Vampire trapping!

Posted on May 16, 2012 by jasonbx

Do you have a local vampire problem? Know where they are, but aren’t ready to go in with a stake yourself? Live in the western US somewhere between the Oregon/California border and Albuquerque? (And studies have shown 23% of US vampires do live near this area.) You have a key opportunity coming up to trap some of those vampires and get rid of them.

There will be a solar eclipse on Sunday May 20th. For most of the country it will just be a partial eclipse, but for the lucky few it will be a full annular eclipse. (The moon will cover the sun, but there will be a ring of the sun around the edge that won’t be covered leaving a ring of fire. Cue Johnny Cash song… Ring Of Fire) I don’t have time to complete the studies, but I’m pretty sure this event is going to be dark enough to allow vampires to walk around during the day, without recoiling and hiding in horror when they first walk out their door.

Now the tricky part is that you only have a few days to lay the groundwork for your trap. The first step is to go ahead and cut the cable lines to the vampires home, and call to have their newspaper subscription stopped for a week. They aren’t entirely stupid, they will figure out your plan if they know there is an eclipse coming up. Go do that now, I’ll wait for you to get back. (Seriously slow guy in Ely, Nevada. We are all waiting for you.)

Now you need to think of some reason that would make the vampires come outside in confusion when the light gets dim. My initial thought is creating an elaborate story about how Dracula has returned and blotted out the sun. Running through the streets screaming, “The reign of the vampires has begun, long live the vampires!” That might be a good start. A marching band and streamers would help the illusion. This idea is for illustrative purposes only. You will likely need to come up with a better plan on your own, with at least three steps and two or more accomplices. Don’t count on the high school band being really useful. Everyone knows 90% of high school kids are worthless. And the other 10% are busy building the next Microsoft in their garage. (Maybe a well funded election campaign would bribe a large corporation in exchange for your votes. You never know.)

As the confused vampires wander outside to see what all the commotion is about, slightly confused about the darkness several hours before normal sunset, you will need volunteers to close up their homes with boards, cement, bricks, or whatever else is handy. Keep in mind that the vampires are going to come back and likely be furious that you screwed up the paint on the door, so maybe find volunteers that you don’t particularly like. Like the neighbor that wants you to help roto-till his garden every year.

Now that your wildly elaborate plan has worked, and the vampires are locked out of their homes, you can begin filming. Seriously, you are going to need to film the next part. No matter what happens you can probably sell the footage. CNN, FOX, or at least Youtube will be highly interested in the vampires exploding, or whatever happens. If they don’t melt away like the wicked witch under Dorothy’s house, at least capture what they do to the person that locked them outside their house. (This is why you want an accomplice. So you can film, and also deny knowing anything about the entire plan.)

And before I get inundated with comments from people who have sold their soul to Twilight, Ms. Meyers has confirmed in interviews she did not really research vampire mythology. So basing your vampire protection on her books is like using Dick and Jane books to teach your kid to be an eloquent speaker. Think about that before you start giving me garbage about how Edward and Leon would survive this. (Or whatever their names are.) I at least made up statistics, and explained how you can make money off the whole deal. How much did she cost you in movie ticket prices alone? This is what friends do, help other people fulfill their childhood dream of vanquishing a vampire, and make hundreds of dollars to fund their next party. Or at least start a career in reality TV.

(I’m available for parties anytime in June. I’ll bring my own solar eclipse glasses to the party.)

Cheap Solar Eclipse Viewing

Posted on May 11, 2012 by jasonbx

The eclipse is coming! This is your only warning, and you should prepare! Or sit there apathetically and do nothing. It is up to you. And by “eclipse” I don’t mean the controversial books/movie. I mean a real, honest-to-goodness, eclipse of the sun.

Obviously from my attempt of a warning, I have personally chosen preparation. Primarily because I was originally going to be able to get in prime viewing territory of the annular eclipse, and wanted to make the most of it. Recently my plans changed, and I won’t be able to make the couple hour trip work that day. But I still will be prepared for a partial eclipse from my sub-optimal viewing location.

Important: Never look at the sun directly! You will cook your eyeball with UV and infrared wavelengths. You may not feel any pain while you are causing permanent damage! Always use a safe method to view an eclipse.

