Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #2104: Ninety pounds and still a loser.

 

My weight loss has now reached the point of being boring.  To me, I mean.  I’ve always been able to bore other people with it.

In any case, as I pass 90 pounds lost, two months after I passed 80 pounds lost, all I need do is rewrite the prior post, plugging in the current numbers.

This morning I weighed 205 195 pounds.  So I’m calling it 80 90 pounds lost, in just under a year and a half, since I embarked on this course back in September 2023.  My BMI is now just under 28 over 26.  If I can lose another 20 10 pounds, I’ll finally make it to the upper limit of “normal” weight.

Otherwise, I just seem to have settled down to a sustainable routine.

I have posted on this topic before.

This post summarizes a few more things that I didn’t expect from losing that much weight.

 

1:  Wardrobe turnover speeds up as you get thinner.

Socks, gloves, and hats are the only clothing I retain from my obese days.  Everything else has gone to the thrift shop/rag bag.  Underwear, outerwear, and all that fits between.  And shoes, as my old shoes were both too loose and too stiff-soled for a lighter me.

At first, passing along my now-oversized clothes was kind of exciting.  It wasn’t merely the positive reinforcement.  It felt a bit risky to get rid of my 2XL stuff.  The promise being that I’d never again need it.

But it’s edging into pain-in-the-(less-voluminous)-butt territory.  It seems to me that, far from settling down as I near my target weight of 185, the pace of change has sped up.  I’m getting rid of too-large jeans that I bought new, maybe half a year ago.  Ditto for putting holes in belts that I know I’ve modified recently.

Turns out, that’s not an illusion.  A little simple (?) calculus shows that, for a constant monthly weight loss, your reduction in waist size speeds up as your waist gets smaller.

Formally, model the male torso as cylinder of fat, of radius R.  Belt size is the circumference of the cylinder, 2πR.  Your weight is proportional to πR2H, the volume of the cylinder of height H.  Calculus tells us that the derivative of weight with respect to radius (d(πR2H)/dR = 2πRH.  That is, it’s proportionate to your belt size.  So, if I lose the same amount of weight every month, I have to lose more inches off my waist at a lower belt size, than at a higher one.  Bottom line, between where I started (46″) and now (36″), if I continue to lose weight at a constant five pounds per month, I now have to re-size my clothes about 25% more often (46/36 =~ 1.25). 

It’s not a huge effect, but it’s dead opposite of what I expected.  I expected the changes to slow down as I approached my target weight.  But, in fact, if the weight loss occurs at a constant 5 pounds per month — a consequence of aiming for a roughly 500 calorie deficit each day — wardrobe changes speed up a bit as I get thinner.

That’s just a consequence of there being less of me, to contribute to the five-pounds-a-month weight loss.

2:  I enjoyed my last gym workout.

I recognize the above as a properly constructed sentence.

But I do not recognize it as anything I was ever likely to say.  Nor, to my certain knowledge, had I ever said anything remotely like that in the past.

Until my last trip to the gym where, after doing some token weight-lifting, I did the ultimate old-guy thing.  I spent an enjoyable, low-intensity hour on the elliptical, sweating in time to the oldies.  Courtesy of:

Post #2097: Ripping thrifted CDs.

Anyway, between the weight loss, and the obvious beneficial knock-on effects on (e.g.) the bones of my feet, being in better shape, and eating adequate protein, I’m feeling pretty chipper, physically.

Post #2023: Protein supplements and building muscle mass.

I’ve never hugely disliked going to the gym.  I’ve been doing it all my adult life.

But this whole enjoying-the-workout thing is a new one on me.

Conclusion:  Sometimes boring is good.

I have no diet secrets to offer you.  At this point, I think there are no diet secrets.

Weight loss is all about calories eaten, versus calories burned.  From that standpoint, all calories are equal, and it makes no difference what you eat.  Only how much.  There are no magic weight-loss foods.

Your new diet is forever.  If I go back to eating as I used to eat, I’ll go back to weighing what I used to weigh.  With the obvious-but-needs-to-be-stated corollary that it doesn’t matter how long it takes, as long as you get there.

Your tastes will change.  Or, more properly for me, my cravings changed. I’d heard people say that would happen, but I absolutely did not believe it until it happened to me.  I still like all the foods that I used to eat, back when I was fat.  But I don’t eat them now.  And, importantly, I don’t miss them.  I don’t crave them.

Slip into your new diet slowly, by identifying and correcting the worst dietary faults first.  For me, this started with eliminating booze.  Once I was sober, then my habit of eating “starch bomb” meals (e.g., bowl-of-pasta) was clearly next up on the had-to-go list.  So that went.  And so on.  Until I eventually got to how and what I eat now (mostly salads, fruits, whey protein, lean meat, non-starchy cooked vegetables.  And cheese.

But that’s me. A life without cheese is a life not well-lived.

But you?  You eat whatever and however you want, as long as you keep within your calorie limit.  And, eventually, you’ll get smart enough to avoid the foods that make that hard for you to do that.  You’ll figure out what works for you, over time.  You evolve your own diet.

Lose two ounces a day.  Aim for no more than a pound a week weight loss.  Use an on-line calculator to determine your daily calorie needs as a sedentary person.  (See below for accounting for exercise).  Subtract 500 from that to get your daily calorie target.  Eat that many calories, roughly.  Assess the accuracy of that estimated 500-calorie-a-day calorie deficit by crudely tracking your weight and monitoring your level of hunger.

You’ll get a lot of dieting advice on eating specific foods, and avoiding others.  Some diets want you to exclude entire food groups (e.g., no carbs, no fat, etc.).

That sort of extreme skewing of your food mix may work for you.  But what works for me is eating a balanced diet, with just three twists.

First, everyone agrees that you should avoid “starchy carbs” or “refined carbs”.  I’ll agree, to the extent that any servings of that need to be kept small.  So, I still eat bread, but only in the form of the occasional 100-calorie slider roll.  But I no longer eat pasta, even though that was a mainstay in my obese days.  In any case, large portions of simple carbs mess up your metabolism.  An hour later and you’ll be hungry again, metaphorically speaking.

Metabolism-wise, having a big portion of some high-glycemic-index food is not doing yourself any favors.  Doing that routinely, even more so.

