I just invented the three minute rule for dropped peanut butter sandwiches

 There are no seconds when you grew up poor.

120ThingsIn20Years thinks it's pretty clever today.

Pressure and it's limits

The energy stored in wind is like the wind stored in drivers. 

If you get a string of it and the bit in front tries to stop for a bit, all the other bits of string like to plough into the back of the stopped bit at the front spilling it's coffee all over its lap. 

So... that's the Betz’s limit in a nutshell.

120ThingsIn20Years just found hundreds of drafts in it's outbox all scheduled to automatically publish over a decade in around 80-90 years. Stay tuned I guess?

 Yeah. I'm BullwinkleIII now

Cheese - Report 1

Cheese report 1

It's been a while, but I logged in to post something to prove who I was to a forum I'd lost my password to. 

Anyway, that's not important, but I found hundreds of draft posts that were partially written that I'd been working on in order to keep something posted every day or whatever my schedule was. 

I read a few, and I thought this one was fun, so I thought I'd drop it onto the planet. 

--------------------

Cheese report...

Haloumi - All consumed yum - Cant recommend you try this enough. Instant easy cheesy fun.

Bouteille Cheese (cheese in a bottle) - don't try this wacky idea -  this its not so cheese-like. But it is actually getting cheesyer by the minute.

Reasonable cheese - confidently named and true to name, this looks like it might be working.

Aquaponics - Easy automatic duckweed feeder

Sorry folks, just a quick proof of ID.

Hi BYAP.

Actually I do have something to post though.

I had another idea for an automatic duckweed dispenser, and it works!

The previous one looked like this...

Or this from the side...

In this new easy one, all you need to do is pump some water into a pond a that's a bit higher than your fish tank, then create a flat spillway that falls into your fish tank. Make the spillway quite broad so the outflow is slow (or have a low flow to the duckweed growing tank). The idea is to not have the duckweed all flow out. A good way to do this is to create some texture on the flat spillway. paint on some silicon mixed with some fine gravel or something. 

It's a good idea to add water to the duckweed pond so that the water swirls. This way the duckweed builds up in the middle, and less will flow out at each time it triggers.

If the flow and texture is correct, the duckweed wont flow over because it gets a bit stuck on the spillway. 

After a while, the duckweed grows thick enough that it blocks some of the water. In my little decorative system, I get a rise in tide of around six or seven millimeters before the pressure builds up enough and dumps about ten percent of the duckweed into the fish tank. 

It wont dump again until the duckweed has grown back.

The result of this is that you never run out of duckweed, you feed more duckweed in the summer (when duckweed is growing faster, and your fish want more food) and it's automatic.

Not a lot of posts for ages. but I'm still doing stuff. 

Thinking - Robotic pleasantries

I  normally say please when I speak to google and ask it something.

I suspect this might be a good habit to get into because...

1. One day robots might get offended if you dont thank them, and punch you in the face.
2. If we get out of the habit of thanking stuff for doing stuff for us, we will start offending people making us coffee, because we will forget they are human.
3. If our kids get out of the habit of watching us thank stuff, the world will probably end in an enormous fireball, killing us all. 

Thank the floor for not letting you fall. Do it now. It deserves some credit. It's a thankless task, but a very important one.

120ThingsIn20Years Thinks it's probably worth thanking everything. 

Thinking - Pedestrian traffic self control

So... you know that thing where you are walking between someone close to some shelves or something and your turn your body sideways... to kind of... crab shuffle... past them?

I just discovered that I'm officially thicker than I am wide, so I should just barge past them front on from now on.

It's more polite, more efficient, and less disruptive.

You also have the added advantage of not needing to decide to go front facing, or butt facing when you brush past them.

120ThingsIn20Years asks...Thicker than you are wide?...

Just barge on through facing front!

Aquaponics - Seed raising in sphagnum moss

Anyone looking for a nice clean medium to sprout seeds for aquaponics should have a look at sphagnum moss. The seedlings come out with out any damage to roots, and perfectly clean.

You can even place a wad directly into your system and put the seeds into it. Then either leave the moss in place for ever (it doesn't rot, but springs back into life, even though you buy it dry and dead).

You could also just pick it out once the plant had become established.

Here are radishes, and some kind of leek or something growing on my kitchen window sill.




