Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘STEM’

Annex 99

I was a bit nervous about climbing down below the floor again to put in the seals my hot tub guru sent me; beside the fact that it’s cold, dirty, and uncomfortable down there, I was concerned that it would be too difficult and I wouldn’t be able to get the union off without breaking something.  But luckily, that wasn’t the case; I had already drained and cleaned the tub, and the union came loose with an amount of pressure even my soft little hands could manage (with the help of Grace’s biggest set of channel-lock pliers).  After I let the residual water drain out, the seals went in with a few minutes of fumbling, and though I somehow managed to gash the knuckle of my right forefinger in the process, everything was soon tightened back up and I refilled the tub.  After that, everything went as my guru had said it would: I turned on the power, the unit went through its startup routine, and before long I was able to take this picture.  I had been warned to recheck the union after the pump ran for a while, and sure enough it was dripping; however, retightening it was easy and I’ve checked a few times since, with no issues.  The water level has remained steady now for a couple of weeks and it seems to be running like it’s supposed to, so I’m beginning to feel more sure that I’ve fixed the problem.  And if something like that ever happens again, at least I won’t be working completely in the dark.

Read Full Post »

Read Full Post »

Annex 94

After that double power outage we had around Christmas, I was rather peeved at the gas company for failing to connect my new heater in November or early December as they were supposed to (not to mention failing to return my calls about the delay).  So a month ago today I called again and happened to get the technician himself on the phone.  He apologized profusely for mislaying my paperwork, and volunteered to make room in his schedule to get us connected as soon as possible.  That was Monday, January 9th, and as you can see it’s now all hooked up and running perfectly.  It was a few days before we could switch the water system over to the new heater, but we got it done two weeks ago today and I’m very pleased with it; the temperature range is basically the same as the electric, but the temperature doesn’t fluctuate as much, so one needn’t fiddle with it throughout the duration of the shower.  I don’t think I’m going to save any money in the log run; Dr. Quest crunched the numbers for me and it looks too close to call, plus it cost twice as much to have the new line run and connected as the heater itself cost.  But it’s going to be worth it to have hot water the next time the power goes out.  Once we got it all connected I made an insulated box to go over the works, but I didn’t include it in this picture because it’s pretty featureless (it’s just plywood with a layer of the same styrofoam insulation I used for the bathroom ceiling).  Once I install some skirting on the north side, that will help prevent heat loss as well, and next winter the wood-burning stove will keep the atrium at least temperate, if not actually warm.

Read Full Post »

Please don’t kill my husband.  –  Shameka Smith

Grace suggested this video to commemorate the passing of guitar legend Jeff Beck; I was unfamiliar with it, but less than 60 seconds in I knew it was the right choice.  The inks above the video were provided by Dan Savage, Mama Tush, Clarissa (x2), Mike Siegel, and Cop Crisis (x2), in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

Read Full Post »

They’re trying to kill me, they’re trying to kill me.  –  Akeem Terrell

I’m sure most of y’all are already very familiar with most of The Pointer Sisters’ hits, but were you aware that they had recorded this one for Sesame Street?  The links above the video were provided by Jesse Walker (x3), Cop Crisis (x3), and Mike Siegel, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

Read Full Post »

Stop, please.  –  Ryan Marzi

I wanted to commemorate the passing of the co-creator of the Moog synthesizer with a selection from 1968’s Switched-On Bach, but apparently the copyright holder must be aggressively censorious because no videos are to be found on YouTube or Vimeo. So here’s one from Daily Motion which has a stupid function that continues to play videos whether you like it or not; I don’t know HTML well enough to know which code to remove to stop it, so you’ll need to close it entirely.  The links above the video were provided by Scott Greenfield, Cop Crisis (x2), Jesse Walker, Stephen Lemons, and Cop Crisis (x2 again), in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

Read Full Post »

Last week I was involved in an online discussion about writing ability, and whether it is actually less common among people who majored in STEM fields vs those who majored in the humanities; I explained that, in my experience as a writer, editor, and former teacher and librarian, it isn’t common in either group, but is slightly less uncommon in the humanities.  I used to edit technical papers as a side gig, and they were often so unintelligible I had to get on the phone to the author to ask what in God’s name he was trying to say.

Of course, the problem is a bit more complex than a simple “which group is better”; certain subgroups of humanities majors, most notably those in the “Ideological Studies” ghetto, are taught to write such convoluted, cumbersome gibberish that after graduation most of them can’t stop doing it even when explicitly told not to.  I was once in a working group trying to draft a press release; despite everyone being told we wanted to keep the language concise, simple, and straightforward for the general public, the draft modifications one group came up with were absolutely larded with academic and identity-politics jargon.  We had to ignore nearly all their contributions in the final draft because the additions, prevarications, disclaimers, lists, and semantically-empty garbage they wanted to insert would’ve tripled the length while crippling the meaning.  It’s important to recognize that this was not truly their fault; for their entire academic careers these participants were repeatedly rewarded for crafting ugly, clunky, unreadable rubbish interchangeable with every other statement of its type, the literary equivalent of an East German institutional building.  Writing ability develops with practice; unfortunately, many students of the past several decades have been taught practices that make their writing worse instead of better.  So, I guess the best summary of the situation is:  Most students start as bad writers.  STEM students tend not to improve.  Humanities majors in traditional fields usually improve at least some.  And “ideological studies” majors improve at writing committee-approved ideological garbage.  People learn what they’re taught.  If they’re taught to write properly, they’ll learn that.  If they’re taught to write improperly, they’ll learn that instead.  And if they aren’t taught to write at all, they will learn whatever they are taught.

