Half a Century

The object at hand is a memento of my first breath, 600 months ago. Shown here are a few distinctive items from a pile my mother had collected and stashed away, and I discovered after her death.

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I was born on the day of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Back then there were no weather satellites, no weather radar, no mobile phones, nor email. “Cable” meant sending a telegram, a less expensive and more reliable alternative than a long distance phone call. A letter cost 4¢ by ground, and air mail was extra. Here are congratulations from Germany, Israel and New York. And I have no idea if this birth certificate would be official enough to satisfy doubters.

The reverse of the Pet Milk stork card is revealing of the era when men were birthday bystanders:

“Congratulations, Dad!
To see your baby, please present this souvenir card at the nursery window.
Hold card against window so nursery nurse can see the name.
Please return card to mother’s bedside.”

But my purpose in this post is to observe some things of interest in the past half century.

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I was too young to notice when the first man went into space, but I stayed up late to watch the live broadcast of Armstrong stepping down from the Lunar Module. Billionaires can now buy a ride into space, but few bother. America has apparently passed the baton to Europe, Japan, and China as the rulers of space.

I remember fallout drills, and actually saw “Duck and Cover” in school. Everyone worried about radiation on a daily basis, but hadn’t heard of cholesterol. Guess which one kills 1,000 times as many people as the other?

One of my teachers was so used to the original Pledge of Allegiance that she would occasionally leave out the “Under God” that had recently been inserted in the middle of “One Nation Indivisible” when we did the daily ritual. She also showed us the proper way to stand from when she was in school. See The Changing Recipe of Pleasure Lesion Stew for a surprising picture.

In the last five decades organ transplants went from science fiction, to an abomination against God that should be outlawed, to a rare and expensive major surgery, to a fairly common procedure that anyone might expect. Drivers licenses (at least in my state) have a donor form. Mine is signed. Is yours?

As I grew up, vacuum tubes gave way to transistors and then integrated circuits. Several technological inventions in the last half century have changed society. I mean, really altered the ways in which people interact.

• The Pill made it possible for women to have a career and social life without either a husband or celibacy, so now women are almost half of the workforce. It also changed the point of dating. Girls no longer consider finding a husband their only goal, and mostly not their primary one.
• The rapidly evolving WWWeb allows people to  interact in many new ways for both business and social purposes. One minor sign: Video phones and teleconferencing are no longer solely toys of millionaires and super-geeks. It is now fairly common for people to work from home.
• Cell phones mean that no one has to make social plans in advance, nor wait by a phone. The world is un-tethered! And you can’t get away from the office!
• Between the web and cell phones, privacy is dying. This is inevitable. As new generations grow up with ubiquitous communication, everything they think and do is broadcast and stored. Much like after the Kinsey Reports, as everyone begins to notice how many others share their own private thoughts and behaviors, guilt will recede.
• The web has also killed the publishing and copyright models of the 16th through 20th centuries, in much the same way that Gutenberg changed the previous setup. Music, text, and video is now cheaper to share than gum. There is still a crying need for editors and librarians, to polish and organize the flood of new and traditional media. This change is ongoing, and we still don’t know how it will settle out. But historians will mark its genesis in my lifetime.
• Containerization (that was just taking hold in my childhood) now makes goods from the far side of the world price competitive with local products. “Imported” now rarely means rare or posh. And the improved communications infrastructure allows many jobs to be moved around the world to find cheaper labor. It is truly becoming a unified world economy.

Some things have not changed much during my life.

• Personally owned motor cars are still the major influence in the planning of transportation and towns. Pubic transit infrastructure in most cities has declined as a result. But it shows signs of returning in the next half century as the cost of extracting fuel rises.
• The price of a gallon of gas is still about half the cost of a movie ticket and about the same as a fast food meal. No change over the ten presidential administrations that I’ve experienced.
• Men still wear pants, although now women also do, without undue notice.
• People still mostly work 40 hour weeks, although now it takes two working adults to support most households.
• People used to get their news from the newspaper with whose editorial slant they least disagreed. Now they get their news from the video and web columnists with whom they almost perfectly agree. Maybe this belongs in the “changed” section. Human nature hasn’t changed, but the media are much better positioned to pander to it.

