

I am not doing too badly right now, but I was reeling a while ago. This is my only sibling, and we have been trying to build a relationship in middle age. Now this happens.

There is still a possibility the biopsy will ultimately come up negative. We won’t know until Thursday. Obviously, that is what I’ll be praying for.

The negative side of this is very obvious. But the positive side can’t be ignored. She had no symptoms. She had no reason to think she might have cancer. But she took extraordinary measures to have a minor problem treated, and as a result of what could reasonably be called irrational behavior, this problem was discovered. Think how much worse it would have been, had she done things differently. Months or years from now, she might have developed symptoms, and she might have been diagnosed with a late-stage cancer. It’s remarkable, when you think about it. You can’t say she has been lucky overall, but finding this problem now was a real blessing, and it was highly, highly unlikely.

I do not ask why God “lets” things happen to me or my family. I refuse to question him. This is a time to draw closer to him and gain his assistance and look for solutions. I am not going to ruin that by reacting like a spoiled child.

I would appreciate it if people would pray for her. I am going to pray that the biopsy result will be negative. I’ll get people at my church to pray. I’ll be fasting. We should have the answer on Thursday.

It’s funny, but during my prayers today, I felt positively enveloped by the presence of God, and I did not understand why. At the moment, I feel an inexplicable sense of warmth and comfort, and it disturbs me a little, because I was so upset earlier, and it doesn’t seem right to feel better. I hope what I’m feeling is God’s hand and not the result of some deficiency in my makeup.

Thanks in advance. I know a lot of you will come through with prayer, and it will mean more to me than a stack of gold bars.

Huh?

I’ve been having fun today, trying to decipher my Sino DRO manual. By all accounts, Sino DROs are very good. If you hire a Chinese person to show you how to use them.

“Setting of system. In process of self check, key ‘.’, then the system enter setting mode after self check finished.”

“It is possible to return to zero any point, take the example of X axis display.”

Okay. Isn’t a self check something you do in the shower?

I have been sitting in front of the mill, punching buttons to find out how the DRO actually works. I am taking notes and writing my own instructions. I guess it’s worth it, because an American DRO costs a grand, and this one was included with my mill! God only knows what it would have cost, had they paid an English-speaker to write the manual instead of using Babelfish.

It amazes me that there are Americans who have figured out how to use Sino DROs. They write about them on forums as if everything was fine. I guess they learn on DROs with better manuals, and when they end up with Sinos, they already know everything. I was considering downloading a manual for a different brand, in the hope that there were similarities.

I tried to determine whether I needed a rotary table, a dividing head, a super spacer, or an indexer today. And I finally realized I would never figure it out if I lived a thousand lifetimes. I think I’ll eventually get a rotary table with dividing accessories and see what happens. I really don’t know what else to do. If I keep trying to figure out the best possible thing to buy, I will die before I actually get anything.

Og says I should get a swivel base for my vise, and I’m sure that’s a good idea. Of course, I chose not to get one when I bought the vise, because I kept seeing forum posts in which people said swivel bases were a complete waste of money. It’s nice how everyone’s advice is consistent. I don’t think I can go wrong with a rotary table. And the table on my mill is long, so my hope is that I can have the vise and the rotary table mounted simultaneously, most of the time.

I am pretty well convinced that I should get a 3-axis DRO, put it on my mill, add a z scale, and move the 2-axis DRO to the lathe. It would be nice to have some idea how long parts are, and I cannot figure out how you do it with a dial indicator with a one-inch range. I think measuring a 24″ part with a dial indicator would be challenging, to say the least.

The DRO manual would be confusing even if it made sense. It has instructions for cutting arcs with a straight end mill. How is that possible? It doesn’t move the work; it just tells you where it is. You can’t move all three handwheels at once unless you have CNC, and I’m pretty sure they would all have to move to make these exotic shapes.

I still want an electronic lead screw for the lathe. It does what a DRO does, most of the time. But when it doesn’t, it doesn’t. And a DRO can’t do what it does. It replaces metric gears, a taper attachment, and sometimes, a DRO.

I gave up on making my own dovetail cutter. It’s a very stupid idea. Luckily Enco is having a sale. They must adore me.

I really think I may make something some day. Possibly by Christmas. Of 2011.

