I've said before I don't care for hip hop. I still don't. Rap doesn't grab me, either, except to inspire a spasmodic lurch for the tuning knob to set the radio to almost anything else.
That said, I just read the news blurb about last night's episode of Saturday Night Live. Back in the day I used to watch SNL and enjoyed it, if I could keep the volume down low enough to not wake up the parents.
I really enjoyed watching Al Franken and Mary Gross - I'm not surprised at all that Al would go on to become a member of Congress, the guy's too smart to not be in charge at some level - in the middle 80s, but I was also saddled with Jon Lovitz' "compulsive liar" character, which irritated me no end, not least for the many many imitations it spawned in day-to-day life.
What's all this about? Justin Timberlake was the guest host for last night's episode of SNL, his fifth appearance in that role. That catapults him into a lofty, rarified stratum indeed, where few other celebrities have ever been. Those other celebrities include Tom Hanks, Candice Bergen, Alec Baldwin, etc. Not a lot of people, but enough that you realize it's a helluva hit parade of heavy comedic hitters. And they were all on the show last night.
The whole list of five-timers, as they appeared:
Justin Timberlake
Paul Simon
Steve Martin
Dan Aykroyd (not really, but he's an original cast member so seeing him on the stage is a huge rush)
Chevy Chase
Martin Short (also not a five-timer but a member of the extremely popular Three Amigos sketch)
Alec Baldwin
Tom Hanks (big cheers for these last two)
Candice Bergen
It's worth noting that Aykroyd's acting during his portion of the Five Timer's Club skit was top-notch. The others were cheerfully hamming, but Aykroyd had actual subtlety.
Later in the show we're treated to a rendition of JT's latest song, "Suit & Tie," which again I must say isn't to my musical taste. But watching him perform I am struck by one thing: Justin Timberlake may be this generation's Michael Jackson.
His stage presence, his musical ability, even his dance moves all combine to offer up a performer who hits the trifecta, the magic bullet of performing charisma and raw talent, polished with years of experience - don't forget he joined the cast of the Mickey Mouse Club alongside other recognizeable names like Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears back in 1993 - that adds up to a seriously capable force in the cutthroat live entertainment industry.
I'm not a professional entertainer by any stretch. I've done a little acting and thoroughly enjoyed it, partly because it distracted me from the grind of my real job. I don't sing in public, which is a public service - though I do enjoy singing, which makes it a little ironic. I don't dance. Ask me to sing and dance and I will quickly become out of breath and trip on something. so much for singing and dancing.
What I can see, though, from my small peek behind the veil of a little bit of entertaining, is that JT seriously works at being the best entertainer he can. Obviously he'd have to or else no one would pay to see him. But his dance moves are sharp, his singing is edgy, and the presence on the stage, even though it isn't music I generally like, is electric. He even acts in movies, and does it well - not like Michael Jackson's cartoonish Scarecrow in The Wiz. Timberlake's characters have depth and personality.
This generation's Michael Jackson. I said it, I stand by it. I just hope he doesn't melt down like Jackson did.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Sunday, March 3, 2013
More about lighting
I'm something of a lighting nerd. I like the whole topic of lighting; not only is it the first invention that heralded the beginning of the age of electricity in human history, but it is also the one invention that permits pretty much all of modern architecture, manufacturing, and other technologies.
Without artificial light, you can't have big buildings. You can't move daylight very far into the interior of a large building; ask the people who work in the Pentagon, or in some of the middle stores of the Mall of America. Shoot, ask me - my office is a plywood shack inside the basement of a brick and concrete structure; to get to daylight I have to go through two doors. There are lots of excellent technologies designed to move daylight from outside to inside, but those only work so well, and the farther you get from an exterior surface the more academic they become. So for everyone who ever got to work before sunup or had to keep working after sundown, artificial lighting is a huge part of what makes your workday possible.
