From my source: "In the natural environment, lichen âoeprovidesâ the alga with water and minerals that the fungus absorbs from whatever the lichen is growing on, its substrate."
As I said before, there are lots of lithotrophes, and they do, as the name implies, eat rock. Read about chemolithotrophes some time.
Oh, and by the way, acid rain also eats rock. Ever been in a cave? 80% of caves are formed by carbonic acid in water dissolving the limestone and forming a void.
>Notice how you don't see very many organisms eating dirt and rock?
Like lichens? There are lots of monocellular organisms that are lithotropic. The only reason they don't do better is because you don't get *much* energy when you convert complex rocks into simpler oxides, so it takes a long time to do a good job of it and in the meantime an animal comes along and eats you. But where I live, all the rocks are covered in lichens and they're slowly digesting them. If you don't have a natural predator, and you're willing to reproduce slowly, rocks make great food: there are a lot of them about. But as long as there is anything more complex than two- or three-atom oxides and nitrides, there is still energy to be derived from breaking them down, and something, somewhere, has made that its foodstuff. (I don't know of anything that eats concrete, but asphalt is digested by bacteria, so I wouldn't be surprised to find out that there's something that can crack concrete down into calcium oxide and sulfur dioxide.)
>The point of all that junk DNA is something that we have not fully figured out yet. It has a point, we'll figure it out, along with all the other things we don't yet know.
Some of that junk is, indeed, just junk -- it's crap we (as a species, and even across all mammals or all vertebrates) picked up from retroviruses millions of years ago, just long repeats of viral genomes. The tricky bit is that some of *that* stuff we've started to use. Mitochondria, themselves, are a case study. They were originally parasites, essentially, much like chlamydia or other obligate intracellular bacterial infections are. Then they became commensal, then symbiotic, and now they're completely necessary for aerobic metabolism, the reason multicellular organisms can survive.
A: people *do* die of mitochondrial disorders all the time -- or at least one theory of aging is that it's largely because of crap spilled out of mitochondria that aren't working right anymore because they've accumulated so many errors, so death from old age or age-related diseases is precisely mitochondrial disorders. (Still heavily disputed, mind you.) B: and that's because their DNA polymerases aren't as good at high-fidelity replication of DNA than the main eukaryotic DNA polymerases. They make more mistakes, they pick up lots of problems, they start failing and the cell starts starving, as well as being damaged by oxidative species created in the ATP synthase cycle and then leaked out into the main cell by failing mitochondria.
>As far as I remember correctly, as the DNA is being copied it is also checked for irregularities.
Yes. There are many DNA polymerases, that synthesize a second strand of DNA complimentary to the template strand when it's unwound, and many of those can proofread: if they detect an error in the strand they're creating as they're extending the new DNA polymer, they can back up and rip it out, fill it in with correct bases, and proceed.
That, by the way, is the major reason that eukaryotes have such good fidelity in DNA reproduction -- errors on the order of 1:100,000,000 replications, whereas viruses like AIDS, which co-opt cellular replication in favor of viral replication but screw up the proofreading functions, have replication errors many orders of magnitude greater. Which results in them mutating *much* more quickly, meaning that they adapt to new environments (immune system response) much more quickly as a group, at the cost of a very much higher individual failure rate.
And that's really the fundamental tradeoff: if the environment is stable, you want very high fidelity in your genetic material reproduction, but if it's changing, the species as a whole wants lower fidelity in replication since that'll allow it to adapt more quickly. Eukaryotes deal with this by having good fidelity but also having transposons, groups of genetic material that can be rapidly interchanged to produce extremely large combinations of genes (seen especially in the immune system) whereas viruses just have crappy fidelity and rely on mass attack.
I'm skipping a lot of steps and it's been 15 years since I actually learned any of this, but a quick bit of reading predisposes me to think it's reasonably accurate.
A large fraction of the metals, in their elemental form, are either toxic or reactive, and several of the intermetallics are also pretty nasty, arsenic being the most noteworthy of that crowd. There are several that actually get much more dangerous as they react and turn into other, lower-energy molecules, most notably mercury, which you can drink when it's elemental (I'm not saying it's a good idea, just that people have survived drinking a half-liter of the stuff: it was a medieval treatment for colic) but mercury that is in a lower-energy state, namely methyl mercury, is deadly in milligram quantities.
