'Nuther Post for RSS check; Jeeps & Studebakers plus robotics UPDATE

+George Strayline --most certainly at your convenience--this post is for RSS feed check.

A post in honor of your Jeep & all its troubles.

The brand name of Jeep did pretty well under its own military steam, and not too shabby when taken over by Rambler. When Rambler morphed into American Motors,  that was kinda the beginning of the end of Jeep as a practical, maintainable vehicle.  AM really got worse when Romney ran it, and then it was passed off to Renault, which did it no favors either.

And it amazes me no end when "historians" think they tell all there is to say about automotive history when they stick to the over-worn deeply-rutted roads of Henry Ford.

In terms of vehicular history, nobody's older than Studebaker because that was a company that made horsed wagons before it started making them horseless, and with the Salty Dog, ran rings around the competition on the race track.  Silver Hawk and Golden Hawk were the best in that category, while everybody remembers the Champion, not so much as a classic Studebaker but as The Muppetmobile.

Remember the big deal that the press made about the last VW Bug rolling off the factory line in Mexico?  That's where the last Studebaker Lark rolled off, too. Volkswagon got it from Studebaker.

Image scanned from a Total Performance tee shirt.

Found this nice pic of the Studebaker Champion, Starlight Coupe model, on the web. Yup, it's the Muppetmobile, but black. That sexy vehicle to the right of it is the Avanti, which went on to become its own brand after Studebaker went belly up and each Avanti was hand-crafted to order, with a Chevy engine under the hood.

I see a red Packard in the back, off in the distance.  That's what you'll see at the historic Studebaker factory in South Bend, IN, too. It's where the Avanti gets made by hand and you can watch.

My own Nellie Belle looked like this, vintage 1963, minus the radio antenna and minus the back 2 doors. Back then, radios were options to be sold separately, and Nellie didn't have one, and there was no place in the dash to put one if you bought a 3rd party radio, either. Nellie wasn't this fine looking either--I bought her with a salvage title and her brakeline was completely missing, as was the radiator. 30 days later I had her on the road, licensed, and headed to the ANARC convention in 1978--and that was in Montreal, Canada, at what was La Maison Radio Canada.  Lost tread on all four recaps on Queens Highway, too. Froze a wheel drum just outside Akron OH and that's how I wound up in Beautiful Downtown Burbank....Ohio.  Good times. I did a drawing of Nellie's back end with the caption MONTREAL OR BUST, and that's what made it to the cover of Glenn Hauser's Review of International Broadcasting in 1978.

Technical UPDATE: Here's where I talk more about Nellie Belle specifically, in detail about how I found it literally in scrapping process when I rescued the machine.  I knew the owner and attempted to buy it from the owner when I was informed that he'd lost the keys. I was waiting on word for when he found them, but apparently he never did and sent the car to the junkyard, where I've been known to frequent when I was shopping for other parts.  I didn't find out that it was in the junkyard until it was almost completely stripped of its guts.  I paid $60 for the hulk, towed it home, and proceeded to rebuild.  I found that the engine's head was cracked and in need of replacement, too.

Technical NPR UPDATE 2: NPR interview about MTI, machine shop for Studebaker

It took a trip to KY to get a replacement head and I had that reconditioned and properly milled at a local machine shop, so yeah--I even rebuilt the engine in it.

Thank goodness for Warshawski's/ J. C. Whitney mail order.  That's where I found stuff like teflon valve seals, chrome cylinder rings and other whatnots that would fit a Studebaker overhead 6 engine.  Yeah--the type of Studebaker engine that typically suffered from cracked heads when the tappets got out of adjustment, and they did that fairly frequently.  The Lark was an attempt by Studebaker corporation to cut costs in response to consolidated motor enterprises like what became General Motors, the latter of which also enjoyed government contracts denied to other automakers. Ford enjoyed such partiality too, and that's pretty much why the multitude of individual automakers either joined or merged with The Big Two or died.  Chrysler and Rambler survived by snapping up other popular but individual model makers but still were barely treading water because of the level of government favoritism toward the Big Two.

