Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Of Course

Now that I've cured and tacked out the Mojave Green skin there seems to be some debate over who gets the resulting product. Isn't that always the case once the work is done?


Meanwhile the skin is drying nicely. I make sure the skin is up off the board so that air can circulate freely.

Monday, September 28, 2020

Show Me The Model

I've been exploring the model space and it's a dark, cold place. You can get lost out there. I developed a basic SIR model for disease transmission and recovery and set out to turn the knobs on the values. Recall the original model looked like the graph below. What you can see is that the blue line is very nearly at zero and the green line is approaching 1000 or the total population that I used.

The blue line being very nearly zero means there are very few members of the population left that are susceptible to the disease. The red line indicates the infectious which are the people currently suffering from infection and potential death. "Flattening the curve" is spreading out the red line in time which can be accomplished by reducing the transmission rate (social distancing.)

Saturday, September 26, 2020

That Took A Bit of Work

In my "What This Blog is About" page I mention about doing something yourself and then explaining it to someone else so you can really start to understand something. I have been asked a number of times my take on the Covid 19 business, and I have tried to stay honest and say I don't know enough about it to offer up much in the way of an opinion. I have been trying to rectify that ignorance and have made the first steps. This is my description of what I know to this point and what I have done.

Thursday, September 24, 2020

That Should Do It

I've finished my shooting Android application to my satisfaction. It has my current burn model in it and some, I repeat some, error checking in it. As usual it can be found in my Downloads Section under Mk1ShooterMod1.apk for the built Android App and Mk1ShooterMod1.aia for App Inventor file.

...Onward Through The Fog.

Friday, September 18, 2020

A Burn Model Updated

I decided to put together a simplified burn model to incorporate into the Android App I put together for re-loading and exterior ballistics calculations. It gives me a little better feeling for the overall veracity of the application. The powder mass function was developed with a 4th order Runge-Kutta scheme which can be found in the Open Calculators downloads section of the blog. The velocity was derived from a lumped parameter energy balance model. I used a thermochemical solver for developing some of the powder constants. I'll probably put together a thermochemical solver for here which will also be useful for detonation and explosive properties calculations which I plan to write about in the future.

Thursday, September 17, 2020

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.

Monday, September 14, 2020

This is my Rifle...

This is my gun... I don't suppose I need to repeat that little ditty that one picks up in Basic Training in the U.S. Army. I assume they don't use that anymore given the coed nature of the Army these days. This is the object I'm speaking of.