Mini Maglite LED Upgrade

Out daughter likes flashlights and often she will fall asleep with one on in her bed. We got one of those windup ones to save on batteries but it is to big for her and she doesn't like it. She loves the Mini Maglight that is much more her size. At some point she took it apart and lost the bulb, while I could have used the spare in the base I decided it is the perfect time to get the LED upgrade I saw at Walmart, It is from NiteIze and has 3 white LEDs in it.

It is a nice little kit, with a 3 LED bulb system and a replacement reflector. The new reflector is the hardest part to deal with, I needed a couple of pairs of pliers to unscrew the face of the Mini Maglite but the LEDs were a simple drop in replacement though it is polarized so if it doesn't light up when you pop it in you need to try it the other way. The LED is big enough that even if she pops it out it is big enough to find easily.

The light it produces is very bright and lasted for hours on old batteries. The flashlight itself gets rather warm after that much time but doesn't seem to be a problem.

Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better | OEDb

Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better | OEDb: "Life-changing knowledge does typically require advanced learning techniques. In fact, it's been said that the average adult only uses 10% of his/her brain. Imagine what we may be capable of with more advanced learning techniques. Here are 77 tips related to knowledge and learning to help you on your quest. A few are specifically for students in traditional learning institutions; the rest for self-starters, or those learning on their own. Happy learning."

This is a fantastic list. It is more geared for the High School/College crowd, but it is well worth reading in detail.

Wound Care: An Emergency Room Doctor's Perspective, by E.C.W., MD

For the concerned individual who must deal with a wound outside the emergency room or clinic setting, for whatever reason, I have some reasonable advice on avoiding infection that is not widely taught, even in some health care settings. (The following applies to wounds that an experienced parent could evaluate and immediately know that a band-aid alone would not be appropriate.)

A major essay. Well worth reading.

How to bootstrap technology

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium: "A favorite fantasy game for engineers is to imagine how they might re-invent essential technology from scratch. If you were stranded on an island, or left behind after Armageddon, and you needed to make your own blade, say, or a book, maybe a pair of working radios, what would it take to forge iron, make paper, or create electricity?"

This is a fun exercise. I like to consider what to take along to colonize another Earth-like planet. I am also assuming clean enough air and water and living soil to start with. And finally I am assuming the colony ship has a good library available, so we are not reinventing the wheel at every stage.

The ship won't be able to carry very much since it takes so much to support the colonists. So it won't have tons of pipe for water handling or things like that. However it would have a full machine shop and a small semiconductor fab to produce some technology. The biggest thing the fab would be needed for would be radio parts. Communication is one of the biggest forms of leverage you can have.

That thing that makes our modern world work best is the division of labor, people who are best at mining may not be the best at farming. That is want we are trying to recreate as quickly as possible. If we do this right we should be able to recreate a goodly sized potion of our technology in 50-60 years or less.

The first thing is to produce food in excessive quantities. If we can make more food then we need we will be able to repurpose much of the population to other specialties. Most of this comes down to domesticating beast of burden so relief ourselves of doing the muscle work, and we want to replace then with machines as soon as we are able. The nice thing about farming is that it is only labor intensive for two periods of the year: Planting and harvesting.

At the same time we need to be sending a few knowledgeable people out to find ores and extract them. If they're close together farming and mining can be done together. As the metals start piling up we refine them and using blacksmithing techniques to make better farming equipment.

One of the next things to start doing is recreating Roman-level sanitation technology. Clean safe water and public hygiene are pretty important. They even had hot and cold running water, sure they used stone instead of metal or plastic piping but it still worked.

Now that the basics are covered we can start building more creative tools: at this stage is where a lathe makes sense to build. Once you have a machine shop you can build steam engines and you are at the Industrial Revolution. The ships has a machine shop but creating another one from local materials would be a great step.

There is also glass making and paper making and textile creation to be considered.

This would take about a generation.

Now you can start building tractors and textile machines and all kinds of labor saving devices. This is when we can start climbing up the tech curve fairly quickly. With all the research in the library we can skip a bunch of blind alleys and dead ends and move more quickly. Even with refrigerators and washing machines and the like the biggest limitation I see is just the sheer size of the population. It is just too small to allow enough specialists to rebuild quickly.

So decisions would be made as the to best use of the available labor pool. It would definitely be worth going for electricity at this point just for the leverage it provides. A bunch of small electric motors in each home does wonders for labor savings, Add to that bunches of simple computers and things get even better.

This is a fun problem to think about, and a lot of interdependent technologies that make it really a lot of fun. But then what things would you do differently if you knew what we know now but where starting over on a new planet from scratch?

The radio spectrum could be used a completely different way and not be a crazy hodgepodge of laws.

though in any case we wouldn't be able to completely recreate modern society but then we probably won't have the need to create many things until we had a big enough population to support sit-com production and all those types of things.