So a half century gives me some personal perspective from which to view history and humanity. Or at least the illusion that I have it.

Not All Natural

When I see a package labeled “All Natural”, I muse about the alternative. What, exactly, is not natural? Not many things in everyday experience cannot be found in nature. For example, plastics are artificially polymerized distillations from found materials. Even that artificial polymerization is just a concentrated effort to do what happens haphazardly in nature.

The same holds true for “artificial” ingredients. Any of them may be found in nature. The artifice comes from concentrating and using them. So what would qualify, to my mind, as unnatural? After all, artifice (the root of artificial) is broadly a work of art, a craft of man. But all the root ingredients he uses are natural, found in nature. Then they are broken down or built up in a manner that is completely consistent with nature.

I could argue that the only thing that would be unnatural is something supernatural. But no supernatural thing has ever been reliably observed. If a supernatural thing could be observed reliably, and its behavior documented, it would become part of the definition of nature, the province of science. But this is not my point.

I believe that I have found an artificial ingredient in my Victorian house. That is, a basic substance that did not exist in any measurable amount on this planet by the time we started looking. Or when God created it, if you follow Young Earth theology. Moreover, I’d bet that my readers have this unnatural thing in their houses, as well.

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I am referring to a chemical element that was not found in nature. The basic elements (beyond hydrogen and helium) were created in stars and supernovae. Basically, the hot quark soup was stirred roughly, and splashed out into a nebula to freeze into the nuclei of elemental atoms. As the quarks congealed, they formed a smear of normally distributed isotopes. Most of those were unstable, and decayed through a series of stages until they arrived at something stable. And most of those decay chains were pretty fast, on the order of milliseconds to a few years.

What we find on our planet (defined as “natural”) is a distribution of isotopes of elements that are either stable, or have very long half-lives. By comparing the relative amounts of each isotope, one can estimate that the nova that produced the planetary nebula from which our solar system formed happened about 6 billion years ago. There are no “natural” elements heavier than Uranium. U-238 (to use the heaviest natural isotope for specific example) has a half life of over five billion years. Most of the “natural” shorter-lived elements (like radon) are here only because they are daughter products of uranium (or protactinium) decay. And some short-lived isotopes, like Carbon-14, are continually produced by cosmic ray impacts.

The object at hand is a smoke detector, wherein lies a modern miracle. The way an ionizing smoke detector works is to have a little open air space that is made conductive by a small radioactive source. A tiny electric current runs through this air space, unless the conductivity of this ionized air is reduced by smoke. Then the alarm goes off. It can detect smoke almost as sensitively as a human nose: A few parts per million.

Therefore when you open a smoke detector, you can see a radiation warning. It is intentionally hard to read, to avoid panicking folks who are afraid of radiation.

There are many radioactive isotopes that could be used, some of them even “natural.” But some are bad because they are chemically toxic. Some are bad because they decay into something dangerous. And some are prohibitively expensive to isolate. So what did they choose?

Americium. This is part of the radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, and also an annoying daughter product that has to be periodically removed from plutonium bomb pits. How radioactive is it? The warning above tells you, if you know how to read it. 1.0 μCi (micro Curies) or 37 kBq (kilo Becquerels) is the answer.

Huh? The latter value is more intuitive. Henri Becquerel shared the Nobel prize with Marie Curie. His unit is the number of decays per second. That is, this smoke detector source shoots off 37,000  alpha particles (helium nuclei) every second. It is an absolute amount, assuming a fresh source, and the correct weight of material.

What I wondered was, “How much material?” This is where the Curie units are more useful. I looked up the Specific Activity of Americium 241, and it is 3.2 Curies per gram.The container says we have one micro-Curie of the stuff, so that gives us 0.31 micrograms. A very small speck. (btw: 1 Ci = 3.7 x 10¹⁰ Bq).

