Genetic Defect

I have a genetic defect which renders me incapable of seeing dirt. Scientists call this gene mutation the "Y-chromosome."

This is usually not a problem.  However, each year when it is time to vacuum the floors and carpets, I can't tell which parts of the floor or carpet have already been vacuumed and which haven't.  This can lead to misunderstandings of a domestic character. But I have solved this problem, and am willing to share the solution with others who may be suffering from a similar genetic deformity.


Step 1.  Get everyone who is not you out of the house for one hour. If the internet is working, make that an hour and twenty minutes.

Step 2.  Access the hole puncher and take out all the holes that have been punched over the last 12 months.  If there are not enough holes, punch some more.

Step 3.  Spread the hole-punch holes uniformly over the carpet to be vacuumed.

Step 4.  Vacuum up all the hole-punch holes.


Voila!  Every individual carpet fiber has now been vacuumed and the other humans in your domestic situation will have no grounds for their complaints and accusations.  Moral superiority is now yours for the next forty-three seconds.  Revel in it!

Helpful Tip for Guys

Gentlemen, if you ever find yourself stranded on Thanksgiving Day in the estrogen-soaked suburbs with no heavy industry, metal works, machine shops, hardware stores or even a half-decent Shed nearby, and you are stuck with a dull carving knife that wouldn't cut soft butter on a warm day, then here is something you can do:

Use the bottom unglazed rim of a coffee mug to sharpen the knife.  Ten or twenty strokes each side with firm pressure and a steady hand should do it.  Ceramic is harder than steel, and unglazed it has just enough roughness to work in an emergency.

However, make sure you are well out of sight and even earshot of any WAGs.  Because nothing you can say will convince them that you are NOT somehow destroying the mug, the knife, your health, your credit rating, your children's futures, and any chance they may have had of getting into a good college someday.  They will not understand this unauthorized use of kitchenware.

So we'll just keep this our little secret, shall we.






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A Winter Wonderland

It is now August and the height of the Southern Hemisphere winter.  Well, it was when I started writing this post.  It's actually September now.  So sue me.

Winter in topsy-turvy Australia means that Bindoon looks something like this:

One notices, if one looks closely at the above photograph, the peculiar absence of snow, ice, or frozen water crystals of any kind whatsoever. This anomaly can be explained by the fact that the temperature is about 70 F.

The hills and pastures of Bindoon, Western Australia are as green as anyone could wish at the moment.  WA's winter is better than some countries' actual summer.  At the Shed, too, we find a Winter Wonderland consisting mainly of wildflowers and bees.

Bindoon is a cattle and citrus area, and is particularly known for its excellent Mandarins. And this has given me an idea.  As anyone knows who has studied the film, The World's Fastest Indian, no shed can be complete without its own lemon tree.  If the whole world's economy collapses and I am somehow reduced to surviving at the Shed, it would be rather embarrassing to be done in by something as ignominious and preventable as Scurvy.  Therefore:

One Lemon Tree.  In planting this tree I was ably assisted by this small black centipede.  Though perhaps "ably assisted" is not 100% on the mark.  Perhaps I should say "not significantly hindered" which amounts to more or less the same thing. 

You're Fired!

Fire is an integral part of life in Australia.  One thing the western US and Australia have in common is the almost annual occurrence of catastrophic wildfires (called bushfires here).  People die, homes and property are destroyed, and millions of dollars are spent fighting this force of nature.

In Australia, fire is so much a part of life that it would be incorrect to say most native plants are adapted to fire.  Actually, most native plants are entirely reliant on fire.  Often it is part of their reproductive cycle: certain compounds found in smoke trigger molecular switches in seeds that signal it to begin germination.

Living in such an environment means that humans, too, must become at least somewhat adapted to fire as a reality.  It is a continual process, starting mostly in winter (the rainy season), when Australians who know what's go going on go out and light small, controlled fires to reduce the fuel burden on their property.  In most rural/residential areas, this is compulsory, and non-compliers receive a burn notice, then a fine if no action is taken, then a visit from the fire brigade, then a bill for their services.

The above photo was taken during a "hot burn" a few years ago at the Shed.  It left an eerie moon-scape the following day.  But the next year, the block was as green and lush as ever.  

This wet season, instead of setting the entire block on fire, I've been doing a series of small fuel burden reduction burns of leaf piles and other specific hazards.  One such hazard is a large Grass Tree that has not been burned in at least a decade, and which is uncomfortably close to the shed.  

Grass Trees are a primitive Australian plant belonging to the order Xanthorrhoea which can live for hundreds of years.  Their closest relatives are the Joshua Tree, the Yucca plant, and for some reason, Asparagus.  The video below shows the correct procedure for reducing the fire hazard of a Grass Tree.  It may appear as though I am murdering the plant, but try to remember that, like a Phoenix bird, they actually LIKE fire.  It's good for them.  In a few months it will look healthier than ever in spite of (or because of?) this immolation.

Keep in mind that this is NOT mindless arson.  This is carefully planned, skillfully executed, legally required and necessary bushfire prevention.  

Burn baby, burn!

Followup: How Clever Are You?

In a previous post, I asked readers to figure out how a water tank level indicator can be made using just two of the four basic building blocks of all engineering, the Blokian Elements of Rock and String.

