Mindconnection eNL, 2015-08-02

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Graphene, mentioned in past issues, isn't the only organic compound making new things possible.

Some years ago at an IEEE dinner, a table mate mentioned a professor who gave students a sample transformer problem but the transformer was made of wood. The idea was to see if people were paying attention. Wood, not being a ferrous material, won't interact with magnetic fields. It turned out that some students forgot this and went through the math.

We all had a good laugh, then I suggested maybe there was some way to use wood. Totally outside my expertise, as I did not design components (as a plant engineer, I specified them in the design of power distribution systems). But could it serve some purpose. Nobody had any interest in kicking that around.

But maybe we should have. The good news here is now there's a bio-degradable chip based on wood. Read the full article here:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/539206/a-biodegradable-computer-chip-that-performs-surprisingly-well

Item 2

An exoskeleton allows a paraplegic to walk on the streets of New York. No news yet on an exo-brain for Obama supporters. Read the full story here:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/medical-robots/rewalk-robotics-new-exoskeleton-lets-paraplegic-stroll-the-streets-of-nyc

Item 3

IEEE Spectrum reported a huge advance in laser technology in its 30JUL2015 eNL. It's called the white laser. Here's the blurb:

"Red, green, and blue lasers are quite useful, but each kind is still limited by its ability to emit light of only one color. Researchers have been looking for a way to create a monolithic structure capable of emitting red, green, and blue all at once. The payoff, they realized, would be a white laser with applications in video displays, solid-state lighting, and a laser-based version of Wi-Fi. Now a team of scientists and engineers at Arizona State University says it has created the first lasers that can shine light over the full spectrum of visible colors."

Here's the article:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/devices/the-first-white-laser

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http://www.ebay.com/itm/RANGE-KLEEN-WKT4162-Battery-Storage-Organizer-for-AAA-AA-C-D-more-/221813374948?ssPageName=STRK:MESCX:IT

I sometimes do business consulting. A client came to me, wanting my advice on how to raise inexpensive capital to solve his small company's cash flow problems. We discussed various options, and I got him on the right track for a temporary fix. But then I asked why he had these problems in the first place.

He said sales were down, and he would just have to work harder to bring them back up. This piqued my interest, because working harder is usually not the solution. Working smarter is. In discussing the problem, it came out that he had one big client that was really taking up the resources.

"It's good money," he said. "They are just slow to pay."

When I inquired how slow, he said they were about 6 months behind. Then he perked up. "But they will really transform our company. They want our work. They've asked for four proposals in the last five months alone, and we worked really hard on those. Things look promising."

I simply said, "Stop."

"Uh, stop what?"

"Everything. Don't keep submitting proposals, if they haven't accepted any yet. Yes, they'll transform your company, and I mean right out of business. So stop doing anything for them. Call them on the phone today, not tomorrow, and tell them work must stop until at least 20% of the invoice backlog is paid. Only then will it resume."

He bristled at this, saying that could spook them into cancelling the contract.

"The one they aren't paying you on? Look up what the NSA did to the Truland Group. 100 year old company, 1,000 employees. And now it's gone." I also reminded him that a contract is voidable by one party when the other party does not hold up its end of the deal, and asked him if their contact stipulated any terms.

The stipulated terms were net 30, which helped a lot. Absent terms, you have a harder case to make and have to depend on other factors such as standard practice in the industry.

I told him he had the terms on his side in a really big way, and he needed to send a clear message that no payment means no work.

"I can't just threaten them like that."

"Sure you can. If they don't pay, you walk away. This is the problem you should have been thinking about. Not the problem of how you yourself can come up with the money THEY owe you."

Here he was with a cut and dry contract law case. If he'd taken them to court for breach of contract, he'd have a slam dunk. I pointed this out, and then said it wasn't really the solution he wanted. There's a faster, cheaper way that avoids destroying the relationship. But first, he had to get it clear in his mind what the real problem was.

This client was consuming resources my client needed for generating revenue. His problem was not how to obtain capital to tide him over until payment came, his problem was getting the payment. There was no sense in providing work for this client while facing a business crisis due to lack of payment. He should have been using those resources to generate real revenue, rather than apparently worthless payables.

He did call that client's accounting department. Following my advice, he told the manager there he had a problem and was hoping she could help. Then he explained that payment problems were going to force him to have to pull people off the project they were doing and actually stop work altogether.

