Obama has not been friendly to the states on MMJ because he realizes that if he lets a state opt-out of one federal law, that opens the door for all of them. This would result in the healthcare bill being taken apart by red states.
The administration is saying they're enforcing anti-marijuana laws (that they previously claimed they wouldn't vigorously prosecute) because states with MMJ laws usually allow local supply/grow operations to provide the marijuana, and the probably obvious result is that people grow in MMJ states, then transport it across state lines to sell in places where it's still completely illegal and the profit margins are much higher. I'm not saying I personally know whether either the states-opting-out-is-dangerous or the transporting-across-state-lines scenario is true, just that a basic understanding of supply and demand tends to make the transporting-across-state-lines scenario very plausible. (And, as much as I hate to admit, pretty much solidly in the jurisdiction of Federal enforcement.)
To give a very approximate comparison (these numbers vary a lot by region, time period, and definition), around 1% of the population is bisexual, and around 5% is gay.
Based on observation, I think that about 1% of the population is obligate bisexual, but the number that are facultatively bisexual is more like 5-8%.
It's a mutant space goat. We better get the telephone cleaners and hair dressers loaded onto B Ark.
A bit of Douglas Adams humor that's often overlooked is the final sequel to the story: all the people left on the planet, the ones who would've been in the A and C arks, were killed by a disease caught from a dirty telephone, because they'd gotten rid of all their telephone sanitizers. The people on the B ark ended up outliving all the "useful" people, a point that is wilfully missed by most readers who identify with the A and C ark people. I'm pretty sure Douglas Adams knew exactly how this would be read, and enjoyed his double-depth joke all the more for knowing that.
(The school looked at her and said she's ADHD and recommended drugs. The doctor agreed to prescribe with no testing, which made me suspicious. I had her formally tested, and she's not ADHD. She's severely dyslexic. I'd like to personally thank the school system and medical community for screwing that up.)
They're terrible at diagnosing unusual or obscure things that look like things they know how to treat. With that said: it might ge that your daughter has vision tracking/fusion problems, which are sometimes a cause of dyslexia. My wife's a vision therapist (and dyslexic) and she's helped a lot of kids diagnosed with dyslexia to vastly improve their reading speed and math abilities by helping them learn to train their eyes. A lot of dyslexia cases are caused by processing problems, but a lot of them can be treated or at least minimized with vision therapy, so it might be worthwhile to your daughter to at least take her to a vision therapist and see if there's any likelihood of improvement. (And age doesn't matter much: one of her patients is 84 and is slowly improving from double vision problems she's had for years.)
It is no doubt sexist but girls who reach puberty are very attractive to a large age range of men. Boys of the same age, only to Catholic priests.
Not to disagree with many other excellent points in your post, but I was reading a book a while back about reproductive strategies in different animal/plant/bacterial species, and one thing it mentioned was that with humans, men are looking for 25-year-olds. Heterosexual men look for 25 year old women, homosexual men look for 25 year old men. They'll settle for stuff on either side of that point, but that's roughly the high point on the desire curve. In contrast, women look for partners who are a few years older than them, whether hetero or homosexual. This isn't the case at all with most other animals, because they generally don't experience menopause, so there's much less age selectivity towards females; whatever switch controls hetero or homosexuality appears to just change which sex you're interested in rather than your attractiveness filter for that sex.
Out of curiosity: why helium rather than argon? Argon's dead cheap, dead common, and doesn't have anywhere nearly the diffusion-through-containment-systems problems helium has. Is there some drawback to it?
I see your cars-in-San-Francisco complaint and raise you a cars-in-Seville-Valencia-or-Granada complaint. Imagine a city where half the roads are so narrow that a single car driving down them means people have to step into doorways to let the car go by, where you can drive through an area 4 blocks on a side where there simply is no space for a car to park, and when you do find an area for cars to park they're already two cars deep up on the sidewalks. The difference is: in San Francisco, the driving and parking situations are such that people think it's okay to own cars. In other places with those sorts of conditions, people don't even consider them as an option.
Yeah, that sounds like a great idea: spend several hours making a video, for a $25 computer I don't want, on the off-chance that you'll come back and read this, and knowing full well that since you're a mouthy anonymous coward you'd just claim I faked or photoshopped the results. Sounds like a *great* use of my time. Tell you what: get an account, respond to this, and make it $75 in cash, and I'll film that video. Though what good it would do, I have no idea: watching someone put a board on a hot plate, load on a chip too small for the video camera to see, reflow it, look at it under a microscope, probe it with a multimeter, and announce that it worked is going to do what, precisely, that my description of the process didn't do?
I did find the article interesting when it appeared in The Atlantic, but after some thoughtfulness I realize it's very unfair to argue that a human being falls into the Uncanny Valley...