Hope Obama hasn’t backed a truck up to the garage by then. When he crowns himself at the National Cathedral and starts confiscating Jewish property, we’ll know he’s almost ready to nationalize our tools and shoot everyone who can read. If you’re Jewish, have a tailor make you a nice silk yellow star right away. Don’t wait for the rush and end up with a crummy one made out of felt.

Liar, Spendthrift, or Both?

The Obama birth mess never seems to die out completely.

Yesterday, I read about the newly discovered Kenyan birth certificate which says Obama was born in Mombasa. Attorney Orly Taitz is using a copy as evidence to try to convince a federal court to get the Kenyans to release the original. I am not a “birther,” and I don’t have a lot of confidence in this document, but I noted that it would be pretty odd for an attorney to present a court with a faked document, in a situation where the truth was virtually certain to come out eventually, and where the attorney’s enemies would do their best to use the submission of the faked document as a basis to ruin her career.

In a comment, Aaron pointed out that Jon Stewart’s staff produced a newspaper birth announcement from Hawaii, printed in 1961, indicating that Obama had been born there on August 4th of that year. I thought that was pretty powerful evidence that Obama had been born in the US. But that’s not the end of it. Mrs. Taitz appeared on TV recently, and she pointed out that it was possible for Obama’s mother to get the announcement published without proof that Obama was born here. She also noted that Mrs. Obama would have been highly motivated to do this, because it would have avoided a lot of aggravation, dealing with the immigration people.

So the newspaper announcement is nearly worthless. IF Mrs. Taitz is correct.

There is a new wrinkle, however. According to Wikipedia (sorry), Mombasa was in Zanzibar when Obama was born. It was not part of Kenya until 1963. If that is true, how can the birth certificate be legitimate? On top of that, we still don’t know how hard it was to get the certificate issued. For all I know, it may be even easier than getting a Hawaiian newspaper to print a birth announcement.

Apart from all this, we still have no explanation for the huge stonewalling effort Obama has made. Accounts say he has spent nearly a million dollars, when he could simply have had his Hawaiian birth certificate (the original, which supposedly still exists) released. Is this his own money? What kind of nut would harm his children’s financial legacy by blowing a million dollars for no clear reason? Is it money from supporters? What kind of nut would donate money, when Obama could solve the problem by writing a note or making a phone call?

If Obama can prove he was born here, he must be out of his mind, spending all this money. Of course, he’s pretty good at wasting huge sums of money, so maybe the lawsuit cost is merely more evidence of an underlying character deficiency.

Speaking of deficiencies, I am trying to figure out what items of tooling I need to make my milling machine useful. Yesterday, I decided it was time to try to get moving on my plan to make quick release tool holders for my lathe. These will have 60° dovetails on them. So I’ll need a dovetail cutter. On the suggestion of a reader, I decided it would be fun to make my own one-flute cutter with an indexed carbide insert.

The cutter would be a cylinder of steel with a 60° cone machined from the bottom of it, big side down. You put the insert on one side of the cone, in a notch.

Problem: the notch has to be an equilateral triangle, with the vertical side tilted 30° from the axis of the cutter, to rest against the side of the insert. This means cutting a big chunk out of the cone part, with the mill table traveling at an angle to the axis. Generally, you would use a rotary table or a dividing head to do this, although you can clamp stuff to the table and align it with a protractor, which is not very precise and likely to lead to insert alignment problems.

So I’m looking at rotary tables and dividing heads. A dividing head is likely to be cheaper and lighter and easier to use. But–I am pretty sure–you can’t cut arcs with it. It clicks from angular position to angular position, in discrete jumps, and you machine with the work at rest. Perhaps I’m mistaken. With a rotary table, you can turn the work while the mill runs. But you will not be able to move it quickly in desired increments, unless you buy extra parts. Say you want to drill six holes around a disk, at equally spaced intervals. With a dividing head, you move the work five times, pretty quickly. With a rotary table, you turn it gradually from point to point, and you line up the angular graduations, which takes time.

Complicating things further, a rotary table may be purely horizontal, horizontal and vertical, or tilting. I assume “tilting” means you can position it anywhere between horizontal and vertical. As you might guess, the price goes up as you go from purely horizontal to tilting.

So once more, I am completely at sea. On top of that, I’ve been informed that one-flute dovetail cutters are stupid, because they cut very slowly. And making a multiple-flute cutter is nearly impossible, because the inserts won’t line up. And anyway, when you make three or four notches for inserts, you weaken the cutter a lot.

