Chinese ASAT

The people where I work seem to be unduly worried about the recent Chinese ASAT (anti-satellite) test. Well, not all of them. Not even most of them. Most of them don't even think about it at all, but those who mention it seem to drape it in cloaks of elaborate Maoist horror, as though they fully expect the faceless Commie hordes to come marching over the horizon at any moment.

The truth is that intercepting a satellite isn't especially difficult. If a country has the basic technology required to launch a satellite in the first place, it has all the technology it needs to intercept a satellite. Both the Soviet Union and the United States demonstrated that they could intercept satellites back in the 1980s, and both stopped doing so after a few tests because the tests tended to litter the heavens with tens of thousands of fragments of the sacrificial satellites.

In principle any spacefaring nation could intercept a satellite if it wanted to. The list of spacefaring nations includes the United States, Russia, Ukraine, the European Union, Japan, Israel, Brazil, India, and China. Even North Korea claims to have launched its own satellite, and Iran recently announced plans to launch its own satellite. Once you've got a booster that can put a payload in orbit, you've got about 90% of what you need to intercept a satellite.

Now, the Chinese test was of the so-called direct ascent type and not the simpler co-orbital type. A direct-ascent kill is harder to pull off than a co-orbital kill because you need a booster of higher performance and you need some sort of fairly precise terminal guidance system. But even so, it's not that hard. You could buy pretty much everything you need off the shelf, from booster to infrared sensor, and there are even websites where you can get the orbital elements of pretty much any satellite you're interested in so you can predict its position in the future.

So I view the successful Chinese test as a notable technical achievement, but nothing that is new or revolutionary or even all that threatening. It would have been much more threatening if we had not known about the test - if the Chinese had been able to kill the satellite without us knowing they had done it. Anyone with a big booster can kill a satellite in a messy and destructive way, but the true test of sophistication is being able to kill a satellite quietly, cleanly, and in such a way that it looks like the satellite just died on its own. And that would scare me - but of course, I wouldn't know, so it wouldn't scare me.

Groggus Maximus

Certain things just don't make sense to me before my first cup of coffee in the morning. Or sometimes even after my first cup of coffee, but never mind that for now.

I logged on to AOL this morning to adjust our satellite TV account. We had grown weary of what we came to call the "Bruce Willis Channel" - that would be Starz, with its literally endless repeats of Armageddon, Mercury Rising and selections from the Die Hard family of movies. Does Bruce Willis own Starz? Or have I not been paying attention and somehow 85% of all movies ever made now star Bruce Willis? Not that I dislike Bruce Willis; I just don't want to watch Armageddon every night. Or any night. Once was enough.

But that's not the point. The point is that I logged on to AOL to adjust our satellite TV package to add HBO. I have a deep and apparently bottomless curiosity about Rome, and I confess the idea of watching the HBO series "Rome" appealed to me. And the idea of watching movies other than Armageddon also appealed to me. So we picked HBO, which combines new movies and "Rome", and thus are all plants watered.

And as usually happens, I got drawn into the pop cultural train wreck that is AOL's welcome screen. I regard the "lifestyle" and "entertainment" tabs on the AOL screen to be two somethings of the apocalypse. Maybe not two actual horsemen of the apocalypse, but maybe two stable boys of the apocalypse, or two mounting blocks of the apocalypse. The apocalypse aint here, but when you read the lifestyle and entertainment tabs, you can sort of see it coming.

So this morning I was nostril-deep in my coffee reading these press releases from the outer circles of trivial celebrity hell and saw something called "Natural Beauty", where AOL proposes to reveal its top ten picks for women who possess natural beauty and don't require "four hours in a makeup chair". Like a moth drawn to the headlights of a speeding Kenworth, I clicked on this story.

Ugh. My point isn't that the women listed in the article weren't beautiful. And I have no personal point of view on the great makeup-vs-no makeup argument. I don't dispute the fact that some women are naturally beautiful (and I might even go further and argue that most are naturally beautiful).

Here's what confused me. These ten women who are supposed to be exemplars of natural beauty who didn't need four hours of prep work to look good had all been subjected to four hours of prep work! Some of the photo captions even listed the makeup and hair artists who had done the work! So we can't even be sure that the women AOL listed really were naturally beautiful. We just have to take their word for it.

I think I need more coffee. A lot more coffee.

Insomnium

I recently discovered a particularly good death metal band. I like using the word "discovered". It makes me feel like I was feeling my way through a long-dead Egyptian tomb beneath some eroded pyramid and found Insomium lying there in the dust. I also like the phrase "particularly good" because it's the kind of sweeping overgeneralization I generally dislike.

So let me rephrase. I recently happened to hear of a death metal band named Insomnium that I happen to like an awful lot. Better?