However, we're not likely to see much of those things being produced by burning garbage, because they're not in the garbage in the first place. Some of the nastier things: arsenic, lead, cadmium, are or have been banned by European Reduction of Hazardous Substances restrictions. Others, like beryllium, just aren't used very often so they don't show up in waste streams very much. Most of what's in garbage is what's in food (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorous) and what's in the ground (oxygen, iron, silicon, aluminum.) Those, and the combinations of them that are commonly found in post-burn air, are generally not horrible, but there are things formed in exhaust streams (dioxins, sulfur dioxide) that do have problems associated with them. However, there is an enormous amount of research done into exhaust scrubbers, and it's likely that existing scrubber systems could deal with this. (If there are requirements for use of such scrubbers: plenty of places try hard to get out of using them, even though they generally are a profit center because they produce useful stuff with resale value, like sulfuric acid.)
For the record, many many other places are currently burning garbage and using the excess heat generated to do useful stuff. Many (most?) cement plant primary kilns burn trash as their heatsource. (I believe a company named Holnam runs some of them.) Problem is they dump gobs of toxic crap out the smokestack because they don't burn hot enough, which plasma-temperatures might fix.
Do you think Octave might be able to handle what you've done in Matlab? I was referencing this because I'd run across your page a while back and wanted to let the PP and GPP know about your work, but there are aspects of it I could use, as well.
If I'd done this, I think I would've just taken several hundred pictures of the needle as it moves from 0 to 100% scale, then compared the webcam picture to the database and seen which was the best match. I'm not a very sophisticated programmer. But I've been impressed by your accomplishment ever since I saw it on hackaday.
I've tried using some opensource OCR programs, most notably Kooka OCR. What I was doing was (I think) the best possible situation: putting a digital multimeter with a very large readout panel face-down on a flatbed scanner and automatically scanning it and dumping the output to Kooka. It does a pretty terrible job, honestly. I'm lucky to get one digit correct half the time, out of the three digits available. I'm doing cropping to make sure only the digits I want are in the frame. If you have any suggestions for better OCR programs, I'd love to hear them. I'm really annoyed by this, because my girlfriend's HP flatbed scanner has OCR software from 1998 that came (apparently free) with the scanner, that has better than 95% accuracy on an entire printed page, at an angle to the scanner. Windows-only, of course.
What I'm claiming is that 90% of LEGO purchases are by people who don't care about quality, just about price, and the company can't survive on that remaining 10%.
Consider Cray vs. PC's. Or even Sun. There might just not *be* a market niche that can support a company. And then we're all stuck with PC's, and I think it's possible that in this particular case, it's the quality of LEGO that's creating a market, and if they went away, the poorer-quality imitations would be insufficient to maintain a market, coz they'd just be bricks. LEGO is having enough problems already maintaining market share against video games and such, and it's possible it's only their research and advertising that keeps a market open.
I've done the same thing: I built a 4WD car back in, I dunno, 1988, and getting the front drive system to hold together was a *nightmare*. I ended up pinning stuff like you're talking about, using orthogonal links, and rubber bands. (I almost resorted to, gasp, superglue.) That's actually almost the only complaint I have with LEGO, that the height isn't an easy multiple of the length/width. It'd be so nice if you could take bricks with holes in the side and just snap another brick along the side, to bind them all together vertically. (Although it'd mean you couldn't have axles of the current size going through the bricks, now that I think of it, so maybe every other row...)
My use of aluminum is simply that I don't have enough bricks to build stiff structures that are a meter on a side and half a meter tall. If I could do a solid shell, that'd be strong enough, but, dude, that's a whole lot of bricks. The gantry head on the thing I'm building right now is made of long runs of girder bricks, the longest LEGO bricks made, triangulated along the sides with other girder bricks, so it looks just like a crane. It's nowhere near stiff enough, but given my brick quantity limitations, it'll have to do. I'm considering buying DUPLO bricks just because they're cheap for their size.
The other thing that sucks is wearing out axles from insufficient bearing area: anything spinning at high RPM for any length of time, you end up with axles with big smoothed-out patches (and they get really rattly as they wear smaller and no longer run concentric.)
