The picture looks like the actual map of Louisiana’s new district shaped to guarantee a black Congressman:
Monthly Archives: March 2011
Today in History – March 31
1774 – American Revolutionary War: The Kingdom of Great Britain orders the port of Boston, Massachusetts closed in the Boston Port Act. That whole “Tea Party” thing really upset them. The original Tea Party folks didn’t dump their own tea in the harbor… We’re just not mad enough YET!
1854 – Commodore Matthew Perry signs the Treaty of Kanagawa with the Japanese government, opening the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American trade. Nothing like armed naval vessels showing up on your doorstep with superior firepower to get the ol’ diplomacy going.
1889 – The Eiffel Tower is inaugurated. Built to commemorate the French national bloodbath Revolution, it is very French in that it is eminently elegant and does absolutely noting except give the Germans something photogenic to march under…
1906 – The Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (later National Collegiate Athletic Association – NCAA) is established to set rules for amateur sports in the United States. Yeah. They’re amateurs like I’m Prince consort to the Tsarina of All the Russias.
1933 – The Civilian Conservation Corps is established with the mission to relieve rampant unemployment. It wouldn’t work today because back then, people actually wanted to work. Today it’d just upset the dimoocrats’ biggest voting bloc. it’s easier to just pay ‘em to stay home.
1992 – An era ends as the USS Missouri (BB-63), the last active United States Navy Battleship, is decommissioned in Long Beach, California.
1998 – Netscape releases the code base of its browser under an open-source license agreement; the project is given the code name Mozilla and would eventually be spun off into the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. If you’re still running MS Internet Exploder, you should change to FireFox. Really.
Food for Thought – 30 March 2011
The “Barney Fife” of presidents:
Meetings
All stinkin’ day.
A thought: Beware the lollipop of mediocrity, one lick and you’ll suck forever.
Today in History – March 30
1814 – Britain & allies march into Paris after defeating Napoleon. How many foreign armies have paraded through Paris?
1842 – Anesthesia is used for the first time in an operation by Dr. Crawford Long.
1858 – Hymen Lipman patents a pencil with an attached eraser.
1867 – Alaska is purchased for $7.2 million, about 2 cent/acre ($4.19/km²), by United States Secretary of State William H. Seward. The news media call this Seward’s Folly.
1870 – Texas becomes last Confederate state readmitted to Union. Lately they’re asking about a do-over on that.
1932 – Amelia Earhart is first woman to fly solo cross the Atlantic, spends first half of trip with left blinker on, applying mascara.
1951 – Remington Rand delivers the first UNIVAC I computer to the United States Census Bureau. 5,200 vacuum tubes, weighed 29,000 pounds (13 metric tons), consumed 125 kW in electricity.
1981 – President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest outside a Washington, D.C., hotel by John Hinckley, Jr., who is trying to impress Jodie Foster. Contrary to rumor, I did NOT send Hinckley an letter telling him that Obama was doing Jodie Foster.
1991 – William Kennedy Smith allegedly rapes a woman, in keeping with his family’s high tradition. Also in keeping with his family’s high tradition, he’s found “not guilty”.
How to Screw Up Libya
Three possible outcomes:
1. Gadaffy hangs onto power. We lose.
2. Gadaffy is out, replaced by a government that slides under the control of Muslim extemists. We lose.
3. Gadaffy is out, replaced by a coalition of secular and religious, freedom-minded groups who form a true representative government restrained by a constitution that protects freedoms. We win.
Now, out of those three, what chances do YOU assign to each? I’m 40% for #1, 57% for #2.
The ground isn’t
CAUTION: Electrical geekery follows
In reference to yesterday’s post many of the comments hit really close to the truth as we’ve discovered in today’s investigation.
The 2400-480 volt transformer in question is indeed wye-connected on the secondary. The neutral connection is indeed connected to a conductor that goes to ground. Those two observations are easy.
What isn’t easy, and we discovered to our dismay, is that this installation from 1983, installed in a station built in 1954, does not have ground conductors tying various parts of the electrical system together.
On the old “Floating” delta transformer, this presented no problem. With the wye, though, every ground fault seeks a return to the transformer neutral via the best path available. With no ground conductors connecting the point where the ground fault occurred and the neutral of the transformer, it took the path through real live Planet Earth. This was not a problem at the point of the fault, where multiple paths to earth were available, but at the point of the transformer neutral there was enough current density to boil water.
Of course, the boiling water bit went away as soon as the faulted circuit was located and disconnected.
What remains, though, is remediation, and while a short-term fix involves tying the transformer neutral to the nearest motor control center, the correct fix involves upgrading station grounding, hundreds of feet of copper cable as thick as my thumb, trenched dug all over a gas compressor station where every hole in the ground must be dug by hand, and money. A lot of it.
A meeting will be held tomorrow to discuss it.
And that’s how MY day went.
Food for Thought – 30 March 2011
Today in History – March 29
1806 – Construction is authorized of the Great National Pike, better known as the Cumberland Road, becoming the first United States federal highway.
