At least they know a good design when they see it

At Barnes and Noble, Coronado Center, ABQ last week, this cover art jumped out at me:

It's a magazine that appears to have the production values and artistic sense of Wired, but concentrates on "doing good." Have a look for yourself, by all means.

From the article:

The problem is that “good design” didn’t look much beyond the object itself. An AK-47 rifle, for example, makes use of sound and appropriate materials and it demonstrates other criteria of good design, such as solid workmanship, efficiency, and suitability of purpose . . . the AK-47 is a classic in the annals of good design (it also happens to be most popular firearm in the world). But the question then is: good for what and for whom?

Well dammit, design shouldn't look beyond the object itself. The object serves a purpose. People give purposes to things.

People give purpose to themselves, or they glide through life without purpose at all. Which is the more destructive? This includes the devout, who no doubt will claim that a purpose was given them by the Savior---for purposes of this post, I consider them to have sought and chosen their purposes.

The Kalashnikov rifle is designed to do a given thing, and its design must be evaluated in terms of how well it does that thing. Good's writers understand and agree that it did indeed fulfill its purpose well. They merely disagree with that purpose.

From the X-ray, I can't tell whether they have an AK-47 or an AKM. I don't see rivets, I don't see the outline or the meat of the rear trunnion for the under folder. No cleaning rod running through the forearm, where an X-ray would show it starkly in contrast to the wood or polymer forearm, and the steel insert in the forearm's barrel channel. The pistol grip shows as much density as the thin walls of the receiver or the solid chunk of the front trunnion.

I'd put a Starbucks venti on the notion that this art isn't an X-ray photograph at all, but an artist's rendering of an AK from a field-stripped parts diagram, massaged to look like an X-ray, to suggest that they've really looked at how an AK is put together. "See inside! Ewwwww!"

Appreciation of good design doesn't stop at how well the device serves its application, but delves into how it is made, the meta-design if you will: this machine was made to be made cheaply.

Humble beginnings

A letter arrived today from Thrift Savings Program, which is the pretax savings plan for Uncle Sugar's military. I needed to sit down after reading:

We will no longer use your Social Security number as your primary identifier . . .

Humble beginnings. It's not without its bugs, of course:

. . . if you talk to our call center representatives, they may ask you for your Social Security number as added protection.

They'll still rely on the SSN as a password---verification of identification---but not as identification itself. It's not what I was hoping for, not what servicemen (and all taxpayers) deserve, but for the FedGov this is a huge step.

More of this, please, and more boldly.

Rev Horton Heat would be dismayed

The State of New Mexico has some inexplicable animus against the martini.

Their highway signs warning against DUI use the distinctive silhouette of the martini glass as the universal symbol for abuse of alcohol. It's unmistakable.

I'd venture to say that the Land of Enchantment has arrested more DUIs suffering impairment from lagers than from martinis of all kinds.

Gone

My brother passed away quietly, in his home, with family near him. I was able to see him and speak to him before that, though I could not bring Toad to meet him. His wife and children move on, with dignity and peace.

We just completed the trek down to Phoenix for his memorial and back, offspring units and all, by passenger car and reward points by Marriott.

This brother was the presence of my father while my father worked away, by the week, during my adolescent and teen years. This brother taught me chemistry in the short hours of summer nights. This brother, when heading out for the service academy appointment he fought for, rued leaving me behind with quarreling parents and a house rotting beneath me. I will always be aware of the long shadow he cast.

This is the brother who exercised the most, lived the "cleanest" if you will, and surprised the rest of us the most by suffering and losing an uneven fight with cancer while the returns on his investments in life were just beginning to roll in.

He died the day that the en banc ruling against Abigail Alliance came down. He could have benefited from the medicines that this case sought to make available. He probably could have benefited also from medical practice disconnected from one's employment; he lost valuable time shuttling from appointment to referral to appointment, until the only service of use to him was hospice.

If I were to have only one, or two, or . .

If I were to have only one rifle, I would consider myself a poor sorry son of a bitch.

In spite of the revered Colonel Cooper's teachings, I would not be satisfied with a Scout. Even JC wasn't happy with a single Scout rifle, even after he had a Steyr built to his specs. My Scouts and/or Pseudoscouts don't cover all of the bases either.

So neither Cabinet Man nor I have only a single rifle, and we seem to keep acquiring them, he at his customary rate and I at mine, with various purposes or roles attached to each.

But the question lingers. So flesh it with some assumptions:

TEOTWAWKI. Your stock of ammunition is what you have around you, possibly supplemented by what neighbors can spare or trade away.

Hits count. Fred gave you the Rifleman patch at a recent Appleseed clinic and you're confident to hit what you can see out to 400, maybe 600 meters. The rifle shoots better than you do.

Fixed, defensible homestead. What you've acquired through the years is still under or around you, and one purpose of the rifle is to keep it.

Partially organized but State-less attackers. Looters, vagabonds, rabble who were created in a city they find no longer habitable. Some may be trained as soldiers. They have no supply chain.

If any US troops show up, your mayor and sheriff stride out to meet them, say everything is fine, offer them breakfast and ask "who's the President?"

Golly. Any of the .30/7.62mm's cited in Boston's Gun Bible would do.

Change assumptions, then. Instead of equipping your own self and maybe some neighbors for Post-Housing-Bubble, let's say you're fielding an army of a few thousand, and you have a small country's treasury at your disposal while the copper and yellowcake mines are still producing.

That's easy. An AR15, converted to piston operation instead of direct impingement, internally dehorned, possibly carbon fiber instead of aluminum, chambered in 6.5mm x39 Grendel. There may be no full- or burst-auto. Every soldier starts out on a 16" barreled carbine and everybody qualifies with between 600 and 1000 rounds per year.

Your Brit expat DIs and Devil Dog marksmanship instructors find the better of them and graduate them to 20 or 22" barreled designated marksman rifles.

The crew-served weapon is the American contender to replace the M249, still firing 6.5 G on disintegrating links.

Any other set of assumptions probably lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.

"VOID IF TAMPERED" be damned

My treasured little 4.5-lb Averatec subnotebook has given me a couple of fits. This February, its video began to flicker erratically. I shut her down at once, then carefully found the screws that covered its video card. A phillips screwdriver bit punched through the VOID IF TAMPERED seals covering them. I blew a can or so of air through the copper heatsink and put it all back together. No more video flickering. I should go back in and apply a drop of heatsink paste on the chip, but . . .

Now the power cord has been overheating. Where the plug wart enters the case of the computer, there have been baked-plastic smells, and incredible amounts of heat, so much that my valued iGo Power power supply's jack got so hot that its insulation started to melt. I've been jiggling the jack so the charge indicator lights. But on my latest trip, even jiggling doesn't get the computer to charge from the wall.

Being a consumer product, the Averatec is built to frustrate shade-tree computer mechanics such as your humble narrator. However, I strove to get to the eentsy printed-circuit board where the plug wart attaches, and slipped it out.

Cold solder joint, oh very yes. I combed through my brother's garage for solder and iron. Found two rotary tools that wouldn't start, they would have been handy to clean the joint prior to soldering, but too bad. I touched the joint up, reinserted, had no continuity (couldn't find a multimeter in brother's garage either, bummer), took the board back out, cleaned the cold joint with a pencil eraser, resoldered.

Bingo. Now she charges and runs without jiggling. No overheating to the point of etching my fingerprints into the plastic of the jack.

How many people would sh17-can an $800 notebook computer rather than sleuth a power supply problem? Should I put out a shingle for fixing stuff like this?