Gun Bronies and Gun Barbie Accessorizing

One thing is for sure, given the latest killing spree involving guns, the NRA won a long time ago. If slaughtering a bunch of cute little first graders does not generate enough national outrage to scare the NRA-paid-in-pocket craven politicians, then nothing will generate effective gun laws. Remember that, gun bronies. You enjoy the right to keep and bear arms, and dress up and play Army, and plink at cans and bottles, and pretend that someday you might get to play cop... all that right costs you is the occasional mass slaughter of cute little children.

The NRA, which for the most part represents gun manufacturers rather than gun owners, has managed to so water-down the laws and and hobble the agencies that are supposed to control firearms, so much so that no new REAL gun safety legislation has not been passed since the Great Depression. (And for those of you who say gun control laws don't work, remind me of the last time someone used a Class 3 destructive device in a killing spree).

Gun manufacturers understand that a gun purchase is an infrequent one, and therefore have more or less adopted the same marketing strategy that toy manufacturers use.

An armed society is a polite society? Why then, the south side of Chicago, where practically everyone is armed, where you can find guns littering the place, must be one of the safest, and most polite places on the face of the Earth! And what do gun bronies say about this? Well, thugs aren't supposed to have guns! Sounds kind of racist doesn't it? I mean these armed citizens only become thugs once they shoot someone, and before that they are good guys with guns, right? Why doesn't anyone stand up for their 2nd Amendment rights? Could it be because they aren't white?

Me personally? I'd say I can't really buy into the argument of self-defense. I mean, if you are wearing a holstered gun to church, you are going to the wrong church. If you are wearing a gun to the store, you are just going through an infantile Batman vigilante fantasy. And I got news for you, you ain't no Batman. But if we go with the idea of preparation, of self-defense, then I can justify owning perhaps four guns. And that by decreasing range, rifle... maybe semi-auto, shotgun, revolver. Long gun for distance, shotgun for intermediate, revolver for up close and personal.

Anything beyond that is Gun Barbie Accessorizing.

You don't think it's all just boys and their toys? Take a look at the bozos in the Open Carry Texas videos, all dressed up in their costumes and with body armor and playing Army and everything. Gun bronies issuing Barbie doll fashion statements.

Assholes.

Radiophobia, or Radiophilia?

Belatedly, Happy Mother's Day, Edward Teller... and he was a mother.

I've been having a hard time finding time to write an essay on some things nuclear (and still haven't really). The best I can do is perhaps produce a old lazy river meandering all over an ancient flat plain, with lots of oxbow lakes and sandbars. A river does go someplace, and I would like to think there is a direction to what threatens to be a series of essays. So here is an My Attention Conservation Notice: 

Life Figured Out How To Handle Radiation a Long, Long, Long, Long Time Ago

 --- or  --- 

Wow, Maybe White People Really Are Vampires! 

(In Which case, I'd Get To Killing Them Off Pronto If I Were You)!

Some people suggested Teller was immortalized as part of the amalgamated archetype Dr. Strangelove in the eponymous movie. Peter Sellers always maintained Dr. Strangelove was based upon former SS officer Werner Von Braun (rehabilitated via Project Paperclip), along with RAND Corporation strategist Herman ("On Thermonuclear War") Kahn, mathematician Johnny von Neumann, with the accent borrowed from Stanley Kubrik's Austrian photography consultant Weegee.

(Kahn was characterized by possible psychopath General Curtis LeMay, along with all those defense eggheads brought in by JFK, as one of those "pipe-smoking, tree-full-of-owls types who had never served and never seen combat". LeMay had a point. Kahn pushed for limited war, and Lemay knew the concept was absurd. If you don't fight to win, you shouldn't fight at all, and Lemay was always for counterforce strategy targeting enemy offensive capabilities).

So, Teller was the Mother of the Hydrogen Bomb. Many call him the Father, but I think of him as a mother - in more ways than one - as he carried the thing to term.

If you want a baby daddy for the H-bomb, go seek out  Stanislaw Ulam. (Had Teller been used as a source character for Dr. Strangelove, Bela Lugosi would have been more appropriate, but Bela had already died). In which case, it might have a vampire movie about the end of the world. Which would be sad, as vampires rely on human prey, and therefore would prefer more and healthier humans being around, rather than less and sickly.

Population explosion, anyone?

Okay, point being here what? Or is this going to be rambling commentary on the unthinkable?