The accounting manager said she'd talk to the responsible managers for that project and someone would get back to him. Actually a vice president called him and said there was a misunderstanding. As I had advised, my client asked, "Do you think you could send a check by overnight delivery?" They did.

You can think all day long on the wrong problem and not improve your situation. Think for just a little while on the right problem, and you can hit a home run. The key is to think about which problem is the right one, rather than simply grab at the one that seems to be top of mind.

Note to Barry Soetoro: Please stop with the blatant lies about how your disastrous economic "policies" have put people back to work. Such blather totally insults us by severely impugning our intelligence.

Granted, many of those not working are retired. But it is also true that this number has swelled enormously during Soetoros' 6+ years of viciously attacking the American economy.

Under our current dictator (the illegal alien who goes by the illegal alias), the national debt has doubled. That alone explains why the real rate of unemployment has shot up so dramatically from where it was before this highly destructive individual illegally took office. It hasn't quite doubled, but it has shot up dramatically.

If you begin with the number of working age adults over the age of 18 who have jobs (about 40% of them do), subtract out part-time only and subtract out wage-meaningless jobs that leave the worker under the poverty line, you come up with a truly dismal employment picture.

Some people doubt this can be true. Their response is, "If that's true, why isn't there a disaster? Why aren't we in a Depression?" The answer is there is a disaster and we are in a Depression, please firmly grab your ears and pull.

The main problem with this Depression is it's getting worse. And it's getting worse because our unlawful federal "government" continues to ransack the economy with senseless, illegal spending at very high rates.

It's not just our illegal dictator who is illegally plundering us into oblivion. The CONgress, which in our current one-branch system reports directly to the executive branch and is not accountable to the people it misrepresents, is also chockful of big-spending criminals who believe any federal spending is good federal spending especially if it benefits the corporations that employ them for the purpose of plundering us into oblivion.

The tone of utter lawlessness pervades both the Congress (which spends, rather than legislates) and the executive (which legislates and adjudicates, in addition to executing). The stench is of this is greatest perhaps in the office of President, a post made dishonorable by a litany of serious criminal activity. The way most Americans vote simply gives permission for all this crime.

If you look at the Roster of Retards who are pretending to "run" against Her Highness The Hillary in this next fake "election" you don't see a solution. Not one of those folks talks about restoring law and order. Most of what they propose is illegal.

To stop the crime spree, we individual citizens need to get involved. At every level of government, but mostly at the federal level. That means frequently contacting your misrepresentative in CONgress to take such action as abolishing the 1040 system (which costs the Treasury more revenue than it brings in, do the math), getting rid of useless agencies such as the BATFE, cutting military (it's not defense) spending to something far less insane than its current level of half the world's total, and looking for things to defund and abolish so this metastatic system shrinks to a sustainable level.

Shrink the tumor, save the patient. That needs to be our attitude toward what pretends to be a government.

You can monitor spending via information from the NTU, and then chastise your misrepresentative for not doing enough to block illegal or just stupid things. If we don't make the effort to stop the crime spree, there won't be a USA (on some day that's now not very far off). We've already tumbled into poverty demographics that are shameful, and unemployment continues to grow.

People like Barry Soetoro have millions of dollars (that we know of, and millions more that we can logically assume they have offshore and most of it isn't in dollars), so they can afford to destroy the economy and then laugh at the rest of us. But the rest of us cannot afford the destruction. And we should not take this as a laughing matter.

Act now.

I had taken her to a range once, and she fired a small caliber pistol one time and said she didn't want to do it again. That was her only experience firing a weapon. Ever. Yes, I did go over the safety basics with her before handing her the weapon, but that was a long time ago.

So I asked her what instruction she'd set up for herself. Her reply was she was just going to leave the safety off and put it in her night stand. I told her this was a very, very bad idea. And she could kill somebody.

She said if someone came into her house with intent to harm, she would kill that person. So I led her into a discussion of how things happen in the real world. In most cases where an intruder confronts an armed, law-abiding citizen, shots never need be fired. The purpose of the weapon is to protect yourself, not to kill someone else just because you can. Plus there's that whole blood-ruined carpet thing.

She said she wasn't going to fumble with a phone while facing an intruder. I told her that's why she needs a qualified instructor, not some guy she knows who thinks he is qualified, to provide her with firearms instruction. Again, I reminded her that in the vast majority of cases, the armed citizen never fires a shot.

I personally have been in not one, but three different situations in which I had no problem calling the police on my phone while confronting the bad guys. Yes, in each of those cases it was plural.

