Compass and Straightedge, Chisel and Saw

By Bobby Neal Winters

Working with hand tools has deepened my understanding of mathematics in some surprising ways.  Let me take some time to explain.

I know how to cut grooves and dados with hand tools now.  Yes, I know they can be done better and faster with power tools, namely a router, but I can cut them with hand tools.

You might be able to appreciate what I’m talking about if you knew what grooves and dados are.

Let’s start with groove because you probably have a good handle on that already.  A groove is, well, a groove. It’s a recess that you cut into a board so that you can slide another board into it. If you have a chest of drawers, it is quite possible that the sides of the drawers have grooves cut into them so that they can hold the thin board that forms the bottom of the drawer.

A dado is the same thing.  The reason we use the two different words is that a groove is cut parallel to the grain of the wood and a dado is cut perpendicular to it.

If you are using power tools, at least as far as I’ve experienced it, this makes little practical difference.  If, by way of contrast, you are using hand tools, it means that a different set of techniques are needed.

A number of years ago, I was approached by a friend and retired colleague of mine from the university. He is a very dear man.  Some one of his long acquaintance had claimed to have solved the problem of trisecting an angle with compass and straightedge.

This would be very interesting because this problem had been proven to be unsolvable a long, long time ago.  And I do mean proved.  It’s not just that mathematicians got to a point and said this is hard, I don’t think it can be done. They proved in a way that no one who has an understanding of the tools they used could reasonably deny.

It’s over.

Mathematicians had been interested in the problem for a number of reasons, one of which was they wanted an exact value for the sine of one degree.  Sine is a basic trigonometric function that has all sorts of practical uses.  If you could calculate the sine of one degree exactly, you could calculate the other trigonometric functions of one degree exactly, and this would make a lot of calculations sharper.

Just because it was shown that you couldn’t trisect an angle exactly didn’t make the practical problem go away.  Other method’s--say power tools if you may--have been invented that allow us not to calculate the sine of one degree exactly, but to calculate it (or any other trigonometric function) as close as we like, as close as we need.

To a mathematician, that is a big difference.  It is--as in the Princess Bride--the difference between being dead and almost dead.

I tried to explain this to the man who’d thought he’d solved the classic unsolvable problem.  I am not sure that I was able to convey the issue adequately. My toolbox of words was not up to the task.

A tool is not just a thing in itself.  It’s not made complete by what it’s made out of or even the form that it is in.  A tool is made by the person who knows how to use it.

I’ve said it before in this space, but it’s worthy of repetition. When you buy a chisel, you get what you pay for.  You can get 4 chisels for 8 dollars at Harbor Freight.  Or you can get a single Narex Richter chisel for $46.  There is no comparison in what you can do.  But--and this is key--someone who knows what to do with a chisel can do more with the 2-dollar chisel than someone who doesn’t know what to do with the 46-dollar one.

Let’s push it a bit further.  

It’s not only necessary that someone knows how to use the chisel, you need to have a community of knowledge.  The community teaches use, learns use, and passes on use to the next generation.

Even though we can calculate sine of one degree to as much accuracy as anyone could like, it is important that we keep alive the knowledge that we can’t solve it exactly.

Even though we can cut dados and grooves with a router, it is important that we keep the practice of working with hand tools alive.

We have to keep these practices alive.  There is a big difference between dead and almost dead.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Of Worms and Men

By Bobby Neal Winters

After a long, wet spring, summer is here.  We are living in the cleansing rays of the unrelenting Kansas sun.  It sees all; it knows all.

I was taking my walk the other day and saw an earthworm who had tunneled out of the grass by the sidewalk.  It was still moist enough for that to happen.  

Had the worm turned away from the sidewalk, he would’ve been all right; he had a 50-50 chance. Alas for him, he had turned toward the sidewalk.  

It was one of our many brick sidewalks. And he was writhing in the earthworm equivalent of agony on a brick that had been raised to searing heat by the solar rays.

I was watching.  I always keep an eye on the sidewalks as I walk.  I saw the worm’s agony, his pain, his torment, and like the Priest or the Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan, I kept on walking.  I left him there like a soul damned in Hell.  

I feel a little bit guilty about it, but only a worm’s worth.

God’s eye is on the sparrow; I suppose it’s on the earthworm too.  I might rationalize that those two concepts might connect and the sparrow would eat the worm, but there’s a thing I’ve noticed:  This happens to worms a lot.  I see a lot of dried up earthworms on brick sidewalks.

