Today through Sunday are going to be busy, so there’s probably going to be a strong dose of random.
I haven’t done anything with food in a while, so how about a seasonally appropriate recipe?
“Erich Shows us How to Make Hasenpfeffer”.
Another version from AlmazanKitchen:
Now I know why I don’t post more food videos: I’m hungry. So let’s switch gears.
Here’s another historical video from the AT&T Tech Channel: “The Thinking Machines”.
As I generally do, I’ve set this up to skip the intro.
One of the reasons this past weekend was so busy is that I got up brutally early Saturday morning and drove out to the KR Training facility (KR Training, official firearms trainer for WCD) to attend a “Stop the Bleed” class taught by Levi Nathan.
I know there are many gun bloggers who feel like: if you carry a gun, you should carry a tourniquet, too. I haven’t been doing that because:
Summarizing: I got exactly what I wanted out of Mr. Nathan and the course, and I heartily endorse this event and/or product.
And even though this was at KR Training, this isn’t just a gun thing, for all my foreign readers. People hurt themselves badly and suffer life threatening bleeding in all kinds of ways: car accidents, construction accidents, kitchen accidents…
I also heartily endorse the idea of taking an official “Stop the Bleed” course from someone, anyone. You’ll get hands-on practice with stuff, and hands-on practice is good.
That being said, today’s videos are all StB related. Some of this is for my own personal bookmarks, and some of this is for the benefit of my loyal readers who want the knowledge, but may not yet be able to step out and take a StB course.
Remember: Have gloves. Wear gloves. Nitrile is recommended.
This is a compressed (slightly over 15 minutes) version of the “Stop the Bleed” presentation.
Here’s a longer version (a little over an hour) with demos.
Again, these are not substitutes for taking a for real actual course from someone who knows what they are doing. But I know a lot of people still don’t feel like it is safe to go out and mingle in public, so this is better than a poke in the neck with a sharp stick.
And from North American Rescue, makers of the Combat Application Tourniquet (C-A-T), here’s how to apply one:
NAR has a content rich YouTube channel. Here’s another video on the use of the emergency trauma dressing.
And from ITS Tactical, here’s a video on using the Israeli bandage:
Finally, by way of SkinnyMedic, “How to use your IFAK”.
Note that some of these channels talk about stuff other than trauma dressing, gauze (for packing) and the C-A-T: for example, chest seals.
The advice we got in class for using chest seals (and even more emphatically, chest decompression needles) was: don’t. Chest seals seem to show up in a lot of pre-packaged IFAKs, but as Mr. Nathan put it, this is not within your scope having taken just a “Stop the Bleed” course. This is the kind of thing that EMTs with higher level certifications do, not random hobos such as myself.
Also, if you get someone else’s blood on you: tell the responding medical people. We all know about HIPAA, right? Well, there’s a limited exception in the law: if you get someone’s blood on you, and it is documented, and it turns out that person has a blood-borne pathogen, you have a right to be informed of that as long as it is documented. You don’t have a right to know how and where they got it, just that they had it.
Now all I need to do is get my (stuff) together. I’m actually kind of surprised at how many of the companies selling IFAK pouches don’t make them in red. Condor is the only one I’ve found: 5.11 doesn’t, for sure.
The pouch should be the cheapest part of your kit, as long as it holds everything in place. But in a high stress emergency situation, I’m personally thinking “red = first aid”, and I want to be able to tell people “grab the red pouch”, not “grab the black pouch, no, the small black pouch, no, the other small black pouch, no, that’s the dark purple one, grab the black one…” Know what I mean, Vern?
Science Sunday!
I’ve got a few things for you today. First up: “ABCs of Radiation” with “Illinois EnergyProf“, which gives a nice explanation of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation for the uninitiated. You know, for kids.
Bonus #1: Some kind person appears to have uploaded all of Jonathan Miller‘s “The Body In Question” series to the ‘Tube. I wanted to see this when it was first run on PBS in America, but for some reason I don’t recall at the moment was unable to.
Here’s episode #1:
Bonus #2: Have you ever asked yourself, “How do atomic clocks work?”
Here’s how the The NIST-F2 Atomic Clock works:
And here’s a more general introduction:
Bonus #3: which, of course, was nicely set up by the previous videos. This guy’s voice is right on the ragged edge of annoying for me (he reminds me of Inspector Clouseau), but I thought the content was worthwhile for HP fans: the HP 5061A Cesium Clock.
Here’s a two-parter for you. From 1966, and an old show for children called “Discovery“.