The original artificial lighting option was fire. For further reference, I recommend Artificial Sunshine Maureen Dillon, and I wrote about that very good book a couple of years ago. And fire, the assorted variations of fueling, flame size and carriers were the entire lighting gamut for the human experience for thousands of years. Eventually Edison and many many others came along and whipped up some alternatives that didn't require open flames.
They still did their thing by getting hot. A filament energized by electricity to become so hot that it glowed in the visible spectrum, was the device originally invented and demonstrated by Humphry Davy in 1802, but never successfully commercialized until Edison came along and threw his considerable efforts at the problem, culminating in the first practical, mass-produced electric light bulbs in 1879.
The very best incandescent lamp efficiency I can find is about five percent efficient - which is to say, of the power going in, only five percent re-emerges as visible light. The rest is heat. And that's for specialized projection lamps, which run crazy hot and don't last long enough to be practical lighting lamps.
Fluorescent lights aren't very new, either. The last significant development of fluorescent lighting technology, that of coating the inside of a neon tube with a fluorescing material, came in 1926. Since then, most of what's been going on with fluorescent lighting has been a matter of incremental improvement, both in the materials of the lamps themselves and in the control systems that condition and control the power that runs the lamp.
The most efficient fluorescent lamp I can find mention of is a new, high-output T5 tube generating light at about 105 lumens per watt, which is about 15% efficiency.
So you know, compact fluorescent lamps aren't as good as that, though they are good.
The very best LED lamp delivers light at about the same efficiency.
We can do better: the very best low-pressure sodium vapor lamp produces light with about twice the efficiency. Granted, the light it provides is orange.
The day is coming when we're going to have a light source that is 50% efficient - only half the energy that goes into it will be wasted. Look at it from another perspective: next time you're at the grocery store, look up at one of those fluorescent fixtures that has four tubes in it. Now imagine the exact same amount of light as all four of those tubes provided by only one of those tubes, and that tube still getting the same amount of electricity into it as now.
That's going to be one seriously bright tube.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Cree announced achievement of over 270 lumens per watt in an LED lamp. In a real-world application you can expect that to be considerably less, but even so consider: to get the same kind of light as a fluorescent tube using 25 watts, I would need an LED tube using only 10.
That's pretty good.
I have a few more comments regarding lighting but that's plenty for now.
Without artificial light, you can't have big buildings. You can't move daylight very far into the interior of a large building; ask the people who work in the Pentagon, or in some of the middle stores of the Mall of America. Shoot, ask me - my office is a plywood shack inside the basement of a brick and concrete structure; to get to daylight I have to go through two doors. There are lots of excellent technologies designed to move daylight from outside to inside, but those only work so well, and the farther you get from an exterior surface the more academic they become. So for everyone who ever got to work before sunup or had to keep working after sundown, artificial lighting is a huge part of what makes your workday possible.
The original artificial lighting option was fire. For further reference, I recommend Artificial Sunshine Maureen Dillon, and I wrote about that very good book a couple of years ago. And fire, the assorted variations of fueling, flame size and carriers were the entire lighting gamut for the human experience for thousands of years. Eventually Edison and many many others came along and whipped up some alternatives that didn't require open flames.
They still did their thing by getting hot. A filament energized by electricity to become so hot that it glowed in the visible spectrum, was the device originally invented and demonstrated by Humphry Davy in 1802, but never successfully commercialized until Edison came along and threw his considerable efforts at the problem, culminating in the first practical, mass-produced electric light bulbs in 1879.
The very best incandescent lamp efficiency I can find is about five percent efficient - which is to say, of the power going in, only five percent re-emerges as visible light. The rest is heat. And that's for specialized projection lamps, which run crazy hot and don't last long enough to be practical lighting lamps.
Fluorescent lights aren't very new, either. The last significant development of fluorescent lighting technology, that of coating the inside of a neon tube with a fluorescing material, came in 1926. Since then, most of what's been going on with fluorescent lighting has been a matter of incremental improvement, both in the materials of the lamps themselves and in the control systems that condition and control the power that runs the lamp.
