Today a 12YO girl in LA shot up her middle school. In the only country that this happens with regularity we have not a clue how to prevent it. This is the 14th school shooting of the year.
For some reason that video has been making the rounds on some of the forums I frequent as characters in web comics struggle with depression. Well, one character in one comic is actually singing the song, but that doesn’t explain why the same video is spreading to other forums. Maybe there are lot of people depressed by the current administration.
I have been spending a lot of time waiting to fall asleep because my feet have been cold and uncomfortable. I have a warm quilt that makes my upper body very warm, but for some reason my knees on down stays cold. This keeps me awake, and when I can’t sleep, I think. My favorite subject to think about is the bucket, and last night I was thinking about the Sprint-T. Specifically thinking about making the frame lighter and stiffer. Lighter by only making the rear hoop and diagonals out of the 0.120″ wall tubing, and everything else out of the 0.060″ wall. Stiffer by using the diagonal brace to carry the front mount for the radius rod that carries the weight of the back half of the car and triangulating the crap outta that mount in as many directions as possible. Comparing the weight of the floppy, bendy, noodly Speedway kit ladder frame (roughly 75 pounds) to the raised rail Sprint-T frame (80 pounds) that is almost completely rigid, well that’s not much weight to get stiff.
I was also thinking about using the brake reaction torque of the front axle to produce anti-dive the same way a torque arm makes anti-squat at the rear axle. The bad thing about this is it changes caster as the axle travels. That means the directional stability of the car changes and the steering feel changes, depending on how hard the brakes are grabbing. Thing is, for the normal radius rod front suspension for this type of car, this is normal driving behavior.
And 1/31 is my annual walking tour of the local tax offices, meaning I spent entirely too much time on my feet standing in line with the other last-minute taxpayers between walking to the offices. I couldn’t do this by bus because the offices are all too far from the bus stops, and the bus does not run frequently enough. I can walk to the bus stop I need to get off at before the next bus gets there. So I’m tired as heck tonight while I’m composing this post, not sleepy, but physically tired. My back hurts and my leg hurts, the one that got all the damage in the wreck.
Witch on a Bicycle 