Pretty Cool!

There is a little bit of parallax in this view, but even if we grant that the temperature is 45 degrees, this is a lab thermometer and it reads in Celcius. That makes it 113F. Pretty warm considering that the air temperature is right around the freezing point. Also, by the time I took the second shot, the temperature had eased upwards to just below 50C.

All of the excess warmth is from decay of the leaves, but there are a couple of effects which explain why the leaves in my bin are hot while ones on the ground are not. First, insulation; the shredded leaves hold the heat in. Also, there wouldn't be a lot of decay happening at close to zero Celsius, but at elevated temperature the reactions go faster and thus produce more heat. It is a kind of synergistic effect.

I make these leaf storage bins by just cutting a bit of wire fencing and then making a cylinder out of it.

Added: The smell of the decomposing leaves is really nice: Somewhere between the Fall leaf smell and good tobacco and fresh pine. The source material is Oak, maple and pine leaves and branches.

Chasing Eight

For those of you who associate with me on Facebook, you will have noticed that the majority of my posts there are running workouts. This is because I have been using a utility for keeping track of my running and it posts each run to FB.

The utility calculates the minutes per mile for each run as well as giving me an average pace for each week and for the year. The average has been in the low eights all year because while most workouts are done just under eight minutes per mile, there are a lot of really long runs early in the year when I am doing marathon training. Naturally, one cannot expect to put out the same level of intensity for a 21 miler as for five and a half miles, so the average is low early in the year, but then after the marathon is over I focus on speed.

So I have slowly seen the average for the year dwindle from around 8:10 or so down to 8:01 but then the utility I've been using went defunct! So, I went to the website of the utility and it allowed me to download all the data. It took some doing to get it all into a format Excel could digest, but then hey presto! The pace was like 7:40! Not really though. Some of the times were off because I had a bunch of entries that were one hour, no minutes and some seconds and it just truncated out the minutes, so an hour and 20 seconds would show as one minute and twenty seconds. So I fixed all of that and took out the two bike rides and (drum roll) it is still under eight! 7:58/mile for the year on a total of 1,103.17 miles.

Superstar

Chipper/Shredder Repair--3 Step...

1. First, see if the parts are available on-line but do not order them!

2. Make sure that I can disassemble the machine and get the broken parts out.

3. Order the parts.

Breaking And Fixing Things

My wife normally walks the youngest to the bus stop, but since I was home today, it fell to me. As usual when the weather is nice, the dog accompanied us. After the girl got on the bus, I noticed that the dog was limping along next to me. I felt under the paw she seemed to be favoring and there was a little broken acorn stuck in the pads. I cleared it and she immediately started walking normally. She is not the kind of animal who could live on her own in the wild. If she did run away from us, I am pretty sure she would befriend some human, that would take her in and feed her.

The day was perfect for gathering and disposing of leaves and so I set-about that, using a leaf grinder that we have. It works pretty well: You can run it at full power and blow the leaves into a pile and then lower the hopper and rake leaves directly into it. There is even a bag that can be placed over the outlet so that the ground-up leaves can be piled-up for composting. I ran it for only about half an hour before it started making a violent sound and shuddering. I shut it off and investigated the mechanism. It was FUBAR'ed--at least beyond repair until parts could be obtained. The grinding mechanism consists of a bunch of steel flails that can pivot on thick steel posts and the whole thing rotates on a large open drum. At least one post was knocked-out and at least two flails were sheared off. There were no rocks or other damaging materials inside the works, so I can only surmise that parts, weakened over time, finally broke.

There was plenty else to do, so I got cracking on those. A large branch that broke in the recent nor'easter was hanging over part of the driveway. Most cars have either a hard tie-down point or come equipped with a eye bolt that you can screw into your bumper via an access port. So I used that, along with some rope I had, to pull the branch of Damocles down. The chainsaw made the branch into manageable pieces and it all joined the rest of the pile from the snow storm a few weeks ago.