Second, savory “ultra-processed” foods — I’d guess Doritos are the poster child there — I cannot have in the house.  Because, even after all this time, I’ll binge them if they are around.  Hilariously enough, artificially-cheese-flavored rice cakes fall into this category.  Rice cakes?  They are only 45 calories each, but I end up inhaling them if I start eating them.

Compare that to, say, a nice, savory cabbage soup.  Even though I make a fine cabbage soup, somehow I seem to have no trouble, whatsoever, stopping after one bowl of cabbage soup.  It’s tasty.  Sometimes it’s borderline delicious, in a cruciform-vegetable kind of way.  But it just doesn’t hot-wire my brain and light it up the way the artificial cheese flavor does, in those rice cakes.

So, I respect my limit and just don’t go near the stuff.

Third, as noted, I use whey protein powder as a significant source of low-calorie protein.   Otherwise, with so few calories available daily, to meet the USDA protein recommendation, I’d have to eat nothing but meat.  More-or-less.

In particular, I have found “protein pudding” (the Jello variant) over frozen berries to be a mainstay of my diet.  It tastes like sweet chocolate ice cream, but provides as much protein as a serving of meat.  I also put the flavored stuff in my coffee, in lieu of milk or other coffee creamer.

I offer no apology for resorting to these artificial products (whey powder, Jello sugar-free pudding).  Without them I’d have a hard time meeting both my daily calorie maximum (~1700 calories) and my daily protein minimum (1 gram protein per KG body weight).

Post #2021: Animal-based protein supplements, digested.

Beyond that, I just eat in small amounts.  Space those out over the day.  Absolutely standard diet advice.  So I eat three or four small (300-calorie) items (e.g., salad with salad dressing), plus three or four 100-calorie snacks (e.g., an apple).  Plus however much cheating I feel comfortable with that day.  And makeup calories for any extra burned at the gym.  All with an eye toward eating an average of about 500 calories a day less than what I need to maintain my weight.

Exercise calories are accounted for separately, as I do it.  On days when I exercise at the gym, I eat to make up for those additional calories spent.  (But note that you must net out your basal metabolic rate from whatever calorie count you get for a given exercise.  E.g., if I burn 600 calories in an hour on the elliptical exerciser, I get to eat an additional 400 calories of food that day.  The 200/hour slippage is the calories I’d have burnt in that hour merely by being up and about — calories already accounted for in the “sedentary calorie need” calculation done at the very start.

Practically speaking, this adds a whole new dimension of “bonus” to exercise.  I get to eat more, on a gym day.  Not hugely more.  Ideally, only as much more (in calories) as I burned at the gym.

And that’s it.  No secrets.  Aim for slow weight loss.  No alcohol.  Avoid large servings of anything with a high glycemic index.  Eat lots of fruits and non-starchy vegetables.  Get plenty of roughage.

Lift weights to keep up your muscle mass as you diet.  Eat a gram of protein a day per kilogram of body weight.

In hindsight, all I’ve done is follow standard, mainstream dieting advice.

But only as a last resort.

Post #2103: This and that.

 

Well,

a)  this is a blog, after all, and

b) if the President can flip flop daily on tariffs, then

c) it’s hard to see the shame in having a mere blog post that wanders a bit.

1:  AI replacement theory

1: Every human job that can be replaced by AI will be.

2: Every human job that requires speech and reasoning alone is at immediate risk of being replaced by AI.

3: All other human occupations will be condensed to the portions that can’t feasibly be replaced by AI.

 

These are laws of economics, not computer science.  New technologies have been doing this sort of thing since the start of the industrial revolution.  There’s nothing about this that’s entirely unique to AI.

This time, instead of technology making your biceps obsolete, now it’s making your brain obsolete.  The most important difference between the AI revolution and what has gone before is that this time, they’re coming for my job.

I just can’t quite get my big brain around the fact that my big brain is obsolete.

It’s going to take me a while — like a few posts — to work out the ramifications of that, to my own satisfaction.

If nothing else, if this does what I think it’s going to do, to “knowledge workers” generically, that’s got to be nothing but bad news for the real estate market here in Northern Virginia.  Pile on a dip in Federal employment, and, as I live here, I should pay attention to what’s happening with AI.

Even though I’d much rather not.

 

2: My garden is a mess

Yonder it sits, as of late fall of last year (left), and as of about 5 minutes ago (right).

In theory, this should be some sort of planned operation.  E.g., I want to grow such-and-such, in this-and-so quantity.  And so on.

In practice, I can’t even get that far.

Instead, this has turned into a game of fixing the worst errors, then seeing what’s left.

First, I need to get the sun-rotting plastic out of my garden, and disposed of.  But, as I (intentionally!) made the raised beds by recycling plastic coroplast campaign signs, removing those plastic sides effectively destroys all the existing raised beds. 

But, second, I always intended these beds to be temporary, and, ultimately, I figured the dirt would fill some of the worst “valleys” in my back yard.  So that’s what I’m doing — dismembering the side-less corpses of these raised beds and using the dirt to fill the largest and most annoying valleys in my lawn.

(These “valleys” are the aftermath of the installation of the ground loop for the ground source heat pump, and they continue to sink, ever-so-gently, 20 years after that was installed.  It really does not surprise me that this method (parallel trenches 6′ deep) seems relatively rarely used, compared to drilling a vertical well for the ground loop.  I already shoveled 10 tons of dirt trying to fill those valleys the first time.)

Third, I’m re-using the concrete corner blocks from the defunct low beds to build fewer, taller, better-placed raised beds.  I don’t actually want the resulting raised beds, but they are a place to store the concrete corner blocks, and most importantly, to store some of the soil that’s in the former plastic-sided beds.

Interesting calculation there. When I started these beds, I brought in 10 cubic yards of 50/50 mixed topsoil and compost.  And now, when I do the arithmetic on what’s left (bed dimensions x bed depth = volume of soil in bed), come up with about 5 cubic yards.  Which is just about exactly what I ought to have, if all the organic matter (the compost) in the original mix has rotted and so returned to being C02.  The upshot being that, at a density of about a ton per cubic yard, I’d have to shovel 5 tons of dirt, to get rid of these beds.  Not clear I’m up to that task any more.   Not clear that I’m not.

So, as stupid as it was to have to move a raised bed once, I am, in effect, moving them twice.  But the second time is largely to get rid of their dirt.  It’s a planned-life-cycle kind of thing.