Michael Jackson? Heidi Montag? Jocelyn Wildensteen? I keep claiming the reason the uncanny valley is going to disappear is that robots are marching this way across it, and humans are marching that way to meet them.
Oh hey someone's doing it: http://hackaday.com/2012/01/31/3d-print-in-wax-cast-in-metal/ Printing powdered wax into a wax form, and doing lost wax casting. (All the advantages of lost foam, with much less smoke. This does limit you to castable refractory, which gets expensive, but they have castable refractory that can handle platinum, so you could do steel with this.)
I put BGA's, LLP's, and SON's on boards by hand all the time. I use a hotplate that goes to 260C rather than a toaster oven because I can place it and then look at the edge with a boom-type microscope set at 45 degrees. With a BGA you can see slightly under the package to make sure the balls are on the pads; with an LLP or SON you can see the edges of the chip leads and make sure they're aligned with the pads. Check all four sides, because it's not uncommon to have one side lovely, the two adjacent sides slightly twisted, and the opposite side almost one whole pad off. If you're using leaded solder it'll tend to self-align, but you can't trust that. Bolting insulative material (we used old FR4 boards) to each side of the hotplate prevents you burning your hand from touching it by mistake and provides you a place to steady your hand while adjusting the rotation/placement with a dental pick. We place 0.5mm pitch BGA's (which we call microSMD's) this way on a regular basis, when our BGA rework station is busy or down. AND! it is possible, although painful, to check continuity to the chip from the board, in many cases, without an x-ray. Check for a diode drop from each node to the substrate.
I think that'd work great except that the surface texture of his patterns is rough and that's going to be hell for drawing the pattern from the sand. I've done a *lot* of green sand pattern casting. You need A: draft and B: good surface finish. (How good? The castings I do, if I put a piece of scotch tape over a lathe center hole in a turned form, the finished casting has the zigzag end where the tape dispenser cut off the tape clearly visible in the metal. Any surface imperfections will be finishing issues.) For draft you need a slope of about 2%-ish. So you'd have to print out a slightly tapered form -- which isn't a huge problem, especially if the large side of the taper is down -- but both the end and side texture of cheaper 3d printers is rough enough it'll hold sand. (If you dip the form in hot wax you get a nice waterproof coating that's also fairly smooth, and you can also make your form to exactly the right size, and dip it twice or three times, and account for cooling shrinkage so your casting comes out the size you want, rather than having to build your form too large.) I totally agree on the pillar-of-smoke thing, but the sheer frustration of having to design around a cope-and-drag and doing split molds, figuring out how to get stuff out of the sand, and most of all the stress of having the crucible full of hot metal and having to oh-so-carefully split the mold, desperately hoping it doesn't collapse, draw the parts, and then rapidly patch any errors, sometimes makes my stomach turn. There are a lot of benefits to lost-foam casting, and personally I think unless you need to cast multiple copies, in which case having a wood or printed master makes sense, the quickness and trouble-free nature of lost-foam is just outstanding.
I've used 7x10's. I've used my Atlas -- same model as yours. I'm sticking with the Atlas, and my coworkers who have 7x10's come over and look at the finishes I can get and sigh with envy. I consider most of the 7xwhatevers to be parts kits that could be turned into a reasonable lathe if you replace all the plastic changegears with steel ones (at $40 each) and likewise the plastic gibs and don't mind that you still can't get the compound to feel solid, and spend a bunch of time scraping away at little bits that the ways hang up on when traversing. With that said, it is a drag that I can't order a new leadscrew from Harbor Freight and have it delivered a few days later, like the 7x10 guys can: I have to scour ebay for that damned acme stub thread leadscrew Atlas saw fit to use, since Clausing has run out of them. Equipment that hasn't been in production for 40 years means some serious scrounging for parts, so there's a big plus side to new-ish. (also by the way join the atlas618 group on yahoo -- a wealth of info.) Basically, the way I see it is: people who want to learn machining don't want an old machine that they have to fix, because they have to understand machining to figure out what's wrong. I don't think they do much better with Chinese imports for pretty much exactly the same reasons. I learned on one of those crap AA/Sears 612's, and beat the daylights out of it learning; I'd feel terrible if I abused my Atlas that way. And all that gets you a decent manual machine, and you still have to wade through turning that into a CNC, which is, as I could talk your ear off about, its own huge complicated set of problems to wade through, where there are even fewer people who know enough about what you're doing to offer relevant advice. I dunno. All the options are bad. But you should totally take a look at that yahoo group.
