Category: Oddities

Who’d’a thunk it?

Monthly Science: Garden Soil Temperature

The soil temperature near the base of the bird box, under a few inches of chipped leaf mulch, shows the expected trend for the growing season, but there’s a weird bump in mid-October:

The NWS temperature summary confirms the anomaly, with the DEP column giving the departure from the historic average:

DY MAX MIN AVG DEP
==================
 1  65  58  62   5
 2  72  58  65   9
 3  73  49  61   5
 4  65  51  58   2
 5  62  40  51  -4
 6  70  38  54  -1
 7  76  52  64  10
 8  74  52  63   9
 9  70  44  57   4
10  63  37  50  -3
11  56  44  50  -3
12  63  35  49  -3
13  63  37  50  -2
14  78  59  69  17
15  79  69  74  23
16  72  53  63  12
17  73  52  63  13
18  68  50  59   9
19  56  33  45  -5
20  61  30  46  -4
21  57  48  53   4
22  53  50  52   3
23  52  48  50   2
24  59  41  50   2
25  66  34  50   2
26  58  43  51   3
27  64  38  51   4
28  73  38  56   9
29  68  42  55   8

The precipitation record shows over an inch of rain in those four days, so that weather probably blew in from the south.

2014-11-01

Halloween Horror: Line Voltage on the Loose!

I hauled the Kenmore 158 sewing machine and controller to a Squidwrench meeting for some current measurements (and, admittedly, showing it off) while schmoozing. After hauling it home and setting it up on my bench again, it didn’t work: the motor didn’t run at all.

While doing the usual poking around under the cover, I spotted this horrifying sight:

Loose AC line hot wire

The brown insulation tells you that’s a hot wire from the AC line and, in fact, it’s coming directly from the line fuse; it’s live whenever the plug is in.

It’s a stranded wire to allow flexing without breaking, but that same flexibility allows it to squeeze its way out of a tightly fastened screw terminal. In principle, one should crimp a pin on the wire, but the only pins in my heap don’t quite fit along the screw terminal block.

This sort of thing is why I’m being rather relentless about building a grounded, steel-lined box with all the pieces firmly mounted on plastic sheets and all the loose ends tucked in. If that wire had gone much further to the side or top, it would have blown the fuse when it tapped the steel frame. The non-isolated components on that board are facing you, with those connections as far from the terminal block as they can be.

Engineers tend to be difficult to live with, because we have certain fixed ways of doing things that are not amenable to debate. There’s probably a genetic trait involved, but we also realize that being sloppy can kill you rather quickly; the universe is not all about pink unicorns and rainbows.

In fact, the universe wants you dead.

Now, go play with those goblins and zombies tonight…

Memo to Self: Tighten those terminals every now and again. A wire will come loose shortly after you forget to do that, of course.

2014-10-31
Astable Multivibrator: Hairball Edition

Just to show all those precisely machined enclosures and tidy hand-wired boards don’t count for much:

Astable Multivibrator – as-built

The schematic again:

Astable Multivibrator – as-built – simulation

It started with that idea and evolved slightly.

2014-10-28
How Big Is Your Blog, Ed?

So the good folks in the wordpress.com support infrastructure have been manually exporting my blog and sending me a link to the ZIP file, pursuant to the still unresolved failure-while-exporting issue. A bit of back-and-forth around the latest backup / export produced an interesting data point:

The message about the export file not being found is simply an indicator that the huge export could not finish compiling before a more general time limit was reached — in this case because your site is easily in the top .1% for size. I will pass your suggestion for improved exporting along.

I’m sure that’s among the freebie blogs on wordpress.com, but I never thought of myself as a member of the 0.1% club.

Huh. Snuck up on me while I wasn’t paying attention. If I could do that with money, I’d be on to something.

I’ve never participated in their post-a-day challenges, because that’s what I do around here. Should you find something interesting, every now and again, that’s a bonus.

Back to the workbench…

2014-10-07
Calling All Airship Pirates!

This airship drifted by just north of the house, aimed toward one of the nearby back yards on the hillside:

Hot Air Balloon – Red Oaks Mill

It was not at all clear they intended to land, just that it was happening anyway. Burners roaring, the bag just cleared the ridge and vanished into the west…

Further, we know not.

Back in 2006, I spotted a balloon making a water landing:

Water Landing

They managed enough lift to cross the driveway, then deflate it on the yard in front of the house, to the delight of passersby…

2014-10-05
Real Estate Signage: Devaluing the Brand
Stipulated:
- Christie’s has licensed their brand to local realtors
- Such licensees / franchises / whatever are locally owned and operated
- Realtors make money only when they sell a property
- Sometimes, you must sell a property’s upside potential
- Ya gotta market what ya got
Even keeping all that in mind, I think this property devalues the Christie’s brand:

HL Property – Salt Point Turnpike

IIRC, it was a roadhouse eatery, back in the day, has been many things since then, and hasn’t been much in recent years.
2014-10-04
Love at First Sight?

Woolly bear caterpillar on corn cob

The corn cob sat on the patio after an outdoor supper, awaiting a trip to the trash can, when an all-black woolly bear caterpillar appeared from nowhere.

I’m sure it’s a direct descendant of that one. We put this one in the garden, too, for the same reason.

2014-09-28