I would like to report that the following individuals submitted correct solutions to the problem:

Diana Boredom
Holly N. Likely
Phyllis Steen
Hugh Lyon Sachs
Orson Buggy
Lotta B. Essen
Barbara Seville
Isaiah Prayer
Payne N. Dias
Helen Highwater
Gladys Overwyth
C. Colin Backslash
Cody Pendant
Isabell Ringing
Noah Vale
Frieda Wales
Dave Reckoning
Paul Bearer
Warren Pease
Les Ismore
Ralph Oliver d'Fleur

However, I am unable to do so.  Because nobody with a really funny name managed to solve the problem.  In fact, only one reader was able to do so at all.  "Steve Davidson" (if that is his real name) is a member of the Inventor's Association of Western Australia, obviously highly intelligent, of average weight and height for an Australian, and an excellent driver.  Congratulations, Steve!

-     -     -

The solution? The following series of images explains how little more than rocks and string can be used to make an accurate water tank depth indicator.

Three rocks are connected by two pieces of string.  The bars, tree branches or pulleys over which the strings are looped are incidental to the way this depth gauge works, rather than fundamental.  Less friction there improves performance, but they aren't central to how this device works.

Two of the rocks are of roughly equal weight.  The third rock is much smaller than the other two.  Because the the two outer rocks together weigh more than the middle rock, they rest on the ground while the middle rock is suspended.

The right-hand rock is positioned inside a water tank.  The middle rock is often concealed inside a tube or pipe.  The smaller rock must be visible from the outside.

When water is placed in the tank, the right-hand rock gets submerged.  Under water, things weigh less.  The two outer rocks combined no longer weigh more than the middle rock.  It therefore falls.

As the submerged rock breaks the surface of the water, it starts to weigh more again.  At some point, its partly-submerged weight combined with the weight of the smaller rock will exactly equal the weight of the middle rock.  This forms a stable equilibrium.  By adjusting the length of the left-hand piece of string, the smaller rock can be positioned so that it exactly points to the level of water in the tank. It will then indicate the actual water level at all times as the tank is filled or emptied.

It is so simple that most of you are thinking, "Why didn't I think of that?"  While the rest of you are thinking, "I KNEW it was something like that!"

The first guy to really understand this business about things weighing less under water was so excited by his new understanding that in his eagerness to get back to his laboratory he forgot to put his pants on.  He ran all the way there in the nutty.  This is why today we have the saying, "he is too smart for his britches."

Archie of Syracuse (b. 287 BC) realized that for anything to be under water, it must push out of that space an equal of volume of water.  Therefore its weight is reduced by the equivalent weight of the displaced water.

Rocks take up space and are heavy; string keeps things connected.  Everything built by Human can be reduced to the four Blokian Elements: Rocks, Sticks, String and Glue.  If you understand the way these four concepts work, you can build anything.



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Fighting for Survival

They say we only grow when we struggle.  I haven't weighed myself for a while, but according to that statement which I now elect to interpret literally, I must be about 400 pounds.

Summer is always the most difficult time of the year in the Outback.  While Minnesota loses about half its population each winter (most are later found hiding in Arizona), the Australian Bush is something you really want to avoid in the summer.  Which ironically is at the same time.  So basically, January through March, we're all screwed no matter where we live.

I made it back to The Shed this 100° F weekend and was barred at the door by three large Redback spiders.  But they were no match for a stick and a half a can of spray.

Do Aboriginal people go around dot-painting
all the lizards in this country, or what?

Then I discovered that a colony of ants had appropriated an old sleeping bag for their nest.  There were signs of mouse activity, and some poison bait had been taken, but no sign of the corpses.  I'll bet the ants know where they are.  And, strangely, my new box of tissues was completely empty.

No fewer that two weird lizards of the kind shown here were living in the bottom drawer of the night stand where I keep a few extra sheets and towels.  It's actually a Thick-Tailed Gecko or Barking Gecko (Underwoodisaurus milii).  The lizards, I mean - not the night stand, which used to be an antique until someone painted it green and gave it to me for free.  The mice had been in there, too.  It's where every last one of my tissues was found, torn up into neat little squares for some reason.  I really think mice must be OCD.

A Lizards' Paradise.

And in case you're wondering, Barking Geckos really do bark.  They made quite a fuss when I grabbed them with BBQ tongs, plopped them into a saucepan (which I knew by experience they could not climb out of), and removed them to the woodpile away from the Shed.

To top it off, a very large black scorpion was in the Shed, strutting around the sleeping area as though he owned the place.  I had my boots off and feet up, reading this exact bookwhen I saw it out of the corner of my eye.  I put my boots back on, went over, and stomped on it as hard as I could.  It got really angry and tried to ignore me.  Must be the female of the species (which is most likely Urodacus novaehollandiae, definitely ultra creepy but not really dangerous).

So then I stomped on it again, even harder. This time, some guts came out and it finally stopped being a scorpion.

Another polka-dotted lizard in a cardboard box for some reason.

