sweasel.com

Heh, looks like the lowest gear has been moved slightly since you nabbed it. Now the two small ones would just pass each other.

Speaking as someone who disassembled more than one alarm clock before they went digital (or even flippy numbers fake digital), I’d have responded “Oh, uh, sure, I meant to do that. The viewer is, uh, looking down the Z-axis at a set of gears, one of which is tall and engages the other two gears in different planes. Um, yeah, that’s it. You just don’t have enough vision to see it. So there!”

Ha! You’re right! The two little ones would just squeak by now.

Oh, I was an incorrigible clock taker-aparter myself, Mike. Usually with unpleasant results, although I have an antique wall clock that I took apart, cleaned, reassembled and refinished that actually WORKS! And looks good also, if I do say so myself.

I love the feral-child studies. In high school I had to do a report on The Wolf Children and Feral Man. It really is interesting stuff. It’s sad that many of the feral children did not live to vibrant adulthood once in “captivity.” Russia is full of such stories, too.

Have a look at a two pound coin. Count the gears in the ring on the reverse side. Yup, there’s 19 of ’em. Tee hee.

[pedant]
It’s not the Smithsonian Institute.
It’s the Smithsonian Institution.
[/pedant]

The technical people at the SI are very good, but the executive management and PR weenies are about what you’d expect in a Washington, DC organization largely dependent on pleasing politicians and bureaucrats.

Poor old Smithson. Never visited the States in life, so after he died we dug him up and replanted him in the walls of the Smithsonian Castle.

argh, I got spam trapped

Just to get some facts straight…First, the blog is written for Smithsonian.com-the website of Smithsonian Magazine–not for Smithsonian.org, the website of the Smithsonian Institution. Michelle Malkin got that wrong, too. Also, I wrote the intro and was not inspired by Obama’s speech. I simply noted that he referred to a “Sputnik moment.” I also pointed out that the country hasn’t exactly rallied around him on this. The logo in which the gears didn’t turn was designed by a person on the Smithsonian Magazine staff. It was meant to be a simple graphic element and admittedly we didn’t check to see if the cogs would turn. All the comments about the logo came after Michelle Malkin mentioned it in her blog last Sunday. No one said a word about it before then.

Wow. Just . . . wow! Which is to say. . .when the person you are mocking finds your comment, and responds–calmly and responsibly–in a way that indicates the responder has actually looked at what you posted. . .well geez. Um, one might almost say “Wow”?

“check to see if the cogs would turn” Huh? That’s like saying “check to see if three was an odd number”.

And they would have gotten away with it without that meddling Malkin!

A trivial moment, but humorous. As an analogy, remember the overly-orchestrated scene of the big showdown near the end of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”? Pull it up on YouTube and look closely. The Lee Van Cleef character is standing there with his gun belt on, with full cartridge loops. With a cap and ball revolver in the holster. No percussion caps on the nipples, either.

This is what happens when you let black people run your country.

Oh, Oceania, you are the gift that keeps on giving. Like a recalcitrant herpes sore.

Hello, Randy. I sympathize. I really do. I’m all up in there with the symbolic meanings and not much with the gear tooth ratios.

But, as I said, I worked as an illustrator for an engineering company for twenty five years. Guys who think in gear tooth ratios? They have NO mercy for those who don’t.

Hey, Mike C:
That was an Italian-made Western, hence “Spaghetti Western”. Given the Italian performance with arms (although not as bad as that of the French, they are NOT known as experts), what ELSE would one expect? Of course, Hollywood TODAY would easily make similar errors. Not because the US does not know about such things, but because Hollywood and everyone THEY know do not.

[quote]Comment from David Gillies
Oh, Oceania, you are the gift that keeps on giving. Like a recalcitrant herpes sore.[/quote]

I take it that you are referring to the American strain of HSV2? That nice little number that hides out in your populations lower lumbar neurons and pops up to infect your dermal coital partners? Good old kinesin transport down your MTs in your dendrites, then budding into that nice prodromal blister?
In the mean time, it hides out as a nuclear LAT just waiting to synthesise new prodgeny.
Would you like me to provide you with a novel mi or siRNA and a suitable vector to neutralise the viridae code through centrosomal silencing – or would you prefer a lifetime on Acylovir?

You’re off your game today Oceania – you know how this disappoints me 🙁

Oh back to my original reason for posting –
It’s obvious that logo shows government machinery.
How you ask?