A friend who has done this tells me it's somewhat of a waste of time because the 3D printer wants to move an order of magnitude faster than the max speeds most mills are capable of driving. (Since it's adding toothpaste, rather than cutting away metal, maybe that's not so surprising.) He ended up buying a Thing-o-Matic (and doing a *lot* of re-engineering to get it working reliably) but now he's thrilled with it. It doesn't replace his mills and lathes, but it sure is a convenient addition. He's all oh the thumbwheel broke off my micrometer: I'll print a new thumbwheel bracket. The windshield mount on my recumbent broke, so I'll print a new one. He's printed plumbing parts, cookie cutters, centering adapters for optics, replacement bar handle clamps, you name it, and there's no setup or clamping or accessories or anything like that -- not even alignment. He just emails the completed gcode to the machine and goes in twenty minutes later and takes his new item off the stage. I'm dead envious. That might be different if you're using a servo-based mill with fast ballscrews, but for steppers with fine-pitch threads, well, my CNC is pretty rattly and jiggly when it's driving around at 10ipm and his Thing-o-Matic can run at 500ipm.
*I* certainly have never seen a mill/drill under $1500 that's useful for anything other than a boat anchor. A coworker got a Smithy Granite 1224 that he thought was fairly useful, but it sure wasn't $1500. (And of course that's a pure manual machine, so you still have to add at *least* $500 of electronics to get CNC -- and for that same $500 you can buy a complete 3D printer kit and be printing stuff in two hours, they claim, whereas it took me about 20 hours to convert my manual mill to CNC.)
It isn't ironic, it's sad, that 40 years later, there are people who honestly believe that the moon landings were faked.
The fact that you can see the landing site with a powerful telescope apparently isn't good enough for some people.
-- Stephen
I have a friend whose wife is Chinese. Their daughter is reading "Animal Farm" right now -- the Chinese edition. He asked her what it was about and she said "The French Revolution!" because apparently the Chinese version of AF she has is *quite* a bit different than ours. I was interested in that and was wondering if he'd seen other places where stuff had gotten seriously distorted and he said, completely straightfaced, that his wife didn't believe the US had ever landed people on the moon because that's what Chinese schools taught her. I have no idea if this is true, but if he was trolling me he was keeping a dead serious face doing so.
Our invitations were milled on my CNC with a 4mm ball-end mill, into 2mm thick aluminum, and individually wrapped in copper foil. People told us the invitations were too beautiful to open -- and since we used thin copper foil and thin aluminum, they only cost about $0.75 each to mail. I wrote the invite in Inkscape with the hersheytext plugin, using one of the one-stroke fonts (which are optimized for engraving) and used the gcode extension of inkscape to convert this to the gcode that EMC2 on the mill reads. It took some work tramming the mill to get it flat, since engraving this shallowly means you need the bed and the spindle dead perpendicular and the bed moving dead flat, so I put a big thick hunk of aluminum on the bed and milled in a recess into which each invitation plate fit, with the bottom milled dead flat, to hold it level. I added a vacuum hold-down by milling/drilling some holes in the bed under the invitation plates, that went to a lawn sprinkler solenoid that attached to the vacuum pump (the compressor pump from a refrigerator.) The solenoid was controlled by EMC2 with one of the digital output codes.
The upshot was that I'd put a piece of metal in, hit 'play', and walk off. It would cut in fifteen minutes, and move the spindle off to one side and turn it off, and I'd wander in and swap out another piece of metal. It took about a week of running, but only maybe an hour of my time because I was just swapping out finished pieces.
The trickiest and most dangerous part was cutting the aluminum plates to size. I bought a 4x8foot sheet of aluminum, and lacking anything that could cut that safely, I ended up using an old trashed carbide blade on my tablesaw. It was the loudest sound I think I've ever heard, but it was pretty accurate. Wear every bit of protective gear that you have if you try this.
Unfortunately I was in a horrible hurry to get everything done so I haven't gotten any good pictures uploaded, but here is a picture of what text enscribed in powder-coated aluminum looks like. We used an italic font and I didn't cut as deeply for the invitations (and it was bare aluminum) so I think they looked a lot nicer.
Oh and I got my mom to handwrite all the addresses because she's excellent at calligraphy.
Now, it's likely you don't *have* a cnc but there are scads of places who will do this sort of work for you and since it's two-dimensional and fast it comes out being pretty cheap if you farm it out to a local machine shop. But there is a lot of pleasure in doing it yourself.
Is there any reason to believe that any car would have let the occupants survive being smashed between a 20 ton 18 wheeler and a 5 ton stationary UPS truck (both of which have hard frames that don't crumple upon impact)? That's a lot of force for a car to absorb. Maybe we should all be driving military tanks to protect us from the rare small-car smooshed-between-two-trucks accidents.
While I'm not advocating large cars for general usage -- they're a terrible idea -- I can say that having been in this particular crash, in a Subaru wagon, I appreciated having the car crush over a meter shorter than it was, while still maintaining enough space for me to survive. Here's a picture of what was left: the car was shortened by about the same distance as the total length of a SmartCar after the semi truck rear-ended me at 75 mph when I was sitting at a stop.