I checked out Enco, trying to find a dovetail cutter which would be appropriate for making BXA tool holders. It’s very hard to figure out. The height of the cutter has to be right, and so does the width, and it has to work well with whatever diameter cutter you use to make the slots you turn into dovetails, so you have to have the right size shank.

My head hurts.

I can make cubic and rectangular pieces of metal, and I can drill holes and mill slots in them. So far, that’s about it.

Using the mill is a blast, regardless. I stare at it, like I would stare if I just found out I was married to Jessica Biel. I can’t believe it’s here. So far, my efforts have been limited to tramming the mill and facing a metal disk with a fly cutter, but that’s pretty exciting compared to having no milling machine.

I think new machinists probably tend to look like Christians, because the lathe throws oil on us, making vertical stripes on our shirts, and the mill throws oil horizontally, and when it’s all over, you end up with a big cross.

I’m going to make something, starting today, even if I only turn my disk into a rectangular block.

The facing went okay. The work seems to rise when I tighten the vise, which is disturbing, but I have been beating it with a soft hammer while I crank the handle, and it appears to do away with the problem. I faced the disk on both sides, and the thickness, measured at four points, was within two thousandths of an inch. That’s okay for now.

Yesterday I learned that this particular mill has a table which is supposed to be somewhat higher in front than in back. How much higher? That’s the question they don’t answer. They say it may be 0.005″. “May.” So maybe I need to tram the mill again. What fun.

Sooner or later, something useful will be made in my garage. I will notify you when it happens, and on that day, it will be such a big story, no one will care where Barack Obama was born.

I See no Mention of Mother’s Virginity

Sondra K. linked to something hilarious yesterday. California attorney/dentist Orly Taitz has produced a document which she claims is a Kenyan birth certificate indicating that Barack Obama was born in Mombasa.

I really don’t know what to make of this. There are kooks on both sides of the political spectrum (on the left, they are called “moderates”), and the air is always full of BS. On the other hand, I have no respect for liberal claims that the Obama birth kerfuffle has been thoroughly debunked or that it was never anything more than a hoax. They say the same sort of things about respectable scientists and statesmen who doubt the global warming religion, which is losing credibility week by week. Moreover, this type of attack often indicates an underlying fear and an awareness on the part of the attacker that he can’t produce facts sufficient to support his argument. Remember how Dan Rather took this path. Then Les Moonves moved Dan’s desk into the men’s room, and now Dan’s retirement plan consists of shaky lawsuits against CBS.

Hawaii produced an electronic birth certificate, and some official or other stated that he or she had seen the original. The Republican governor of Hawaii said Obama was a US citizen. I was happy to accept that. I’m not all that eager to hear the phrase “President Biden.” But it never occurred to me to think about Kenyan records. I don’t know if Ms. Taitz is the one who came up with this idea, but whoever it was is very sharp. This is the kind of thinking that makes a thorough and effective litigator. People have ridiculed her as incompetent and embarrassing, and for all I know, if I looked at her record as a whole, I would draw the same conclusion. But looking for the Kenyan certificate was a great idea.

Lou Dobbs has taken a beating over this. As he has pointed out, people are openly lying about him. He has made it clear that he doesn’t buy into the “birther” view, but frantic leftists all over the airwaves and the web are falsely claiming he questions Obama’s citizenship. The hysteria on the left does not suggest confidence. Quite the opposite. And as Dobbs has pointed out, the main thing driving the story is Obama’s unwillingness to take the quick, inexpensive steps required to end it.

I didn’t realize until today that the Obama response has been expensive. According to various sources, it has cost seven figures. That is incredible. Can it be true? If someone questioned my citizenship, and I thought stonewalling would cost me FIFTY dollars, I’d run for my birth certificate immediately. And like most halfway responsible American adults, I do have a copy of my birth certificate. It’s odd that Obama does not. You would think a pampered kid raised by doting grandparents would have a fairly orderly life.

Some Kos nut says the Kenyan certificate is a fake, because it says something like “Republic of Kenya,” and it was issued in February of 1964, and Kenya (according to a digital image of a newspaper clipping) was not a republic until later that year.

