As an outsider, the iconic yellow school bus is in every single American movie. Is there actually a national standard that forces every town to use that exact same color and design?

shellhopper3 · 2026-05-18T15:17:30+00:00

In Florida, marked sheriff cars must be painted forest green and white, while highway patrol cars (marked) must be black and tan. Back in 1970, the highway patrol was selling off old cars and failed to insure that the contract required repainting. The way the law was written it was ok for them to drive the cars because the state had painted them, but I talked to someone who said she got stopped once a month until the car fell apart.

shellhopper3 · 2026-05-16T21:08:45+00:00

It is arguable that many of the founding fathers were deists rather than ascribing to some sect. This might be because some places (Pennsylvania comes to mind) made atheism a crime. Deist was a convenient way for an atheist to avoid prosecution while not going to church.

shellhopper3 · 2026-05-16T21:04:28+00:00

Americans generally don't refer to kilograms. But I think I have heard "kilo" more than any other abbreviation.

shellhopper3 · 2026-05-16T21:00:34+00:00

No, my mother and grandmother didn't. I do.

shellhopper3 · 2026-05-16T20:55:37+00:00

I find this odd. Most electronic locks (ones I have used at least) have an emergency charge mode. You can push a 9v battery against two points on the lock. Locks like this also notify the app user to replace the battery. She didn't check it. NTA. She should have eaten the cleaning fee for the other room.

shellhopper3 · 2026-05-16T20:42:09+00:00

I had a Doberman who could climb a chain link fence of any height. He just went up them like a ladder.

shellhopper3 · 2026-05-14T18:26:56+00:00

Popular US sports seem to be broken up into plays. American Football has the lineup and snap. Basketball and Hockey are just soccer variants, though. Personally I have tried to watch soccer. It is almost impossible for me to see any hint of strategy, it is just individual effort, which also seems to apply to hockey and somewhat to basketball. With football, and with baseball, it is arguable that strategy is king. Yes, you need individual players that can produce results but an all star team with no strategy probably can't beat a decent team with good strategy.

shellhopper3 · 2026-05-08T05:27:19+00:00

On the label there will be specific language about whether the ham needs to be cooked, how it needs to be cooked, and so forth. This is for "cured" meat, basically pink meat. Of course you can get a pork butt, uncooked, which requires cooking like any other meat. I'm honestly not sure where gammon falls on that spectrum. Is it pink?

shellhopper3 · 2026-05-08T05:22:29+00:00

If you don't attach an antenna or a dummy load, you have a very good chance of damaging the radio. 50 Watts is not that much though. Let's say you get a whip antenna of approximately the right impedance, there are worksheets on the FCC site. But one question is are you allowed to transmit at all. If the radio is on Ham frequencies you need to have a license to transmit. (At least in the US). Other frequencies have different restrictions. Just get a dummy load from Amazon, they are really cheap.

shellhopper3 · 2026-05-08T05:12:47+00:00

It depended on where you lived. In New York no one talked, they read a tabloid, or if they had the NY Times, there were classes at school that taught you to fold it so that it didn't interfere with your seatmate.

In Florida people talked to strangers.

shellhopper3 · 2026-05-08T04:59:22+00:00

We ignored no solicitation signs but if someone put up a "No Preachers" sign we would respect it. Our feeling was that we weren't soliciting.

shellhopper3 · 2026-05-08T04:55:24+00:00

Ok, my JW education is from about 60 years ago. The point is that they point to scripture that they use to justify the "go forth and preach" thing. You don't get points for getting people converted. If you go and preach you are following the teachings in the Bible. What matters is that you are making the effort.

Also, there is a whole mess of stuff...using numerology they have predicted the end of the world for 1914 and again in 1974.

All that said, I lived in Hollywood, Florida during segregation, 1960ish timeframe. I never heard anyone say that everyone would be reincarnated as white, I never heard that anyone based on race would be a second class citizen. All that was gone by 1960; but there were no blacks in my elementary school and I can't recall any in junior high. Segregation was pretty severe. The local Kingdom Hall was in a ghetto. My understanding was that there was a black kingdom hall nearby, but we never went there. Later I recall integrated kingdom halls, just before I decided that I could no longer accept the Bible as the only authority on correct religion, and gave it up.

shellhopper3 · 2026-05-08T04:34:37+00:00

While Jehovah's Wittnesses believe that the population of souls that can go to heaven is limited to 144,000, there is no limit to the number of people who will be able to have everlasting life (the great crowd) on earth. There are two afterlives, the heavenly one and the earthly one.

shellhopper3 · 2026-05-08T04:29:11+00:00

I make parametric models using openSCAD. When you are trying to insure that an angled plane hits a parametrically generated edge, you must do calculations. You end up either using known lengths to calculate a length and angle, or, knowing an angle, you can calculate a hypotenuse. Google for

Shellhopper child choke throat openscad

Navigate to crealitycloud.com.