“The World Beneath the Sea”, part 1. This is mostly about marine animal life.
“The World Beneath the Sea”, part 2. This concentrates a lot on things like scuba diving, minisubs, and SeaLab II, which would have been right up my alley when I was a child (and is still right up my alley today).
I was talking with my brother about calculator watches recently, which reminded me of this video from Techmoan: “Hewlett Packard HP-01 1977’s Smartest Watch”.
As a HP geek, I would kind of like to have one of these: however, examples in good condition are expensive.
Bonus #1: I also thought it might be interesting to do some startup videos. Not tech startups, but starting up things. For example, an Airbus A320:
Bonus #2: Or a railroad locomotive.
Bonus #3: Or a DC-3.
Bonus #4: Or a tractor, “with a 12 guage shotgun shell”. I believe this gives new meaning to the term “shotgun start“.
Sometimes, the warning signs are lit up with neon and searchlights, and people still miss them.
A married pair of San Francisco entrepreneurs were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, the latest twist in the saga of a once trendy, now bankrupt fecal matter-testing startup.
Zachary Schulz Apte and Jessica Sunshine Richman, co-founders of defunct microbiome testing company uBiome, are accused of bilking their investors and health insurance providers, federal prosecutors said. They were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit health care fraud and money laundering.
Now, I’m just a poor dumb white boy from Hampden, but I feel like there’s at least two big warning signs that were missed here.
1.
I’m an absolute believer that you should avoid – indeed, run away from – any crowd funding campaign that is medical or health care related.
2.
Goop? Seriously? No s–t.. Again: anything that’s recieved an award from Goop, is promoted on Goop, or has any involvement with Goop: run like hell in the other direction.
Science Sunday!
I’ve been fascinated by rocks and rock hunting and geology since I was a young child.
I’m just not very good at it. So instead, I enjoy reading the works of others, like John McPhee.
Mr. McPhee talks with Eldridge Moores, a University of California geologist (and collaborator with Mr. McPhee on Assembling California) and reads from Annals of the Former World (affiliate link).
Bonus #1: “A Brief History of Colorado Through Time”. I used to collect those “Roadside Geology of…” books. I should at least go out and replace my copy of Roadside Geology of Texas (affiliate link). Perhaps I will be able to use it soon.
Bonus #2: “Flood Basalts of the Pacific Northwest”. Or, giant lava flows!
George Bass. I think he may have been an obscure figure to most folks: Dr. Bass (a professor at Texas A&M) was one of the pioneers of underwater archeology.
After being honorably discharged in the late 1950s, he pursued a Ph.D. in classical archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, an American photojournalist named Peter Throckmorton was researching Turkish sponge divers and learned that they knew of ancient artifacts on the ocean floor. Mr. Throckmorton wrote to the renowned archaeologist Rodney Young seeking sponsorship for a proper excavation. Professor Young turned to one of his graduate students who specialized in the Bronze Age and had enthusiastically read accounts of deep sea dives — George Bass.
Mr. Bass was less than fully prepared. He had time for only six weeks of a 10-week diving course at a Philadelphia Y.M.C.A. And before joining the expedition and diving 100 feet into the Mediterranean, he had tried on a tank just once and gone no deeper than 10 feet — in a pool. Yet that first trip became the foundation for the rest of his career.
“You have to be young and ignorant and naïve to get anywhere,” he reflected in a 2010 interview with the Penn Museum.
…
Early on, archaeologists who sought to take advantage of the aqualung remained aboveground, relying on reports from hired divers, who lacked archaeological expertise. Professor Bass took a more hands-on approach. He became the first archaeologist to do his own diving while supervising other divers. And he organized on-site training in underwater excavation methods for fellow archaeologists and students.
With help from scientists he recruited for his teams, he engineered new methods for removing artifacts from the seabed and for spending long periods underwater. One crucial early insight was that objects that look like rocks may actually be the corroded remnants of metal goods. Professor Bass X-rayed what he found interesting. If a rocklike object contained an inner cavity where a metal artifact used to be, he would pour epoxy inside and cast a replacement.
His excavations produced illuminating material about ancient shipbuilding. His first expedition, off Cape Gelidonya in Turkey, solved a puzzle about why Homer refers to brushwood on Odysseus’s ship. The remains of a sunken ship there revealed that brushwood had been used as a cushion for heavy cargo to protect the hull.
Deborah Carlson, the president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, which Professor Bass helped create and then ran for much of his life, ultimately in Texas, said he deserved to be considered the founder of the field.