But how often does that happen? (Once per life is probably an extremely accurate estimate: I'm most likely an outlier.) Planning for crashes like this is like planning for an asteroid strike: the amount of time spent even thinking about it isn't justifiable. Spend your energy considering how to lower your risk of cardiovascular disease: it'll probably be 1000x more useful.
The HPVelotechnic is fully suspended. Previous to it I had a Turner SWB, that had no suspension. After a 100 mile ride I thought I was going to piss blood. That's why it went away and the HPVelo showed up. It's this bike. It only has about 40mm of front suspension travel, which curbs soak up entirely (and then some.) I've never seen a recumbent that had enough suspension travel to handle a curb without bottoming out. In contrast, on the mountain bike or my road racing bike, I can bunnyhop the bike up/over a 40cm ledge smoothly, with the only jostle being the slight bump of landing again. Each frame geometry has its advantages, but for rough territory, the mountain bike just *shines*. (Although if you want to see something amazing, check out this video of a dude doing pretty astounding observed trials riding on a carbon road bike. It gets good about 40 seconds in.)
Fairing, yes, but recumbents are *terrible* off-road. I can ride my cannondale mountain bike over a ford taurus sedan. My HPVelotechnik recumbent can hold 28 miles an hour for most of the day but can't even handle crossing a curb unless it's basically perpendicular (and even then it's pretty unpleasant.) Not to mention: have you ever pushed a recumbent? It's *awful*. And she's going to be spending a lot of time pushing her bike. For flat paved roads recumbents are unequalled, but for offroad rough conditions mountain bikes are pretty amazing.
The aerodynamics (and weight) on a Hanebrink are *horrendous* -- but with a tire like that, and over terrain like that, you're not going to be anywhere near the speeds at which that matters. (For bikes the crossover is usually in the 12-20 kilometers per hour range, below which your power is mostly going to fighting friction, and above which it's mostly going to pushing air aside.) Those aero bars are mostly going to be of use to her for changing hand and body positions. I've done 100+ mile and multi-day rides on mountain bikes and they're murder in part because of always having your hands/arms/body in one position. Your point with the tires is well-taken. If you don't go wide enough to float on top of the snow you just add more rolling resistance, and in order to float on the snow you have tires that no longer fit in a typical frame. (Hence Hanebrink's ultrawide-stance frames.) I've ridden Pugsleys and the like that can float over wet sand but are still unpleasant in dry fine sand, and are miserable in powder. Some day I'd love to try a Hanebrink. I'd also love to make my own, only make a pedal-powered quad with reasonably balloony tires so it could float as well. (Of course, at that point it starts becoming more attractive to just go ahead and make a hovercraft like Steam Boat Willie.) But generally I prefer a cyclecross tire over a huge fat wide tire in most somewhat-deep-snow conditions precisely because it'll cut through and give me some traction with much lower rolling resistance.
Hanebrink's been building these bikes for almost two decades, although I've only seen one in person. These days Dan's making an electric-assist version of the bike. They have a bare minimum of plastic parts, which break in the cold. I don't know what he's using for tires these days but his first run were apparently done using knobby ATV tires that he'd ground the knobs off, which he described as a fairly unpleasant process. They also have a somewhat complex geartrain to give reasonable heel clearance from the chain, as well as reasonable speeds across a wide terrain profile.
Starfish Prime, an atmospheric nuclear test in 1962, results: "electromagnetic pulse also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 1,445 kilometres (898 mi) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms and damaging a telephone company microwave link. The EMP-damaged microwave link shut down telephone calls from Kauai to the other Hawaiian islands."
I'm not sure it's a non-issue, particularly given that modern electronics have geometries that are at least two orders of magnitude smaller than anything in 1962, so should be damaged by two orders of magnitude less voltage gradient, and modern weapons designers have apparently made weapons that are optimized for higher EMP, so I would expect that a modern EMP blast would be larger, and electronics more suseptible, than a blast that demonstrably did cause damage to electronics.
The aftermarket clones is, I'm told, precisely why my company -- and several other major analog IC designers -- have all their fabs in the US or Europe. They do test engineering and packaging in China, but that's all. As for preventing copies, one of the interesting things about that is that in a lot of markets, the process of reverse engineering, producing silicon, producing test hardware, getting packaging validated, and getting the chips to market means that by the time those reverse-engineered chips hit the mass market the originals are halfway through their lifetimes, have already recouped the engineering investment, and are being sold at a fairly slim profit margin, so 80% of the money that is going to be made off that socket has already been made. Second to market, with cheaper chips, is a really tough business.
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Obama has not been friendly to the states on MMJ because he realizes that if he lets a state opt-out of one federal law, that opens the door for all of them. This would result in the healthcare bill being taken apart by red states.