1911 – The M1911 .45 ACP pistol became the official U.S. Army side arm. I carried an M1911A1. Still own one, a brilliant design of the sainted John M. Browning.
1936 – In Germany, Adolf Hitler receives 99% of the votes in a referendum to ratify Germany’s illegal reoccupation of the Rhineland, receiving 44.5 million votes out of 45.5 million registered voters.
1971 – A Los Angeles, California jury recommends the death penalty for Charles Manson and three female followers. And he’s STILL alive. Our enlightened overlords call this “justice”.
1973 – Vietnam War: The last United States combat soldiers leave South Vietnam.
And , ZIP!!!! He’s gone!
Had my Monday all planned out, but as in battle, event he very best plans seldom survive first contact.
First contact this morning was BEFORE the 0800 staff meeting when the phone rang and it was the controls tech from my second most distant station.
CT: You’re gonna love this!
Me: No, I’m not. You don’t call me first thing Monday morning to say hi and have a pleasant chat over coffee. What’s up?
CT: You know our new transformer? (Indeed. Since the new transformer went in, a lot of nagging problems disappeared)
Me: Yeah?
CT: Well, right next to it, steam’s coming out of the ground.
This is not what I wanted to hear early on a Monday morning. I ran through a series of possible causes. Call it like five seconds worth.
Me: Ooooo-kay…
CT: The guy that discovered it sais the ground shocked him.
Not a good sign. I LIKE my electricity kept neatly in its expected environs.
Me: Okay. Here’s what I want you to do.
I gave him a simple procedure to find out if there was indeed voltage at the point where steam was coming out of the ground. I waited for the return phone call.
CT: I read 270 volts.
I’m thinking BINGO! because 277 volts is a number tied intimately into the three-phase 480-volt power system.
Me: Okay. I have an idea. Now go to the motor control center that this transformer feeds and make THESE measurements while I do the staff meeting.
When I got out of the staff meeting he’d sent me an email that told me tow things: One, he had a ground on one circuit of his 480-volt equipment, and two, there was a ground conductor missing between the motor control center and the transformer. And electricity was leaving the bad equipment and trying to get back to the transformer and somewhere it was creating a strong enough field to boil water, hence the steam.
So after the staff meeting and a meeting with an engineering company who’s supposed to take over another project, I got on the road headed all the way up into Mississippi. I stopped at dark a hundred miles short of my destination and will drive the rest of the way in the morning.
Gee, I’m having fun.
Food for Thought – 28 March 2011
Today in History – March 28
37 AD – Roman Emperor Caligula accepts the titles of the Principate, entitled to him by the Senate. Pelosi and Reid are contemplating this as we speak.
193 AD – Roman Emperor Pertinax is assassinated by Praetorian Guards, who then sell the throne in an auction. Secret Service? Hey guys, I have a twenty in my back pocket if the opportunity avails itself.
845 AD – Paris is sacked by Viking raiders, probably under Ragnar Lodbrok, who collects a huge ransom in exchange for leaving.
1933 – German Reichstag confers dictatorial powers on Hitler. History. Learn from it.
1979 – In Pennsylvania, a pump in the reactor cooling system fails in the Three Mile Island accident, resulting in the crapping of many pairs of pants. Zero, that’s ZERO!, deaths.
Food for Thought – 27 March 2011
Of course you’ve noticed, haven’t you?
The Name Game #273
Out the door and into the drizzle early this morning to spend a day in the presence of adult and very pleasant company, so the Name Game is late. A man’s gotta have his priorities, you now.
So now I read the paper and find that we have seventeen new babies from between February 21 and March 17. Ten are to parents with different surnames, and one little one has a mommy who doesn’t name a daddy at all.
Since it’s a short list, we won’t do categories:
Kourtney L. & Andrew L. (different last names) decide that adding a “Y” will make a pretty good last name into a perfectly fine first name for their daughter, giving us Blayke Rivers.
Ashleigh R. & Patrick C. give their son a manly-sounding single syllable first name, presenting little Trace Ryan.
Miss Alaina F. does a spot of tryndeigh in lieu of a daddy’s name, presenting her daughter, little Makaila Eliza.
Timothy & Kennette(!) B. show us that they WERE paying attention in geography class, because that’s where they found a name for their little girl, Dakota Martin.
Velicia(!) R. & Brandon W. get all confused. They have a baby girl, but they named her “son”, as in Madison Gabrielle.
Justin & Lauren K. triple up on their son, little Taiden Allyn Nicholas. Cool! make a name up, spell another wrong, and you have something a kid can be proud of.
Jeremy & Stefanee(!) T. do that single syllable sound for their male child, little Cruz Timothy.
Alexa A. & Hunter Q. tag their son with Tucker Wilson. I guess with parents named Hunter and alexa, the kid didn’ stand a chance.
And that ties down the list for the week. On the horizon for the upcoming festivities is a jaunt up to stations in northeast Louisiana and north Mississippi. Oh, the fun I’ll have!