Thus far they've released three albums - "In The Halls Of Awaiting", "Since The Day It All Came Down", and "Above The Weeping World." The band does not get particularly high marks on www.bnr.com, which it describes as (and this is not a direct quote) good but not highly original. And maybe that's true, but there's something about this band's style that appeals to me very much.

Their first album, "In The Halls Of Awaiting", seems to me to be pretty deeply influenced by Swedish melodic death metal of the Gothenburg type. The album brings to mind Dark Tranquility or In Flames, depending on the song, but even then, the approach isn't straight imitation. For one thing, Insomnium's lyrics make sense to me, after a fashion. I enjoy Dark Tranquility a great deal, but when I look up their lyrics on www.darklyrics.com, the words still make no sense to me. Insomnium's lyrics are considerably more poetic, though since they are probably translated from Finnish there are places where the lyric flow gets a little lost. Plus one hears here and there on the album doom metal influences - it is in places much slower and more somber than conventional death metal, and there is thankfully next to none of that Florida school drum-pounding business.

Their second album, "The Day It All Came Down", is even better. The Gothenburg death metal influence is still there, but the doom metal influence is much stronger. The pace is slower, the mood is more somber, and the lyrics continue to be epic and poetic. "The Daughter Of The Moon" is particularly good, half death metal and half doom metal and all good. The parts with the slow whispered lyrics send chills down my spine. Some of the songs show more Gothenburg influence and others show more doom influence, but taken as a whole, the album is an excellent listen, somber and atmospheric without being sappy.

I haven't heard their third album all the way through yet, so I have to withhold comment, but what I've heard so far sounds pretty good, the same nice mix of melodic death and doom, stylistically similar to the second album, and just as polished.

There are certain tropes in death metal that fatigue me. One is the "brutality arms race" where the quality of the music is apparently proportional to the brutality of the lyrics. Though is is mostly a feature of American death metal, the Scandinavians aren't above this sort of thing either. (And let's face it, Scandinavia is the real home of death metal). I shall cite as my example Dismember, which isn't bad musically. It sounds like grindcore filtered through Carcass, with the same characteristic guitar sound that is sometimes called the "electric saw". But the lyrics! If songs like "Skin Her Alive" or "Sickening Art" don't unsettle you, you just aren't paying attention. They're brutal for the sake of being brutal, though cynics could argue that since the vocals are indecipherable anyway, they might as well be using a grocery list for lyrics. There are worse examples, but the point is that some bands seem to be brutal and disgusting just for the sake of being brutal and disgusting, an arms race of tastelessness that after a while I grow weary of (though I should point out there are bands that as a matter of deliberate practice parody this tendency by being outrageously, heroically tacky).

The other main trope is Satanism, often ridiculously over-the-top Satanism that is clearly intended to sell albums to self-hating teenagers who think Satanism will provide answers to questions like "How come nobody likes me?" This is such a defining trait of black metal that you almost can't have black metal that doesn't mention Satanism in some way, but it also exists in some forms of death metal, most notably the stuff that comes out of Florida (and yes, I'm thinking of Deicide).* I grow weary of this sort of nonsense pretty quickly, and no, it isn't because the Satanic point of view shakes my beliefs - it takes more than tattooing an upside-down crucifix on your forehead to "challenge my beliefs". I'm just readily fatigued by the way they use Satanism as a crass marketing tool. This is why I don't listen to Deicide or black metal acts like Dimmu Borgir, because the shameless exploitation of their ingrained Satanism just wears me down.

It is against this background that I find Insomnium especially pleasing. It's extreme metal, make no mistake, but extreme metal of unusual musical sophistication and highly unusual lyrical taste. Instead of extolling the dubious virtues of brutality, violence and schlock blasphemy, Insomnium is much more subtle. The prevailing mood is somber rather than violent, with most of the songs being about loss, longing and regret rather than hacking people apart with medical instruments or sacrificing black chickens to Satan. The mix of death metal and doom metal is very sophisticated and atmospheric, and I frankly can't get enough of it. It isn't uplifting music that makes one want to dance and sing the way Bowling For Soup does. (Yes, my droogies, I like Bowling For Soup a lot too.) But as a slice of atmospheric, somber, and very advanced and sophisticated doom/death metal, Insomnium seems pretty hard to beat.

(I have to be careful with terms like "doomdeath metal" because there is already a class of music known as doomdeath, which includes bands like My Dying Bride. Insomnium isn't as doomy as doomdeath metal, but it isn't as deathy as death metal. So what is it? It's good, that's what it is!)

*There is a genre of black metal, usually from Norwegian bands, that is anti-Christian but not Satanic. This genre is sometimes called "Viking metal" because it isn't clear that it can be black metal without being Satanic.

Torpedo Boat Flotilla

Here's a bad picture of my fleet of 1/72nd scale torpedo boats. Why not?