The administration is saying they're enforcing anti-marijuana laws (that they previously claimed they wouldn't vigorously prosecute) because states with MMJ laws usually allow local supply/grow operations to provide the marijuana, and the probably obvious result is that people grow in MMJ states, then transport it across state lines to sell in places where it's still completely illegal and the profit margins are much higher. I'm not saying I personally know whether either the states-opting-out-is-dangerous or the transporting-across-state-lines scenario is true, just that a basic understanding of supply and demand tends to make the transporting-across-state-lines scenario very plausible. (And, as much as I hate to admit, pretty much solidly in the jurisdiction of Federal enforcement.)
To give a very approximate comparison (these numbers vary a lot by region, time period, and definition), around 1% of the population is bisexual, and around 5% is gay.
Based on observation, I think that about 1% of the population is obligate bisexual, but the number that are facultatively bisexual is more like 5-8%.
It's a mutant space goat. We better get the telephone cleaners and hair dressers loaded onto B Ark.
A bit of Douglas Adams humor that's often overlooked is the final sequel to the story: all the people left on the planet, the ones who would've been in the A and C arks, were killed by a disease caught from a dirty telephone, because they'd gotten rid of all their telephone sanitizers. The people on the B ark ended up outliving all the "useful" people, a point that is wilfully missed by most readers who identify with the A and C ark people. I'm pretty sure Douglas Adams knew exactly how this would be read, and enjoyed his double-depth joke all the more for knowing that.
(The school looked at her and said she's ADHD and recommended drugs. The doctor agreed to prescribe with no testing, which made me suspicious. I had her formally tested, and she's not ADHD. She's severely dyslexic. I'd like to personally thank the school system and medical community for screwing that up.)
They're terrible at diagnosing unusual or obscure things that look like things they know how to treat. With that said: it might ge that your daughter has vision tracking/fusion problems, which are sometimes a cause of dyslexia. My wife's a vision therapist (and dyslexic) and she's helped a lot of kids diagnosed with dyslexia to vastly improve their reading speed and math abilities by helping them learn to train their eyes. A lot of dyslexia cases are caused by processing problems, but a lot of them can be treated or at least minimized with vision therapy, so it might be worthwhile to your daughter to at least take her to a vision therapist and see if there's any likelihood of improvement. (And age doesn't matter much: one of her patients is 84 and is slowly improving from double vision problems she's had for years.)
It is no doubt sexist but girls who reach puberty are very attractive to a large age range of men. Boys of the same age, only to Catholic priests.
Not to disagree with many other excellent points in your post, but I was reading a book a while back about reproductive strategies in different animal/plant/bacterial species, and one thing it mentioned was that with humans, men are looking for 25-year-olds. Heterosexual men look for 25 year old women, homosexual men look for 25 year old men. They'll settle for stuff on either side of that point, but that's roughly the high point on the desire curve. In contrast, women look for partners who are a few years older than them, whether hetero or homosexual. This isn't the case at all with most other animals, because they generally don't experience menopause, so there's much less age selectivity towards females; whatever switch controls hetero or homosexuality appears to just change which sex you're interested in rather than your attractiveness filter for that sex.
Out of curiosity: why helium rather than argon? Argon's dead cheap, dead common, and doesn't have anywhere nearly the diffusion-through-containment-systems problems helium has. Is there some drawback to it?
I see your cars-in-San-Francisco complaint and raise you a cars-in-Seville-Valencia-or-Granada complaint. Imagine a city where half the roads are so narrow that a single car driving down them means people have to step into doorways to let the car go by, where you can drive through an area 4 blocks on a side where there simply is no space for a car to park, and when you do find an area for cars to park they're already two cars deep up on the sidewalks. The difference is: in San Francisco, the driving and parking situations are such that people think it's okay to own cars. In other places with those sorts of conditions, people don't even consider them as an option.
Yeah, that sounds like a great idea: spend several hours making a video, for a $25 computer I don't want, on the off-chance that you'll come back and read this, and knowing full well that since you're a mouthy anonymous coward you'd just claim I faked or photoshopped the results. Sounds like a *great* use of my time. Tell you what: get an account, respond to this, and make it $75 in cash, and I'll film that video.
Though what good it would do, I have no idea: watching someone put a board on a hot plate, load on a chip too small for the video camera to see, reflow it, look at it under a microscope, probe it with a multimeter, and announce that it worked is going to do what, precisely, that my description of the process didn't do?
I did find the article interesting when it appeared in The Atlantic, but after some thoughtfulness I realize it's very unfair to argue that a human being falls into the Uncanny Valley...
Michael Jackson? Heidi Montag? Jocelyn Wildensteen? I keep claiming the reason the uncanny valley is going to disappear is that robots are marching this way across it, and humans are marching that way to meet them.
