Today (tonight?) at 8:42PM MDT. Right now if I get my timing right.
Winter’s coming, the days are getting shorter. Are you ready for Christmas ads yet?
Work Is Where You Go To Recover From Your Vacation
So what to do when you’re retired? …
So how did DT spend his holiday?
Building a fence … or attempting to.
No different than any other day recently.
This gets to feeling like … exercise.
I’m allergic to that stuff: my skin turns red and starts leaking fluids.
The old fence had rotted at the base and was tipping over. Can’t just let it go – the propane tank is on the embankment plus the problem of dirt washing down onto the driveway … to say nothing of wiping out Ms DT’s flower garden.
Luckily, I’m paid by the project, not by hour.
Not that it makes a difference in this case. As Ms DT states: “Do you want to eat?“
Did I mention that in my household, I always have the final word:
“Yes, dear“
So the old fence was pulled out. Turned out the fence was further rotted out than I thought … nothing salvageable.
Borrowed a neighbor’s tractor – I need to buy one of these – and did some dirt removal.
There’s more clay in there than I expected and this is a Class 0 tractor. When I buy one, I’ll need a Class 1 … digging into that put a strain on the hydraulic system … but it worked. Made things a bit easier than digging by hand.
But I came close to ruining things – like stressing the hydraulic lines – when I found out that not only were the old fence posts embedded in concrete, but the installers laid down a concrete-filled trench. Most of the footings eventually came out – big chunks they were – except the corner post at the edge of the house/driveway; the one right where I wanted to set the main anchor post.
It’s not a valid plan if it doesn’t have to be changed in the middle of the project.
Gonna need the dirt for backfill once I’m done.
I know I’m in as good a shape now as when I was 25 so the railroads have done something to make their ties heavier. I don’t think those 2x8s are only wood either – wood doesn’t weigh so much that I can’t carry two 8-footers at a time …
I had a tool for digging 12″x2ft holes … but I decided to opt for this new-fangled thing called an auger. Funny thing – the tractor doesn’t have sufficient up/down motion on the rear to dig a deep hole and pull the auger back out.
That sucker weighs near-on 150lbs … and for some reason, that seems excessively heavy.
So the routine is to back into position … and the seat doesn’t rotate. No parking brake, so place the transmission into neutral and set the scoop down to hold the tractor while running, get off the tractor (which is too small for me, my boots get hung up and my knees bang into levers and such), go back and adjust the auger height – by lifting the mechanism while pulling and resetting the cotter pin, get back on the tractor, engage the PTO into low gear while disabling the drive gear, engage the auger (did you catch the seat doesn’t rotate? Need to dig while twisting backward while sitting forward), dig as far as it will go, reverse the process in order to reset the auger – by lifting the mechanism by hand while pulling and resetting the cotter pin.
Tim the Toolman Taylor had it right: “Too much power is just enough”.
Repeat as necessary … to find there’s insufficient up/down to dig a deep hole … which means now, dammit, I need to use concrete along with gravel to set a sufficient base.
But so far, somehow … I’ve saved Ms DT’s rose bush. The plants on top are Russian Sage – just now coming to bloom … as is the lavender on the other side of the driveway.
This sure feels like that thing they call “work”.
I need a job so I can rest from my days off.
Becoming Participants in the Cosmos
Submitted by John Fleming
Occasionally I post snippets about my cosmological thinking. When I was a boy I was all gaga about astronomy, checked out all the astronomy books in the local library, my parents bought me a small Gilbert Scientific reflector telescope that I spent many evenings scanning the heavens, peering into the dark trying to discover all the Secrets. Nevertheless I went on to engineering instead of science. During a visit to Palomar a few years ago I bought a gift shop book that described all the discoveries the Hale 200-inch participated in since its commissioning. That book reignited my enthusiasm for cosmology.
That book gave me the realization that the universe has a design. It’s a self-assembling mechanism, it has emergent structure, it has a program, and it has an operating principle. It starts with lots of hydrogen and a little helium (and possibly the mysterious “dark matter” and “dark energy”) at a temperature and pressure. The first massive stars form, go supernova, create the other elements, and become black holes. The black holes become the seeds of galaxies, greedily gobbling matter to become hyper-massive and collecting vast clouds of surrounding matter. Galactic collisions cause star-burst formation. Galaxies are star-creation factories. Stars are element creation factories, creating all the elements and stable isotopes beyond hydrogen. As the universe becomes metal rich from generations of stars spewing their products into the void, the new stars accumulate planets, gas giants, rocky and metal-rich planets and water-worlds.
The operating principle in the universe is: Every step creates the conditions needed for the next step.