The alert reader will have noticed that if I stomped "even harder" the second time, then I could not possibly have stomped "as hard as I could" the first time.  Because if that were true, then I would not likely have been able to stomp even harder within such a short time.  Did my muscles undergo a miraculous 10-second growth spurt?  OK, I admit to the inaccuracy.  The first time, I only stomped as hard as I thought I needed to.  Which in my defense was pretty damn hard, but obviously not hard enough.  I'm sorry.

Because, as the alert reader is also surely aware, this was not my first time stomping on a large scorpion in my shed with my boot.  I have a certain amount of experience doing this.  And I have to say that this latest one was by far the largest and hardest scorpion I have ever stomped on.

I also discovered that although its carapace appears dark, almost black under normal light, this kind of scorpion glows bright green under UV light.  How on earth did I discover that, you wonder?  Simple.  Being the science geek that I am, I carry a UV light around with me and look at interesting things with it from time to time, when I suspect that the items might be fluorescent.  Bark scorpions in my native Arizona (much smaller but much more dangerous than these) are widely known to be UV fluorescent, and this is actually the best wayto find and eradicate them.  But the bark scorpion is also pale yellow under normal light, virtually translucent in color, so it was unknown whether a black scorpion would also glow under UV.  Now we know that it does.  The contrast between its color under normal light versus under UV light is really astonishing!

Flyscreen judiciously applied prevents critters from
living inside furniture.

I will attempt to get photos of this phenomenon next time, but all the heat was too much for my good camera's battery.  Which brings up the point I started out trying to make:  in the summer, one must work extra hard to keep a place like the Shed from being taken over completely by the creatures of the Bush.  And, it's too darn hot to really do very much besides spray a bunch of insecticide all around and wait until winter to try anything more ambitious.

I did manage to do this one thing:  I added flyscreen mesh to my antique green nightstand to keep mice and lizards from making it their future home.

If you have a cabin, a shed, a beach house, vacation dwelling, a "granny flat" out back or even a guest bedroom you don't use very often, then I recommend the following precautions:

• All food must be in sealed cans, glass jars, hard plastic bottles, or buckets with tight-fitting lids.  No food can be left in cardboard boxes or plastic bags.  They will be opened and used to support an entire ecosystem.  
• All sheets, towels, clothing or fabrics must be stored in sealed plastic bins. 
• The backs and bottoms of dressers, chests of drawers, wardrobes, etc. must be sealed using flyscreen material or thick plastic sheeting (and mice have been known to chew through both).  
• Something has to be done about the beds and mattresses. But I haven't figured out what just yet.
• Gaps, nooks, crevices, and voids in doors, walls, furniture, ceilings and appliances where vermin can nest should be filled with expanding foam or thoroughly sealed up. 
• All trash must be removed upon vacating the premises (my biggest problem - I keep forgetting to do this).
• No water must be left available.  Roaches can live a long time on apparently nothing, but cannot survive long without water.  Plug drains, empty anything containing water that isn't sealed, and shut off supplies. 

Finally, DO NOT feel sorry for them for even a moment.  They can, and should, survive just find outside where they belong.



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How Clever Are You?

There are a lot of really clever inventions out there, mainly due to (and sometimes in spite of) the efforts of a lot of really clever people.  Are you one of them?

Are you clever enough to figure out a way to indicate the level of water in a rainwater tank using nothing other than String and Rocks, two of the four fundamental Blokian Elements?







I'll even give you a hint:  It looks exactly like this:

As the water level inside the tank increases or decreases, the external red pointer (seen on the white pole near the center of the photo) rises or falls to indicate the actual water level to within a couple of millimeters.  How does it work?

I have seen fluid level sensors that use mechanical floats, electromagnetic transducers, ultrasonic sensors, capacitive sensors, induction sensors, thermal sensors, Vessel Resonance Depth Gauges and differential pressure depth gauges.  But this is the first one I've encountered that uses only string and rocks.  Talk about Low Tech, you don't get much lower than that.  Unless it were using just Rocks and nothing more.

The depth of a hole, canyon or gorge can be determined using only a rock.  Drop the rock over the edge and count "One-hippopotamus, Two-hippopotamus, ..." until the rock hits something.  Then square the number of hippopotami.  That is the depth of the canyon in rods.  To get feet, multiply by 16.  To get meters, multiply by 4.905 instead.  What could be simpler than that?

If you can describe to me how this tank level indicator operates using only String and Rocks, I will add your name to the Blokian Honor Roll in a future post that reveals the answer.  A diagram is useful.  Click on the "About Me" link in the left sidebar to send me your entry.

And don't forget to do your Christmas Shopping!




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Too Much Stuff

It's possible to have too much stuff, but you usually only become aware of the fact when it's too late and you have to move it all to a different house.

After three years in a house that was too small for our stuff (some of it had to be left outside in the rain), it was finally time to move to a bigger house.  Except for the stuff that had been ruined by being out in the rain, of course.  Luckily, there was a Bring Out Your Dead day a few weeks before the big move.

To save about a thousand dollars, we decided to move ourselves.  We rented a truck from Thrifty because the name simply appealed to us somehow for reasons we can't explain.  It was a 3-tonne truck which is the largest you can operate in Western Australia with only a normal driver's license.  It took four trips over a 48 hour period.  We returned the truck at 1 o'clock in the morning.

(Like the music?  Get it here.)


