I think it’s vitally important to think of humanity as a species in a tremendous and highly dangerous game. Here in the United States there are still anti-science ideologues and other idiots who think that natural selection isn’t a thing, but it’s undeniable that it happens, and whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, we’ve taken over our whole planet now, so we’re engaged in natural selection at the cosmic level. There are other species out there somewhere—there simply must be—that are taking over their own home worlds, and eyeing the rest of the cosmos. As we look out to the stars at night, it’s important to realize that there are many eyes looking back at us. Many of those eyes will never build civilizations; some will. Many of those eyes will never see their species leave their planets; some will. Our species has left this planet before, but not permanently. We are only visitors to space, to the Moon; we need to prepare ourselves as a species to take up residency in the cosmos, and make permanent and lasting our mark on the Universe.

With the United States, leader of the Earth in terms of space travel and getting actual humans up into space, ceding this ground indefinitely, I am distraught to think that we may be procrastinating what should rightly be our primary imperative as a species.

One of my favourite photographs as a child was one of the Earth as seen from the surface of the moon, rising over the horizon just the same way we see our Moon from here.

It’s a beautiful photograph, but if you only focus on the beauty of it, I think you miss the message this photograph brings to our planet: that we as a species are vulnerable, that this blue rock that contains everything we know, everything we are, every single one of us and everybody we love, is but a mote of dust floating through the cosmos. It’s too easy to forget that, because this Earth is huge, from our diminutive perspective. We have to remember that ant-hills are huge to ants, but they’re all one lawnmower pass away from destruction.

We’re all so caught up in what we need to do as individuals to survive, I know, but at some point it becomes important to think about what we will do to survive as a species. Nevermind the whales, the giant pandas, the polar bears, the glaciers—the Earth itself would be just fine if the human species were to suddenly become extinct—but what of events that could destroy the entire Earth? We need a spare planet, and ultimately that’s what space travel should be working towards.

This is our island. We as a species were born on this island. It is also, however, our prison. We own it, we can do as we wish with it, we have built structures that cover not only its entire surface but the bottoms of oceans (see also: the internet, road systems, railroads; we have been planetary engineers for quite a while now), as well as a cloud of our own creations that orbits this planet and several other planets, comprising a network of sensors and probes that span the whole solar system (see also: the deep space network), but we as a species are trapped here.

Just as it was a priority hundreds of years ago to explore and colonize the New World, so it should be our priority now to escape this island prison, and expand to many more worlds.

As a species, we have brazenly crossed the thresholds of many other frontiers. We have sent ships filled with our best and most capable explorers away to shores we didn’t at the time know existed. We’ve sent our astronauts to the Moon and returned them home safely. It is our curiousity and our fearlessness that has carried us this far as a species. Why is it that, when faced with this new frontier (notice I did not say “final”), we hesitate? Why do we allow our politicians to argue about whether or not it’s worth the expense to send more explorers into the stars, when the questions we want to answer and the goals we want to achieve by it have nothing to do with money at all? If a gamma ray burst hit our planet today, there would be no one left tomorrow to spend the money that was saved by not exploring the cosmos. If the Sun were to explode tonight no alien species would ever even know we were here by inspecting the ruins of our creations. How can we stand here at the brink of humanity’s greatest discoveries, and balk at the price tag? It is as if the Vikings saw Newfoundland in the distance and decided to turn back, or as if Columbus had seen the West Indies and decided they simply weren’t worth sailing for.