I've been ruminating, reading through old books and new, on nuclear fission, nuclear weapons, the nuclear industry, and the biological effects of ionizing radiation. One thing I found interesting is there is evidence that radiation in small amounts is - not necessarily beneficial - but perhaps appears to be beneficial. I explored this somewhat in an essay called The Spa Treatment Mystery. I would like to expand on that, and all this stuff percolating in my brain for the past month has given me a hunch that there is a slippery eel of a gestalt that I've seen glimpses of through the murk and the mire.

Your patience will be required in order for me to sneak up on this slippery eel, and from different directions. This may lead to something, but through a whole forest of false analogies, rather like deriving the correct numerical solution with the wrong equation or the wrong computational model (which happens more often than you would think). Random Items to Get Started:

• Dr. Strangelove may have been a satire, but pretty much every aspect of the movie was true. 
• Nuclear fission, and more specifically, Leo Szilard's nucleonic reactor, moved from proof-of-concept to industrial-sized production model in just under 90 days. 90 days. I doubt you can point to many technological endeavors with such a short development time. And the continued development of nuclear weapons probably rivals or surpasses Moore's Law.
• In fact, the prediction of Moore's Law, the integrated circuit and semiconductor industry, would never have come to pass without the heavy subsidies from the Defense Department in pursuit of optimizing nuclear fighting. The entire consumer market of computer/electronic/entertainment would not exist without this initial computerization of war (paid for US government taxpayers, and Internet Libertarians may at this point grind all appropriate gears).
• About one pound of coal gets you one kilowatt hour of electricity (as does one thousand cubic feet of natural gas, or one and a quarter cups of oil). One pound of uranium gets you seven million kilowatt hours. 

If you were born between 1951 and 1958, you are a fallout baby. Meaning you were conceived, gestated, born and raised in a sea of poisonous radioactive atmospheric fallout. And yet, the incidence for cancers and birth defects for this group of people is practically indistinguishable from any others.  

Last year, I was injected with a small amount of radioactive technicium (Tc-99m) and put under a gamma ray scanner. To my amazement, an image of my right kidney appeared on the screen, looking rather like a night image of the Earth, with little towns and cities all lit up. As for my left kidney? It was looking like North Korea at night - nothing. Tc-99m has a half life of six hours, and so, had I gone ot the airport, I would have been mistaken for one of those mythical yet-to-be-seen dirty bombs that Homeland Security is always looking for.

Interesting how many Los Alamos scientists switched over from bombs to biology at the end of WWII. Nuclear science had matured and looked for another field with the potential for world-changing breakthroughs: molecular biology. Radioisotopes were invaluable for the study of metabolic pathways.

From 1945 onwards, some 2,349 nuclear tests have been conducted worldwide - 528 of exploded in the atmosphere. An estimated 629 megatons of explosives have been set off, and some tens of millions of curies of radiation have been released to the environment, so much so, that the equivalent of World War III has been fought over a 70 year period. Had the same amount of fallout been the product of Orion nuclear rockets, mankind would enjoy a solar system wide empire today. Bartender, canned ape for everyone!

In addition, from 1951 to 1992, some four thousand radiation experiments were conducted by the AEC, the CIA, the DoD, the CDC, the NIH, the VA, and NASA on (for the most part uninformed) ha subjects. As documented by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Eileen Welsome:

"hospital patients at New York's Sloan-Kettering, Cincinnati's General, Houston's Baylor College, and San Francisco's University of California were fully irradiated to produce military data; eight hundred pregnant women were dosed with radioactive iron and their fetuses monitored by Vanderbilt University; seven newborns and over a hundred Native Americans were injected with radioactive iodine; seventy-three mentally disabled children were fed radioactive cereal by Quaker Oats and the AEC; two hundred cancer patients were dosed with enormous amounts of cesium and cobalt ; and 232 inmates had their testicles irradiated at carcinogenic levels by the University of Washington. The prisoners were paid a hundred bucks and sterilized at the end of the experiment to 'keep from contaminating the general population with radiation-induced mutants'. Around two hundred of Nevada's explosions directly irradiated over two hundred thousand site witnesses, most of them servicemen, while around ninety atmospheric demolitions afflicted thousands who would be known as 'downwinders' - resident of Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah." - The Age of Radiance, Craig Nelson

Those are what we know of. There are undoubtedly as many or more cases of radioactive exposure that we do not know of. Every single nation that has pursued nuclear fission has had some type of accident. The US Navy, and the Soviets, have dumped literally thousands of tons of radioactive waste pretty much wherever they wanted into the oceans. The Soviets were so lax in their waste disposal it's almost a surprise their former territories are not luminous. And a dirty little secret in Japan is that most nuclear industry workers are the yakuza. Nuclear waste disposal there is handled accordingly. 