By the end of it, my body felt like I had been hit by a truck.  A big, blue truck with the word, "Thrifty" painted on the side.  Four times.

Interestingly, we put 170 miles on the truck but used only 8 gallons of diesel.  That makes it slightly better than 20 miles to the gallon.

This gave me an idea.  I could load my tired old 1800-cc Toyota light truck into the back of this moving van and cart it around everywhere I went.  I'd get better fuel economy that way.  Plus it would save on wear and repairs.  With nearly 450,000 kms on the clock (that's 280,000 miles for my metric-impaired readers), repairs are becoming more frequent.  It would also save on speeding tickets.

How can you avoid getting saddled with too much stuff?  I suggest moving house every few weeks.

Just to be on the safe side.



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How I Injured Myself

The Temporohumorous Field, a recently-discovered 5th force of nature, causes funny things to become less so later on, and not-funny things to become downright hilarious as time passes.

This happened a few years ago, naturally making it a lot less funny now than it was then.  Or is it funnier now, because it was painful at the time that it occurred.  Or is it . . . no, I'd better stop now before I injure my brain.



How I Injured Myself at the Shed


I went up to the Shed last weekend with the intention of getting on top of the firewood situation, but I came back  with a piece missing.

I've been using a lot of firewood lately due to the chilly Bindoon nights.  Fortunately I got my chainsaw working again, so I could finally do something about replenishing the supply.  As I was revving away through various logs, tree trunks, branches and the occasional large spider, I wasn't paying the fullest attention to what I was doing.  I looked down, and I'm sure you've seen this one coming, I found myself standing in the middle of, yes, you guessed it:

a large pile of firewood.

Some of it was too big for the wood stove and needed to be split.  So I put the chainsaw away, got out my trusty Splitting Maul (actually not so trusty as it broke the next day - I suggest getting a steel-handled one as described in the link)  and started bashing away.  Then, as often happens in these type of situations, the blade missed its mark, glanced off the log and hit the ground, narrowly missing my foot and hitting a large rock instead.  With the edge dented, the job would be even harder.   So I went inside the Shed and set up the grinding wheel.

As I was leaning in to the grinding wheel to get that perfect edge on my axe, I could feel sparks from the wheel hitting my fingers.  I could feel the axe head getting hot, too.  I also started to feel very hungry, so I put the axe down, turned off the grinder and went to make a sandwich.

The bread was unsliced, so I got out the cheap thrift-store breadknife that I keep at the Shed and started sawing away, sawing and sawing and sawing back and forth through the bread, when I momentarily became distracted by an interesting thought.  "Why am I wasting my time with sandwiches when there's a nice steak in the freezer?"

So I put the useless breadknife away and got out the frozen steak.  I decided that while the cast-iron skillet was warming up on the portable gas stove, I would try to trim off some of the fat using my Swiss Army knife.  You know how holding a frozen steak with one hand while trying to cut with the other makes your fingers frozen, numb, and more than a little clumsy?  Well, that didn't happen to me, because as I was getting the knife out, I had yet another thought.

What else goes really good with steak?  Grilled onions!  Mmmm.

It was delicious.  But I nicked the tip of my left thumb while slicing the onion.  You can never be too careful when doing reckless, dangerous things like eating vegetables.

Keeping it Clean

I'm not exactly sure how, but supposedly I'm related to this guy, a very funny blogger who writes about his adventures as a Slacker Dad.  In his post of 15 October, he confesses his true degree of domicile domestication by revealing some actual housekeeping activities he has committed even though no one would be the wiser were they to be "postponed."  To my way of thinking, cleaning something that is twice as dirty never takes twice as long.

National productivity could therefore be increased (and the economy saved once and for all) by simply extending the intervals at which many routine cleaning and housekeeping chores are undertaken.

For example, I have never, ever washed my truck.  Not even a little.  I figure, it always rains eventually, after which the truck looks as good as . . . well, as good as it needs to look.  And it will just get dirty again shortly after that.  So who am I to interfere with the natural order of life?

Keeping the Shed neat and tidy is also an exercise in cost-benefit analysis.  If the dirt, debris, dead spiders and gravel one finds in the Shed interferes with something important enough, then it gets cleaned.  Not until.

Even then, cleaning is done in as expeditious a manner as possible.  I use the most available horsepower, the largest broom I can physically push, and the harshest chemicals legally obtainable to get the job done fast.  Often, it doesn't come to that, and I encounter few situations that a damp microfiber rag can't handle.

"Honey, I'm going to clean the bathroom.
Do we have any more gasoline?"

Most bathrooms and lavatories in Australia are tiled, floor and walls, and by law they must be equipped with a drain in the floor.  That is an excellent feature which sadly goes unused by many of your non-male segments of the population.  A floor drain means that when a lavatory gets to the point where not even the spiders will go in there, you can get a garden hose, or better still, a Pressure Washer, and sort it right out in a few seconds flat.

I clean the outdoor dunny at the Shed by tossing a bucket of water in through the open door as I am passing by. If I happen to think of it at the time.

