Electrical theory: Basic, the fluid analogy and V = I x R

The easiest way to understand basic electrical theory is to consider the flow of electricity through a wire as being like a fluid flowing through a pipe.

We will consider two reservoirs connected by a pipe with one reservoir being higher from the ground than the other, and a pipe connecting them.

Battery analogy: Fluid moving between reservoirs through a pipe, forced by gravity.

What happens in this situation should be obvious. The fluid will flow until there is no fluid in the top reservoir above the level of the outflow pipe. Flow will be fast at first and close to the end flow will be slow.

The maximum flow will be determined by the diameter of the pipe

Almost the exact same things are observed for a battery.

If we consider pressure the fluid exerts on the pipe it is similar to voltage in an electrical system.

V  measured in Volts    [Joules per Coulomb]

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The  flow of the fluid in the pipe is similar to the current in an electrical system.

I  measured in Amps  [Coulombs per second]

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The diameter of the pipe is similar to resistance in an electrical system.

R measured in Ohms Ω  [Joule seconds per Coulomb squared]

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The total quantity of fluid in the system is similar to total charge in an electrical system.

C measured in Coulombs [ 1 Coulomb = 6.24150965 ×10¹⁸ electrons]

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This brings us to Ohms law, the most basic law of electronics:

V = I x R

Voltage is equal to current multiplied by resistance.

Warning: The diagram shows a battery in whats called short circuit configuration. short circuits should be avoided as they can lead to dangerous destruction of the battery.

<more to come>

Dollar stores and similar retailers

Businesses fail for a variety of reasons many of which are not related to the quality of the products or the price they are sold at.

A good example was the enormous real estate collapse in Japan in the 90’s. Many good business and hard working people simply ‘went to the wall’.

Went to the wall:  destroyed, ruination.

I would say bankrupt, but many Japanese people consider bankruptcy a terribly shameful status and simply refused to declare bankruptcy.

So in the aftermath of this economic collapse huge quantities of goods were at a price to high to sell and people had too little money.

Eventually the idea of the 100 Yen store originated buying up old stock from businesses in trouble and selling it at  the standard price of 100 Yen, about 1 US dollar at the time.

This moved the stock in the short term and in the long term started a new business concept for Japan. Later on these 1oo Yen stores and their mimics began importing their products from lower wage economies to keep their prices down.

<discussion of economics effects of this>

So just because a product is in a dollar store it does not mean its fatally flawed in some way. It’s possibly slightly obsolete or maybe the product was over produced.

You should always keep your mind open and check for quality however. It’s good to have a person how knows about the type of product to see if there is a problem with it.

Generally I would not buy electronics from dollar stores as a fatal flaw can be very well hidden, though electrical and data cables and connectors seem to be of good enough quality.

The dollar store can also be a source of items for crafting other items.

Another good reason for going to a dollar store is to see if there are substitutes to things you already buy that can be gotten even cheaper.

Perhaps another reason is to do a ‘why did this product not sell’ investigation.

Scram bag : Potasuim permanganate ( KMnO4 )

Potassium permanganate crystals.

A very useful substance.

Also called Condy’s crystals and Permanganate of potash.

Can be used to:

Light fires.

Add to a flammable substance that is a liquid, glycerine, oil,fat, a little water will help the fire start.

Sterilize water.

3 crystals per liter of water will sterilize the water.

Disinfectant for some skin infections.

A stronger solution will make a solution that will attack fungal and bacterial infections.

Keep in a well sealed container

Keep away from eyes

If contact is made with skin wash it off with water, brown stains (MnO2) on the skin are common, but will disappear in a few days without further incident.

can be purchased from pharmacies and often found in survival kits.

Geometry: the hidden source of patterns

This is not meant to be an introduction to geometry, more  of an introduction to the concept using basic tools.

Didi you ever wonder how Europeans made  ‘heater’ shields that exact, distinct shape?

I stumbled into this the other day. It seems there’s a simple geometric pattern that can be made with basic tools.

No ruler required. no need to worry about inches or cubits.

Shape of a shield defined. 3 squares side ‘A’ along the top,and a radius 3 times the length of 3*A from the bottom corners.

All you need is to make a square using a single arbitrary length, and then to make a radius 3 times longer perhaps with a string.

Perhaps not the most useful item in this day and age, but the concept is that you can make a complex pattern simple if you understand the simple rules in the pattern.

Look for the simple pattern, its probably there.

People, Networks, Databases and Fascism

A strange series of ideas to be a topic.

The database is a method of  recording, storing, sorting and retrieving information.

Back in the old physical-analogue world we had libraries and drawers filled with card indexes. For anyone that used that system, it was a slow process to find what you were looking for, and took a significant level of skill and labour to use and maintain.

