Month: May 2025

Tom’s World – 24MAY2025 – Batteries Not Included

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TomD

For chainsaws you’ll probably want a smaller one to start, maybe 14” or 16” max. I’ve moved a lot of my outdoor power equipment from gas to battery after a lifetime of small motor gasoline problems am delighted.

I’ve now got battery weed eater, chainsaw and blower. No snow blower for me, I live in Florida. I’ve settled on the Ego system. You want the same maker and battery commonality between tour tools. A 56V x 7.5 amp hour battery costs $400, close to double what the tool costs and you can buy tools sans battery much cheaper. I’ve got a 7.5 a 5 and a 2. The 2 will run my weed eater to last much longer than I and with every bit of the power of my gasoline ones but without the hassle.

And stepping down, my battery hand tools have almost totally displaced the 110V from yesteryear. I still have 110V slide miter and skill saw. My battery skill saw doesn’t the ability to, say, rip a sheet of 3/4” plywood easily. But impact driver, 1/2” impact wrench, 1/2” drill, jigsaw, sawzall, trim nailer, router all mostly Makita but with DeWalt and Bosch thrown in over the years have become standard. I hate power cords.

Fun and Games in Dunwich

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Last night Ithaqua, the Great Old One known as the “Wind-Walker” took a walk through our corner of Dunwich.  This morning when I arrived for breakfast Camera Girl said, “Don’t get excited.”  These are three of my least favorite words.  This is what she showed me:

Well, that’s not technically right.  When I first saw it, the tree was hung up in the branches of two trees on the left side of the driveway.  It took considerable yanking on the trunk with a rope that I managed to throw over it before it finally came crashing down on the ground.

Camera Girl told me to call the “tree guy” and have him take his chain saw to it and get it out of the driveway.  This didn’t sit right with my rock-ribbed conservatism and spirit of self-reliance.

I got out my bow saw and other paraphernalia and got to work.  I sawed the trunk.  I took a hammer and a pry bar to it.  I used an automobile jack to jack up one side.  I even climbed on top of it and jumped up and down on it.  Finally, a combination of all these actions succeeded.  Seven hours later a tired but morally self-satisfied man emerged drenched in sweat, favoring a sore lower back and triumphant over this malevolent natural disaster.

I think Winston Churchill will forgive me if I paraphrase him in saying, “Never have so few owed so little to me.”

So unfortunately, when I went to the endodontist on Thursday, he confirmed that there is indeed a crack in the root of that molar.  And that means that a root canal will not prevent the tooth from becoming infected again.  The tooth must be extracted.  So, I said “Okay, let’s do that.”  Imagine my chagrin to discover that endodontists don’t extract teeth.  And as it then turned out neither does my dentist.  In fact, at this point I don’t think he does anything at all as a dentist except refer me to other dentists!  So eventually I found a dentist who will extract the tooth but not until Tuesday (it’s Memorial Day weekend you know.)  All talk about implants will be delayed until this simple procedure is completed and I can eat food without my mouth aching or worse.

But it has been an educational experience into the arcane world of dental specialty practices.  Most of my discussions with the office personnel consisted of them warning me that I would have to pay them the full amount of the procedures and attempt on my own to get my dental insurer to reimburse me some pathetic subset of my outlay.  Well, one thing for sure.  A lucrative dental practice does not guarantee good taste in office art design.  Some of the photographic decorations that I sat looking at as a patient were not that inspiring.  Although I did like them better than the abstract paintings that some of their colleagues favored.  Honestly there should be laws or at least professional ethics guidelines to protect people suffering from dental pain from being exposed to these awful things.  Well, Tuesday is just around the corner.  Surcease from sorrow is a mere ninety-six hours in the offing.  Unless the climate gods unleash a biblical plague of fiery hail I should be “detoothed” by Tuesday morning.

Stop the Presses.  Gravity is a Force and Space is not Curved.

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So I get most of my physics from YouTube and the latest news flash is that Einstein’s belief that mass warps space-time may be put aside for a theory where gravity is a force again and space-time isn’t curved.  In fact, maybe it’s not space-time anymore just space and time.