And the new garden plan, such as it is, involves growing more stuff that neither the deer nor the bugs want to eat. But that my wife and I do.

That’s a very short list of crops.  That’s about as far as I’ve gotten on my garden plan for 2025.

3: Bee hotels, the final chapter begins

I am putting up my native (mason, orchard) bee hotels for the last time.  Mine are bundles of 6″ (or so) bamboo tubes, with smooth-cut ends (cut while green, or commercial pre-sanded cutoffs), with inside diameter around 3/8″ inch.  Above, I’m using Virginia clay to seal off one end of each tube.  When I have those sealed and dry to my satisfaction, those bundles of nesting tubes will be hung securely over the site of the emergence box (Post G25-001), ready for spring to commence.  And for the female mason bees to use at their convenience.  Next spring, the (now filled, hopefully) bundles of nesting tubes will have to be taken down and placed in next year’s bee emergence box.

Post G25-001: Finishing off my mason bee hotel duties

 

I have a small back-yard vegetable garden.  I’ve tried to keep that garden attractive to bees.  Partly, that’s for pollination.  Partly, that’s a good way to avoid using the worst and most persistent pesticides.

This post explains why I’m not going to be putting out a “bee hotel” in my garden this year.

Not only do these bees do nothing for my garden, I’m not sure I’m doing them any favors by providing such a large number of nesting sites.

Two years ago, I bought a little bee hotel at Home Depot.  In theory, this array of narrow, closed-ended tubes provides nesting sites for local native and solitary bees, e.g., mason bees, orchard bees.  (But not social bees, like honey bees or bumble bees.)

And, sure enough, about half the nesting tubes in that Home Depot bee hotel ended up filled, the first year I hung that up.  As shown at the left.

(I now know that this is a terrible bee hotel design and I would never buy it again.  The tubes are too short (4″), which apparently leads to an excess of male over female bees.  And they’re glued in place, and so cannot be replaced annually with clean nesting tubes, as everyone advises.)

Regardless, the picture above bodes good luck to this location, w/r/t/ mason bees.  A lot of people hang one of these up and get nothing, at least for a year or two.  But I followed all the directions, and hung that securely, a few feet off the ground, in a sheltered location that gets morning sun, with plenty of flowering plants nearby, and a nearby source of mud for the bees to use.  (That last one courtesy of some slightly leaky rainwater barrels.)

Following standard advice, I took that bee hotel down for the winter and left it in an unheated building.

Then I killed my overwintering mason bees.

I killed them with kindness.

My unheated outbuilding must have been just a touch warmer than the surrounding area.  In any case, by all the signs — average daytime temperature, extent of blooming flowers —  my bees emerged early, as explained in Post G24-004.  Just as the crocuses were starting to bloom.

If that didn’t kill them outright — from the low temperatures and lack of blooming plants for food — then it almost surely prevented them from reproducing.   Again, as explained in Post G24-004.

The moral of that story is, resist the urge to shelter your overwintering bees.  Let them freeze along with everything else.

 

One year ago, for my second attempt, I made my own bee hotels.  I used 6″ long bamboo tubes, cut from the green bamboo growing in my back yard (Post G23-015).  (Cutting them green gave them a smooth, splinter-free finish that did not require (e.g.) sanding.  Apparently, you don’t want to leave rough edges on these tubes, or they’ll cut up the bees’ wings.)

( You will see mentions of a lot of plants whose stems can, in theory, be used for bee nesting tubes.  I tried growing a few (e.g., poke weed), but I learned the hard way that, as with bamboo, your only realistic option is to harvest the material green, and immediately cut it to length.  If you wait until spring to go looking for some, all those hollow stems will be weathered and brittle, and you won’t be able to get nice smoothly-cut 6″ pieces from them.)

I closed off one end of each tube with some mud.

Locally-sourced.

Then bundled a handful of such tubes together with wire ties (and later, jute twine).

And hung up my nice new bee hotels, under the eaves of my back porch.

These were an even bigger hit with local mason bees.  As you can see at the left, almost all the nesting tubes were filled. Only a handful of empty tubes are left, and by eye, these seem to be too large for my local mason bees to want to use them.  (Bees are quite picky about what size of nesting tube they will use.)

Similarly, I made and hung one more bee hotel with much smaller-diameter tubes.  This would have been attractive to smaller “leaf cutter” bees that might be present in my area, mid-summer.  But I got no takers for those smaller tubes — that 4th bee hotel remained completely empty.

This year, I put those filled bee hotels into a “bee emergence box”.

This is just a dark box with some holes cut out of the sides, level with the bottom of the box, as shown, left.  (Level because the newly-emerged bees don’t fly out of the box, they crawl to the opening and hang out there for a while before dispersing.  That, according to the University of Utah extension service (Google link to .pdf).

Exactly why I need to supply a bee emergence box seems subject to some uncertainty.  Some experts say its to “avoid predators”.  (I assume the newly-emerged bees are fairly helpless.)  Some say the box must be placed directly adjacent to new bee hotels (with fresh nesting tubes) and that neither should be moved, even a matter of inches, once emergence has begun.  Some say that the box allows female bees to find their way back to this location, as they can smell the old cocoons, but the box keeps them from re-using the old nesting tubes.

In short, all experts agree this step is good.  But exactly why it’s good, and what purpose this serves, seems unclear.  Somewhat folklore-ish.  (And clearly related to the naughty bits bee reproduction in some fashion, possibly explaining reticence on this subject.  But everybody agrees that such a box is a good idea.)

In any case, below are my home-made bamboo bee hotels, carefully and gently placed in my simple emergence box, before I closed and sealed the lid.

FWIW, one bamboo tube had a little tiny perfectly round hole drilled in it.  I’m pretty sure that was an instance of parasitic wasp predation, so I removed that one nesting tube as I placed these in the emergence box.

Apparently, the point of all the darkness is so that the only light entering the box is from the holes that I want the bees to use, to exit the box.  And, because this sits in a sheltered location (under the eaves of my porch), I’ve done the easiest thing and made the release box out of cardboard.  (Interestingly, I found scant details on release boxes, as if such details hardly mattered.)

Why I’m not putting out multiple bee hotels again this year.

