A simple task

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
Edsger W. Dijkstra

Like M. Jourdain in Molière's le bourgeois gentilhomme who is surprised to find he's been speaking prose for the last 40 years, I discovered I've been using simple machines all my life without realising that was A Thing. Actually, simple machines have been A Thing since Archimedes offered to move the world with one. A machine is a tool which uses mechanical advantage [technical term!] to make it easier for us the move stuff. The Greeks knew five such objects: 

• the wheel and its axle; 
• the screw; 
• the wedge; 
• the lever; 
• the pulley. 

In the 1590s, Flemish engineer Simon Stevin added a 6th - the inclined plane - [prev rant] although that is a sort of stationary wedge.

Over the last tuthree years of splitting firewood, I've been making pairs of my own wedges by making an oblique cut in a straight-grained baulk of timber maybe 500mm long [examples R with club hammer for scale). The whole point of simple machines is to make something other than human sinew and muscle do the work. The other solution is to press animals - principally asses Equus asinus and horses Equus caballus but in other times and places oxen Bos taurus; buffalo Bubalis bubalis; camels Camelus dromedarius; and llamas Lama glama - into service. 

Meanwhile back in the wood . . . You can leave wedges in a check / crack / split overnight to work their mechanical advantage. Impatient folks may choose to whack at a lump of wood until an accident ensues. This is adjacent to washing dishes: soaking some burned pans in cold water overnight will save a lot of work scraping and cursing; and be better for the pan's surface. Pouring hot soapy water into these pans if often a waste of energy and dish-soap and the soap-soup gets cold surprisingly quick.

But part of the joy of splitting wood is being contemplative and part of that is looking closely at the piece of work to exploit its structural weakness. Look at the picture: judicious tapping with that one-handed club hammer is often good enough to reduce a log to fire-box size. A lot quieter than the damnable chain-saw. I will agree that my wedges are a mort too fat. A longer more acute point does more work although it looks more breakable.

I'll tell ya this for free: my sinews are really not up for the machismo of wearing out an axe or a splitting maul. I have no desire to have my wrist go sproiiing; putting me out of action for weeks.  And FFS use PPE. You only have two eyes and a flying splinter will take one out as soon as look at you: so wear a forester's visor or safety goggles. Last year, bish bash,  two lumps of wood separated from a log under my maul and drove back into my shins: first the right then six weeks later the left. In both cases my trousers were unharmed but the missile raised a chicken egg sized contusion under the cloth which took several weeks and many dressings to dissipate. I guess kevlar chain-saw chaps would be reasonable protection, . . . down there: so I try to remember to wear them. Here's a chap with some thoughts on wedges which split rounds. This fellow makes wooden splitting wedges gluts.

Jobs for the boys

One of the niblings, a personable young chap in his early 20s, is trying to find his niche. Not everyone decides, at the age of six, to be a librarian, fire-fighter, farmer or pharmacist . . . and sticks with it. I was only a little older when I announced that I would be a "Surgeon-Chaplain in the Marines" OR a ballet-dancer. I can assure you that no part of this career-plan came to bear fruit. We dropped by the other day to hear that he was just wrapping up a course in driving the many sorts of fork-lift that play a part in warehousing The Stuff that sustains the capitalist monster. He's done the safety-video; just needs someone in his network who'll gave him a trial.

The clearing house that pointed him towards the fork-list course also suggested that he might like be processed through a niche-locator service. When they're 22, let alone when they're 6, few have a clue about the job descriptions that appear on other people's CVs let alone what might be a good fit for them personally. You're probably right to be skeptical about whether a one-size-fits-all multiple-choice questionnaire is going to help you to the key insight that will settle your vocation. 

Look at the list [L] generated for those who completed the questionnaire in a particular / peculiar way but have no post-Leaving Certificate [=High School Diploma] quals. As the list is not alphabetical, one can only assume that starts at the best fit at the top. I suppose, for some meanings of plausible, it's a small jump from farrier (specialist in equine hoof-care) to hairdresser (specialist in human head grooming)  - clue: hooves and hair are both made of keratin??  But there's the obvious safety net because, if there are no vacancies in keratin-trimming, the nibling can always try Prison Officer, Slater or Forestry which obviously require similar  predispositions and skills??!? Farrier, Jockey and Riding Instructor all need The Nags, so there was probably a Q whose import was They Shoot Horses Don't They?

