Month: October 2020

Glamping CanyonLands is open for business!

October 15, 2020 Incoherent ramblings

 

My brother and his wife are awesome and fearless. Despite the all the uncertainty and chaos in this climate of dictatorial lockdowns, restrictions and pervasive fear-porn, they have opted to start their own glamping (glamous camping) business, Glamping CanyonLands. They’ve bought a bare bones desert property in Utah that literally had nothing.  They’ve now transformed this nothing into a facility with a washroom and shower (and everything that was required to do so, like water heaters, pumps, septic, …), built parking, and are currently providing three sets of luxury tent accommodations.

This video highlights some of the surroundings and the facilities.  They’ve only been open for a couple of days, but already have a nice set of reviews.

During the night, the location is perfect for viewing the milky way. During the day, it can be your staging area for awesome desert hiking, sightseeing and photography.

Classical mechanics notes on Amazon in paperback (but don’t buy a copy!)

October 13, 2020 math and physics play ,

I have a fairly monstrous set of classical mechanics notes that I accumulated when I was learning all about the theory of Lagrangians, Hamiltonians, and Noether’s theorem.

I also audited a few of the classes from the 2012 session of PHY354H1S, Advanced Classical Mechanics, taught by Prof. Erich Poppitz, at the University of Toronto, and have some notes and problems from those classes in this set of notes.

These notes are not self contained.  In particular, there is fairly heavy use of geometric algebra in many of the problems, with assumptions that the reader is proficient with that algebra.

These notes (436 pages, 6″x9″) are available in the following formats:

  • for free in PDF format (colour),
  • on Amazon in paperback (black and white),
  • as latex sources.

I’ve pressed the publish button on kindle-direct-publishing so that I could get a paper copy of these notes for myself.  An extremely vicious edit is required.  Until I do that editing (assuming I do), the price is set to the absolute minimum no commission price that Amazon let’s me offer (i.e. printing cost plus profit for Amazon.)  I wouldn’t actually recommend that anybody buy this in it’s current form — download the pdf if you are interested.

I’m actually toying with the idea of rewriting these notes from scratch, creating an “Advanced Classical Mechanics, with Geometric Algebra” book out of some of the ideas.  I could flush out many of the details that I explored originally, but add some actual structure and coherence to this mess of write-once-read-none junk.  Tying things to a geometric algebra theme would be the value add proposition that could distinguish things from all the other classical mechanics books in the universe.

That said, this idea would be a very tough book project (for me), as I’d have to understand all the material enough to present it in a coherent fashion.  I’d want to include and explore both Euclidean and relativistic Lagrangians, which would make the material tougher, but comprehensive.  I don’t like the idea of assuming the reader is familiar with special relativity, but the thought of me having to include a self contained introduction to that topic that isn’t complete garbage is pretty intimidating.  Especially if you consider that I’d also want to introduce STA, and help the reader understand the connections between all that material.  There’s a lot of ideas that would all have to come together!

Replacing some wall sconces. Electrical surprise!

October 3, 2020 Uncategorized , , ,

We had some wall sconces in the second floor hallway.  One of them sputtered and we didn’t trust it.  Sofia found some nice replacements a few weeks ago, and today was installation day.

I was rather surprised when I took off the old light and found a wiring hairball.  Here’s a picture after taking off (all but one of) the merretts:

I’d never seen anything like this, not even at my last house, where the previous owner (Mr. C) never found a ground wire that he didn’t like hanging loose.  You can’t really see into the back of the box in that picture, but all the wires are loose (no wiring clips securing the wires to the back of the box). none of the sheathing has been removed, and all the connections were jammed into a single tight cubic inch in an impossibly tangled mess.  The grounds were all tied, but Mr C would have been proud, as none of them were connected to the ground screws at the back of the box.  You can see things a bit better after a bit of unraveling:

Of these wires, I hadn’t yet identified which was switch, which went to the second sconce, and which was the supply.  I’m not sure about other locales, but the Ontario electrical handbook specifies that white is hot at the switch, so looking at this, I think the guess should be that the switch wire is the top left (i.e. when the switch is on, we have supply through the white, to and through the switch, and back through the black where it will power the load.)  That didn’t make sense since the switch is on the right down about a foot.  The only logical wire for the switch would be that bottom one.  I decoupled everything so that I could test the lines (carefully) with the power back on, warning everybody in the house to keep clear:

