Category Archives: Archives

Auspicious timing

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Eric Darton’s Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York’s World Trade Center was published in January of 2001, just eight months before 9/11 would deeply brand the image of the twin towers with exactly the opposite sentiment.  To right, a sparkly Dufex foil print I bought in early 2002 that recalls the mood. The reverse is marked “Dufex Prints / Printed in England / Pictures Colour Library / Reference Number 409359.”

Darton’s book is fairly well-reviewed on Amazon. There’s a new self-aware edition as of August 2011.

60 days of face exercises

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Though skeptical, I decided to experiment with adding a facial exercise routine to my regimen back in November, and took a “before” picture (left), so I could compare later on and decide if it was worth keeping up with. The photo on the right was taken 60 calendar days later, having done the exercises five days out of every seven, about ten minutes each morning and evening, during the intervening time.

There’s no doubt my face looks stronger and better defined, but I would not characterize it as “younger.” In fact, I’d say it’s aged me, most noticeably by deepening my “smile lines.”

Of course, Xmas happened between the first picture and the last, and it at least feels like I do 80% of my aging, each year, over the holidays.

My first 3D print

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This is the first full print off my MakerGear Mosaic FFF 3D printer. A shot glass is the traditional “maiden” print among RepRappers—it’s a quick, simple object and the libation-tightness of the finished print is a pretty good test/demonstration of the printer’s abilities. In fact, the traditional file is minimug.stl, which I elected to forego in favor of this slightly larger and more impressive shot glass, which is Thing #11944 from user raldrich. It is teardrop-shaped in honor of the RepRap project logo. It was printed from red 1.75mm polylactic acid (PLA) filament on the evening of Tuesday, January 17, at a small party my friends and I had to celebrate the event. We each independently verified its Glenfiddich-tightness. The traditional playing of Daft Punk’s Human After All album, during the printing, was also observed. The rhytmic, protomusical whines of the Cartesian robot’s stepper motors are a good complement to most Daft Punk songs.

Handmade gift from a young neighbor

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In the house next door is a family of four—a married man and woman and their teenage son and daughter. I met the woman shortly after moving in, at the mailbox, and when she heard I worked for MAKE, she started talking about her son, who builds exotically-shaped Rubik’s cube-type twisting puzzles and sells them to enthusiasts around the world. I wrote a blog post about him shortly thereafter.

A few weeks later, while working outside of a morning, I heard a familiar sound over the fence in their backyard: a light metallic whang, repeating three times, with ten seconds or so between each, and then 30 or 45 before the group of three repeated. I knew the sound, but it took me a minute to reach back into memories of my own adolescence and place it: someone was practicing with throwing knives.

I stuck my head over the fence and said hello. The boy brought over his throwing knives—three of them, handmade from pieces of an old circular sawblade. I still have my own set (though mine were bought, rather than made) from when I was almost exactly the same age, doing almost exactly the same thing.

The boy and I struck up a friendship, and since that time he has rung my doorbell once or twice a week. And each time he brings over something he’s made, to show off. That, and questions: How would I make this? How would I find out about this? Where would I get this?

And the uncanny similarities between him and me, when I was his age, keep piling up.

I’ve taken lately to passing down some of my unfinished projects to him, some of my venerable and treasured junk. Around the beginning of December, I made a gift of two old blades left over when I dismantled a pair of cheap display swords, a few years back, to get at some decorative castings on their handles. He fit one of the blades with a full tang wooden handle and kept for himself. The other he fit with this elaborate guard and hand shield he welded up from steel wire. Then he mounted it on a piece of oak, decorated with his own pyrography, and presented it to me as a Xmas present.

The blade is a bit over two feet long, from pommel to tip, and the display board a bit under that. It’s probably not actually usable, but that is hardly the point. I hung it up on my office wall and intend to display it there, or someplace equally proud, for a very long time.

“Nobody knew anything about what was buried in the ground.”

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Sorting old files today, discovered this clipping from the UT student newspaper dated 2002-10-15. I noticed the buried capsule and wrote to the inscribed address to satisfy my own curiosity, then mailed the packet of stuff they sent me to the Texan mostly so I’d have something to do with it. I had never worked as a journalist at that time, so I had no idea how easy it was to feed one a story.