First, these bees do my garden no good whatsoever.  These orchard or mason bees will have come and gone long before anything in my garden is blooming.  If I had an orchard, with lots of early-spring fruit blossoms, encouraging a local population of orchard bees would be a good idea.  But as it stands, these bees will have emerged, mated, and died a month before anything in my garden is blooming.

These are not the bees you’re looking for.  … Move along.

Second, it’s not clear that I’m doing them any good, either.  Mainly, it’s not clear that nesting sites are the limiting factor for my local mason bee population.  There really isn’t all that much around here blooming in late March.  And so, I wonder if in effect, I may be raising bees, simply to have them die off soon after they emerge, because there’s no link between the number of bee hotel tubes that I provide, and the size of the local early-spring flowering plant supply.

I found no guidance whatsoever on “right-sizing” a mason bee hotel, to match the resources available in the surrounding area.

Conclusion

 

There’s not a lot to providing nesting sites for solitary bees.  You just have to obey a few simple rules.

The nesting tubes should be about 6″ long, for the most common mason bees.  The tubes need to be of about the right diameter for the bees you are trying to attract.  In my case, maybe 1/4th to 3/8ths of an inch.  If you use natural materials, you’ll get some variation in diameter anyway.  One end of each tube needs to be closed off.  (I did that with mud.) You need to have them set up so that you can either throw them away once they have been used, or sterilize them (e.g., soak in bleach) for re-use.

And you need to move your bee hotels (or the contents thereof) to a release box the next spring.  That’s just a box with holes at floor level, so that the emerging bees will see the light and crawl out into the outdoors.  That way, they can emerge, but they aren’t able to find their way back in again and re-use the old nesting tubes.

But, be aware that when they say you should try to attract bees to your vegetable garden, they didn’t mean mason bees.  These guys are up and about way too early in the year to do my garden any good.   They’ll have lived out their lives weeks before the first pea blossoms open up.

My upshot is that I need to let this box sit around for, at most, a couple of months.  Then I can throw the whole thing away.  I guess I’ll continue to put up bee hotels until I’ve used up my stock of six-inch bamboo tubes.  But I’m not seeing any benefit to making this a permanent part of my garden.

Addendum

I relented.  These are this year’s bee hotels, pre-mud.  I took the best from my stash of potential bee nesting tubes.  And tossed the rest.

My final thought on the emergence box is that mine is entirely in the shade.  (Facing east-ish, on the north-ish side of the house, though I think that’s not very relevant.)

The point is, cool.  Living in Zone 7b, with little nearby in the way of flowering fruit trees, I think the later my bees waken, the better.  Within reason.  There will be more around to eat, I think.  In any case, no direct solar heating — no direct sunlight — is consistent with this year’s approach of not sheltering the bee hotels in winter.  These bees are going to have to live in the ambient air.  They need to be in sync with ambient air temperatures.

But I can see where, in a more northerly climate, you might make the other call, and at this time of year, if a bit of extra heat means having your bees up and about when their preferred blossoms are out, then that’s a good thing.

In both cases, I’m guessing that you up the odds of bee survival by trying to ensure that their emergence coincides with lots of local blooms, within what the bees themselves can tolerate.

Anyway, crocuses alone make slim pickings for orchard bees.  My observation, based on my unfortunate experience last year.  So perhaps I am erring on the side of caution.

Or, in this case, shade.

Epilogue:  Psst.  It’s the maple trees.

Why did this work well, in this location?  Based on internet chatter, a lot of people have trouble attracting mason bees.

I did manage to avoid significant operator error, on my second try.  This, by hanging the bee hotels in a sheltered place, then leaving them alone until it was time to move them to the emergence box in the spring.

But I think my success has more to do with the location, than with anything I did.

So, why is my back yard a good location for orchard bees? 

Right at this moment, there’s little in the way of flowering trees in my area.  (We’re in sync with the DC cherry blossoms, more or less.)  I guess we have some Bradford pears out, but not in my area.  My wife’s extensive daffodil beds are in bloom.  But that’s about it.

Nary a blooming orchard in sight.  It’s too early for most of the flowering trees in my area.

It was my pollen-sensitive wife who pointed out that there is one common tree that is flowering now:  Maple.  She knows these things.

And now that I look it up, yep, flowering maples provide food for orchard bees.  So sayeth Google’s AI:

Arguably, then, my back yard is more-or-less mason bee heaven, owing to the presence of several large old maple trees. Plus mud, from the gardening.  And nesting tubes, from the gardener.

Of which, the nesting tubes — nesting sites — were likely the “rate-limiting factor” in my local native bee population.

OK, let’s say this is all true.  I could maintain an extensive population of mason bees in my back yard, owing mainly to the presence of several large maples there.  As long as the mason bees emerge as the maples are flowering, the female bees have plenty to eat.

These bees still don’t do me one bit of good.  In a food-production sense, these are not the bees I’m looking for, to pollinate what needs pollinatin’, in my garden.  They are here, then gone, far too early in the year.  (Further, my maples need no help in producing seeds, thanks.)

So there you go.  At this point, I’m betting that this bee-wrangling went well, in my back yard, from the start, because mason bees can feed on maple flowers.  Those are in abundance now.  All these bees were lacking was nesting sites.  And these hotels were the only game in town, or close to it.

But — aside from observing the great circle-of-life thing, as it plays out for the mason bee — it doesn’t do me one iota of good to maintain a mason been population in my back yard.

Post #2102: How high is that helicopter? Part 1.

 

Is there an easy way to determine the altitude of a low-flying aircraft?

After looking over my options, I’m going to try an antique optical rangefinder.

I bought it on Ebay.  I’m currently waiting for it to arrive.

Background

I was awakened last night by yet another low-flying helicopter, here in the DC ‘burbs.

The noise from these ranges from merely obtrusive, to loud enough to rattle the windows.  Below is a recording of one of the several that passed overhead today, taken from my back porch.  It doesn’t quite stop conversation, but you do have to raise your voice a bit.

This is normal for the DC area.  There are a lot of military and other government high officials stationed in this area.  These folks tend to get shuffled from place to place via helicopter.  Unfortunately, one of the well-used north-south routes passes directly over the Town of Vienna.

Is it really that loud, or is flying low?

In theory, nothing should be flying below 1000′, in my area.