Read Full Post »

The Limits of Resolution

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose…I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.  –  J.B.S. Haldane, “Possible Worlds” (1927)

If you’re anything like me, you were already tired of the “We’re living in a simulation” nonsense before it even got as widespread as it is now.  The idea that what we perceive as reality might not actually be real goes back at least to Plato’s cave and the Hindu concept that the universe is the dream of Brahma, but for the genesis of its current popularity we must turn from the sublime to the ridiculous, namely the movie The Matrix (which stole both its name and its central concept from a 1976 episode of Doctor Who and many of its details from the works of Philip K. Dick, most notably Ubik, but does justice to neither).  This currently-popular version of the philosophical exercise postulates a creation with the grandeur and inescapability of what we might call the “primordial simulation” models (wherein the “simulation” is either the natural state of the universe or was created by an eternal demiurge far beyond the comprehension of any being within the simulation), yet residing within some physical realm at least resembling the “simulated” universe in which we are imagined to exist.  Expressed more succinctly, the modern “simulation” fantasy as typically conceived imagines a simulacrum of a universe created by some finite being or beings for some definable purpose and existing within some physical instrumentality.  And such a model is, due to those arbitrary limitations, pure claptrap.

The problem with this version of the idea lies in the very concept of a “simulation” as a thing that requires a “simulator”, rather than recognizing it a state intrinsic to the mathematical structure of the cosmos itself (a la Plato) or else as a product of a form of existence as far beyond our comprehension as the totality of the universe is beyond any given individual who might ponder their state of existence (as in Hindu cosmology).  But the Matrix-style simulation fans aren’t imagining an open-ended, intrinsically unknowable system; quite the opposite.  Instead, they postulate a very complex but still finite formal system, resident within something like a supercomputer (albeit an immense and very advanced one).  However, no formal system can adequately describe itself*, which means it also cannot adequately model itself; any simulation of this sort must therefore be of dramatically smaller scope and lower resolution than the world in which its simulating mechanism resides, just as no fictional world or electronic simulation within our world can ever be as large or complex as our world.  If our universe were truly a finite simulation within a knowable, physical system, there would be some point, probably but not necessarily on the scale of the infinitesimal, that we would be able to perceive the limits of granularity.  Sooner or later, our instruments would reach a point at which the resolution of our universe was no longer sufficient to allow us to subdivide structures into still-smaller parts, and given that our theoretical models already extend down to phenomena smaller than a billionth the size of the smallest particles we can detect, which are themselves far tinier than the electrons whose movements define the contents of our own computers, I think it’s safe to say that isn’t likely to happen.

*If you’ve never studied Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, here’s a very accessible book which might help you to understand both its narrow implications for mathematical modeling of phenomena and its philosophical implications for the universe as a whole.

Read Full Post »

Bathhouse 39

Before we get to the part where I need to MIG weld the roof structure, Grace is stick-welding everything she can reach from the deck or the lower steps of a ladder (I won’t let her get above the third step, and I’m not really comfortable when she’s above the second).  In this picture, you can see where steel uprights have been welded to the roof brackets, and the transverse beam above the shop roof (held by clamps in earlier pictures) are now done as well.  My job while she’s welding is to repeatedly spray the nearby wooden surfaces with a hose to keep sparks from igniting anything; about 6 last evening it started drizzling, and we’re supposed to get more rain over the next few days, so that will help too by keeping everything too damp to catch.  Unfortunately, we were just about to lift this crossbeam into place, so I had to content myself with this shot and letting your imaginations do the rest until next time.  The thing I’m standing on is the wellhouse; once the roof is in place, that shitty old roof will come off and we’ll put a flat top on it, because as it turns out it’s just the right height for a bar.

Read Full Post »

Diary #579

Just once, I’d like to return from a trip without having to deal with some kind of problem before I can even get settled in.  After returning from Freedom Fest on the 24th I spent a few days in Seattle, then returned home to Sunset on Wednesday.  While refilling the dogs’ water bowl, I noticed the water pressure was extremely low, so I went around to make sure nobody had left anything running.  Nobody had, and within another hour there was no water at all.  At first Grace thought the pressure switch had gone bad, but when she bypassed it to check the pump we still had no water.  Fortunately, we had already purchased a new pump when we first moved here, since there was no way to know just how old the one that came with the property might be; unfortunately…have you ever changed a well pump?  It’s not hard, but it’s strenuous and time-consuming and absolutely fucking filthy.  There was also no way to know how deep the well was, so I just had to keep pulling the hose up (with Grace guiding it out of the well casing) until we found the pump; since the water table is pretty high here I knew it wouldn’t be too deep, but that still meant I had to pull up 14 meters of water-filled irrigation pipe with a waterlogged pump at the bottom.  Then I had to dash to town to get about $30 worth of fittings while Grace switched out the pumps, and when I returned (about 5 PM) we still had to wire up the new pump and carefully lower it back down the shaft, then reconnect it to the water system.  We finished a little after 8, at which point we discovered the damned thing still wouldn’t work due to an overloaded control box.  Still, that meant we could hot-wire the pump to fill up the pressure tank so we could take showers and have water overnight, and we replaced the faulty control the next day.  As you can see, the old pump was a Sears model which (according to the serial number) was built in 1992; I’m definitely not complaining, because nearly 30 years is a pretty good operational life for any mechanical device run as hard as a well pump is.  But all the same, I’d have been happier if it had held on for just a few extra days.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »