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Interweaving contrails this morning. My ADS‑B receiver (antenna visible at right) wasn't getting signals from either plane, as is typical for military flights in my area.
Two interview podcasts with Judith Butler appeared on the web yesterday: one from KQED‑FM of San Francisco and another from the BBC.

Neither interview was outright bad but they both disappointed me somewhat. KQED's host Alexis Madrigal didn't ask hard questions. The BBC's Stephen Sachur seemed less familiar with the details of Butler's positions than he should have been.

In general I find interviewers on public broadcasting in the USA to be more timid than their counterparts in England and Germany. Stephen Sachur is skilled at playing devil's advocate. I've heard him pose challenging questions to guests from all across the political spectrum and there's often little to nothing in his tone that gives away his personal feelings on the matter at hand.

KQED's Forum program used to be better. Kevin Pursglove, the host in the early 1990s, was first‑rate.
some steel ring, must not be crucial
I changed the manual transmission oil on my Ford today and a broken part came out the drain hole in three pieces. The car still shifts fine, lol.
Someone asked on reddit where to get a huge model of a resistor as shown in a tweet. Seeing the pics made me want to make one to put on my wall.

Fry's electronics in Sunnyvale used to have even huger models of electronic parts that looked like they were soldered to the floor. The front door to their store had a big model of an ENTER key on its outside surface and an ESC on the inside.

Turning a resistor shape on a lathe wouldn't take long. Attaching aluminum tubing for the leads would be straightforward. The challenge would be in getting clean straight edges when painting the color bands. I have some ideas. Could be a fun project. I'll post a pic if I ever make one.
shutter speed ½ sec
PST -> PDT
Most of the power tools in my shop have belt drive, allowing control over the operating speed by choosing the size of the pulleys. The radial arm saw is an exception: the blade is mounted on the motor shaft. It runs at the AC line frequency, minus a little bit ('slip').

I got curious and measured the slip on my radial arm saw this morning: it's running at 59.15 Hz (3549 RPM) in this pic. It runs very close to 60 Hz unloaded. the wood is clamped down
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I sometimes wonder what it would be like to move to another country. A friend who got fed up with politics in the USA moved to France last year.
I'd miss using old tools if I moved overseas and furnished a workshop from scratch. Yeah you can find used tools if you look hard enough but that's not the same as acquiring them without deliberate effort.
Part of what I like about working with wood is the feeling of participation in a craft with millenia of history. The basic operations (sawing, turning, ...) have been practiced for much longer than electric tools have been around. The mechanical properties of wood have been with us all along.

I also like that humans are not the only species to build things out of wood. A bird's nest doesn't use fasteners or glue but building one nonetheless requires skill to get a satisfactory result. I like leaving pieces of bark on finished wood products, partly because it reminds me of structures built by the creatures we share the Earth with.

All this is a roundabout way to segue into telling you that the Bald Eagle nest cam I mentioned last year captured a fun encounter last week of a squirrel jumping onto a sleeping eagle's back before dawn; see the first 16 seconds of this video.
About 20 years ago, I strained the tendons in one of my fingers while climbing, badly enough that I had to avoid using that finger for a few months. I learned a bit about technique during that time as I had to think more carefully while not having full use of one hand.

Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham after his publisher bet him that he couldn't write a book with a vocabulary of only 50 words.

I have great respect for harpsichordists. Their instrument doesn't have the dynamic range that a piano does and subtlety of phrasing is everything.

Béla Bartók didn't write specifically for harpsichord but he did encourage people to play some of his piano pieces on one. Huguette Dreyfus, one of my favorite harpsichordists, recorded an album of Bartók on the harpsichord back in 1969. Here's the first 15 bars from her performance of Mikrokosmos #145 (the second dance in Bulgarian rhythm):

this

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