Building a furnace

I'm building a little furnace for backyard foundry duty, so I can cast parts for some of my zillion other hobbies. I'm not happy with all the brute-force furnaces out there on the Internet, that achieve all their melting power with a MOAR PROPANE! mentality, so I want mine to be one of those virtuous circle devices that work better the harder they work. Enter the air preheater:

Those holes in the side wall are air channels, for the incoming air to soak up some heat from the furnace wall instead of just letting it sink to ambient, unused. Unfortunately the side wall didn't slip out of the bucket as cleanly as I had hoped, and some fireclay got stuck in the corner, breaking out of the bottom of the wall when I turned the bucket over:

I'm glad the channels ended up mostly where I wanted them - parallel to the inside wall right to the bottom. (I made a little jig to help me line up the steel rod, that I used to make the channels, with the inner wall.)

Next I need to build a floor for this furnace, again with internal channels to communicate with the ones in the side wall. A roof might be nice too, but that can be (has to be) a separate part. I probably won't put air channels in the roof, in order to avoid plumbing problems - and so it will be possible to run this furnace without its roof.

Refreshing science fiction

Most sci-fi I see is either insufferably militarist, or hopelessly naive, and besides, most mainstream entertainment is boringly unambiguous. Not so with C 299,792km/s. You should probably not read further if you want to see the movie, there are spoilers below. But watch it again after reading the rest; I understood some things better only the second time, after I'd read some comments on the movie's vimeo page.

Here we have a grave, almost reluctant Malleck leading a mutiny on the Kestros IV, clearly a space warship. While certain in her conviction that her act is just, she is not merely juxtaposed as The Captain's moral opposite. The Captain seems like a reasonable man who merely does not (yet?) share Malleck's ideology: that humanity can do better than build space warships to blow stuff up and wreck planets.

My favourite line of the movie is "That's alright, I don't need them" - in response to the Captain's warning that he can't give her his "launch codes" (presumably for some superweapon). It's the first in-story hint that this is not the usual evil-terrorists-commandeer-superweapon trope-tripe that Hollywood loves dishing up. Immediately after, the film cuts to the retro-style Beyond the infinite "documentary" that's woven into the in-space arc hints at this beating-swords-into-ploughshares theme by negation, when Dr Harold Newman laments, "Since Man has been building tools, he has used them as weapons". It becomes clear with time that Malleck seeks to use the weapon as a tool, exactly as Newman vainly hopes (about untold amounts of energy), "or, to reach new [worlds]."

No doubt there are some hidden treasures in the film I've missed. There is a scene where Operator Hale searches for Lieutenant Kai, and a screen scrolls a list of names with short blurbs, some of them a bit bizarre. For example, there is "Unresolved conflict has led to extreme silliness" and "Bread crumbs are not as healthy as once [blurred]." No doubt some in-jokes among the film crew - and perhaps a nod to some of the Kickstarter campaign's funders?

Overall, I love the film. I wish there was more of it. Some people seem to be troubled by the acting, but it doesn't bother me. In fact, to me it adds authenticity - the characters are technocrats and soldiers, not orators and superheroes. The only scene I find a bit fake is where Kai figures out that something fishy is going on - that the ship is not awash with radiation but is, in fact, hijacked.

Even soldier Kai is human. There is a delightful scene near the end where he figures out what Malleck's motive is, and cracks the slightest smile, as if to say, "Yes, I like this script better than the wargames I signed up for!"

Watch it now, and then figure out a way to subvert your environment so that the world can become a better place.

Yesterday's mistakes and mystery words

guerre is a war. I should have inferred this from the capitalization of the phrase « Seconde Guerre mondiale ».

lors de la guerre then becomes "lors de la war", or "during the war" - a compound "transitive" preposition. (TIL about the idea of transitive and intransitive prepositions.)

fut is some past tense thing; seems to be the simple past of être (to be).

se déroula is like de-rolling - unrolling, in this use more abstractly as in "to unfold, to proceed", or, as Google translates it, "took place". I can't quite figure out the se part.

d'août is just the month of August!

était is the imperfect past tense, again of être.

près de is what you get when you press things together: they end up close to each other. Specifically, près de 40 000 militaires are nearly 40,000 soldiers.

il s'agit frustrates my attempt to find its idiomatic role. It's clearly the "it is about" meaning of the verb agir - to act, but I can't coax Google to translate "it is" back to s'agit without adding an explicit "about" which clearly doesn't belong in the context of "it is the largest deployment".

depuis is just "since".

Learning a new language

I feel like I want to learn a new language, but I can't quite decide which one. Since sometime in my teenage years, when I happened upon my sister's copy of Basic Italian (ISBN-10 4833700301), I've wanted to learn Italian, and for a short time in 2004 I could get by with a few Italian words and a lot of handwaving.