When a worm is in the dirt, digging its way around, it is reasonably safe.  (I don’t know much about the day-to-day life of a worm. At least it’s in its habitat.) But when it bursts through the surface, it has literally and figuratively crossed a boundary.  There is very little in its experience or in the collective experience of its kind that has prepared it for what comes next.

It is Lost.

Until I was 26 years old, I was a Southern Baptist. Others may have had a different experience, but everything I’d ever been taught as a Southern Baptist was focused toward saving the Lost.

That was the Beginning, the Middle, and the End of it.

Every sermon, every altar call, every revival.  That was the focus.  Indeed, that seems to me that’s all there was, but that was many years ago.  We make decisions and then we change our memories to justify those decisions.

What I do remember though, and what I do believe is true, was that the church was our connection to the world.  It was a small, rural community. There was no culture other than basketball during its season and church. That was it; that was life.

If you chose to go, church was twice on Sunday (Sunday School and worship in the morning and worship again in the evening) with another opportunity on Wednesday night.

There was connection; there was accountability; there was life.

I know a man.  I was once his teacher. He’s fallen on hard times. He’d always smoke pot, but there’d been an accident; surgery; pain.  He got hooked on painkillers.  He’d once had a sharp, sharp mind. 

He approached me sometime back with some rocks he’d found.  He was convinced that they were quite valuable.  He wanted me to help him get money from them, but it wasn’t quite clear how.  It was quite clear, however, what he wanted the money for: drugs.

“Can you help me, Dr. Winters?”

I asked him if he’d ever considered a 12-step program.

“You don’t understand, Dr. Winters. I don’t need your help in getting off drugs. I need your help to get money to buy drugs.”

If I wind up going to hell, I will be listening to that conversation on a loop.

We need a place to be plugged in.  We need a place to belong. We need a group to be accountable to. 

Otherwise, we wander off and become...lost.

The promise of Liberal Christianity is that you get to choose your own way of being; you get to live by your own rules; no one tells you what to do.

More conservative religions are tacitly (and sometimes not so tacitly) deprecated because they are told what to do by their minister, priest, rabbi, or imam.  Could it be, however, that being told what to do is not a bug in the religion, but a feature?

Do we choose schools or colleges that say, “We don’t tell our students that two plus two is four.  If they want the sum to be 3 or 5, then that is their choice.”

We can walk by a worm dying on a sidewalk and pass it by without saving it because it’s just a worm.  To walk past a lost human is worse, but a human can’t be saved until he wants to be.

Sometimes all we can do is pray.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

Cleaning and Organizing My Workshop

By Bobby Neal Winters

I recently finished a stretch in university administration. I did a nickel as chair of Chemistry among other things.  I learned a lot through my experience, most of which will never see print. (I don’t want anybody to worry.)

Department Chairs are to the university what sergeants are to the army.  The brass puts together the lofty plan, but the sergeants get er done. 

Most professors spend a career gathering things together that are useful to them.  They wanted them; they bought them--either with university or personal funds; they used them. They become precious to them.

And then they retire.

They imagine that their things would be useful to those who follow them.  And who knows, they might.  Whoever replaces them, might find these things useful, but they don’t. Why? Because they don’t know they have them.  They are wet behind the ears from graduate school; they are teaching full-time for the first time; they are trying to keep their heads above water.  They have no time--nor desire, really--to wade through the stuff that belonged to the person they are replacing to see if any of the items gathered over decades might be useful.

Having seen that and having dealt with the practical fallout of some of that, I am taking that experience into my personal life.

I’m reorganizing my workshop.

Reorganizing might be too strong a word, but let’s go with it.

I’ve had problems with my dust collector because I’ve not installed it correctly.  Because of this, sawdust has been collecting everywhere, but in particular in my main storage shelf.  

It is actually rather surprising that the sawdust is collecting there because it is a wire shelf and the sawdust can just fall through, but the sawdust is collecting on the individual items on the shelf.  So I am having to remove each and every item and suck the sawdust off it with a shopvac.

It’s quite satisfying actually.

You start with the top shelf because if you start at the bottom the dust from the top will fall down and undo what you’ve just done.

This ain’t my first rodeo.

In reorganizing, deep-cleaning, or any large, daunting task, you pick a small, easily identifiable area and start there and work your way out.  In a house, you pick a room and then pick a corner of that room. 

I’ve picked a corner and a shelf in that corner.  However, I was quickly reminded that you also need a staging area.  That is, you need a place to put the stuff that you are removing and reorganizing.