As first shown it wouldn’t work at all, and after it was fixed it does nothing. 🙂

@Mark Matis – The Italians’ performance in using arms is one thing, but their performance in making arms does have one bright star. Fabbrica d’Armi Pietro Beretta S.p.A. does good work and have been doing so for over 500 years.

Agreed, Uncle Al, but I stand by my point that it would be unfair to chide Italians for inaccuracy in depiction of arms, because the vast majority of Italians have NOTHING to do with Fabbrica d’Armi Pietro Beretta S.p.A.

I’m no engineer but the gaps between the gears look inconsistent too.

And thanks for the link 🙂

I’m with Uncle Al on this. Anyone who judges a nation by its film industry is asking for trouble.

How many cowboys did Hollywood equip with those fabulous 94 shot Colt revolvers?

That was the one flaw in Open Range, an otherwise wonderful film: Costner’s 11-gun. Its really a simple continuity fix too, just don’t have them shoot so much without a pause that at least could be plausibly believed as reload time off camera.

AWWWWW, fer Jebuss sake!
It’s a frikken symbol….like the damn swastika!!!!

It takes our human imagination and/or an emotionally based response, as opposed to critical sensibility to make it other than what it is.

Focusing on the symbol instead of the TRUE problem weakens and diminishes the core of debate on both sides. Its up to both sides to get the fuck past the symbols and focus on the core of what we are about.

Does true anarchist democracy or its antithesis, a full blown socialist fascist state work as a government that allows….and requires individual responsibility for their own “life, liberty and the *pursuit* (there is no frikken guarantee!!!) of happiness.”

History tells the tale…..HELL NO!, neither work.

Its not about race. It is and always has been about political posturing and power mongering.

It IS about social programs instituted to give away someone’s capitol to five generations of welfare recipients breeding to create another 10 mouths to provide the “family” with another new car and the a 52 inch plasma screen whilst they parlay their food stamps for whiskey and beer and/or sex and drugs.

We created them by allowing bleeding heart socialists to convince us that its the government’s responsibility, not the individual and their faith….however it is expressed!!!… to help those in true need.

Well forged documents, like the *ORIGINAL* U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights were created to do just that.

Get a grip folks….and make that grip a well worn S&W .357 or a Springfield XD .45 and/or the good Rabbi Mossberg 12ga. riot gun.

The worst of the spawn of the welfare state has yet to come home to roost. And the Kool-Aid Congress in Washington is NOT helping!

God bless y’all in Britain. Y’all are experiencing the tip of the iceberg, ready to rise and rip the remnants of the best of Western Culture to shreds. All it takes is communists like Obama to be allowed to remain in power.

Ms Weasel, I just noticed you get credit for the cover art for Rick Locke’s ebook “Temporary Duty”. Congratulations. Captures the story quite well…just so you know somebody noticed..

@Sven in Colorado — Well forged documents, like the *ORIGINAL* U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights were created to do just that.

I’ll take the Articles of Confederation over the U.S. Constitution any day. Just look where the Constitution has brought us.

No Oceania, it was a slightly more nuanced way of saying you’re a disease.

But anyway, no link this time to get me spam-blocked: look at a two pound coin, first minting. There’s a ring of 19 gears in the design, and no gear ring with an odd number of gears can turn, even in principle.

David Gillies–Why not? I expect this is embarrassingly basic, and no doubt I could parse it out for myself given an adequate number of fingers and toes, and a sufficient supply of scratchpaper and writing utensils. . .but, well–why not?

You’re off your game today Oceania – you know how this disappoints me 🙁

Yeah.
I’m on backup power and there is 3-4 feet of snow outside.

Can’t Hark: Start with two gears. If they’re meshed, one turns clockwise, the other counter.

Now three in a row. In order, clockwise, anticlockwise, clockwise. Add a fourth, c-a-c-a; the fifth gives you c-a-c-a-c.

Thus the basic principle is that two gears, meshed, turn in opposite directions, and the derived principle is that, in an odd number of meshed gears, the ones on the ends turn in the same direction.

If you bend the row containing an odd number of gears ’round into a ring, you mesh two gears that are turning in the same direction, and that locks up the whole gear train.

Regards,
Ric

Seems to me the Articles of Confederation could and would be as ignored, misused, and raped as the US Constitution was. The problem is leftist politicians, not the document its self.