The most efficient fluorescent lamp I can find mention of is a new, high-output T5 tube generating light at about 105 lumens per watt, which is about 15% efficiency.
So you know, compact fluorescent lamps aren't as good as that, though they are good.
The very best LED lamp delivers light at about the same efficiency.
We can do better: the very best low-pressure sodium vapor lamp produces light with about twice the efficiency. Granted, the light it provides is orange.
The day is coming when we're going to have a light source that is 50% efficient - only half the energy that goes into it will be wasted. Look at it from another perspective: next time you're at the grocery store, look up at one of those fluorescent fixtures that has four tubes in it. Now imagine the exact same amount of light as all four of those tubes provided by only one of those tubes, and that tube still getting the same amount of electricity into it as now.
That's going to be one seriously bright tube.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Cree announced achievement of over 270 lumens per watt in an LED lamp. In a real-world application you can expect that to be considerably less, but even so consider: to get the same kind of light as a fluorescent tube using 25 watts, I would need an LED tube using only 10.
That's pretty good.
I have a few more comments regarding lighting but that's plenty for now.
Friday, February 22, 2013
Not Quite a Book Review: The Nanny Diaries
The Nanny Diaries, by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, has been out for a while. It's not a recent release by any measure, hitting the shelves in 2002. I recently discovered that there is a sequel.
I finally read it over Christmas, and a few things came painfully clear throughout the book:
Mrs. X (never identified by name by the authors) should not be a mother. Mr. X is a habitual marital cheater and the clearest, saddest victim in this whole situation is the little boy, Grayer X. Nanny is the only loving person in Grayer's life, the only one who treats him with any care.
I deeply resented the adults in McLaughlin and Kraus's book. They are hugely self-absorbed, selfish, just terrible people. Nanny is almost pathologically empathetic with her little charge, and her love interest, "Harvard Hottie," has a posse of outlandishly insulting, offensive friends.
I hated this book. I hated its development, the climax and the conclusion. The worst part of the conclusion is that in the end, no one has learned anything: the X's are still together - barely - and Grayer is desperately weeping for Nanny to come back to him. In short, it was heartbreakingly realistic in that sometimes the end is eminently dissatisfying and sad.
Just flipping it open again to review and determine exactly what to say upsets me, sitting here and writing about it upsets me. I understand that some stories need to be told and perhaps there are a lot of people out there who are completely unaware of how life moves on for the hoi polloi - those people should be bolted into a chair and forced to read this book over and over. But I'm not one of those people.
I will never, ever read this book again. Ms. McLaughlin, Ms. Kraus, I apologize if I offend you, but that's how it plays out.
I finally read it over Christmas, and a few things came painfully clear throughout the book:
Mrs. X (never identified by name by the authors) should not be a mother. Mr. X is a habitual marital cheater and the clearest, saddest victim in this whole situation is the little boy, Grayer X. Nanny is the only loving person in Grayer's life, the only one who treats him with any care.
I deeply resented the adults in McLaughlin and Kraus's book. They are hugely self-absorbed, selfish, just terrible people. Nanny is almost pathologically empathetic with her little charge, and her love interest, "Harvard Hottie," has a posse of outlandishly insulting, offensive friends.
I hated this book. I hated its development, the climax and the conclusion. The worst part of the conclusion is that in the end, no one has learned anything: the X's are still together - barely - and Grayer is desperately weeping for Nanny to come back to him. In short, it was heartbreakingly realistic in that sometimes the end is eminently dissatisfying and sad.
Just flipping it open again to review and determine exactly what to say upsets me, sitting here and writing about it upsets me. I understand that some stories need to be told and perhaps there are a lot of people out there who are completely unaware of how life moves on for the hoi polloi - those people should be bolted into a chair and forced to read this book over and over. But I'm not one of those people.
I will never, ever read this book again. Ms. McLaughlin, Ms. Kraus, I apologize if I offend you, but that's how it plays out.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
An Absence of Gun Control: Uncontrollable Guns
You can get online and get in touch with companies that sell gun kits. The net result at the end of that is a completely legal, unregistered, untraceable gun.