But in the past, that has been an issue.  I recall that, many years ago, some Vienna Town Council members complained to various authorities about noise from low-flying aircraft, and got the “minimum 1000′ for the TOV” as part of the answer.

This got me thinking about measuring a passing helicopter’s height.

(Luckily, I am hardly the first person to have had an interest in this.  Luckily, I say in hindsight, because that way, my Google inquiries would not attract undue attention from the authorities.)

Turns out, there is no good way for an amateur on the ground to measure the height of an over-flying helicopter.  At least, none that I’ve come across.

But seriously, how hard can this be.

If nothing else, think of it as a way to rule out bad pilot behavior (low flight altitude) as an explanation for a loud helicopter fly-over.  (With the obvious alternative explanation being “that was a loud helicopter”.   Which, given that these may be military aircraft, is always a possibility.)

So, are those overflights loud because they are loud aircraft, or are they loud because they’re flying well below 1000 feet?

Optical rangefinders that won’t work

First, there are “laser rangefinders”, not intrinsically different from a laser tape measure, just more oomph and maybe some specialized optics.  But first, I ain’t pointin’ no laser at no aircraft, period.  Let alone a low-flying (likely military) helicopter.  Plus, the ones available for civilian use (e.g., laser tape measure, laser golf or boating rangefinder, rangefinders for hunting big game) probably won’t work for this use anyway, owing to the small visible target.   I get the impression these laser rangefinders (e.g., for golfers) can find the range to a hillside or location on an open lawn, but they aren’t designed to find something as optically small as a helicopter flying at 1000′.

I’m also brushing aside all the military “passive-optical” (coincidence and stereoscopic) rangefinders.   These are WWII-era and earlier tech with mirrors, prisms, and such.  If nothing else, aside from having to own one (they tend to be big, to get you the best separation of the two lenses), you’d have to have the forethought to have it handy, and set up, just as the helicopter was flying by.  Plus, those are all expensive military collectibles now.

 

A vintage civilian non-laser coincidence rangefinder, via Ebay

 

Source:  Ebay.

I can vaguely recall hand-held purely optical rangefinders, from the pre-laser era.  These are the vastly smaller, and likely less accurate, analogs of military coincidence rangefinders.  But they worked the same way, using two widely-separated lenses, then measuring how much you need to move the image from one eyepiece, until it coincides with the image from the other.

I bought one on Ebay.  Above, you see a RangeMatic 1000.

This allows you to measure distances to 1000 yards, with some modest degree of accuracy.  It looks like it should be more than adequate to allow me to identify helicopters flying at 500 feet, rather than at 1000 feet.  It looks like the difference between 150 yards and 300 yards is about an eighth of a turn of the dial.

This, if it works, will give me the line-of-sight distance to the helicopter.  That only tells me the height of the helicopter if it flies directly overhead.  I’m going to need to add some sort of mounting and an inclinometer.  The line-of-sight distance, plus the angle of elevation above the horizon, should allow me to infer the height of the helicopter over ground.  (In fact, that’s easy enough that I don’t even have to look it up.  Height above ground is the sine of the angle of elevation, times the straight-line distance to the object.

Thus ends this task, until my Ebay’ed optical rangefinder shows up in the mail a few days from now.

Estimating overflight height by apparent size.

The very crudest golfing range finders work by using the height of the pin (the stick-with-flag that marks the hole).  These pins are a standard size, and the simplest golf rangefinders simply place the apparent size of the pin on a scale — the smaller it is, the further you are away from it.

Other purely optical methods seem chancy.  In theory, if I could identify the model of helicopter, I could infer distance by measuring how how big the over-flying helicopter appears.

This is more work than I care do do.

Can I determine the height of a passing helicopter, purely from its sound?

Source:  Reference BBC.  Photo by Joe Pettet-Smith

First, an interesting historical side-note.  Listening for approaching aircraft is not a new idea.   As I understand it (likely from seeing it on YouTube), in parts of Great Britain, big, cast concrete parabolic sound reflectors still stand along the coastline.  These concentrate (and effectively, amplify) incoming sound waves.  These were used to detect the sound of incoming aircraft while they were still miles offshore, prior to the implementation of radar during WWII.  Reference BBC

This is one of those weird things that is clearly possible, from first principles.  Maybe not even terribly difficult, as a one-off proof of concept.  But for which you can buy no ready-made unit.

Sound travels about one foot per millisecond.  Two microphones, 100′ apart, would therefor experience about a 100-millisecond (or one-tenth-second) difference in when they “heard” a sound at ground level.

For this approach, I’d use some microphones, some recording gear, and the speed of sound, to triangulate where a near-surface sound is coming from, based on when (precisely) that sound shows up, at microphones placed at known locations perhaps 100′ apart.

The theory is easy:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_location

Start with the concept of a gunfire locator or gunshot locator.  These (typically) use a widely-distributed set of microphones to detect and locate gunshots.  Once a gunshot is detected, these use “standard triangulation methods” to estimate the direct and distance to the gunshot.

(There are crowdsourced versions of these:  https://github.com/apispoint/soter, but that seems limited to categorizing a noise as a gunshot, not pinning down the location.)

Substitute helicopter noise for gunshot, and do the math in 3-D instead of assuming location on the ground, and that’s what I’m after.  Something that will give me a fairly precise location of a helicopter flying overhead.  From the noise of it alone.  So that I may then calculate the height above ground, from that location.

In two dimensions, you only need two microphones — think, two ears — to identify the direction that a sound is coming from.  Per Wikipedia, that’s all about the lag between the time the sound hits one ear, versus the other.  To quote:

Where:

  • is the time difference in seconds,
  • is the distance between the two sensors (ears) in meters,
  • is the angle between the baseline of the sensors (ears) and the incident sound, in degrees
  • c is the speed of sound

But that only works (pins down a unique direction) if you’re working in two dimensions.  And one pair of microphones provides no clue as to distance.  Just direction.

If you work through what you do need, to pin it down in three dimensions, a minimum rig would need four microphones, arranged like the corner of a cube.  This provides a pair of microphones in each of three dimensions.  The further apart the better, as these are going to be used to estimate a helicopter height of maybe 1000′.

The rest should be math.

But this solution involves a lot of hardware, no matter how I figure it.  Four microphones or recording devices, wires to connect them to a central station, and a four-track sound recorder.

