Monday, March 18, 2024

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Light, Shadow, Shape, and Texture


This photo was shot with the handy EF 24-105mm f/4L IS general purpose zoom lens mounted on the Canon EOS-1D Mark III.

It was shot in RAW and processed through Adobe Photoshop's RAW converter using the "B&W with red filter" setting.

Like I usually do, I have the 1D Mk3 set up to record both a RAW file and a high res monochrome JPEG. Even though I (almost) never use the straight-out-of-camera JPEG, this ensures that the image shown on the back of the camera is in monochrome and helps me keep my head in that B&W mode, looking for light, shadow, and texture rather than colors.

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Automotif CDLXXVII...

The real find last Wednesday, though, was this immaculate 1965 Chevrolet Impala Super Sport coupe parked out in front of Good Morning Mama's on 54th Street while its owner was inside enjoying a delicious brunch.

In Crocus Yellow with a black vinyl roof, this thing sure is a looker. While the late third generation "six-four" Impalas get all the love, I think the more flowing lines of the early fourth gen cars make them the best looking Impala SS of them all. That sloped rear window blending into the sculpted rear fenders is an aesthetic improvement over the more vertical rear window on the '64.


Despite what you might think, not all Impala SS's came with V-8s. The base motor on the 1965 Super Sport was the 140 horsepower 230 cubic inch "Turbo-Thrift" inline six. Next up on the option list was the 2bbl L77 283cid V-8, rated at 220bhp.

The "327" fender badges and single exhaust outlet tell us that the buyer of this car sprang the ninety-five bucks for option L30: which was Chevy's 327 cubic inch "Turbo-Fire" V-8 with a 4-barrel Carter WCFB carburetor and 10.5:1 compression ratio for a rated output of 250 SAE gross horsepower. (For $138, they could have gotten the dual-exhaust 300bhp L74 327.)


 Dig those groovy taillights!

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Saturday, March 16, 2024

Automotif CDLXXVI...


Also from Wednesday's car-spotting session was this Cascade Green 1964½ Ford Mustang convertible. Officially, according to Ford and the VIN plate, it's a 1965 model, but the first Mustangs built from the spring of '64 until the actual start of Ford's 1965 model year later that fall are known by fans as "1964½" cars.

By building a sportily-styled 2+2 coupe with front bucket seats and a console-mounted shifter on the basic underpinnings of their compact Falcon sedan, Ford created a whole new class of automobile for the American market: the "Pony Car". It sold like gangbusters and was immediately* joined by the Plymouth Valiant-based Barracuda and, later, the Chevy Camaro, which shared the front subframe of the Nova compact.

The fender badges say it has a 289 V-8. Prior to the official start of the 1965 model year, there was no 2-barrel version of the 289 offered in the Mustang, with the cheap V-8 role being filled by the 2bbl 260cid Fairlane V-8. The 289 would be one of two 4bbl variants, either the 210bhp 9.0:1 compression version, or the hi-power "K-code" motor, which was considerably beefier, with an output of 271 SAE gross horsepower.

From a period Car and Driver road test:
"Crankshaft design for this engine became the subject of a special study. The crank is made of precision-cast alloy iron and runs in five main bearings. About 70%of the total unbalanced couple is balanced by counter-weights on the crankpin webs, and the remaining 30% is balanced by two external counterweights—one mounted in front of the timing sprocket and the other integrally with the flywheel. In most previous passenger car applications of this engine, the fourth harmonic unbalance occurs beyond the normal speed range. But on the high-performance 289 the fourth harmonic comes within its 7000-rpm range, so the vibration damper developed for the Indianapolis engine, with enlarged rubber contact areas and tuned for higher crankshaft speeds, was adapted. The high-performance 289 also has the cross-bolted crankcase from the Indy engine, plus a number of special design features such as high-tensile strength connecting rods, copper-lead alloy bearing shells, chrome-plated valve stems, mechanical valve lifters, and a high-lift, high-overlap camshaft. The cylinder heads give a compression ratio of 10.5-to-one, and the air intake system consists of a low-restriction air cleaner, an opera-throat four-barrel carburetor, and direct manifold passages. The exhaust system boasts individual headers merging into twin tail pipes. Power output is an impressive 271 bhp at 6000 rpm with a maximum torque of 312 lbs-ft at 3400 rpm.Naturally this unit can be tuned still further for racing purposes by such patent medicines as Dr. Shelby's Cobra Elixir (or imitations available from your local Performance Drugstore). Over 300 bhp may be reached without impairing engine reliability. Specific output of the hottest production model Mustang engine is 0.95 bhp per cu in, as against 0.73 for the standard 289-cubic-inch power unit."


*...and when I say "immediately", I mean immediately. Mopar fans will gleefully point out that the Barracuda was actually the first Pony Car to go on sale, having beat the Ford to showrooms by almost two weeks. The Mustang program was a poorly-kept secret around Detroit, and the rush program to put a glass fastback and bucket seats in a Valiant got iron on the streets before Dearborn did.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Safety First, Accidents Last

Still among my finest moments in prose:
If you’re standing in the produce section at the grocery store and some dude pops out of the cereal aisle going all mass-casualty on the place and you successfully use your AIWB-carried blaster to save the day, it’s going to take some of the shine off the moment if you forget to de-cock your P226 Legion and shoot yourself right in the meat department while putting it away.
Practice hitting that decocker or applying the safety every time you come off the sights.