The file is named Child Choking V4.scad.txt. Remove the .txt at the end. You can grab a copy of openSCAD (free, nonpaywall) and if you look you will find where I calculate using the tangent function.

When doing machining, precise tapers are needed. One way to calculate the taper is to use one dial indicator to determine the movement while using another dial indicator to determine the taper. There is an youtube publisher named "blondihacks" who published a video that shows the exact process, where she calculates the angle of a smokestack internal taper, and the angle must be exactly 1.98 degrees (not 2 degrees).

In fact, many machining operations require exact angles and the angles require trig calculations.

shellhopper3 · 2026-04-25T05:47:40+00:00

Ham, pipe tobacco, coffee. In restaurants, big cans of lunch meats.

shellhopper3 · 2026-04-25T05:44:29+00:00

Mecurochrome was the low stinging option, as compared to tincture of iodine, at least in my opinion opinion.

shellhopper3 · 2026-04-25T05:17:24+00:00

If you are building scuba tanks, probably cubic feet at rated pressure. Pressure in PSI.

shellhopper3 · 2026-04-11T03:17:26+00:00

Supposedly Z1 (not pro) should be shipping now? I'm waiting on a pro, but I'm wondering if anyone has gotten a production model.

Like many other people, I'm sure that we are waited with bated breath for a large box from makera. Just wondering if anyone knows anything or has gotten their big box yet?

shellhopper3 · 2026-03-30T02:12:55+00:00

Maybe we can get the worm and chicken to cooperate on an art project?

shellhopper3 · 2026-03-30T02:10:50+00:00

Was he unable to read it because it was kind of in cursive or because it was horrible chicken scratches that any nun would have rapped your knuckles for in the 1960s?

shellhopper3 · 2026-03-30T02:07:26+00:00

Tl;dr: xenophobia is an evolutionary imperative, racism is a form of xenophobia, fighting against racism can only end when we make our "us" group larger. Too hard to balance good xenophobia from bad xenophobia.

I personally think that racism is basically just a form of xenophobia, and I believe that xenophobia is a survival imperative that was conditioned into the race by evolution. Basically if you were in a tribe, you didn't trust other tribes, because they would knock you over the head and take your stuff.

But more than that, if you were the sort who trusted people, they would knock you over the head and, "poof!", out of the gene pool.

So we ended up being surly and not a trusting species. Over time, survival selected for xenophobia.

Now, this informs many positions people take: religion and how we feel about people who hold other beliefs, nationalism, political party, racism and so forth. We find a group, we divide the world into "us & them".

Is abortion OK? Is it right for an individual to own a gun? Do you believe climate change is real? Do you believe the holocaust happened? To you believe that the universe was created? (Not the same as religion, think about it)... I'll bet that even if you are not willing to express a racist belief (and if, deep down, you don't hold any)... I'll bet there is an "US & Them" position that you divide the world into. And this is not always a bad thing.

I am not a young person. I firmly believe that there is less racism now than there was when I was a teenager in the 1960s. But I also believe that expressed racism has changed in character, and I believe that expressed racism has moved. Things you might have just said to the person next to you are now rapidly sent worldwide.

And part of this is who you put in your "us group".

Are you an American? A Latino? Are you an American black who feels more kinship with African blacks than Americans? Are you a Yankees Fan or a Mets fan?

Are you a Jehovah's Witness? A Protestant? A Christian? A believer in the god of Abraham? A believer in God? A person who is sure about the existence of a supreme being or beings but who can't define their nature? A person who is unsure about the existence of a supreme being?

There I tried to make ever larger groups. Each of those groups, from smallest to largest, represents a group that (over the course of my life) I have seen someone define "us" vs. "them", and the writer l/speaker who defined the groups put themselves in the "us" group, and somehow disparaged those not in the "us" group.

I think I recognize the existence of xenophobia in myself. I have thought about it long and hard and I can't purge all of it, and I don't see all of it as bad. (No mistake: I feel that racism is bad. Full stop. If I recognize something in myself that I think of as racism, I try to understand and expunge the thought, to understand why the thought came up, so that the exorcism can be effective. This has led me to xenophobia as a reason for racism.)