Uh, okay.  Personally, I never understood why (or how) space could be curved.  I didn’t see why light couldn’t just be affected by gravity the same as everything else.  I mean what does it mean to say space is curved?  Space, per se, is nothing.  It is the lack of something and all it has is location so how can a bit of nothing be curved?  Now the fact that matter and even light can be deflected in their motion through space makes sense.  We can see it all the time with magnets and projectiles in a gravity field.  It’s Newton’s law extended by all the other theories that identify the other forces; electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces.  So why say space is curved?  According to the report (and I’m not saying I can fathom this) this new way of looking at gravity also eliminates the current paradox between quantum theory and Einstein’s conception of gravity.  In your face Albert!

Now to be fair to Professor Einstein later on he had been thinking about a similar system he called Teleparallel Gravity.  So maybe all of this is just more reviewing old ideas because nothing new has been discovered.  But I think it makes sense to bring the best minds to bear on these fundamental questions.  Of course, if there’s no space-time then all of the science fiction that used the term becomes dated and passe.  Such is life.

Now, if there is no warping of space does that mean Black Holes can’t tear a hole in it?  Is there no such thing as a singularity?  Are there no worm holes and no way to go from one universe to another?  Next thing you know they’ll be telling me that the speed of light isn’t the fastest speed possible and faster-than-light travel is perfectly achievable if only I can buy enough dynamite from the ACME company and strap it to the back of my rocket sled.

Okay, now the inertialess drives of Doc Smith’s Skylark and Lensman series are science again and jungle worlds with naked red-haired amazon warrior women who can become part of the federation are totally realistic again.  I just hope that the ultra-intelligent but hopelessly-evil amoeboid Eddorians don’t find out about this quantum gravity thing before the Arisians do, so we will still have a chance to perfect a way to destroy Ploor with an inertialess planet that we’ve somehow translated from another dimension and then restored its inertia in time to use it as an irresistible planet wrecker.  Oh wait, I just said there are no alternate dimensions.

Okay, forget that last bit.  But otherwise, I’m completely on board with this new quantum gravity/non-curved space rigamarole.  Let’s just try and give it a cooler name.

It’s All Gotten Very Sad

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Three weeks ago, at the beginning of May I turned off the heating system in the house.  And that was an historically reasonable action.  At that point the days were averaging in the high sixties and sometimes breaking into the low eighties.  So, hurrah for the end of winter and come on summer!

Well, today after the fourth really cold day in a row I looked at the thermostat and noticed the temperature in the late afternoon was sixty-three degrees.  I saw that Camera Girl was wearing an arctic survival suit and the dogs were burrowing into the permafrost layer that had infiltrated the living room.

Being the benign dictator that I am I overrode Camera Girl’s frugal instinct to “just add more layers of clothing until you’re warm” and turned on the heating system and set the thermostat to seventy-two.  Global warming; don’t make me laugh.

Now, of course, I’m well aware that in the southwest it’s already in triple digits here and there.  But up here where the geniuses of Harvard and Yale hold sway we’re freezing to death but we spend all our time worrying about ice caps melting.  But finally, finally, finally all of the nuttiness they enacted to make fossil fuels too expensive to use has come back to bite them on the butt.  The governor of Massachusetts has discovered that natural gas prices have skyrocketed!  She can’t account for it!  And she is demanding that the agencies responsible for regulation of energy companies and those companies themselves immediately lower the consumer cost for natural gas!

Of course, what it means is she will have to reverse the executive orders she put in place to make the prices higher a few years ago.  Essentially, she is “shocked, shocked to find out gambling is going on at Rick’s Café Américain.  Oh, by the way here are your winnings Madame Governor.”

But I think the biggest shocker will be to those who own and invest in the green new energy companies that Biden rewarded with billions in subsidies and grants.  With all that payola shut down there is going to be a lot of unemployed “consultants and lobbyists who will have to figure out a new racket.  The real question I have is what happens to all those rooftop solar panels when they stop working in a few years.  Do the homeowners have to replace them out of their own pockets?  And if they won’t, what exactly happens to them?  Will they eventually be covered over with tar paper and shingles?  They don’t look like they’ll keep the snow and ice out indefinitely.  Will people have to yank them off their roofs and have their roofs patched?  And how much will it cost to “recycle” the panels?  Who’s going to pay for that, the homeowner?

These are troubling times for the followers of Gaia.  The Earth goddess’s disciples are out of power in Washington and even in her most loyal bastions in Germany and Belgium things are not going well.  Greta Thunberg has been reduced to chasing after and hectoring her neighbors in Stockholm if they drive automobiles instead of ride bicycles.  But the new African immigrants don’t know who she is and they’ve roughing her up a bit.  It’s all gotten very sad.