You can view an eclipse a couple ways. The most straightforward is some special eclipse viewing glasses you can buy. They are generally about $2 apiece for the cheap cardboard ones. If you hurry, you’ll still have time to have some mailed. Otherwise, if you are in a large city, local planetariums and astronomy/science supply places may have them in stock as well. The planetarium in town where I bought a couple pairs was almost exactly the same price as online, had exactly the same product, and simply saved me waiting for something to be shipped. Do not use anything like sunglasses, welder’s glasses, etc. If it isn’t specifically designed to look at the sun, you are going to cause problems.

If you don’t have the option of getting some sun viewing glasses, there is another even cheaper way to go. You can make a pinhole projector, so that you aren’t looking at the sun directly. With a pinhole projector you are looking at the image of sunlight on a paper or screen, rather than looking at the sun directly. This is like watching a movie on a screen at a theater, instead of staring into the bright light of the projector itself.

The absolute simplest way of making one is with two pieces of paper. You poke a hole in one paper with something like a thumbtack. Then you let the sun shine through the hole and onto the second sheet of paper. The upside is that there is no way to get any cheaper than this. The downside is that it is obnoxious make sure everything is lined up in a straight line, and still be able to look at what is showing on the “screen.” Probably would work best if you are planning to hold the pinhole paper for someone else, and let them look at the image.

Another way to go is to use a box to make sure everything stays parallel, and only have one big moving part to fiddle with. In 5 minutes or less, you can have a functional box projector made with items around your house. Basically you need a box, piece of paper for a “screen”, a paper or piece of aluminum foil to poke a hole in, and some tape. Ideally, the longest box you can find. A shipping tube (or two together) or something similar would probably be ideal. In my inital tests, 18 inches of box wall to wall is going to give you an image about the size of a pea. Having about 6 feet of distance gives you somewhere between a dime and a nickel in size. The tradeoff is the bigger your image, the dimmer it is. You can play with the previously mentioned two pieces of paper on a sunny day and see how this size to brightness ratio works.

The other reason I can see to use a box or enclosure is you get less reflected light off other nearby objects and can see the dimmer image more clearly as you increase its size. I made a simple box projector to see how it worked, and could immediately see some of the advantages over using just two pieces of paper. The downside is you can’t adjust the image size. If you are playing with this for the first time, I recommend standing right on one edge of a tree shadow so you can “find” branches or leaves in your image, and see that it really is doing something besides just making a bright spot on the paper.

Below are some pictures of my 5 minute project. For version 2.0, I want to attach a long tube on one end of a larger box to make the distance longer and get a larger image. And maybe have the viewing section through a smaller cutout in the flaps, so there is less outside light hitting it. Of course this will require more time investment, and if I get too crazy I might spend upwards of a dollar on parts. (Version 5.0 would include mirrors and lenses. But at that point I should just save time and buy a telescope, since I would actually be building one.)

I used this cereal box to prove some of the concepts..

I taped the original test project on a west facing window in the kitchen near sunset. The post-it had my “pinhole” which was placed over the larger hole in the carboard. Then a blank paper was my screen while moving closer and further from the window. This let me get a much better feel for how moving away gave a bigger, but dimmer, image. And let me look closely at the screen without trying to keep everything in line and having both hands full.

Then we moved from proof of concept version 0.6, up to…

Box 1.0

You can see all the relevant “parts” in this picture. Screen, pinhole, and box.

I had used aluminum foil to poke the hole into based on initial online research. Not sure it is really better than a hole in paper, but still researching.

As you can see, I selected a box that didn’t require the difficult task of making my own hole.

This is the projector in action. Notice the small size of the “image” with my 1 cubit length of box.

Projected image from this creation. Roughly the size of a pea, and has part of a shadow of a tree branch across it if you zoom way in.

So, now you have seen a basic design. I’ll post other designs as I make them, but with a week to go, I may be a bit limited what I get done. These are several of the resources I looked at and liked when doing my own research on how to view an eclipse.

Basic pinhole or mirror ideas
http://www.eaaa.net/pinhole.htm

More involved pinhole directions.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/eclipse/how.html

Gives idea of how to determine image size, etc
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/objects/eclipses/3306081.html

For those that are interested, there is another event on June 5th (6th in Asia) that could allow you to use your glasses again. Venus will make a transit across the sun. Basically another eclipse, but a very small shadow. That makes the glasses $1 per viewing…

Or half of free if you build a way to project the image…

2012 First tomato spotted

Posted on May 6, 2012 by jasonbx

I was puttering in the garden today, and we have our first tomato sighting of the year! The Besser Tomato plant has a baby tomato roughly as big as the head of a pin. Now the anticipation of tomato season can haunt us for weeks to come.

