The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Oddities

Who’d’a thunk it?

Buckle Up For Safety

Windshield head strikes

Y’know how some folks say they don’t wear a seat belt because they want to be thrown free in a crash? Here’s how that works in actual practice.

The air bag fires as the front bumper begins to deform and your body rises off the seat. Because you’re not belted in, the bag boosts your upper torso against the roof liner, bounces your head off the sunshade and bezel, then feeds you directly into the windshield glass.

Laminated glass doesn’t disintegrate, so your skull probably won’t completely penetrate the windshield. You’ll lose some scalp, though, as you slide down the crumbling glass and wedge above the dashboard.

Even if you survive a broken neck, the ensuing brain trauma means you won’t be the same person ever again.

News flash: massive brain trauma does not make you a better person.

Before laminated windshield glass became mandatory, your head would completely penetrate the windshield. Here’s what happened in 1937, from the incomparably grisly — And Sudden Death by J. C. Furnas:

Safety Glass Windshields

I read one of the many Reader’s Digest editions of that article during my formative years. Probably the one in October 1967, if a bit of Google-fu serves me right. You can’t get reprints of it from RD any longer, it seems.

However, unbelievably, while I was composing this post, I checked eBay and found a typewritten copy of the article, signed by Furnas, with 38 minutes remaining in the auction. I was the only bidder: for nine bucks (delivered) it’s mine.

Most likely it’s a publicity / fundraising copy, because the handwritten notation on the first page reads:

With best
regards to
[name]
J. C. Furnas
Oct 20, 1947

Those SUVs reside in the junkyard along the Dutchess Rail Trail near Creek Road, where I might get a new seat to rebuild my comfy office chair this spring.

2010-12-17
Cold Solder Joint

Found this inside a friend’s dead USB memory stick:

Cold solder joint in USB memory

The leads come from a teeny 12 MHz crystal. The solder blob on the other side looked just fine, but you simply can’t tell by looking.

As it turned out, the stick was dead for some other reason: the Flash memory controller chip got hot when the stick was drawing power. Resoldering all the joints had no effect, which wasn’t surprising.

I suspect a killer static discharge or some such calamity.

2010-12-16
Scraped Into Gibberish

Every now and again I search for a few obvious keywords to discover where my posts have wandered off to; there’s a straightforward Creative Commons license (on the About page) that scrapers seem unable to comprehend. In a surprising number of cases, a simple note to the ~~plagiarist~~ webmaster suffices to eliminate the problem.

Lately, though, the scrapers collect a page of text, run it bodily through a thesaurus, then post the ensuing gibberish. I think this gives the page some overall search-engine-friendly English syntax while concealing the deed from the original author.

For example, my original deathless prose:

Loose plugs, it turns out, vibrate the HT’s jacks right off the circuit board in short order and those jacks are a major pain to replace.

A trip through the shredder produces this gem (I won’t reward them with a link):

Loose plugs, it turns out of the closet, quiver the HT’s jacks all there potty the lap conquer rooms in butt in fail ask for and those jacks are a foremost ass effort to be a sensation.

Doesn’t that give you the impression of someone locked in a room with a foreign-language dictionary, desperately trying to force an important message through a noisy channel?

For the record, note that I did not refer to anyone’s posterior anatomy. It seems their phrase-o-matic converter fills in some obvious (to them, anyway) empty spots. All those, um, keywords appeared, as if by magic, in the “translation”.

Sometimes, though, they get it right. My summary:

Memo to Self: It’s always the connectors.

emerged with just one change:

Memo to Self: It’s everlastingly the connectors.

Isn’t that cute?

I collect some of the more amusing spam efforts there.

2010-12-09
Steel Stair Stringer: Just Make It Fit

Stair stringer cut out for bolt

Saw this in the Syracuse Sheraton: every stringer in the stairwell had a torch-cut opening so they could bolt the flight to the landing.

I don’t know if the flights came pre-assembled (minus the concrete, I assume), but the cutouts definitely have that “WTF do we do now?” aspect about them, don’t they?

Ah, well. I’ve been there & done that, too.

Haven’t you?

