Gap's recycle your blues Oct 6-20

If you're in touch with the latest in things running around the internet, you probably heard about the Gap logo crisis. Basically, Gap changed their logo on their website, people hated it, Gap tried to spin it positive by encouraging submissions, and in the end they said, never mind we'll keep the old one and didn't quite admit to making a mistake.

However, as much as I myself really, really, really don't care about Gap's logo, and have never purchased anything from Gap (I do nearly all of my clothes shopping second-hand), I wish that this other action by Gap would get more press: Gap's donation program Another, more thorough description

Basically, if you bring old, worn-out denim (of any brand) to Gap, you'll get a 30% off on a pair of new jeans.  The donated jeans get turned into housing insulation through Bonded Logic and distributed to various housing projects.  The last time they did this promotion, some of the insulation went to Katrina rebuilding projects.

Now, obviously, a lot of perfectly good jeans will be going to the Gap instead of to a Salvation Army store, or Goodwill or other options that provide clothes for those with lower income.  However, I think that the idea of a store that addresses end-of-product-life issues WITH AN INCENTIVE is a wonderful idea.  RadioShack long ago had a battery recycling program for people who brought batteries in to be replaced.  This was great, but was never really well-known, and if a person was buying a new cordless phone instead of just a new battery, they would almost never recycle their battery from the former phone.  There was no reason to go to the trouble of hauling a dead battery with them that they were never going to use.

Anyway, I think that the only negative here is Gap's potentially less-than-great treatment of overseas labor.  Which, as far as Gap itself goes, I don't know too much about.

One of my (many) chess sets

A lot of people collect things-- stamps, coins, baseball cards, cars, debts, stocks, socks... you name it, most likely someone, somewhere collects it. I made a decision a long time ago that I would collect chess sets.

Now, I also like building and making things (part of the reason I am an engineer...). So, obviously, it was inevitable that I would make at least one chess set. Browsing the internet, I'd come across a few different "nuts and bolts" chess sets, but they all seemed like they compromised in some way. Usually, there were a few pieces that seemed like quite a stretch interpretively. Or maybe a piece seemed stretched literally; there's a normal sort of height pattern for pieces in relation to one another, and a lot of the hardware piece sets didn't do a good job of following that.

So I set out to make my own, better "nuts and bolts" chess set. As with any good design project, I started out by defining the requirements:

• The chess pieces will conform to standard chess piece height conventions (more on this at the bottom)
• The chess pieces will conform to key chess piece features (it should be obvious what each piece is)
• The chess pieces will be made of unaltered hardware (with the allowable exception of cutting all-thread to length)
• The chess pieces will be disassembly-friendly.
• The chess pieces will use no glues, welding, or solder.
• The two sides will be differentiable without using paint.

The results are below in the picture and slide show.

From hardware set

Turn on the comments for the slide show to see some of the details of making each piece. A list of the parts used is available here.

For the interested: My rant on chess sets

There is a certain order to chess sets which dramatically helps with recognizing pieces and gives a sort of creative framework which I find very appealing. I'm much, much less inclined to play/purchase a set which breaks these 'norms.'

I think one of the most salient features of a good chess set is that the pieces conform to a given height scheme: the pawns should be short and about half the height of the king/queen. The rooks (castles) should be the second shortest. The knights and bishops can be approximately the same height, but if one is taller, it should be the bishop. The king and queen should be approximately the same height, with possibly a top point of a king's crown taller than the queen.

A classic indicator of the king is a cross topping his crown. (I'm particularly proud of the fact that my hardware kings are phillips head screws, and thereby are topped with a cross.... sneaky...).  A classic indicator of the queen is a many-pointed crown.  The only piece which is never radially symmetric is the knight; most of the time the others will be radially symmetric. In the case that a set is actually representing people with faces, this radial symmetry can be neglected in favor of more sculptured people.

 If you want to see the other chess sets in my collection (minus a few recent ones) you can see them here.

From chess pictures

Mordecai's favorite alloys

There are some spectacular results from centuries of material science and metallurgy. One of the spectacular things about metals in particular is the incredibly complicated interactions and the sometimes non-intuitive results that come from mixing metals.

In fact, it's not even just what's in the mix... but what happened to it, and even how fast it happened. Metallurgy is like baking, but more complicated. The fact is that there are large amounts of information that help to understand some parts of metallurgy, but there is NO way to accurately predict a lot of the properties for an untested alloy.

Even in simple two-metal systems, say nickel and iron, there's a lot of surprises. For instance, Invar, a 36% nickel 64% iron alloy which has the unique property of extremely low thermal expansion (less than 1.3 x10^-6 1/K). Pure iron's thermal expansion coefficient is about 12*10^-6, and pure nickel's is about 13. But put them together in the right ratio, and you get 1/10th of that!

Another favorite is Monel; I remember what's in Monel because it reminds me of money... and in monel is copper (pennies) and nickel (nickels, duh!). Monel sold industrially usually includes some other trace materials as well. Monel is stronger than either copper or nickel are by themselves. It also exhibits exceptional corrosion resistance.

And, one more cool alloy is Nitanol, a nickel-titanium alloy that is both super-elastic (you can bend it like crazy and it will spring back unharmed) as well as a shape-memory alloy (you can heat it up and under special circumstances it will change shape).

And the last favorite alloy is finally one that has no nickel in it at all... it's a eutectic alloy of Gallium, indium and tin called Galistan. Just like the copper-nickel alloy was stronger than either copper or nickel, a eutectic alloy melts at a temperature lower than either of the things its made of. Galistan freezes at -19 C (-2.2 F), so it's liquid even colder than water! Remarkably, pure gallium has a melting point of 29C (85 F), and so will melt in your hand. Also remarkably, pure gallium expands 3 percent upon freezing; like ice, solid gallium is less dense than liquid gallium. If you're interested in more boiling water level of melting (melting tea spoon, for instance), then you want Fields metal or Wood's metal. You can buy both gallium and Field's metal here: http://www.scitoyscatalog.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=SC&Category_Code=H

DiscWorld

In my lifelong quest to continue to do fun things and collect nerd/geek cred, I recently was introduced to Terry Pratchet's fantastical DiscWorld series. It's one of the few fiction works that I've read recently, and I enjoyed its snarky commentary on human nature.

I have found that the fiction works that I do actually enjoy tend to be ones with grand orchestrations behind them. Virtual worlds that have so much background and context that it's like a masterpiece painting. I tend not to enjoy fiction works that are just 'normal.' If it's set in the past, then I think I have trouble allowing for that strange combination of the real and the imaginary. If it's a poor work in an imaginary setting, I tend to feel like I'm missing parts of the world. But stories with a map, with a culture, with a context... those have more promise.

(Narnia, LOTR, star wars, etc.)

I guess, in summary, there's more to a story than the story.