“Under his direction, ancient shipwrecks were excavated underwater for the first time,” she said in a phone interview. “He did it by taking his archaeological training and putting on scuba gear and taking the excavation to a new dimension.”
Roger Baldwin. He and three of his Army buddies – Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott, collectively known as the “Four Horsemen of Aberdeen” – were early pioneers of basic blackjack strategy.
It led Edward O. Thorp, a mathematics professor and blackjack expert, to validate their calculations on an IBM 704 computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and to write the best-selling 1962 book, “Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One,” which helped bring the Army group to public renown.
Mr. Thorp recalled the influence of the men’s strategy in his 2017 memoir, “A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market.” “The Baldwin group,” he wrote, showed that the advice of the reigning experts was poor, unnecessarily giving the casinos an extra two percent advantage.”
Arnold Snyder, a renowned author of blackjack books, said by phone: “No one actually knew what the right strategy was because it hadn’t been calculated. They figured out what to do if your hand totals 15 and the dealer has an 8 up: do you hit or do you stand?”
Dick Hoyt, marathon runner. He ran the Marine Corps Marathon in 1992 and finished in 2:40:47.
Oh, I forgot to mention, it should be “they”, not “he”. Dick Hoyt was was pushing his disabled son, Rick Hoyt, in a wheelchair the whole way.
Rick Hoyt was born in 1962, a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy, unable to control his limbs or speak. “We had long since learned how to interpret our son’s smiles and nods,” Dick Hoyt wrote in his 2010 book, “Devoted: The Story of a Father’s Love for His Son.” “But as good as everyone in the family was about figuring out what Rick needed, we were still only making educated guesses.”
But in 1972, engineers at Tufts University built a computer that allowed Rick to communicate by choosing letters with a tap of his head. His first words were “Go Bruins,” revealing a passionate love for sports.
In 1977, Rick asked to be involved in a five-mile benefit run. Though his father was not a competitive runner, he pushed Rick in his wheelchair the entire distance, finishing next to last.
“When my dad and I are out there on a run, a special bond forms between us,” Rick Hoyt told The New York Times in 2009 with the help of his computer voice program. “And it feels like there is nothing Dad and I cannot do.”
You might remember this from one of Rick Reilly’s SI essays.
Science Sunday! And Happy Pi Day!
I was hoping to find some good Pi related videos on YouTube. Instead, I turned up a lot of crap about something called “Pi Coin”, which sounds to me like a scam cryptocurrency. (Is “scam cryptocurrency” redundant? In any case, I’m putting my money into DogeCoin.)
I thought about posting some pie related videos, but I can’t quite stretch my definition of science that far.
So maybe a grab bag of science randomness?
“I Make Guncotton (Nitrocellulose) With Hardware Store Ingredients, Again.” Never know when this might come in handy.
Bonus #1: “The Rocket: Solid and Liquid Propellant Motors”. Vintage 1947, and a nice explanation of how solid and liquid propellant rockets work.
Bonus #2: This is a little on the darker side, but I feel like there’s at least one person (besides me) who might find it interesting: “A History of Nerve Agents” with Dan Kaszeta, the author of Toxic: A History of Nerve Agents, from Nazi Germany to Putin’s Russia (affiliate link, but since this is from Oxford University Press, it’s a bit on the pricy side).
Science Sunday!
I’m going back to the space science well again, after only two weeks, because I feel like both of these videos are worth using.
“Uptime 15,364 days – The Computers of Voyager”. This is a talk by Aaron Cummings from the Strange Loop Conference, and deals specifically with the computer hardware: less so, as the presenter puts it, with the actual science of V’ger.
Bonus: This might cross more into leadership and management than space science, but I thought I’d use it here anyway: Andrew Chaikin on “Management Lessons of the Moon Program”.
I’ve read A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts (affiliate link) and enthusiastically endorse it. If you only have time to read one history of the space program, Chaikin’s book is a good choice.
Science Sunday!
I’ve stated before that computer science is science. So: from Dartmouth College, a semi-short documentary about the “Birth of BASIC”, featuring Tom Kurtz.
Bonus #1: Here’s a mildly interesting sidelight on science history. In 1945, Kodak had a problem: batches of X-ray film were ruined. Specifically, the film was peppered with dark spots. Turns out the problem was…the bomb.
“How Kodak Exposed The Atomic Bomb”.
Bonus #2: Hey, they even call this a “Leadership Through Science” film! “The Inside Story Of Modern Gasoline: Science Fashioned Molecules For Top Performance”, from 1946 and the Standard Oil Company of Indiana.