There were other, similar blocks well before Hilary Page invented Kiddicraft. I have a box of 2000 pressed wooden blocks called "American Bricks" from 1938, that are similar in size and identical in layout (ratio of height, width, and length, with 2x4 blocks, with 8 studs on top and matching holes on the bottom.) I've read previously that they went back into the late 1920's, and there were others like them beforehand.
It wasn't the idea of stackable, interlocking bricks like Page's and others, that made LEGO successful. It was learning how to do precision plastic injection molding that allowed the bricks to stick together very tightly, and precision chemistry that allowed them to last through thousands of attach/detach cycles, that made LEGO enormous. A friend of mine was a plant manager for an old Samsonite plant that licensed the manufacture of LEGO bricks from 1968-1972, and he said that the LEGO plastic injection molding equipment, used for making toys, was superior to the best American plastic injection molding equipment used for medical equipment at that time.
I've taken to using aluminum sheet to fill in for large quantities of blocks, when I need to make a stiff, large structure. I can replace mass quantities of blocks. But, yeah, there's no way I can replace power transmissions, reduction units, all the things that make LEGO such a useful machine prototyping tool. I already miss the days when I could go to a local toy store and buy a Technic 871 set and get a dozen gears and axles. Something comparable from Smallparts.com would run $400 and wouldn't be anywhere nearly as universally useful.
The thing is: I don't think 95% of the people buying LEGO bricks are doing that. They're just getting a toy for their kids. Another toy, that has bricks but costs 30% less, will substitute perfectly. If you're buying for yourself, you get much better stuff than when you're buying for your kid or someone else's kid because you know they'll just eat them, melt them, or make LEGO catapults and launch the parts into next week.
I have mixed feelings about this. I have 38 years' worth and hundreds of thousands of LEGO bricks, which cost an enormous amount, and it'd sure be nice to get vats of cheap bricks so I can build some of the things I want. (I'm halfway through making a 3-D printer using chocolate, that has a working space of about 9 cubic feet, and boy does that take a lot of blocks.)
But at the same time, companies will rush into the space formed by LEGO losing their trademark, build cheap bricks, outcompete LEGO, LEGO will go out of business, and then we'll be stuck with lots of cheap imitators who aren't making the beautiful stuff LEGO created, and that could end up destroying exactly what makes LEGO worthwhile.
There is a value to having a single entity driving a market -- a planned economy in miniature.
The good thing about current patent law is that they'll only put the US and Europe 20 years behind places that don't give a hoot about patent infringement. After that, the field's open.
In a way, this is a good thing -- if they patent *everything* right now, and 99% of those things don't get addressed for lack of technology or resources, until the patents have expired, then all those research directions are an open field, for anyone to explore. You could look at this as a retarded version of open source (where by retarded I mean both 'stupid' and 'slowed down', in this case, by 20 years.)
As long as they don't manage to lengthen the scope of patents, all they're doing is cutting their own throats.
Two of the last three weddings I've gone to, at the reception the bride was wearing a shirt that said "GAME OVER" and showed icons of a woman in a wedding gown with a big smile on her face, and a man in a tux, looking sad, standing next to her. Just a little observation, is all... and hey, how about a few pithy quotes: "It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as possible" -- George Bernard Shaw "In America, the only really happy folk are married women and single men." -- H. L. Mencken.
Now, I don't happen to *agree* with those quotes or that shirt. But a lot of people do. There's a lot of societal pressure in the US for women to get married, because a lot of people see an unmarried woman as uncomplete. I think that's a crazy viewpoint, personally, but I have a lot of friends who feel that way, whether consciously or not.
I agree with what white_yeti said. If you can't fit in the space, usually your drill + the length of a drillbit that can get through the thickness of the studs -- typically at least 4 1/2" -- will usually won't fit in the space either. You can get a short right-angle drill, but you can also just make a couple small holes in the drywall up at the ceiling corner, feed the wire in (in both directions) there, and then refinish that point. Drywall work sucks, admittedly, but its obviousness rises as (roughly) the cube of the circumference of the hole times the square of the straight-line circumference. Which is to say a small oblong hole isn't too hard to make vanish, compared to a book-sized rectilinear patch. And drywall work is a hundred times easier if you use the wet-sandable mud, rather than dry-sand only because you can feather it with a wet sponge and never have to deal with dust.