So let’s go ahead and terraform Mars. Let’s send people there in 10 years, not 50. Let’s begin the process of finding another star system that seems like it might be able to harbour us. The Earth has been the cradle of our species; let’s find more safe harbors in the great ocean of space. Let’s etch our name in the very cosmos themselves, so that thousands, millions, billions of years from now there will be no mistaking the fact that we existed! Let’s go further, faster, more efficiently. Let us not allow ourselves to become callow and complacent on our little blue rock; let’s find more little blue rocks out there and claim them as our own the way we’ve claimed the lands of this one. Evolution is not a linear process; it is exponential. Complexity begets complexity. So should exploration beget exploration, knowledge beget knowledge, expansion beget more expansion. As we reach the limits of how many humans we can cram onto our little blue island, are we really content as a species to say that’s all the humans we need in the Universe? Are we really prepared to content ourselves with only one planet, only one star system, only one galaxy? The human species wasn’t even content to inhabit only the nice, temperate continents on this planet; we needed to colonize Antarctica too, because it was there. Humans can’t live on the summit of Everest, but hundreds travel there for a few fleeting minutes anyway, because it’s there. We need to similarly inhabit the cosmos, because it’s there.

We don’t have the resources to do this right now, but we have the resources to begin the process. Get on it, space cadets.

The screws holding the control assembly onto the bike were very rusted. I managed to free one of them by hosing it down in WD-40 and lightly hammering a phillips head screwdriver into it, but the other one stripped immediately as the rusted head of it crumbled into dust. I tried coating the tip of my screwdriver in carbide paste and hammering it into the screw lightly, and even tried my impact driver with various phillips head bits attached. Nothing worked. So I left it there like that for a few days because I was just really busy there for a while, and came back to it today.

To get the bolt un-stuck, I first hit it with a cold metal chisel. This cut a slight V-shaped notch across the bolt head. I then fitted a carbide blade to my hacksaw and cut a deep notch, about 2/3 of the way through the head of the bolt. (I had to remove the brake master cylinder to safely access the bolt.) The notch wasn’t wide enough, so I used a metal file to file out the edges of the notch wide enough to fit a screwdriver into it. I then tapped it a few times with my impact driver just to get the bolt unstuck, then unscrewed it with a flat-head screwdriver with a box wrench slipped onto the handle to give me a little more torque. Overall, it took me a full hour to get the bolt unscrewed. When I finally got it unscrewed, I opened up the control assembly and was able to easily find the contacts for the starter switch. I will soon fabricate a replacement. The entire inside of the control assembly was thickly rusted, though, which indicates to me that at some point in this bike’s long life, someone left it out in the rain quite a bit.

So let that be a lesson to the kids out there. If you give even half a shit about your motorcycle, don’t leave it out in the rain uncovered for long periods of time. Rust is insidious, and whenever it gains purchase inside a part, the moisture that caused it hangs around and causes more and more and more rust until there’s nothing left. I now have to fabricate out of metal entirely new parts for the inside of this control assembly because some previous owner in the past 4 decades didn’t care enough to throw a tarp over it. Remember, space cadets, give a shit and cover your shit.

I used to play around with electronics a lot as a kid. I knew them well enough to read a schematic, to build sometimes pretty complicated things, and to have a basic understanding of what I’d need to change about a circuit to make it do different things (like, say, changing the gain on a simple amplifier circuit). At some point, my parents gave me a hand-me-down university computer and I just kind of left electronics behind a little. This past month I’ve tried to catch myself back up to where I’d like to have gotten with it.

I never really studied electronics, except during college strictly within the digital realm. Digital electronics are either off or on. They only understand 0′s and 1′s. Serial. Parallel. You end up using an awful lot of NAND and NOR logic gates. I already felt like I knew just about enough about digital electronics. I’ve had absolutely no problem with even some very complex Arduino projects the past year, so I’d reviewed digital as much as I needed to. It was time to finally actually understand analog electronics.

Literally the only bits of analog electronics design I’d mastered were the kinds of skills you’d need to build a radio, or that came up in the written exam the FCC gives you if you want a ham radio license (my call letters, for those who care, are KF4SOO). I’d had an idea last year, to sell a modular analog synthesizer in pieces as kits, the kind you could buy one at a time and put together yourself if you wanted, the kind that moms and dads wishing to impart their love of electronics and music to their kids could assemble as a fun little project. I felt like it was a really cool idea, and would even be well suited to be crowd-funded on Kickstarter or somewhere. I didn’t have the knowledge or skills that I needed to complete such an ambitious project, though, so it sat on the back burner for a few months.