Now here's a job which any of us could have a try at: "Designer of vocational questionnaires". Hint: random number generator might be useful.

Agent BG GRAS

My youtube feed is bloody woeful; same ould same ould shite that I might have clicked-in-error months ago. What I really want is a random selection of peculiarities that I've never 'eard of. I have been to The History Guy - a USian feller with a bow-tie and clear diction - before but not this year, so I was interested to look-see what he had to say about Johnson Atoll a US government owned "bird-sanctuary" and weapons-testing facility in the middle of the Pacific. As well as poorly fore-thought, poorly controlled, nuclear debacles [Blue Gill Prime 25 June 1962], the site was also used for bio-weapons testing.

Project SHAD Shipboard Hazard and Defense investigated the dispersal of biological agents about the same size - 1-5μm -  as, say Bacillus anthracis a pathogen which we've encountered before on Gruinard Anthrax Island. The first step is to investigate the best way of dispersing / targeting such an agent so that it rains down on the Soviets [Bad Guys R] while minimizing collateral damage to USMC / USN personnel [White hats]. It was as if the multiple own goals (which proved that the wind is fickle mistress) in WWI had never happened. 

The apple falleth not far from the tree! The mad boffins lit upon Bacillus globigii which is close enough [exactly the same 2μm size anyway] to B. anthracis and has the advantage of forming black colonies when spread on Petri dishes. The central conceit of SHAD was to expose USN ships to "Agent BG" delivered in a variety of SciFi vehicles and then swap down the surfaces afterwards to see how far and fast the bacteria had travelled. "In Project SHAD, B. globigii was one of the simulants for biological warfare agents. It was used to determine characteristics such as the behavior of biological aerosols such as downwind travel, dispersion, penetration, and the tenacity of its presence after washing equipment" Bacillus globigii is now known as B. atrophaeus but some [lumpers!] taxonomists think it squeezes nicely in the spectrum of Bacillus subtilis - a genetic and bio-fermentation work-horse which we've met before.

If this sounds suspiciously close to the USN raining Serratia marcescens down on San Francisco in Operation Sea-Spray, that's because it was the same operatives ringing the changes on the bacteriological colour spectrum. That exposure turned out to be fatal to at least one US citizen who didn't sign an informed consent form! Almost all the participants in the SHAD shenanigans were also oblivious to the fact that they were guinea-pigs in an experiment. The biowarfare folks, seemed to have given "Agent BG" a GRAS [generally recognised as safe] designation without, like, actually carrying out some studies to test that assumption. And it turned out that this blasé certainty was quite unjustified although it took 30 years for the Feds to admit this. Most healthy adults will successfully resist the assault - so there wasn't a rush to the infirmary aboard the ships involved in SHAD - but Bacillus globigii has been identified in infections from prostheses and catheters as well as ingested food. The black colonies of B. globigii is not the Black Death but it's not completely harmless either.

More misc maio

Verrry miscellaneous

• Do NOT diss The Help
• Read the comments for dozens of similar take-your-job-and-stuff-it stories
  
• Articulating a happy ending via Kottke
• Too many dead horses 
• Gaijin spik Japanese
  
• 🧀🥐🍕
  
• The best meal in Milano!  
• Best sausinge rolls in Oz [above]
• Multilingual brocolli
  
• Activating charcoal, sequestering carbon, microbing the soil 
• €18 a bag in West Cork
• Not me: we CIY char-it-yourself
  
• ♬ ♫ ♩ ♪
• The Mingulay Boat Song Harbottle and Jonas
• Latcho Drom
  
• YoYo and James greet the sun
• Nana and her White Rose
• La Barca - Tarantella 
  
• 🔧🛠🔨
  
• zero waste 1200mm x 2400mm plywood sheet >> 400mm x 400mm drawer unit
• grrl builds deck
• Dai-bach builds clog 
• Florian builds 100 cups
  