Ostensibly this is entirely legal. There is a legitimate loophole in the ATF laws that make it completely kosher for you to roll your own. If you have the smarts, you can make a gun. The only catch is that you cannot legally transfer ownership of said gun, ever. It's yours. When you die, it goes in the casket with you. And whereas most of us are law-abiding citizens, and more than a few of us are tool-happy nuts who like to make stuff, that's cool. I recently heard a news story where some curious experimenters fired up their 3-d printer and made some crucial gun components by simply printing them, just to see if they could and make it work. (They could, which startled several interested parties)
It's even okay for companies to sell kits that take some of the especially heavy lifting off the builder: a kit for the lower receiver, the main part of the gun that everything else connects to, starts with a solid piece of metal.
What's wrong with this picture? Not a thing. What you get when you purchase the kit is exactly that: a solid piece of metal, along with detailed, measured drawings showing exactly where and how deep to machine the metal to make it into a functional lower receiver to which other parts can then attach. It takes quite a bit of work, some machinery setup and a fair amount of patience. You have to want it to spend that kind of time.
You can purchase an additional array of supplies which attach to the receiver blank: jigs and guides that make it much easier to machine out the receiver's assorted recesses. Still okay, and still completely within the bounds, I think, of the law.
You can purchase a bulk order of 100 kits at a 30% savings.
What?
Purchasing one, two, even five of these kits is easily passed off as "for personal use only." How can you defend a bulk purchase of 100 kits? What possible use can anyone have for 100 semi-automatic rifles, 1911 automatic pistols, really 100 of anything that isn't shares of stock, money or socks?
See, at this point I think there really is a problem with this picture. I'm actually halfway inclined to buy a kit myself, simply because it is up to me, and not the government, whether I own a gun or not. But damn, a bulk discount for buying 100 kits at a time just shouts, "Arrest me because I am a dangerous nutcase."
Please note that I am not providing links to any of the companies that sell these kits. Because I consider what they're doing to be so iffy from a moral standpoint, I won't make it a no-effort jump to satisfy your idle curiosity. If you go looking for them, that will be on your time and on your own head.
Ostensibly this is entirely legal. There is a legitimate loophole in the ATF laws that make it completely kosher for you to roll your own. If you have the smarts, you can make a gun. The only catch is that you cannot legally transfer ownership of said gun, ever. It's yours. When you die, it goes in the casket with you. And whereas most of us are law-abiding citizens, and more than a few of us are tool-happy nuts who like to make stuff, that's cool. I recently heard a news story where some curious experimenters fired up their 3-d printer and made some crucial gun components by simply printing them, just to see if they could and make it work. (They could, which startled several interested parties)
It's even okay for companies to sell kits that take some of the especially heavy lifting off the builder: a kit for the lower receiver, the main part of the gun that everything else connects to, starts with a solid piece of metal.
What's wrong with this picture? Not a thing. What you get when you purchase the kit is exactly that: a solid piece of metal, along with detailed, measured drawings showing exactly where and how deep to machine the metal to make it into a functional lower receiver to which other parts can then attach. It takes quite a bit of work, some machinery setup and a fair amount of patience. You have to want it to spend that kind of time.
You can purchase an additional array of supplies which attach to the receiver blank: jigs and guides that make it much easier to machine out the receiver's assorted recesses. Still okay, and still completely within the bounds, I think, of the law.
You can purchase a bulk order of 100 kits at a 30% savings.
What?
Purchasing one, two, even five of these kits is easily passed off as "for personal use only." How can you defend a bulk purchase of 100 kits? What possible use can anyone have for 100 semi-automatic rifles, 1911 automatic pistols, really 100 of anything that isn't shares of stock, money or socks?
See, at this point I think there really is a problem with this picture. I'm actually halfway inclined to buy a kit myself, simply because it is up to me, and not the government, whether I own a gun or not. But damn, a bulk discount for buying 100 kits at a time just shouts, "Arrest me because I am a dangerous nutcase."