In my original post I made a lot of assumptions. In most of the US, if you do your own work on your primary residence, and it is a single-family residence unconnected to any other residences, you can do your own work if you get a permit and have the work inspected by a licensed electrician afterwards. If it's a second home (not a primary residence) or connected to other houses, all work must be done by a licensed electrician.
Nobody bothers to get a permit or get their work inspected on their own homes, however.
(That's for 110v wiring. For 'low voltage', anything under 24 volts, you can do anything you want any time you want.)
The walls between *rooms* are made of *brick*? Wow. Renovation must be a bitch. A couple years ago, it took me about three hours to move a closet from *this* room to *that* room, with wooden walls, coz I could just rip off some sheetrock, cut out two studs, put in a header, put in two studs in the old doorway, and put up new drywall. It's also my (rather picky, admittedly) habit that when I walk into a room and try and turn on the lightswitch in the wrong place, well, it's not the wrong place, then is it? so I move the switch. Which, again, takes about an hour and a half, and then it's where I wanted it to be in the first place. When I move a computer from over *here* to over *there*, I move the power outlet (because I run a separate circuit for the computers, through a UPS) and the Cat5 outlet. I can't even imagine trying to deal with that with brick walls.
Why? What do you put in your walls? I usually put insulation around bathroom walls, and sometimes even offset the studs so there's no continuous conduction path. But otherwise, the rooms are basically the same temp, so why bother insulating? Until zone heat control becomes common, it's just a waste of material. I've lived in older houses that had uninsulated external walls. If you don't have plumbing (which those houses didn't when they were built) and you have warm clothing, it is, again, a waste of money to put insulation in the walls. These days, any house I'd build would have 20 cm thick outer walls, filled with insulation. But I'm still not sure I'd bother with insulation between rooms, because it's too low a return on investment.
Some notes on wiring -- either power or ethernet cable. 1. Drill two holes in the header, each about 1/2" in diameter, about 2" apart. You put a flashlight over one so you can see what you're doing when you drop the line down the other. 2. On the bottom end, cut a full-sized hole for a standard rework box. You can get standard wall faceplates for snap-in Cat5 outlets. I generally wire with double-hole faceplates, and put a phone cord in the lower one and Cat5 in the upper. A rework box hole gives you a large enough opening that you can get your hand in there and grab stuff. Pull the wire out and run it into a rework box and put that in the wall. (if you have really big hands you might not be able to do this. Find someone with smaller hands or run a loop of wire into the wall first, then drop the wire from the top, through the loop, and then pull the loop out the hole.)
By using an adjacent hole to admit light, I can usually manage to drop a wire into an existing box if I've punched out the knockout on the top, with a bit of care.
Note that all this advice, and the parent poster advice, all assume you don't have firebreaks inside the wall. Many newer houses have 2x4's across the wall halfway up, to keep the space between the walls acting like a chimney. In that case you're going to be cutting drywall and/or finding a seriously long drillbit. (It's possible to weld a drillbit onto the end of a 3' piece of mild steel rod, but it's pretty unpleasant to use.)
>I think the Republicans have a good shot of convincing the American people the Democrats have overreached if they deemphasize the ultra socially conservative southern wing
So the question I've been asking people lately is: can they *do* that? The wing you're talking about isn't just southern: it constitutes about 20% of the whole US, more or less. You can't ignore that, and given that we can roughly apportion the electorate as 40% D, 40% R, 20% independent, the Republicans *can't* afford to lose close to half their base by deemphasizing them. This is the most passionate, highest-contributing (save corporations) and highest-voting group in the US. I think the Republicans are inextricably tied to the evangelical vote, and the question is how far they can move from that base while still getting its support.
One of my friends is blond and blue-eyed and looks like she just walked out of a pub in Islington. She was born in Soweto, Johannesburg, and gleefully fills in "African-American" on every census and employment form she fills out. Another friend has brown skin, black hair, and is a fourth-generation American, even though most of her great-great-grandparents were Thai and Chinese. She tends to put 'other' when she fills in forms that ask her ethnicity.
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From my source: "In the natural environment, lichen âoeprovidesâ the alga with water and minerals that the fungus absorbs from whatever the lichen is growing on, its substrate."