Ric Locke: Ah, thank you! I knew it was something embarrassingly dumb: I was confusing “gear” with “cog.” Duh!

For Christopher taylor:
The problem is NOT “leftist politicians”, for THEY do nothing more than flap their gums. NOT ONE OF THEM will show up on your doorstep to arrest you or shoot you if you defy their edicts. Instead, they will send “Law Enforcement” to do so. And “Law Enforcement”, in spite of THEIR oath to “…preserve, protect, and defend…” that SAME Constitution, will instead spit on that oath, bow and scrape before their Masters, and then do WHATEVER they are told. Just look at those fine members of “Law Enforcement” from Wisconsin who the other day, in spite of clear reports that the Obamas runnin’ wild at the State Fair were screaming to “get whitey”, announced that there were NO Hate Crimes committed.

The stench is overwhelming. And it smells like pig. Can you imagine what the US would be like if even HALF of its “Law Enforcement” actually bothered to honor their oath? And if THEY will not do so, what does it actually matter whether the politicians do so? As an example, Congressman Issa and Senator Grassley have been investigating treason and murder by the Federal Government – Operation Fast and Furious, among others, that actually ran guns to the drug cartels in Mexico at the behest of DOJ, DHS, FBI, and State at the very least. And that gun running resulted in the murder of TWO Federal Law Enforcement Officers. Can you IMAGINE what would be going on if Mere Citizens were blamed for same? Yet NOT ONE fine member of “Law Enforcement” can be bothered to even ARREST the swill responsible for that!

CHMC: Ric Locke pretty much nailed it. And a cog is a gearwheel, although it’s frowned upon in technical usage. These days it’s almost exclusively used ina metaphorical sense, as in, “I’m a small cog in a big machine.”

Mark Matis: I hear you. The riots last week in England show how hollowed out Law Enforcement is there, too. In the US the cops have become simultaneously pansified by political correctness and made into paramilitary shock troops by an excess of surplus army firepower. That’s why they’ll send a SWAT team to serve a notice for an overdue paring ticket, but won’t lift a finger to stop a pack of howling gibbons from beating up innocent bystanders.

Sooner or later, a line will be crossed, both in the UK and US, and the quotidian forces of government will be powerless to stop what follows. Those of us who love liberty and the Rule of Law will likely not be very pleased with the backlash, but the backlash won’t be against us directly. If one day, a flash mob is surrounded by an even bigger mob and every hooded, illiterate, nihilistic, hate-filled thug is lined up and executed on the spot I will not be surprised. I don’t want this to happen. But nature abhors a vacuum. There was a very interesting book by Ted Willis I read many years ago called The Churchill Commando, where middle-class rage at societal disorder in the UK is used to build a neo-Fascist political order. It seems eerily prophetic.

There is certainly a schizoid aspect to policing in the UK.

While, OTOH, the upper echelons seem to be Common Purpose sociology graduates (yes, I believed it was a stupid conspiracy theory, too – once) the lower ranks are far too often chippy little sods with an attitude problem that affects the middle class as much as it does da yoof.

For all that Claphamites stood in the street and applauded the old bill last week, the once apparently indissoluble bond in the UK between the forces of law’norder and we poor bastards who have to pay for it, has been seriously weakened.

Our top cops are Nu Labour stooges, while beat officers are too often nasty little bullies looking for an easy nick.

Uncle B., though I know you only through the forum of this blog, I suspect we have a great deal in common. I have a cousin who is a policewoman, and she is one of the finest human beings I know. Her two brothers, also coppers, would be chief picks if I were ever in a ditch fighting off the forces of barbarism (or zombies.) But the police force, sorry, service as it it is currently constituted is not aligned with the interests of the people who fund it and who it is meant to serve. It has become a weapon of the Gramscians. I don’t really know how it can be recovered. True democratisation and the introduction of a Sheriff system via election of Chief Constables might be a move towards reconnecting the police with civil society, but I fear the compromise the Tories had to make when they got in bed with the infernal LibDems has put the kibosh on that for the time being.

