Well Drilling & The Caliber Question

Jim (don't know the last name--he goes to church with me, so it is strictly first name) the well driller started today. I went out to see how it was going, and as I walked towards the drilling rig, I wasn't sure that it was even going, until I saw diesel exhaust. The rig, once fully erected, stands out.



The second truck carries 1200 gallons of water (used to lubricate the drilling bit as it cuts through rock) and a collection of drill extensions and casing. The drill extensions screw into each other, allowing the drill bit to keep going down. The casings go into the hole to prevent the rock from collapsing in, once the drill is removed. Jim tells me some rock is strong enough that it doesn't require casing, but this sandstone does. I am not surprised--it crumbles very easily.

Air pumped to the bottom of the hole forces the mixture of drilling foam, water, and pulverized rock to the surface, where it comes out looking like bad chocolate pudding.



I asked Jim when he knew that he had reached water. Apparently instead of coming out thick, it gets very runny, because the water in the formation overwhelms the small amount of water he is putting down the hole.

When I arrived, he was at 67 feet, of which the first 33 feet were this beautiful organic-rich soil with some basalt rocks (apparently from up the hill), and the rest was sandstone (although it is just wet sand when it comes out). While I was there, he added another drilling extension, and went another six to ten feet down. I am expecting water at about 120 feet, based on the experiences of others in similar formations nearby.

Here's Jim's assistant, also a licensed well driller, with their miracle child, Pearl--born after sixteen years of trying for children, with all the medical assistance possible, and then giving up. Jim gave a powerful testimony in church a few months back to the importance of trusting God when the desires of your heart aren't being met.



My wife and I returned in the evening, having not heard from him--and we found that the bad chocolate pudding mound was a lot larger and runnier. There were now bags of bentonite (used for sealing around the bore hole at the surface to prevent surface water contamination). The winch was no longer on the drill extension side of the support truck, but on the casing side--and it seemed as though a number of the casings were now missing. I think this means that he hit water within an hour or two of my leaving. I haven't heard from Jim, but I expect to know tomorrow.

We climbed the hill to look at the neighboring property--and met our neighbors with the airstrip at the top of the hill. They confirmed that there are predators (other than mosquitoes) in the area. They were chased across a barbed wire fence "over there" by a black bear, and they have seen a cougar drinking at the pond about 300 feet from our property line. Foxes and badgers abound. We look forward to seeing them. We mean them no harm, but we aren't insufferably dense bunny-huggers, so...

What are considered reliable handgun cartridges for short range defensive use on black bear and cougar? The Smith & Wesson in .44 Magnum would certainly be sufficient, but it is a bit clumsy for my wife to carry when hiking. Is .45 ACP JHP sufficient for black bear, or would FMJ be required for sufficient penetration to hit vital organs for an immediate cessation of hostilities?

What about cougar? I know that these are thin skinned animals, and smaller than the two-legged predators that we usually worry about, but unlike a criminal, who is likely to be deterred from continuing an attack by fear of bleeding to death, a cougar may not. Is there a reliable stopping choice in a handgun caliber?

UPDATE: I spoke to Jim this morning. At 127 feet they hit water. He thinks it is only about five gallons per minute--adequate, but he believes that going a little deeper might get us a higher flow rate.

The House Project: I Think We Have Finalized The Floor Plan

It has transformed into a four bedroom, three bath house with a four car garage (two wide, two deep, so really two cars and a lot of storage). It turns out that while we do need some pit run to make a road base for part of our driveway--we won't have to buy any. The rock dredged up while grading the house platform is exactly what we need. This knocks several thousand dollars off the driveway.

You Can't Take It With You...

But you can leave it for someone else to enjoy:

THOMPSON FALLS - The distance between Thompson Falls High School and the sun is about 93 million miles.

But it sure seems a lot closer now that Rusty Kincade's astronomy class has their hands on an 11-inch Celestron telescope installed inside an all-weather observatory on campus.

With the new telescope, students can see, photograph and record on videotape close-ups of the sun, moon, stars, planets, constellations and, on Tuesday at least, an open ridge 4,000 feet high in the Bitterroot Mountains about six miles across the Clark Fork Valley.

...