But Italian is relevant to pretty much only one country: Italy itself. So I've been on a search for another language to learn. Ideally one with some chance of economic benefit. I'd considered Spanish (which would open not just Spain, but several South American countries), Chinese (likely to become the dominant economy in the world, but just so damn foreign, and that writing system!), French (some use in parts of Africa, France itself has a decent economy) and Lithuanian (a linguistic interest sparked by a former Venusian interest). For now I'm leaning towards French, so I've bookmarked a few pages and now I think I should read a French Wikipedia article (or at least its introduction) every day.

Today's article is Operation Athena:

L'opération Athéna est la contribution des Forces canadiennes à la Force internationale d'assistance et de sécurité (FIAS) lors de la guerre d'Afghanistan. L'opération fut divisée en deux phases : la première se déroula de juillet 2003 à juillet 2005 dans la région de Kaboul et la seconde d'août 2005 à décembre 2011 dans la région de Kandahar. L'objectif global de l'opération était d'améliorer la sécurité et la gouvernance de l'Afghanistan. L'opération Athéna à Kandahar a constitué la plus longue mission de combat de l'histoire des Forces canadiennes. Avec près de 40 000 militaires canadiens engagés, il s'agit du plus grand déploiement des Forces canadiennes depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

I'll document my progress learning the language by translating what (I think) I understand. Obviously this technique relies quite heavily on the French language's influence on English, and Latin's too. Here goes:

Operation Athena is the Canadian Forces' contribution to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) deployment to Afghanistan. The operation was divided into two phases: the first, from July 2003 to July 2005, to Kabul and surroundings, and the second, from the end of 2005 to December 2011, to Kandahar and its surroundings. The objective for the global operation was to assist with security and government of Afghanistan. Operation Athena at Kandahar was the longest combat mission in the history of the Canadian Forces. With about 40,000 Canadian troops engages, it was also the largest global deployment of the Canadian Forces' Second Army.

Mystery words:
lors (de la) guerre
fut
déroula
d'août
était
près
il s'agit
depuis

Rolling Jubilee

It's heart-warming to read about people apparently hacking the system to do good. In this case, to make the world a better place by forgiving distressed debt - the people's bailout.

Then again, I can't help but wonder what effects this campaign will have, if it goes beyond a bit of hipster activism. It's like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle - you can't participate in a market without affecting it. The interesting questions here are, how big a player in the debt market is OWS likely to be, and what is the price elasticity of demand for debt?

Also, while at 5 cents to the dollar it doesn't seem worth getting worked up about it, I'm never quite comfortable with do-gooders taking on a burden that isn't theirs. And yes, that means I don't believe in charity - or at least most of it. Of course there are narrow-interest causes that are appropriate to fund by charitable donations, but others, like this problem of almost ubiquitous quasi-odious [1] debt, are broad social problems. Broad social problems should be addressed by broad social mandates - exactly the sort of thing governments are intended to do. If everybody bears the consequences of a social problem, then I think everybody should also contribute to its solution. By means of, say, income tax. And then you can segue into another interesting topic - how the burden of income tax should be distributed.

And that's the irony here: OWS is all about contrasting the burdens of the 99% with the privileges of the 1%. Like the phenomenon that many wealthy people are able to structure their income such that they pay a far lower effective rate of tax [2] than not-so-wealthy people do. And then OWS go ahead and voluntarily tax themselves with the cost of forgiving debt.

It still seems like a morally positive thing to do, and I still hope they shake things up.

---

[1] Nobody held a gun to anybody's head and made them take a $100,000 student loan for a liberal arts major. Other examples may seem more legitimately odious.

[2] Tax in general, not specifically income tax. Which is part of how they do it - by structuring their income such that more of it appears as capital appreciation, which attracts the far lighter capital gains tax.

I got mugged, then got (most of) my stuff back

Today I experienced my first mugging - in fact, my first violent-violent crime (to borrow from Whoopi Goldberg's "rape-rape"). I was walking my dog Vissie through the extended neighbourhood, hoping to take some more stereo train photos along the way. Here's the last train picture I got; unfortunately my muggers are not in the frame; it all happened so soon after the last pic I took that I must assume they are behind me in this image. Exif data says I took it at 17:41.

The purpose for all the train pictures I'm taking is to be able to construct a 3D model of these old 5M2A trainsets for an openBVE route I'm slowly working on - the route from Cape Town to Simons Town. It's surprisingly difficult to get a pair of photos of the same motor unit (I'm concentrating on these - the coaches are boring) with a reasonable angular separation. My camera (you hear that, mugger assholes? MINE!) "thinks" so long between pictures that by the time it's ready to take the second of a set, the train has usually moved a whole length or so. The name of the game then is to find open areas (to get the undercarriage unobscured by station platforms) where the trains tend to move slowly, due to having just left a station, or due to approaching the junction near Heathfield station.