This would be a difficult and expensive solution, so I’m not going to pursue it further unless the RangeMaster 1000 fails to do the job.

Conclusion

I’ll have to wait for my antique optical rangefinder to arrive before I can bring this to a conclusion.

My belief is that a simple hand-held “antique” optical rangefinder, plus something to measure the angle of elevation, should provide all the accuracy I need to distinguish helicopters flying at or about the 1000′ ceiling, from putative “low flying” helicopters at (say) 500 feet.

My guess is that these helicopters are merely loud, not low.  But I should be able to validate that with this simple bit of equipment.

Post #2101: Anyone who is surprised when we no longer have free elections is not paying attention.

 

This is just a note-to-self.

And it’s just a simple matter of logic.

With all the broad new powers being claimed by the current Republican President, and the purge of the military (including the JAGs), the FBI, and our national security apparatus …

… do you really think they’re going to let those new powers fall into the hands of a Democrat?

And so, if our excursion into South American-style goverment-by-oligarchy somehow proves unpopular with the masses, it’s pretty much a given that free and fair elections are history.

I would say, plan for the future accordingly.

In any case, I’m just putting down a marker, with this post, in case somebody is somehow surprised, three and a half years from now.

Post #2100: Measuring road salt in drinking water, a summary.

 

This might make a good science fair project for somebody, so I’m giving this topic one final, compact write-up.

If you live in an urban area that draws its drinking water from a local river,  or other nearby flowing surface water …

… and you live in a climate where they salt the roads for winter storms,

… and the weather cooperates, in the form of some distinct road-cleaning rain or melt event following a winter storm,

… you can easily infer the presence of road salt, in your drinking water,

… with a cheap ($6) total-dissolved-solids (TDS) meter, a water glass, and some patience.

 

In my area — where the Potomac River is the main source of drinking water — it takes about ten days from the time the rain washes the salt off the roads and parking lots, until that salt shows up in the drinking water.  YMMV.

See posts 2085, 2086, 2088, 2089, 2090, 2091, and 2092 for background.

The required background, as a series of true statements.

We use a lot of road salt in the U.S.  Google’s AI tells me we use 20 million metric tons of it a year.  The same AI tells me we have about 230 million licensed drivers.  So I make that out to be just under 200 pounds of road salt, per licensed driver, per year.

The accepted EPA threshold for “salty taste” in the drinking water is 250 parts-per-million chloride ion.  Assuming I did the math right, 200 pounds of salt (60% chloride by weight) is enough to impart a salty taste to more than 50,000 gallons of water.   Or, enough to impart a salty taste to 0.7″ of rain, on your standard suburban quarter-acre lot.

That’s all by way of saying that, “outdoors” is a big place, but that’s still a lot of salt, even when spread outdoors.  Enough salt that you ought to be able to notice it, in the environment.

The negative effects of road salt use are well-known, including corrosion (of cars, bridges, rebar in concrete …) and pollution of surface and ground waters with the salty runoff.  In particular, nothing that lives in your local fresh-water environment really likes being subjected to a salty water.

There has been a prolonged push in the U.S. to use less road salt. Seems like that started in the late 1990s in New Hampshire, where they were discovering problems with water wells that had been, in effect, poisoned by prolonged use of salt on nearby roadways.

State DOTs and others do not use salt to melt the snow off the roads.  They plow the snow off the roads.  The salt is just there to achieve “disbondment”, that is, to prevent the packed snow and ice from freezing solidly to the pavement.  So that they can plow down to bare pavement.

The desire to use less road salt led to the now-common practice of brining the road surfaces prior to snowfalls, one of a set of techniques known as “anti-icing” (as opposed to after-the-fact de-icing).  If weather conditions are right (e.g., no rain prior to the snowfall), spraying the roads with a thin layer of salt water, then allowing that to dry, achieves “disbondment” of the initial snowfall with minimum use of salt.  Brining uses roughly one-quarter of the salt that would be required to achieve the same road-clearing result, if spread as rock salt.  (Source:  Brine Fact Sheet, 2016, American Public Works Association.)

That thin layer of salt creates a weak spot in the snow/ice layer that forms on the road.  That weak layer is what creates the “disbondment” of the ice and the underlying pavement.  That “disbondment” allows the plows to scrape the snow off the road, to get down to bare pavement.  Rock salt is also there for the disbondment, it just achieves it less efficiently.

Some of the sodium in salt tends to stay local.  This is what “burns” greenery near salted areas such as sidewalks.  But the chloride in salt travels along with the runoff, plausibly (around here) in the form of calcium chloride, formed as sodium was exchanged for calcium in the soil.

A “total dissolved solids” meter measures the electrical resistance of water, and so indirectly measures the concentrations of ions in the water.  Around here, in normal times, that would be mostly calcium and carbonate ions, as that’s the main dissolved mineral contributing to our roughly 10 grains of water hardness in this area.  But ions are ions, whether they be from calcium carbonate or sodium chloride.  And so, a total dissolved solids meter will react to salt in the water, as it would to any other ions in the water.

As a result, to the extent that road salt gets into my drinking water, this should generate a predictable rise in total dissolved solids, as measured in my tap water.  Each time the salt is flushed off the roads (by rain, say), I should see a rise in TDS in my tap water, with the appropriate lag.

In Fairfax County, it takes about a week for water to work its way from the filtration plants to the furthest taps in the system.  This is known, because Fairfax flushes the system annually (switching from chloramine to chlorine during that period), and it warns citizens about the resulting change in the smell and taste of the water, annually.  And in that warning is the factoid that it takes about a week.

All you need to track TDS in your drinking water is a cheap ($6 via Amazon) total-dissolved-solids meter, and patience.  The patience is required because, with a cheap meter, you’ll only get stable results if you allow the tap water to sit long enough to come up to room temperature.  (The underlying conductivity measurement is quite temperature-sensitive, and the cheap TDS meter that I bought takes forever to adjust to the water temperature.)

If you’re worried about your meter’s reading drifting over time, keep one water sample permanently, and use it for a reference.  Re-reading the TDS in that “reference” sample will show you that your meter’s reading is stable.  (Or, at least, that’s what it showed me.)

And, voilà:

As noted, these peaks in tap water TDS are ten days after some weather event that flushed a lot of road salt into the local creeks.  (Typically, a rainy day.)