Nash merged with Rambler early in American Motors history, and that's the firm that first came up with "unibody construction" with a minimal chassis: Nash-Rambler. Chrysler got Pontiac, and so forth. Studebaker remained defiant, as did Kaiser and so many others that eventually went belly up before American Motors did, and before Chrysler suffered its first bankruptcy crisis.  So yeah--I'm just as fond of Hank Ford as I am of Tom Edison. Meh and a half.

Anyhoo, back to Nellie Belle.  Yeah, I named my Stude after the vehicle driven by the sidekick on the Roy Rogers - Dale Evens show--and that was a Jeep--mainly because ole Nellie was just as temperamental as that particular Jeep was.

 But my Nellie was as non-stock as you could get, more suitably represented by Johnny Cash's song, "One Piece At A Time".

When I got the ole girl home, I had to find more parts.  I found an Impala radiator that fit nice until you got to the bottom of it.  Bolt holes didn't match down there, but they did up at the top, so I just drilled me some new ones and in it went.

From that point on, ole Nellie would cease to have value as an original stock vehicle--but she was MY Nellie.  Anybody stealing that gal for collectability would get a very rude awakening.  Nellie was mine and nobody else's and I was the only one on the planet that would know how she worked.  When she got temperamental, I'd be the only one who could get 'er running again.

She got all new brake lines, and the brake cylinder got rebuilt, as did the wheel cylinders. Knowing what models of auto that used the same equipment as Nellie came in handy in rebuilding the wheel cylinders, to which I also took a cylinder hone.  I did the same thing with the inside of the engine cylinders, too, by the way, and made a point of getting oversized rings from Warshawski's in that regard.  Also got some updated stem seals for the cylinder valves because if there's one thing Studebaker was notorious for, it was for leaving an oil slick on the ground where ever it was parked. Those stem seals pretty much took care of that.

One of the tests that collectors of old cars make is the Magnet Test--if a magnet don't stick to the body, then the body isn't pristine.  Nellie ended up about 1/8 Bondo and/or fiberglas and would have failed the Magnet Test miserably.  Look at the pic of the Lark again, and notice where the headlights look like they've got eyebrows.  That's the first part of a Stude Lark that rusts out badly, and Nellie was no exception.  But I think I did a damn good Bondo job on those areas that it would take a magnet test to detect that the metal was all gone. No, I did NOT break my arm patting myself on the back for that, either. :P

I put all new lines on the braking system, rebuilt the brake cylinders on the wheels, rebuilt the master cylinder, and all that. Rebuilt the engine with new! improved! non-stock parts via mail order. I fired 'er up, put 'er in gear, and discovered that gear shifting was a rough proposition, so I took the tranny out to see what the problem was.  Yup--it was old age.  It was a plain vanilla Borg-Warner 3-speed stick-on-the-wheel kind of arrangement, and as it happened, I could take an identical Borg-Warner 3-speed tranny out of any other vehicle and make it fit perfectly, which I did.  Tranny came out of a Rambler.

Long story short, I had 'er roadworthy and passing inspection at the Dept. of Motor Vehicles of Illinois 30-ish days later and thought that attending the ANARC Convention in Montreal would make for a great shake-down cruise.  It's what shook out that made that trip a real adventure, part of which was spent in Beautiful Downtown Burbank Ohio because a rear drum froze up.  But hey--I lived to tell about it, didn't I.

Note to the shortwave radio demographic of this blog's audience: Lawrence Magne (you got that right--THE Passport to World Band Radio Lawrence Magne) has a pic of me and Nellie after just getting back from that epic Montreal trip, after which he gave me a lift to the NUvention in Indianapolis...which provided fodder for one of my vintage Clara Listensprechen Reports.  I got the invite from Serge Newman, as it happens, and Larry really thought my Nellie was amazing.  After that trip to Montreal & back, so did I.

For you old NASWA old-timers who remember the "Clandestine Corner" that Larry wrote for FRENDX, you should also remember the masthead artwork I did for Larry's column. It morphed into "Clandestine Cranny", but here's ya a piece of NASWA history for ya.  Yup, I'm the same person who doodled up David Walcutt's column's Log Report masthead, too. We used to be neighbors in Carbondale, and that's how I wound up buying his Barlow-Wadley XCR-30 machine.

