[TheForge] The "tick stick."
Bruce .
freemab222 at gmail.com
Sun Dec 15 11:47:12 EST 2019
Mike,
Your list reminds me of a few search axioms, which can be useful around the
home or in the shop:
1. There are *holes in the universe* ("HitU"). These are not
supernatural, but very real. Pull out the bottom drawer in any cabinet,
and you'll find dust, paperclips, combs, and other smallish things that
fell out of the drawers into that the bottom of that cabinet -- a notorious
HitU. Some sofas sport HitU's under cushions, within the side arms, and
even under the springs (above the bottom cloth) and, with all those HitU's,
are notorious for eating coins, keys, popcorn, peanuts, etc., etc. While
knowledge of such HitU's may be useful as you look for a critical item
(like your car keys), there's a grand strategy that works better: Saturate
the HitU's. To do this, obtain multiples of all those cheap but important
items that you hate having to search for, like nail clippers, pocket combs,
even some small shop tools. Store those wherever makes sense to you, and
over time you'll notice their numbers diminish. But if you initially
obtain *enough* of each such object, then an interesting phenomenon
occurs: They will start "falling out" of the HitU's at the same rate that
they fall into them. This is called *a "steady state,"* and, when
achieved, allows you always to find at least one of those fifty or so
pocket combs you bought at the flea market 20 years ago. (I think 50 is
about the right number for pocket combs in a modest-sized house.) The
number you need of each such item to saturate your HitU's is an
imponderable, so it's better to buy more than fewer of any given object.
You *could* simply pay attention to where you put things down and not
need so many, but that discounts the possibility of your being distracted
for a moment, the object falling out of an overstuffed drawer or being
moved by other people or pets, and, most importantly *it takes
considerable mental energy that some of us would prefer to
conserve! *Pencils
are cheap and easily lost, so I probably have at least 200 pencils around
my house and can always find at least a dozen. Dollar Tree now sells
ballpoint pens at 8 for $1, so I have dozens of those as well, in each of
three colors. Sharpie markers are tougher, as they are much pricier and
get used up or dry out, in addition to falling into HitU's -- which they
fall into at least as fast as do pencils. Obviously, the larger the item
in question, the larger the HitU required to conceal it, so you likely
won't need to double up on your major shop tools. I do find it handy to
have two hand drills, however, and wrenches behave like combs and pencils,
so take advantage of flea markets, garage sales, and Harbor Freight to
stock up before you've got one more nut to tighten after hours on a snowy
night when you can't even go borrow one!
2. The above, notwithstanding, *when a tool disappears, it is most
likely to be found in the last place you used it*. (Of course, at my
age, that may be impossible to recall. (We need to combine a glasses cam
with object-recognition software and a database program, so when your one
and only whatchamacallit that you were using five minutes ago disappears,
you can query your smart speaker to learn where it is. Or maybe we can
just pay attention to what we're doing.) However, if you walk through what
you were doing, you can often stumble upon it.
3. If you still can't find your missing thingamajig, call in someone
else to help look. Wives can work well -- their eyes and brains work
differently from ours. (Old male, here.) Lacking a wife, even a friend
who is unfamiliar with what the object is may do better at finding it than
you. This is* the "fresh eyes" trick*. A fellow I know misplaced some
tool some time before I arrived at his shop. He told me what he'd been
looking for and I found it within a couple minutes -- very near to the last
place he used it.
4. And if you cannot immediately call for help when searching for a lost
object, *change your search criteria*. Not long ago I was searching for
a flexible shaft tool that I KNEW was on a particular set of shelves in a
cardboard box. Never found it. Till a week or so later when I was doing
some cleanup and found it in a plastic box on that same set of shelves.
You'll never find a plastic box when looking for a cardboard one. Try
looking for a container of any reasonable size or shape, without regard to
material or color.
5. Finally, *let there be light.* Our eyes adjust so marvelously to
differences in ambient light (unlike cameras, BTW) that we often fail to
realize just how much adequate light maters. Get some of those
sometimes-free-with-coupon No. 25402 ultrabright LED flashlight from
Harbor Freight (a half-dozen my saturate the HitU's, but, hell - I get them
for free!) and USE them when searching for something. It's truly amazing
what you'll see with adequate light that you won't with dim light. I think
the brain simply doesn't register what the eye doesn't adequately resolve.