Another time and energy-saving tip I learned here in the Outback is how to do laundry without really trying.  The sad fact is that after eleven or twelve days, those jeans ARE going to need a wash.  But don't stress about finding a coin-op laundry out in the Australian bush! Just pry them off and put them in a bucket with a tight-sealing lid.  Put a few inches of water and some laundry powder in there, too, and seal it up. Then throw it in the back of your ute and go about your business.

If you have a second pair of jeans, now would be a good time to get them.  Not that there's anyone out there to see your pimply white legs, but jeans are essential protection from the plants and creatures of the outback, and the unforgiving sun.  Only tourists wear shorts.

While driving along any of rural Australia's many fine motorways (snort!), your bucket o' laundry will be jostled, jolted, shaken and agitated better than if it were in that machine at the paint store.  By the time you get where your going, which due to the sheer scale of the place could be days, your clothes will be clean as new.  Just give them a quick rinse, throw them over a branch, and within minutes they will be dry and ready to wear again.

Environmental cost:  zero (0) additional energy and about a half a gallon of water used.

Financial cost: $0.0002 in laundry powder. Why doesn't everyone do this?



Oh, yeah.  Most people have a washing machine at their house.

How To Lie in a Hammock

It's not junk food. It's not driving slightly over the posted limit. It's not carrying a few extra pounds around the middle. It's not chlorine or fluorine in the drinking water. It isn't those overhead high-voltage power lines (an awe-inspiring monument to what separates Man from the animals: his ability to make electricity). Neither is it drinking from plastic bottles, cooking salty food in a teflon pan, or licking cholesterol-based pork-flavored frosting directly off of aluminium pots. It's not even duct-taping a dozen active cell phones to your head and calling all of them at once. None of these things can actually kill you.

Stress is the real killer. Do something about stress, and these other risk factors take care of themselves. Ignore stress, and you're caught in a non-stop game of whack-a-mole with a never-ending stream of environmental health hazards, many of which you can do nothing about.  But what can your average Joe do about stress?  Plenty.

When men are relaxed, composed, well-rested and get the required amount of sleep, they perform better on the job, have stronger marriages, have better relationships with their kids, fewer car accidents, fewer health problems, more hair, and a longer schwanz.

(Well, probably.  We haven't actually tried to get data on that last one.)

Men, it is virtually YOUR DUTY as a husband or father to go lie in a hammock. RIGHT NOW!

Here's how to make hammock-time a safe and enjoyable means to a longer, happier life, rather than the painful, embarrassing Funniest-Home-Videos experience it has the potential to become.

1. Find two stout trees in a quiet location that are 12 feet apart and each at least 8 inches in diameter. I strongly advise against hammocks slung on a metal frame, between posts of a patio, or on hooks screwed to a wall or ceiling. No hook, eye bolt or screw from a hardware store will do the job, and 2x4s or even 4x4s are not suitable. You need trees.

If the trees are too close together, your bum will drag on the ground. If they are too far apart, your bum will drag on the ground. Weird, isn't it?  It's paradoxes like that which motivated me to study physics and mathematics in the first place.  The really important questions in life.

2. Get two pieces of strong rope, half inch diameter give or take, about 5 feet long, but long enough to wrap around your trees three times with a foot or two left over. Tape and melt the ends to prevent fraying (if natural fiber, tape or lash the ends and apply glue).  I like to wrap the rope in tape at the cut before I cut it, to forestall any unraveling.

3. One end of the rope attaches to the loop on the end of your Hammock as shown. Pass the end through the loop, behind and around the hammock cord, and then under itself. Do not make a more complicated knot than this, because a) it will not hold any better, b) it will be more stressful on you and on the rope.  The secret to hanging in there for the long haul (physically and metaphorically) is to manage stress and keep things simple.

Second pass: goes under first pass.

4. The other end of each rope is wrapped around a tree at about head-height like this. The second pass goes under the first, on the side of the tree facing directly away from the other tree. The third pass makes a loop which is put under the second pass as shown. Why a loop? When it starts raining you can pull this end of the rope and have your hammock stowed away in seconds flat. Again, don't try to make the knot more complicated. If done correctly, the rope will break long before this knot ever lets go. The bark of the tree provides friction against the rope, so don't attempt this on metal poles, smooth timber posts, or on anything other than a natural tree, or with anything other than twisted multi-strand rope.

Third pass: loop held by second pass.

5. See that the hammock hangs approximately as shown (below). If it hangs too slack, it will be uncomfortable. If it doesn't hang enough, you could break the ropes and end up with a bruise on your backside and your ego.

A Catenary.

6. Lie diagonally across the hammock, not lengthwise. Hammocks are more stable this way, and you will not flip over and fall flat on your face to the utter glee and amusement of anyone who happens to be videoing you on their cell phone.

An empty hammock forms a geometric shape called a Catenary. It is the solution to an elliptical integral equation which has no simple algebraic form. It is one of Nature's most beautiful shapes, in my opinion. Interestingly (well, to me anyway) it is also the shape assumed by a thin, flexible elastic object, such as the blade of a saw, when the ends are pushed towards one another.

When a typical 200 pound man sits in the middle of a hammock, how much tension is on each rope? Would you say one hundred pounds, which would be the total weight shared evenly by the two ropes?  No! This is why many hammocks fail.  The rope tension is actually much higher than that. If the trees are 12 feet apart and the total hammock length is 15 feet, then the rope tension is 167 pounds. If you shorten the hammock by 1 foot, the tension increases to 194 pounds. Taking another foot off makes it 260 pounds. I'll leave the details of the vector geometry for the reader to do as an exercise.