2010-12-03
Bed Bugs: Dying on Planet Sticky

Even half an inch of masking tape forms an impenetrable barrier for small creatures; you could splurge on 2-inch tape to get more surface area if you’re squeamish. I did see a spider stepping daintily along a barrier, but, for the most part, all these specimens became mired within a few millimeters of an edge. That made it easy to decide which direction they were traveling: incoming insects stuck near the floor and a (very few) outbound insects stuck at the top, just after leaving the non-sticky surface.

This is, we think, a well-fed first- or second-instar bed bug caught on a tape barrier; it’s not quite the right shape for the book louse seen below. A powder trap caught the only other bed bug in our collection.

Bed bug on tape

In addition to that sole bed bug, the tape barriers captured a steady stream of critters that were not bed bugs. The trick is sorting through all the false positives…

Given the number of books in the house, we caught many book lice. These have a disturbing resemblance to bed bugs, but are basically harmless to humans. You don’t really need books to have book lice, although we captured most of them adjacent to our bookshelves.

Book louse with 0.5 mm scale

This scary critter is a carpet beetle larva. They survive on any fabric surface and can infest upholstery as well as carpets.

Carpet beetle larva with 0.5 mm scale

Dust mites, at least for their first few instars, are transparent little bags of bug stuff. The first instar may have six legs, just like a first instar bed bug, but successive instars have eight.

Dust mite first instar

Here’s a close up view, showing it has eight legs:

Dust mite

We have no idea what this cute little thing might be. It’s about 0.5 mm in diameter and, to the naked eye, looks like nothing so much as bed bug crap. But it’s alive!

Spherical insect – dorsal

This terrifying apparition sprinted across the (non-isolated) kitchen table, whereupon I mashed it with a magazine. It’s most likely not a bed bug; we’re guessing a spider of some sort. That stylet in its proboscis doesn’t look spider-ish, though.

Red insect with stylet

It might be related to this eight-legged critter; the lancet on the front end is similarly scary. The legs aren’t the same, though.

Mystery bug

All in all, we found a bewildering variety of insects, bugs, and spiders wandering around in our house. None of them are particularly harmful, although I now have a (most likely pyschosomatic) allergy to dust mites.

We’re not entomologists: if you know what the mystery critters are, I’d like to hear from you!

Up next: a Hot Box that might forestall all this excitement.

2010-11-19
What Do Squirrels Do When It Rains?

Rain-soaked squirrel

Although I’m not a big fan of ~~tree rats~~ squirrels, I’ll admit this one was having a tough time of it during a recent rainstorm. He (she?) sat motionless on that stub of a branch for well over half an hour, no doubt thinking gloomy thoughts.

Taken through two layers of mid-1950s window glass, so it’s not the sharpest image in my collection, but I’m not going out in the rain just to take a picture of a squirrel!

2010-11-06
Voting Machines: More Distrust Thereof

As mentioned there, I have reason to distrust electronic voting machines, which stir the unreliability of PC-based computing into the boiling pot of election politics.

Voting machine LCD miscalibration – Open Poll

Attempting to open the polls with the Administrative Menu on the LCD produced this incorrect response. Fortunately, the next screen in the Reports section had a Cancel option, so I could back out and try again by tapping the screen well above the Open Poll button. That worked.

Later on in the day, for the first time in my experience as a Ballot Marking Device Election Inspector, a voter requested to use the BMD machinery to cast her ballot.

Voting machine LCD miscalibration – BMD Audio Session

Here’s what happened when I tried to start the somewhat misleadingly named Audio Session that invokes the BMD: Ballot Review turns on a mode that presents the scanned values from the next ballot on that tiny little LCD, one contest at a time.

When I called the Board of Elections to get help, the tech said “Hmmm. That shouldn’t happen.” We did get the Audio Session started and the voter commenced entering her choices, eventually succeeding in producing a printed ballot that she found satisfactory.

The tech sent to fix the situation (we Election Inspectors are not encouraged to fiddle around with the machinery, for well and good reason) was stumped. Eventually we scanned a ballot, using a live vote as a debugging aid, and managed to get the option turned off again. Obviously we hit a corner case, but that’s not what you want in an election with voters lining up behind a dysfunctional scanner.

It was, of course, the one-and-only scanner in the polling place.

While this does not directly affect the election results, it certainly does not inspire confidence in the architecture, the programming, or the operator training of the election system.

Not a pleasant experience…

2010-11-05