Archive for March 2016
Aurora Borealis above Denali National Park. Posted on Tumblr by the US Department of the Interior, 2/23/16.
Mother Nature shows her power with this dramatic lightning storm over the Needles District at Canyonlands National Park in Utah. Photo from last summer courtesy of Claudia Castillo. Posted on Tumblr by the US Department of the Interior, 3/21/16.
The quintessential Maine moment: rugged coast, colorful sunset & a lighthouse Acadia National Park. Photo by Jeremy Stevens. Tweeted by the US Department of the Interior, 2/27/16.
A fiery sunset overtakes the sky at Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in Colorado, casting an otherworldly glow on the park’s purple sands. Photo courtesy of Chris Wheeler. Posted on Tumblr by the US Department of the Interior, 2/9/16.
Describing this beauty is impossible. Sunset over Arches National Park. Photo by David Long. Tweeted by the US Department of the Interior, 2/10/16.
Grand Canyon National Park. Tweeted by the US Department of the Interior, 2/26/16.
Less than 100 miles north of California’s Bay Area, Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument sweeps down from the Snow Mountain Wilderness to the cool blue waters of Lake Berryessa. Established in July of last year, this secluded, hilly expanse of oak woodlands, grasslands and flowery meadows is a gorgeous and peaceful place for all kinds of outdoor recreation. Photo by Jim Eaton. Posted on Tumblr by the US Department of the Interior, 3/19/16.
John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States, after losing the popular vote and losing the electoral college vote.
It was chaos.
In our 10th Presidential election, no candidate won a majority of the electoral college vote. In such a situation, the 12th Amendment to the Constitution governs what happens next: when no single candidate gets a majority of the electoral college vote, the election of the President is thrown into the House of Representative, who choose from the top 3 electoral candidates in a single vote. That’s exactly what happened 192 years ago.
We think today’s politics are crazy? Here is what happened in 1824:
The # 2 political party, the Federalist Party, had effectively dissolved, leaving only the Democratic-Republican Party standing. The Democratic-Republican Party had in fact won the last 6 elections for President. Unfortunately, in 1824 the Party could not agree on a single candidate, so they fielded what were essentially 4 regional candidates: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William H Crawford & Henry Clay.
Andrew Jackson was the popular favorite, and his group would eventually become what we know today as the Democratic Party. John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay represented a group that would become the National Republican Party (which is not the same thing as today’s G.O.P.).
Andrew Jackson “won” the popular vote – though in this era, not all states even had a popular vote. Rather, some states simply empowered their state legislature to decide how their state’s electoral votes should be cast for President! Jackson did win 99 of the 261 Electoral College votes. That was the largest number won (with John Q Adams 2nd with 84) … so neither of them won a majority of the electoral votes. In this election, they would have had to have 131 votes to win the Presidency outright.
But they didn’t.
Andrew Jackson, the popular vote winner in 1824, but not President until he won again in 1828.
So, it was up the the House of Representatives to choose the 6th President of the United States. The Speaker of the House was Henry Clay, who finished 4th in the Electoral College vote and thus was excluded from the Top 3 that the House would choose from. Clay endorsed Adams, and that helped to swing the vote to Adams. The final House tally was Adams 87, Jackson 71 and Crawford 54. Adams was the new President, by a margin of 16 votes in the House.
Adams later appointed Clay to become Secretary of State, which was a rumored deal when Clay first endorsed Adams. Neither Adams nor Clay ever confirmed such a deal existed, but the alleged deal became known as the “Corrupt Bargain” in the press. Jackson railed against this supposed backroom deal throughout Adams’ term, and then unseated him as President in the election of 1828.
John Quincy Adams thus joined his father as the only one-term Presidents in the then-short history of our Republic.
History Repeating In 2016?
