Last week of frozen Shellpot Creek?

It's freezing cold this week and the snow fell yesterday. Is this the last week of frozen and snowy Shellpot creek?

This is how it looked this morning when it was 11F.

Building a control panel

Linus' wanted me to build him a "control panel" to pretend to launch rockets or control something. I looked at Radio Shack online and then went and bought a bunch of lighted switches, lights, buzzers, sirens and a breadboard to test and hook it all together. It was pretty cool.

I'll need to find a good box to put it in. They even had the cool guarded switches where you must lift the red guard to then be able to flip the switch, which is also lighted. We can use those as "arming" switches for the noisemakers.

I had showed Linus some of the basics of connecting a circuit, showing how the power starts the circuit and then through the light or switch and that it must make a circle to work. I hooked up a little fan and described how the red wire goes to red and the black to black. Then I was out of the room for a while and I heard a loud beep. He had been listening and paying attention enough that he figured out how to take out the fan and put in the beeping buzzer and have it work on the switch. I think he gets it!

After some experimenting I will eventually have to make something more permanent.

I was inspired by this post at MAKE of a father creating a Mission Control Desk for his son (via BoingBoing).  This one is more elaborate than I am capable of.

A search produced this one at Instructables as well.

That one is more my speed and ability.

Now I am on the hunt for videos explaining breadboards and soldering as well.

What could MEWOBOR license plate mean?

Saw this one today, Delaware license MEWOBOR. I want to respect the effort to get this personalized license plate and understand the message, but I don't get it.

Any comments or interpretations?

Preparing the pictures of me with past presidents for my office.

Do you know how people put pictures of themselves with famous people on the walls of their offices in order to show the influence they have?  I have especially seen this for those who work in government.

I was able to get my picture with several presidents at the baseball game so I am ready to fill my office wall.

 President Washington

 President Jefferson

President Lincoln

President Roosevelt (Teddy)

These may seem like pictures taken with mascots at National's Park before a baseball game last summer, but these are legit.

Enigma machine at the Franklin Institute

Back in June, the Spy exhibit at the Franklin Institute had a real live Enigma machine used by the Germans in World War II to encode their secret transmissions.  Lucky the Allies had broken the code and could read those transmissions.

You may recall that we had a chance to visit Bletchley Park, the place where the British and their allies worked on breaking the code, as a side-trip on a visit to London some years ago.

The instruction are in German, but are provided for the interested user.

Artifacts from the Hughes Glomar Explorer, real life inspriation for Charles Stross' The Jennifer Morgue.

Charles Stross in the Jennifer Morgue explored the secret history of the ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer. There really is such a ship.  At the Franklin Institute in June an exhibit of the history of Spying had artifacts from Project Azorian, the attempted lifting of a soviet submarine by the Hughes Glomar Explorer.

A commemorative plaque.

A belt buckle and in the background a manganese nodule that was an example of the intended use of the ship.

Of course in Stross' novel nothing so mundane as a Soviet submarine is lifted, the true prize was yet another eldritch horror.

Freezing rain coats the world

It was freezing rain this morning and it coated all the trees beautifully but not so much that I wanted to get wet taking close up pictures. These are some hanging plants close to the house.

Snow yesterday was fluffy

The picture of the creek was taken while the snow was still falling.

There was 5" on the pathway at 5pm yesterday. Amounts ranged up to 7" and down to 4" depending on the spot. It was still snowing so we might have gotten a little more, but official numbers for Tslleyville and Claymont were 5" and 4.8" so I think my measurement us consistent.

The snow was extremely light to shovel. Even a shovelful only felt like the weight of the shovel. We shoveled a few times to keep up.

This morning at 7am the various thermometers read 4F, 5F and 7F so it was cold!

Back to the Future Lego!

That's a lot of blocks to assemble. So many that Linus and I actually separated them by color as recommended to make it easier to find the pieces during assembly.

The final vehicle has parts that can be substituted so you can make the different cars for the first second or third movie. Mine is a mix of the first movie with Mr. Fusion and the third movie.

There is the OUTATIME and future barcode license plate, a flux capacitor and the control panel with the date entry system. Cool!

New Superbowl 48 predictions after the Wild Cards are done.

We lost four teams to wild card playoffs this past weekend.  Three of the games were very close and exciting.  The only surprise perhaps from my simulation standpoint would have been SD's win.  That being said, the final Superbowl predictions don't change that much.  Denver and Seattle are the clear favorites to make it to the final game, as the bubble chart below shows.

I also have the box chart sorted by Superbowl and colored to make it clearer to see.  I like this one because the area of the color represents the probability that that team wins the Superbowl, but you can see the boxes within that show who their opponent would be.

Another weekend of football awaits.