TCS Daily - L'Eggo My Lego

TCS Daily - L'Eggo My Lego: "So they first explored with the children the issue of ownership. Not all of the students shared the teachers' anathema to private property ownership. 'If I buy it, I own it,' one child is quoted saying. The teachers then explored with the students concepts of fairness, equity, power, and other issues over a period of several months.

At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that 'All structures are public structures' and 'All structures will be standard sizes.' The teachers quote the children:

'A house is good because it is a community house.'

'We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes.'

'It's important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building.'"

Interesting lessons in those schools. Much more important then things like reading and math.

Stories like this make me want to hurl!

The implosion of the Soviet Union confirmed that socialism just doesn't work. When we visited our relatives in East Germany it was amazing to see bomb damaged buildings still un-repaired after 50 years.

And what have the children learned. Low-level mediocrity. Woopee

How Much Emergency Money Should You Have On Hand?

The Simple Dollar has a post on why you might need to have some emergency cash on hand. However, he doesn't really give you any guidelines on how much.

Is a Franklin enough? A week's salary? something else?

It depends on what you can do and what you are expecting to happen.
For example the various relief agencies will take 72 or more hours to get on scene for most disasters. But it often takes about 2 weeks to restore services. In any case it may take longer to get to your particular home.

Having some cash on hand is great to help cover some items you may have forgotten. If you lose your job you need to understand that it generally takes 1 month per $10,000 your make to find a similar job. For example, if you had earned $60,000/year, it will generally take about 6 months to find an equivalent paying job. So having 6 months of expenses (mortgage, bills, insurance premiums, &etc.) saved up is a good thing to have, but that is a family emergency and you'll still have access to banks. Though if you identity is stolen you may have a job but no way to get to your bank accounts, so having a month or two's expenses handy may be very handy.

If there is an evacuation having enough cash on hand to drive across the country, eating fast food and staying in motels and filling up the car is useful to have. Things will cost more near the site of the disaster so expect to pay more.

If you want gold for a economic disaster, like Post-War Germany (doesn't matter which one) or current Argentina, the best choices are plain gold jewelry like necklaces and rings. My parents and grand-parents made use of these are an alternative currency on occasion.

Most people have a good idea of what they are worth as you see them for sale in every mall, unlike gold and silver coins which very few people are familiar with. Besides they are pretty and most people want them.

For emergency supplies a good progression is this:
• A 72 hour kit for the office/car to get back home.
• A 2 week supply of food, water and fuel for a BBQ at home.
• A 1 week supply of cash for food, gas, motels in case of evacuation.
• Expand home supply to 2 months built up over time to a years supply.
• Increase cash supply to cover 2 months of expenses built up over time to a job search level.

Browse Random House books

Random House has created a new ability to browse their books on line. This is a good way to get people to buy since it is more like the bookstore experience.

Paycheck Calculator

This is a useful money hack. You can fine tune your tax exemptions and the like.

You know you're a foodie...

when you have six different kinds of salt in you cupboard.

We made a run to the Penzey's spice store over in Old Town Arvada. That is always fun because they have jars of spices that you can get a good sniff from.

Among other things we picked up some Diamond Kosher salt, which is a much different size compared to our standard Morton's Kosher flake salt and so I wanted to try how that works in food.

We also picked up some course salt for grinding as we have a salt grinder that is almost empty.

We have some Pacific Sea salt that makes for a nice finishing salt.

Finally we have ordinary table salt and popcorn salt. The popcorn salt is a very fine salt that is great on popcorn and fried foods.

Why Johnny Can't Think

READ!

Why Johnny Can't Think

READ!

LEARN CPR - CPR information and training resources.

LEARN CPR - CPR information and training resources. : "Learn
CPR is a free public service supported by the University of Washington School of Medicine.� Learn the basics of CPR - cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Updated with new CPR Guidelines issued by the American Heart Association and published in Circulation, Dec 13 2005."

Everyone should know how to do this. An actual class would be best but this is better then not knowing at all.

Teach your children your self they aren't learning in school

This video lasts 15 min. If you have children in school you must see this.



We are helping a 10 years old neighbor and have been wondering why her reading and math skills are so poor. Now we know. :(

Bother. Lattice Math is nothing more then warmed over Diagonal Math, was big during the Renaissance, it was taught at only select Italian universities. It was dropped like the Albatross it is once the Standard Algorithm was created. It is slow, tedious and was just a stepping stone to a better way. What kind of dunderhead dredged that up to sell it to our schools.

The Standard Algorithm is the standard because it is fast and error resistant. I am sure if someone comes up with something better we'd convert to that before too long.

Does it seem darker around here to you?

Let's just burn them all and get this dark age off to a rousing start.

Independent Online Edition > This Britain: "All public exhibitions would close, along with schools learning programmes. The permanent collection, which includes a copy of every book published in the UK, would be permanently reduced by 15 per cent. And the national newspaper archive, used by 30,000 people a year, including many researching their family trees, would close."