The long grey one in the foreground is a German S-100. Behind it is a Lindberg "Coast Guard patrol boat", whatever that means. Aft of the S-100 is a Revell PT-109, and behind the PT-109 is an Airfix Vosper MBT.

The PT-109 is an old Revell kit. It's been around for a long time, and the molds seem to be deteriorating. The crew figures are misshapen and mutant, and thin parts like the propeller shafts and 20mm gun barrel are almost unusable. Flash and mold misalignment plague most of the other small parts. I replaced the shafts with wire, but managed to make the screws, depression railings, .5o-caliber guns and other small parts work. I added a 37mm deck gun from White Ensign Models, which curiously enough was harder to assemble than the PT-109 in the first place. I don't know what White Ensign uses for its "white metal parts", but they seem particularly immune to super glue. Most of the itme I spent on the model was spent improving the torpedo tubes - removing the seams and scratchbuilding representations of the loading hatches. When I do this kit again (as surely I will) I intend to model a boat from later in the war, with a 40mm Bofors, 37mm automatic cannon, lightweight torpedoes and torpedo racks, and masthead radar.

The Airfix MBT is a surprisingly nice kit, a bit unconvential in terms of engineering but it builts up into a pleasingly cluttered and detail-rich model. The crew figures are good, though the twin 20mm guns are not great. Beats me how the magazines attach to the guns! I faked it, and it looks okay from a distance, but my solution is not correct.

The Lindberg patrol boat is also surprisingly nice. It came with hardware so it could be battery-powered, but I left that out. The main problem with the kit is that I can't find any references for it. I have no idea what kind of boat it is. The 20mm guns are also dreadful; I replaced them with a single 20mm Oerlikon from an old PT-109 kit.

The Revell S-100 is the most modern of the four, and is a very nice kit, well-detailed, well-engineered and nice-fitting with a couple of exceptions. One is that the screws take a lot of work to make them look decent, and even then they don't match the real screws. Another is that the 37mm gun is dreadful. And the last is that the kit comes with no crew figures. I bought a set of Revell vinyl Kriegsmarine crew figures and I'll eventually paint a few for the S-100 (and for the Type-VIIC U-boat that I haven't started yet) but for now, the kit is devoid of crew. And what's up with that misshapen jaguar on the decal sheet?

Pay no attention to the collection of 1/70oth scale battleships!

The Second Tractor

This is my second tractor, a 1956 Ford 850. It is closely related to but slightly larger than the more common 8N and 9N tractors, but it has a five-speed transmission with a "Christmas Tree" shifter instead of the four-speed found in N-series tractors. It has been nicely restored, with the only major problems from a restoration point of view being a non-stock seat, no decals, and no headlights. It was my Christmas present. Shortly before Christmas we saw it on the side of the road for sale, and we stopped and bought it. We probably paid a little bit too much for it, but the price we paid wasn't outrageous by any means.

Why a 1956 Ford 850? Nostalgia, mainly. I like vintage equipment, and it reminded me of the 9N that my grandfather had, and I think it was a certain visual appeal compared to the hyper-modern hydrostatic fully-loaded "compact tractors" some of my neighbors have. And I could hitch my $4,000 Ford 850 to my neighbor's $20,000 New Holland "compact" and tow the New Holland backwards for as long as I wanted to. One of the problems one faces when buying vintage tractors is the dread spectre of the "proprietary hitch". But with a Ford, this isn't a problem. The Ferguson-Ford hitch arrangement became the standard type, so any modern category-one three point implement should hitch right up, unlike the case with other vintage tractors, where a certain amount of adaptation is sometimes necessary. I'm not sure if the Ford's PTO output is standard, but since I don't have any PTO attachments, it's irrelevant for now. (And, frankly, a lot of PTO attachments kind of scare me anyway.)

It came with the blade as shown above, but it was rusted to the point it wouldn't pivot. Some persuasion with Liquid Wrench, a long 4x4 and my largest hammer broke it loose, though, and now I can pivot the blade just by leaning on it. I want to find a one-bottom plow or hardpan breaker for it now - the tractor is shown sitting on the spot that will one day be our garden, but I currently have no implements that will break up the hard desert soil.

It starts easily and runs well. It is quiet. It is also fast in fifth gear. The only leak is a tiny bit of seepage from the front main seal. The hydraulics, transmission and differential are tight and leak-free. The clutch doesn't grab or chatter. When I first got it, the right brake hardly worked at all, but fixing it was a simple matter of adjustment. When I first got it, it steered fairly hard to the left, but after pumping a bunch of grease into the front end it works much better. There are a couple of cracks where the top link attaches to the draft control linkage, but I can weld those. And the hood is difficult to latch because I think it's slightly misaligned.