Our imprecise tomato experiments continue for another year, with only two new varieties. My past experience with early season transplants is typically I get them out too early, and often the first flowers don’t set fruit. (Which I am ok with, since usually people don’t put transplants in the ground already big enough to be flowering.) This early tomato is exciting, even if so far it is only one tomato that will be a cherry tomato size fruit. Several of the other plants have flowers on them, but no fruit quite yet. I’m just happy all of them survived the cold snaps that went down near freezing the last couple weeks!

The pumpkin and melon plants went in the same time as the tomato plants. Which was weeks too early, but we didn’t have time or energy to wait and baby them in the house still. They have made it so far, but looking pretty rough. Worst case, it is still early enough to swing by a garden center. Realistically, they should have just been going in the ground about now or later anyway.

The red and green grapes I started a year ago made it through the winter and look healthier than ever. Great new vine growth so far, but no signs of any fruit yet. The older Concord plants have little clusters forming already, making me try and compare with the new ones. One year establishment and setting fruit would be amazing, but apparently too much to hope for. Maybe next year.

The flowerbed along the west facing back of the house that refuses to grow anything is at least doing passable. Last year 25-50 sunflower seeds along the dripline didn’t even germinate. And the flowers further forward were stunted. (It was a really wet spring, so maybe explainable. Unfortunately prior years have been marginal also.) This year the ornamental grass came through the winter just fine, and will hopefully make it into the future as a permanent feature. And this year I decided if this bed won’t grow anything pretty or useful reliably, it might as well grow something to block the hot afternoon sun on that side of the house. So I put in two rows of sunflowers at the front of the bed with couple inch spacing between seeds, and about 18 inches between the rows. We had tons of seeds I saved from last years volunteer sunflowers at the end of the garden, so I tried these over-seeded and well before final frost, and planned to put in new seeds later if not enough made it. At least half of them seem to have come up, and survived late frosts and slugs. It is enough that it will make almost one solid row across the bed. So it appears I probably won’t need to add new seeds.

I did go in and plant two rows of beans in this back bed recently as well, with low expectations. One row between the sunflowers, and a row behind. Hopefully the beans will climb on the sunflowers to also help reflect/absorb some of the sun, and ideally add some nitrogen and improve the soil for whatever attempt is made next year. I have never really bothered growing beans before, so I’m not worried if they don’t do particularly well in the poor soil. Soil improvement was my main goal at this stage. Time will tell if we get any food out of them.

Grow little plants, grow!

5 kinds of Mormon

Posted on May 4, 2012 by jasonbx

Liberal Mormon’s are going to hell. Just ask any of the other four kinds of Mormons. On the other hand, LM’s think the intolerance and naiveté of other Mormons is more of a threat to mankind than Russian missiles, wheat weevils or R-rated movies.

Once upon a time, I had the full text of this classic Robert Kirby article on my website. (Description of JasonBX.com in 2005, when I was learning HTML and looking for employment.) I have always found the write up humorous, and initially thought I would put it where I could easily locate it again to share in the future.

After my original website had languished for a while, I reviewed my visitor behaviour and found something fascinating. That article, tucked away on an obscure corner of my website, was the single most visited page of the entire website. In fact, it was generating well over 50% of my total visitors. Admittedly, this was still a pretty small number of confused people, but I was rather stunned by this discovery anyway.

It made me think a little about how websites draw traffic, and search engine optimization. It ended up later influencing me to create separate websites for some of the niche content in other parts of my site. The original website entirely went away for several years, and was resurrected in 2012. But the impact of that one “useless” page has always stuck out in my mind since that time. And after reviving the website, I find that I still get several visitors a week following old links to a non-existing page.

Recently the newspaper that Robert Kirby writes for reprinted this classic article. Since I don’t want to take pennies in advertising revenue away from the copyright holders, it gave me an ideal chance to link things back to a “more correct” source. The newspaper article can be found here: 5 kinds of Mormon

If this sort of humor interests you, Robert Kirby has written several books over the years. The one containing this article, and available at many fine retailers is:

The internet is amazing. Not only can you find a name, but view the pretty cover as well. The picture will take you to Amazon, and I’m sure they will recommend other fascinating items that people just like yourself look at and buy.

