The Big Think

wherein Sean comes up with a brilliant and potentially world-altering idea.

I’m truthfully humbled.

Physicist Brian Cox gave a talk at the recent Ted Talks conference on the impending operation of the Large Hadron Collider. It may sound geeky and inaccessible, but Cox is an engaging and genuine presenter. It’s very much an everyman, popular-science type talk, but it touches on a subject that I’m very interested in. Do yourself a favor and take 20 minutes to watch his excellent talk. That way you’ll understand the significance when, a year or so from now, I make an effusive blogpost that they’ve found the Higgs Boson.

On a sidenote, how can you not love Brian Cox? He holds a chair in particle physics at the University of Manchester, but looks more like a member of the Beatles. I hope this guy gets more face-time with the public. Who knows, we may have school girls swooning after a physicist- surely, something that’s never happened in this universe.

Got another 6 hours in today. More sanding (koff!), as well as some more face frame construction. I would have had another three hours but an unexpected call let to some unexpected audio work on a film next week that’ll go a long way toward paying for the ent. cent. Yay!

Tomorrow I tackle the face frame on the main center section, then figure out a good way to attach all three frames. After that it’s time to move on to the doors, then the ebony inlay.

Total time is 88 hours.

Amazing! And a great physics lesson, too.

If health insurance premiums and national wages continue to grow at current rates, the average cost of a family health insurance premium will surpass the average annual household income by 2025, approximately the time when the Medicare trust fund is projected to be insolvent.

link to article

I don’t know what the answer is- nationalization, privatization, boutique medical treatment, some sort of hybrid, or something completely new, but this is a serious issue, and the numbers don’t just get scary in 17 years. It’s looking like sometime during the next presidential term most Americans are going to have to take a hard look at their medical insurance and just quit paying premiums, either that or start doing without absolute necessities (and I’m not talking iPhones and cable tv here).

Much of the waste and out of control costs go not to the doctors, but to the lawyers and insurance companies themselves. Whenever we go to the doctor, we just pay out of pocket and usually get a 20-30% instant rebate on the bill- which is the market’s way of saying that there is a huge amount of waste in the system.

I’m happy that we live in a prosperous country. I’m happy that life spans are so dramatically better than they were even three generations ago, and I’m not unwilling to see a company turn a profit (a company is just made up of people, after all). But the system is badly broken and right now it seems like they only thing that will catalyze a fix is a complete breakdown. Which looks like it will happen, at the latest, by the end of the next decade.

The list of reasons why everyone should start a business, and why the home is a great first frontier for many of those businesses, is long. Here are some examples:

1. Because of online and communications technology, you can start many businesses at little or no cost.

2. You can start a side business without foregoing your “secure” day job.

3. You can spend more of your time doing something you’re passionate about.

4. You can make a little extra money, and maybe eventually ramp up to replacing that day job.

5. The biggest companies now have many free or inexpensive solutions available for small business making it easier than ever to start and grow.

6. If you have a family, just imagine what a positive impact it could have on your children as they watch you toil, create, breakthrough, tough it out, and demonstrate how to take control of your life and live passionately rather than being a cog in the wheel.

7. Outsourcing enables you to streamline your activities (and the physical footprint) of your business so that you focus on doing the work you love and farm out the other stuff.

8. Home-based business is generally accepted - even preferred - as a mode of business in the marketplace these days (whereas before there were credibility issues).

9. Tax write-offs are often available.

10. You take control of your destiny rather than relying on someone else to make the right decisions for your future.

link

Good news: anyone can become great in just about any field. It only takes 7300 hours.

Silicon just got a LOT cheaper, and this is reportedly going to drop the the price of solar panels. Technologyreview has an article on it.

I would love to see solar drop to the point where it’s competitive, or even cheaper, than grid-tied electricity. We have plans in our next house to generate much of our electricity from solar panels. I mean, how cool would it be to run the whole house off of solar-tied to the grid for when I’d like to run my table saw or dishwasher, of course.

Ultimately, it’d be nice to be able to generate enough power to charge a plug-in hybrid so that we could almost completely do away with paying for gasoline as well. I think within 10 years we’ll start to see this kind of thing become mainstream. It’s possible now (there are thousands of people living completely off the grid), but the primarily-electrical, plug-in car is only now starting to hit the streets. Give it a few more generations and some improvements, and I’ll bet that we see this soon. Not only will this get us off of foreign oil, but it’ll reduce emissions and free us from the tyranny of the gas pump.

It can’t happen fast enough for me.

I spent 8 more hours in the shop today for a running total of 82 hours! Had to run back to the lumber yard for three more pieces of QSRO. Hopefully the final bits of solid wood I’ll have to buy. Came home and spent a quality 90 minutes in front of the planer driving my neighbors nuts with the noise. I got everything planed up and the rest of the day was spent gluing up one final panel (this one will be the main surface directly underneath the TV) as well as making the face frame for the left side bookcase. A funny thing happened whilst doing this. I had very carefully measured all the pieces and pocket screwed them together. Perfect 90 degree angles between them. The bookcase also has perfect 90 degree surfaces. When I applied one 90 degree surface to the front of the other one…..

everything was crooked.

It was like suddenly we didn’t live in Euclidean space-time any more. It was the weirdest thing. I could measure 90 degree angles all over the place, but the face frame was “slanted” by as much as 1/4 inch between the top of the case and the bottom. This utterly flummoxed me until I took the face frame apart, reconstructed it (with the same wood and the same screw.. in the SAME HOLES), and it worked. Amazing. I think I’ve discovered a unique quality of wood: it has the ability to bend spacetime.

So anyway, that’s how I spent my 8 hours today.

4 hours yesterday (total of 74 hours!) on the entertainment center. I planed up a bunch of thin pieces and glued them to the back where the TV will be mounted. This is so, when you look at the surface the TV is mounted on, you’ll see solid hardwood oak and not plywood (yuk!). I only applied solid wood where you’ll see the back around the edges of the TV, and not over the whole back “wall”, so right now I’ve got a roughly 16×9 TV “space” layed out. Looks kinda funny.

I also started in on the face frame but ran out of wood. Well, I have more QSRO, but it’s not the same color and I want to make sure the color match is right, and that I’m using stock that has consistent grain and ray-flecking:

Back to the lumberyard today for more wood.

So yesterday I spent another 4 hours (total time: 70 hours) on the ent. cent. I didn’t do much but cut the tops to final length and sand, sand, sand. If you’ve ever wonder why the iPod was invented, it was so woodworkers could stand for three hours in one place while sanding.

Speaking of sanding, I always wear earmuffs and a face shield, but I can’t use the inexpensive filter that I bought several years ago. It’s really uncomfortable and since I have a beard, it has small gaps around my face that let the dust in anyway. I’ve been considering the purchase of a much more expensive and effective dust hood but can’t quite bring myself to pull the trigger on it. After all, there are better things to spend the money on (like, say, nothing at all), but I figure that I can spend a few hundred dollars on this now, or several tens of thousands of dollars later on when I get chemo for the lung cancer that’s brought on by inhaling fine wood dust for a few decades. Or maybe the Hodgkin’s disease. Oh joy. (cough, cough). I do my best to keep the exposure to a minimum by sanding outside with the wind behind me, but there’s only so much I can do.

Yeah, yeah. I’ll probably just buy the stupid thing. It’s a new product and I’m waiting for the first round of reviews to hit. Dropping almost four Benjamin’s on a ventilated face shield isn’t my idea of fun, but neither is an arm full of bleomycin.

Back to the shop. Today’s I start on the face frames. Then more sanding…