But then came the innovation, a machine to automate some, and then eventually almost all of the process of the database. The first database was used for census purposes, innocent enough on the surface. Then Germany had a census in 1933. The company that made the first electromechanical database eventually was bought by the founder of IBM, their client was Nazi Germany. The Nazis needed a way to keep track of all possible opposition to their regime and exactly who was already dead or in prison. Not much point in sending thugs to a house of a man who was already executed and buried anonymously in a mass grave.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

So the Nazis needed to uniquely number people who could be trouble.

ID tattoo on the arm of a suspected dissenter who survived Auschwitz, Nazi Germany. Fascism is not subtle if you know what clues to look for.

So not only were the dissenters numbered, so where the prisons, the supposed type of dissent, in short everything was number for the database. To a machine everything is just a number, in a cold , clinical, unfeeling, morally vacuous way.

After this happened, the second world war started, and 5 years later ended. The surviving fascists deemed useful were absorbed by the fascist victors (operation paperclip) and the surviving dissenters ran as far as they could. Many survivors of prison camps were really serious about getting as far away as possible, and Melbourne, Australia (about as far as you can get from Germany) became home to one of the highest number of survivors of this period of fascism. Not surprisingly many of the ethnic and religious groups with historical roots to Germany of the 1930’s are quite evasive about census questions, or even refuse to reply to such requests for information.

So in short fascists love databases, it helps them feel in control, and it does give them some level of control when they attempt to crush dissent. The less databases your name and details are on, the safer you are from fascists.

The Database Join

This brings us to a subtle database concept: ‘the join’.

The join allows different databases to be used together and a more detailed picture can emerge. Imagine we start with a list of first names and next to each name is their favorite fruit. Next we have a separate database with fruits and the color of the fruit next to it. So then by joining these databases together on the common column of ‘fruit’, we would than have ‘name’, ‘fruit’ and ‘color’. Nothing sinister so far but as you can see the join allows the database to become more expansive, and offer even more related data.

In some countries joining government databases together is illegal, as it is too much of an invasion of privacy. What business is it of the government to know which fruit you like (or any other matter) ?

Data relationships

Before joining a database to another database, the technician must consider an important technical consideration: data relationships.

The database join visualized.

For the above example I will explain

One to One :John like apples only

One to Many :John likes apples and bananas and oranges

Many to One: John and Jane like  apples

Many to many: John and Jane like apples and bananas

Only the ‘One to Many’ and ‘One to One’ relationships can be easily modeled  in a database, and most fascists prefer systems that match that kind of data relationship.

The many to one relationship is really just a one to many relationship looked at from another direction, and is not too difficult to model in a database.

The many to many relationship is almost impossible to model in a conventional database and fascists really hate anything that looks like this as they cant control it.

Natural networks getting stronger or weaker.

A fascist is like a puppet master, many strings connect for the limbs of the puppet to his/her one hand. A ‘One to Many’ relationship and control is almost absolute.  The puppets under the puppet master could have their own puppets but in terms of the fascist puppet master the relationship is still one to many via the join of the initial puppet. But if additional strings were added between the existing strings, control of the puppets and its limbs would be lost and the puppet would be out of control. The fascist may be a puppet controlled by another puppet master.

The resulting arrangement of a healthy ‘Many to Many’ network would be like a web made by a drunken spider. It is a good  network. If you are reading this it means you are connected to a network, even if it is printed out and far from electricity and any for of connectivity that’s where it has come from. The internet is now everywhere, in  remote parts of Africa, emails and webpages are printed out and carried far into jungles for people to read. The internet was designed to be a destruction proof network, a central system simply couldn’t survive as there was one point of vulnerability which would collapse the entire system, the center.
This illustrates fascism’s weakness, once the center is gone fascism fails. in a network this is no center, no central point of catastrophic failure.

The ‘Many to Many’ relationship is the safest because it is outside of the control of the fascist puppet masters. There is no center, there is no single string to pull, no armchair control strategy, it’s simply too complex to control.

Fascists always wants centralization because it leads to central control which is fascist control.

Central banks, central planning, central control, ever wonder who is at the center?

Be independent, form you own connections with people, make up you own mind and resist all forms of centralization.

An example of a dangerous network to join.

http://map.occupy.net/

Fascists or their puppets trying to create a database of dissenters, whats next?

No serious activist or dissenter would join a mysterious database.

Pinocchio. He was a puppet until he stopped telling lies, then he became a real little boy. Subtle message in a children’s story.

<more to come>

Social parasites are as old as social organisation itself.

People are not the first creatures to create complex hierarchical societies, the termites and ant were doing it millions of years before us.

In fact Ants specifically have attempted almost every type of society we can think of: scavenging, farming, livestock, war, slavers, nomadic, subsistence etc.

Because of their flexibility and adaptability they have been very successful and are found everywhere except Antarctica.

Because of their successes, other creatures (the social parasites) have adapted many ways to effectively live off the ants.

Some disguise themselves visually as ants, some are expert on producing the colony identification smell to be accepted, some are even other species of ants.