As I said before, there are lots of lithotrophes, and they do, as the name implies, eat rock. Read about chemolithotrophes some time.
Oh, and by the way, acid rain also eats rock. Ever been in a cave? 80% of caves are formed by carbonic acid in water dissolving the limestone and forming a void.
>Notice how you don't see very many organisms eating dirt and rock?
Like lichens? There are lots of monocellular organisms that are lithotropic. The only reason they don't do better is because you don't get *much* energy when you convert complex rocks into simpler oxides, so it takes a long time to do a good job of it and in the meantime an animal comes along and eats you. But where I live, all the rocks are covered in lichens and they're slowly digesting them.
If you don't have a natural predator, and you're willing to reproduce slowly, rocks make great food: there are a lot of them about. But as long as there is anything more complex than two- or three-atom oxides and nitrides, there is still energy to be derived from breaking them down, and something, somewhere, has made that its foodstuff.
(I don't know of anything that eats concrete, but asphalt is digested by bacteria, so I wouldn't be surprised to find out that there's something that can crack concrete down into calcium oxide and sulfur dioxide.)
>The point of all that junk DNA is something that we have not fully figured out yet. It has a point, we'll figure it out, along with all the other things we don't yet know.
Some of that junk is, indeed, just junk -- it's crap we (as a species, and even across all mammals or all vertebrates) picked up from retroviruses millions of years ago, just long repeats of viral genomes.
The tricky bit is that some of *that* stuff we've started to use. Mitochondria, themselves, are a case study. They were originally parasites, essentially, much like chlamydia or other obligate intracellular bacterial infections are. Then they became commensal, then symbiotic, and now they're completely necessary for aerobic metabolism, the reason multicellular organisms can survive.
A: people *do* die of mitochondrial disorders all the time -- or at least one theory of aging is that it's largely because of crap spilled out of mitochondria that aren't working right anymore because they've accumulated so many errors, so death from old age or age-related diseases is precisely mitochondrial disorders. (Still heavily disputed, mind you.)
B: and that's because their DNA polymerases aren't as good at high-fidelity replication of DNA than the main eukaryotic DNA polymerases. They make more mistakes, they pick up lots of problems, they start failing and the cell starts starving, as well as being damaged by oxidative species created in the ATP synthase cycle and then leaked out into the main cell by failing mitochondria.
>As far as I remember correctly, as the DNA is being copied it is also checked for irregularities.
Yes. There are many DNA polymerases, that synthesize a second strand of DNA complimentary to the template strand when it's unwound, and many of those can proofread: if they detect an error in the strand they're creating as they're extending the new DNA polymer, they can back up and rip it out, fill it in with correct bases, and proceed.
That, by the way, is the major reason that eukaryotes have such good fidelity in DNA reproduction -- errors on the order of 1:100,000,000 replications, whereas viruses like AIDS, which co-opt cellular replication in favor of viral replication but screw up the proofreading functions, have replication errors many orders of magnitude greater. Which results in them mutating *much* more quickly, meaning that they adapt to new environments (immune system response) much more quickly as a group, at the cost of a very much higher individual failure rate.
And that's really the fundamental tradeoff: if the environment is stable, you want very high fidelity in your genetic material reproduction, but if it's changing, the species as a whole wants lower fidelity in replication since that'll allow it to adapt more quickly. Eukaryotes deal with this by having good fidelity but also having transposons, groups of genetic material that can be rapidly interchanged to produce extremely large combinations of genes (seen especially in the immune system) whereas viruses just have crappy fidelity and rely on mass attack.
I'm skipping a lot of steps and it's been 15 years since I actually learned any of this, but a quick bit of reading predisposes me to think it's reasonably accurate.
A large fraction of the metals, in their elemental form, are either toxic or reactive, and several of the intermetallics are also pretty nasty, arsenic being the most noteworthy of that crowd.
There are several that actually get much more dangerous as they react and turn into other, lower-energy molecules, most notably mercury, which you can drink when it's elemental (I'm not saying it's a good idea, just that people have survived drinking a half-liter of the stuff: it was a medieval treatment for colic) but mercury that is in a lower-energy state, namely methyl mercury, is deadly in milligram quantities.