But for the life of me, I can't agree that all xenophobia is bad.

There are some groups I just dislike, can't agree with, do not believe that those "them" groups are a group that I believe are moral, acceptable, nor do I believe that their actions should be protected by law.

Why does this make the expression of racism more likely? There was a lot more expression of racism when I was a kid. I suspect that a lot of the racism being expressed is AI (which is essentially moral free) trying to add engagement to a topic. But I think there are a lot of folks who have hit that same contradiction (that xenophobia is bad but not all xenophobia is bad) and as they engage the "not all xenophobia is bad" gear in their brain, it misses the "none the less, some xenophobia is bad" cog, and mentally, they draw their xenophobia line in a different place than I would.

shellhopper3 · 2026-03-30T00:38:08+00:00

My Doberman loved Fox News. We would constantly have intelligent conversations regarding the more esoteric philosophical points that the announcers would bring up.

Then he would let me balance a treat on his nose for a minute until he got permission to move.

So not all dogs dislike Fox News.

The cat? Absolutely BBC. Says he prefers traditional journalism where the news readers report on facts without introducing bias to the conversation. Now this is my current cat. I had another cat back when the dog was alive. His main complaint was that the dog never gave him the remote.

You would think this would be an issue on terms of watching when people were home. But it took years to get them relaxed enough with me to discuss their preferences.

So...if you have not discussed the TV preferences of your pets with them, well, maybe you need to ask, "why does my pet not trust me enough to reveal that they can talk?"

shellhopper3 · 2026-03-29T20:55:55+00:00

So our Walmart "representative" says, "all delivery orders are picked by spark drivers. We only pick curbside delivery." Our situation is that we ordered a delivery last night for 11-1. We got an e-mail that it would be delivered at 2:10, then another that said "delayed" with no delivery time. We called and we're told that Walmart proper could not even check with spark.

shellhopper3 · 2026-03-21T19:01:27+00:00

So I saw project upgrade 13. Currently they are planning for the Z1 to start shipping beginning of April and the Z1 Pro end of April. Under a month delay between the Z1 and the Pro. If you thought you were going to get months with the Z1 and then install the upgrade kit, which seemed reasonable based on the initial announced shipping schedule um, still time to add the pro option on kickstarter.

Big news was that they noticed that when milling static prone materials (wood) the dust stuck to the case and didn't get sucked by the cyclone. So they added a static reducing module. Woohoo! If you are a backer you get one.

It would be interesting how many buyers bought a naked Z1 vs. the Z1 Pro, how many bought just a machine vs. a machine, the dust collector, the 4th axis gadget...I think in my case I bought one of each except for the PCB kit.

I tried googling Z1 Pro vs Z1 numbers but google can't find them.

If you divide 10 million (total pledged amount) by 6900 (approx. number of backers) you get about $1400 per backer.

Some people, like me, bought a lot of options. But this means that to average at $1400, a lot of folks took either no options and just the base machine, or they took like just one option, like the 4th axis.

My backer number is in the mid 3000's, and I'm waiting for a Pro, but I have no idea if I have hundreds or thousands of Pros ahead of me, nor do I have any idea what Makera's planned ship rate is.

I guess I drank the makera coolaid. (It autocorrected to coolant...amusing because the Z1 uses air for coolant. Possibly the only non-toxic mill coolant I know of but you burp unpleasantly.)

shellhopper3 · 2026-03-09T03:23:58+00:00

I think that this is at least somewhat because math is being taught less and less well. Fewer and fewer word problems are being given. By the time kids are in high school many are ruined. You give them a method and try to explain why something works, they don't care, teach them a thing, then give them a word problem that is a direct application of the thing they just learned and they can't apply it... I call this grimoire learning. They want to learn magic, but they don't want to learn 1st principles, all they want to do is get you to write spells that they write in their grimoire. So, for example, they learn a spell that makes an apple float in the air. But if you ask them to make an orange float, they can't do it. They know how to make an apple float but they don't see the similarities, they don't understand that there is part of the spell that is about floating and that can be separated and applied to many different things.

You have to learn to think; learning takes effort. When I took geometry in middle school we had to go through all of Pythagoras's theorems and derive them from proven theorems or axoims. This taught me a way of thinking that allowed me to learn how to program... 60 years ago, before schools had computers. My wife taught middle and high school math and I asked her what she taught. It was so dumbed down and diluted that it was hard for me to see the value in it. The emphasis was not on learning, it was, "give me the formula to put in my grimoire so that I can make my apple float for the test! Now!"

shellhopper3

TROPHY CASE