Director
The Johns Hopkins University
Applied Physics Laboratory
11100 Johns Hopkins Road
Laurel, Maryland 20723-6099

Wednesday, August 21, 2002

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am a Chemistry student at the University of Texas at Austin. I am writing because my curiosity has been piqued by a bronze plaque affixed to the top of a small underground concrete installation I’ve recently noticed beside the University’s moldering old WPA-era exhibit of “A Texas Dinosaur Trackway.”

The plaque, which I have reproduced photographically herein, identifies the installation as “Transit Satellite Tracking Station 002”; the fields provided to indicate the operational lifetime of the station are conspicuously blank. The last lines implore the curious, “For information write to the director.”

I am curious. I would like information: What does this installation do, and how does it do it? What function does it serve, and for whom? If it operates under the auspices of a particular government agency, to whom might I address a FOIA request?

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Yours truly,
Sean Michael Ragan

I kind of hope they’ll dig it up. It’s not clear to me if the plaque was intended to mark some kind of larger installation that is no longer present, or if the “tracking station” itself is still contained in the concrete somewhere below the identifying plaque. It’s also not clear to me whether the equipment the station might contain is or is not still operational. If I were to put on a hardhat, carry an official-looking clipboard, rent a jackhammer, and go dig it up, would anyone notice or complain? If so, who?

FEMA will admit of no plans for alien contact

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Per a random FOIA request I filed back around the end of 2009, Office of Records Management of the Federal Emergency Management Agency claims to be “unable to locate or identify any responsive records” to my request for “budget summaries from the years 1979 to the present, inclusive, that will indicate how much money FEMA has allocated and/or spent in preparation for, or analysis of, the possibility of emergencies that might be caused by contact with extraterrestrial life, sentiment [sp] or otherwise.”

When I sent it to them, of course, I typed “sentient” instead of “sentiment.” I am not yet so paranoid as to suspect their typo is part of the conspiracy. They claim to have conducted a “comprehensive search of files within the Chief Financial Office.”

I was not expecting them to admit that they had prepared for an alien invasion, but I thought there might be an outside chance that they had dedicated some resources to analysis of the possibility. And “sentient or otherwise” was intended to include the possibility of a “space plague.” I suppose I should really ask the CDC about that one.

Interesting military bomb disposal document from 1975

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Like many people, I enjoyed The Hurt Locker. Although it certainly achieved an atmosphere of gritty realism, I found myself dubious about some of the specific protocols the protagonist EOD technicians used in dealing with IEDs. I can really say nothing, of course, about how realistic it may or may not have actually been, because I have no experience with EOD (thankfully), and those who do aren’t talking. Render safe procedures, as the actual technical details of bomb disposal are known, are highly protected tradecraft, for obvious reasons: If the bad guys find out how you defuse bombs, they can protect against those procedures or, even worse, design traps for them.

It is basic common sense that Hollywood-style cut-the-blue-wire-with-the-white-stripe-not-the-black-wire-with-the-yellow-stripe bomb defusing almost never happens, if at all. Still, I was curious enough about the real-world details of RSPs to Google around, a bit, to see if any SOPs, training material, or other official information had leaked out onto the web. This effort was unproductive, but an Amazon search for “render safe procedures” actually produced an active Marketplace listing for a 6-page Army pamphlet titled Hazardous Devices: Location and Render Safe Procedures. It was just a couple bucks, which I plunked down out of curiosity. The listing has since vanished, but the pamphlet showed up in the mail a few days later. I scanned it; you can download the PDF if you want.

The document bears no kind of secrecy markings, and, as I said, was purchased on the open market. Also, it is dated to 1975, making whatever tradecraft it reveals some 35 years out of date. I therefore feel comfortable circulating it as a techno-historical curiosity.

It is essentially an annotated flowchart for dealing with an object suspected of being a bomb. Its obsolescence is highlighted by the fact that the first recommended step is to listen to the object (via conduction through the surface on which it rests) with a stethoscope, in order to determine if it contains a mechanical clock. Still, some interesting info, here.