However, we're not likely to see much of those things being produced by burning garbage, because they're not in the garbage in the first place. Some of the nastier things: arsenic, lead, cadmium, are or have been banned by European Reduction of Hazardous Substances restrictions. Others, like beryllium, just aren't used very often so they don't show up in waste streams very much. Most of what's in garbage is what's in food (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorous) and what's in the ground (oxygen, iron, silicon, aluminum.) Those, and the combinations of them that are commonly found in post-burn air, are generally not horrible, but there are things formed in exhaust streams (dioxins, sulfur dioxide) that do have problems associated with them. However, there is an enormous amount of research done into exhaust scrubbers, and it's likely that existing scrubber systems could deal with this. (If there are requirements for use of such scrubbers: plenty of places try hard to get out of using them, even though they generally are a profit center because they produce useful stuff with resale value, like sulfuric acid.)
For the record, many many other places are currently burning garbage and using the excess heat generated to do useful stuff. Many (most?) cement plant primary kilns burn trash as their heatsource. (I believe a company named Holnam runs some of them.) Problem is they dump gobs of toxic crap out the smokestack because they don't burn hot enough, which plasma-temperatures might fix.
Do you think Octave might be able to handle what you've done in Matlab? I was referencing this because I'd run across your page a while back and wanted to let the PP and GPP know about your work, but there are aspects of it I could use, as well.
If I'd done this, I think I would've just taken several hundred pictures of the needle as it moves from 0 to 100% scale, then compared the webcam picture to the database and seen which was the best match. I'm not a very sophisticated programmer. But I've been impressed by your accomplishment ever since I saw it on hackaday.
That's possible. I actually haven't tried Kooka or gocr with printed text, just with the multimeter's segmented LCD.
This guy has an algorithm run in matlab to convert dial indicator readings to numbers using MatLab. He claims 99% accuracy over 2000 readings.
I've tried using some opensource OCR programs, most notably Kooka OCR. What I was doing was (I think) the best possible situation: putting a digital multimeter with a very large readout panel face-down on a flatbed scanner and automatically scanning it and dumping the output to Kooka. It does a pretty terrible job, honestly. I'm lucky to get one digit correct half the time, out of the three digits available.
I'm doing cropping to make sure only the digits I want are in the frame.
If you have any suggestions for better OCR programs, I'd love to hear them. I'm really annoyed by this, because my girlfriend's HP flatbed scanner has OCR software from 1998 that came (apparently free) with the scanner, that has better than 95% accuracy on an entire printed page, at an angle to the scanner. Windows-only, of course.
What I'm claiming is that 90% of LEGO purchases are by people who don't care about quality, just about price, and the company can't survive on that remaining 10%.
Consider Cray vs. PC's. Or even Sun. There might just not *be* a market niche that can support a company. And then we're all stuck with PC's, and I think it's possible that in this particular case, it's the quality of LEGO that's creating a market, and if they went away, the poorer-quality imitations would be insufficient to maintain a market, coz they'd just be bricks. LEGO is having enough problems already maintaining market share against video games and such, and it's possible it's only their research and advertising that keeps a market open.
I've done the same thing: I built a 4WD car back in, I dunno, 1988, and getting the front drive system to hold together was a *nightmare*. I ended up pinning stuff like you're talking about, using orthogonal links, and rubber bands. (I almost resorted to, gasp, superglue.) That's actually almost the only complaint I have with LEGO, that the height isn't an easy multiple of the length/width. It'd be so nice if you could take bricks with holes in the side and just snap another brick along the side, to bind them all together vertically. (Although it'd mean you couldn't have axles of the current size going through the bricks, now that I think of it, so maybe every other row...)
My use of aluminum is simply that I don't have enough bricks to build stiff structures that are a meter on a side and half a meter tall. If I could do a solid shell, that'd be strong enough, but, dude, that's a whole lot of bricks. The gantry head on the thing I'm building right now is made of long runs of girder bricks, the longest LEGO bricks made, triangulated along the sides with other girder bricks, so it looks just like a crane. It's nowhere near stiff enough, but given my brick quantity limitations, it'll have to do. I'm considering buying DUPLO bricks just because they're cheap for their size.
The other thing that sucks is wearing out axles from insufficient bearing area: anything spinning at high RPM for any length of time, you end up with axles with big smoothed-out patches (and they get really rattly as they wear smaller and no longer run concentric.)