As to the citric acid titration curve, look it up on Google images. The
trick seems to be that in a polyprotic acid, or in a mixture of different
acids, if you happen to get a series where the pKa's are roughly 1.5 pH
units apart (which is the case for citric), then the titration curve is
roughly linear. This is incredibly useful when experimenting with the pH
of media -- as I was for pH of HPLC eluents. It becomes possible to set up
an acid source and a base source and have the automated instrument mix them
in different proportions for different chromatograms, and from the percent
of each used, you can closely calculate the pH of the resulting eluent.
The alternative to this is to individually adjust pH for a series of
eluents -- a much more tedious and time-consuming approach. Of course,
when you do determine what pH works best for your chromatography, you then
must confirm this with an eluent prepared from scratch, pH adjusted and
known exactly.
Bruce
NJ
On Sun, Dec 15, 2019 at 12:57 AM Mike Spencer <mspencer at tallships.ca> wrote:
>
> Bruce wrote:
>
> > ...while I was inventing dirt.
>
> Hey! I think I remember the invention of dirt! Was that you and
> Frosty? Gosh.
>
> > Other tricks? Worth hashing out:
> >
> > When reassembling anything,...
>
> I was in my local electric motor shop recently, awaiting diagnosis of
> genset failure. This shop does motors that have to be unloaded with a
> bridge crane and/or are so old that they have to make the parts. I'm
> totally ignorant of their kind of magic but the guys there have the
> right attitude to make me feel at home.
>
> So I was swapping small talk with a guy who had some parts off a
> (guessing) 20 HP motor. He was taking photos. "Just like to have
> photos of your good sork to show the grandkids?" Nah, they photograph
> every step of disassembly of everything, small parts included in the
> frame. Helps to avoid spending hours bolting something up only to
> notice that this-here widget should have gone *inside* or that
> internal chunk there is upside down.
>
> > Right now, the only other tricks I can think of are related to my
> > field -- analytical chemistry. I don't suppose anyone else would be
> > interested that citric acid gives a linear titration "curve", rather
> > than the more usual sigmoidal ones?
>
> Actually, I *do* find that interesting. I, too, am a retired
> biochemist. The big difference, however, is that I retired after one
> year of actually doing it. I built a molecular sieve column with a
> total volume of 50 micro-liters to separate proteins, built paper and
> gel electrophoresis gear from junk, aimed at analyzing 1 micro-liter
> samples of perilymph. (Yes, it all worked.)
>
> But the cockroaches crawling around my infant boys' cribs (only a
> couple or three blocks away from the Kennedy pied a terre on Beacon
> Hill) triggered a move. A few years learning to be a mechanic and
> getting infected with blacksmithing led to homesteading here and
> eventually a blacksmith shop. [1]
>
> So I could be said to have retired at 27 (shortly after the invention
> of dirt). But I still find the thing about citric acid interesting.
>
> For those readers here who are unfamiliar with the importance of
> curves, linear & sigmoid inter alia, they're the things you use to get
> a PhD. Frivolous science lesson on the subject appended. :-)
>
> - Mike
>
> [1] http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/temp/shed.html
> --------------------------------------------------------
>
> Want a PhD and don't know where to begin? Here's a starter outline:
>
> 1. Everything is normally distributed (The Bell Curve)
>
> 2. Everything is sigmoid (Diminishing returns)
>
> 3. Everything is sinusoidal (Goes in cycles)
>
> 5. Everything is stochastic (Completely random and unpredictable)
>
> 6. Everything is fractal (It's turtles all the way down)
>
> 7. Everything is chaotic (Deterministic but unpredictable)
>
> 8. Everything is a metaphor (The PostModernist option, for the
> math challenged)
>
>
> None of these universals is true, of course, but you can write a nice
> academic paper on almost anything assuming one of them and then
> demonstrating that the assumption is or is not justified. If you can't
> spin a PhD thesis out of one of these, you may need to invoke:
>
> 9. Shit happens (The Dada, holistic, artistic option)
>
>
> --
> Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
> /V\
> mspencer at tallships.ca /( )\
> http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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