If you break the seal, remove the solder, and clip the safeties (don’t try this at home) you can look at the isotope itself. It doesn’t look like much. My sample is over 20 years old and apparently has been splashed with dirty water, possibly during a house fire in 1988. Here is a cool picture of a fresher bit.

So how dangerous is this un-natural bit of nuclear waste in your home? Americium is not chemically toxic, and most of its compounds are relatively insoluble. However, that 37 kBq means it can break 37,000 of your molecules for every second it is in you. So don’t touch it. Because it is an alpha source, it is completely exposed; any protective covering would stop the alpha particles from reaching the air it needs to ionize. Air itself stops alpha particles within a few inches. But each decay also produces a gamma photon. At 37kBq, this gamma source is pretty dark. By comparison, a 100 watt light bulb sends out about 10²⁰ times as many photons per second.

How long will it last? The half life (how long it takes for half of it to decay) is about 433 years. It decays into another alpha source, Neptunium-237 with a half life of two million years (still chemically harmless and 4,619 times less radioactive). So after 20 years, there is still 98% of the original activity in this sample. This is why they prefer Americium-241 to many other isotopes for home safety use. The whole Neptunium series decay chain is listed here, for those who want to know its future.

Banking on My Heritage

This object today was my mother’s coin bank. This is a promotional product from her father’s place of business. His branch of the then-nationalized bank, Die Sparkasse der Stadt Berlin, was in a trendy new west county suburb of Berlin as the Third Reich rose from the ashes of a defeated and crippled nation.

Photographically Unwrapped, Click to Enlarge

My grandfather Otto was not really a banker; he was a calculator. He sat at one desk in a large room full of desks and calculated columns of numbers, like interest payments and account balances. He’d run his finger down a column and write the sum. Yes, I am descended from math geeks on both sides.

What really impressed my mother as a little girl (when she went with him to work) was the vertical people conveyor they used as a worker’s elevator in the 1930′s. It was a continually running vertical belt of person-sized platforms in a shaft that you step quickly onto and off of as it reaches or clears your floor. I’d put a picture of one here if I could find one.

I never met my grandfather. His asthma, quick wits, and connections kept him away from the front during the war. He become a bicycle courier when the banks (and all non-essential business in town) closed, as the war drew to its by-then inescapable conclusion. But Allied heavy artillery disassembled him and his bike near the center of town within a week of V.E. day. At least he went quickly while doing something useful. My mother found out months later, when the Soviets allowed her to return to what was left of her hometown.

Mom managed to keep this bank as a memento. The Allied soldiers who occupied her home had left it behind, along with the other things that were not valuable or particularly portable. She carefully packed it from place to place in postwar Germany for a decade, and then brought it to the U.S. where it survived a few more moves before she settled down. She gave it to me when I was almost old enough to understand that it was precious to her. I’d guess about half of the dents and scratches were my doing, from when I was small.

So today’s Object At Hand is a souvenir from one of my ancestors.

Running Out of Light

This morning I had an idea. But then I looked up at that cartoon light bulb hovering over my head, and decided to write about that object, instead.

This marvelous still-working antique makes for a better image than the collection of dead light bulbs that were actually my inspiration. You see, the world is running out of tungsten. So I am starting to salvage the filaments from my dead light bulbs.

May I assume that you don’t think about tungsten very often? This metal is rarer and harder to purify than gold. But it sells for only a few dozen dollars a pound. Every electrical light bulb, whether incandescent, fluorescent, or arc, contains tungsten. So do x-ray tubes, cat-scanners, and (believe it or not) commercial airplane wings.

What’s so special about it? It has a high melting point. It is the only element that would be a liquid on the surface of the sun. This is why it is so useful in light bulbs. It is also one of the heaviest elements: As heavy as gold, or eleven times as heavy as magnesium. This density is why it is in the wings of large airplanes, as dynamic turbulence compensators. You can see many examples and learn lots of cool stuff about tungsten here at PeriodicTable.com. I get lost in that site, either geeking out or admiring the photography and stories.