Next, the swing set. A large branch had caused one of the swivels to break-off and so now one of the swings was hanging by only one chain. Even though the swivel had broken off, there was still the top part of that piece of hardware--so a chain could be reattached. I didn't want to do that though because the swivels have a nylon bushing in them which allows for smooth swinging action. Luckily there are other attachments that don't really need to swing and I used the same swivels for everything. I just switched out the swivel from an adjacent trapeze with the one from the swing. It was tedious though--the bolts are threaded for their whole eight inches or so and had to be screwed all the way out and then all the way back in.

Next, wasn't really a repair, but still it was stuff I did: I hauled all of the bikes and a wagon as well as a unicycle from out of the front porch/alcove to a loft in the garage. Now it is nice and neat there. While I was crawling around in the loft, I came across a hand cart that has had a flat tire for years. Today was the day to do something about it. The hub of the wheel was in two parts and held together by four bolts. Once these were off, it was easy to pull out the old inner tube. I took it with me to the hardware store so that I would get the right one. The new one is installed and functioning perfectly.

The Gate

This last week was an odd one in many ways due to the freak Nor'easter we had the Saturday before.  Our home lost power Sunday morning right after breakfast and as would become evident, some of my employer's facilities were also hit.

I got a call on my cellphone Monday letting me know that my office in Billerica was without power and corporate HQ, also in Billerica was in the dark too.  I went to the R & D campus in Bedford where they have "flex work" areas.  These are essentially just a desk with a nice big monitor, a keyboard and mouse that you can plug your laptop into.  Phone works through the PC, so it was really easy.   I kind of liked it.  It was quiet and I got a lot of work done.

I had only ever been to the Bedford campus for meetings and so forth and so had never really explored the surroundings as I would any routine workplace.  The first day, I decided to go to McDonald's for lunch since I knew that there was one within, I thought, walking distance.  It turns out it was "within walking distance" if I ate while walking back.  This was fine:  Two McDoubles and a Dr. Pepper, all off of the Dollar menu.  It satisfied both hunger and the eternal desire to pinch pennies.

The next day I brought lunch and ate it at my "flex work" area and so had a full hour to explore.  I went out the back parking area and came onto a road which contained facilities much like the one I had left--pharmaceutical makers, biotech outfits and companies that make things that help out the first two.  Within about a mile, I came to a bike path.  It was a brilliant Fall day, crisp, with a bright if weak feeling sun.  The path itself was unnervingly straight and seemed to recede to a geometric point someplace off in infinity.  The path was littered with colorful leaves, though there were still an abundance on the trees which lined the path.

Even though the path cut through heavily wooded terrain, one could still see homes and industrial buildings through the foliage.  I was about 40 minutes into my walk and starting to become concerned that a hoped for break in the path would not come in time for me to be back within the hour.  Before panic set-in, I noticed that the buildings I was passing seemed familiar.  I was walking right by the campus I had left from!  Great! Except that there was a 10 foot high fence topped by barbed wire between the path and the campus.  I could climb such a fence if I thought it was really necessary but I was a long way from feeling the need for such extreme measures.  Just as I was musing about climbing and wondering how far the path would go before crossing a road again, I noticed a gate.

The gate clearly had a lock on it, but it was only 10 feet off of the path, so where is the harm in trying it?  It was truly locked, but what is this?  Next to the lock appeared a sensor pad that looked just like the ones at the entrances to all of our buildings.  I didn't want to get my hopes up though:  Your badge only gets you through doors you are authorized to open.  I tried it though and the gate swung easily open.  I was now about 20 minutes early but I had a fine walk.

I am not from New England and even though I have lived here for close to 20 years, it still seems alien in many ways.  This little thing--the gate opening for me, joins the ranks of lots of other little things; which together have made this place seem more like home.  If not quite actual home, yet.

Saturday Of Odds and Ends

The day started early--at least for my wife and eldest daughter--one took the other out to Great Brook Farm for >--CC--> practice at 8:00 AM.

While my wife was out, I got some coffee roasting done--I did about three pounds, which should last a couple of weeks.

My wife tried to do an exercise video in the interregnum, but her laptop ran out of juice mid-way, so she ran out to Great Brook Farm with the dog.  

When I drove out to get them all, I noticed a wet patch all the way across the road.  Sure enough, though I didn't think of it at the time, my wife carried the dog across the wet patch.  She was not spoiling the dog, though she does spoil the little beast, wife just didn't want the dog to get filthy and thus need a bath--which is a hassle.