The telescope was pointing at the ridgetop Tuesday for demonstration purposes only, because there wasn't much to see in the daytime sky on a partly cloudy day.

Students did get a view of the sun through a special filter. It looked like a bright orange ball, a little smaller than you'd expect, because the halo rays were filtered out.

"We saw solar flares last week," said Casey Zander, 17, one of 18 astronomy students in Kincade's class. Sun spots were also visible recently, she said. All viewing of the sun is through the darkened lens, which filters out the sun's rays because they are harmful to vision.

The $25,000 telescope-observatory system already has been a boon for recruiting astronomy students, Kincade said. It was installed behind the gym a month or so ago on a concrete pad where a big satellite dish once stood.

"We have 27 students signed up for the Astronomy I class next year, and we are scheduling an Astronomy II class for the first time. Eight have signed up" for the advanced class, he said.

The telescope, observatory and associated electronic equipment belonged to a Thousand Oaks, Calif., man, Robert Alan Ziegler, whose sister lives in Thompson Falls and knows Kincade.

Diagnosed with cancer, Ziegler wanted to view the night sky in all its glory before he died. To that end, he purchased one of the best systems available for amateur astronomers, the 11-inch Celestron NexStar GPS.

He died in December, and his sister, Jean Polequaptewa of Thompson Falls, the executor of his estate, decided to donate the observatory to Thompson Falls High School in her brother's memory.

"I knew that this would provide you with a terrific tool with which to inspire kids," she wrote Kincade from California, where she is visiting while she settles the estate. "Out of all the pain, sorrow and frustration I've experienced, giving this to Thompson Falls High School brings me an immense amount of joy. I know Bob would have thought it a great idea also."

Kincade said the telescope is state-of-the-art, and far beyond the means of most high school astronomy programs. (Previously, he used an 8-inch Celestron, with no observatory.)

The House Project: Beyond Dreams

I mentioned earlier today that I managed to drive all the way to the house site on my rather steep property because the excavators now have a driveway roughed in. Here are some pictures.

My friend Jim the well driller managed to get his drilling rig almost all the way up the hill to my property line before the mud won.



Big boy toys: a Caterpillar D7 that hauled the well drilling rig out of the mud, and cut a nice little spot where we are going to drill for water.



Yes, this is the West. There's my general contractor, Scott Fenwick, headed off on his environmentally friendly all terrain vehicle to get some wire cutters.



Here they have started excavating the pad for the house. You can see the mixture of basalt rock and clay.



And looking north towards Horseshoe Bend. This is about where the kitchen will be--but it will have more of a view than this, being up a bit higher.



The floor plans that we keep altering--probably until they start putting in the floor joists.



Looking down the driveway from about 2/3 of the way up to the house:



Wildflowers. Lots of wildflowers.





The orange-yellow daisy looking flowers are called Arrowleaf Balsamroot. Another flower that I've shown you in the past is called the Foothills Death Camas, for what it does to cattle that eat its pods.

Recovering Rapidly

I'll have pictures from the house building project later today. I was able to drive the Corvette up the just roughed in driveway to the house site. (The vehicle ahead of me--a Caterpillar D7--was very impressed!)

Foucault Test

If you are an historian or other academic, you may think that a "Foucault test" is one where you are asked to make sense of an incomprehensible block of deconstructionist text. But actually, there is another Foucault--one who came up with something useful.

Big Bertha, the 17.5" reflector I bought a while back (very cheap) has never performed as well at high magnification as it should. I've done enough experimentation now that I believe the problem is either a defective primary mirror, or the diagonal mirror is too large.

What makes a telescope mirror defective, and what is a Foucault test? You may recall (but more likely, you don't) that somewhere along the way, proponents of the New Math showed you a cone, slice about four different ways. My recollection of this was from fourth or fifth grade. I could not for the life of me see why I should care about the difference between a circle (cutting the cone parallel to the base), an ellipse (cutting the cone at a bit of angle), a parabola (cutting the cone parallel to the slope), or an hyperbola (cutting the cone at a sharper angle than the slope).

Here's a picture, to refresh your memory:



Associated with every figure sliced from the screaming flesh of the cone are two foci. The two foci are on top of each other for a circle, and some distance apart for an ellipse. Here's how you use those foci to draw an ellipse:



It turns out that all planetary orbits are ellipses.