And the surprising thing is, after all the meltdowns, atmospheric tests, and industrial accidents, and irresponsible waste disposal involving radioactive materials, statistically and empirically, this has globally added perhaps only some 13,000 additional cases of cancer and birth deformities to the current load. In fact, there is evidence that low level exposure to radiation creates metabolic adaptations to survive - and thrive - in even higher radiation environments.

My take?  Well, I don't think the Marvel Comics plan of producing superheroes through mutation was ever considered, but I do think there has been an active plan to get us all used to living with radioactive contamination. Toughening the Breed.

Paranoia? Maybe... more later.

Banh Mi Long Time

Yesterday was an urban adventure, jury duty at the Daly Center in downtown Chicago. I won't go into the details of the trial, suffice to say it was a medical malpractice deal that I would title "The Case of the Missing Testicle".

The highlight of the day was lunch! Food trucks are parked in the plaza of the Daly Center. There was a pizza truck, hot tamale truck, hot dog and burger truck, grilled cheese sandwich (the current food fad) truck, but the longest line was in front of the Chicago Lunch Box truck.

Westernized Thai and Vietnamese food, and it all looked good, but I opted for the Banh Mi Long Time sandwich, which is a "sweet filipino longanisa sausage, fried egg" served on french bread. A breakfast sandwich, and I have to tell you, it would be my new breakfast sandwich, if I could get it on a regular basis.

Oh, and the spring rolls were quite good. I will not pass up a spring roll if I can help it.

The Caretakers Redux

"Look, do you want the plutonium, or not?" asked Edward Hopper, the bronze robot's voice booming from fourteen feet above me.

"We do! We want it! I just don't understand why we have to wear these goofy suits when we are around them", I replied.

"It's for your protection. Besides, they poop out more of it when they are comfortable!"

"They're robots!"

"They're also animals. They have feelings like I do." 

"Yeah, but you programmed 'em that way!"

"I'm trying to help you guys out here! I'm starting to think you don't appreciate me".  

That's the extended caption that came into my head as I looked at the latest bronze, The Caretakers.

Yeah, it's finally done. I dicked around on this far too long. Fact is, I did learn some things this time out. The last bronzes, The Stockmen, which I rushed through production in order to submit them for a show they did not get in, had severe casting defects on the figures. These were corrected with proper feed runners. Almost corrected. The figures still had shrinkage porosity defects, aka "sucks", which I will take care of next time.

"sucks" in the same spot on both figures

But the Caretaker bugs were not vented properly. They ended up with some pretty severe gas porosity defects.

This has resulted in a new rule with the acronym ABV.

Gas Porosity from lack of vents

Always Be Venting.

The other big problems with casting, and ones that I should avoid and usually do, is turbulence and oxide inclusions.

This is all about skimming the bronze of shit before pouring, and proper rigging. Proper rigging meaning the obvious like, lots of runner and vents, but more importantly, I've found from experience to avoid right angles and make the rigging more organic and treelike or arterial*, so that a common sprue acts like a manifold and feeds everything rapidly and uniformly.

Surprisingly, or not so, some fluid dynamic studies back up my intuitive hunches and empirical observations: http://phys.org/news/2014-04-common-junction-pipes-particles-materials.html

So, one of these days, I may actually have a defect free casting... through luck. Here are some other pics of The Caretakers:

*Actually, I try and follow an old empirical law of circulation, in determining how many smaller diameter runners feed off a larger one, so that the number of runners needed is the sum of the cube of radius of the larger runner. In other words, the spherical volumes that can be fed from a smaller diameter runner tube sums up to the spherical volume of the larger runner tube.

The Aurignacian Efflorescence

I've joked about how my mother's father's side of the family were Neanderthals, but no, they were just ugly anatomically modern humans. Although it is true that most of us have about 1-4% Neanderthal genes. Svante Pääbo (pronounced PEH-boo, if you really want to know), who has sequenced the Neanderthal genome, has an interesting observation. We tend to think that modern humans were dominant over Neanderthals, as they are now extinct. But the gene flow evidence suggest from Neanderthals to humans. This type of gene flow is seen where one social group is dominant over another, and that the dominant group fathers children that remain with the non-dominant group. Examples are white slave owners in the Americas, and British colonials in South Asia, passing their genes into a population they control.

