In the Shadow of the Great Prairie Dog

I have not been traveling much this summer.  But some family members are.  Steeling themselves for the ordeal of long distance vacation driving my son and his family headed Out West.  Somewhere generally around Phillip South Dakota, on the edge of the Bad Lands, they encountered the World's Largest Prairie Dog.  It watches over a sort of gift store.

 

Well, that's not actually one of the pictures they sent me.  I borrowed it from Roadside America.  The latter is a fun site, I've sent them a few curiosities over the years.  Here's their write up on The Ranch Store and its guardian totem. 

The picture I actually was sent was taken as the blistering sun was getting low in the sky.  Still, it was 102 degrees at 5:30 pm.  Yikes.  I think the big guy looks a bit sinister seen from this angle.....

Mooching around in the only available patch of shade are a batch of actual prairie dogs.  They live there, enjoying an indolent existence where there are no predators, but a steady stream of tourists willing to feed them for one dollar a bag of "Dog" chow.

And, ya know, they are pretty cute little buggers.  Unless you happen to know a few things about them.  Like that they have been documented to transmit several diseases to humans.  Monkey Pox would be kind of bad.  And would require a bit of explaining.  But, helpful hint of the day, prairie dogs can transmit bubonic plague!!!  Lookin' a little less cute now???

And the Seasons Change

The official starting and ending dates of seasons are just dates on a calendar.  Life has other markers for change.  For instance, when I start to hear the sounds of the high school marching band practicing, summer is drawing to a close.

Of course there are other clues.  It's been a great year for growing things, so my hops are heading for a record crop.  Maybe I'll even brew beer with them this year.

The other day it was time to sign up for fall deer hunting tags.  Over the past months we've seen the deer on our land go from pregnant does, to skinnier does with spotted fawns, and now onto various family groupings.  The bucks seem to all hang out together, wandering around in a gang.  Sure, they all look friendly now, but when they all go crazy during mating season it will be another story.

No real summer trips.  Not much fishing, and only one new species to show for it.  Lots of robot stuff.  That season never really ends.  But it does have pauses.

We just finished the summer build with middle schoolers.  They did excellent work, and most of them seem to have caught the bug.  They've all signed up for our fall "Robot School".  And evidently invited all their friends.  So now I'm trying to figure how we can accommodate 20 students when we think our capacity for good instruction is about 12.  Hmmmm.

Well, its good to be busy.  In this brief interval between things I've got projects long delayed to take on.  And potentially some really big tasks in the year ahead.

See you around.

Ketchup, Mustard and their Little Pal RoboDog

I'm not an engineer, but its funny, there are some engineering concepts that translate to the real world.  Apply a lot of force to something and it moves.  Less force, maybe not.

Over the weekend we brought two robots to an off season competition.  One was "Mustard" the robot built by the high school team over a couple of months of  work.  Complex.  Had a rough outing at its first event but was heroic in the second tournament.  At its third event - the unofficial state tourney - it flagged a bit.  And it was mostly just sitting around since then.  A couple of the high school team members who had never driven it took a couple hours to see if they could learn it.

The other robot was Ketchup.  Built by middle schoolers over the course of 6 sessions.  Rugged, single minded, it was designed to do one thing.  Pick up those white pipes and drop them into the lowest tier of the scoring platform.  They worked hard on this project.

So....how did it turn out?

 Mustard, the high school robot struggled.  It was

designed to do one thing, score those pipes on the highest

scoring point.  Alas, just as one dog year equals seven

human years, so also with robots.  One month is about

seven human years, making Ketchup an old timer.

Old timers have aches and pains, things that go amiss

We had wiring issues deep inside the mechanisms, and

several matches the darn thing just sat there.  Worst

record of all robots there in the qualifying rounds.  True,

it got a bit happier towards the end.  Pit crew and the

new drivers learned a lot.  It got picked for an 

elimination round alliance based on how it ran its last few matches.

As for Ketchup, the middle school built machine...it was designed to do one thing and to do it very well.  Pick up those pipes and get them to the lowest scoring level reliably and fast.  10 per match please.  It's lining up for the shot in this picture, with its temporary number 9996.

And it did just that.  True, it only managed a bit more than 7 per match but to be fair it was called upon to play defense a few times or it would have come close.  The event kept detailed stats, and Ketchup finished ahead of several regular season robots in the won lost column (including its big brother Mustard) and number one in those L1 scores.  Design objectives achieved.

Ironically the two robot sibs were both on the same alliance in playoffs and did very well together.  They did not quite make it to the final round, but came close.

The matches will be available on Youtube in a few days.   I'll post some links then.  We may also put together a "Making of Ketchup" video down the road a bit.  In the meantime here's a bit of entertainment from the displays out in the lobby area.  Robot Dog.  Hank would go nuts seeing this...

Baby Bullhead Ballet

Immature bullheads are pretty darn cute.  Cuter than the adult version for sure.