Back to the topic. I was walking my dog. For the last year or so I've been maintaining a map of which routes I've covered. This is what the map looks like today:

The red line is today's route, followed by a blue trail to the police station after my foray into Parkwood. The red 'X' marks the spot. So these two out-of-frame guys grabbed my camera and dog-walking-stuff bag and, I guess, pushed me over. My memory of the details is fuzzy. But I must have realized what was happening just a split second before it went down, because I was able to hold on to one guys, then perhaps the other, grabbing his ankle to make him fall. I hope he tasted a mouthful of sand. I heard of of the guys say "Steek hom!" ("Stab him!"), and I recall thinking, "Shit just got real", looking out for where the knife is. I didn't see one, and in any case, my inner reptile had taken over and decided it was a good idea to pull ankle boy to the ground.

Unfortunately they got away. (Fortunately I didn't get stabbed in the process.) They weren't all that far ahead, and I was able to get up relatively quickly. Reptile decided to throw some conveniently nearby ballast at them, and if my aim had been better, I might have hit them. I just about had the distance. My aim was off though, and the second stone landed on somebody's garden shed's tin roof. (I feel like I should pay a visit and apologize, or at least explain. It feels dishonest to apologize for something I know I'd do again if I rewound the situation.)

I'm a bit bummed that Vissie doesn't really seem to be a hunting dog. She didn't respond to "Go get them!" (Not that I'd expect her to do that - she's quite territorial at home, but doesn't really bring that aggression along on walks.) In my fantasies I'd have a giant Dobermann like family friends' horse-like Spencer chasing them down like helpless prey and barely holding off from making mincemeat of my attackers.

So I had to do the pursuing myself anyway. I rounded the corner of houses, followed the muggers along the canal as they climbed down and out of it the other side (perhaps to pin me on the near side with my dog, but I quickly found an easy way over). Then over the M5 / Prince George Drive, still carrying significant traffic, luckily not having to wait too long to get my gap.

These assholes probably didn't expect a white guy to follow them into Parkwood, a pretty dodgy-looking area. I've given the cleaning lady at my ex work a ride home after year-end functions a few times, so I knew it was going to be "interesting" feeling like there's a target painted on my back going in there hoping to confront my muggers. I managed to follow them a few blocks before I finally lost sight of them, but not before launching another missile at them (which hit a shopkeeper's car instead, dammit).

So there I was, just me and my little dog sticking out like a sore thumb in a pretty depressed area. It's really no wonder that some of the people living in Parkwood engage in opportunistic crimes. Whingeing white people from leafy suburbs like mine, Plumstead, should really think hard about the effects of NIMBY anti-activism.

Feeling rather down, having moved past the momentary anger stage, I knew it was time to fess up. Today wasn't the shopkeeper's best day either. When I went back to that red car I hit, the guy working on it told me it was the shopkeeper's, and that he had just finished "fixing it". I'm not clear on the nature of this fixing - but clearly the man had just finished doing some work on the car for the shopkeeper, when my piece of rubble hit it. Like a bird pooping on freshly washed washing.

During this car-checking male bonding ritual, a little girl came over and said I should "go up there" and get my stuff. No ways, we all (the adults around) reckoned this would be a trap. So we continued talking car, as I was trying to get to a (reasonable) fee to make things right.

Lo and behold, that's when a young lady with a baby on the arm appeared and gave me (most of) my stuff back. She didn't want to give a name, saying only, "Die boere ken my, hulle ken my goed" ("The police know me - they know me well" [1]). I don't understand how that happens, but yes, somehow, someone, somewhere decided that I should get my stuff back, so I did. Whether it was the muggers' mom or some other "strong woman" type who made it happen, I don't know. I certainly don't think it was remorse that made my muggers capitulate on what, to me, was their unassailable position - they had my stuff, and I had lost sight of them. Courtesy of someone, I have two pictures I didn't take. Here's the first post-mugging shot. Exif says 17:52:

The LCD seems to be fine, as is the lens motor and, in gross, the camera exterior. As you could infer from the mugger-cam above, the lens cover is jammed though. There's sand in the crevices between the body panels, so I'm hoping that a teardown + clean can restore lens cover action. If not, I'll have to remove it entirely. I'm optimistic that the optics are still okay - a post-retrieval test showed a blurred but recognizeable scene, which isn't that surprising, given the jammed cover.