My tester showed that the top left was the supply, leaving the top right and the left as candidates for the switch and the other sconce.  A couple more trips to the breaker box, and some temporary connections verified what was what, and I was ready to start reconnecting things.  First step was stripping the sheathing off the wires.   I couldn’t use a standard stripping tool, since everything was already in the box, but had to carefully do that with a knife:

I’d never seen anybody not take the sheathing off, which was the major source of the hairball wiring.  This wire was either 12 gauge or just really old, but it was very stiff and hard to handle.  With all the sheathing still on, whoever wired this up originally must have had a hell of a job.  I got the switch’s white connected up to the supply black, and put in some clamps at the back of the box and secured the grounds all physically to the box.

I left one ground long to potentially connect to the new light, but it turned out that the ground wire on the new light was super long, so I ended up trimming that one back and direct connecting it to the back off the box with all the rest, instead of using a merrett for the ground.

Special bonus.

It seemed prudent to open up the switch too, and found that the ghost of Mr C was haunting that too.  Check out the nice floating ground lurking in the switch:

This single pole switch doesn’t have a ground screw, but it just seems really sloppy not to connect that ground to the back of the box.  This wire was also not clamped, so I did that too, and put in a brand new switch while I was at it.

 

EDIT: Before:

After:

My Kiva loan stats and rationale.

October 2, 2020 Incoherent ramblings , ,

For most of the time that I was at IBM (before leaving to LzLabs), I was enrolled in the Employee Charitable Fund (ECF) program.  The ECF was a really easy way to do charitable donations, as the donations were small biweekly payroll deductions.  As all the charitable options were official Canadian charities, I also got that tiny little tax deduction kickback as well.

Despite those benefits, I never really liked the ECF charity options, as it felt like my money was just going into a black hole.  I heard about Kiva on the “How things work” podcast, and decided to bail from the ECF for a while and make some Kiva loans instead.  Kiva is a microloan service, where you can loan selected individuals money in $25 increments.  You get to pick who you want to loan to.  As you get paid back, you can funnel those funds back into new loans.

Switching my funds to Kiva loans isn’t a charitable donation in the traditional sense.  In particular, it doesn’t count as an offical Canadian charitable, so I don’t get any tax kickbacks.  Those are usually just pennies anyways, so that’s not a big loss.  If you are in the US you can get a tax kickback for donations to Kiva itself, but not for your loans.  However, I treat my Kiva account like it’s a one way donation, funneling money in, and recycling all of it into new loans when I get payments.

In a rather timely fashion, as it’s was my end of month “Kiva donation time”, I got a notification of leanpub royalties today:


Leanpub is a pay what you want e-book publishing service that provides the purchasers with automatic updates, and purchaser only forums for Q&A.  I didn’t really expect anybody would buy my stuff on leanpub, since I also make pdfs of all those books available for free.  However, I don’t feel guilty about that for a couple reasons.  One is that the purchaser has freedom to pick their price, and most seem to go over minimum.  The other reason is that I have been funneling my leanpub royalties when I get them into my Kiva account.  Usually, y leanpub sales, as they are batched and sporadic, don’t cover my regular Kiva contributions, but this month, they did.

Having been making kiva loans and contributions for so many years now, I’ve got a pretty decent distribution of countries covered:

I regularly reset my ‘Saved Search’ to remove the most frequently leant to countries, and it looks like it’s time to do that again.

I’m pretty selective about the categories that I select my microloans, and that bias is obvious looking at the distribution of the loan categories I’ve selected:

I particularly like the construction loan category, since I can pick somebody looking for tools to improve their business.  I like the self sustainability of that.

This strategy of small regular loans that feed back on themselves really accumulates nicely.  I’ve been making only small monthly contributions, yet that has added up to $6K of total loans over the years, and I’ve now got $1500 of loans in the pipe.  I’ve lost only about $100, which compared to the management fees of a typical charity, is actually pretty extraordinary.  I’ve also lost a small amounts to donations to Kiva itself.  They are asking for lots per loan these days, and I cheap out those contributions, but that has probably still added up.