In one case, there were five of them, all wielding knives (and one had a pistol). I told those men, "I have six bullets and there are only five of you. Who wants to die first?" You typically do not find heroes among burglars and other bad guys, so this gambit worked.

The cops arrived at this standoff and took things over from there.

I've had qualified instruction from multiple qualified instructors, and in some advanced stuff. But the principles needed for what I did in these three cases are taught in the basic class(es).

A firearm is just a tool. It cannot harm someone, and it cannot make someone safe from harm. In the hands of the untrained, it could prove worse than useless. In the hands of someone properly trained, it is the Great Equalizer that typically keeps a bad situation from turning tragic. If the situation does turn tragic, rarely is the tragedy on the trained person.

It boggles the mind that there are so many unarmed citizens in the USA, at least among the "reality matters" crowd. Some of these unarmed people have legitimate reasons to forego their personal and civic responsibility to protect their home and themselves, and it's good they have made that choice. But most have simply been brainwashed into believing things that, upon examination, prove to be totally idiotic and in no way arise from the facts.

That said, simply possessing a firearm isn't the answer. Buying a gun for protection and expecting to be able to protect yourself without the training is like buying a saw and hammer and expecting this makes you a carpenter. You need to know how to use the tools.

Where can you obtain training? You can find an NRA-certified instructor via the NRA. That's one source. Your local gun shop or shooting range should be able to help you there, also. Most local cops would much prefer you have this training than not, so you can always ask your local police department.

What about kids in the home? I've heard all kinds of goofy things on this topic. Let me tell you how it went for me. Like nearly every other kid I knew growing up, I grew up around guns. They'd be in the parents' bedroom, a "do not enter" zone or maybe on a "do not touch" rack in the living room. Guns were everywhere. Nobody ever had any problems. There was never an incident where a kid did something bad with any of those firearms.

Now, a freedom-hater (gun banner) or violent criminal rights advocate (gun banner) or will point out that with Columbine this rosy scenario didn't happen. That is true, but look at why. Look at what else in those dysfunctional homes went wrong to produce the psychopathy in those kids. And don't forget, they used other weapons than just firearms. And don't forget, if the teachers had been armed, they could have taken advantage of MANY opportunities to stop those kids and thus prevent or minimize the carnage. Making schools into "violent criminals are safe" zones (aka, "gun-free" zones) is just asking for trouble, and we can see that's exactly what we get when such gross stupidity is allowed.

Make your home secure, by getting the proper firearm training. Consider going through the RTC training, which is really quite good in most states. In my state, you don't need a permit to carry concealed; this is a recent development in light of unarmed citizens being unable to stop violent crimes.

When seconds count, the police are only minutes away. The idea that somehow a violent offender will stop and wait until the sides are evened up again can come only from a brain that is in off mode.

A very wise man is fond of saying, "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." The trick is the good guy must be trained in how to properly use that gun. Be trained. Be safe.
 

Many spices are quite potent for health purposes. As part of your health care practices, you should include certain spices in your diet.

The medical care insurance scam known as the Unaffordable Care Act is about ripping you off, not making you healthier. The latest poll among insurers shows they plan to jack rates up by an average of 50% in less than a year. What if that wasted money were, instead, used for health care? What if a tiny portion of it were used for certain health improving spices?

I've mentioned turmeric in previous issues. The news about it keeps getting better, as in this article (thanks, Howard):

http://livingtraditionally.com/spice-prevents-fluoride-destroying-brain-1/

I've gone from buying turmeric in the little glass bottles to buying it in the big plastic pouches (thanks, Don). I get mine here:

http://www.thepowermall.com/thecenterforhealth/healthy_food/spice.htm

Bulk organic turmeric root powder, 1 lb. $14.00. Scroll down the page about 25% to the Turmeric Root Powder or use browser Ctrl + F and "turmeric."

Take some time to look at various spices and what their health properties are. In your research, you'll find some false claims so consider your sources when you're looking at this. Or, try a different approach. Visit the spice rack at wherever you buy groceries and pick a spice. Just one. Then take it home and look up how to use it with food. Get familiar with that, then try another spice.

The pleasure you get from well-spiced food is good for your health, too!

• The best workouts are short and intense.
• A good diet contains far more flavors and satisfaction than the typical American diet.

Due to earth's gravity it is impossible for mountains to be higher than 15,000 meters. That is, except for the mountains of debt generated by the criminals who run the federal government.

Money can't buy happiness. But somehow, it's more comfortable to cry in a Lexus than in a Yugo.