I'm very pleased with it. It isn't as handy as my lawn tractor, but it'll do work that my lawn tractor won't. I've moved quite a bit of dirt with it already, mostly building a flood control berm along the north and west sides of our property, and I've used it to fix our private haul road and to build a private horse cart path around the back of our property. And sometimes, I confess, I start it up and fiddle with it just because it's fun. My two tractors work pretty well together. The Ford breaks up, moves and positions the dirt; and the Bolens does the final grading.

I've ordered some stuff for it. I ordered three generic 12-volt headlights (the tractor is already a 12-volt system with an alternator) so I can mount two on the front and one at the rear as a work light. My wife ordered me the user's manual, shop manual and parts manual (that's how I knew how to adjust the brakes!).

Now I just need a plow. And a box scraper. And forklift blades. And a post-hole digger. And a PTO tiller. And a three-point hitch disk. And... And...

The First Tractor

This is my first tractor. Yeah, I know, it's a lawn tractor, and worse yet, an $800 chain store tractor. Not even a good lawn tractor, you sniff dismissively. But I have to say, this tractor has given us superb service. All I've ever had to do to it is change the oil, clean the air filter, put gas in it, and fix flat tires.

It's just your basic 15.5-horsepower Bolens, and I originally bought it because my property was seriously overgrown with dead grass and weeds that posed a serious grassfire risk. So I bought this thing and proceeded to mow brush for about a week. It would have been faster to use a real tractor and a brush mower, but not being able to afford a real tractor and a brush mower, I used this. And I used it hard too, mowing brush and weeds three or four feet tall on rolling and uneven ground, and other than getting stuck a time or two, the tractor never quit. I had to fix five or six flat tires (mesquite thorns go right through the thin "Turf-Saver" tires) but then I put a tube of green Slime in each tire and the problem with flats went away.

Then I bought one of those cheap $60 stamped-metal assemble-it-yourself wagons for it, and I've used it as a motorized wheelbarrow for about two years. And I've used it a lot. I've moved tons and tons of dirt and gravel, scrap iron, manure, furniture, rocks and brush with it. The original paper-thin tires lasted about six months, then they sprang hundreds of spontaneous leaks. I covered the tires with soapy water to find out where they were leaking, and there were so many leaks the tires looked like they were foaming. So I ordered a set of beefy, muscular hand truck tires from Northern Tool and managed, through the proper employment of words I wouldn't want my kids to say, to get them forced onto the rims and got them to inflate. Since then, the cart had put in many a hard day of work with no complaints at all.

I realized I could drop the mower deck to its lowest position and use it as a grader. My neighbors think I'm mowing dirt, but I'm actually grading with the blades disengaged. It works really surprisingly well, so long as the dirt is soft, but a few passes with the deck and the dirt is smooth and level and nicely graded.

My son left a bunch of scrap iron with me after he quit working for a metal fabrication shop, and I built the blade shown in the picture out of those scraps. That was about a year ago, and time and use revealed certain weaknesses in my design and my welding technique. I fixed the weak welds, added a few gussets where necessary, and changed the design of the hand-powered lifting lever. Then I covered it with red spray paint so it wouldn't look quite so much like Depression-era junk. It may look cheesy, and it certainly won't dig in hard ground, but it's excellent for cleaning stalls, spreading soft dirt and gravel, and skimming big rocks off the ground. The tractor pulls it without any problem, and will pull it even when the blade is overflowing. And it doesn't interfere with the normal trailer hitch, so I don't have to unbolt anything to switch from the blade to the trailer - I just pull out a piece of pipe that serves as the blade's hinge pin, and it drops right off. I can dismount the blade without even getting off the tractor.

It is also handy, because it will fit through standard equestrian gates and will turn in a relatively short radius, making it highly useful in stalls and tight areas.

Also visible in one of the pictures is a mount I made for a dozer blade, which I also made. The dozer blade proved to be relatively unsuccessful. The geometry of the mount is such that it tends to lift the front wheels of the tractor off the ground, plus when pushing things the nose of the tractor makes ominous creaking noises. So I discontinued use of the dozer blade, but the rear box scraper remains in frequent use.

My point, and I guess I have one, is that I am very pleased with my chain store lawn tractor. It is about three years old now and it has proved to be very reliable, other than a burned-out headlight, and it starts every time. My future plans for the tractor are mostly related to tires. I want to order tougher, burlier tires for it from Northern Tool, and since I'm not worried about saving my turf, I'm going to see if I can find rear tires with lugs. It doesn't need the additional traction; I just think it would look boss. And I have vague notions of building a genuine midships grader blade, with adjustable sweep angle, that uses the stock mower deck mounting points and height adjustment mechanism. Why? Because it would be boss!

If I have any complaint with the tractor at all, it is this. I lost the plastic trough you're supposed to use when you drain the oil, and without it, the tractor kind of makes a mess of itself when you remove the oil drain plug. I think I can live with that.