Whom Will They Blame Next, Unicorns?

I have never watched Fox News when I was in USA, and of course I have no incentive to watch it now. However the stories that I read about it on the interwebs are truly bizarre.

This one trumps them all: Fox News host: ‘Anti-Semitism from the left’ is the real cause of hateful attacks on Jews

Where exactly does this “virulent anti-Semitism from the left” happen? Where do roam these elusive creatures, these leftist antisemites? Where exactly is the land of “fringe of the progressive side.”?

How come that someone spews such a weapon’s grade bullshit on air and is not immediately challenged for providing evidence for it? Any person who says such inane claptrap should be discredited and mercilessly mocked.

Making Kitchen Knives – Part 8 – First Evaluation

First thing first – today I tested the very nearly finished knife when I was cooking shrimp for lunch.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

It handles well and cuts OK, but I really suspect it won’t hold an edge as well as it should. But the cheapo wood looks way more posh than I expected it, ammonia fuming really, really improved its looks.

And now to the boring stuff.

What I am doing here is actually a small-sized DMAIC project – an abbreviation for Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control. It is a process used in industry to bring some logic and use of scientific method into improving manufacturing processes. Although as everything in today’s corporate culture it is used wrongly and heavily abused and misunderstood all over the place, because american-trained managers …. wheef, do not get me started on american-trained managers.

Aaaaanyway, in the first phase, Define, you should either define your problem or your goal or both. In my case, I have a specific goal – to get my manufacturing time of this type of knife under five hours of manual labor.

In the second phase you should acquire all measurements that you need in order to do something about it – in my case I have measured the manufacturing time of each distinct step in the process.

And now, in this post, I am performing the Analysis of said data. Total manufacturing time: 10:46, or 646 minutes.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a picture.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

There are of course multiple approaches one might use, but in this specific case I think that this suffices ample enough – it is so-called Pareto Graph. The balks are actual times in minutes for each step, ordered from the highest to the lowest. The black line is a sum of the relative proportions of these times to the total as one progresses from left to right. As you can see, I have ten distinct manufacturing steps and from those five steps constitute 90% of manufacturing time. These are the steps where I have to concentrate on actually reducing said time, because here my efforts have the biggest payoff. That does not mean that improvements in the other five steps are not worthy pursuing at all, but they are not worth pursuing at this time.

I have done one thing that is not normally done, that is I sorted from get-go the steps into two categories – low hanging fruit, where I think I can do improvements without too much hassle and without obtaining expensive or complicated equipment, and high-hanging fruit, where I can save time only through acquiring new skill or new equipment or where I think saving time is not actually possible in a meaningful way.

Now comes the next phase, which is  to improve the process. I will try to implement some of the ideas for that I have expressed and make a batch of multiple (~10) knives with improved process. We will see how it turns out.

It’s Still Beautiful

Remember this?

It is now about four weeks later, and five shades darker:

I’ll take another photo in another couple of weeks, same time, same place.
©rq, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Also I have a small confession to make: since I received my Acceptance Ring from Lofty via Caine, I haven’t removed it for any significant amount of time. Lately, though, it was getting loose on my thumb, to the point where it would slip off (into my purse, a pocket, the floor of the car), but I have always been able to find it again. Soon after taking this photo, however, it slipped from my thumb and fell onto the tracks. I can see it, every time I wait for the train, and I’m trying to get up the guts to retrieve it (believe me, train traffic is not nearly so busy for this to be a truly life-endangering activity) – my thumb feels naked, and I’ve lost a fidget toy.

On the other hand, there’s a strange appeal to knowing the ring is just down there, a little piece of the world of Affinity, a little part of my everyday morning. So I think that, eventually, I will go after it – when the evenings get dark enough for people not to see me rooting around underneath the platform. In the meantime, a small gift from friends has melded with something larger.

[Read more…]

Jack’s Walk

This way beckons, ©voyager, all rights reserved

It’s been a bit of a tough week for me. Partly it’s the weather. It’s been full of cold damp all week and that makes it harder for me to get out, but partly it’s because I had too much fun last weekend. It was my birthday and I was kept busy with visits to my mother and to friends and dinner out and to see the play Menopause The Musical! which was a 2 hour drive in each direction. It was all wonderful, but it was exhausting and once I get into that state it can take days to recover. It was worth it, though. Sometimes I do things knowing that I’ll pay a price. It’s like borrowing spoons from tomorrow. Many disabled people do because we still have interests and our minds and souls still need feeding. I love live theatre and I’m prepared to have a few down days if that means I can still participate. I don’t like to talk too much about my fibromyalgia. I learned that early on that no one really wants to hear you complain. It isn’t that people don’t care, it’s that there’s nothing anyone can do. A bit later on I also learned that it’s better to focus on what’s good in my life (a lot!) instead of what wrong. I don’t want to be defined by things I can’t do and I don’t want anyone’s pity. This voyager intends to have a full life and last weekend was certainly that. By tomorrow I should have a normal number of spoons again or as it feels for me, gravity will return to normal. I hope everyone has a good weekend. I intend to.