Anyway, this rare and useful material  is getting hard to find in the Earth’s crust. And every day, tons of it go to the landfill, mostly in burned-out lightbulbs. All the original tungsten is still in that sealed ampule, mostly as a strand of wire with a small gap. And we throw this rare stuff away.

Although we are generations away from needing to mine the landfills for valuable materials such as this, I have decided to start collecting tungsten from my dead lamps. At the rate they burn out, I may have a pound by the end of my life. But it feels vaguely satisfying to know that it will be easy to recycle, once they (we) realize its value.

A Nod to a Knob

I bought a duplex in 1986. When I first moved in I removed the front door latch and doorknob and replaced it with a modern, stronger latch assembly. Tenants and I have lived comfortably with this arrangement for decades, and inspectors never mentioned it. But I live in an 1890′s historic conservation district, so I have to pay for an inspection every time a tenant moves.

This year we had a new inspector who took one look at the front door, and told me that it must have a doorknob. I suspect that this was only necessary to prove the need for inspections, because all the actual structural and safety issues exceed code. So it annoyed me that I had to “fix” something that had neither ever been a problem, nor changed.

It is an easily remedied issue. I dug into my box of salvaged door parts, and pulled out a selection to take over there and hoped to find a fitting solution.

It took me only a quarter hour to mix and match knobs, shaft, and cover plate on the old door from this collection. It is handy to have handyman skills. But the lesson of this object at hand is that sometimes, admittedly not often, piles of old parts come in handy.

My Changing Relationship with Mr. Squarepants

In Y2K I had a fever, and lay in front of the idiot box for a couple of days. One of the shows I noticed was a new cartoon called SpongeBob Squarepants. Even in my feverish state, it seemed too absurd for words. I’d have rated it too meaningless for Dada! It seemed to violate every possible law of physics, sense, and perception for no apparent reason.

But it grew on me. Once you suspend not only disbelief, but a need for sense, the show has winning characteristics. In a psychotic sort of way. It has an internal consistency that simply exists at a right angle from any known reality. It was a twisted sojourn into meta-sense.

But then it caught on, got popular. Merchandising and popularity ruined it for me. But by then, I’d already foisted it on my young niece and nephew. So as I grew disenchanted, the next generation locked onto my fascination with the show. I haven’t watched it in many years.

But I started getting gifts in that vein. Granted, only one of the pictured objects is actually from the young ones. The others came from adults.

The smallest one came embedded in a bar of glycerin soap as though frozen by Calrissian in clear carbonite. After he emerged, quite clean, I converted him into a roving magnet. Karen never knows where he will next appear.

The cushy one came courtesy of a fellow dancer, who sees something of me in him. Or vice versa. I chose to consider this a compliment. I think.

The big box monopolizing the picture came from the kids. We played the game almost immediately. This may be the only theme version of the game that I’ve played. I like the box because the eyes follow me.

So I have mellowed into a sense of toleration for the character, and admiration for the applied insanity of his creators.

So the Object at Hand today is actually the character that inspired these physical objects, a kitchen sponge with an annoying laugh, a pet snail, and a crush on an underwater Texan squirrel.

Is Penny Wisdom Plain Foolish?

I spent an hour this evening fixing an appliance that I bought at a yard sale many years ago for a coin. Not only that, but I solely and regularly use this appliance for my daily work. You may wonder how I use a potpourri crock pot for my work? As the heater part of a small double boiler for an etchant that can eat through glass or titanium, of course.

And what can go wrong with a crock pot? Well, this one has been dropped a couple of times. But the crack was dealt with well enough some years ago by a liberal application of Acrylic monomer (Super Glue).

So what was wrong? The crack had weakened the heating element (Ni-chrome filament) and it finally burned through. So I took the thing apart and spliced in a bit of fine brass wire that I had lying around. That delicate job was the easy part, given strong magnifying goggles and tiny tools.

But these diabolical inexpensive units are designed to not-be reassembled. They had actually added an extra part to the design to make reassembly impossible. It took me over a half hour to outwit the designers and get the base re-attached in a manner that would let me take it apart again for future repairs.