After the running, we had waffles and coffee and sausage and then got ready to go out apple picking.  I grew up in Washington, of all places and never went apple picking with my family--raiding the WSU orchards is another matter, Our family did go to orchards in Green Bluff for cherry and peach picking though.   My wife and kids have been going apple picking most every Fall for better than a decade now, first in Vermont and now in Massachusetts.

On the way to picking, the eldest had a major gripe about where we planned to pick.  It only had apples and a hay ride.  The other place had all that, plus fresh cider doughnuts and animals.  The problem with the other place is that last time it was a madhouse AND they were all picked-out, so we had to still go to the usual place for apples.  In addition, given the driving, crowds and the time which would be spent in line waiting for the cider doughnuts, we are talking an hour and a half.  We could make our own (superior) doughnuts in that amount of time.  In any case, we had a good time; the dog was welcome there--even on the hayride and they still had plenty of nice apples.

Once home, I mowed the whole lawn--usually I only do one part or another at a time since it is so large.  It took a whole tank of gas and then part of another to complete the task.

Next:  I want to go in search for some nice steaks with bones in them, like T-bone or Porterhouse.  I got steak knives around a month ago and they have been used, but not really put to the test.  The test is carving small morsels of meat from little crevices around the bones.

10 Miler from a couple of weeks ago

There was such a huge delay in the race organizers posting of pictures and results that I forgot all about it.  Here is the finish picture from that race.

The race was October 2nd.

Income Inequality Thought Experiment

Megan McArdle over at The Atlantic has a post which (as always) is thought provoking, but presents data which, once one has thought about it, is pretty obvious.

In economic downturns, such as the one we are in now, income inequality actually becomes less severe.  You can look at the handy charts she provides here, but I will describe a couple of things that are easy to see from the charts:

1.  You can see that in each recession and in the great depression, income inequality falls sharply.  The chart shows the share of total income earned by the top 1% of earners.

Why is it obvious that this would be so?  The income of top earners is tied to capital.  In good times, capital is in high demand and so interest is high.  Businesses are working at higher capacity and so the owners make a lot more profit.  Their fixed costs are what they always were;  The value of the land, machinery, buildings and so forth haven't changed.  They are selling more widgets and so they are using more materials and labor, but these are only a small portion of total costs. 

Workers also improve their income because of two factors:  First, there is more work to be done and so they may go from part time to full, or may gain some overtime hours.  Second, all the added work will create demand for more workers and this should drive up wage rates.

2. The second notable item from the chart is that, in spite of reduction in income disparity during recessions, there are trends which are easy to spot.  From around 1929 until around 1980 the trend was of declining income inequality, after that the trend is in the opposite direction.  I do not have any good hypothesis for why this should be so.

Here is the thought experiment part of the post:

I do not know if the relationship between economic prosperity and income disparity is something that anyone can do anything about.  If someone has ideas on that, I would be open to hearing them.  The thing is that for over 30 years, there has been a clear association between inequality and economic prosperity.  Given two choices which would you choose?

1.  The bottom two quintiles gain a real 10% in income  AND the top quintile doubles their income.

OR

2.  The bottom two quintiles loose 10% of their income  AND the top quintile looses half of their income.

I would choose # 1. because everybody is better off than they otherwise would be.   I didn't want to overcomplicate things, but if you are wondering about the middle two quintiles--they gain or loose in the same direction as the others in their scenario, but by an intermediate amount.  I suspect that people of a more leftward inclination than me would choose # 2.  or would at least be tempted to choose it.

Barefoot Running Update

I haven't run barefoot for a while, just due to various schedule conflicts.  I only do barefoot runs from home since the roads around work are rough, covered in glass shards and have traffic the makes me jump to the side of the road sometimes.  On Sunday I wanted to get in a longish run and so wore shoes since anything over 8 miles barefoot has given me blisters.

Tuesdays, I normally work from home and do a lunchtime run but this week we had a group lunch, so I came in to the office for that.  It would have been a really nice day to run compared with today, which is rainy.  But I didn't want to skip a day, so I ran today. Barefoot.

