What Fresh Hell...

Well I see that the CDC is playing with mask guidance again. "Vaccinated individuals should wear a mask indoors." What? Are the vaccinated carriers? Heaven help women named Claire or some such. Covid Claire would stink as a moniker. So as not to appear as sexist Covid Charlie would not be fun either.

Now according to the CDC, at least to the people down in the basement who probably do all of the good work, the US has had approximately 140 million cases of Covid-19. You can read about the disease burden here at the CDC site. I arbitrarily increased the value based upon the current case numbers and the presented under-report value.

Approximately 60% of the population has been vaccinated. Now I'm assuming people got the vaccine to prevent getting Covid and not getting the vaccine if they already had the disease. If that's the case then what's the big problem? We've probably got over a 90% immunity. Sure we will continue to get cases as not everyone is immune yet, and I'm sure there will be some cases of re-infection. After all, immunity is usually not considered perpetual.

Unless of course something is being left out. No, that wouldn't happen. I don't believe in conspiracies, but I am also highly skeptical when it comes to coincidences.

My Truck Got Hit By My Dog

I've been working on my truck, it has a sad. I had started to get an odd sound on occasion at the torque converter region of the truck so I took a look...

I inspected the flex plate and saw it needed to be replaced. Much to my surprise as I was in the process of lowering the engine to get at the upper transmission to engine bolts the whole transmission fell out. The case had broken some time in the past. So time for a remanufactured transmission. Which also means a new radiator and auxiliary transmission fluid cooler. I am also installing an auxiliary engine oil cooler while I'm at it.

Since I had all this free time I decided to refresh the motor. I put in a reman crankshaft, new bearings all around, new oil pump and screen, new water pump and fan clutch, and a new crank balancer. While I was at it I replaced all the sensors on the block. By the time I'm done I'll have put about $3200 into it which includes the price of the reman transmission. It seems like a lot for this truck but have you priced used heavy duty 4WD trucks lately? We're talking plywood. Prices seem to have jumped 50-75% in the last 6 months.

I think what I'll do is give this truck a flat bed conversion, give it a new paint job to match the horse trailer and make it my horse rig. These are my last horses so once they're in the Pasture of Dreams I'll just sell the whole thing, trailer, truck, and various accoutrements.

What Do You Believe?

Given our last election and some of the rather unusual events I thought I would create a mathematical model to explore this strange space. So the first thing to do is to express the thing in some form and see if it makes sense. An exponential model first comes to mind such as:

As If I Didn't Have Enough To Do

It's always rather surprising to me when people discuss certain aspects of  subjects and I discover they don't read much about the work in the field under discussion. What I have come to find out is that often times people just don't know where to look. I've solved that problem, sort of. There are 10's of thousands of journals from around the world that have open access, meaning free to download. This is why I said I have sort of solved the problem. You still have to do the reading.

Every week I spend at least 4 hours reading journal articles in fields of study I'm interested in. This is a habit I would encourage in anyone with a thirst for understanding. I used to spend a full day of work once a week doing the same thing with the published and bound dead tree version. If you like that sort of thing, I still do, go to your local community college, or university library and find the journals. These days though this wild and wooly thing we have called the Web has lots of resources.

First off, the Directory of Open Access Journals. Just search by keyword(s) and you're off.

Next up, Open Access Journals. This link takes you to the journals by subject.

Ok, for the pirate in you there is Sci Hub for journals behind pay walls. They have by-passed them. Sometimes you might have to follow them around as they've been sued by publishers several times. You might open yourself to civil action in the United States by using the site, so if you go there understand what you are doing. I think they are currently down, probably on the run again.

For United States defense related research, and a lot more, there is the DTIC or Defense Technical Information Center. For most US government labs and centers each agency will usually have a publications outlet site. 

A lot of people think that these journals are primarily for the experts in those fields. That is only part of it. They are meant to communicate your work to others in that field sure, but also many of the articles are written with a broader audience in mind. So dive in, the water is great.

The Explosive Bonded Packer

During my undergraduate days I ran a shock physics lab primarily studying the welding window for explosively welding dis-similar materials. You can find a very brief article on the subject here. The gentleman I worked for at the time was considered one of the world's experts on the subject. I published a few journal articles and learned quite a bit. A few years later I was working at my career job and I got a phone call out of the blue. The caller told me that he got my name and organization from a quite obscure thing known as a world wide web search, Netscape was still fairly new and the only real browser, and he understood I knew something about explosive welding.

The Curiosity Shop: Can I Get A Witness?

Over the years a lot of experimental work I did was centered around high strain rate phenomena in solids. Which, there are probably more people attending your hometown high school football game than are interested in that field.

I have always had an interest in steel, its chemistry, its properties, and also its role in human history. Thus, my interest in knifemaking which embodies the art and craft of steel as well as the science.

In testing explosives a steel witness plate is often used to give a quick qualitative look at what the explosive output may have been. Often times it's more of a convenient way to rest the test item on a more stable surface. Over the years I must have used thousands of steel plates of various sizes and deformed them, punched holes in them and generally scattered them everywhere. I think I may have spent half a year out of my life just collecting them up afterwards. Needless to say I still have a few of them lying around.