So yeah--I'm an electronics technician and I'm a mechanic, which turned out to be the big surprise at Motorola when some of the guys who didn't believe a woman belonged in their shop assigned me to work in the mechanics shop out of the electronics technician shop. Much to their consternation, I mastered that, too, ha.  I'm just as much a heavy-industrial-machine mechanic as I am an electronics technician, but they had no idea about that.  I haven't stopped gloating over it, either.  I was now a silicon ingot saw meister. All of this snit was noticed by the engineering department in QA, and so they adopted me as their favorite technician, and so I stayed on, and in the process picked up skills with robotics.

I actually did work on, repaired, calibrated and programmed actual industrial robots. For real. And an assortment of automated production and test equipment. For a living--got paid to do that, actually in actual fact, believe it or don't. A former co-worker on Facebook (Dennis Gatten) can verify what I claim here in the industrial area.

Okay, I got a question about availability of Studebaker parts & where did I get 'em. Well, as you can see, I used parts designed for other vehicles but I was able to get factory-genuine parts from the old Studebaker plant in South Bend via the on-site vendor, Newman & Altman, who was still making both glass and plastic versions of, say, tail light lenses and such.  Recent of vintage but made with the Studebaker manufacturing equipment. I also relied heavily on mail-order for stuff, too, mainly J.C. Whitney. Plus I did a lot of shopping at junk yards.

I think I forgot to mention what types of robots I worked on/with, and I have to draw a line somewhere between robots and automated manufacturing equipment although the line between the two is rather blurry.  I worked on U. S. Robotics and PUMA "peanut picker" arms, in the main, but the list of automated manufacturing equipment is a very long one, I'm afraid. It should be noted that it's via the automated robotic-like equipment that I became fluent in "speaking" hexadecimal. You could say that I "speak robot" and be quite correct about that.

Okay, you skeptical programming geeks out there, check out this Boolean hexadecimal joke:

2B OR NOT 2B = FF

HAH!  I hear you laughing from 'way over here. :P :D

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Tuesday Mini-UPDATE: I got another chuckle when I saw this posted on Facebook, and then Shared it:

Ya, what I said at the top of the Share was that I'd seen Microsoft's earlier efforts at robot programming but what I hadn't said is that I encountered Microsoft's RBASIC at Motorola's EPI department when working with other automated machinery which includes the aforementioned PUMA et al.  Unless RBASIC is just an programming interface with writing assembly (machine) code, it's the most useless and clueless approach to serious robotics.  Microsoft couldn't find somebody to steal from and so it floundered.  Here's a reminder that Microsoft got started with MSDOS which was swiped from CP/M, and Windows was swiped from Apple.

Here's a link to the IEEE article.

What's interesting is the last paragraph, the author's note in italics.  Nope, that doesn't surprise me, either. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Tom Edison was the Bill Gates of his time, and Bill Gates is the Tom Edison of ours.

I've been reconsidering mentioning the automated equipment I worked on besides robots because there's not a whole lot of difference between an industrial robot and automated manufacturing equipment. If the criterium is that equipment can't be taught and robots can be taught, then such equipment as the Kulike & Soffa die and wire bonders, and wafer saws,  are robots.  Hard to imagine, that. I've heard a few Motorola co-workers refer to a particular type of wafer polisher as a robot, but it wasn't teachable.  It relied on simple limit switches and variable resistor values to determine its position and whether or not it would pick up a wafer to transport it to the polishing turntable.

Well, when I get around to it, I'll go ahead and post the long list of automated equipment I've been responsible for keeping in good repair, calibrated, and taught, but don't hold your breath for that.  I'm sure I'll have left something out by simply forgetting.

Yes, I have been a teacher. To robots. So, basically, yes, I do speak robot.

UPDATE 2: I tried to google up some of the equipment I used to work on an it's just too antique for teh interwebz, alas.  There was an equipment company named Kasper that made both photo aligners (photographed circuitry on bare wafers) and wafer scrubbers. I built a machine-code test box to test each of the scrubber's modules with and it would have served as a good example here of how I spoke to automated equipment so that I could test for functionality.  I could find a modern Kasper aligner, but made by Eaton, but there's no sign of the wafer scrubber.