From a business perspective all I’d worked out was that the system needed to be inexpensive, with discrete modules, each serving a simple purpose, that were easy to wrap one’s head around. I wanted to design simple things like a MIDI-controlled oscillator, some simple filters, a mixer, and amplifying stages for use with other equipment. I imagined a whole ecosystem of related musical instruments that could all be hooked into each other and work together.

So, I spent the past month studying, practicing, and building, and today I am sending off the order for the first batch of parts for early prototypes of one part of the system I’ve been designing. Along the same lines as the whole analog synth system, I’ve designed a simple 8-note sequencer, similar in purpose to a Roland TB-303 synthesizer but far simpler in functionality. It features tempo adjustment from 60 to 180bpm, and two oscillators that work in concert to generate a super-wide variety of square-wave tones. The eight steps of the sequencer route power through 8 different controls for the second oscillator, so the first oscillator can be thought of as an octave control. Printed circuit boards for my design are on their way here (got the shipping notification earlier today), and I’ll be assembling them into cigar box enclosures as soon as I have all the necessary parts. I’ll be blogging more about the design and the assembly of the first units soon, with detailed photographs.

The circuit at the centre of the design is Forrest Mimms‘s “Stepped Tone Generator” (a.k.a. the “Atari Punk Console“), a widely-known circuit that uses the classic 555 timer IC to make funky stepped tones. Anyways, I’m back to it. Rock on, space cadets.

Obviously the Tiler is paranoid, maybe even schizophrenic. One only need to look to the four-tile screed the Tiler left on Chestnut street in Philadelphia to confirm the tiles clearly came out of a troubled mind. The insistence of the tile text, though, and in particular the side text. The first tile I ever saw in person was in Chicago, near the Hancock building. It had the usual title, “TOYNBEE IDEA IN KUBRICK’S 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER,” but what interested me the most was the side text, below the tile. It said, “YOU MUST MAKE + GLUE TILES” over and over again (another tile, in Saint Louis, also featured this refrain, and I photographed it). The whole timeline, from the call in to the Larry King show, to the television jamming, to the shortwave radio station, to the proliferation of tiles, indicates a man who felt genuinely, deep down, that he had conceived of an idea that could save Humanity. He obviously felt it was urgent enough to try actively to spread his idea and to have it considered by people of great importance, yet eventually resorted only to leaving linoleum tiles embedded in asphalt all over the world, with instructions for other Toynbee enthusiasts to do the same. When the tile enthusiasts in Resurrect Dead were at his doorstep attempting to contact him, people who were uniquely sympathetic and who would listen to whatever ideas or notions he had, he refused to answer the door. He had an idea that was so vitally important to him that he would go through so much effort to spread it, yet he ultimately just wanted to be left alone and didn’t want to be found.

I know, when I think about it rationally, that I only feel stung by this because I, too, am a devotee and utterly fascinated by the tiles, and I wanted to finally know the answer. The difficult lesson here is that some mysteries, even those as tantalizing as they are intriguing, simply do not want to be solved. On to the next one, then, space cadets.

Nothing can erase the horror, the grief, the loss of life, the loss of potential, from these tragedies. No kind words can bring these children (and grownups, too) back. What we can do, though, is stop pretending like this is a problem with not having the exact right amount of guns in the exact right amount of peoples’ hands. 

There are two sides to this argument, it seems, this argument that’s completely and totally irrelevant to the actual problem of crazy people gunning down folks in elementary schools, theatres, shopping malls, etc. The first side is the “Too Few Guns” side. Let’s discuss that first, because it’s the one I find the least helpful and the most insulting. Louie Gohmert, Republican representative from Texas and dumbass of the lowest order, opened his big fat stupid mouth on Fox News Sunday today to say,

Chris, I wish to god she had had an m-4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out … and takes him out and takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids…