• WWOOFing small-holding on Papa Stour
  
• An essay of colour in art
  

Arma Virumque

Wot, Latin? Pretentious gittery alert! Last November, much delayed by Coronarama, we rocked up to þe olde family pile in the Midlands to hang out with the descendants of my GtGrandfather. It was not unpleasant to meet the second cousins, all the first cousins - my father's generation - being dead. There were, of course, children of my generation and a few of them had children at foot. Gdau.I and Gdau.II's 4th cousins. Unless folks live in the same village forever, it is quite rare to have anything to do with 4th cousins. The genetic dilution is such that they have as much likelihood of sharing a Mendelian genetic trait as any rando on the dance-floor . . . unless you've emigrated to Nepal - for the mountain air, like.

Regrettably, one or more of this cousinage had spent too much time on the dance-floor with randos because The Beloved and I both copped a 'rona, felt crap for a week, and took about 4 months recovering from the assault. In one part of the stately 1710 family pile, þe olde family crest was carved into weathered sandstone: paly of eight,  gules  and  arg ; a lion, rampant, or, holding a snake in its paw. I've known this forever because the downstairs jacks in my parent's home had a framed copy of the said arms. Owning such a picture in that location was a nice balance of pretentiousness and ironic comment on the whole ancestry nonsense.

It set me to tumbling back 60 40 [corrected after comment] years to when The Boy was in primary school in suburban Boston. His class was requested and required, as part of a history and heraldry project, to draw a picture of a coat of arms. Perhaps because his bestie at the time was 'hispanic', The Boy elected to draw the Escudo Nacional de México which depicts "a golden eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus devouring a rattlesnake" . . . something something Aztec legend about the foundation of their core city. I have a vague memory of discussing the home-work project and quite possibly mentioned our own contribution to heraldic nonsense - perhaps México was easier to talk about in class?

Whatevs, the picture generated [see L] became part of [nuclear] family lore and has survived multiple rounds of house-moving triage through the next 6 decades. Its survival is partly attributed to artistic merit but partly to the ironic title added by The Boy's father "Penguin being tickled by french loaf". AITA? Yes!

 

Skunk Works

 Nope, not Mephitis mephitis the American skunk today, folks. Today we treat rather of the post-WWII aerospace industry as jewelled by Lockheed Corporation, before its 1995 merger to become today's Lockheed-Martin behemoth. In 1933, Lockheed employed a star engineer called Kelly Johnson fresh out of college. This guy had an uncanny feeling for aeronautics: he could intuit what normal folks had to get out their slide-rules to calculate. In WWII, his team developed the P-38 Lightning and USA's first jet fighter the P-80 Shooting Star.

But he is most well-known for ring-fencing a chunk of Lockheed equity in an autonomous entity, Advanced Development Projects, for creating super secret super planes for The Feds. ADP became known affectionately as The Skunk Works. Johnson was not an empath and he took no prisoners but if you could deliver, he'd back you and pay top dollar to keep you. Skunk Works pushed the envelope to create airplanes which were far beyond the technical capabilities of their aerospace competitors. More importantly, their U-2 spy plane and SR-71 almost rocket Mach 3 Blackbird were far beyond the reach of Soviet counter-measures.

Kelly Johnson retired in 1975 and handed over the reins to Ben Rich who had better people schools and kept producing sky-breaking novel planes until the end of The Cold War. I'm getting most of my info from his memoir Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed [1994] which I've just coursed through as a book-book. Reminds me of why they are called page-turners. In singing the praises of Lockheed's products, you might be tempted to think "he would say that, wouldn't he?" but the narrative is leavened with numerous Other Voices interludes where some of the dramatis personnae - pilots, engineers, politicians, air-force brass - get to add their 2c perspectives.

In the Rich years, Skunk Works most notably produced the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter, which was effectively invisible to radar [R]. The idea developed when one of the Lockheed engineers read and understood a paper by Пётр Я́ковлевич Уфи́мцев a Soviet engineer: Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction. Insofar as I paid attention to boy things in the 1980s, I was super skeptical about a plane made out of polygons would return no signal to radar. But it was so: F-117s were famous for not being shot down.

