Summer Robotics 2019

The mixed middle school - high school robotics sessions are at the half way mark.  Lots of progress.  

We've set the lego component aside for a week or so to concentrate on other areas.  

The goal was to have a frame - built by the middle school students - and a control system built by same, get together.  Here's the frame in the home stretch.

And with the control board mounted.  I should point out to the uninitiated that this is a fair degree of complexity.  I've seen a few challenged high school teams accomplish not much more than this in a full six week build season.  Of course we did cut a few corners.  Notice the duct taped on bumpers!  

Across the work space others have been working on programming tricks.  We already had what we call "Puppy Mode", where the robot's light tracking system will follow a person holding a reflective target.  It was just another step forward into "Dog and Tennis Ball" mode.  The sensors are set to recognize the shape and color of an orange beach ball.  Carry it, toss it, roll it across the room.  The robot follows it like a loyal but none too bright Labrador.  Sorry for the low quality picture but you can just see the tracking cross hairs on the display screen...

For the remaining sessions we will continue to program on both the existing high school robot and the newly born middle school one.  The CAD team has been designing and cutting custom parts.  Simple things like a battery holder but still....these are just kids.

Really smart kids.

Forgotten Brewery Caves - Ooops!

There is a tendency to think of brewery caves as being very solid structures.  Indeed, the ones carved out of solid rock tend to be effectively indestructible.  Even the lesser examples made from brick vault construction tend to hold up pretty well.  Many of them from the 1870's and earlier are still hanging in there.

But now and then in the course of my research I run across stories of brewery caves that collapsed soon after construction.  Ooops.

Example the first:

This story is from Manitowoc Wisconsin and if memory serves is from 1869.  Since the brewery was only built in 1865 that means the cellars started to collapse after only three years.  It makes you wonder about the quality of construction.  But remarkably enough, the brewery building is still standing!  Maybe it was a different contractor.

Example the second:

The Melms brewery was on Virginia Street in downtown Milwaukee.  It was one of the biggest of the breweries of the post Civil War era but fell on hard times when its founder died young, supposedly after accidentally sitting on a needle and developing an infection.  In its salad days the brewery looked like this:

The same general location today:

The railroad tracks are gone but the general elevation of the land and the composition of stone below and brick above looks right.  The configuration of windows is a bit off though, so this may have been another building in the brewery complex.  

Presumably there are some vaults down under those parking lots but given the bad luck with vault construction on this site it seems unlikely that they'd survive.

The Melms name has been carried on in the form of the new Melms Brewing Company in a suburb of Milwaukee.  It was started by a descendant of old C.T. Melms and is of course worth a visit when in the area. 

In Search of The Giant Breakfast Stottie

Four years ago on a search for the obscure we happened upon an establishment called The Last Cafe in England.  And it was just that, being a short distance from the official boundary with Scotland.   A small establishment, it seemed to cater largely to passing groups of motorcyclists and rally car enthusiasts.  

We were just looking for a cup of tea but one member of our party was intrigued by a menu item called "Breakfast Stottie".

One of the British members of our party informed us that it was a traditional dish in Newcastle, environs of same, and up into Scotland.  A Stottie is a very large, loaf like dinner roll.  You can fill it with all manner of foodstuffs.  The contents of an entire Full English Breakfast filled it quite full indeed....

An adventurous Dutch member of our party could not pass up the challenge.....

As best I can calculate this was about 1600 calories of food.  But it was consumed to the last crumb, to the dismay of the house dog who was hungrily watching.  One suspects most guests don't finish theirs.  I know the husky soldier two tables over tried and fell short.

Stotties are called that based on an Old English word Stott meaning to bounce or jump.  Supposedly bakers determined the proper consistency of the loaf by dropping it on the floor.  If it was sufficiently rubbery to rebound a bit, well, you had a proper stottie.

Here's the proprietor of the establishment four years ago.  In conversation on our way out he mentioned that this was the standard Breakfast Stottie.  On request he could make it in a larger version.  He does not look the sort to kid about such matters.

Last May we had occasion to stop in again.  The place seemed to be under new management and we were told that it had been a while since the Breakfast Stottie had been on the bill of fare.  And alas, even in England there has been a trend in recent years towards healthier, better quality food.  My contacts in the Newcastle area were unable to find a single eatery still serving the Breakfast Stottie in its proper form.

Oh, something similar with about half the ingredients and caloric wallop can still be purchased.  Shamefully and misleadingly this is called The Ultimate Breakfast Sandwich.

But the true Giant Breakfast Stottie is either extinct, or at a minimum has become a sort of culinary Bigfoot, still existing...perhaps...in some vague area out beyond The Last Cafe.

The Brew from Scratch Project. 2.0

Last year my plan to home brew a batch of beer entirely from scratch came to grief. Deer ate the entire barley crop.  An unexpected fence replacement cut the hop production back by 90%.  Note:  Hops being effectively a weed, it is hard to stop its growth.  But I'm going to give it another try.  Infrequent updates ahead.

25 May, 2019.  Hops vines headed up the nice new back fence.  These are Cascade hops if you are keeping score.

Last year I put in a patch of barley at my son's acreage outside of town.  The deer moved in immediately.  This time, for a small expense, I just took an extra plot at our local community garden.  It has a fence.  "Full Pint" seemed a good variant to plant.  I hope a pound of seed will be enough.  

July 3rd.

Hops doing very well.

The barley is less encouraging.  It has been a cool, wet season and I probably should have used more seed.  But it is growing.  The red tape on the string is to remind the crew that mows between plots that this is not plain ol' grass but a crop.  When I grew barley many years ago there was some unfortunate confusion...

