Detritus of Empire for 2017

And as the sun rises on a new year lets have a different kind of coin.

January of course is named for Janus, a Roman deity who could look both forward and back at the same time.  Looking back is seldom a useful endevour but were I inclined to do so 2016 was personally a rather good year. Being a grandfather is fun.  Being a student a full generation and then some older than my peers is interesting.  I have traveled here and there, seen and done interesting things.  Regular readers would be bored by a recap.

So perhaps a look forward.

I expect to remain a student.  I am not sure which classes at the local Tech school I will take on but the universe of things I need to know more about is vast.  I could in addition to now being a mediocre machinist add to my repertoire and become mediocre at welding, or pneumatics, or programming.

Many of these topics overlap with another goal, to remain a teacher.  Robotics is great fun.  At the high end is the soon to launch FIRST robotics season.  We have the ingredients to be very good this year but of course a great season happens when none of the thousand little things that could go wrong do go wrong.   On the other end of the scale it is time to upgrade my long standing middle school robotics program.  Components have become quite affordable and I am no longer shackled to an employment schedule.

I expect to travel.  Like so many plans it assumes good health and no family crises.  Its Vindolanda in May and if all goes well a return to Italy either before or after.  There might be a Classic Summer Road Trip.  I might come up with something entirely new.

For writing I occasionally try to keep to a pattern.  I have things lined up such that I will plan one robotics post and one history related post per week for a few months.  The third post of the week will be "pot luck". Later of course archeology comes along.  I will try to stick to three times a week posting but after nearly six years of same I think an occasional variance is justified. 

It has been a busy year at Detritus of Empire.  If stats can be trusted, I have had a significant uptick in visitors of late.

Of course stats can't be trusted, not really.  When a topic of arcane interest suddenly has five hundred "hits" you can be sure most of them are automated 'bots from somewhere in the murk of Eastern Europe.

But they seem to cause no harm and are perhaps in their own way simply curious.  

So, to my human audience in 2016, Thanks!

To my non human audience, 01010100 01101000 01100001 01101110 01101011 01110011 !

2016 Farewell

Last post of the year, and I find myself wondering what to say.  Posting three or more times a week year round means that I have to date already said quite a lot.

I expect that the default tone of most "Year End" retrospectives will be the same: How Many Important People have Died.

Which I consider nonsense.

Back in my practice days I used to opine that medicine was one of the few professions with a zero percent success rate.  If you follow them long enough each and every patient of yours is going to die.  Of course that is a bit silly, and the real measure of success is whether they lived long, productive and comfortable lives.  But it is nevertheless true, a 100% death rate is the human condition.

But what about the list on Facebook of 130 Celebrities that Died in 2016?

This just means that we have in recent decades created "Celebs" at a much increased rate. 

Consider an analogy.  When excavating a Roman site you will find very few coins from the 1st through 3rd centuries.  When you do they are generally hefty, well worn and have a substantial percentage of honest metal in them.  But when you are unearthing levels from the 300's you find coins galore.  The economy of the Late Empire was continually teetering on the edge of collapse and mints churned out measly little coins with no intrinsic value.  It took a handful of them to buy something that in an earlier day would have been had for a single coin.  When one of these devalued coins was dropped into the muddy street it was not worth picking up.

Now I don't mean that the "Celebs" that have died in the last year were all low value light weights.  We all have our favorites, and I consider for instance Alan Rickman to be a solid gold aureus.  And I consider a few others to be at least denarii with decent silver content.  But the definition of what is a famous person has become rather arbitrary.  A popular culture voracious for something shiny and trivial to talk about has minted them by the bucket load.

I suppose that in the golden age of film there were a enormous number of actors and actresses playing bit parts in famous movies.  They went on to live lives either in or out of the entertainment industry, and then passed away.  Perhaps their local paper might make note of their bit part in The Wizard of Oz but pre-internet, pre-Imdb nobody else would take notice.

We probably are seeing a rise in the deaths in the Musical sub category.  Rock and Roll and the various genres that followed generated a big cohort of slightly famous people.  They appear to be dying a bit younger than average citizens.  But certain "occupational hazards" of the chemical sort probably curtail the life expectancy of modern era musicians just as booze and chain smoking made elderly Blues stars uncommon.

And as to the recent tendency for people to become famous just for being....famous?  I harbor no ill will towards Kardashian Nation but if newspapers still exist when that bunch starts to pass away there are entire Sunday editions already pre-written.

I don't intend to be insensitive to those who have had a personal loss this year past. In particular a loss that is unexpected and/or of a young person is a bitter thing.  But as years inevitably come to an end so too shall all of us.  I lost my father this year.  But his was a long life, a good life.  He was one of those well worn coins with heft and inherent value, not one of the lesser and lighter strikes from a gaudy mint that runs 24/7.

Higgledy-Piggledy

We are in that curious stretch between Christmas and New Years. Holidays pop up at irregular intervals, dishes and serving plates seldom seen emerge from storage, a few wadded up remnants of wrapping paper hide in corners and under furniture.

It is all rather Higgledy-Piggledy.

I like the phrase.  It first shows up in the 1590s and has a logical origin, the disarray typical of pigs.

Duplication words with altered initial consonants are more common than you might expect. Probably for the excellent if simplistic reason that they are fun both to hear and to speak.

Hanky-Panky, and Hocus-Pocus are a couple more that are well known.  But a quick stroll down Etymology Lane turns up so many more.  Many date from the 1600s when this particular vein of linguistic ore seems to have been most productive.

Some I already knew:

Hodge-Podge, Hurly-Burley, Hub-Bub, Helter-Skelter, Jibber-Jabber and Topsy-Turvy.  Topsy-Turvey fittingly exists in 31 variants!