120 Things in 20 years grew something!

Cheese - Where are all the good bits?

The best bits of hard cheese are the white specks that sparkle on the tongue and make you ratchet up to the next price or age range, and give your cheese maker more of your money.

These tasty white specks on aged cheese are the result of enzymes and other interesting things acting on complex fats that are broken down into free fatty acids. Whatever "free fatty acids"are.

I'll let you know if they turn out to be important, but compared to how important cheese is, I'm guessing they rank a distant second at best, so this is probably the last you will hear of them from me.

The result is these little crystalline bursts of awesomeness that you can see distributed around in cheeses like parmesan.

They are delicious.

Go and open the fridge or climb down into your celler now and have a look.

Better yet dig out all the crystalline bits and eat them all, and see what I mean.

Nobody else in your house will mind.

I'll wait.

See how absurdly delicious they are?

So....

It turns out these crystals of goodness form over time as the cheese drys from the outside in. As a result, you should buy cheese from the outside of a round rather than the inside, as even though the entire cheese is the same age, the cheese on the inside hasn't "aged" as much.

Probably to do with it drying or it's exposure to air or something.

It doesn't matter. Buy the stuff nearest the rind, and nearest to the outside of the round.

But my question is...

Why dont they just make parmesan with a hole through the middle like a doughnut to allow the air into the centre?

120ThingsIn20Years is eating cheese, and thinks it should be even better.

Thinking - Lightning

I never realised just how far out of my way I'm willing to go to get struck by lightning.

I've called 000 (911) at least half a dozen times in my life.

Closer to ten times I think.

One of the times I called was to report a bushfire started by lightning. One of the other times was a house fire caused by the two %#@!*% running away from the fire they set in some guys house, and another time was a house fire caused by who knows what.

So three fires.

I'm getting worried that at some stage, the people who are authorities about such stuff will start to wonder why I'm always at the scene of such things. All I can do is proclaim vigilance.

Perhaps I'm setting fires but dont recall....

Either way, I think it's best I call the requisite authorities and have them come and put out the fires/or whatever else is required.

I'm pretty sure it isn't me.

If it was me, I'd have to doubt the first time I called the police by waving down a cop on a motorcycle, and set him off to chase the three big boys that pushed me down into the gravel and scratched my bike. I had a crazy sense of power as an eight year old boy.

Righteous, but crazy.

However it plays out, I'm of the opinion that people like fire fighters and cops are at my command.

I am a white, middle class, middle aged, male.

The world (sadly) is built for me.

Anyway...

I've called for a lot of fire fighters in my time, and they always respond quickly.

So today I find myself sitting in my driveway under some power lines enjoying a lightning storm, and wondering who would call the required medics on my behalf should I be struck by lightning.

After all, I'm the guy that does that. I'm not sure there is another guy in my street that does that.

I'm not even sure there is another human that does that.

I may well be the record holder for the most vigilant caller of emergency personnel on the planet for all I know. 

So...

Actually I've got nothing to say.

Next time there is lightning, take out a chair and a beer and with a little luck, it will make you happy.

Happy is good.

Enjoy nature's extremes.

If you get killed by being stuck by lightning, sue me if you're feeling mean.


120 Things in 20 years is still here

Thinking - Cloud funded cloud funding project

The title says it all really.

Has anyone tried to cloud fund a new cloud funding business?

If not, I think it's about time.


120ThingsIn20Years has no problem with getting lost in endless loops, or getting lost in endless loops.

Thinking - Multi-individual organisms (ants and so forth)

A while ago I wrote about the time I saw a cockroach die of old age. At the time it put me off killing things for a while because I was just about to kill it when it did the getting all dead thing. But...

Not long after that, I was sitting on the street in front of my workplace enjoying the smells of the traffic, and eating my lunch.

We didnt have a tree, and there was no other shade.

As the inevitable crumbs dropped to the ground, the ants started to wander around picking them up and taking them home presumably to feed their kids. I watched with exactly the amount of interest such things demand until I suddenly became slightly more excited.

!

An ant had decided to bite me.

And whats more, it too was taking it's newly acquired bit of food back home to feed the kids.

The ant was eating me.

It was holding a huge lump of my leg with it's face.

It didnt care at all that it was taking a few cells at a time with, I'm guessing, an ultimate goal of taking all my cells. At least all the squishy ones.