Although the timing and magnitude are right, I have not proven that this is purely the effect of salt.  Maybe TDS goes up after every rainstorm, salt or no salt?  I think that’s unlikely, but I can’t rule it out until weather conditions are right, and we have a rainy day with no remaining salt on the roads.

Conclusion

I’m pretty sure the peaks in tap-water TDS, shown above are driven by road salt being washed off the roads.  Water filtration (short of reverse-osmosis) does not remove salt (or chloride) from the water.  And, because we drink river water, not well (ground) water or water stored in large reservoirs, that salt then shows up, in short order, in the water.

All of which tells me that these peaks look about right.

I’d like to have double-checked that it is salt, by being able to taste the saltiness in the water, but the increase in TDS was not large enough to cross the commonly-accepted threshold for salty taste (250 ppm chloride ion in the water).

Ultimately, all that’s left to show is to show that such TDS peaks don’t appear, 10 days after a rainy day, when there isn’t salt on the roads.  That way I can rule out that these TDS peaks are simply related to rainstorms.  Leaving salt (moved by rainstorm) as the only plausible explanation.

Again, the beauty as a science fair experiment is that all it takes is a cheap TDS meter, a water glass, and patience.

Post #2099: MAC Zoning retail.

 

Vienna, VA approved four buildings under the now-repealed Maple Avenue Commercial (MAC) zoning.

The Chik-Fil-A/Car Wash is what it is.  The current owner of that Chik-Fil-A franchise is at least the second owner, since this building went up around six years ago.  Unsurprisingly, the sidewalk-based seating, 20′ off a busy arterial highway, remains empty 24/7.   I don’t think anyone would mistake that area for a vital and happening corner of town.

The old folks home (Sunrise assisted living) has a no-name coffee shop at street level, for its token retail, as required under MAC.  This appears to be a captive enterprise, that is, commercially, it’s part of the assisted living facility.  But as a result, if there is a more moribund “retail” location in Vienna, that remains open for business, you’d be hard pressed to see it.  I live around the corner, and I’ve never seen anyone go into or out of that establishment, nor have I ever seen anyone sitting close enough to the windows that I could make out the figure of a person.   For all intents and purposes, the coffee shop might as well be purely decorative, as it appears completely unused.

Vienna Market has a little row of hard-to-get-to-shops with no street-level parking.  But it’s OK that they are awkward to use, because they’re all empty.  They’ve stood empty in the roughly four years since that townhouse development was finished.  I noted the other day that they finally removed the construction barrels from around the steps going down to those shops.  But those shops are still dark.

The Town also approved a big apartment block at the corner of Maple and Nutley, 444 Maple West.  The builder tore down the existing buildings some years ago, and is now getting grief from the Town for leaving it a vacant lot for so long.

But the important thing is that, as of now, none of the retail space in that proposed new building has been rented.  In fact, per this recent reporting, potential renters shown at the original presentation for the building either were imaginary, or pulled out.  The result is that ” … marketing materials show all suites as still available for leasing.”

Conclusion

And yet, the actual retail scene on Maple Avenue appears healthy.  There isn’t an excessive vacancy rate.  There are no large unused retail spaces.  (The biggest exception is, I think, a disused stand-alone bank branch on the west end of Maple in Vienna.)

That said, at this point, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that MAC zoning has not resulted in the explosion of “destination retail” that had been touted by the (then) Mayor and some members of Town Council.

Instead, new construction, at new-construction rental rates, appears … difficult to lease, to say the least.  Un-leasable, so far.  That suggests that retail in Vienna is “saturated”, for want of a better word.  What’s already there isn’t doing badly.  But building new space, at high rents, doesn’t appear to be a viable strategy.

Afterthought:  Relic retail?   I wonder about the extent to which some of our existing retail is, like our private outdoor membership pools, a relic of an age of lower land prices.  Relics, in that they continue to function, as-is, but they wouldn’t (possibly, couldn’t) be produced at current land prices.

Post #2098: If they ever get serious about cutting the Federal deficit …

 

It’s not as if cutting Federal spending is some brand-new idea.  It’s not as if nobody has noticed the Federal budget deficit before.

But if the current regime were serious about the budget deficit …

The current push to fire Federal workers is all about purging the bureaucracy.  This is standard operating procedure for autocrats.  You won’t see a modern autocratic takeover of a former democracy without it.

In case you were confused, this explains why (e.g.) Musk et al. keeps going out of their way to insult Federal workers gratuitously, why the firings are so slap-dash, and why the dollar total of claimed savings seems to be treated as a joke, not worth checking for accuracy.

All of that, because if your primary goal is simply to purge the bureaucracy so that you can replace it with your loyal partisan hacks, none of that matters.  Heck, insulting Federal workers is a feature, not a bug.

It’s not about making any material savings in tax dollars, because everyone who has even the faintest idea where the money goes realizes that the dollars you can save by reducing the federal workforce itself are small.  Most of what the Federal government does is make transfer payments.  Take taxes from some, give that money to others.

Source:  SSA.

For example, Social Security is 20% of the Federal budget.  The entire overhead of Social Security — Federal workers, contractors, their offices and equipment — accounts for about 0.5% of Social Security costs.  The other 99.5% is payments to the aged, blind, and disabled.  Administrative costs of Social Security have been below 1% of total costs since 1989, so this isn’t exactly some new development.

Sure, Republicans get their jollies cutting the EPA.  And, apparently, they’ve now jumped the shark on “starve the beast”, and simply plan to reduce IRS employment until the government is no longer able to collect taxes, and so goes from starvation to bankruptcy.

Source:  Citations given below.

But the bottom line is that compensation of civilian employees (i.e., not the uniformed services) amounted to $271B in 2023 (reference:  Congressional Budget Office).  Or, about 4% of total Federal outlays of around $6.75T (reference:  US Treasury).

By reference, the current annual budget deficit runs around $2T per year.  You can fire them all, and it’ll hardly make a dent in the deficit.

Worse, there are some areas where the Federal government really does hire people to do the work, not just to move the money.  But the three agencies with the largest civilian Federal workforce are Defense, Veteran’s Affairs, and Homeland Security.