The great civilizations all had libraries, maybe not as a heart maybe more like a panaceas. Destroy your panaceas and with some help you can live a good long time, but you are not going to live quite the same again.

Libraries are the Institutional memories of our civilization. They are more important then most people recognize.

But few people read much anymore. Sure they surf the web and scan the newspaper and read a pertinent chapter from a book but rarely do we read whole books from front to book anymore. That is sad because as we stop reading, we stop thinking that the places where we keep our books are important. Soon they decay and are lost to us forever.

Google and Microsoft are both scanning books for all they are worth and that makes me very happy.

Few people would put the burning of the library of Alexandria as the start of the Dark Ages. By itself it wasn't but that it was not restored was a strong sign that dark times were coming.

Books are the most powerful time savers out there.

Today the American Library Association's posters have employed Denzel Washington to encourage kids to read. But how many of these students really buy the message?

I recently spoke with a junior who was stressed about her decreasing ability to focus on anything for longer than two minutes or so. I tried to inspire her by talking about the importance of reading as a way to train the brain. I told her that a good reader develops the same powers of concentration that an athlete or a Buddhist would employ in sport or meditation. "A lot out there is conspiring to distract you," I said.

She rolled her eyes. "That's your opinion about books. It doesn't make it true." To her, the idea that reading might benefit the mind was, well, lame.

This totally misses the point of books, at least non-entertainment books, they are a short cut to learning. Those posters are propaganda and obvious propaganda too. We don't live long enough to recreate all the thought out there and most of those thoughts were wrong anyway.

It is not unusual for an author of a book to work on a problem for 20 years, wasting lots of time on false ideas and dead end theories and then writes a book that filters out all the bad stuff and leaves just the best stuff for us to use to get to the next level.

" If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." -Isaac Newton

Those giants were only able to leave books behind so that others could continue the work.

A book will condense a lifetime of work into something that you can read in a matter of hours or days.

How valuable is that? I read about people that do time management who recommend taking 2 minute showers instead of 7 minute showers to save time. That's pretty good but it is like clipping coupons or buying in bulk, sure they save some money but it is better to buy a good used car and save thousands of dollars in one fell blow then to clip hundreds of coupons over years. If I can condense 20 years, 5 years, or even just 1 year of research into something I can read in a matter of hours how much better is my life? How much further can I go? If I read just 4 books that condense 20 years of research into a weeks worth of reading I have saved an entire lifetime.

What is that worth to you?

That is what is so important about reading and books.

Public Libraries

Public Libraries: "Welcome to a community of public
libraries! Here you will find the most extensive directory of
public libraries of the United States."

This is a good resource for finding your local library and their online portals.

The Longitude Dial Time and Elegance.

"My original goal in this," he said in response to my surprise, "was to produce an accurate timepiece with no moving parts—an original creation that combined art and science, drawing from the long traditions of both in its design, and incorporating the finest craftsmanship and latest technology in its construction."
William Andrewes

This is a gorgeous piece of engineering and craftsmanship, I find it amazingly beautiful. It is as simple as a sundial and yet requires laser engraving of a particular type of stone to get it just right. It also embodied a man's passion like nothing else and it shows! This is one of those thing were form and function didn't follow one another but made love.

"A clock or watch may keep time, but only a sundial can find time—a distinctly different function—by deriving the hour from the relative positions of the Earth and Sun."

He is a time geek, I knew that there is a difference between what we use for time keeping and what the Earth's actual time differed slightly, the need for leap seconds and the like. But this takes it to a whole new level.

This time finder combines a sundial and a projection map, into a something more then just a sundial. It is designed around it being in a certain place on this planet and it will work best only there and maybe the antipode, but I am not sure about that.

I like sundials. I remember walking into one in Germany, I say walking into since it was make up of the church spire and the adjoining courtyard with the hours laid out on the surrounding buildings. That was a marvelous blending of form and function.

We have a sundial for our garden that says "Time started in a garden."

This would make a fabulous centerpiece to a formal garden. This calls out for not just a garden but a house worthy of it. A solid house that would last for generations make not of sticks or bricks but of great blocks of stone with a slate roof. This timepiece is a call for timelessness in our lives.

Thanks to Boing, Boing

Software Bisque: Paramount ME

Software Bisque: Paramount ME: "
"

This may be utterly geeky, but I have been dreaming of a telescope mount like this for a long time. It gets cold in a hurry once the sun goes down up here in Colorado and it would be a lot of fun to just watch the stars at night without having to freeze.

A really cool bit of software would be to link a whole bunch of these together to create a massive amateur telescope array.

Now if I just lived somewhere where you could see the sky at night. :(

OpinionJournal - Extra part 3

OpinionJournal - Extra: "In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty. If that sounds too much like Plato's Guardians, consider this distinction. As William F. Buckley rightly instructs us, it is better to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University"

DevonThink For Writing Your Next Book at The Apple Blog

DevonThink For Writing Your Next Book at The Apple Blog

I've been using VooDooPad and it is pretty good. I'll have to check this out.