Back to the discussion at hand. I had initially thought I would simply let the topic fade into obscurity, but the reprinted article has given me a chance to address the lost and confused folks wandering aimlessly across the world wide web. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go write to some Nazi Mormon’s that would benefit from some reading they missed out on 20 years ago…

Elect the Amish candidate!

Posted on April 8, 2012 by jasonbx

The recent presidential campaigns here in the United States are driving me nuts. The general consensus is that we want to elect anyone but the guy that is a terrible decision. Even the guy our friends are now convinced we should vote for isn’t ideal. But instead of defining what the ideal candidate would be, then finding someone that fits that bill, and supporting them, as a society we are going to spend all of our election cycle finding new and obnoxious ways to say “Anyone but that guy!”

In order to help this dysfunctional cause out, I propose we bring in an indepent candidate as a new possibility. He is so new and fresh we don’t know exactly where he is from, simply that he is Amish. The Amish guy came out of nowhere, and is now suddenly set to be a contender for at least the next two weeks, until he is no longer the fashionable choice and is discarded. (After his political career is over, he will only surface in the news as unsubstantiated rumors swirl.) Lets go through the reasons he is suddenly in vogue first.

He has very conservative ideology. And is willing to stick with it unflinchingly, even in the face of ridicule. He is very strong on family values. Understands the value of hard work. Believes assistance should come from the community first, not the government. Debt is to be avoided if at all possible. The first amendment is critically important to him. Even the right to personal choice is important in his society, allowing teenagers to leave the community and decide whether they want to continue to choose an Amish lifestyle. He is a realist, understanding social security in its current form can’t work forever, already doing his best to keep his whole community from counting on it, or even contributing into the system in the first place. Our new front running candidate is even humble in this case, not wanting to be in a leadership position, but being asked by the concerned public to please run, because he is the best candidate they could find.

On the plus side here, we have someone that looks to be more acceptable to the general voting public than many of our current crop of candidates. Probably better than the candidates from any party, and at every level from the Presidential election down to the community council seats. What could possibly stop this juggernaut of a candidate from winning it all in a landslide?

Well, admittedly he doesn’t have much financial backing yet. Everything he has in campaign funding, he raised himself. But he is going to need a super PAC and some advisers to help him understand which methods of campaign ads will be most effective to get his name out. Even at this point, we don’t know his name. Just that we are now feverishly supporting him to the death, whether he has any chance in this campaign or not. His opposition to pictures and video interviews will limit his television news time. And gaining new campaign donations may be difficult. He doesn’t like the “jet setter” lifestyle, and doesn’t want to seem to simply pander to the rich across the country with a series of overpriced meals, in a different state every day. He is your average working man, and avoids these overly pretentious events. His “grassroots” campaign support might grow closer to the speed of grass, given his nonexistent social media presence.

There are other concerns as well. His international military policy is entirely based around passive resistance, so the defense industry lobbyists are forming opposition groups as we speak. Also, he may not have a firm grasp of the finer intricacies of international trade relations, with his regimen of limited media exposure. And education reform is a low priority, given his belief that his eighth grade education has been enough to get him this far. Women’s rights and issues could later become a hot button concern. He isn’t opposed to women’s rights, he just believes we all have our roles to fill. He also doesn’t believe in insurance, so depending on your views on the health care debate, he is either the best or worst thing that could happen to this country. Paying cash only could certainly limit the growing cost of medical care for everyone, even if the insurance mandate were struck down.

Sure, our Amish candidate has a few concerns and minor skeletons in his closet. But they are pretty limited, and with proper campaign management can be explained away easily. Given his strict use of cash, and no phones, there isn’t a scandalous paper trail to be followed and crush him at the last moment. And his requests to limit pictures throughout life means there is no evidence of past transgressions that will surface. But he has so much more going for him than the right and left wing basket cases, and even that Mormon and the black guy don’t stand much of chance based on the initial view. In our public quest to finally reform U.S. politics and get rid of career politicians, the man with no political background should bring a refreshing change into Washington!

(As new information comes to light about our candidate, please share it. We hope to track the entire rise and fall of his political career. Will he be a slow building long term champion, or a meteoric flame out?)