Let me assure y’all that elections DO NOT necessarily improve the state of “Law Enforcement”. Sheriff Clarence Dupnik is elected, and it was HIS forces who murdered Jose Gurena in cold blood. Yeah, the Chicago chief is appointed, but by the elected swill running THAT city, and NOT ONE of their force has any honor whatsoever. As I have repeatedly said, if even HALF of “Law Enforcement” in the US actually bothered to honor their oaths, the country would be VASTLY better off. But things are so bad that those pitiful few who might even consider doing so, instead do not because they are terrified that the overwhelming swill forming the REST of their department would refuse to back them up if they desperately needed it. The stench is overwhelming.

DG – Yes, I’m sure we’re in complete agreement. I have a great deal of sympathy for honest men and women who become cops (it was a career I even considered (albeit briefly) when I was young). Pace MM, I do think some form of elected plodery might work here, even though I accept his points that it can go (and has gone) hideously wrong in the USA, in places.

I also think DG is terrifyingly right about Gramsci, whose dark shadow flickered across the skyline last week in even greater relief than previously.

I have to hold myself back from paranoid images of plotters working this out as a step by step programme, but that is exactly how it feels.

Perhaps Gramscian politics is a self-perpetuating virus?

Actually, my first thought was, “The Department of Innovation is represented by cogs in a machine? That is so not the right symbolism.” And yes, the gear tooth ratio is inconsistent.

Yes, it could be viral. Neat little circles depicting plasma membrane receptors. That sort of synaptic budding that some people here know oh so well.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. I intellectually grasp that the bottom of the world is cold now, but it still seem wrong. For some reason it just reminds me that the lowest circle in Dante’s Hell is was ice.

As for elected police chiefs- not a great solution. Here’s the problem I see inTexas. In medium size communities it works well. However in small towns the elected officials become inbred, and in the large cities full of (I believe you call them ) chavs, either the chavs elect one of their own or, since they rarely vote the penthouse crowd elects some liberal loon (see your Ken Livingston for an example.

Didn’t some successful country used to have a civil service base purely on success in an examination system?

Some vegetable: China. See Interesting Times (Pratchett, Terry) for a somewhat-jaundiced view of how that worked out.

Regards,
Ric

And some vegetable – that MIGHT have a chance of working, but NOT in the US. Affirmative Action breeds Preferred Species, who then get points added to their scores until enough of them get the jobs.

And then refuse to do them, of course. Because they KNOW that nobody is gonna touch them. As our illustrious and eloquent Attorney General Eric Holder said, they are His People.

Gramsci plays a role, and unintended consequences of policies made by people who forgot human nature. So, I think, does something else.

From A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller (1959):

… children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens–and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn’t the same.

…

The closer men came to perfecting themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.

I think it was de Toqueville who noted something along the lines of revolutions only happening when things were getting better.

Affirmative Action breeds Preferred Species, who then get points added to their scores until enough of them get the jobs.

Once in, then they are sent to class to learn how to read and write – on our dime. Yes, it IS true. The people I know, who work within a large city police department are truly disgusted with the quota system.

Instead, they will send “Law Enforcement” to do so. And “Law Enforcement”, in spite of THEIR oath to “…preserve, protect, and defend…” that SAME Constitution, will instead spit on that oath, bow and scrape before their Masters, and then do WHATEVER they are told.

And you believe they wouldn’t do that if we had the Articles of Confederation instead of the US Constitution? As you say these politicians break their oaths, why wouldn’t they do that with another set of oaths?

Well, Christopher taylor, I was not the one espousing Articles of Confederation in lieu of the Constitution. I agree that the damnable swill passing themselves off as “Law Enforcement” have no honor whatsoever, and would spit on ANY oath other than of one to their Masters. Thugs with Guns. Nothing more, nothing less. And I long for the day when their dead bodies are stacked like cord-wood in the streets, and their souls are rotting in hell for eternity for what they have done. They TRULY DO make Mafia Enforcers look noble in comparison!

[…] of jokes, Stoaty notices something about our latest permanent, useless, pointless bureaucracy that’s absolutely hilarious. Just go looky. You’ll be both astonished and completely […]

I had a computerized security system that had a set of three interlocking gears as the default desktop background, that could not be changed. I had to look at those damn things every day for years.

When it came time to select the new system, I said I did not care who won the contract, as long as it was not the one that had it before, because of that damn desktop.

Yup, that’s some suck-ass design work. Faux pas aside, honestly looks more like a “Department of Steampunk” logo.

Well, they couldn’t use the tradition incandescent lightbulb symbol for innovative ideas BECAUSE THEY’RE TRYING TO MAKE THEM ILLEGAL.

Ha!

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