Where do I even start, with this? So now, elementary school principles are supposed to be like Rambo? They need military training now? This is not even a serious thing to say, even if he thinks he’s being serious. Supplying every school principle with a military-grade assault weapon is not going to solve a goddamn thing—if anything, it will drastically decrease the safety of the situation. Louie “Dumbfuck” Gohmert is proposing that the situation would be drastically improved if, instead of one shooter, there were two. How are these 5- and 6-year-old children supposed to react to the vision of their principle sprinting down the halls with an M-4 assault rifle, possibly slathered in war paint, screaming at them Schwarzenegger-style to get down? How would that possibly improve the situation? From a purely statistical standpoint, doubling the amount of shooters (and, perhaps more crucially, doubling the quantity of ammunition flying through the air), necessarily increases the overall danger of the situation. Do I even need to remind everybody that if the shooter got the principle first, then he’d have a M-4 assault rifle in addition to the other guns he brought with him (one of which, reportedly, was an AR-15, the civilian semi-automatic version of the M-4; so the principle might’ve provided him an upgrade by doing this)?

What Louie Dumbmert is doing there is called “trolling”. He’s offering as a solution for something that would absolutely not be helpful, but it’s just barely plausible enough to get other dumbasses behind him. Let’s talk about another shooting.

I heard this very same argument made in the wake of the also-very-tragic Aurora movie theatre shooting. People were coming out of the damn woodwork claiming that if at least one other person in the theatre had a gun, this whole tragedy would’ve been avoided. No it wouldn’t, you fucking retards. What we would have instead is two gunmen in a theatre. If police burst into the theatre ready to save the day, who would they shoot at? Everybody? See, because it’s a movie theatre, it’s very dark in there, and the shooter threw tear gas grenades to make it even more difficult for anyone to fight back. He was also wearing body armor. The right reaction when that happens is to run the fuck out of there, not to engage a clearly crazy gunman who has more of an upper hand than Alan Rickman in Die Hard. Think about that for a second. John fucking McClane would not have been able to, in the darkness and tear gas, pick off the right shooter (with a headshot, remember, because of the body armor) without at least injuring several other people, and that’s the best case scenario. Rambo could’ve walked into that theatre and completely failed to save the day. What these idiots who keep making these arguments don’t seem to realize is that a gunman in a totally unexpected situation like that can easily maintain the upper hand just by surprising everybody. Call it the “Shock and Awe” strategy of mass domestic shootings if you want; it’s extremely effective.

We are going to need something better than “MOAR GUNS” to solve this thing.

Let’s talk about the other side of the equation for a minute. On the left side of this question are millions of people who want strong gun control laws. I am one of those people, but with a caveat. Gun-rights advocates (correctly) argue that banning guns or the sale thereof would not prevent all these tragedies. It is absolutely true that crazy people and criminals and all kinds of evil people are more than capable of sneaking firearms across the border with Mexico, or smuggling them from abroad via ship, or even machining them themselves at home (so-called “garage guns” are entirely legal in the United States at least at the federal level, mostly because enforcement of restrictions on guns people make in their garages would be costly and impossible at the same time). That is totally true, but machining your own guns at home, smuggling them in from abroad, or buying them on the street illegally are all much more difficult than buying a gun at a pawn shop, and that’s why it’s still sensible to have better and more effective restrictions to keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people. Just because an idea won’t be 100% effective 100% of the time doesn’t mean the improvement it makes to the situation isn’t worthwhile.

But the people arguing that strict gun control laws alone would solve this are also wrong, because merely regulating firearms in a sane and civilized manner isn’t nearly enough. We also need to have a conversation in this country about mental health, and whether it was a good idea when Reagan dismantled our national mental health care system after doing the same to California’s state-run system. The Aurora theatre shooter and also the Tucson shooter, Jared Loughner, had one thing in common in addition to their mental illness: both had sought help earlier and had not received the care they needed. In the case of Loughner, people close to him and his schools clearly noticed that something was wrong and he had many opportunities where police might have put him in front of a psychiatrist, but at no point was the alarm raised that maybe this was a guy who, if left untreated, might suddenly become violent, as if we don’t have more than plenty of examples of this same pattern. In the case of the Aurora shooter, James Holmes, he had had frequent interaction with psychiatrists and, in the months before the shooting, exhibited a patently dangerous pattern of buying several guns and huge amounts of ammunition in a very short time.