Please note that I am not providing links to any of the companies that sell these kits. Because I consider what they're doing to be so iffy from a moral standpoint, I won't make it a no-effort jump to satisfy your idle curiosity. If you go looking for them, that will be on your time and on your own head.
Monday, February 18, 2013
Monsanto vs. Everyone
It's in the news again this week as no less an authority than the US Supreme Court takes up the case, Bowman v. Monsanto.
Let's look at the particulars: Vernon Bowman, farmer, grows soybeans on his farm. For his first planting he uses Monsanto's genetically engineered "Roundup Ready" soybean seed. He signs a contract ensuring he will not save any back for replanting and according to him, he doesn't.
What he does do, however, is he purchases soybean seed from the local grain elevator for his second crop. And therein lies the rub.
This case has already gone up in a couple of lower courts and in both cases the court upheld Monsanto's argument.
Monsanto insists that Bowman is infringing on their patent by availing himself of Roundup Ready seed that is mixed in with the "commodity seed" provided by the elevator. Monsanto says Bowman is experiencing yields larger than he should if he were using non-Roundup Ready seed, and that he should have to pay a fine for infringing on Monsanto's patent, and for contract violation.
I've seen Monsanto take on farmers before, including a suit which they brought against a farmer - and won! - for having Roundup Ready canola plants in his fields even though he hadn't bought any Roundup Ready seed - the plants were there as a result of windborne contamination.
One wonders a few things:
1) How many spies does Monsanto employ, to keep such tabs on things like whether there is a small portion of RR plants growing in a field where there shouldn't be any?
2) How much diligence is due on the farmer's part?
The point behind Roundup Ready seed is that it germinates into a plant that has been genetically engineered to be highly tolerant of the broad spectrum herbicide "Roundup." It's worth pointing out that Monsanto is the company that produces Roundup, so their stake in this is much more than protecting its patent rights on the seed itself. The main ingredient of Roundup, glyphosphate, is no longer protected by Monsanto's patents, and other companies are now producing glyphosphate-based herbicides. It's worth noting that just as people and companies were starting to look forward to Monsanto's patent running out (thus making price-cutting competition possible), we started hearing about glyphosphate resistance cropping up in weeds, thus undercutting the effectiveness of glyphosphate-based weed control.
That Bowman uses Roundup-Ready seed for his first crop is not in dispute, and he insists that he obeys the stipulations of the contract with Monsanto. Monsanto, however, is up in arms with the results of his second planting, the one that Bowman gets by purchasing seed from the elevator. That elevator-sourced seed is not marketed as Roundup Ready, it's just "commodity" seed, which could be anything.
My point is that Bowman didn't purchase his second planting seed from Monsanto. He bought it from the grain elevator, which made no claims on its seed's resistance to herbicides, germination rate, or anything else. The seed was ostensibly intended as animal feed, what Bowman did with it after purchasing was really up to him.
According to court documents, Bowman tested the seed and found it resistant to Roundup, so he planted it and used Roundup as a post-emergence herbicide. That, by the way, is what is supposed to be so great about the seed. You can use Roundup at any time with the crop, instead of only pre-emergence for before the crop sprouts. Before Roundup Ready seed was developed, you had to stop using Roundup once your planting had broken cover.
So what Monsanto is charging here isn't breach of contract - the contract Bowman signed doesn't apply to this seed, since he didn't purchase it directly from Monsanto - but patent infringement, availing himself of the herbicide resistance bred into the plant by growing it from genetically modified seed. The original farmer that produced the soybeans on his farm was compliant with the contract, and sold the seed in good faith to an end user. And since we must assume that farmer didn't infringe on the patent by saving any seed from his crop, he's in the clear. He grew the crop, he sold the crop, he's done. That the crop is, by virtue of its parentage, resistant to herbicides is not his concern.