Some of the equipment was in-house engineered, like the polisher arm I just mentioned as not being a legit robot as such, so there won't ever be pics of that anywhere, ever.  There was one of those polishers that was giving the entire maintenance office conniptions day in and day out, and I named it The Boogie Beast and did up a cartoon of it in a book where I kept a bunch of cartoons poking fun at situations like that...my Khartoumb Book.  I'll have to find that and post the thing here sometime.  Here's a sample page out of it, and keep in mind that, at the time, there was a best-selling motivational book that Motorola liked to recommend,  called "In Search of Excellence":

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Motorola

Semiconductor Sector
Artifacts of Antiquity

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(a work in progress, subject to change without notice)

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Me & a co-worker (hi, Dennis!) tried to come up with a list of all the equipment that Equipment Maintenance was responsible for maintaining, and neither one of us thinks the list we came up with was complete.  I added on stuff from previous employment and it's still overshadowed by all the stuff I had to deal with at Motorola.  Here goes...

In looking over the stuff I got in my Khartoumb Book, I noted my transition from Bubbles to Epi/EMO (Electronics Materials Organization) and most of what's in there is from Bubbles (Bubble Memory facility), so the Boogie Beast isn't in this one; I started a new book with Epi and can't find it at the moment.  The Oft Quoted Quotes in Bubbles sound like those in Epi, although I've got separate sections for those.  The cross-over quotes:

"I can't find it. It's around here somewhere."
"You cleaned the shop and now I can't find anything."
"This machine is a piece of junk. Got any dynamite?"
"Heard any rumors about what our incentive bonus is dropping to this month?"
"Sure, it's obsolete and we don't use it.  We're saving it for parts."
"Please get the board out of the temp cycle oven. It sounds like it's dying."
"We need to inventory this equipment we can't find."

When I talk about "Bubbles", that's what the factory which made bubble memory chips was called.  They had a softball team called "Tiny Bubbles" and when we got the notice that corporate was going to close the facility, I drew a khartoumb picturing the Titanic going under with lifeboats still moored to the top, with each labeled "IOS", which stands for Internal Opportunity System. We were told that we couldn't transfer out of Bubbles and couldn't use the IOS.  The softball team captain (Joel) liked it so much he had tee shirts printed up with that image on it.

Here's what a bubble memory chip looks like...

Bubble memory chips were diced from a processed garnet substrate wafer that looks like the following, after it has been laser-marked with a traceback lot number.  It's hard to see on the following pic but it's etched on the upper side, where the "flat" is.  While a crystal is still in ingot form, the ingot is x-rayed to determine the layout of its crystal lattice and then a "flat" is ground on the ingot before it's sliced into wafers, for the purpose of indicating how the crystal lattice is laid out internally.

After circuits have been etched into the substrate (basically chevrons and lines in a bubble memory chip, unlike other types of integrated circuitry), the wafer gets diced up and each die gets mounted on a lead frame.  The following is a pic of a lead frame in which a garnet chip is mounted but the wires haven't been bonded on yet.

Oh gee, this is Motorola property--what the hell am *I* doing with it? Well, when Bubbles got scrapped, nearly all of this stuff got put on the back dock to be scrapped, and I actually asked if I could save some of it as souvenir of something that was about to become history.  I was told that would not be a problem, and even though all Motorola facilities were fenced and guarded, the guards knew what was going on with Bubbles and basically didn't care either, as long as we covered their asses with proper paperwork...which looked like this....

This particular property pass was obtained so that I could move my tools from Bubbles on Price Road in Tempe to Epi on 52nd St. in Phoenix--in this particular case, my soldering station supplies.  Speaking of forms, here's a maintenance equipment report for the area that grew silicon crystal ingots from scratch:

The entry GATTEN_D is the aforementioned co-worker who was maintenance, not actually an operator.
The "CZP" were called "CeeZaps" and the MKVs were Motorola-brewed ingot saws using wires to saw wafers with. Some of those were Mark Vs and some of those were Mark VIs.Collectively: "midsaws"

Here we go--found some instructions for setting up the Mark V wire saw. This is just the last page of it...