I murdered it of course.

But then I remembered I didnt like killing things because of the cockroach event.

But then I remembered that an ant cant really live on it's own. It's just a few cells out of a much bigger creature that is the entire nest. Some critters that live like this cant even feed themselves without other critters from the hive helping. Bees and ants (except for solitary varieties) are just tiny bits of a bigger organism.

So if one bites you and takes some of you home...

Murder it.

Somebody else will take care of their kids.

The hive won't even care.




120 Things in 20 Years wants to acknowledge things are killed on my behalf all the time, that I kill things to eat all the time, and the bees and ants we might normally meet dont actually have kids. Also we all eat thousands of cheese mites (found on cheese, flour, plant leaves etc. I just thought you should know.

Thinking - Peak String

I've been busy, but just thought I'd call it. I think this might be "Peak String" as far as string theory goes.

120ThingsIn20Years is just sayin'

Thinking - Preserves

We bought a induction hotplate a while back, and sometimes fry stuff on it in a place where we also keep jars of things like apricot jam.

It turns out if you lightly spatter your jars with cooking oil, then subject them to the normal vibrations of a house with people moving around and traffic etc, the jar lids work their way loose in time to the point where they are effectively off when you pick up a jar, no matter how tightly you put the lids on.

I love the universe.

It just keeps revealing new bit's I didnt even know it owned.

120ThingsIn20Years thinks stuff is awesome.

Thinking - Slightly interesting TV helicopter factoid

When I watch helicopters shooting at people on TV, it doesn't look very real. Why dont they just hover and shoot?

Why do they keep flying past really fast and taking a few shots, then letting the escaping car escape?

It turns out there's a good reason!

Well at least I think there is, and let's face it, that's good enough for me.

There's this thing called autorotation, and it's a very fine thing indeed. It seems that when your helicopter's motor dies on you in flight, it's not just a case of "plummet to the ground and hope you land in a used marshmallow dump" or something.

It turns out there's actually something you can do.

Which is odd, and a little surprising. And also kind of pleasant if you are in a helicopter with no motor.

Helicopter blades can change the angle they sit at when they are doing their rotating thing. They can make it so they create more or less lift as required, and they can also tilt forward or backward to create thrust so you can actually go somewhere, and not just hover impressively.

Personally I think hovering is impressive enough, but it turns out other people like to derive useful function from their helicopters.

So using some sticks and pedals and things inside the helicopter, your pilot (hopefully) can make your helicopter go where they (or you if you own enough money) want it to.

But when it's falling out of the sky, it turns out they can set the blades in such a way as to make them spin a lot using the substantial breeze that they find blowing through their blades when they plummet to the ground.

As I understand it, it's a bit like strapping a ceiling fan to the front your bike and riding around the block.

The fan, despite being disconnected from any power supply, starts spinning a lot.

Now, it turns out "spinning a lot" is just the kind of thing that you want from a helicopter's blades when you dont have a motor any more.

So if your motor dies on you, as long as you have enough forward momentum, OR altitude, you dont just fall from the sky. Your skilled pilot can do the ceiling fan on a bike thing for a bit, get the blades up to pace, then just at the last minute, turn all that handy rotating blade motion into lift and actually land without everyone's blood falling out.

Way cool.

I mention that the requirement is either forward momentum, or altitude, because that's true.

I like to say true stuff where I can.

If you dont have enough forward momentum to keep the blades spinning, you can trade some altitude by falling out of the sky for a bit and pulling up. This translates into forward momentum. So you need some altitude to do a bit of a dive to get some forward momentum, or just have some forward momentum to start with.

So...

I'm guessing the reason the TV helicopters dont just hover fifty feet off the ground and shoot at Jimmy Bond a lot is because it's a really stupid thing to do.

Who knew?

120ThingsIn20Years thinks TV might have actually got it right.

Aquaponics - Float Valve Mod

I installed a float valve on my aquaponics system because I grow a huge sphere of slime in there as free food for my Golden Comets.

I'm currently making a half hearted attempt at breeding them.

My Float valve looks exactly like this pictured to the left.



I bought it on eBay for two dollars I think.

It works pretty well but it doesn't put out a lot of water. I'm guessing it was designed to keep a dog bowl full or something, and for this it would be perfect. But I need a little extra flow.