The evidence is not conclusive for this, but let's run with it. So, prior to what are known as "replacement humans" making a migration out of Africa some 75-50,000 years ago, a first wave of anatomical humans shared the Middle East with Neanderthals, and the Neanderthals enslaved, or at least intimidated, that first wave of humans. 

The question you might ask is, who are these replacement humans, and why were the first wave humans not dominant? And the answer is found in the archaeological evidence. The stone tools in use by both Neanderthals and first wave humans were identical and unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years, kind of indicating a similar and static set of cultural tools as well. Given an equal tool kit, the physically more powerful Neanderthals probably had an advantage (see Gods versus Titans myths from all over the world). But then, starting with the late Mousterian tool kit, and progressing into the Aurignacian tool kit, humans using these tools start to occupy sites where Neanderthal tools existed. Neanderthals start to disappear.

Keep in mind, the Aurignacian stone tools are much more various and sophisticated, and are associated with the so-called Cultural Big Bang, when the first cave art, animal figurines, and probably rope, twine, and textile objects appear (base on the prevalence of fine bladed flint, bone needle, and fish hook tools).This Aurignacian Efflorescence really took off in a big way, and practically every habitable surface of the Earth was populated in a few short millennia. Many suggest this cultural sophistication was the result of language.Oh, bullshit. There is plenty of anatomical evidence to suggest language predated the Aurignacian Efflorescence by several hundred thousand years. 

So, what did it? Genetics? Hardly.

My answer? Bows and arrows. And a peculiar form of psychopathy that exists to this day, perhaps best made manifest through our habit of genocide. We ape versions of solenopsis invicta, armed with our projectile stings, swarmed out of Africa to conquer the world.

The Final Kickstarter Reward

...and only six months late! Well, it was for my nephew, and he knew about my medical problems and how I was a little delayed on everything. And then I had to get sculptures ready for shows. But it's all done, and now all I have to do is specimen boxes of cast glass. I was supposed to 30, and I ended up with 10.

Anyway, here's the reward from start to finish. The cast glass and bronze waxes:








The bronzes in their raw state:

The cast glass piece:

The finished bronzes:

And an impromptu presentation of the reward. The wood shelf I slapped together from scraps:

I have committed multiple perversions

Back in 2001, I was commissioned by the glassblower to make a pickup kiln for him. I was proud of the fact that I came up with a pickup that used a cantilevered pickup shelf using drawer slides underneath so you didn't need to buy high temperature rollers like what they use in glass lehrs.

Building the pickup kiln got me interested in gas kilns and burners and furnaces, and I decided to make a propane-powered version of a vitrigraph.

Reason I did that was vitrigraphs are electric kilns raised above the ground with a hole in the bottom of them for soft glass to stream out of, and since they are electric there is the risk of a shock. So, that would not be problem with propane-powered one. So, I built a series of them, and finally ended up with what was called the Stringinator Mark II.

Now, at first I just used the kiln to make thin pieces of stringer, where you put scrap color glass into a flower pot and then heat it up to flow out quickly and make thin strings of glass. But then I decided to see if I could make cane, and I could. It was kind of a pain in the ass, because I had to crouch in an uncomfortable position on the floor. Looking up into the bottom of the kiln played Hob with my neck, but  I'd grab the nubbin of glass coming out of the flower pot with tongs, and then as you pull the glass slowly down, it would cool enough you could grab it with your bare fingers. ("Cool enough" being a relative term. My calloused fingers tips didn't seem to mind that it burned a little).

So then, I would twist the glass to make candy cane type of stuff, and then really rapidly twist the two-colored glass to make what I called "supertwisties". So, then I got bored with making helices, and would stop twisting the cane one way, and start twisting it the other way, and make what are called hemihelices.

So, then I got into a regular pattern of twist one way, stop, twist the other way, stop, back to twisting the first way, etc. I don't have any pictures of the glass vases or bottles that used these alternating supertwisties for surface patterns. A number of renters really liked them. But the interesting pattern, when these canes got spread out from the heat and getting blown larger I had no name for.

But now I know there is name for them. A hemihelix with multiple perversions: http://phys.org/news/2014-04-hemihelix-scientists-rubber-bands.html

I'll see if any of the renters can find a picture of this pattern.

Update: Couldn't find the glass. Here is a link to the video:

http://johnkurman.blogspot.com/2014/10/supertwisties.html