I was the first female to be hired in that long-standing good ole boy shop, but having worked among all guys back at the power plant, that part didn't bother me a bit, but it clearly bothered some of the folks in the shop. I eventually got bad peer reviews, all interpersonal relations-based, but the engineers in the Quality Assurance dept. saw what was going on and despite all the efforts (which included shuffling me from the electronics tech shop to the mechanics shop, where I was expected to fail but didn't) I was appointed chief technician over QA equipment as well as the person responsible for training the other guys in both shops, ha.  I got a raise in spite of hell & high water, anyway. It wasn't much of a raise, but it wasn't what the good ole  boys were shooting for.

Don't get me wrong--being the only petunia in an onion patch had its challenges even back at Illinois Power Co.  Nobody had a high opinion of me at the start there, either.  The first thing I was told to repair was a Leeds & Northrup transmitter that I found out later nobody else in the shop could fix. Sure, I'm gonna tell you I fixed it because I did, but I can tell you exactly what I did--what the guys before me overlooked--to get the thing running again.

In testing the input compared to the output, it appeared that a transistor had gone bad.  But it also appeared that it had been replaced by somebody who worked on it before I did. Well, what also appears to have happened is that people before me used The Shotgun Method of troubleshooting: replace a lot of parts and you're bound to fix the bad one.

Apparently, the Shotgun Method was a failure in this case, and so I got the problem.

So, what I did is look for the suspect transistor in the schematic to see what else might be dragging that part down, and I found it.  When you look at the transistor in the context of its neighbors, you could see that it was part of what's called a push-pull amplifier and the other transistor it's supposed to work with, pushing and pulling with, needed to be a MATCHED opposite number and what I was looking at on the circuit board was a pair of mismatched transistors.

The old transistors were obsolete, and so the opposite number couldn't be replaced as a matched set, either.  So I proceeded to look up transistor specifications, located a matched npn/pnp set of completely different but usable transistors, replaced both of them, and the thing worked again, much to the amazement of my new co-workers.  When I was asked to explain how I did it, and I attempted to relate the above story, I was interrupted with grunts of "whatever".  Kinda like the verbal equivalent of eyes glazing over.  Anyhoo, that broke the ice, as it were, with the shop and I was accepted a bit more.

But not entirely because it was also presumed I wouldn't take up a fight with the administration when it came to union contract negotiations.  I was presumed to be stereotypically weak.  After I got to the point where I was fighting for proper promotion and the backpay that the union told me to forget about, and WON (much to the astonishment of the union and the co-workers), I was finally accepted as one of the guys.

And to this day I think that, even if it was a dirty job, it was the best damn job I ever had.

Now you know how I got to be the way I am, like John Wayne toilet paper. Rough, tough, and won't take no shit offa nobody. And besides that, perfectly qualified to operate and maintain my own time machine.

Well, remember I mentioned a "Boogie Beast"?  Motorola home-brew wafer polisher, known more formally as the "friction mount polisher".  Here's one of the drawings that maintenance had to go by when troubleshooting the animal:

 Kinda brings home the saying "A woman is expected to do twice as well as a man to prove that she's his equal--but fortunately, that's not difficult".

Remarkable U.N. session with Russia tacitly making a point

Rewind the clock just a tad and recall how Russia made claims about how its military actions were counter-terrorism actions against, basically, Islamic turkmen. Fast forward to the Boston Marathon bombing by a couple of delusional youths, and the deal where Russia gave us vague warnings about those folks.  It's a claim now being made by Russian ally Assad, in Syria, pretty much making the Republican hawk faction in this country look silly for wanting to arm the terrorists just so that Assad could be overthrown violently, all the while howling about red lines.

In retrospect, in view of the United Nations that Republicans had always wanted to go dark entirely, nothing looks more loony than the actions they were howling in favor of taking.  We are now looking at a United Nations coming together not with the usual low-level ambassadors but with higher levels of leadership functioning in the manner envisioned by those that formed the League of Nations at the close of the Great War.  The hope in this quarter is that it doesn't fail and repeats the history of being part of the reason why World War II was launched.