Regrets

The shopkeeper eventually told me "it's okay", and reassured me that his car is insured. The damage is minor, having only chipped some paint off the trunk and rear bumper without denting any panels. It's one of those vexatious "benefits" of owning a car: occasional minor damage that costs the world, relatively, to fix. While I don't really regret throwing stones at my muggers while still at the railway tracks, I really misjudged this one. I'm a bad person and I should feel bad! (I do.) I don't recall having seen any people in the ballistic cone, so things could have been worse (hitting an innocent person), but I definitely should have reigned reptile brain in on this one. In a sense I'd like to make right with the shopkeeper. I'm not sure how. I'd feel a little unsafe going back into Parkwood with a wad of cash to give to him, but other than that I have no connection to him - no name, no phone number. And I don't want to get scammed out of an unreasonable amount in compensation. It's hard for me to trust people from such a different socio-economic background, which is why I didn't give the car fixing guy the R350 he thumbsucked (down from an initial R900 - see what I mean?) as a cost to fix. (I did, in fact, have a few hundred rand in my pocket - my muggerazi forgot to check there!) People can be a little skelm if they perceive you to be "rich", IME.

If I had been more fit, I could have caught up with my assailants sooner and re-confronted them more on my terms rather than on theirs - Parkwood with its "no I didn't see them" ethic. (Thanks to the kids who haven't yet been brainwashed by this shit and pointed me in the direction these guys had run.) If you're fit, you can tire your prey, and then take advantage of your greater metabolic capacity in a fight.

My physique isn't imposing - at all. If I turn sideways I disappear. Of course it's unwise to go around vigilante-style looking for trouble, but it's hard to imagine greater strength being a disadvantage. Being able to more effectively resist attackers might have let me avoid the unplanned road run I had.

Do I regret my choice to stay in South Africa, when I could live in Europe instead? I am a German (dual) citizen, so getting there (and staying, and being able to work) is not a problem. I don't know. I'm sure today's incident will affect my feelings, and make me doubt my wisdom in staying here. Time will tell.

Along the way

Getting out of Parkwood wasn't too hard - I was only a few blocks in. I didn't really feel welcome there, hearing a few "hey, whitey!" calls, but didn't feel particularly unsafe. Just... not exactly welcome. (I got the same vibe once before after dropping Wilma off at home there after some work function.)

In Southfield I encountered a Metro Police officer, and after asking for directions, had a little chat. It was remarkably reassuring, talking to this dad-like someone who was willing to just listen to my story. Perhaps it was partly also my first in-person reconnection post-mugging with the developed side Schrödinger's city, with authority.

Thanks to the lady who was watering her garden and let me drink from the hose. All the exertion had dehydrated me, so my throat was dry and it was rather unpleasant feeling like a piece of biltong.

Diep River SAPS let me lay a charge, this time without my having to squeeze blood out of a rock. I guess I cope with things by making jokes, as I kept poking fun at how I'm reporting "Amount (1) Description (Sock)" among the items stolen. (It was one of an expired pair, that I used to hold spare batteries for my camera.) Either my jokes aren't funny, or the police aren't allowed to laugh at jokes that complainants make.

Future

I expect that I'll be dealing with some post-crime neurosis, like not wanting to walk the 'hood, as my internal risk heuristics recalibrate. I'll probably get over it and over revenge fantasies and other psychological fallout after a while, as it has in the past when crime has affected my life.

While I was getting over the initial shock of having just been relieved of my camera, the thought going through my head wasn't so much, "They stole R1000 worth of my stuff!", but rather, "There are photos on that memory card that I don't have at home!". Keep it in mind, folks, when you go out with your camera. Download photos to somewhere off-camera regularly. Back up your computer too, while you're at it, and store the backup media at a friend's home. And for goodness' sake, don't fall for the "store it in the cloud!" panacea-talk.

[1] "Boere" is a somewhat derogatory term for "police". It translates literally to "farmers", referring to the mostly Afrikaans-speaking "boerevolk" whom many saw as the protagonists of Apartheid. Back then, police officers were almost exclusively white, and stereotypically Afrikaans-speaking.

Giant Cape Gooseberry capes

Cape Gooseberries do well in my garden. They germinate readily, crop well, and yield almost 100% - pests try, but almost completely fail to get to the berries. Berries are good to eat even after falling to the ground and waiting there for a few days. That's when they're at their ripest, and sweetest!

Now that their fruit are ripening in the Southern Hemisphere spring, I'm checking each of my plants almost daily for sufficiently ripe fruit. One ice cream box is already full of caped berries; I'll have to process them into jam soon, or cart them off to my mother and get my share of the spoils: gooseberry cake! Here's how the ripening berries normally look while still on the mother plant:

The one resting on the base of my thumb will be ripe enough to eat in a few days to a week or so. Or to store in the fridge: another welcome trait of this plant - the berries keep well.

But this isn't all I found on this stand. (It's a few individual plants that are hard to tell apart.) Hiding in the foliage were these strangely giant capes:

They're about twice the normal size! The berries inside feel no bigger than normal though, so I'm not expecting a bounty of berries the size of a crab apple. Would be cool though! (And there's still time for these green fruit to develop. Maybe the berries will still fill out their calyx and surprise me.)