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.
Who’d’a thunk it?
That’s pretty much in the midst of the City of Poughkeepsie, but raccoons have figured out that the livin’ is easy around people. I’m sure he’s also figured out dumpster diving, although he’s likely not looking for discarded electronics…
Love those eyes!
We stopped in Alfred NY to try out some trikes at The Bicycle Man, went to The Terra Cotta (not that one) for lunch, and parked on a side street. Every parking meter along the street (free on Saturday, fortunately) had an array of house flies parked along the upper edge.
Perhaps this is the best place for flies to warm up before a flight? Was there a recent hatching?
They swarmed off the meters as we passed, then settled back in the same way.
Weird…
Found this installation in the Mens Room at the first rest area inside New York on westbound I-90. The extension cord trails out the window and around to the back of the building…
I suppose the building’s heaters had failed, but, still, this seems odd.
The snows have retreated and it seems the mice have been busy tunneling in the back yard. If we cared more about the lawn, I’m sure I’d be outraged. As it is, the tunnels will be gone after a few mowings and life will move on.
I didn’t spot their grainery, but I’m sure the grass will be greener around the latrine…
Certainly these were different mice than the ones who made far more extensive living quarters out front, but they’re definitely relatives.
Saw this mountain at Marist College. I wonder how many will go directly to the recycling bin?
I can’t recall the last time I used a phone book; it’s faster and easier to type the name & location into that little search field, whack Enter, and click the obvious hit.
If you look hard enough, somewhere in the first few pages you’ll find the instructions to turn off next year’s phone book. We’ll see how that works out…
Heat pumps behave like bidirectional refrigerators: they cool the building by heating the outside air or heat the building by cooling the outside air. In relatively mild, dry weather, this works perfectly.
Here in the Northeast US, it’s not such a bright idea. For about half the year, the ambient temperature is low enough and the humidity high enough that pumping heat out of the exchanger drops its temperature below the dew point, whereupon ambient moisture condenses on the fins and, given the temperature differential between ambient and coil, freezes solid.
In that situation, the efficiency of the heat exchanger drops well below zero: it turns on electric resistance heating bars to warm the inside air and runs a defrost cycle on the exterior heat exchanger.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Perhaps the defrost cycle hadn’t started yet?
I passed a few minutes in the high school lobby (while waiting for the Fencing team to return from a competition) trying to decipher the Braille signs. I’ve always had my doubts about the utility of these things, but I suppose if you’re going to have signs, they may as well have tactile lettering, too.
Anyhow, what little I knew about Braille (six dots, um, 64 symbols, um, tapers off after that) didn’t extend to actually knowing any of the letters, but how hard could a substitution cipher be? I figured out most of the letters in Stairway quickly, but some were obviously missing. Perhaps Braille includes symbols for common digraphs?
The Library across the lobby provided more letters, with obvious mismatches that showed I wasn’t anywhere near as clever as I thought (a distressingly common situation these days). Perhaps the two leading dots indicate “Here be there text”?
Then I found the Ticket Booth, which strongly suggested digraph symbols.
Upon returning home, I did the obvious search and eventually wound up at the Library of Congress Instruction Manual for Braille Transcribing: a short introduction to a very complex subject. Poring through Appendix B provided all the correspondences I needed:
Some years ago we took an introductory course in American Sign Language when one of my not-quite-a-nephew (son of a cousin, whatever that is) went deaf. Without anyone for day-to-day practice we never achieved fluency, but that was a window into another world, too. We still pass a few basic signs to each other across a noisy room …
Photography note: photograph signs from far enough off-axis that the flash hotspot on the surface is out of the image. If you must get a rectangular sign out of it, apply a perspective transformation to the image.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 