We're looking at a lot of differences, alright, but a lot of similarities from the Arab perspective.  In the Great War, the Ottoman Empire was a British ally and a lot of people forget that.  And it was neglected by the British, which is why it switched sides to being a German ally.  The Ottomans, although Muslims, were Turks, and while Arabs embraced the Islam of the Turks, it did come to pass that when the Ottomans switched sides, the Arabs stopped being allied with them, too.  Arabia made a difference in the Great War and it's making the same kind of difference in the current business before the United Nations.

But this puts Arabian royalty in a peculiar position of having to renounce its own state religion, too conveniently passed off as plain vanilla Islam...passed off as plain vanilla Sunni Islam if you're lucky.  When the House of Saud took over Arabia via violent overthrow, it established Wahab Islam as Arabian state religion, and that's not plain vanilla Sunni Islam.  Westerners commonly hear the crap about how the difference between Sunni Islam and Shiite Islam is a simple issue about succession, and nobody proves that to be the false crap that it is than Arabian Wahab Islam where succession is filial, which Sunnis will deny that any Sunni practices.

In order to rule Arabia, the House of Saud was brutal in its takeover and subsequently brutal in the establishment of its version of Sunni Islam while preserving filial (royal) succession.  As is the case of every brutal regime, it persists because its allies prop it up. The Saud regime has become weak as the result of its dependencies and Wahab radicals have known this for a long, long time--even well before Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida, both of which are Wahab progeny.  As are Salafists.  As is ISIS.

Sure, we're working with a Sunni alliance NOW, but you can see why they also don't want to say what exactly they're contributing to the war effort.  Sunnis tend to be Arabs and Turks; Shiites tend to be Persians and, well, Alawites.  Detailing what Saudi Arabia does could very well be seen as blasphemy by the people the royals rule because in rendering assistance to the West, they will be violating what the House of Saud has been teaching as religion.  This could very well prove to be the Saud family's Waterloo and all those previous years of unsustainabilty is going to add up to a wipe-out for them.

Whence Turkey, though? They've been suppressing a conservative trend, and the Turkish version of Sunni Islam doesn't jibe with Saudi Wahabism, or even the hybrid Salafism.  Western evangelists who were whining about how Islam needs a Reformation don't realize that Wahabism WAS that reformation, and that Salafism is a reformation of Wahabism, and all these reformations into which you add Al Qaida and ISIS = religious cancer.  Same could be said for today's evangelism as evidenced by megachurches, today's version of a religious Towers of Babel in worship of that golden calf of mamon $$$$$$$.

People die because of this stuff, because there's earthly power in it and the powers that be are heavily invested in maintaining it.  As the House of Saud seeks desperately to preserve itself much like the Ottomans sought to do in the Great War, it'll inevitably hit a dead end.  Such is what's inevitable for any other entity deluded into thinking there's glory in imperial rule.  America has already run smack into its limits in that regard and rather than claiming imperial rule, it must needs seek co operation from co equals in government.  ISIS continues to ignore the basic premise of the first Califate Empire, and that is for Sunnis and Shiites to embrace each other as they did after the Battle of the Camel, in a live/let live configuration where every tribe is ruled by its own Sharia and not the Sharia of other tribes--yes, to function as a Republic where locals are ruled by local law and the imperial government only sees to common defense and welfare--and in terms of religion, confined itself to only "pillars".

That's why the Roman Empire was so popular and grew quickly when it was a Republic.  It fell when it became imperial.  Imperial rule is not sustainable.  Note ye well, China, as you deal with your Uyghur situation. If you learn Islamic history via what the West teaches, you're getting only a fraction of the story.  Choose your sources wisely. ISIS didn't.

With love from the UAE. Still, evangelists who claim that Islam is anti-female know nothing of Islamic history. Women in leadership positions began with Mohammed's wife, Khadijah--Mohammed, orphaned camel trader, married UP with that marriage. The last female leader recognized by the Sunnis was the daughter of General Abu Bekr (the first one) of the Koreish: Ayisha.  She led the Sunni troops in battle herself on the Day of the Camel. Fatima and Ali led the Shiites, only they weren't called Shiites back then. They were known for centuries as Fatimites.