Towards the end of the book Rich refers to irresponsible outlets in Western Europe for supplying weapons to small hostile countries. In the same paragraph he talks about tremendous losses to Soviet helicopters from shoulder-held Stinger missiles supplied by our own CIA. What is sauce for the Red goose is clearly not sauce for the Yankee gander. Where do people get off with their unconsidered certainties of being in the right??

In his memoir, Rich sets out his stall that Skunk Works was successful because it was not trammeled by paper-work. In those early days, everyone was believed to be on the same page - fighting them Reds - so the USAF would trust Lockheed - and other defense contractors - to deliver what they said they'd create . . . in budget . . . without (unpatriotic) feathering shareholders nests on tax-payer dollars. Proposals, tenders and procurement contracts were short and on message. In one anecdote Ben Rich, in retirement, goes to visit the USS "Old Ironsides" Constitution (launched 1797) in Boston Harbor. The old lady was undergoing a paint job and the site engineer admitted that 200 pages of documentation were required to make this happen. Rich pointed to a glass case displaying the original contract to build the whole damn ship . . . three copperplate pages! 

Another key to Skunk Works success was the physical proximity of the engineers and draughtsmen [yup mostly men) with the machinists, welders, electricians and tool-setters on the shop-floor. If things didn't work / fit, the engineers could immediately go back to the drawing board. When each good pair of hands is respected and heard, everyone buys into the Project and mistakes are less like to fall between domains. Good book, recommend.

2300andMe

I've had a quite a bit to say about 23andme, not least because a very early hire was a graduate of TCD Genetics Dept, my alma mater. 23andMe may be original and best, but there is now a long list of other international corps which will analyse DNA from [cells in] your spittle and find a raft of rellies. I was tempted to submit when I had €100 to spare and thought it would be a bit of a jape. I'm glad I didn't, because like the spoken word and the sped arrow, you can't put the genii your DNA back in the box once you've thrown it out on the wind. 

Richard Atkinson had no such qualms, or managed to choke them down, it he had. He worked in the book-trade as an editor and publisher and felt adrift on hearing the news that his line and lineage would stop with him. At about the same time, he acquired a steamer-trunk full of family papers dating back to the 1700s. Shocked! 'e was; shocked! to twig that his ancestor and namesake, Richard Atkinson, was a slave-holding sugar-planter in Jamaica in the 1780s and 1790s. This realisation was rapidly followed by the news that his ancestors had, like George Washington his US contemporary, been shagging their property and there was a whole line [maybe 7,000 people] of black cousins. I mention this at the head of the post to acknowledge and park the murk; because nobody should beat themselves up for the sins of their parents, let alone more distant progenitors.

The original Rcd. Atkinson was a small farmer and tanner from Cumbria, who made his money work for him, moved to London and parlayed his assets into a fabulous fortune. He moved in the innermost circles of political power, knew ministers and fixers and was able to secure lucrative government contracts to supply matériel [rum, biscuit, horses, salt-beef, candles] to the British army during the American War of Independence. Along the way he acquired a controlling interest in a tuthree sugar plantations in Jamaica . . . with the attendant "personnel". 

The present Richard Atkinson spent ten years in county archives and family vaults reading reading reading letters, account books, certificates and wills and eventually wrote his first book Mr Atkinson's Rum Contract: The Story of a Tangled Inheritance, published in 2021. Leaving aside the author's hand-wringing, it's a really interesting insight into how the world turned 250 years ago. History, as she is taught, is a tired re-churning of the same old sources - many of which are the books of previous historians. Edmund Burke was eloquent, Charles James Fox was fat, William Pitt the Younger was young - Prime Minister at 24! Whereas Richard "Rum" Atkinson doesn't even merit an entry in Wikipedia. Battles and Generals fill the pages of Encyclopedia Britannica but nobody knows who ran the commissariat that allowed those generals to win those battles.

Mr Atkinson's Rum Contract redresses that imbalance and brings a rich seam of unpublished papers to see the light of day and, as you'd hope and expect from a book-reader and editor, the result is a well organised narrative with a cast of interesting characters. Short reading by author. Generally good fun; pity about the slavery!