Oh hey someone's doing it: http://hackaday.com/2012/01/31/3d-print-in-wax-cast-in-metal/
Printing powdered wax into a wax form, and doing lost wax casting.
(All the advantages of lost foam, with much less smoke. This does limit you to castable refractory, which gets expensive, but they have castable refractory that can handle platinum, so you could do steel with this.)
I put BGA's, LLP's, and SON's on boards by hand all the time. I use a hotplate that goes to 260C rather than a toaster oven because I can place it and then look at the edge with a boom-type microscope set at 45 degrees. With a BGA you can see slightly under the package to make sure the balls are on the pads; with an LLP or SON you can see the edges of the chip leads and make sure they're aligned with the pads. Check all four sides, because it's not uncommon to have one side lovely, the two adjacent sides slightly twisted, and the opposite side almost one whole pad off. If you're using leaded solder it'll tend to self-align, but you can't trust that. Bolting insulative material (we used old FR4 boards) to each side of the hotplate prevents you burning your hand from touching it by mistake and provides you a place to steady your hand while adjusting the rotation/placement with a dental pick. We place 0.5mm pitch BGA's (which we call microSMD's) this way on a regular basis, when our BGA rework station is busy or down.
AND! it is possible, although painful, to check continuity to the chip from the board, in many cases, without an x-ray. Check for a diode drop from each node to the substrate.
I think that'd work great except that the surface texture of his patterns is rough and that's going to be hell for drawing the pattern from the sand. I've done a *lot* of green sand pattern casting. You need A: draft and B: good surface finish. (How good? The castings I do, if I put a piece of scotch tape over a lathe center hole in a turned form, the finished casting has the zigzag end where the tape dispenser cut off the tape clearly visible in the metal. Any surface imperfections will be finishing issues.) For draft you need a slope of about 2%-ish. So you'd have to print out a slightly tapered form -- which isn't a huge problem, especially if the large side of the taper is down -- but both the end and side texture of cheaper 3d printers is rough enough it'll hold sand. (If you dip the form in hot wax you get a nice waterproof coating that's also fairly smooth, and you can also make your form to exactly the right size, and dip it twice or three times, and account for cooling shrinkage so your casting comes out the size you want, rather than having to build your form too large.)
I totally agree on the pillar-of-smoke thing, but the sheer frustration of having to design around a cope-and-drag and doing split molds, figuring out how to get stuff out of the sand, and most of all the stress of having the crucible full of hot metal and having to oh-so-carefully split the mold, desperately hoping it doesn't collapse, draw the parts, and then rapidly patch any errors, sometimes makes my stomach turn. There are a lot of benefits to lost-foam casting, and personally I think unless you need to cast multiple copies, in which case having a wood or printed master makes sense, the quickness and trouble-free nature of lost-foam is just outstanding.
I've used 7x10's. I've used my Atlas -- same model as yours. I'm sticking with the Atlas, and my coworkers who have 7x10's come over and look at the finishes I can get and sigh with envy. I consider most of the 7xwhatevers to be parts kits that could be turned into a reasonable lathe if you replace all the plastic changegears with steel ones (at $40 each) and likewise the plastic gibs and don't mind that you still can't get the compound to feel solid, and spend a bunch of time scraping away at little bits that the ways hang up on when traversing.
With that said, it is a drag that I can't order a new leadscrew from Harbor Freight and have it delivered a few days later, like the 7x10 guys can: I have to scour ebay for that damned acme stub thread leadscrew Atlas saw fit to use, since Clausing has run out of them. Equipment that hasn't been in production for 40 years means some serious scrounging for parts, so there's a big plus side to new-ish.
(also by the way join the atlas618 group on yahoo -- a wealth of info.)
Basically, the way I see it is: people who want to learn machining don't want an old machine that they have to fix, because they have to understand machining to figure out what's wrong. I don't think they do much better with Chinese imports for pretty much exactly the same reasons. I learned on one of those crap AA/Sears 612's, and beat the daylights out of it learning; I'd feel terrible if I abused my Atlas that way.
And all that gets you a decent manual machine, and you still have to wade through turning that into a CNC, which is, as I could talk your ear off about, its own huge complicated set of problems to wade through, where there are even fewer people who know enough about what you're doing to offer relevant advice.
I dunno. All the options are bad. But you should totally take a look at that yahoo group.
A friend who has done this tells me it's somewhat of a waste of time because the 3D printer wants to move an order of magnitude faster than the max speeds most mills are capable of driving. (Since it's adding toothpaste, rather than cutting away metal, maybe that's not so surprising.) He ended up buying a Thing-o-Matic (and doing a *lot* of re-engineering to get it working reliably) but now he's thrilled with it. It doesn't replace his mills and lathes, but it sure is a convenient addition. He's all oh the thumbwheel broke off my micrometer: I'll print a new thumbwheel bracket. The windshield mount on my recumbent broke, so I'll print a new one. He's printed plumbing parts, cookie cutters, centering adapters for optics, replacement bar handle clamps, you name it, and there's no setup or clamping or accessories or anything like that -- not even alignment. He just emails the completed gcode to the machine and goes in twenty minutes later and takes his new item off the stage. I'm dead envious.
That might be different if you're using a servo-based mill with fast ballscrews, but for steppers with fine-pitch threads, well, my CNC is pretty rattly and jiggly when it's driving around at 10ipm and his Thing-o-Matic can run at 500ipm.
*I* certainly have never seen a mill/drill under $1500 that's useful for anything other than a boat anchor. A coworker got a Smithy Granite 1224 that he thought was fairly useful, but it sure wasn't $1500. (And of course that's a pure manual machine, so you still have to add at *least* $500 of electronics to get CNC -- and for that same $500 you can buy a complete 3D printer kit and be printing stuff in two hours, they claim, whereas it took me about 20 hours to convert my manual mill to CNC.)
It isn't ironic, it's sad, that 40 years later, there are people who honestly believe that the moon landings were faked.
The fact that you can see the landing site with a powerful telescope apparently isn't good enough for some people.
-- Stephen
I have a friend whose wife is Chinese. Their daughter is reading "Animal Farm" right now -- the Chinese edition. He asked her what it was about and she said "The French Revolution!" because apparently the Chinese version of AF she has is *quite* a bit different than ours. I was interested in that and was wondering if he'd seen other places where stuff had gotten seriously distorted and he said, completely straightfaced, that his wife didn't believe the US had ever landed people on the moon because that's what Chinese schools taught her. I have no idea if this is true, but if he was trolling me he was keeping a dead serious face doing so.
Our invitations were milled on my CNC with a 4mm ball-end mill, into 2mm thick aluminum, and individually wrapped in copper foil. People told us the invitations were too beautiful to open -- and since we used thin copper foil and thin aluminum, they only cost about $0.75 each to mail. I wrote the invite in Inkscape with the hersheytext plugin, using one of the one-stroke fonts (which are optimized for engraving) and used the gcode extension of inkscape to convert this to the gcode that EMC2 on the mill reads. It took some work tramming the mill to get it flat, since engraving this shallowly means you need the bed and the spindle dead perpendicular and the bed moving dead flat, so I put a big thick hunk of aluminum on the bed and milled in a recess into which each invitation plate fit, with the bottom milled dead flat, to hold it level. I added a vacuum hold-down by milling/drilling some holes in the bed under the invitation plates, that went to a lawn sprinkler solenoid that attached to the vacuum pump (the compressor pump from a refrigerator.) The solenoid was controlled by EMC2 with one of the digital output codes.
The upshot was that I'd put a piece of metal in, hit 'play', and walk off. It would cut in fifteen minutes, and move the spindle off to one side and turn it off, and I'd wander in and swap out another piece of metal. It took about a week of running, but only maybe an hour of my time because I was just swapping out finished pieces.
The trickiest and most dangerous part was cutting the aluminum plates to size. I bought a 4x8foot sheet of aluminum, and lacking anything that could cut that safely, I ended up using an old trashed carbide blade on my tablesaw. It was the loudest sound I think I've ever heard, but it was pretty accurate. Wear every bit of protective gear that you have if you try this.
Unfortunately I was in a horrible hurry to get everything done so I haven't gotten any good pictures uploaded, but here is a picture of what text enscribed in powder-coated aluminum looks like. We used an italic font and I didn't cut as deeply for the invitations (and it was bare aluminum) so I think they looked a lot nicer.
Oh and I got my mom to handwrite all the addresses because she's excellent at calligraphy.
Now, it's likely you don't *have* a cnc but there are scads of places who will do this sort of work for you and since it's two-dimensional and fast it comes out being pretty cheap if you farm it out to a local machine shop. But there is a lot of pleasure in doing it yourself.
Is there any reason to believe that any car would have let the occupants survive being smashed between a 20 ton 18 wheeler and a 5 ton stationary UPS truck (both of which have hard frames that don't crumple upon impact)? That's a lot of force for a car to absorb. Maybe we should all be driving military tanks to protect us from the rare small-car smooshed-between-two-trucks accidents.
While I'm not advocating large cars for general usage -- they're a terrible idea -- I can say that having been in this particular crash, in a Subaru wagon, I appreciated having the car crush over a meter shorter than it was, while still maintaining enough space for me to survive. Here's a picture of what was left: the car was shortened by about the same distance as the total length of a SmartCar after the semi truck rear-ended me at 75 mph when I was sitting at a stop.
But how often does that happen? (Once per life is probably an extremely accurate estimate: I'm most likely an outlier.) Planning for crashes like this is like planning for an asteroid strike: the amount of time spent even thinking about it isn't justifiable. Spend your energy considering how to lower your risk of cardiovascular disease: it'll probably be 1000x more useful.
The HPVelotechnic is fully suspended. Previous to it I had a Turner SWB, that had no suspension. After a 100 mile ride I thought I was going to piss blood. That's why it went away and the HPVelo showed up. It's this bike. It only has about 40mm of front suspension travel, which curbs soak up entirely (and then some.) I've never seen a recumbent that had enough suspension travel to handle a curb without bottoming out. In contrast, on the mountain bike or my road racing bike, I can bunnyhop the bike up/over a 40cm ledge smoothly, with the only jostle being the slight bump of landing again. Each frame geometry has its advantages, but for rough territory, the mountain bike just *shines*. (Although if you want to see something amazing, check out this video of a dude doing pretty astounding observed trials riding on a carbon road bike. It gets good about 40 seconds in.)
Fairing, yes, but recumbents are *terrible* off-road. I can ride my cannondale mountain bike over a ford taurus sedan. My HPVelotechnik recumbent can hold 28 miles an hour for most of the day but can't even handle crossing a curb unless it's basically perpendicular (and even then it's pretty unpleasant.) Not to mention: have you ever pushed a recumbent? It's *awful*. And she's going to be spending a lot of time pushing her bike. For flat paved roads recumbents are unequalled, but for offroad rough conditions mountain bikes are pretty amazing.
The aerodynamics (and weight) on a Hanebrink are *horrendous* -- but with a tire like that, and over terrain like that, you're not going to be anywhere near the speeds at which that matters. (For bikes the crossover is usually in the 12-20 kilometers per hour range, below which your power is mostly going to fighting friction, and above which it's mostly going to pushing air aside.) Those aero bars are mostly going to be of use to her for changing hand and body positions. I've done 100+ mile and multi-day rides on mountain bikes and they're murder in part because of always having your hands/arms/body in one position.
Your point with the tires is well-taken. If you don't go wide enough to float on top of the snow you just add more rolling resistance, and in order to float on the snow you have tires that no longer fit in a typical frame. (Hence Hanebrink's ultrawide-stance frames.) I've ridden Pugsleys and the like that can float over wet sand but are still unpleasant in dry fine sand, and are miserable in powder. Some day I'd love to try a Hanebrink. I'd also love to make my own, only make a pedal-powered quad with reasonably balloony tires so it could float as well. (Of course, at that point it starts becoming more attractive to just go ahead and make a hovercraft like Steam Boat Willie.) But generally I prefer a cyclecross tire over a huge fat wide tire in most somewhat-deep-snow conditions precisely because it'll cut through and give me some traction with much lower rolling resistance.
Hanebrink's been building these bikes for almost two decades, although I've only seen one in person. These days Dan's making an electric-assist version of the bike. They have a bare minimum of plastic parts, which break in the cold. I don't know what he's using for tires these days but his first run were apparently done using knobby ATV tires that he'd ground the knobs off, which he described as a fairly unpleasant process. They also have a somewhat complex geartrain to give reasonable heel clearance from the chain, as well as reasonable speeds across a wide terrain profile.
OK, I did that. So what is a 'smart vagina' as opposed to just a 'vagina'?
It only accepts incoming connections from trusted sources?
Starfish Prime, an atmospheric nuclear test in 1962, results: "electromagnetic pulse also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 1,445 kilometres (898 mi) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights, setting off numerous burglar alarms and damaging a telephone company microwave link. The EMP-damaged microwave link shut down telephone calls from Kauai to the other Hawaiian islands."
I'm not sure it's a non-issue, particularly given that modern electronics have geometries that are at least two orders of magnitude smaller than anything in 1962, so should be damaged by two orders of magnitude less voltage gradient, and modern weapons designers have apparently made weapons that are optimized for higher EMP, so I would expect that a modern EMP blast would be larger, and electronics more suseptible, than a blast that demonstrably did cause damage to electronics.
The aftermarket clones is, I'm told, precisely why my company -- and several other major analog IC designers -- have all their fabs in the US or Europe. They do test engineering and packaging in China, but that's all. As for preventing copies, one of the interesting things about that is that in a lot of markets, the process of reverse engineering, producing silicon, producing test hardware, getting packaging validated, and getting the chips to market means that by the time those reverse-engineered chips hit the mass market the originals are halfway through their lifetimes, have already recouped the engineering investment, and are being sold at a fairly slim profit margin, so 80% of the money that is going to be made off that socket has already been made. Second to market, with cheaper chips, is a really tough business.