As the hammock is shortened so that it doesn't hang down at all, the force theoretically approaches infinity. But long before that happens, the trees lean inwards to reduce the tension, or the rope stretches slightly, or something breaks.  Again, do not use metal hooks, screws, bolts, hangers, eyes, or anything from a hardware store other than good, honest rope and two solid trees in a quiet location.  If these steps are followed to the letter, I personally guarantee you total relaxation, longer life, better health and significantly fewer incidents of public humiliation. Or your money back.

Taking Down an Impossible Tree. With Science.

A large eucalypt tree in the general category referred to as a "White Gum," but probably a kind of Wandoo was overhanging the Shed and dropping its leaves onto the roof, contaminating the rainwater that I depend on.  It can be seen in this picture, in the upper right-hand corner. Because the tree was overhanging the shed and threatening to smash it when cut down, Geoff offered to help out with his truck and a rope to pull on it.  But when he came to inspect the tree more closely, he turned right around and said, "Can't do it.  Leaning too far over.  It'll drag my truck right along the ground and smash your shed anyway."  So I had to figure out another way.  Did I mention the tree was over 60 feet tall?

"If only I had a 1-inch steel cable, roughly 200 feet long," I said to no one in particular. "Like the kind that mores ships to a dock.  If I had something like that I reckon I could sort this tree with no trouble at all."  A few weeks later I was down at the back of the block fossicking around in the junk that the previous owner had left.  Isn't fossicking a great word?  It's Australian for "rummaging."  I was out fossicking around, and you'll never credit what I came up with.  A 1-inch steel cable roughly 200 feet long. Coiled up inside an old oil drum.  


To quote the immortal Dave Barry, I am NOT making this up!

Anchoring the cable

I dragged it out and made a loop in one end.  I tied a light line to a heavy stick and managed to throw it over a large branch of the tree.  The line was used it to hoist over a stout rope.  I used the rope to carry up the very heavy steel cable and slip-knotted it around the tree.  The other end of the cable was anchored to the base of another large tree some 100 feet away in the direction away from the Shed, and away from the lean of the tree. 


One problem: a large branch of another tree was in the way of the cable, so it had to come off.  If Funniest Home Videos teaches us nothing else, it is that guys on ladders with chainsaws will always come to grief.  That, and no one has ever approached a trampoline without injuring themselves and then being sniffed by a dog.  Also, piñatas are to be avoided AT ALL COSTS, unless you are wearing a cup. The reason a guy will always fall off the ladder when he cuts a large branch off a tree is simple physics.  What's holding up the branch?  The tree, of course.  How is it doing it?  By applying stress through the trunk of the tree.  What happens when that stress is suddenly removed?  Lots happens!

Click to see larger image.

I knew the tree would recoil violently when a branch weighing several hundred pounds was suddenly no longer attached to it, so I lashed the ladder tightly to the tree.  I also planted a cement base for the ladder to rest on (visible in photo).  And when I made the cut, I didn't allow the branch to gradually swing down like a pendulum and knock me off the ladder; I went right through the branch as fast as the chainsaw would take me.  The branch recoiled like a diving board, vibrating on its primary mode in free-fall and fell nearly straight down.  Still, the cut end of the branch took out a large chunk of bark from the trunk of the tree (visible in photo as a yellowish patch halfway up the trunk), narrowly missing the ladder I was on.  As soon as the cut was complete, I clapped on to the tree and held on tight.  The tree shook violently, but I stayed with it and, importantly, I did not loose the ladder.  (The photo shows a long-handled shovel for scale, the cable visible going overhead, and the cut branch on the ground ready for drying.  On the far right side is the tree I am attempting to bring down, with a mark where the fell cut would be made.)

Later I acquired a second-hand 3-ton chain hoist (ex-rental) and used it to take the slack out of the cable.  Then after taking one last look around, I was satisfied that I had taken every precaution.  The tree, according to my calculations, would fall on a line perpendicular to the cable and about 30 degrees away from the Shed, missing it with all of its branches.  Every angle was correct.  My position would also be perfectly safe.  I fired up the chain saw.

The cable slip-knotted over a fork in the tree that was originally 30 feet off the ground.
The rope used to hoist up the cable is still attached. 

After cutting about two thirds through the trunk, I heard a loud pop.  The taut cable dropped about 6 inches and the entire tree gave a slight shiver. A shudder.  I set down the chain saw and ran to where the cable was anchored.  I hauled on the chain hoist and tensioned the cable up again, but the tree held fast. After waiting to see if anything would happen, I cautiously resumed chain-sawing through the trunk in a cut that was considerably more open than before. All was going to plan.

After chewing through a bit more of the 14 inch diameter trunk, the tree popped again, gave a shiver, and seemed to go slack.  It came over all lazy and swayed there as though it were about to faint. That distinctly lower-frequency motion indicated to the vibrational engineer in me that the  tree had almost no stiff support any longer, and was simply balancing in space.  I dropped the chain saw once more and ran back to the hoist.  I didn't have to haul on it very much before the tree began a long, slow-motion tilt, picking up speed, and rushing faster and faster towards the ground.  It made an almighty CRUNCH!, broke into several large pieces, and then lay still. 

