Nothing Happens At Ten

It is Daylight Saving Time again. So last night I went around moving all the clocks forward an hour. That was when I discovered that our Daniel Pratt clock had stopped ticking. I tried to get it going again, but it would not run. Don’t believe me? Here is a movie of the clock not running.

As you can see, the clock is not ticking.

Oh. Still watching? OK. I’ll wait.

Hmmm. hmmm… dum de dum…..

Done yet? Seriously, you can watch it all day and it won’t do anything.

Anyway, DG said that the clock was protesting Daylight Saving Time. The clocks are fed up with being joggled and disturbed twice a year, he said,  just because some bureaucrat in Washington has made a rule that we have to do that. “It’s a silly rule”, he said, and he has taken up the cause and is protesting in support of the clocks.

While he was doing that, I took the clock down to the bench and found this.

That is the cord that holds the weight that makes the clock go. It was all frayed and wrapped around the axle (sort of like DG). I replaced the cord with a new one, and the clock is now running nicely. It hardly even missed the loss of an hour because it spent a couple of hours in the Clock Hospital.

I showed the cord to DG and said, “Hey, DG. This is just like you!”, and he said, “No. I’m a frayed knot!”

HAHAHAHAHA

Sometimes I crack myself up.

Now that we are in a cold snap (Old Man Winter has arrived!), DG decided to stay in and sit down with a mug of nice, steamy coffee.

“DG”, I said, “are you aware that when you do that you make yourself complicit in the Coffee Plant conspiracy to take over the world?”

Seriously, DG, it’s true.

You see, the coffee plant, Coffea arabica, down in Colombia is always trying to expand its reach. It is procreating with abandon and trying to take over the world and using you to pursue it’s heinous plan.

DG: Wha?

Really. Here is what is going on. In order to take over the world, the coffee plant puts out lots and lots of coffee beans, which are picked by Señor Juan Valdez, packed into bags, and put on his mule. The mule carries the bags down to the boat, which takes them across the ocean to here. Once the beans get here they are roasted and ground and sold in the supermarket.

DG: Wha?

Hush.

The beans are sent to the supermarket in little bags and sold to you, DG, and you put them into your coffee maker to make your coffee. And here is the tricky bit. Since coffee contains caffeine, and caffeine is a diuretic it makes you ….. um…… well…. “go”, if you know what I mean.

DG: Eww

After you go, it gets flushed, filtered, and fumigated and then dumped into the ocean where it evaporates and turns into fluffy little white clouds that skip across the ocean down to Columbia where it rains on the coffee plant, making the plant grow so that it can make more beans….. for Señor Valdez to pick… and to take over the world.

So, you see, your real purpose in this world is to be a very small cog in the complex life cycle of the coffee plant….

DG?

I think DG has switched to tea.

DG is sick of all this rain. He really wanted to build a snowman before the crocuses bloom.

I told him that he could blame it on the Augernaut*

You see, in that very first snow storm in early December, the Augernaut broke (again) when we were half way through cleaning up that mess. Since then it has been in and out of the Augernaut hospital for a broken arm and then a fuel leak. We only got it back and working a few weeks ago…. just in time for the constant rains to hit.

I think that the word “snake-bit” might be appropriate for that machine.

*Our very huge snowblower, which we are beginning to have doubts about.

DG went rummaging through our Computer Museum again and came up with this old style Chinese abacus.

This is a 2/5 Chinese abacus, called a “suanpan” 算盘. The 2/5 means that it has 2 beads on the top and 5 beads on the bottom.

The abacus we used in our previous post is a newer, 1/4 Japanese style abacus called a “soroban” (算盤, そろばん, counting tray)

You can use the suanpan the same way that you use the soroban by simply ignoring one top bead and one bottom bead. Just leave ’em aside, like this:

DG: Well that’s stupid. Why have the additional beads if you don’t use them?
Me: With the extra beads, you can do hexadecimal arithmetic.
DG: Hexawhat?
Me: Hexadecimal. A number system based on 16 instead of 10. The extra beads allow you to count up to 15 before you carry over to the next column. Like this:

DG: That’s stupid. Nobody would ever have a reason to do that.
Me: Yes, they would.
DG: No, they wouldn’t.
Me: Yes, they would.
DG: There is no practical application for hexawhat.
Me: Yes, there is.
DG: Prove it.
Me: How many ounces are there in a pound?
DG: Um.
Me: Well….. ?
DG. Um. 16?
Me: Gotcha again.