Migration

The other night I paused the TV to listen to the cries of migrating birds outside in the dark. There’s something very haunting about that song, so much distance and weather and effort ahead. And yet they fly, obeying a biological imperative. After all, it’s getting cold.

Moving on.
©rq, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I was introduced to Jānis Ivanovs, Latvian composer, through choir, where we sang his Gājputni (“migratory birds”) one of the first years I was a member. It’s a very moody piece in minor key, and we performed it with great effect during our surprise performance in competition. Since then, his vocalizations (tone poems?) for choir appeal to me most simply due to emotional attachment, despite the fact that he has many symphonic works to his name.

Unfortunately, the migratory birds are too seldom performed to have video available online, so instead, here is my second choice, Rudens dziesma (“autumn song”). (You can always visit the National Library, they have all the vocalizations in archive!)

Jack’s Walk

©voyager, all rights reserved

©voyager, all rights reserved

There’s lots of colour in my neighbourhood right now and it isn’t all in the trees. Some garden plants are still thriving, like my neighbour’s hollyhocks, marigolds and nasturtiums. They’re not even shaggy around the edges. The nasturtiums are one of my favorites. They’re like happy little alien ships waiting for word that it’s time to go home.

Tummy Thursday: Rfissa

Recently I talked to one of my colleagues about how my kid had better been born in a society where you eat with your fingers. This made her drool about Moroccan food, which you do eat with your fingers (though there are of course strict rules of hygiene and politeness), and she mentioned something she really needs to make again. Of course i asked for the recipe and because you’ve all been very good kids, I share.

Flat bread:

600g soft durum wheat semolina

300g flour

1 tsp salt

at least 400ml of warm water.

Mix until there’s a rubbery dough, let rest for 10 minutes. Form small calls with lightly oiled hands, let them rest for 20 minutes. Roll/pull until they#re almost translucent, fry in a lightly oiled pan, let cool and tear apart.

I only used half the recipe and that was more than enough for 3 adults and 2 kids. Making the bread was a hello lot of work and I think I’d prefer to make it for a dinner where its role is more prominent. I also didn’t tear it into pieces.

Flat bread frying in pan

©Giliell, all rights reserved

flat bread

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Chicken:

Wash a chicken and cut into pieces, fry for a few minutes in a large pot with some oil. Add two large onions in not too small strips. Fill the pot 3/4 with water and season. The recipe says “to taste” and suggested ginger, ras el hanout, fenugreek, cumin, stock, coriander.

After 30 minutes add lentils and keep cooking. About 10 minutes before the lentils are done, add two more roughly cut onions and some parsley.

I didn’t use a whole chicken but chicken legs because 1 chicken is exactly too little for 5. For seasoning I used beef stock, fenugreek, cumin, black caraway seed, orange pepper, garlic and chili. I used small red lentils because they nicely fall apart and make a velvety sauce. I also only added my parsley after the cooking. And I cried a lot because onions.

Rfissa

©Giliell, all rights reserved

The picture doesn’t do it justice. It’s very delicious and savoury. And since the sauce was basically onions and lentils, #1 ate two big servings. With her fingers.

Macedonia 5 – Stillness

One impression that I was left with after my trip was a sense of… unfinished? The opposite of stillness. It’s hard to explain. The city of Skopje was such a mix of modern, ancient, renovated and decrepit, and through it all it was clear that Things were Happening, but… there was also a sense of organized chaos? I have a lot of question marks in my thoughts about the city, and the best I’ve been able to tell people is It was interesting. I think the one conclusion I will come away with is that there is no need for conclusions.