But overall, still a great prototyping tool.
There were other, similar blocks well before Hilary Page invented Kiddicraft. I have a box of 2000 pressed wooden blocks called "American Bricks" from 1938, that are similar in size and identical in layout (ratio of height, width, and length, with 2x4 blocks, with 8 studs on top and matching holes on the bottom.) I've read previously that they went back into the late 1920's, and there were others like them beforehand.
It wasn't the idea of stackable, interlocking bricks like Page's and others, that made LEGO successful. It was learning how to do precision plastic injection molding that allowed the bricks to stick together very tightly, and precision chemistry that allowed them to last through thousands of attach/detach cycles, that made LEGO enormous. A friend of mine was a plant manager for an old Samsonite plant that licensed the manufacture of LEGO bricks from 1968-1972, and he said that the LEGO plastic injection molding equipment, used for making toys, was superior to the best American plastic injection molding equipment used for medical equipment at that time.
I've taken to using aluminum sheet to fill in for large quantities of blocks, when I need to make a stiff, large structure. I can replace mass quantities of blocks. But, yeah, there's no way I can replace power transmissions, reduction units, all the things that make LEGO such a useful machine prototyping tool. I already miss the days when I could go to a local toy store and buy a Technic 871 set and get a dozen gears and axles. Something comparable from Smallparts.com would run $400 and wouldn't be anywhere nearly as universally useful.
The thing is: I don't think 95% of the people buying LEGO bricks are doing that. They're just getting a toy for their kids. Another toy, that has bricks but costs 30% less, will substitute perfectly. If you're buying for yourself, you get much better stuff than when you're buying for your kid or someone else's kid because you know they'll just eat them, melt them, or make LEGO catapults and launch the parts into next week.
I have mixed feelings about this. I have 38 years' worth and hundreds of thousands of LEGO bricks, which cost an enormous amount, and it'd sure be nice to get vats of cheap bricks so I can build some of the things I want. (I'm halfway through making a 3-D printer using chocolate, that has a working space of about 9 cubic feet, and boy does that take a lot of blocks.)
But at the same time, companies will rush into the space formed by LEGO losing their trademark, build cheap bricks, outcompete LEGO, LEGO will go out of business, and then we'll be stuck with lots of cheap imitators who aren't making the beautiful stuff LEGO created, and that could end up destroying exactly what makes LEGO worthwhile.
There is a value to having a single entity driving a market -- a planned economy in miniature.
The good thing about current patent law is that they'll only put the US and Europe 20 years behind places that don't give a hoot about patent infringement. After that, the field's open.
In a way, this is a good thing -- if they patent *everything* right now, and 99% of those things don't get addressed for lack of technology or resources, until the patents have expired, then all those research directions are an open field, for anyone to explore. You could look at this as a retarded version of open source (where by retarded I mean both 'stupid' and 'slowed down', in this case, by 20 years.)
As long as they don't manage to lengthen the scope of patents, all they're doing is cutting their own throats.
Two of the last three weddings I've gone to, at the reception the bride was wearing a shirt that said "GAME OVER" and showed icons of a woman in a wedding gown with a big smile on her face, and a man in a tux, looking sad, standing next to her. Just a little observation, is all...
and hey, how about a few pithy quotes:
"It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as possible" -- George Bernard Shaw
"In America, the only really happy folk are married women and single men." -- H. L. Mencken.
Now, I don't happen to *agree* with those quotes or that shirt. But a lot of people do. There's a lot of societal pressure in the US for women to get married, because a lot of people see an unmarried woman as uncomplete. I think that's a crazy viewpoint, personally, but I have a lot of friends who feel that way, whether consciously or not.
I agree with what white_yeti said. If you can't fit in the space, usually your drill + the length of a drillbit that can get through the thickness of the studs -- typically at least 4 1/2" -- will usually won't fit in the space either. You can get a short right-angle drill, but you can also just make a couple small holes in the drywall up at the ceiling corner, feed the wire in (in both directions) there, and then refinish that point. Drywall work sucks, admittedly, but its obviousness rises as (roughly) the cube of the circumference of the hole times the square of the straight-line circumference. Which is to say a small oblong hole isn't too hard to make vanish, compared to a book-sized rectilinear patch.