The seeds Bowman purchased are not stamped with the name Monsanto anywhere on them. They don't grow a special color or only facing toward St. Louis, Missouri. That Bowman tested the seeds and found them resistant isn't in dispute. What's really being contested here is whether the patent protection of the seed should be exhausted.
I think Bowman has one small leg to stand on in that he had no way of knowing whether the seed he was purchasing was Roundup Ready. The commodity seed he purchased was pulled from the grain elevator, not from any marked bins that had been filled by a specific individual.
At this point I have a question and I think the case could hinge on this: was Bowman required to assume the seed he purchased, being glyphosphate resistant, was "Roundup Ready" seed? Since the existence of glyphosphate-resistant weeds and indeed even coca plants has been noted, it's clear that resistance to glyphosphate need not be only from Monsanto's genetic modification. It could be wild, a sport mutation that has no bearing on Monsanto.
Granted this is a bit of a stretch, but it casts Monsanto's claim to patent infringement in some doubt, as the desirable trait can be had by other means than Monsanto's manipulation, and while Monsanto can easily bring to bear the technological tools and know-how to prove that the seed may indeed be the product of their GM product, Bowman cannot. And that brings us back to how much due diligence can reasonably be expected of a farmer.
Also pertinent but not entirely related: when people have to pony up for more and bigger expenses to eradicate herbicide-resistant weeds, can they hit Monsanto with a class action suit for creating the attractive nuisance that is Roundup? If they had stuck with mechanical weed control (pulling), the weeds wouldn't have developed the chemical resistance and Monsanto wouldn't have created the chemical-dependent weed control market.
Just a thought, probably specious. But it bears asking.
Let's look at the particulars: Vernon Bowman, farmer, grows soybeans on his farm. For his first planting he uses Monsanto's genetically engineered "Roundup Ready" soybean seed. He signs a contract ensuring he will not save any back for replanting and according to him, he doesn't.
What he does do, however, is he purchases soybean seed from the local grain elevator for his second crop. And therein lies the rub.
This case has already gone up in a couple of lower courts and in both cases the court upheld Monsanto's argument.
Monsanto insists that Bowman is infringing on their patent by availing himself of Roundup Ready seed that is mixed in with the "commodity seed" provided by the elevator. Monsanto says Bowman is experiencing yields larger than he should if he were using non-Roundup Ready seed, and that he should have to pay a fine for infringing on Monsanto's patent, and for contract violation.
I've seen Monsanto take on farmers before, including a suit which they brought against a farmer - and won! - for having Roundup Ready canola plants in his fields even though he hadn't bought any Roundup Ready seed - the plants were there as a result of windborne contamination.
One wonders a few things:
1) How many spies does Monsanto employ, to keep such tabs on things like whether there is a small portion of RR plants growing in a field where there shouldn't be any?
2) How much diligence is due on the farmer's part?
The point behind Roundup Ready seed is that it germinates into a plant that has been genetically engineered to be highly tolerant of the broad spectrum herbicide "Roundup." It's worth pointing out that Monsanto is the company that produces Roundup, so their stake in this is much more than protecting its patent rights on the seed itself. The main ingredient of Roundup, glyphosphate, is no longer protected by Monsanto's patents, and other companies are now producing glyphosphate-based herbicides. It's worth noting that just as people and companies were starting to look forward to Monsanto's patent running out (thus making price-cutting competition possible), we started hearing about glyphosphate resistance cropping up in weeds, thus undercutting the effectiveness of glyphosphate-based weed control.
That Bowman uses Roundup-Ready seed for his first crop is not in dispute, and he insists that he obeys the stipulations of the contract with Monsanto. Monsanto, however, is up in arms with the results of his second planting, the one that Bowman gets by purchasing seed from the elevator. That elevator-sourced seed is not marketed as Roundup Ready, it's just "commodity" seed, which could be anything.
My point is that Bowman didn't purchase his second planting seed from Monsanto. He bought it from the grain elevator, which made no claims on its seed's resistance to herbicides, germination rate, or anything else. The seed was ostensibly intended as animal feed, what Bowman did with it after purchasing was really up to him.
