From the BBC:
BBC News – George Floyd death: Trump’s church visit shocks religious leaders
Baby Deer in Brushpile
As events in the rest of the world accelerate, events in my world seem to be slowing down. I have three brush piles in the back yard that I am slowly cleaning up. For a decade or two I piled up branches whenever I trimmed or cut down trees. Decided to clean up my yard and the brush piles were my first target. Bought a little electric chipper and have been slowly making progress. Using the mulch from the chipper to mulch the front beds. Today I decided to take on some larger branches I took down a few days ago. The plan was to cut these into three foot pieces, as straight as possible, for the wood piles and later burning in the fire pit.
After getting my long extension cord out, my small electric chainsaw and putting on gloves and glasses I had made about three cuts when I smelled something. We have skunks living around here and I believe they have made burrows under all of my brush piles. They don’t bother me but I’m always a little nervous that one time when I’m pulling a branch off of the pile I’ll rouse a skunk. So I looked around and saw this little guy. No mom any place to be seen and he was behind my fully fenced in yard. He could have come through the iron fence but no way any larger animal could. I was sawing just a few feet from this guy and he didn’t move. At first I thought he might be dead. I couldn’t see any breathing and his eyes were open but he seemed alive. I took a picture and decided to call it a day. Came back less than an hour later and he had moved on.
Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 GB RAM
I was wondering if this was in the works. A new Raspberry Pi 4 board with 8 GB of RAM. I bought one of the 4 GB models, which is my new desktop machine. In the old days I would have upgraded the RAM in my PC, with the Raspberry Pi I’ll just get a whole new board. For $75, why not? No real hurry. 4 GB seems to be more than enough right now.
The most powerful Raspberry Pi now has 8GB of RAM
Over 100,000 US COVID-19 Deaths
A good overview of the COVID-19 crisis in the US from the BBC as a grim milestone of 100,000 deaths is surpassed. It is difficult to view this as anything but a horrific failure, and it goes on.
BBC News – Coronavirus: From ‘We’ve shut it down’ to 100,000 US dead
2,000 Year Old Tile
Funny the ancient Romans built stuff like this to last centuries, but my bathroom and swimming pool tiles look terrible after a few years and need to be replaced in a few decades, max. So much for modern technology.
Roman mosaic floor found under Italian vineyard
Mower Math
There is a pulley on my mower below the battery below the seat that drives the differential / transaxle. It would be nice to keep this part but nicer to drive it directly from an electric motor rather than via the complicated arrangement of belts and pulleys that go all the way to the 14 HP gas engine in the front.
This differential is just forward / neutral / reverse and had no gear shifting; that is all done by the belts in an unusual arrangement using “variable pulleys”. The biggest problem was finding out the gearing ratio of the transaxle. Was going to put it up on blocks, (somehow) get it running and (somehow) count the revolutions of the wheels and the main pulley. Maybe use a video camera. This all seemed complicated and even dangerous, so I had another look at doing this without the motor running, and without dismantling the whole rear end.
Turns out I could prop one of the pulleys that maintained tension on the belt with a piece of pipe I cut, then putting the mower in drive and then turning the pulley it would inch forward. Pieces of tape on the pulley and the tire let me keep track of the number of revolutions. Turns out spinning the input pulley to the transaxle 21 times turns the 17.5 inch tires once. This comes out to a little over two inches (2.618) of forward progress of the mower for each spin of the transaxle input.
The big question is: what sort of motor would I need to drive this directly? Electric motors tend to be 3,000 to 5,000 R.P.M.s. Would that be too fast, or too slow?
For 3,600 R.P.M. (for instance) times 60 gives 216,000 R.P.H (revolutions per hour). At 2.618 inches per revolution, we would go over half a million inches in that hour (565,488 to be more precise). There are 5,280 x 12 inches in a mile. which gives 8.925 M.P.H. which is pretty reasonable. So I can directly hook an electric motor directly to this transaxle and get a reasonable speed. I like this idea because it eliminates all the belts and pulleys, but keeping the transaxle keeps things like the brakes and the back wheel arrangement the same.
While researching this I learned that people race riding mowers. Might be a new hobby in my future.
Playing in Traffic
I still keep up with a few technical journals. I tend to read CACM’s “Kode Vicious” letters. Often a bit on the technical side, but written from a realistic, if not cynical, perspective.
The latest one is on self-driving cars. Short and uncomplicated, it lays out some of the high level issues for success in safety critical software applications. Not as boring as it sounds, even for non-techies.
Kode Vicious Plays in Traffic
By George V. Neville-Neil
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 63 No. 6, Pages 25-26
10.1145/3396263
This Isn’t War
Briefly, the battle against COVID-19 was cast as a “war”. I thought this was appropriate. Over 100,000 fellow citizens have perished and the economy is in tatters. If COVID-19 were a country, there is no question we would be bombing the hell out of them, spare no expense. And yet, we quickly backed away from this wartime footing which is usually the way we do things in the USA. Everything worth doing has to be a war. War on Poverty. War on Drugs. War on Terror. War on Cancer. Why no War on COVID-19?
War allows the freeing up of resources. Nobody complains about debt or the inconveniences. War also means sacrifice. Is this the problem? Are our leaders unable to ask Americans to sacrifice, even when their own lives and the lives of their loved ones are at risk? What am I missing here?
Fish Food Fail
We have a small pond out back. Used to have a nice koi until a raccoon got him. Replaced Mr Koi with a few goldfish and some minnows. By now we are down to one goldfish and a couple of minnows. I feed them most every day, and noticed I was running low on food. Usually I would go to the local pet store, since a small container lasts maybe a year, but with COVID-19 I decided to order it on-line. Amazon had a minimum order of two. Ok, this is light stuff. I ordered two. Turns out I should have looked closer. While the containers look identical, the ones I ordered are 3x – 4x the size of the one I have. Now I have maybe a decades worth of goldfish food. Could be worse. I know someone who thought they were ordering ten bananas on-line and was surprised to find ten *bunches* delivered.
Steven A. Guccione 