Crotalus Scutulatus

Or as they are more popularly known the Mojave Green rattlesnake. Our main residence is on the eastern front of the Sierra Nevada mountains and is classified as high desert. The high desert is full of life it just tends to be spread out more and much of it is nocturnal. One member of the local fauna is the Mojave Green rattlesnake. They can have a nasty bite as the venom is both a neurotoxin as well as a hemotoxin.

I don't see them very often but I make sure they don't stay around. If I can't transport it easily I'll put it down quickly. Children and dogs are especially at risk from a bite. Just today a woman my wife knows had an unwanted visitor. They have 5 kids and numerous dogs, so, "something has to be done!" You can guess what happened, and I brought the carcass home. Here it is showing the beautiful pattern it has and I decided I needed some more rattlesnake leather.

Ballistics Calculators

I've been working on a system to take with me shooting. It's essentially an external ballistics application for my Android phone that gives me bullet path calculations. It's not meant to be a whiz bang super ballistics calculator that will tell you everything for every bullet and condition. It's set up to calculate the functions I want for a limited number of cartridges, loading conditions and projectiles.

The first thing I did was develop the means to make any corrections needed for the flight path due to temperature, humidity or altitude. These can be all lumped together by calculating the air density. This is the circuit for the Assistant set-up. It's a little module (Bosch BME280) that reads temperature, atmospheric pressure, and relative humidity. I use those inputs to calculate the air density. It also accounts for any altitude corrections that might need to have been made through the direct reading of the atmospheric pressure. In fact the manufacturer likes to claim you can get an altitude within a meter or so from it. The values are read in and sent via Bluetooth to my Android app.

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.

An Upcoming Trip

It's time for a little back country riding. The "boys" have new shoes and they are ready...

...and so am I.

This trip will probably be to see a good acquaintance of mine up near Kennedy Meadows. My normal route from Walker Pass to Big Pine Meadow is shown on the map below the break, but I'll be casting about for different ways to go so it will probably take me a bit longer. I'll probably put about 75 miles in the saddle. 

New Things, Old Problem

I don't have much to say in this post but I do have a fair amount of things to do. I am attempting to add some, what I think will be useful, features to this place. As with anything new there are some growing pains.

Odds and Ends

I prefer to build my own applications for things. I like to create and then maintain a bunch of building blocks that I can quickly adapt them for any particular application. I have put some of them in my public downloads drive which can be accessed from the links in the lower right side of the blog. The phone apps and u-processor executables have virtually no self-checks or error avoidance in them. They're not really intended for everyday users they're more for people looking to adapt them for their own use, so you've been cautioned.

Air Layering

Suppose you had a strong need for propagating more fruit or nut trees for a food source but you have no way to get the plants. What would you do? Fortunately for us the plant world is both prolific and highly adapted to self-propagate. Yes, most trees can be propagated from seed, but it's difficult, and usually takes a long period of time to get bearing trees. Also with seeds it's sexual reproduction and as such it's difficult to know how the resulting offspring will turn out. One method to speed this up and avoid any other growing from seed issues is through cloning. There are two main methods of cloning plants; from cuttings or air layering. Not all trees and the like will take well from cuttings, or the success rate is so low it's almost impossible to do. The best way I've found to propagate trees, vines, or shrubs is through air layering or Marcotting. This involves exposing the cambium of the plant and then promoting root growth in the exposed area. The resulting new root bearing stem is obviously an identical clone of the original plant and will thus bear true. The methodology is as follows and is done visually through photographs.