The early bit was just what one would expect on a rainy 50 F day.  It felt cold on my feet.  After maybe 1/3 mile, I lost feeling in my feet.  It felt fine but I was concerned that I would injure them and not know it. In the next couple of miles, they started to thaw out and it didn't hurt but was unpleasant.  Finally, they warmed up completely and the run became a sheer joy!  I was warmed up and the final two miles were smooth and fast.

4.28 miles @ 7:37 per mile pace.

This was probably very high sevens or low eights for the first mile or so and then low sevens for the rest.

Not as funny as the Rain dog ad. but really effective

Coors Light - Rocky Mountain High  (1996) - 0:60 (USA)

Blue Beer Cans

I had noticed them a few days ago but didn't really think about them until today. Along a section of road that I go jogging on, there were blue cans roughly every hundred feet or so.

I presume they are beer cans but cannot say for sure because I was running and didn't get the best view. Also, it was raining.  They seemed beerish in design and besides, what else besides Pepsi has a blue can?  I would notice the big round Pepsi logo on the side if it was there.

What I was thinking is that somebody probably threw them out of a car window. You never see some guy just walking along the road drinking a can of beer, so it must have been from a car. But how do they end up so close together? At the speed a car goes, I would think that if you were throwing out empties as they are created, then each can might be around a mile or so apart--less if there are multiple drinkers in one car, but still further apart than every couple of hundred feet.

What if the drinking was done somewhere and the driver didn't want to bring the empties home? Say it is a teenager and he doesn't want his parents to see the empties. So, some guys park somewhere and drink, then on the way home they throw all the cans out the window? That is plausible. Though if you are going to litter, why not just leave the cans in the area you parked in? Maybe they didn't think of the need to get rid of the cans until they were already under way--this would be typical teenage lack of planning. Also plausible.

Maybe I have the whole temporal scenario all wrong. Maybe it is someone who drinks one beer on the way home every day. He finishes around the same point every time and so the cans are all in roughly the same area.

Miscellaneous Stuff On A Day Off

I had a lot to do today but thankfully not much in the morning. I took advantage of this by cooking bacon and fried eggs for breakfast. I know; this is what weekends are for but the last few weekends have been filled with early morning errands--so no dice, or eggs or bacon.

I was recovered from my gluttony by the late tens and so went for a medium run. I wanted to get in a 13 miler but there wasn't time so I did a 7.85 and was happy with my 7:46 pace. It was a perfect Autumn day, mostly sunny but crisp, temperature wise.

After the run, the first of two contractors showed up. The first one thinks our design idea will work just fine, the other thinks that the space we want to use for a stairway is not big enough. The job is doable either way, but I plan to get out my own tape measure and figure it out myself.

While the first contractor was just finishing up, I had to run Dahlia to a new dentist for a check-up. This is the girl's third dentist. The first was a nice guy but just didn't have very good hands. The second was sweet, but she was a little creepy too. This latest one seems promising.

As soon as I got home, we got a call from the eldest munchkin, wondering if anybody planned on attending her Cross Country meet. I jumped into the car and zoomed on over there. It was against Billerica and was at a park across the street from the House of Correction. I wonder if I was the only one to see an element of irony in the setting.

Now home and gearing up for grilled lamb chops--which used to be wicked cheap but are becoming increasingly pricy.

Rainier

Growing up in Washington, Rainier Beer commercials were a staple of TV viewing. They made you not mind commercials!

The beer wasn't so great, Olympia was better, but it was cheap and you felt like rewarding the company for making such great commercials.

9-11

Althouse commentary on Jeans...

It is pretty common that threads take an interesting turn due to the commenters playing off of each other. This happened in the Althouse post on The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, by Barry Schwartz

The author had used the plethora of choices in jeans and people got off onto tangents related to jean styles, such as "skinny jeans".

The ever talented Paddy O said...

Skinny jeans for men should, of course, be taxed heavily.

Being late to the thread, I made a reposte much later, but I couldn't help it, it was stuck in my mind...

In most cases they are heavily taxed, structurally at least.

Along the way, I came across this posting which was funny and perfect, by Coketown.