You may know this particular Standard Oil better as Amoco, which is what the company was renamed to in 1985 (though they were using the Amoco name before that). They merged with BP in 1998.
I thought it might be fun to dip back into the AT&T Tech Channel and their archives, and pick out some stuff related to telephones and telephony.
All of these videos have modern introductions, but I’ve set the embedded versions to skip over that intro. If you want to rewind, you’re certainly welcome to: I don’t control your browser. (Never mind that bitcoin miner I opened in a separate window.)
“Good-Bye, Central” is from 1978, and documents the last places that actually used central switchboards, instead of the dial system. This is just a little over 10 minutes, and even less if you skip over the intro.
“The Hello Machine” is also short, and is historically interesting: it was directed by Carroll Ballard in 1974. Mr. Ballard went on to direct “The Black Stallion”, “Never Cry Wolf”, and “Fly Away Home”, as well as doing second unit direction on “Star Wars”.
I know it might be a snoozer for some. (I think when you say “wordless film-poem”, you’ve lost Lawrence. Unless it has music by Philip Glass. Though now I’m wondering: could you do a “wordless film-poem” with tanks?) But: only 13 minutes, and less if you skip the intro.
One more: “To Communicate is the Beginning”, from 1976. This is a bit longer (32 minutes).
There are other interesting folks in this besides Brattain and Welles (though you know I had to use this because Welles): I won’t spoil all of them for you, but I will say I was surprised that Vladimir Zworykin shows up. (He actually died in 1982, at the age of 94.)
Another spoiler (possibly): the Bryant Pond Telephone Company lasted until 1981. The company was sold to Oxford Networks, and Bryant Pond’s cranked system was converted to direct dial and incorporated into the regular network in 1983.
Science Sunday!
It seems to me that a lot of folks I know are interested in the computers of the space program. Especially the Apollo Guidance Computer.
Well, here you go: from the National Museum of Computing, “Light Years Ahead: The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer”. Bonus points: the presenter, Robert Wills, is (or at least was as of October 2019) a Cisco employee.
Bonus video: “Common Misconceptions in Aerodynamics”, a presentation to University of Michigan engineering students by Doug McLean, a retired Boeing Technical Fellow.
Science Sunday!
I’ve been thinking about volcanoes. Why? No reason, really.
This seems right up RoadRich’s alley, and possibly Lawrence’s as well. I’m trying to find this on blu-ray, but the only versions I’ve found so far are not US region discs.
(What I really want to do is a double-bill of this and “Krakatoa, East of Java”. The latter actually does seem to be available on a US region disc at a reasonable price.)
Anyway…
I like this video because it clearly solves two problems at once: heating up the ravioli and opening the can. And because the ravioli is in the can, you avoid the gas problems you get when you try to toast marshmallows over hot lava. Now if you could just figure out a way to contain the hot ravioli once the can explodes.
Anyway, that was just the appetizer. From Gresham College and visiting professor Sir Stephen Sparks CBE, “Enormous Volcanic Eruptions”.
Bonus #1: “Volcano!”, a NatGeo documentary.
Bonus #2: “Life on the Rim: Working as a Volcanologist”, also from NatGeo, but short.
Bonus #3: Professor Tamsin Mather on “Volcanoes: from fuming vents to extinction events”.
Since I ran really long yesterday, I thought I’d go mostly shorter today. I also thought I’d post some things totally unrelated to military aviation: while I have a bunch of new related stuff in the queue, I’m going to try to avoid going back to that well more than once a week.
(And, of course, Thursday and Sunday are already booked up with unrelated topics.)
From 1953, according to the YouTube notes: “The 225,000 Mile Proving Ground”, a short documentary about railroad research and development. Featuring Hugh Beaumont being a little hard on the Beaver.
Bonus #1: Did you know there was an Early Television Museum? There is. According to their website, it’s even open right now. Hillard is closer to Columbus than my usual stomping grounds of Cleveland, but not out of the realm of possibility for a day trip.
In the meantime, here’s a tour of the Early Television Museum. And I guess this does sort of tie back to yesterday’s Walleye video.
Bonus #2: I said “mostly shorter” because I did want to make one exception, on the grounds of timeliness: from the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco, October 31, 2013: “An Evening With Hal Holbrook”. About 77 minutes long.
“In a rare treat, the audience enjoyed several extended recitations of Twain throughout the evening.” If that helps you make up your mind…