Here it is in it's full "on" position.




And here in it's "off" position.

It does "off" pretty well, although I'm not overly fussed about it's "off" state. I dont really care if it leaks a little.

As you can see from the black pipe leading into it, there are some holes to make a spray to add a little aeration, but also to make sure there is never a situation where there is zero flow.



I only have a dozen or so adult goldfish in my system, and it is capable of holding a lot more.

 It could cope without any flow for a day or two, but the fish seem to enjoy their water moving around a bit.

The problem is that the slimeball I'm cultivating in the tank can sometimes find it's way into the outlet. The result is an overflow, and the sump tank running dry. The pump hates it when that happens, and I was lucky enough to catch it just before it ran dry a couple of days ago.

The point of the float valve was to slow the amount of water entering the fishtank if the water level gets too high. But because the flow through the device isn't very high, it isnt quite doing the task I assigned it.

I decided to make it flow a little faster.

To this end, I taped out the pin that holds it all together with a chopstick.

As expected, everything fell apart nicely, and I found that the thing worked by the float levering a small slide with a silicone stopper on the end. This blocked the water outlet when the float was
... floating

The bottom bit has the float on the end and fits into the box section on the next bit up. The lowest bit of green slimy plastic is the silicone stopper that presses against the next higher up bit of green slimy plastic.


I should write operating manuals.

The inlet hole did indeed turn out to be pretty small. Perhaps this is so the silicone stopper has a nice large surface area to stop leaks.

But I dont care about leaks because even when the slime blocks my system, it always lets some water through.

It never blocks it perfectly.

So I drilled it out to a size that should let more water through, but still allow the float to shut down the flow.

I had to do it by hand because the chuck on my drill has decided that it likes having the 13mm drill in it and refuses to surrender it no matter how I try to persuade the thing otherwise.

Thats what you get for running water all over the chuck when drilling stainless hinges and trying not to overheat the drill bit.

Somewhat surprisingly, the thing all fell back together as easily as it fell apart.

A few taps of the pin and it was all good.









So now the flow looks like this when it's in the "off" position.

Not a bad result.

Most of that flow is because I didnt bother to clean up the hole I drilled.

"Drilled" is probably a bit of a fantasy really.

Lets just say I made a hole with a drill bit.

In the "on" position I get a lot more flow now.

All in all I think this can be called a complete success.

And perhaps more importantly, it  shows that maybe I can still do stuff.

It's been a while.




If I care enough, I'll clean up the hole and make it so the flow actually stops when the float is floating.

Trying to drill by hand is fine until you actually make it through the thing your drilling. Then it becomes very difficult to make a clean hole because the drill bit just tries to screw itself into the item.

This is the "before" shot.






And this is the "after" shot.

The result is you get three quarters of a hole as you brake through the plastic.

I'll file it back to something like round if it turns out to matter.





So...

I did something.


120ThingsIn20Years Some of the photos were even in focus!

Cooking - Rice

In lots of places on the globe, people cook rice by rinsing it (if you can afford the water) then adding enough water to cover the rice up to the point where the water is level with the first joint of your pointing finger if you stick it into the pot of water until it just touches the rice.

So... submerge your rice by one pointing finger joint.

Where I'm from we just read the packet.

Not everybody gets a packet.

It turns out rice doesn't come from the supermarket, but actually grows as the seed of a grass.

But the interesting thing about the Western world view on rice cooking, is that it often depends on making exactly one dose as described on the packet, and in a saucepan exactly like the one they used when they wrote the recipe.

All different kinds of rice absorb the same amount of water, but they take different lengths of time to do it. The result is you get a lot more evaporation when you cook brown rice compared to white rice because it takes so much longer to cook.

If you want to make an extra big stack of rice, you cant just triple your normal recipe, because if you are using a pot that evaporates the same amount of water (or for example, the same pot), you only need to add a single cup of water for every extra cup of rice. There isnt a lot of evaporation until the water starts to simmer, so even if it takes a lot longer to get to temperature, it's still around the same actual cooking time once it has. So you get the same amount of evaporation.

Roughly.

If you follow the two and a bit cups water to one cup rice recipe you find on brown rice, then triple it to make enough for everyone, you get glue.