Let’s pretend the current front runners, Donald Trump & Hillary Clinton, win their parties’ nominations. However, since they both have very large negative ratings, a movement happens to bring another candidate onto the Presidential ballot in November … let’s nominate the most popular Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine (liked by 78% of her constituents!). Collins promises to nominate prominent politicians into her cabinet, perhaps choosing popular Ohio Governor John Kasich or California Governor Jerry Brown as Vice President. Trump & Clinton run a dead heat of a race, and neither wins 270 electoral votes. If Ms. Collins just won her state’s electoral votes – finishing # 3 overall in the electoral vote of the Presidential race – then the House could choose to elect her over both Trump and Clinton.
That’s not my prediction, mind you, but it could happen!
More
Huffington Post: Doomsday Savior?
Wikipedia: United States Presidential Election, 1824
270ToWin:Presidential Election Of 1824
Portrait: John Quincy Adams
A stunning picture of a storm rolling through California’s Death Valley National Park. Photo by Donna Fullerton. Tweeted by the US Department of the Interior, 3/15/16.
Click on these wondrous photos to enlarge them and read the explanations below each photo.
Whirlpool Galaxy and Companion The graceful, winding arms of the majestic spiral galaxy M51 (NGC 5194) appear like a grand spiral staircase sweeping through space. They are actually long lanes of stars and gas laced with dust. Some astronomers believe that the Whirlpool’s arms are so prominent because of the effects of a close encounter with NGC 5195, the small, yellowish galaxy at the outermost tip of one of the Whirlpool’s arms. Photo from the Hubble Telescope.
DEM L 190 Resembling the puffs of smoke and sparks from a summer fireworks display, these delicate filaments are actually sheets of debris from a stellar explosion in a neighboring galaxy. Denoted N 49, or DEM L 190, this is the remnant of a massive star that died in a supernova blast whose light would have reached Earth thousands of years ago. Photo by the Hubble Telescope.
Butterfly Nebula, NGC 6302 What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour—fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes. A dying star is at the center of this fury. It has ejected its envelope of gases and is now unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow. Photo by the Hubble Telescope.
M82 The starburst galaxy is remarkable for its bright blue disk, webs of shredded clouds, and fiery-looking plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out of its central regions. Throughout the galaxy’s center, young stars are being born 10 times faster than they are inside our entire Milky Way Galaxy. The fierce galactic superwind generated from these stars compresses enough gas to make millions of more stars. Photo by the Hubble Telescope.
Horsehead Nebula The Horsehead Nebula is a dense cloud of gas and dust embedded in a much larger structure, and a favorite target of astrophotographers because of its unusual shape. Most previous views have been almost identical. But when seen in infrared light, it takes on a whole new appearance. Strikingly, it is nearly a negative of the visible-light view. The area above the top of the horse is bright in visible but dark in infrared, while the body of the horse shows up much brighter in the infrared compared to the visible. Photo by the Hubble Telescope.
Omega Centauri Hubble snapped this view of a colorful assortment of 100,000 stars residing in the crowded core of a giant star cluster. The image reveals a small region inside the massive globular cluster Omega Centauri, which boasts nearly 10 million stars. Globular clusters, ancient swarms of stars united by gravity, are the homesteaders of our Milky Way Galaxy. The stars in Omega Centauri are between 10 billion and 12 billion years old. Photo by the Hubble Telescope.
Stellar Spire in the Eagle Nebula Appearing like a winged fairy-tale creature poised on a pedestal, this object is actually a billowing tower of cold gas and dust rising from a stellar nursery called the Eagle Nebula. The soaring tower is 9.5 light-years or about 57 trillion miles high, about twice the distance from our Sun to the next nearest star. The tower may be a giant incubator for newborn stars. Photo by the Hubble Telescope.
Stephan’s Quintet A clash among members of a famous galaxy quintet reveals an assortment of stars across a wide color range, from young, blue stars to aging, red stars. Three of the galaxies have distorted shapes, elongated spiral arms, and long, gaseous tidal tails containing myriad star clusters, proof of their close encounters. Group member NGC 7320, at upper left, is actually a foreground galaxy about seven times closer to Earth than the rest of the group. Photo by the Hubble Telescope.