For a dozen deductible dollars I can have a new one delivered to my house via eBay. Why do I regularly chose to spend so much time to repair disposable appliances?

My parents both went through economic times much worse than the U.S. Depression, losing nearly everything but their lives. They raised me with essential parsimony. Not actual deprivation, mind you. Just a frugal mindset that pervades my being. I hate to throw anything usable away.

But now I have predictable (if meager) income, and no debt. I have money in the bank, and could afford nice things. But it just feels wasteful to throw away something that I can fix. I mentioned this in “How Does a Microwave Work?“

Things I no longer need may end up on eBay. I usually net less than minimum wage for my time on most of these sales. But the widget/parts/book gets a new life with someone who really wants it, and the post office makes some money.

So the object at hand today is the realization that I am an oddball tinker living in a throw-away society, illustrated by a stripped-down 4″ crock pot.

How Does a Microwave Work?

I was sitting with a neighbor one summer afternoon around 1989, when the neighbor asked, “Dan, do you know how a microwave works?”

I told him that I did, and asked him if he’d like me to explain it. He assented. So I considered how to explain how they work to someone with little math. And then launched into what probably was a dizzying description with hand gestures of quantum and molecular degrees of freedom, electromagnetic resonances, and a brief detour into the evolution of and differences between magnetron and Klystron tubes before finally mentioning the history of radar and the serendipitous development of the Radarange. (Now that we have the web, you can find a fit-for-non-geeks  explanation, for example, here.)

When I stopped for air, he said, “That’s all very interesting.  But I asked because I have a dead microwave that I’m throwing out, and wondered if you wanted it to take and fix it.”

Oops. My socially defective self forgets that what people ask is often only obliquely related to the question they mean to imply. When he asked if I knew how one worked, he meant, Did I know how the works fit together, how to fix one?

I told him that I’d give it a try. I had never owned a microwave, but a good rule of thumb on electric gadgets is that total failure implies simple repair. Usually an open circuit or bad switch.

So I went with him and carried it home. I was hopeful because it was a simple older model with no membrane buttons, digital display, nor processor control. Just a mechanical timer and button. I took it apart, and figured out that one of the three safety interlocks — that make sure it won’t run with an open door — was worn out. I bypassed it, leaving only two.

Occasionally one of the remaining safeties blows an internal fuse when someone tries to open the door while it is running. Then I just take it apart and replace the fuse.

This Object at Hand gets daily use, twenty-odd years since it was saved from the landfill. I may yet get another twenty years out of it.

Discarding an Era

About 3 years ago, I pondered disposing of a certain box of papers that I’ve been keeping for decades.  Reluctant Admission of Obsolescence is the post I’d written.

Today, I finally decided to go through it one more time, and get rid of it. Or most of it. Today’s Object At Hand is the relatively thin pile that I decided to keep a while longer. This is merely a representative sample from a full file box.

What we have here is a short stack of folders containing some documentation and notes, some disks of programs and data, and a 30′ roll of a program listing. All the equipment involved is completely obsolete, the specific computer languages are no longer used, and the companies for which most of these projects were done no longer exist.

So, why do I keep these mementos?

Perhaps because I am officially a codger. “I remember when” we used assembly language. Higher level languages (Fortran, Pascal, HP-Basic) properly used line numbers and GOTO’s. The worst was having to program in relay logic for conveyor controls. Yes, diagrams of electro-mechanical circuits as a programming language. I decided to write a program to write the relay logic for me, from a simple set of rules. Had I patented and published that tool, I could’a been well off back then. But I was always writing tools to make my jobs easier.

“I remember when” floppy disks were actually floppy and could store between 140 KB and 360KB, depending on formatting and how new the drive was. Microsoft was a new contender in the systems and languages market for small computers. This code ran on a Hewlett-Packard massive 728 KB RAM 9816 computer using a Motorola processor that ran rings around Intels offerings. I also wrote code for several proprietary industrial and lab boxes that few would have heard of, even back then.

Printouts were either slow, noisy 8-pin dot-matrix, or (as shown here) a fancy, modern thermal printer. Thermal was fast (for the time) and quiet. But it fades, like memory. And the cheaper paper came in rolls instead of fan-fold.