In any case, Skopje is full of statues – hollow statues – so many figures standing or sitting around or holding epic poses, it’s quite grand. And many of them are large! Immense! Makes you feel a bit small, to be honest. And the sort of grandiosity that puts me a bit on edge. Here’s a very, very, very tiny sample:

Alexander the Great, of course.
©rq, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The view from under the arches of a medieval bridge… not even the oldest object around.
©rq, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Upskirt photography at its finest.
©rq, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The other side of the bottom of the previous statue – sitting around for ages!
©rq, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

A paeon to motherhood, I assumed – I might add that nobody was looking particularly thrilled.
©rq, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I am frighteningly ignorant when it comes to good music from the region, though, so here’s Loreena McKennitt instead. I intend to work on my musical diversity.

Making Kitchen Knives – Interlude 1 – The Little Great Polishing Experiment

I will share with you a proper analysis of the acquired data, but I just finished a little experiment and I am too eager to share the results.

Without too big analyzing of anything, it is clear at even a casual glance that polishing is the most time-consuming part of the job. It is also the most boring part, in my opinion, because not much can be done and the opportunities for a mess-up are numerous. It is necessary to go through the laborious process for fancy knives, like Ciri’s dagger, but for a kitchen knife without any ribs or facets it is a waste of time.

For over twenty-five years, ever since I read about the technique in ABC as a kid, I wanted to try a process that goes under many names, “tumbling”  being probably the most known one. I have even mentioned the device for it in the article “The Handmade Dilemma” as a “polishing drum”. It is a technique that has been in use for thousands of years, literally – for example Bohemian Crown Jewels contain precious stones that were polished this way. And it has been tried and used for knife finishing both on commercial and hobby scale. All that it takes is having the polished things in a rotating drum where they tumble over each other, sometimes with the help of a polishing medium, sometimes without. A very simple machine, and had I lived by a stream I would build a water powered one years ago. Unfortunately I do not live near a stream and wind is too unpredictable so I am stuck with using electricity, and I have not got my hands on a motor with the right properties yet.

But I got lucky, my colleague has bought small toy tumbler for his son when he was little and they do not need it anymore, so he lent it to me a few months ago. As you can see, it is not big enough to hold a knife, not even a small one, so after I let it run with a few pieces of unhardened steel with very mixed and generally unsatisfactory results, it has collected dust again.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

But here was the second stroke of luck – I have bought a slab of high-carbon tool steel and I started to make myself a set of better hardness measuring gauges than the impromptu ones I have made from an old saw blade. I have already ground and hardened these little chisels to HRc 62,  and I only cleaned the two big facets and sanded them up to 150 grit – that is the grit up to which the grinding and polishing is relatively quick and the blade does not heat up too much. I was not intending to high-polish these, since that would be silly. But I remembered the lent tumbler and checked if they fit in – and the did!

So I chucked the blades into the polishing drum with a spoon of jeweler’s rouge and half filled it wiht crushed walnut shells, mixed it all up and let it run for one day. Bugger – it got blocked after unknown time and I only found out next day. So I started it again for one day. And the change in surface was remarkable. It was not polished, but the perpendicular sandpaper scratches were no longer visible and the surface has got a very nice satin sheen to it. But I like my blades mirror-polished, so I started it for another day. I took another chisel out and subjectively there was no change against the first day, so I assumed that this is as good as it gets (but I will let it run for one more day). But I also assumed that since there are no visible perpendicular scratches anymore, I can quickly buff it to mirror polish with the three buffing wheels that I have  – and I was correct.

Here you can see four pictures taken with my digital microscope (courtesy of our quality department who tossed it away because they lost the installation CD – so I took it home and downloaded free software). Each picture represents a section approximately 10 mm wide in reality.

After 150 grit belt – parallel scratches perpendicular to the blade are very clearly visible.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

 

After one day, scratches from the sandpaper are no longer visible with the naked eye, but they are still visible under the microscope.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

 

After two days, the scratches from sandpaper are no longer visible even under the microscope unless you really look for them.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

And after just a few minutes with the set of buffing wheels the scratches are no longer visible and the surface is so polished that the microscope photographs itself.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Jack’s Walk

 

Help me, I’m melting ©voyager, all rights reserved

It’s an overcast and dreary day and cold enough that I wore my winter coat this morning. I’ve been struggling a bit in the colder weather so today I took Jack to the forest. It isn’t any warmer there, but the leaf swooshing makes me happy and so does watching Jack romp off-leash. He loves to chase the chipmunks and squirrels and because he’s slow I never worry about him actually catching something. Wait, he did catch something once. A rabbit, but Jack was laying down on his own front lawn just looking in wonder at the baby bunny when the poor thing bolted and ran straight into Jack’s mouth. Jack spat it out and the two of them sat there for a moment looking at each other before I shooed the bunny away. I swear that’s a true story.