The solution to this problem is not going to be a simple one, and it requires a lot of research, a lot of discussion, and a lot of debate. I do know that we can’t keep pretending it’s totally fine for crazy people to legally buy all the guns they want, and I have some modest suggestions for how we might prevent that.

1) Add even the most cursory psychological evaluation to the background check process. There has got to be some way we can eliminate even a modest percentage of crazy people just by requiring someone to talk to them for a minute before they buy their first firearm. It doesn’t have to be an especially onerous requirement, maybe just a five-minute conversation with the gun dealer or a written questionnaire would reduce the risk by a few percentage points.

2) Restrict mass-purchasing of firearms. One of the most alarming things about the Aurora shooting is that the gunman bought all his guns and ammunition openly through completely legitimate means. The gunmen in the infamous Columbine shooting, by contrast, bought theirs from gun shows (so, still purchased legally, but via a widely-acknowledged loophole in the law). There is no legitimate reason for someone to rapidly stockpile large amounts of guns and ammunition, at all, and limiting people to buying fewer firearms in short time periods (I’ve heard one gun per month thrown out as a possible figure for this, which would not be onerous at all on legitimate gun owners). The sale of ammunition is barely regulated if at all in this country. If James Holmes had to buy all his ammunition in person, it might’ve been easier to spot the pattern in his behaviour. Then again, it’s not like online retailers are incapable of writing software to match these kinds of patterns. Online merchants have all manner of software already tracking patterns in our purchasing behaviour for marketing purposes; why not also for violence-prevention purposes?

3) Very tightly regulate especially-dangerous kinds of firearms and firearm accessories. I’m not talkin’ about grandpappy’s shotgun here. I’m talking about big semiautomatic assault rifles—which up until a few years ago were banned but can now be legally purchased by anyone. I’m talking about semiautomatic handguns that can fit in your pocket, and police weaponry. These are not the kinds of “arms” the Founders were talking about when they wrote the Second Amendment (nor were they necessarily talking about private citizens, but the wording is very vague and that’s another discussion entirely). Nobody except the military needs assault rifles, and nobody legitimately needs more than one or two handguns, and no private citizen needs extended clips that hold scores of bullets. I know some of you are trying to come up with a reason for this, but go ahead and stop right now: there is no reason to have a whole bunch of handguns unless you’re some kind of drug trafficker or mafioso or something. If you want to shoot an assault rifle then go join the military; they have them there, I hear.

4) Don’t let crazy people slip through the cracks. Again, one of the most alarming aspects of this pattern of mass shootings in this country is that police and psychiatrists and school administrators and friends all had multiple opportunities to at the very least see that something was clearly wrong with the shooters, long before they turned violent, but somehow nothing was done about it. Each one was followed by interviews with psychologists who, in retrospect, regard the tragic events as likely terminations of a known pattern. We need to catch more of these sooner, before the violence that ensues when a psychologically unwell person retreats into isolation, stockpiles armaments, and lashes out. I am not nor would I ever be saying that these peoples’ actions are not their faults—they are ultimately responsible for what they’ve done—but I am saying that in these cases enough evidence existed to suggest the perpetrators should be institutionalized and highly medicated, they weren’t, and that is a huge problem.

5) Don’t fetishize absolute security. No solution will prevent absolutely 100.000% of all shootings everywhere. Don’t rule out solutions just because they only reduce the risk rather than completely mitigate it. A reduction of 20% of the risk of mass shootings would mean 28 people (out of a staggering 140) wouldn’t've been killed in 2012 alone, and those lives would have been worth it.

That’s all I’ve got for you today, space cadets.

After considerable deliberation, Angie pulled the fence aside while I lifted up the kitten. She climbed the fence a little and I grabbed her when she got to the top. Now she’s hiding in my office, but she started eating solid food earlier and seems to be getting enough water for now. She’s super adorable, too!