According to court documents, Bowman tested the seed and found it resistant to Roundup, so he planted it and used Roundup as a post-emergence herbicide. That, by the way, is what is supposed to be so great about the seed. You can use Roundup at any time with the crop, instead of only pre-emergence for before the crop sprouts. Before Roundup Ready seed was developed, you had to stop using Roundup once your planting had broken cover.
So what Monsanto is charging here isn't breach of contract - the contract Bowman signed doesn't apply to this seed, since he didn't purchase it directly from Monsanto - but patent infringement, availing himself of the herbicide resistance bred into the plant by growing it from genetically modified seed. The original farmer that produced the soybeans on his farm was compliant with the contract, and sold the seed in good faith to an end user. And since we must assume that farmer didn't infringe on the patent by saving any seed from his crop, he's in the clear. He grew the crop, he sold the crop, he's done. That the crop is, by virtue of its parentage, resistant to herbicides is not his concern.
The seeds Bowman purchased are not stamped with the name Monsanto anywhere on them. They don't grow a special color or only facing toward St. Louis, Missouri. That Bowman tested the seeds and found them resistant isn't in dispute. What's really being contested here is whether the patent protection of the seed should be exhausted.
I think Bowman has one small leg to stand on in that he had no way of knowing whether the seed he was purchasing was Roundup Ready. The commodity seed he purchased was pulled from the grain elevator, not from any marked bins that had been filled by a specific individual.
At this point I have a question and I think the case could hinge on this: was Bowman required to assume the seed he purchased, being glyphosphate resistant, was "Roundup Ready" seed? Since the existence of glyphosphate-resistant weeds and indeed even coca plants has been noted, it's clear that resistance to glyphosphate need not be only from Monsanto's genetic modification. It could be wild, a sport mutation that has no bearing on Monsanto.
Granted this is a bit of a stretch, but it casts Monsanto's claim to patent infringement in some doubt, as the desirable trait can be had by other means than Monsanto's manipulation, and while Monsanto can easily bring to bear the technological tools and know-how to prove that the seed may indeed be the product of their GM product, Bowman cannot. And that brings us back to how much due diligence can reasonably be expected of a farmer.
Also pertinent but not entirely related: when people have to pony up for more and bigger expenses to eradicate herbicide-resistant weeds, can they hit Monsanto with a class action suit for creating the attractive nuisance that is Roundup? If they had stuck with mechanical weed control (pulling), the weeds wouldn't have developed the chemical resistance and Monsanto wouldn't have created the chemical-dependent weed control market.
Just a thought, probably specious. But it bears asking.
Monday, January 21, 2013
Stuff Worth Owning: Ace Hardware 10-in-1 Screwdriver
That's a long title, but there's no way to shorten it. I don't remember what I was shopping for at the Ace Hardware in Clinton TN, but these bright yellow screwdrivers caught my eye at the checkout. I'm not usually diverted by impulse items at the checkout, but ask my kids and they will tell you loudly that I have an especial weakness for tools in general and screwdrivers in particular. Hell, I've even made screwdrivers when I needed a special one. A display of screwdrivers next to the register can almost suck the credit card right out of my hand.
I can't find the screwdriver on Ace's website, but this is it:
I can't find the screwdriver on Ace's website, but this is it:
The handiest tool in the junk drawer. I paid about $8.00
Recently I had a bit of a meltdown with my Maytag Neptune laundry stack. Now I'm a pretty good fan of Maytag appliances, but not the post-Whirlpool buyout models. Maytag stopped being the standard of excellence sometime around 2000 or so. Maytag had lost a fair portion of its reputation by the time of the buyout, but since then its reputation is completely gone. It's only a division of Whirlpool now: a brand, not a manufacturer. What made Maytag equipment unique and durable is no more.