Other words I did not know, and sadly will have difficulty fitting into any forseeable conversations:

Kim-Kam, Crawly-Mawly, Mingle-Mangle and Hab-Nab.  Flim-Flam I of course knew, but Crinkle-Crankle, Gibble-Gabble, Hiccup-Suickup were new to me.

Most of these are from a single wondrous source Edward Moor's "Suffolk Words and Phrases" (London, 1823).  Moor in turn quotes from an earlier work,  John Ray's "Collection of English Words Not Generally Used" (1768).

Higgledy-Piggledy and all its sound alikes are said to be "conceited rhyming words" all said to "signify any confusion or mixture".

Merry Christmas, Mr. Bill

We had a good Christmas.  All the family was under the roof at least for a while.  There was a toddler to chase.  Surprisingly there were two cute puppies although I did not get to keep either one.  Thoughtful presents were exchanged but the old cliche is really true for us...having the family and "associates" around was the real treasure.

Oh, but Bill the Squirrel did well with the gifts.

Here he is in his Santa Hat.  

This year he got to add:

A Tuxedo!  And, because fur is a good but not perfect cover up...

Strictly speaking, I'm not Naughty

Was Calvin and Hobbes the greatest comic strip ever?  It would be an interesting question to debate, but given the decline of newspapers in recent times I would say that it would at a minimum have a strong claim to being the last of the Great Comic Strips.

Calvin was a marvelous creation, conceived by genius.  

The issue of whether he was Naughty or Nice is indeed problematic, you would have to see the world from his perspective....something that not many could manage.

The above got me thinking about the meaning, not of Christmas, but of the word "Naughty".

I was wondering, and frankly hoping that it somehow tied in with the word "Nautical", thereby cementing the reputation of tattooed sailors swaggering around the sketchy districts of port towns being, well, naughty.  But that's not where the word comes from.

Naughty comes from the word naught, a still occasionally used word for "nothing".  It traces its origins deep into the muddle of Old English and High German.  The word has connotations that to the modern mind are jarring.  Those who had nothing were naughty. It was only a short jump to the opinion that they had nothing because they had bad habits...naughty behaviour as we would put it today, but without the modern winking appreciation of minor foibles.  This sense of being disobedient, especially as children, only turns up in the 1600s.

The term Nice is another interesting study in word play.  In the late 13th century it meant in Old French "foolish, stupid, senseless".  It traces back to the Latin nescius which combines "ne" indicating not, and "scire" a word that means "to know" and which also gives us "science".

As a word Nice has come up in the world a great deal.  from stupid it morphed to fussy, a meaning still preserved in the term "niceties" which denotes an excessive attention to detail.
Perhaps because being attentive to small details is universally appreciated "nice" has steadily accumulated ever more favorable connotations.

So as 2016 winds down which List am I on?  Oh, the Nice one for sure. 

I have certainly been foolish and stupid on occasion in the year that has been.  But I am far from being a person who has nothing.  I have friends, family, good health and resources sufficient for my modest needs.  

I doubt that real life incarnations of Calvin would have the patience to read this far down into a posting on etymology but if some desperate kid is trying very hard indeed to influence the decision maker at the North Pole, please, take freely what you need from the above instruction manual.  Some would say that doing so without giving credit would be naughty but I beg to differ.  It would very nice.

Santa gets Tech Support

My oldest son is still very good friends with a guy he has known since they literally were both in diapers.  They have had many adventures over the years, adventures that have had a certain flair due to their collectively peculiar sense of humor.

Even as grown ups.

They created a silly board game that extols the virtues of unrestrained capitalism.  "The Game of Moral Bankruptcy" as they have dubbed it.  As a game playing experience it is fun, perhaps because it is always played with appropriate beverages in hand.

Their home made game set up was rather crude, so for Christmas this year "Santa" has come up with a more polished version.  It helps that some of The Helpers now have access to design software, 3D printing and a laser engraver.....

My end of this rather fun project was to design game tokens and dice with custom logos.  The dodecahedron die was particularly tricky to do in Solidworks.  Here it is being printed.

And here are some finished products.  I consider this to still be prototype level work, obviously some of the materials I tried work better visually than others.

The 12 sided die.  Notice the smoking cigarette, fighter jet and beaker logos.  Adjacent are a couple of game play markers.  One is from Big Box Stores.  The other is supposed to represent a giant drop of oil from Grand Olde Petroleum.  I may add a dab of black paint to that one.

Another view of two game pieces to show up a third color option.  The capsule is from Bright Side Pharmaceuticals.

A six sided die.  This one came off the printer on a larger scale than I thought I had put into the design specs.  I might redo it or just leave it.  It is a one inch square "Clown Dice".  Note also the Lockhart Defence game piece and an eight sided die.

With the tokens and dice complete the next step was the game board.  I have access to a really swell laser engraver and am got a bit of "Elf" help with the design software.  Time to fire up the laser.

The final result was good, but not perfect.  But it should serve its purpose well enough, and if the lads ever decide to go into commercial production I have learned a few tricks to improve the next version.  The dice for instance might not roll completely "true" due to the differing weights of the various faces, as some logos cut out more material.

But I was told that would be fine.  In a game about corrupt capitalism loaded dice fit in perfectly.

Not the Commemorative Merch she was expecting....

Seen at the local consignment/on-line auction house.  I suppose this has been kicking around since the 1990s.  I don't have any personal animosity towards Mrs. Clinton and did not vote for her opponent.  So I present this only as a poignant, non political "Ozymandius" moment.  

History is fickle.  It is not ours to Command.

Final sale price: $3.00.