So what is the next step? Life forms on planets once the hot and violent early universe settles into more genteel environments, and all the elements become abundant. And now there’s a scale problem. The universe moves at galactic distance scale and billion-year timelines. Life is small and short by at least eight orders of magnitude. The problem: how is it possible for life to have any effect on the mechanism of the cosmos, to participate in the operating plan? To what purpose is life? And I have come to believe that life is a part of this Grand Design, to be not just a recipient but a participant. It’s not a belief or faith as it is an axiom that things are not created for no purpose. The Teacher in Ecclesiastes proposed this axiom long ago: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”.
Life (well, life as we know it) has another problem. It starts planet-bound. A planet can be born, life brought forth, endless generations of species evolve, live and die, then the planet’s sun goes red giant and nova, consuming the planets and recycling them into the galactic medium. All that life had exactly zero effect on the progress of the universal program. All that Art and Beauty created by that life is lost like tears in rain.
That seems to falsify the purpose axiom.
And now I’ve had my latest realization. That’s the way the universe works at all scales, that’s part of the operating principle. It looks to us as if the universe is wasteful and purposeless to the extreme. All that matter sucked into black holes, billions of galaxies, uncountable trillions of stars, endless uninhabitable planets, less so inhabitable planets, and apparently nothing to show for it except the progression of structure and organization. The operating principle expects that from the uncountable billions of life experiments, a few will be “successful”, enough to become active participants instead of mere inhabitants, to modify the universe, its conditions and things, to create the next steps.
Now I have an explicable answer to “why should we go into space?” I’ve been looking for that answer since I was a boy. Because we some of us want to be active participants in this Grand Design. We don’t want to be recycled as one of the failed ones.
We’re going to need some things to sustain and guide us for the long haul, those of us that want to get going and get out there: morals, ethics, Beauty, Art, and insatiable desire to become better than we are. It’s either get busy living, or get busy dying. We don’t know where we are going, and we don’t know what it will look like when we get there, but for now what we know is the journey is the destination. Travel is not for the faint-of-heart and stay-at-homes.
We don’t even know if our kind if life is transitory. Perhaps our purpose is to create AI which will replace us, AI that can span the stars and colonize the currently inhospitable locations in the universe, AI intelligences cool and vast embedded in and interconnected across the interstellar medium, having single thoughts across many human lifetimes. It doesn’t matter. We are here for an as-yet unknown purpose, we must survive and thrive and spread among the stars.
Links:
Utube dot com/watch?v=80_TbSVBVqA
Utube dot com/watch?v=tLpyklFEahs
Juneteenth
Let’s all go out and celebrate DEI-pandering.
Me? It’s Thursday – I have things to do.
Redhead
Summertime
and the living is easy …
“First Alert Weather: System brings chance of rain, storms and snow for the first weekend of summer.“
Facade…
Published by Jean Tues July 17, 2007
I have nothing to say
at the moment
that you want
to hear.
The words in my head,
on the tip of my tongue,
would send you away
so, I say nothing
right now
of any import
in order to keep you
close by.
Were you busy today?
Any plans for the weekend?
Meanwhile, my brain and
my heart
overflow, flooded with
want and fear of
goodbye.
Skimming the surface
Superficially chanting
much meaningless think.
How sad that we
dance around,
unsatisfyingly,
what both of us crave,
determined to maintain our
exterior shield
of wanting for naught.
Someone’s Predicting July
Oh, no! Global Warming!
Headline today: “The hottest temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere summer are approaching“
Predictions also suggest a cooling trend beginning in late August.
These Boots Were Made For Walking
Once upon a time, I made my living as a prospector … though that’s not the word used today … probably because I didn’t have a burro to follow me. Anyway, we had spent a week or so wandering around the Nevada/Utah border poking around rocks of various types.
I’ve lots of prospecting experience and have become extremely competent in finding leaverite ore …
Woke up one night when the fire was dying down and caught the firelight reflecting off my boots. Grabbed my camera and took a picture.
This here’s the result.
My feet are getting itchy again – may be heading to the back country pretty soon.
“Can you hear me now?“
Nope!
Just Three
… headlines of the day – to keep the blood flowing.
“Ilhan Omar criticizes Trump’s military parade, calls US one of ‘worst countries’“
Why is she even still in the country, let alone Congress? She entered under false pretenses and has no intention of honoring her oath of office.
“Russian drone strikes on Ukraine capital city claim US citizen among the dead.“
And why would a “normal” US citizen even be there? Should have listened to Ol’ Remus. FAFO.
“Alex Padilla is an embarrassment to California”
Oh, come on now. He’s way down the list – He’s the embarrassment? With the likes of Schiff, Pelosi, Waters, Newsome?
He’s a “Who is Alex Padilla?”
I really should stop following the news …