...The entire industry has moved to that skin-tight bullshit that our forefathers most feared. In fact, Levi's--the clothing standard of hypermasculine cowboys and lumberjacks--has a style out called "Ex-girlfiend." The idea being that your ex-girlfriend left her jeans in your hamper (did she walk home without pants? Or bring a spare pair?), so now you're going to wear them...instead of doing the right thing and returning them and saying, "I found your jeans while I was sorting laundry and listening to Dashboard Confessional. And I miss you baby," and scoring an afternoon of decent, if awkward, Sex for Old Time's Sake. Then she realizes her jeans are stretched, and that night, on Facebook, you read on her wall: "I think my ex-boyfriend has been wearing the jeans I left at his house like four months ago," followed my 6 lol's and 21 likes.

Brilliant on many levels! Redone here since Althouse posts at such a rate that gems are soon buried under more posts.

Math in Motion

Hat tip, John Derbyshire from The Corner

Three Boats

In one short trip to Maine last week with the wife and kids, I rode in three different boats.

All of us went for a whale watching cruise in a powered boat that was maybe 75 feet long. As we cruised along out in the Atlantic ocean, one thought kept percolating up in my mind: This has got to be the most pointless thing I have ever done. We are cruising along, nothing to look at, not close enough to land to see anything interesting etc. The guide did point out the house where the actress who played the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz lived. Though, this was on the way out of the harbor and once we were out to sea there was nothing much to look at.

Even after we saw whales, it still seemed pretty much a total waste of time. We saw a group of three Minke whales and later, one Finback whale. They would all do the same thing: They would surface 3-5 times in quick succession to breathe and then dive, not to be seen again for 3-8 minutes. All you see a little bit of their back. Wow! The youngest daughter, seems to think they have a lot of personality and are, "cute". But really all I can tell is that they are large creatures that spend a lot of time uneventfully converting fish into whale.

The resort has a few canoes and kayaks that guests can use, so we thought we would try that out. I went out in a canoe with the three kids and we paddled around in the water between South Port and the mainland of Maine. The children were full of doubts about: 1. The sea worthiness of the boat. 2. My ability to navigate. 3. My ability to return them to shore without dunking them. 4. Sharks, naturally. My main concern was for my wife, who saw us leave the dock area and then paddle around a point of land and go out of her sight. Further making this hard for her was that we had planned to go around a small island in the channel and so would have come out where she could see us. When we got to the back of the "island" it turned out to be a peninsula and so we explored further along the channel before returning. This part was kind of fun. We looked at various boats anchored and discussed which one was closest to what we would want,-if we were to get a boat of our own. Intermittent fog came and went and this added a bit of charm and frisson to the event.

After an uneventful return to the dock, I switched to a kayak paddle (this has a blade on both ends)and went out on my own to explore a bit more. I had been taking it easy in the canoe because it really would have been a buzz kill to topple the boat and dunk the kids in ice-cold water. They can swim and were wearing life vests in any case but it would have been unpleasant. I went a bit further in the kayak than when we had gone in the canoe and tried to paddle hard enough to get a burn going in my arms--this takes a lot less effort than one might guess.

I think I enjoyed the paddling around far more than the whale watching--if for no other reason than that all the paddling added up to around an hour while the whale watching sucked away four hours. Plus I got a little of much needed exercise out of the paddling.

Well, it is fixed...

It seemed to work just as well without being fixed, but somehow I feel better knowing that it is back in order.

I had come home Thursday from work to find: My wife at a "ladies night out", the kids watching TV and the dishwasher open with white powdered detergent everywhere. The lid to the soap container was jammed with caked detergent and it would not stay shut. After I fully cleaned the area, the lid still would not stay shut, so we just ran the machine that way, maybe four loads since then and the dishes looked fine.

Today I had some time, so I took apart the door and found a piece of the latch had fallen off. Part of it was a lever that fit into a spring loaded solenoid. Presumably, the spring keeps the latch closed until the solenoid actuates and allows the lid to pop open.

It looks like it can only fit in one way, but I have yet to run the machine. If nothing else, it looks like it will clean just fine without the lid.

Where does it all go?

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From Megan Mcardle