But my Neptune pair is from a few years before the buyout. Even so, it turns out the Neptune line is not without problems. Get online and start looking up Neptune control problems, and you'll see this phrase a lot: "R11 resistor burned," and "Q7 Triac failure." My machine's board had both of those fail. The net result is that the machine won't spin out and clothes are sopping wet at the end of the cycle. When that happens, Maytag's pat answer is to replace the entire board. The list price on a new board is over $200, but I lucked out and found a local electronics purveyor who had purchased an appliance dealer's old inventory, and wasn't fully cognizant of what he had. My price: $60, including postage. I only took the step of replacing the board after trying and failing to replace the burned resistor and triac. Some people have successfully made that repair, but evidently my soldering mojo is so far limited only to plumbing. I'll keep working on it though.
So what does it take to replace the board? Look back at the screwdriver.
That's it. I don't need any other tools to take my Maytag Neptune completely apart. It takes one size of Torx driver (included in the driver's array of bits), two sizes of nut driver (take the bit out and there it is), and one size of Phillips driver. Sometimes you need a regular screwdriver to pop an electrical connector loose: not a problem. This one tool removes the door (not really necessary), top, front, control panel, everything. It's not until you get even farther back inside the machine that you encounter fasteners that are beyond this tool's capacity. At that point my entire upper body would be inside the machine.
To be completely frank I'm not a huge fan of multi-bit screwdrivers. Too often you find the multi-bittedness of the tool is part of what makes it unacceptable in lots of ways: having nesting parts makes the shank really thick, so it's no good for getting deep-set screws in appliances, tucked far down in narrow holes. Or sometimes what you need is a screwdriver on this side and a nutdriver on that side at the same time, to keep things from turning while you're trying to loosen or tighten fasteners. With the multi-bit screwdriver, you only have the one tool at a time.
All of that said, I first made some exploratory forays into the machine and discovered at that time that the multi-bit Ace screwdriver answered every need. I had gathered my ratchet set, a couple of different screwdrivers and even a Vise-Grip, just in case. When everything was done however, all my tool cases were still closed and the Ace was in my pocket. So when I got the replacement part in the mail, I didn't go to the shop at all. I cracked open the junk drawer and reached for that chunky, bright yellow handle with the Ace logo and got to work. 20 minutes later, my first post-meltdown load of laundry was up and running.
I remember asking the young lady behind the counter where the tool was made. She wasn't able to nail down the manufacturer - neither was I in research prepping for this post - but she did confirm it was made in the USA, so if nothing else that might be good enough.
Like I said, not a huge fan of multi-bits, but I'm a huge fan of this one. Shop around, get a couple. Put one in the car, one in the shop.
And one in the junk drawer.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
DON'T BELIEVE ALL THE ADS
If you see an ad on my blog that says anything against Barack Obama, disregard it.
That's right, ignore it all. Of course I can't compel you to do anything whatsoever, so you're going to do whatever you want and more power to you. However I can say this: don't believe any ad you see on my site must necessarily reflect my own beliefs.
There's an ad on here right now that says "Barack Obama wants to BAN GUNS! Don't let him do it!"
I say, do let him do it. There are a boatload of guns out there getting bought up that shouldn't be legal to sell. Obama doesn't want to ban all guns and only a simpleton would believe that he does. Ads like this are just more right-wing, ultra-conservative rabble rousing.
Don't let yourself be roused. That's how you separate yourself from the rabble.
That's right, ignore it all. Of course I can't compel you to do anything whatsoever, so you're going to do whatever you want and more power to you. However I can say this: don't believe any ad you see on my site must necessarily reflect my own beliefs.
There's an ad on here right now that says "Barack Obama wants to BAN GUNS! Don't let him do it!"
I say, do let him do it. There are a boatload of guns out there getting bought up that shouldn't be legal to sell. Obama doesn't want to ban all guns and only a simpleton would believe that he does. Ads like this are just more right-wing, ultra-conservative rabble rousing.
Don't let yourself be roused. That's how you separate yourself from the rabble.
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