Pismis 24 The small open star cluster Pismis 24 contains extremely massive stars. The brightest object in the picture was once thought to weigh as much as 200 to 300 solar masses. This would have made it by far the most massive known star in the galaxy, and put it considerably above the currently believed upper mass limit of about 150 solar masses for individual stars. However, Hubble images show that it is really two stars, each 100 solar masses, orbiting one another. Photo by the Hubble Telescope.
Cat’s Eye Nebula The Cat’s Eye Nebula, one of the first planetary nebulae discovered, also has one of the most complex forms known to this kind of nebula. Eleven rings, or shells, of gas make up the Cat’s Eye. Each “ring” is actually the edge of a spherical bubble seen projected onto the sky — that’s why it appears bright along its outer edge. The view from Hubble is like seeing an onion cut in half, where each skin layer is discernible. Photo by Hubble Telescope.
More
HubbleSite.org
Wikipedia: Hubble Space Telescope
DailyMail.com: Is China Building The Next Hubble?
Spring is arriving with warmer days & stunning sunsets like this one at Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. Tweeted by the US Department of the Interior, 3/12/16.
Cotton-candy yellows and pinks color the hills of Badlands National Park in South Dakota. The Badlands’ striking formations contain one of the world’s richest fossil beds, carrying clues to ancient mammals like rhinos and saber-toothed cats that once roamed here. Photo by Brenda Bergman. Posted on Tumblr by the US Department of the Interior, 2/17/16.
Glacier National Park in Montana, pictured here on a spring day. Photo by Greg Chancey. Posted on Tumblr by the US Department of the Interior, 3/3/16.
I am awash in shortcuts, offcuts & endcuts.
The problem is that hardwood (once you stop going to the big box stores) does not come in standard sizes. It generally does come in 8, 9 or 10′ lengths, but sometimes I buy boards that are 40″ long. Or 5′ long. Plus, when I buy lumber, I’ve discovered its most efficient to have the guys at the yard cut the boards into 6′ lengths. My shop isn’t made to handle 10′ boards … and if you’ve ever lifted a piece of Jatoba that’s 8″ wide, 2″ thick and 60 pounds long, then you know what I’m talking about.
In any event, boards are many different lengths, and many different widths when you bring them home from the store. No matter what you’re making from the lumber, you always – always – have small boards left over that don’t fit into your current project. And since I make a lot of projects, those boards pile up over time.
When I entered this weekend, I had 3 large containers of cutoffs under 12″ long. Boards that were somewhere under 2″ wide and 24″ long filled 2 storage racks, 1 storage cabinet, 4 portable containers, 1 trash barrel and many nooks and crannies in the shop that we won’t discuss.
I am awash in shortcuts, offcuts & endcuts.
Therefore, this last weekend was designated for addressing the problem head-on. I would use those small boards to make small pieces, such as sous chef boards and magic bottle openers that can use boards under 16″ in length. And that was just the beginning.
Here’s what I learned this weekend.
1. A job that needs doing is a job that’s worth doing. After all, what choice do you have? The job needs doing.
2. Don’t put an overflowing, open container of shortcuts on a shelf above your head without expecting to come away with a bloody forehead.
3. Safety comes in many forms. Sometimes … sometimes … you must remove the blade guard on the table saw to make a safe cut. Just don’t tell Velda.
4. The shop is so much more pleasant with the upgraded dust collection system & the portable dust extractor that I can use to vacuum the floor. Yes, I do that on a good day, and it’s wonderful. When I cleaned out 2 sections of my biggest shortcut rack this weekend, I could not believe how much dust was in, under and behind the rack. Good thing I have a tool for that.
5. Throwing away bad wood is essential. Discerning which wood is bad is a constant challenge. Anything shorter than 12″ is not usable in my world. I’ve got no time for 8″ x 1-1/4″ x 3/4″ offcuts.