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Attention Seeking

“A lot of the so-called mischievous behavior of cats is simply an attempt to get the owners’ attention,” Serpell says. “They’ve learned by trial and error if they sit on your desk and throw your pens on the floor, eventually you’ll give them attention or get up.” Taking an extra 30 minutes every day to interact with your cat could lead to a happier dynamic.
I don't know where the cultural trope of 'aloof cats' came from. Whenever my ex would lounge on the sofa to watch TV, his big black tomcat, Lucifer, would perch on his shoulder like a parrot on a pirate. No sooner would I lay down on the bed than Mittens would come a-running from wherever she was in the house to curl up next to my head.

When Huck gets anxious for attention, he'll rare up on his hind legs and knock stuff off of desks with a swipe of his paw. Holden will get upset that I'm paying attention to the strange flat glowing panel in front of me, rather than the cat, and mill around in the footwell of my desk while mewing plaintively until I finally pick him up and balance him in my lap for a bit (which is awkward because Holden is way too large to fit in a lap and it takes both hands to keep him balanced there.)



Meme Dump





Still Here

Roseholme Cottage didn't blow away last night. All we got was a pretty spectacular light show, lots of thunder, and a few spurts of rain. Not even any hail.


Quite a few places across a swath of Indiana just north of us weren't so lucky, however.

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Thursday, March 14, 2024

Automotif CDLXXV...


Spotted on Wednesday afternoon rolling northbound on College Avenue was this Monza Red Corvette Stingray coupe.

I had the Nikon D700 with the compact 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G travel zoom. Plenty of focal length to grab details!


I love that style of wheels on muscle cars and pony cars of the era, but I'm not sure how I feel about them on a sports car like the 'Vette. They look pretty good on this one, though.


Telling a 1970 and a '71 apart from a distance like this is well-nigh impossible as best I can discern. If it has amber front turn signal lenses (which this one does not) it's a later '71 model, but earlier '71s seem to have had clear lenses just like the '70s.

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024

What's Old is New, and Then is Now

Have you ever had to check to see if a muzzle loading firearm was loaded? If you haven't, it's not that hard.

First you make sure that it's not primed or cocked, and then you drop a long dowel down the muzzle, and mark it at the crown. Then pull it out and hold it alongside the barrel with the mark even with the muzzle end. If the other end of the rod doesn't come even with the breech end, there's a powder charge and a projectile in there.

It's obviously easier with revolvers, whether cartridge or cap 'n' ball, since you can observe the contents of the chambers directly.

When self-loading pistols were first introduced, a lot of thought went into various ways to ascertain the chamber's status without having to cycle the action. Many early autos, like the Luger, had extractors that doubled as visual/tactile loaded chamber indicators.

Savage's Model 1907 pocket auto originally had a clip that encircled the breech, shaped kind of like a pocket clip on some pens, with a tab that extended rearward and would be forced outward by the rim of a chambered round.


Later models dispensed with it, as it required separate machining steps to both the barrel and slide, added an extra part, and could tie up the slide if the finger-like indicator tab were to break off.

Besides, loaded chamber indicators are very much a "trust but verify" sort of thing, as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather check the chamber manually regardless.

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I LOL'ed.

The Atlantic titled a story about the social media theories swirling around Kate Middleton as "QAnon for Wine Moms" and I just want to recognize greatness in title-writing when I see it.

Well played.

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Automotif CDLXXIV...


There is literally a zero percent chance that this Porsche 356 Speedster is not a kit car, but really, who cares? You can get kit cars that will handily outperform the original, plus a real Speedster is a seventy year old car that is worth the best part of half a million bucks these days, and who's gonna flog an investment like that out in traffic where any yo-yo in a Kia could bunt you into penury by running a red light?

Plus with a real 356 at this point, sheer economics mean you need to keep it as close to stock as possible, while you could set a kit car up for maximum hoonage.

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024

A Jog Around the Blogs...



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Garbage In, Garbage Out

As more and more AI-generated product finds its way onto the 'net, Large Language Models are going to increasingly find themselves trained on the output of other LLMs...
"After the world's governments began their above-ground nuclear weapons tests in the mid-1940s, radioactive particles made their way into the atmosphere, permanently tainting all modern steel production, making it challenging (or impossible) to build certain machines (such as those that measure radioactivity). As a result, we've a limited supply of something called "low-background steel," pre-war metal that oftentimes has to be harvested from ships sunk before the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, including those dating back to the Roman Empire.

Generative AI models are trained by using massive amounts of text scraped from the internet, meaning that the consumer adoption of generative AI has brought a degree of radioactivity to its own dataset. As more internet content is created, either partially or entirely through generative AI, the models themselves will find themselves increasingly inbred, training themselves on content written by their own models which are, on some level, permanently locked in 2023, before the advent of a tool that is specifically intended to replace content created by human beings.

This is a phenomenon that Jathan Sadowski calls "Habsburg AI," where "a system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AIs that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features." In reality, a Habsburg AI will be one that is increasingly more generic and empty, normalized into a slop of anodyne business-speak as its models are trained on increasingly-identical content.
"
Go and RTWT.