Exactly in the spot I had planned for it to be.  Nothing damaged, no injuries, no errors.  

With a bit of engineering and physics, the impossible becomes a simple one-man job.

The Top 10 Shed Improvements, pt. 2

Continued from 5 Sept 2011:

The Final Five of the Top Ten Shed Improvements are:

5.  Wood Burning Stove.  This was a wedding gift from my good neighbor Geoff.  Did I mention I got remarried a few years ago?  Not everyone was pleased, but Geoff was absolutely delighted for me.  A few years back his wife rose up from the breakfast table one morning as Geoff was drinking his tea and said, "Goodbye.  I'm leaving.  For good."  And that was that.  The first and last conversation they had about it.  He was seventy years old.  He spent three years in a depression, barely getting out of bed.  Then one day a dumb clueless American guy started trying to build an impossible shed on the block over the road from him.  This guy needed all the help he could get, and now Geoff had a reason to get up in the morning.  And that American certainly learned a thing or two about how we do things in Australia.  Sadly, Geoff isn't around any longer.  Last year his ex forced the sale of the property to finalize the division of assets, and now Geoff travels the world with a beautiful, rich widow.  (What?  Did you think I was going to say he'd fallen off the perch?  Geoff has still got more fizz than many men half his age.)

4.  The Dunny.  The jakes, the john, the bog, the thunderbox, the commode, the crapper, the head, The outhouse, the privy, the loo, the latrine, the WC, the reading room, the throne room, the porcelain bus stop, the necessary place.  Building this essential addition deserves a post all its own, and will be appearing soon. 

3.  Insulation.  I was told it couldn't be done: "You have to install insulation BEFORE putting the roof and walls on a shed.  The only way to insulate it now is to remove the roof."  Here's a tip:  never tell an engineer he can't do something!  I actually did it, with the help of my wife who is very handy, smart, practical and excellent in every way.  And with a scissors-platform lift that we hired for the day.

2.  Rainwater Tank.   There is no other source or supply of water at the Shed other than what I can carry with me.  The roof, being 100 square meters, collects 100 litres of water for every millimeter of rain that falls.  This part of Western Australia can get 400 to 600 mm of rain in a good winter (nothing the rest of the year), and so I can collect up to 60,000 litres (16,000 US gallons) a year.  This tanks' capacity is (surprise surprise) 65,000 litres.  In 2010 we had about 200 mm of rain all year, and I was so low on water I had to bring it with me up to the Shed in bottles.  This year (2011) is much better, and the tank is three quarters full as of the end of August.

Visible on right side: external depth
gauge, an ingenious and clever item.

For the first few years the water was always brown and odd-tasting due to a large Wandoo tree overhanging the Shed and forever depositing its leaves on the roof.  Rather than clearing the gutters every week, I decided that the tree had to go.  Because that would be less work in the long run, and I am essentially very lazy.  I am ambitious in my laziness, though, and will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid unnecessary work.  It's actually a lot of hard work to be this lazy.

And the most awesome Shed improvement to date is:

1.  Thermobond HRC Roof Paint.  I was still an ignorant foreigner when I ordered the material for the Shed.  I did not understand the consequences of roof color selection.  Even with insulation the shed was unbearably hot in the summer under its dark green roof.  Before insulation was added, it was 15 to 20 degrees C WARMER inside the shed than outside, meaning it could be 65 C or 150 F inside.  The insulation knocked about 10 degrees off that figure, but the roller door could not be insulated and was a major source of heat with the afternoon sun bearing directly onto it. It became so hot you could not touch it.  I would say 80 C or 175 F easily.  You could feel the radiant heat from it anywhere in the shed.  The size of the roller door meant that 5 to 6 kilowatts of heat was entering the Shed through it alone.  That is the equivalent of a large gas furnace, the last thing you want running full blast in the middle of summer.  After painting the roof and roller door with this engineered paint, the steel was no warmer to the touch than ambient even in the full afternoon sun, and the shed's inside temperature was knocked right down to ambient temperatures.  This paint has made all the difference!  I strongly recommend it to anyone with a steel roof, whether it is on a house, a workshop, a patio awning, a travel trailer (caravan), a chook pen or anything that gets too hot in the sun.  


The paint's magic is that not only is it highly reflective (so bright you can't look directly at it in full sun), but it also has a high "emissivity" normally associated only with black or dark colors.  Emissivity means that when the surface is hot, it radiates the heat away from it easily, making things cool off faster. So not only does the painted roof reflect more of the sun's energy away in the first place, it also dissipates its own heat faster, and won't get hot no matter how long the sun beats down on it.  This was also one of the cheapest improvements I made to the shed, costing me about $200 in paint and $200 to rent an airless sprayer for 24 hours. I only wish my son were around to appreciate it.  He hasn't been back to Australia in more than a year.  I lost the court case of his mother's relocation application because the female judge regarded the mother's choice of where she prefers to live as vastly outweighing any benefits the child might derive from having a father, not to mention the father's laughable parental rights. As every feminist knows, fathers have nothing whatsoever to offer a child.  As everyone else in the known Universe knows, feminists are completely full of shit.