It was an exciting time to be a geek. I eagerly read Byte magazine, and Computer Shopper. The latter was only a hundred pages when I started, and had actual articles and reviews. By the early 1990′s it was closing in on 1,000 pages of ads every month. I did order a 12 MHz 80286 IBM-AT clone with a huge 20 MB hard disk for under $2,000 for the company  in 1987. The Apple Lisa cost more and did less. The more powerful Commodore Amiga was mis-marketed; it could have been a serious third party as Apple and Microsoft rose from the chaos that was the small computer market.

There was no internet, but I had CompuServe. They charged $6/hr and no monthly fee, back then. But modems were only up to 1200 baud (0.00012 MB/s). It was text only.

Actually, the interesting part of the pile is a collection of minutes and memos from board meetings as the company imploded under (what I now recognize as) conflicting styles of mismanagement. Those notes are hilarious, in retrospect. Fresh out of school I learned how to run a start-up into the ground. Although technically a Vice President, I was actually just an engineer; was neutral and safe from the political machinations that chewed up the bosses. As it turned out,  I worked for a couple of months without pay. But it was interesting.

I guess that the object lesson is that I treasure learning experiences. These mementos remind me of my early heyday in that era when computer literati were a small club.

Magical Field

I’ve always been fascinated by the contrast between images and objects, between what you can see and what you can feel. I loved the disconnect of invisible forces and of intangible visions. Today’s object serves to illustrate both mysteries.

Magnet on Fridge casting light and shadow

Magnets have always fascinated me. Their invisible forces are so strong up close, yet fade so fast over distance. I like the way they feel. The way they affect things without any visible connection. The way they -click- together, but pull apart like stiff taffy. This little guy is one of many that I order wholesale from KJMagnetics.com. (If you buy some via my links, I might earn some credit toward my next order.)

Light has also been an active interest of mine. This day I was fascinated by the way the sun hit the side of my fridge and created this marvelous separation of bold beams of dark and light from the apparent poles of this magnet. (Actually,  This odd magnet is magnetized across the diameter; the better to make bracelets and such.)

Vision is so innate to us that most people don’t realize how incredibly complex our internal algorithms are that detect actual objects from the sea of illusions that is the visible world. The mystical world of light. It always amuses me to tease this sense of vision; the better to extend my view. And then to try to share.

I’d had the years of calculus and physics  necessary to understand Maxwell’s Equations (about how radio, magnets, light, electricity, static, and such are related). Contrary to popular belief, understanding the mysteries of nature increases ones appreciation. Mystery for the sake of wonder is another way of saying “ignorance”. With the math-enhanced mind one can see the forces, the vectors, and the field lines involved in holding this nickel-plated, sintered cylinder of neodymium alloy to the fridge, and the related fields of light and shadow reflecting from it. It’s wa-ay cool when you see it that way. Kinda like this comic.

Simpler math (basic integral calculus) shows why magnets stick so hard and pull away so quickly. Dipole forces (like a magnet or an atom) reduce at inverse-cubed rate, as opposed to the inverse-squared rate of light, electric fields, sound, and most other things. Knowing this in no way diminishes my childish delight in feeling the pull, in testing each new magnet, or in levitating neodymium between blocks of bismuth.

And I can’t resist: Electric fields are what keep the magnet from simply sinking into the fridge. Every “solid” object has a vibrating surface of atoms. More precisely, a surface of electron fields. What makes that hard “clack” when you slap hard things together is the electric fields around those surface electrons pushing each other apart, like quadrillions of little springs. But springs that obey the dipole inverse-cubed law of forces, where the radius is half an atom wide (the positive pole is each nucleus and an atom is about 1/10 of a nanometer wide). So it seems like you go from zero to sixty pounds of force in no distance at all. But there is squish on the nano-scale.

Thus my eye catches photons bouncing off of a shiny cylinder on the fridge, and I see those myriad little force fields of which everything is made, and try to illustrate them with a fridge magnet.