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A few good points were made after I posted this--it's not like Arabia had much influence over the Ottomans in the first place because we're talking about the height of the colonial period and Arabia was essentially British.  True, but the British weren't Islamic and had no influence over Muslims of any sort, while the Arabs and Turks were both Sunni Muslims, and let's remember that there was an Arab rebellion underway--here's a reminder that T. E. Lawrence was influential in that particular development.  Yup--Lawrence of Arabia.

It's also true that although Arabian Arabs and Ottoman Turks were both Sunnis, the Turk version of Sunni Islam was still significantly different than Arab Sunni Islam, beginning with and not limited to the language difference in view of the fact that, at the time, the Quran was NOT translated from its original Arabic into any other language.  It was translated in to Turkish in the 1920s and that was the first time the Quran was translated at all.  Going back to the time when Mohammed had died, the Quran wasn't in writing AT ALL, since it's universally true of the spoken word that it transfers poorly into writing, lacking inflection and vocal tone.  This is why, to this day, no Muslim of any denomination recognizes the written form of the Quran as being anything other than inferior to the prescribed recitation, a vocal prescription established since the beginning of Islam and conveyed through rigorous training to any appointed to recite it in mosques.

Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Erdogan, is on record as saying that there's no belief in sectarianism and they don't condone such things.  Well, that's the position of all Sunnis of all flavors, which is why they call Shiites heretics instead of a different sect. They don't believe in sectarianism because Sunnis believe that all Muslims should be Sunnis.  A lot of westerners don't catch that nuance.

Late night UPDATE, BOOKTV Edition: I'd already shut down the computer, getting ready to turn in, flipped the tube to CSPAN-2 and there was a panel discussion in progress with 3 authors talking about today's jihadists. The Q & A session raised a few points pertinent to this post, addressed by the author of The Taliban Revival.  I found the panel discussion on YouTube, and I'll post it here, but not before I point out the important part first. 

A woman asked a lengthy 2-part question about a movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan whose purpose was to foster Sufi beliefs superimposed on both Shiite and Sunni tribes because Sufism has traditionally sought a non-sectarian resolution to traditional sectarian tenets.  The reply was that even though this indeed is universally acknowledged to be the case by all Muslims regardless of sect, Sufism nonetheless poses a threat to the political theocratic power currently enjoyed by sectarian leaders, and that's why it hasn't taken hold as well as expected.  

The video won't embed on this blog, so HERE is the link.

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Saturday UPDATE, post-Zito Edition:
For the people who already read the Friday update, noting the references to mathematics which got passed over,  I got a happier note for ya. It's mathematics getting cute.

Friday UPDATE, John Zito Edition:

John's a Deist, though, and we're tangling once again on the "cosmological argument" where he proclaims that an atheist can't disprove that there is a deity and some actually acknowledge that a deity is possible.  I countered with the definition of "agnostic", where an atheist is convinced there's no deity and a person who admits to the possibility of a deity is actually an agnostic in his admission that he doesn't know for sure.

This was in a separate thread, a precursor to the one where he just posted a picture of a black rectangle, then added the comment thus...to which I added my comments, thus:

...and that's the score this inning, with discussion ongoing, of course.

What John's overlooking is that it's all relative, and there's no actual "high" or "low" to this, that mathematics does take into account "imaginary numbers" and "irrational numbers" but treats them as quantifiable (finite) unknowns. Science deals with what can be measured even if the quantity is unknown, so therefore it's required to be defined as a quantity, and all quantities are finite.  Oh, John, John--you still fancy yourself to be the master logician, don't you.  LOLz.

And so I wrote the following response:

I've said it before and I'll say it again--today's state of science is in dire need of a reinvention of the zero, an aspect of mathematics that was introduced into Europe during the Dark Ages by the Arabs, who were far more scientifically advanced than the Roman numeral-confined Christians, and without which the Christians would have never had a Renaissance nor an Age of Discovery.  The concept of an absolute zero as being equal to absolutely nothing causes it to be mathematical and scientific fiction.  The sum of that stuff (the summary, the summation, the sigma) is as relative as the R in TARDIS.