Playing video games at the Shed.

When a court-appointed psychologist visited the Shed to observe my son and me together in our natural habitat, he reported that the Shed was "better accommodation than some places I have paid money to stay."  Clearly the message is that  if you come to Australia, you should be prepared to rough it.

The Top 10 Shed Improvements

These are the improvements to the Shed that actually made things better.  Not that there have ever been any misguided, botched efforts that made things worse.  At least none that I will admit to.  In fact, I never have failures.   I have  "learning experiences."   Lots and lots of learning experiences.  But the results of that lifetime of "learning" are the following accomplishments, listed in order from the meager to the spectacular.

10.  Work benches. Doing everything at ankle-height is fine if you have really long arms.  But for me, it became hard on the back after a while.  Fortunately the previous owner of this land had left a fair amount of scrap building materials, presumably the beginnings of his own shed.  Among them was a stack of 3" pine fence slats, still nailed together in 8' square panels, and a remarkable collection of used doors.  The slats were stacked on top of some old tyres, so the termites had not yet gotten in them.  Pine slats might not be good for much, but they're still Sticks, and in the hands of a competent Aerospace Engineer, there isn't much they can't do.  With a bit of "eyeball" mitering learned from grandpa Jacob, and using just a hand saw and a cordless drill, I turned a few decrepit slats and a couple of abandoned doors into sturdy work benches and shelves.  The set of mobile drawers was a Bring Out Your Dead lucky find.

9.  Awnings.  Had I known how good these were going to be, I might have put them all around the Shed.  As designed, they protect the windows from the blazing summer sun while giving me an unobstructed view of the block.  But because I designed them to be self-supporting, they were the very devil to get up.  The buttresses that hold up the awning are in turn held up by the awning, so I had something of a chicken-and-egg situation.  Fortunately, I also had some sticks and string on hand, which as usual saved the day.

8.  The Mezzanine.  By adding an elevated floor spanning one of the Shed's four "bays," I increased the amount of useless junk I can store in the Shed by 25 percent!  I'm not sure if that was entirely a good thing, but it also created a comfortable space below it, which I was eventually able to wall off, insulate and air-condition.  Summer was nearly impossible in the Shed before that.  On a technical note, working with these Rolled Structural Steel Profiles is quite easy and a lot fun too, but it has one or two delightful engineering challenges. When a "C" beam is loaded, it tends to open up and twist away from the open side of the "C" in a mathematically predictable way (some of the bending moment becomes torque due to asymmetry of the cross-section).  However, if you pair them such that two of them face each other, they can be strapped together like this, and therefore carry more than double the load of either one alone.  And they don't have to be close together.  I spaced them 650mm (about 26") apart to produce isotropic loading capacity of the structure.  That's an engineers' way of saying it has the same strength whether loading the floor along or across the floor joists.  The floor decking is 25mm (1") Sturdifloor tongue-groove particle board (nothing flimsy about the Shed!).  As a bonus, the decking itself is capable of distributing shear from one joist to its neighbors, thus making the floor even stronger decked than bare.  Typically, decking due to its weight reduces the load capacity of a platform, but in this case, due to careful engineering, it is actually increased.  In all, this platform is incredibly light, stiff, strong and inexpensive. The very definition of an engineering success.

7.  A Fridge.  Before this came along I relied on ice chests and a portable 12V refrigerator that runs off a car's cig lighter. The portable fridge was fantastic and now I wouldn't think of going camping or on a long road trip without it, but it was also heavy and I got tired of schlepping it back and forth to the Shed.  Plus I like being able to turn up at the Shed and find some supplies already there such as frozen french fries (chips) or a steak in the freezer, single-serve butter and jam packets, and an ice-cold Ginger Beer waiting for me.  The sort of things that can quite happily stay there for several months untouched and still be fit for human consumption (to the extent that they ever were to begin with). But before the fridge would be of any use to me whatsoever, I needed:

6.  Electricity.  This was a major undertaking.  It required the use of hydraulic, diesel-powered men driving rugged, manly machines to dig a 100 foot trench 4 feet deep to bring the cables up from the road.  It also required licensed, manly electricians to install a power board, outlets, lights and switches.  Fortunately I have a friend named The Paulinator who gave me "mate's rates" on the materials and work. People call him that because they assume he is really a machine from the future.  Also he has a lot of kids.  


Because it was such a major financial investment, I naturally had to have a very good reason for going through with this.  I was trying to have more time with my son, in particular I wanted at least the time to which I was already legally entitled, but which was being denied to me on various flimsy excuses.  Improving the Shed with electricity, a fridge, lights, a TV, video games and other amenities would remove some of the excuses for the denial of regular weekend contact with my son.  I happily invested many thousands of dollars (a big chunk of my remaining life's savings) and many, many hours of difficult, strenuous, hot and sweaty labor in this good and worthy cause.  




But in the end, other even flimsier excuses were found to keep my son and me apart.  "Honolulu?  What's so great about Honolulu?  No, I can't in good conscience consent to that. A boy needs a father.  Fine, see you in court."

Next: The Final Five Top 10 Shed Improvements.