And drywall work is a hundred times easier if you use the wet-sandable mud, rather than dry-sand only because you can feather it with a wet sponge and never have to deal with dust.
In my original post I made a lot of assumptions.
In most of the US, if you do your own work on your primary residence, and it is a single-family residence unconnected to any other residences, you can do your own work if you get a permit and have the work inspected by a licensed electrician afterwards.
If it's a second home (not a primary residence) or connected to other houses, all work must be done by a licensed electrician.
Nobody bothers to get a permit or get their work inspected on their own homes, however.
(That's for 110v wiring. For 'low voltage', anything under 24 volts, you can do anything you want any time you want.)
The walls between *rooms* are made of *brick*?
Wow.
Renovation must be a bitch. A couple years ago, it took me about three hours to move a closet from *this* room to *that* room, with wooden walls, coz I could just rip off some sheetrock, cut out two studs, put in a header, put in two studs in the old doorway, and put up new drywall.
It's also my (rather picky, admittedly) habit that when I walk into a room and try and turn on the lightswitch in the wrong place, well, it's not the wrong place, then is it? so I move the switch. Which, again, takes about an hour and a half, and then it's where I wanted it to be in the first place. When I move a computer from over *here* to over *there*, I move the power outlet (because I run a separate circuit for the computers, through a UPS) and the Cat5 outlet. I can't even imagine trying to deal with that with brick walls.
Why? What do you put in your walls?
I usually put insulation around bathroom walls, and sometimes even offset the studs so there's no continuous conduction path. But otherwise, the rooms are basically the same temp, so why bother insulating? Until zone heat control becomes common, it's just a waste of material. I've lived in older houses that had uninsulated external walls. If you don't have plumbing (which those houses didn't when they were built) and you have warm clothing, it is, again, a waste of money to put insulation in the walls.
These days, any house I'd build would have 20 cm thick outer walls, filled with insulation. But I'm still not sure I'd bother with insulation between rooms, because it's too low a return on investment.
Some notes on wiring -- either power or ethernet cable.
1. Drill two holes in the header, each about 1/2" in diameter, about 2" apart. You put a flashlight over one so you can see what you're doing when you drop the line down the other.
2. On the bottom end, cut a full-sized hole for a standard rework box. You can get standard wall faceplates for snap-in Cat5 outlets. I generally wire with double-hole faceplates, and put a phone cord in the lower one and Cat5 in the upper. A rework box hole gives you a large enough opening that you can get your hand in there and grab stuff. Pull the wire out and run it into a rework box and put that in the wall. (if you have really big hands you might not be able to do this. Find someone with smaller hands or run a loop of wire into the wall first, then drop the wire from the top, through the loop, and then pull the loop out the hole.)
By using an adjacent hole to admit light, I can usually manage to drop a wire into an existing box if I've punched out the knockout on the top, with a bit of care.
Note that all this advice, and the parent poster advice, all assume you don't have firebreaks inside the wall. Many newer houses have 2x4's across the wall halfway up, to keep the space between the walls acting like a chimney. In that case you're going to be cutting drywall and/or finding a seriously long drillbit. (It's possible to weld a drillbit onto the end of a 3' piece of mild steel rod, but it's pretty unpleasant to use.)
>I think the Republicans have a good shot of convincing the American people the Democrats have overreached if they deemphasize the ultra socially conservative southern wing
So the question I've been asking people lately is: can they *do* that? The wing you're talking about isn't just southern: it constitutes about 20% of the whole US, more or less. You can't ignore that, and given that we can roughly apportion the electorate as 40% D, 40% R, 20% independent, the Republicans *can't* afford to lose close to half their base by deemphasizing them. This is the most passionate, highest-contributing (save corporations) and highest-voting group in the US. I think the Republicans are inextricably tied to the evangelical vote, and the question is how far they can move from that base while still getting its support.
One of my friends is blond and blue-eyed and looks like she just walked out of a pub in Islington. She was born in Soweto, Johannesburg, and gleefully fills in "African-American" on every census and employment form she fills out.
Another friend has brown skin, black hair, and is a fourth-generation American, even though most of her great-great-grandparents were Thai and Chinese. She tends to put 'other' when she fills in forms that ask her ethnicity.