But one parasite stands out as truly remarkable: the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus (first identified in 1865).

It was originally  thought this fungus was  unique, but as of 2011, 3 similar fungi more have been discovered.

Most ants are largely immune to attack by fungi because they produce a toxin called 2-phenylacetic acid, which kills most fungi and bacteria. They spread this ‘disinfectant’ as they walk around.

How ever leaf cutter ants (Atta) don’t produce this chemical disinfectant because they are fungus farmers. They don’t actually eat the leaves they cut and carry, they feed the leaves to a mound of cultivated fungus in their nest and then eat parts of the fungus. It is similar to the way people make cheese by collecting milk.

So ant of the order ‘Atta’ are vulnerable to fungal infection.

Here’s how the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infection life cycle occurs.

An ant makes contact with a fungal spore which enters the ants body.       ( infection / infiltration)

The spore releases chemicals in the ants body to take over its behavior.       ( take over the brain and control actions)

The ant then attempts to climb somewhere high into a leaf or twig.        ( take a prominent position)

The ant then make a death grip bite onto the leaf or twig it is standing on.      ( paralyze the host with a death grip )

The ant then starves to death while the fungus grows larger inside the ants body.      ( slowly kill the host, while growing larger )

The fungus grows so large it bursts out of the ant body with huge chitin horns.     (out grow the host)

Often them the fungus anchors the ants body to the leaf or twin it is on.      (cement dead host in place as a vehicle for propagation)

The fungal horns then produce fruiting bodies which then produce and release spores falling onto other ants.     (propagation)

Cycle repeats

Ant killed my brain controlling parasitic fungus. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis http://gingerdead.com/2011/05/04/parasitic-fungus/

There are parasites in social and political groups that operate the same way as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus acts towards ants.

Degrees minutes and seconds: human time and distance scale

It helps to have a tangible reference point when talking about degrees minutes and seconds.

If you plan journey using degrees minutes and seconds these are the real world parameters.

1 degree of an arc is = 60 Nautical miles = 69 Statute miles = 111.12 Kilometers

About 4-5 days walking at a typical speed on roads.

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1 minute of an arc = 1 nautical mile = 6076 feet = 1.15 statute miles  = 1.852 kilometers

About 20 minutes of time walking at a typical speed on roads.

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1 second of an arc is therefore 101.2666 feet  = 101 + 4/15  feet =  101 feet 3.2 inches = 33.755 yards  = 30.866 meters

20 to 30 seconds of time walking.

The size of a large house.

I did try to compare this distance to a football/soccer field. but even that is not standardized, if the most widely played sport has no standardized  field size, it explains why we are in the mess we are currently in.

Rocketstove: Making one from metal Olive oil container

For the last few months I have have comments turned off. There was a lot to say and I didn’t want distraction. But don’t think that meant I wasn’t listening to you. I pay attention to what people read and what search terms lead them here.

Rocket stoves have been a popular search item so its time to give you even more information.

I’m going to make one. I’m starting with a 13kg Olive oil can and I’ll have photos for all the relevant steps and a boil time test.

13 Kg olive oil can.  31 pounds in weight

The starting material a large Olive oil can. restaurants and other food businesses throw these away quite regularly, so that’s a good place to start looking if you don’t usually buy oil in this size container.

It’s convenient that there is a large round hole in the center of the top so I wont need to cut one there. Somewhere in the purple band is where I will cut a hole for the pipe which will be the elbow bend pipe.

There is a small handle on the front which i will probably keep as it will be useful for carrying the stove if I need to move it. i think the handle will be better at the front rather than the back as it will stop the ashes falling out for the bottom of the elbow.

 

The next step will be using sand paper to remove the paint from the can. If the paint is left on the can, it will burn and produce unpleasant and possibly toxic fumes.

 

<more to come>

Scrambag: folding pruning saw

Apart from the obvious intended use of pruning trees, the compact folding pruning saw allows you to collect small branches easily.

A saw is safer to use that a axe or heavy knife in cutting wood. One of the most common sources of dry wood in a forest is dead-fall.

Dead-fall is dead or broken branches fallen to the ground, and are often very dry and difficult to cut will axes as the will act like a spring when hit.

Sometimes dead-fall is a branch upside down and very dry, because of this it makes excellent fire wood or construction material.

The saw can elegantly cut of the exact pieces you want and even help you create items form the wood with precise cut lengths and flat ends of wood.

The saw is also very light compared to a small axe and very small, about the size of a small axe handle.

Folding pruning saw, compact and allows straight cuts in wood with little effort.

 

Price about $10 for average quality.

Available from hardware stores and gardening supply stores.

Fire: Swedish fire torch

This is a really neat technique of conserving wood and getting a fire going fast and making a stable cooking platform. You will need an axe and a saw to shape the wood block, but it looks worth it.

I just had another thought, all the things are familiar but arranged in a different way and its suddenly so much better, what a concept.