If you are wondering why the Veteran’s Administration is on that list, it’s largely because the VA runs more than 1000 health care facilities, including (as I recall) about 160 hospitals.  That, along with many outpatient clinics, skilled nursing facilities.  And about 150 national cemeteries, as veterans retain a burial benefit, and can claim the right to have their remains buried in a VA cemetery.

Don’t confuse “purging the bureaucracy as part of a power grab” with a genuine effort to balance the budget.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Executive Office of Management and the Budget (OMB), the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and (I think) the Congressional Research Service (CRS) all have created extensive lists of options for reducing the Federal deficit.  Not to mention all the various private-sector entities that have been chiming in on this for years.

Even the most superficial study shows why those remain options, and have not been implemented.

The CBO web page on this issue (https://www.cbo.gov/budget-options) lists so many options that they give you a search function, with limits.

Let’s say you’re in a mood to think big, and you’re only interested in items with at least half-a-trillion-dollars in deficit reduction (over a ten-year budget window).   No problem.  Above, you see the first dozen such half-trillion-dollar items on the CBO list.

Bear in mind that the CBO-listed dollar amounts are for a ten-year budget window.  So, with the deficit currently running around $2T a year, you’d be need for a total of $20T in savings, off this list, to claim to come close to balancing the budget.

Lesson 1:  You’d have to do all of the above, and then some, to come close to balancing the budget.

Lesson 2:  Notice how many lines say “waste, fraud, and abuse”.  None of them.  Instead, essentially every item consists of either raising taxes, or shifting costs to the states, businesses, or citizens.

And the rest …

You can find similar lists of potential savings from GAO. 

As if this writing, the OMB website appears to have been wiped and replace with pro-MAGA pap.  It’s now a great source for pretty pictures of the President and First Lady.  It no longer appears to offer any information whatsoever to the public.

 

Conclusion

None of this is news to anyone who has ever given this 10 minutes’ worth of research.  Surely, the MAGAts who’ve taken over the Federal government know this.  And therefore anyone can infer that, whatever they’re hoping to accomplish with “DOGE” chaos, addressing the budget deficit isn’t one of them.

It’s just icing on the cake that these folks now have unfettered access to every Federal tax return.  What could possibly go wrong with that?

The Federal government used to have rules.  For reasons.

Now, apparently, whatever you can grab, its yours.  Just make up a plausible-sounding reason, and you’re good to go.

Post #2097: Ripping thrifted CDs.

 

One of my local thrift shops had a two-for-one sale on music CDs.  A dollar a disk, for any music CD on the shelf.

I decided to gamble a few dollars.

I got more than I bargained for, in a good way.

Ripping thrifted CDs.  One part nostalgia.  One part entertainment.  One part psychotherapy.

Zero parts algorithm.

Continue reading Post #2097: Ripping thrifted CDs.

Post #2096: Fire and fat, on a snow day.

 

Snow day today.

No need to shovel it, is my guess.  Rain and above-freezing temps should take care of it in short order.  Streets are already clear, as shown.

This, in contrast to the last one, where the snow and ice hung around owing to the much colder weather.

It’s shaping up to be just a short-lived covering of the snow-sleet-rain-freezing rain-drizzle delight that is  “wintry mix”.

It’ll soon be gone.  Let it be.  Plus, I don’t much feel like shoveling.

Part 1:  Fire

Wood.  Think of it as natural gas’s costlier, stinkier, noisier, whinier cousin. Just in case you were thinking how lovely it might be to heat with wood.

Sure, wood is a perfectly usable home heating fuel, if you’ve got an appliance to burn it in.  Which I do, in the form of a modern fireplace insert.

But I thought over the pros and cons, and in my situation, I decided against burning wood for home heating.  For a lot of reasons.

But now I’m back to burning firewood, to heat a part of my house.  In the burbs.

When, in theory, the same part of my house could be heated quite nicely with gas-fired hot-water baseboard heat.  Run off a 95% efficient boiler, yet.

Heating with wood, in the circumstances as described, is every bit as dumb as it sounds, from any number of perspectives, including but not limited to cost, outdoor air quality, indoor air quality, convenience, noise level, waste disposal, required routine maintenance, and so on.

In this context, wood has maybe three saving graces.  The big visible fire in a modern glass-fronted wood stove looks nice.  As a fuel, it has lower carbon footprint than natural gas or (in my area) electricity. (The wood I burn was atmospheric C02 just 10 years ago, on average, based on a typical 30-year-old tree limb or trunk in my firewood.  But due consideration must be given to the (very large, very brief) atmospheric warming effects of the resulting soot emissions.) And, third, it’s robust emergency heat. 

I’m burning wood because my gas-fired baseboard heating system is busted.  And that system, alone (no heat pumps) heats the ground-level (den) of the house.  A pipe in that hot-water baseboard heating system froze and burst, during the recent cold snap.  Not the first time this particular pipe has done so.  But until I feel like peeling the siding off that corner of the house to get to it, that system is going to stay broken.

In any case, the fire inside a modern glass-fronted wood stove is a practical thing of beauty.  Looks nice, and your toes can get toasty in front of it.  But all things considered, out here in the ‘burbs, I think it’s best to treat it as an occasional luxury.  And, rarely, use it as true emergency heat.

Or, as I’m using it now,  heat when you have no reasonable alternative.

Wood heat is both a chore and a health burden on you and others.  Burning it all day, every day, makes little sense in my circumstances.

 

 

Part 2:  Fat.  A brief essay an aerobic exercise after significant healthy weight loss, for a 66-year-old guy.

Thanks to 80 pounds of weight loss, I can now do some aerobic exercises “like a younger me”, so to speak.

This has a tinge of the surreal to it, because I still feel like an old man.  Practically speaking, the only way in which I feel lighter is when going up and down stairs.  Arguably, my joints hurt less now (than they did when I was obese).  And my feet.  But in general, the whole apparatus — my muscoloskeletal system — still creaks and cracks and groans and aches.  As does, metaphorically, the rest of me.

The upshot is that you kind of turn back the clock …

… but only on your level of fitness.

The jalopy runs faster after a tune-up.  But it remains a jalopy.

Objectively — and not exactly a high bar — for any sort of aerobic or strength-to-weight exercise, I’m a lot more fit now than I have been for decades.  But I still feel like an old man.

Never dealt with that combination before.  I can’t find any one word that quite describes the experience.