The parabola has two foci also--one real close, the other at infinity. The hyperbolas far focus is beyond infinity (which makes only a little less sense than saying it is at infinity).

What does any of this have to do with telescopes and Foucault?

It turns out that the ideal telescope mirror is a parabola: one focus is up close--about where you put your eye. The other focus is at infinity. A parabola takes the image at infinity (and for practical purposes, all astronomical objects are at infinity) and focuses all the light and image where you put your eye.

Making parabolic mirrors isn't easy. You normally start by grinding a telescope mirror spherical, and then altering its shape with some rather empirical methods, into a parabola. I've done this before, long, long ago, when I made a telescope mirror. It isn't easy--and until the middle of the nineteenth century, no one really knew how to tell when a mirror had reached the perfection of a parabola. Just to make life really miserable for telescope makers, to make a really good telescope mirror, you have to make that parabola so accurately that it is accurate within 1/4 wavelength of light. Yes, you read that correctly. This means that the surface of the mirror has to be within tolerances of millionths of an inch.

Until Jean Foucault (who also invented the gyroscope, Foucault pendulum, and proved that light moved more slowly in water than in air) came up with the Foucault test, figuring out whether a mirror was a proper parabola was largely experimental. You took the telescope outside, aimed at a star, and then tried to see if it would focus correctly or not. If it was fuzzy--if you couldn't get a crisp focus--it probably wasn't a parabola.

The Foucault test is capable of measuring those millionths of an inch difference between a spherical mirror, and a parabolic mirror--and doing it with surprisingly simple mechanisms. Here's a detailed description of it. The essence of it, however, is that different parts of a parabolic mirror--different "zones"--will come to slightly different focal points than a spherical mirror. For a light source at the focal point, the spherical mirror will bring all the light back to the same point. The parabolic mirror will bring the light from different rings on the mirror to slightly different points--and a few millionths of an inch turn into fractions of inch of difference on the focal points.

Anyway, I used to have a Foucault tester. I don't know. I am going to try and find someone locally who has one that I can use on Big Bertha's mirror.

China & Taiwan (Humor)

I really can't call the People's Republic "Red" China anymore. It isn't really Communist, but closer to Fascism, with a weird mix of totalitarian politics, private and state capitalism, and not even a pretense of laissez faire. But people would look at you funny if you started calling it Black China.

Anyway, I'm re-reading Professor Anders Henriksson's Non Campus Mentis: World History According to College Students. There's a review of it by me here. The short version is that it is a collection of sentences out of college papers and exams that construct a history of the world that leaves you breathless with laughter.

Sometimes the humor is because of a particularly tragic spelling error (the kind that reminds you that many college students learn English now by listening, not reading): "The five European grade powers were England, France, Germany, Russia, and Australia-Mongolia." "Literature ran wild. Writers expressed themselves with cymbals." "There was a change in social morays." "The Civil Rights movement in the USA turned around the corner with Martin Luther Junior's famous 'If I Had a Hammer' speech. Martian Luther King's four steps to direct action included self purification, when you allow yourself to be eaten to a pulp."

Other tragicomic moments are the result of scrambled collections of facts--but scrambled across many centuries, rather as if Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) actually took place. (This is one of my favorite movies, by the way.) "Friedrich Nietzsche was a German movie producer who wrote Triumph of the Will and Superman." "The history of the Jewish people begins with Abraham, Issac, and their twelve children. Judyism was the first monolithic religion. It had one big God named 'Yahoo.' Old Testament profits include Moses, Amy, and Confucius, who believed in Fidel Piety." "Admiral Dewey sank the Spanish Armada in Vanilla Bay."

A number of the amusing moments, however, suggest that contrary to the popular perception of wild college students, a number have been sublimating desires into their writing. "German unity was acheaved by William I coupling with Bismark. After several hurtful convulsions he culminated to power as the first Geyser of Germany." And the sentence on topic for the headline: "Manifest Destiny is China yarning to embrace Thai Won as a kind of imperialist foreplay." Well, yes, rather like the Rough Wooing of Scotland by England.