Zito Edition UPDATE 2: Sorry, folks, but the show's over already. John edited his numberline question slightly to include another participant, and the discussion wound up thus:

UPDATE 3: Nope, the banter continues, with a question about how do I know we actually sent somebody to the moon. Ahhhhh, consider the source. The rest goes seriously downhill from there. Things hit rock bottom when John tried to bring up why blacks were black and decried any mention of genetics. At that point I dropped him from the Friend list and he's currently blocked. I don't stand for bigots of any sort.

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October post-script: According to recent blog stats, unknown person(s) have been hitting on this post as well as on my primer, Time And Relative Dimensions In Space Explained.  I've re-read both posts, and as a result think that further clarification is in order for those not privy to the contexts those posts were originally the result of.

Time is a sequential progression, fractal (not linear) in nature, although in establishing a chart of a sequence of events, it can appear to be linear but only where the points in the sequence are construed. Events can be simultaneous, co-incidental, and subject to cause-effect, wherein lie the branch-offs of progression.  The concept of time travel involves bypassing quantifiable segments of the progression(s)/regression(s), or taking of short-cuts without being confined to  a specific sequence in the branching sequential progression/regression.

I'll say this again: the problem with John's number line analogy is that it is a linear progression to the exclusion of other dimensions, even though mathematics deals with such things.  Mathematics recognizes imaginary numbers, irrational numbers, and the like, but they are nonetheless quantifiable even if they're unknown and can be dealt with when designated as a standard mathematical unknown variable.  However, all quantities are necessarily finite. 

The concept of infinity is represented by a symbol which depicts a Möbius Strip and the theory behind this thing is where one can illustrate the fallacy of infinity because one makes the error of presuming only one dimension. The Möbius Strip can also be used to illustrate the R in TARDIS as well (and expressed in terms of Dimensions In Space), as follows:

Take a strip of paper and make one.  Make another one by using a strip of paper twice as long.  With the two strips you can see that you have represented infinity, but you can also observe that one strip is larger than the other, so what is it that you have here, one infinity that's larger than the other?  How can that be if they're both infinite, hm?

Think about that, and you'll get the picture.
Illustrating further the imaginary nature of an absolute zero resides in the question, "What's south of the South Pole?"  Well, for one thing, the poles shift and the location is supposed to be an absolute, off of which you're moving north in every case.  What it is, is an arbitrary reference point and not a mathematical entity, for it's also arbitrarily moveable, and besides, it necessitates an every-case statement because it asserts an absolute no-case that any other point is completely South.  It's been a necessary arbitrary zero by which other points are gauged, but that's the aspect that makes it relative to other points and not an absolute.

June 2015 Mets Hat Guy UPDATE: I've mentioned this before, about the science behind theta sigma navigation of branching progressions (what time navigation is) while still observing the linear character of a sequence of events (and/or people) and how such navigation can be developed intuitively.  You got it: the Mets Bucket Hat Man, who rattles off what sounds like a strictly linear sequence but actually retraces to branch-offs by "bringin' it back to..." whatever.  He is, hands down, the unquestioned master of theta sigma navigation. Enjoy:

...and he always wraps it up with "How Ya Like Me Now?", which underscores the importance of Now in any temporal sequence--in computer parlance, it's the "floating zero".  He begins with "I see where you're goin' with this" as if he can see the future from where he sits. A true master indeed.

Buzzfeed article

Global Voices article

The following is a very very very old joke but still makes the rounds even this year. How to tell how old it is? It mentions a slide rule.  Why yes--I still do have my own slide rule.

You don't believe me about my slide rule, do you.  Well........behold:

October 2015 UPDATE: I ended this post with a much milder comparison of linear to non-linear problem solving while this difficulty of linearity even among prominent mathematicians cropped up yet again in the form of a 500+ page proof of The ABC Conjecture and so I devoted another post on this topic yet again, but wasn't as dainty about it as I was here, and so I now add a link here to that subsequent post over there.  500+ pages worth of linear mathematical footage was 500+ pages because it was linear.  Just sayin'.