Here:

1. Kos nut
2. Unverified clipping
3. No other evidence, in spite of leftist panic and concerted effort
4. No proof that Kenya was not using the word “Republic” in official documents in February of 1964, regardless of whether the term was correct
5. World Net Daily says it looks like other Kenyan certificates they have unearthed, although they have not given dates.

The debunkers will have to do better.

My sense of this thing is that the Kenyan document will turn out to have some kind of problem. I doubt that it’s a rank fake, as Karl Rove suggested, because Ms. Taitz would be crucified, impoverished, disbarred, and if possible, burned at the stake, should leftists discover that she knowingly submitted a phony document to a federal court. At least, they’ll try to inflict these punishments on her. Maybe she’s as crazy as liberals say she is, but you would have to be nearly insane to throw your career away on a bogus document which would cause you great harm and benefit your enemies. I don’t know what other flaws could invalidate the certificate, but they will likely turn up as leftists work themselves into a frenzy, investigating it. It may be that there is a way to get a Kenyan certificate issued retroactively, based on weak affidavits or some such.

Taitz’s effort has been referred to as “a fishing expedition.” That’s not accurate. Here’s what that term means. I’ll give an example. You sue someone for negligence because you stepped in a hole in their backyard. To prove they knew there was a hole, you ask for every email they’ve sent for the last twenty years, plus all of their letters and phone records, plus all the emails and phone records of everyone they know. That’s a fishing expedition. You have no legitimate reason to believe a certain fact, yet you unreasonably seek tons of evidence which could conceivably tend to prove that fact. Here, Ms. Taitz has a facially credible document on which to base her suspicions. And if she is demanding the right to compel the production of additional evidence (the essence of a fishing expedition), I am not aware of it.

I would be surprised if this fuss amounts to anything. And I am hoping it won’t be necessary to attack Obama in this manner. He is incompetent and immature, and he has an off-putting, tyrannical, condescending personality, and he keeps betraying his supporters and breaking promises, so I’m hoping the American people will continue to reduce their support for him. He shafted the Jews, his grandmother, doctors, the UAW, Caucasians in general, and the police unions. He can’t keep sawing away at his support without consequences. It’s starting to look like the “Carter II” predictions are coming true. I sure hope so.

I can’t believe the Cash for Clunkers program. I looked into it this weekend, because my dad was considering getting rid of his Explorer and getting a pickup. Here’s how it works. If you own a really awful car which is worth considerably less than $4500 as a trade-in, you can take it to a dealer and get $4500 toward the price of a new car. It jacks up the value of your trade-in. The dealer will generally succeed in getting most of this money (or more) from you when you negotiate the purchase and financing. And while you can’t buy whatever you want, you don’t have to buy a high-mileage car. Depending on the mileage your old car gets, you may be able to buy something that gets as few as 20 miles per gallon, combined. Where does the money come from? Ultimately, taxes. In the short term, from debt financed by the Chinese and other fine friends of America, at disturbing interest rates. Which you and I will have to cover. Where do the old cars go? Do they go to charities and poor people who need transportation? Are they sold to junkyards so the parts will go back into the stream of commerce? No, they get crushed, in a ridiculous and obscene destruction of wealth.

So, to recap:

1. Dealers get lots and lots of money from buyers who can’t negotiate and do not understand how interest works.
2. Many buyers end up with cars that get lackluster mileage.
3. Energy and wealth are wasted in the destruction of perfectly good cars the poor could use.
4. We pay for it later, with interest.

It took energy to build the cars we’re crushing and the cars that will replace them. No one seems to think about that. I think it’s safe to guess that building and selling a car require energy equivalent to several years’ worth of gas. And think of all the plastic in cars. That’s oil.

Isn’t this really just another carmaker bailout?

This boondoggle will cost billions. Meanwhile, Obama has decided we can’t affort three hundred million dollars for the best fighter plane available. Remember that years from now when our flying “clunkers” are raining down in pieces (along with the limbs and intestines of our pilots) after superior enemy aircraft blow them to bits. We have cash for clunkers, but not for self-defense. Odd priorities. Defense is expensive, but it’s very cheap compared to defeat.

I better go to Thoseshirts.com and buy my “Welcome back, Carter” shirt before they sell out.

“Does it Come With its Own Wall Wart?”

I blogged Mike’s visit to Miami, but I don’t know if I mentioned his car. He drove a Prius down from DC. This is his SECOND Prius, so he can’t claim it was a first offense.