I have not done much fishing this summer.  Lots of family stuff.  Lots of robot stuff.  But in my relentless quest to catch new species I have been out a few times.  Always in the odd places, backwaters, ditches, etc.

In one such place I came across a school of baby bullheads doing a very elaborate Bullhead Ballet.

Middle Schoolers and their Robot

It's been a hectic six weeks.  So, how much can a group of middle schoolers accomplish in that time?  Well, here's the numbers.  Once a week sessions, 11-4 on Tuesdays.  We usually had 6 to 9 students working, with two or three adult coaches and one or two invaluable high school team members.  In that time they went from nothing....to this:

Impressive.

They'll be taking it into competition on Saturday.  If interested, the live stream should be at:  https://www.youtube.com/@frcteam8744  

I've seen a lot in 27 years of working with kids and robots.  Wonderous things.  Alarming things.  But surprising things?  Not very often of late.  But this group, this robot....surprised me.  In a good way of course.

We Watch Deer. Deer Watch Us.

Trail cam photo from a week or so back.  Since starting deer hunting five years ago our number of functional trail cams has gone from three down to one.  Temperature swings, ant infestations.  Just cheap Chinese electronics.  

We'll be up doing some hunting prep in the days ahead.  So some functional cameras would help.  I took Hank to one of "his stores", dog and guy friendly places.  He was creeped out by the giant inflatable black cat lawn decoration.  Halloween too damn early, I was creeped a bit myself.  But here he is helping me pick out a couple of low cost 'cams.  

This is about the maximum of his Brave Hunter mode.  Chipmunks frighten him and he thinks skunks want to be his friend.

"Made in Scotland, from Girders"

You'd probably had to have traveled to Scotland or the northern reaches of England to get that reference.  It is one of the many slogans of a peculiar beverage called Iron Brew.  Or if you want to be picky, Irn Bru.  The busy bodies in some agency said they had to change the name because the stuff is not technically brewed and contains only trace amounts of iron.

But it sure looks like rusty water.  And the first time I ever drank it - also the first time I'd ever eaten Scotch Eggs - rusty water was my general impression.*  And yet, it is the most popular soft drink in Scotland.  By the way, another of their slogans is "Scotland's Other National Drink".

As this time line of cans shows, the stuff has been around for a while.  Weirdly it got started in the US in the 1880s, and did not make it to Scotland until around 1900.  Sometimes peculiar American products thrive in new environs.  See Spam for instance.

In general adverts in the UK are far wittier than what we see in the US.  And for a product aimed at Scots?  Very over the top and with that delightful accent.  Here's a highlight reel of just some of the Best of Iron Brew ads.  Uh, as with anything that spans decades there is some humor that you could not get away with today.  That does not make it any less humorous.

Enjoy.

*/When I was over last May I tried it for a second time.  And...they seem to have changed the formula.  It was bad in different ways!  Some of the ads above allude to variations on the basic "Bru".  They make a diet version.  And for a while at least, an Iron Brew based Energy Drink. I'm fairly brave trying food and drink on foreign travels, but that would be too much.

America's Got Talent (probably with Flute-Girls)

My grandkids enjoy America's Got Talent.  I doubt they watch it, or in fact anything, on broadcast TV, but they sure like the YouTube videos of some of the acts.  Mostly my wife watches these with them.  I can enjoy them too, as there is considerable skill, energy and creativity on display.  But I have the sort of pesky analytical mind that wonders how many takes for each act, how scripted the apparently spontaneous banter with the judges really is, how many acts an audience is expected to sit through in a day.  That sort of thing.

And when my mind wanders thusly, etymology can never be far away.  So, what does Talent really mean?

It goes all the way back to Greek.  Specifically to Talantan which means "a balance, a pair of scales".  I've dug parts of these at Vindolanda.  Here's an example found at the "sister site" of Magna back in 2023.

You could weigh all sorts of things with these, but with the word at hand we need to concentrate on monetary matters.  A "Talent" in ancient times was a measure of silver.  Specifically, 6000 of a silver coin called drachma.  This is about 57.75 pounds of silver, assuming nobody has fiddled with the content, and would be more money than most people of that era would see in their lifetimes.  A drachma was roughly the equivalent of a Roman denarius, and each were about one day's wages.

Why, I've even found the occasional denarius

The Parable of the Talents.  Most of us remember it.  It appears in both Matthew and Luke, in versions that differ enough to suggest they did not come from the same primary source.  Essentially a Master has to take a long trip.  He gives three servants money.  One gets 10 talents, one gets 5, one gets a single talent.

As you recall, the first two servants invested the money and doubled it.  The more cautions third one buried it in a hole - about the equivalent of keeping it in a checking account - and was severely chastised for his caution.

In the middle ages the meaning of talent morphed from a big pile of money into "a gift given for one's use and improvement", then into the abilities - lets call them talents - that enable a person to make good on such an opportunity.  