More photos soon, space cadets!

It took probably twice as long than if I had merely bought the cheapest parts and been done with it, but I took the time to source 100% of the resistors, capacitors, integrated circuit chips, connectors, and potentiometers for building the CMoy from United States-based manufacturers. The resistors are all from Xicon, in Texas; the capacitors are from Xicon and Cornell Dubilier, of South Carolina; stereo volume control from Bourns, of Riverside, CA; stereo headphone jacks from Switchcraft right here in sunny Chicago, IL; and integrated circuit chips from Texas Instruments in, well, Texas I’m assuming. It took a little bit of effort but I have made the list of parts, as a project on Mouser Electronics’ website, available for anyone to use if they want to build a CMoy amplifier with a minimum of drama and use only US-sourced parts.

After all my fiddling about with the fuel system, nothing seemed to be working. I pulled each spark plug to see if fuel was even making it into the engine, and two plugs were dry after turning the engine a few times over. This indicated to me that the middle two carburetors were having troubles, so I decided to pull the carburetors and just thoroughly clean and rebuild each one.

Pulling the carburetor assembly out of the bike was a bit of a chore. I don’t think they’ve ever been removed completely since it rolled off the assembly line! I removed the throttle cables and spent about twenty minutes tugging on the assembly before it loosened and I was able to completely remove it. Then the task of separating the four carburetors, which was a bit more complex than I thought it would be but I managed it just fine. Now I had four carburetors and a small pile of linkages that synchronized their throttles, chokes, and fuel lines together.

Taking apart the first carburetor I could’ve sworn I lost a spring, a tiny little compression spring (there’s about a bazillion little tiny pieces to each of those linkages, including little tiny springs). I spent about an hour searching the floor of my garage, stopped for the day, then took a closer look at the exploded diagram of the carburetor and it turns out the spring I was looking for was still inside the linkage. Lucky break. Actually it was only when I’d dismantled a second carburetor that I discovered that the spring I saw in the diagram was further below where I thought I’d lost one. So I continued the rebuild.

It’s becoming apparent to me that this is a lot harder to do without a full set of tools. When I say a “full” set, I don’t mean one of those hundred-or-so-piece tool kits you see at the Home Depot, even the ones labeled “Mechanic’s Tool Set”. I mean a full set, including taps, dies, punches, cold-metal chisels, every single metric combination wrench in the damn world, screwdrivers of every possible size… a full set. Someday I’ll have that. For now I’m using a sewing pin as a centering punch, because even if I bothered to get a punch set I still wouldn’t have anywhere to put it when I’m not using any punches.

Finally got the whole thing dismantled and found the problem immediately. Either one or both jets of each carburetor are completely clogged, at least a couple of them so badly that they’re still soaking in carburetor cleaning solution in my garage right now. I’ll try them again later today. The rebuild part is easy enough; I’ve just been replacing each O-ring and gasket with my spares when I see them. Hopefully once this process is done, not only will the bike actually start but those carburetors will last another few years at least without failing or leaking.

My plan is to finish the rebuild, get the carburetors back on the bike, get it running, then take it to my mechanic, Chewy, to have him synchronize them and adjust them back to where they should be, and replace the tires and a couple of other things on the bike in the process. Once that’s done, the bike will be driveable and should be pretty reliable. At that point, hopefully the transmission and clutch and all that I haven’t had a chance to try out because the bike doesn’t run, will just work and be fine, otherwise I’ve got a long road ahead of me with this.

So wish me luck, space cadets.

That the spark plugs all fire properly is another indication that the bike’s troubles are carburettor-related, which doesn’t shock me. When I first got it there was 20-year-old gasoline still in the tank, which doubtlessly had made its way into all the fuel valves and carburettors over the years. I think I may insert a small fuel filter inline with the fuel line that goes from the reserve valve to the carburettor assembly. At least for the first few thousand miles of riding it should have one, just to make sure whatever’s left inside the fuel tank doesn’t gum up the engine.

Alright well I’m back to work, space cadets; more updates later if I get those carburettors out.