You start with at least a couple of cups more water than you need.

To avoid glue it's important to only add one cup of water for every extra cup of rice more than the recipe on the packet calls for.

Or just stick your finger in your pot so it touches the rice, and fill with water to the first joint on your pointing finger. The finger method also ingeniously accounts for the width of the pot, and thus the surface area of the water, so it works even when you change pots. It works all the time.

120ThingsIn20Years thinks it works all the time.

Cooking - Emulsifying agents

Nope.

This post isn't going to be about getting spies mixed up with each other, but rather an altogether much more palatable thing.

It's about salad dressing.

If I had my way it would be illegal to sell any food with an ingredient my grandmother couldnt instantly recognise.

Unless it was one that someone else's grandmother from some other country could immediately recognize.

That would be fine as well.

But anything like "dextroconcubinic acid" or whatever, is definately out. Dont bother looking that up, I invented it just now.

But I also dont think prohibition is worth anything at all, so I figure I should embrace all those mystery ingredients.

Or not.

Whatever.

But it's left me wondering why people dont have things like emulsifying agents in their kitchen. I understand an agg does a pretty good job of it, but what if for some unfathomable reason, you dont want an egg?

Well, (and here's the crux of the post) you can just add a little of something you dont recognise to get the result you want in the stuff you do recognize.

Take this for example...

Put a teaspoon of store bought, shelf stable mayonnaise-like product into your next salad dressing, and your oil and vinegar will love each other for ages before their inevitable separation.

It will undecuple the time your emulsion stays together!



120 Things in 20 years is feeling hungry.

Thinking - R2D2

That little R2D2 robot nugget doesn't really have a lot going for it other than charm and cracking skills. Some would say that's enough, but I want more from my personal robot assistant.

It talks in ascii via a screen when it communicates with humans, and chirps to everything else regardless of what language they speak. Even my iPhone speaks more languages than R2D2.

Now dont get me wrong, I've always enjoyed it's company, and it seems like a decent kind of ... device, but it hasn't seen a lot of upgrades in the time we've known it.

I think it's been a hundred years or so. The kid did a few adjustments, but I dont think there was any kind of major operating system upgrade from the manufacturer or anything, and it seems to have pretty much the same skill set on the ice planet as he did all those years earlier.

That makes him a toaster as compared to my aging phone.

Not happy!


120 Things in 20 years wants more from my robots NOW!


OK this time I really haven't added a photo (or a post really)

Thinking - Pest control

Once when I was eighteen years old or so, I owned a ghetto-blaster style sound system.

Which is interesting enough as it stands.

But to add interest to the narrative, I once saw a remarkable thing occur upon it's top surface.

A cockroach walked across it.

I realize at this point that this is still not the gripping tale promised by it's title, but there's more...

I rolled up some junk mail* vouchers for fast food and furniture, and just as I was about to kill it, it died.

It just died right there in front of me while I watched. I presume it died of old age. I have a slight allergy to bug spray type product (I get hay fever from them) so it wasn't because of a surface spray or anything.

I'm guessing it didnt die of a heart attack or anything, because I've notice in squashed cockroaches there's no sign of a heart of anything else meaningful.

Just mush.

I always assumed they dont have organs, just soup, and something that makes their legs twitch to give their famous ability to scurry.

Here's my impression of an actual X-ray of the mush inside a healthy, living cockroach.

Pretty convincing stuff.







Anyway...

The thing just up and died right in front of me just seconds before I was going to kill it.

I was going to rob it of those last few seconds of life.

It changed the way I saw killing things for a while.

Until the ant incident a few months later, but thats a story for another day.

That's it really.

I just thought you should know.


120 Things in 20 years thinks it may be the only person on earth to have seen an insect die of old age.

*In order to take a relevant photo of something rolled up, I just went out to get the daily batch of junk mail that we have hand delivered to our door every day. Today for the first time in our history here, there has been no delivery. When we lived in the country we didnt get junk mail, so we still find it culturally interesting and worth a read. Before we lived in the country, I lived in the city, so received junk mail, and something called the Messenger Post, which is a free newspaper (looking thing) that someone sees fit to throw at every house in South Australia, and is typically used to help fill recycling bins, and wrapping fish heads. In fact it was most likely a copy of the Messenger Post news paper that I would have rolled up on the day.