I have questions.  Did this bit of metaphorical advice have anything to do with the antagonistic attitude of Christians towards Jews regards lending money for profit?  I mean, it seems like the Big Guy specifically endorses this business model.

I also wondered how much trouble a servant would have been if he hadn't even preserved the principle, but lost it all.  This happened pretty often even before cryptocurrencies came along.  One common avenue for investing was backing a trading expedition.  Ships sink.  Bandits gonna bandit.

And I was surprised to learn than an alternative version of the parable occurs in a fragmentary and apocryphal text called The Gospel of the Hebrews.  In it, one of the servants actually blows the entire sum on "prostitutes and flute-girls".  Now, I'm not sure quite what that second category actually is, but it sounds like something you'd find on America - or perhaps Judea's- got Talent!

Robots goin' Places. Robots doin' Things. Summer 2025.

There's been....a lot going on.  The high school team has been doing outreach visits.  School Board, sponsors, that sort of thing.  These are fun for the kids.  Also, work for me.  But necessary.

At most of these events we are given a specific time slot.  But we always go way over.  It's because our audience always has lots and lots of questions.  Gather engineers around robots and its hard to pry them away.

One new wrinkle to this summer's visits is that we brought along both the high school robot and the one we have middle school kids building for an upcoming off season scrimmage.  Here's the two machines side by side.

The one on the left is "Mustard" our 2025 competition robot.  Its lil' pal is "Ketchup".  Ketchup is designed to pick up the game pieces - called Coral btw - off the floor and deposit them on the low shelf of the scoring structure.  Often.  I've told the tyke's drive team I'd like to see them do ten scores in a match.  Here's how it works.....

Of course you want those game pieces to be as far away from their point of origin, and therefore close to their destination.  So we had the next year 7th, 8th and 9th grade kids practice launching the Coral as far out onto the floor as possible.  Kids this age are good at scattering things around on the floor.

Lots of fun.  With more and better ahead.

Brick Yards of Chippewa Falls - Part Three

The Laycock and Barrett brick yard probably got off to a great start.  Chippewa Falls was growing, and they had the inside track.  But times were changing.  There is a gap of several years in the on line version of local newspapers, so all I can say for certain is that sometime in the mid 1870's this partnership went away.

There were a few mentions of brick yards in the 1880's.  There was a George Robson of whom it was said: "He will probably operate his brick yard in this city the coming summer if he does not sell out before the season opens".  That was in March, 1888.  In August of the same year an I.B. Taft was supposedly intending to start a brick yard on his farm.  

But a real revival of the industry had to wait for J.B. Theriault .  As you can see from the link, we've met him before.  He caught my attention early as his are, to date, the only marked bricks from our town.

Theriault's brick yard was on the western edge of town.  From the various descriptions of earlier yards I'm assuming they were all in the same general area.  There was, still is actually, a nice vein of good clay to be had there.  But as we shall see, that's not enough.

John Theriault got his operation up a bit late in 1890 but still had a good season.  He sold all the bricks he could make, employed 20 men, and was aiming to double production the next year.  I've shown this in the linked post, but here's a view of part of his plant.  Keep in mind that brick yards are sprawling places.  Lots of kilns, drying racks, clay pits, etc.  

There were actually two brick yards working the same vein of clay by about 1900.  Below is a Birds Eye view that shows the adjacent Goulet brick yard and gives a better sense of the scale of the operation by 1907.

A reporter for the local paper visited the Theriault brick yard in 1893, and had a lot to say about it.  The clay was said to be of a quality equivalent to the highly successful brick yards in Menomonie.  The proprietor had invested $11,000 in the buildings and equipment and employed 25 men.  Some of them lived on site at a boarding house with "a first class cook". * 

The capacity of the plant was 40,000 bricks a day, although it was only doing 30,000.   It was mentioned that the new addition to St. Joseph's Hospital, as well as many buildings up in Rice Lake, had recently been completed using Theriault bricks.  But there was that recurring problem.....

Theriault was handicapped by having no rail road spur.  Efforts to obtain one came to naught.

Eventually this impediment proved fatal.  Bricks, so long as the quality is good, are all the same.  And for big projects it would only be natural to go with the lower bidder, this usually being the yard that could eliminate some contribution to the expenses.  Like that extra shipping.  

By the mid 1890's Theriault was making 1,200,000 bricks a year.  But was still only running at half capacity.  The other yard, adjacent to his, had several owners.  French Lumber Company brick yard, Goulet and Bergeron yards, and the Chippewa Brick Manufacturing Company. 

Although both brick yards dwindled in the early 20th century and seem to have been gone circa 1915, there are still traces of their presence.  It now has nice new homes on cul-de-sacs, but there are three ponds, at least some of which were clay pits where material for making bricks had been excavated.  Potentially since the late 1860s!

* The first class cook at the Theriault brick yard boarding house was Zele Fourboul.  We've met her, her unfortunate spouse and her murderous step son in a previous installment!