Oh,  there's some weeds and such in there as well.  I pull out the most egregious ones. But when trying to make an Old Time batch of beer you have to factor in that most farm house breweries used barley that probably had all sorts of other stuff in it.  Adds to the ambiance I hope.

Next update in the fall.

4th of July Parade 2019 - A House Undivided

A small town parade on a humid day.  The timing was perfect, rain just before and just afterwards.  The usual array of floats, fire trucks, marching groups of Girl Scouts.  Politicians?  None.  Any candy being passed out, and there was a bunch, was entirely altruistic.  A few images of the event.

Directly across from us were a middle aged white guy and a middle aged black guy.  Some sort of in laws I figure.  They chatted in a companionable fashion then together stood up when the colors came past at the start of the parade.  They both doffed their caps but the black guy was a little quicker on the draw.

I don't think that is Diet Pepsi in the can.

A bare chested Z-Z Top interpretation of Uncle Sam.

I'm not sure what the fuss was about tanks in the Washington DC parade.  Here we had a tracked fire fighting vehicle that looked much the same....and it had a very enthusiastic elderly woman spraying the hot, humid crowd with water!

May you enjoy the 4th along with your neighbors and family.

Ixonia Wisconsin

In the study of words and language there are very few accidents.  If something sounds eerily familiar you can usually trace the word back through time, and if necessary across a few linguistic groups, and find a connection.

So I recently set out on such a hunt with great confidence.

Wisconsin has the dubious distinction of being an epicenter for Lyme Disease and other tick born illnesses.  They are a significant nuisance to all and a serious health matter to some.  Most of this unpleasantness comes to us courtesy of a little critter variously called the deer tick, bear tick, or blacklegged tick.  If you want to be both accurate and a bit formal, it is Ixodes scapularis.  Here's our little pal that causes so much mischief. 

One reason they are such a bother is that they are small....and the immature forms are even smaller.  Check as you might, you will miss a few of these buggers.

Diseases are often named after the geographic location in which they were first identified.  Ebola is one example that has been in the news  of late.  Even Lyme disease was named after Old Lyme Connecticut.  I bet the local Chamber of Commerce is pretty happy about that.

Tick species don't appear to have such a naming system but when I looked at the map prior to a recent road trip and noticed that there, right in the heart of tick country, was a little hamlet called Ixonia Wisconsin I figured there had to be some connection. Just had to be.

Here's a Google Earth view of down town Ixonia.  Loopy's tavern seems to be the main establishment.  It's next to the rail road tracks.

So, lets get into the etymology, not the entymology, of ticks.  Ixodes is actually the genus name and it is a Greek word.  It means "like bird lime - sticky, clammy".  Not particularly accurate as ticks have dry, hard shells.  But just look at that picture, does it not make your skin crawl a little?

And Ixonia?   Well.....

Township of Ixonia Organized

It was on February 12, 1841 when a part of Watertown, Towns seven and eight north of Range 16 were set off to organize the town of Union. It remained the town of Union for only five years and then was divided into two individual towns. Town 7 was called Concord without any disagreement, but a dispute resulted in the naming of town 8. To simplify matters it was agreed upon to put the letters of the alphabet on slips of paper and have young Mary Piper draw them until a name could be formed. As the result, "Ixonia" was the name given town 8 on January 21, 1846, and remains the only town bearing this name in the United States.

So there you have it.  A genuine linguistic coincidence.  When young Mary Piper drew random slips of paper back in 1846 she came up with Ixonia.  Ixodes scapularis had already been named, in a more systematic fashion, back in 1821 but I doubt Mary or anyone else in the room was aware of that fact.

Had they known one imagines another draw would have been forthcoming.

Circle of Life in the Backyard Pond

We have a modest back yard pond.  I built it years ago so we could enjoy a bit of nature out there.  But not too much nature.  It had become a great place for mosquito larvae to wriggle about and I was tasked to deal with the situation. Not being one to start tossing poisons about, I just went to the local bait shop and got a scoop full of minnows.  My fisheries biologist son suggested a type called "fatheads" would survive nicely and eat lots of mosquitoes.

Of course there were a few who did not survive the transition, but my rough count suggested that there should still be a dozen or so swimming about consuming mosquitoes.  One day later I saw three.  A week later it was down to one rather well fed but lonesome fathead.  My grandson suggested that minnows are very good at hiding but I did have some suspicions.

Second attempt then.  Back when my boys were youngsters we'd go down to the rocks below the local hydro dam.  In the spring there would be high water but when it receded there were ponds that I recalled being full of tadpoles.  And yep, still true.

Not my back yard pond, this is nicer.

Those little black things trying to hide, that's them.  These are the tadpole version of the American Toad, which I will continue to call Bufo americanus despite a recent name change.  I considered this a genius idea, the tadpoles themselves eat small bugs and then the adult toads might stick around and eat more.

This looked promising.  There were thousands of them and the water quality they were thriving in was way worse than our pond.  So I scooped up a bunch.  Some were tiny, others approaching toadlet status.  As seen below some of them got legs but so far don't know how to use 'em.

And here actually is our back yard pond, new denizens carefully transitioned into it.  I don't know much about the buoyancy properties of defunct tads but eight hours in all I could see were apparently happy, live tadpoles eating algae and bugs.  I put the cement frog there as a sort of protective totem.  Bufo the Great in the eyes of the tadpoles when they first emerge as toads....

The Tadpole Colonization project was accomplished on the longest day of the year.  That means the shortest night.  So when my wife went down for coffee at first light an interesting sight was beheld....

Raccoons!  Notorious eaters of pretty much everything.  The Mystery of the Fatheads solved.  I hope the tadpoles are craftier...
--------------------
Update.  Most of the tadpoles seem to be gone.  I don't think they are better at hiding than minnows.  Alas.