I will admit that it seems like a practical, comfortable car. However, I came up with a number of useful things you may wish to use if you ever converse with a Prius owner.

1. “Where do you add the detergent?”

2. “I prefer a top-loader.”

3. When they tell you how long it took to drive somewhere, say, “And that was on SPIN CYCLE.”

4. “Your car just made a noise. I think the toast is done.”

You can also refer to the car as “the Maytag” and pretend to look for the agitator.

Hope this is helpful.

But You CAN Win

Baldilocks has been giving her take on what “lucky” and “unlucky” mean. I agree with her when she says she doesn’t like describing life in terms of luck. God exists. So does Satan. So does free will. And then there are the countless spirits that affect our lives for good or evil.

I see life in terms of blessings and curses. The curses are more controversial than the blessings. A lot of people–even Christians–get mad if you say misfortune is sometimes caused by sin, or that God sometimes punishes people severely. There is a bizarre movement these days to portray God as Santa Claus. All blessings, no punishment. And of course, that’s silly and utterly wrong. God and his angels killed thousands upon thousands of people in the stories of the Old Testament. The Holy Spirit–yes, the Holy Spirit–killed Ananias and Sapphira dead as hammers, and that was in the New Testament. God gave people tumors, leprosy, blindness…he drowned the entire population of the world, except for eight people, and if memory serves, seven of the eight were spared only because of God’s regard for Noah. He drowned the Egyptian army. He burned the people of Sodom and Gomorrah to death, and that includes women and kids. He caused terrible problems for his entire nation, because David took a census. Go ahead and tell me God wouldn’t give you VD or cancer or bankruptcy or whatever you want to name. That may be what Oprah believes. The Bible says otherwise. And like Ralph Richardson said in Time Bandits, God is “the nice one.” Bad behavior leaves you open to attack from less-friendly beings.

I believe your spiritual health consists of a certain number of blessings and a certain number of curses, and a lot of it can be traced to the things you or your ancestors have done in the past. Some people succeed at most things they do, even if they make a poor effort. Others can do everything right and fail time after time. Some highly disciplined people are fat. Lots of irresponsible, weak people are skinny. You can do a lot of things right and fail, and you can do almost everything wrong and succeed, depending on what you have in the spiritual bank. That’s what the Bible tells us, and it’s true. So you should always make investments in the bank. Pray, do alms, try to behave, tithe, find out what sins are closely associated with your family and repent of them, and so on. Sooner or later, the seeds will have to bear fruit. And presumably, the bad seeds you’ve planted in the past will eventually peter out and stop sprouting.

I sometimes find I’m doing bad things my parents or grandparents did, even though these are things of which I disapprove. They sneak up on me; they may take forms I don’t immediately recognize. I am doing my best to drop these practices as soon as I discover them. I don’t want this stuff bearing fruit five years from now.

I suspect that when the Bible says “charity shall cover the multitude of sins,” it means that charity can prevent many of your bad seeds from sprouting. Maybe you can spare yourself some punishment here on earth. Take a look at the 41st psalm and see what you think. The Greek word translated as “charity” is “agape,” which means a benevolent, selfless sort of love, so presumably, what we call charity qualifies. If the 41st psalm is correct, by helping the needy, you can literally make yourself lucky. This is what “he shall be blessed upon the earth means.”

Most Christians worry about going to hell, but they don’t think a lot about leading a blessed life. That’s unfortunate, because it means we end up accepting God and then going on with our lives almost as if he didn’t exist. Missing out on the blessings we were intended to have right here on earth.

Oddly, many of us think God owes us a good time. Most of us don’t tithe or pray regularly or try to avoid sin. Most of us do little for charity, which is remarkable, given the endless opportunity; I don’t understand why I did so little in the past. We do whatever we please, and then when bad things happen, we think God has cheated us, and we ask, “why me?” It would make more sense to look at the good times we haven’t earned and say, “why not me?” A lot of people refuse to believe in God, because they think life would be perfect if he existed. It’s amazing how many of us think we deserve perfect lives, just because God could spare us all unhappiness if he wanted. Apparently God is supposed to be a genie who does whatever we tell him, without requiring us to grow up. And if you love your kids, you’ll let them eat banana splits for breakfast, and you won’t make them go to school. Same thing.

I am trying to make myself more “lucky,” and it’s working. And I do not believe in Oprah Claus.