6. I can’t claim my cutting boards are “Made In The USA” according to preliminary research done by the soap maker. Since all of my parts are not made in the USA, then the cutting boards that I make cannot be “Made In The USA.” Maybe. I will keep saying that the boards are made in Valencia, CA, which may not be an international marketing term, but it is true. For that matter, I could probably claim the boards are made in the USA, just not “Made In The USA.”
7. Safety can be destructive to tools. Luckily, the GRR-Ripper that I used this weekend is made to have the saw blade go through the heel of the tool so that you can safely cut boards as small as 1/4″ wide. Which I did this weekend (as you can see with the cut-up yellow heel in the lower right corner of the tool, right). Safely. I don’t need a new heel yet – but I bought a pack of 6 for pocket change. Now that I have them, I can use the tool with a clear conscience. Safely.
8. It does no good to own a tool if you’re not using it properly. See # 7, which has been used sporadically, and not for the reason I bought it, because I didn’t want to “ruin” the tool by sawing through the heel. This weekend, I got braver, then got smarter & then got safer.
9. Patience is a virtue. Sorting through piles (and piles and piles) of shortcuts is time-consuming, and does not seem as efficient as just grabbing more lumber out of the rack to make the next piece. In the end, though, I got quite a bit done this weekend by not going to the lumber rack for every piece. At the end of the weekend, I had only gotten 2 boards out of the rack, and both of those were for a very large cutting board I allowed myself to make as a treat.
10. I have an odd self-reward system.
11. When you embrace using shortcuts, sort them by size and make yourself use them, many great pieces can be created.
12. At the end of the weekend, I had not touched 5 storage locations, and barely touched 2 others. Miles to go before I sleep.
13. 52 pieces are now ready for glue-up, and that’s a good weekend’s work using any size of lumber – which is something I need to remember!
- 1 chess board
- 1 pig (so I’m back in the pig business. Almost.)
- 1 routed cheese board (new design, and I now have 2 to make)
- 3 small boards
- 3 cutting boards
- 3 Lazy Susans
- 3 large cutting boards
- 4 cheese boards
- 5 large sous chef boards
- 8 small sous chef boards
- 9 magic bottle openers (the smallest piece I make, at 5″ x 10″ x 3/4″)
- 11 clipboards (5 legal and 6 letter size)
Species used:
- Hard Maple
- Birds Eye Maple
- Curly Maple
- Cherry
- Black Walnut
- Purpleheart
- Yellowheart
- Bloodwood
- Teak
- Hickory
- White Oak
- Red Oak
- Honey Locust
- Canarywood
- Goncalo Alves
- Padauk
- Jatoba
- Jarrah
A sunburst illuminates trees heavy with snow at Table Mountain Winter Play Area outside of Ashland, Oregon. Photo by Joel Brumm, Bureau of Land Management – Oregon. Posted on Tumblr by the US Department of the Interior, 2/23/16.
Grand Teton National Park in the snow. Photo by Michelle Olmstead. Tweeted by the US Department of the Interior, 3/8/16.
Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park. Photo by Melissa Machonis. Tweeted by the US Department of the Interior, 2/11/16.
Wish you were still sleeping? A crescent moon rises over snowy marshes and the last rays of an orange-pink sunset at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge. Located along the coast of Delaware, Bombay Hook protects one of the largest remaining expanses of tidal salt marsh in the mid-Atlantic region. Photo courtesy of Tim Williams. Posted on Tumblr by the US Department of the Interior, 2/19/16.
Every March, thousands of Sandhill cranes stop in Great Sand Dunes National Park & Preserve on their way to their northern breeding grounds. The fields and wetlands of Colorado’s San Luis Valley provide excellent habitat for these majestic birds. With the dunes and mountains nearby, they dance and call to each other. It’s one of nature’s great spectacles. Sunrise. Posted on Tumblr by the US Department of the Interior, 3/11/16.
More
Great Sand Dunes National Park
The Dunes And The Rainbows
Gold!