My workshop is my garage, and there is a freezer in the garage.  The top of the freezer--as it is directly adjacent to the shelf--is an ideal staging area to hold items temporarily while you suck the sawdust off of them, but it was full of parts of a project I was working on.  It should have been on my gluing table, but my gluing table was full of another project I was working on.

So--and pay attention here--I finished the project that was on my gluing table and removed it from the garage entirely.  It is now waiting to be given to a new home. I then moved the stuff from the freezer to the gluing table, and by virtue of that was able to get started on sucking the sawdust off the items on the shelf.

When we clean and organize, there is another aspect that is quite important, and we dare not leave it out: We throw away.

(As an aside here: start any reorganizing project, no matter how small, with an empty trash can. File this along with “He who seeks revenge should start out by digging two graves.”)

Yes, we take an item and examine it.  What the hell is it?  Do I know? If I don’t know what it is, am I ever likely to use it?  If it looks expensive or if there is a possibility it might be of sentimental value to my spouse, I show it to her. Otherwise I throw it away.

If I know what it is, but am not likely to use it, I--again taking value, monetary or sentimental, into account--toss it.

After having tossed, I now have more room.  I also have an updated mental inventory of my tools. (I have three Dremels. Three. Two corded and one cordless. Cool.)

Though I was concentrating on the shelf, at the same time, I was doing a little organizing here and a little organizing there in the rest of the shop.

I did this from about 11am yesterday until about 4:30pm. It was 90 degrees the entire time. I’m glad it’s not really hot here yet.

I still have the bottom two shelves to go. I hope to be able to throw away about half of what is left.

Life is good.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 I remember everything

By Bobby Neal Winters

My mother had been in a nursing home for a while before she passed away.  She had been suffering from dementia for a long time before not even my brother’s efforts to take care of her, himself, and a full-time job were not enough, and we had to put her in care.

She got to a point where she didn’t remember me.  Being a 5-hour drive away I couldn’t be around enough to keep the image of me alive in her mind.  When I last saw her the week before she died, she waved me away from her like I was an intruder.

I remember that as vividly as it was the other day and it was more than 13 years ago.

And even that memory is precious to me.

We get something from the act of remembering.  Undoubtedly, there is a brain scientist somewhere who’s studied the brain and discovered that we get some sort of chemical reward for the act of remembering.  If not, some of them should start looking because it is there.  Some of us might have more of it than others.

We like to remember things even when they make us sad.  In fact sometimes the reward is stronger when we remember sad things.

Those of you who follow this space know that I spend quite a bit of time out in my woodshop listening to music as I work.  A lot of that music is music from the 70s or 80s or it’s country music.

The music from the 70s and 80s is from when I was in high school and college and is wrapped around and tangled up in a lot of memories. I can listen to it and scenes from my salad days are brought before my mind’s eye.

The country music is more subtle.  While I did listen to a lot of country music during those days, I find even more recent country music is able to help me connect with memories.

The reason for that is straight-forward: Down deep in my bones and on a very, very basic level, I am a hick. I’ve shelled peas as the sun rose on a summer morning. I’ve walked barefoot through clover and stepped on bees.  I’ve turned over cow patties to get rolly-pollies so that I could fish for perch.  I’ve peed on mud so that I could make mudpies. (I was three, but yep, I am hick.)

The best of the country artists can tap into imagery that helps me connect with those memories.

A couple of days ago, I was listening to a song by Luke Combs called “Where the Wild Things Are,” and there in my memory were my dad and my Uncle Neal.  I would characterize “Where the Wild Things Are” as a retelling of the story of the Prodigal Son where certain things are swapped around.  The Prodigal leaves home. Instead of the Prodigal returning to a home with a resentful brother, the Brother goes to visit him “out where the wild things are.”  The Prodigal then is killed and the family goes to him and buries him.

In this, the Prodigal would be my Uncle Neal.  He was the one in the family whose spirit couldn’t be contained in the state of Oklahoma, so he moved to Colorado, out where the wild things are.  His energetically lived life was cut shorter than any of us would’ve liked it to be. 

Not exactly like the song, but to evoke memory, it doesn’t have to be.

Memories like these always come at family funerals, but while the memories are so bittersweet, a funeral is a high price to pay.  Zach Bryan’s new song “Pink Skies” does a wonderful job of evoking the memories of family funerals and consequently the memories of the departed.

Remembering our lost loved-ones is so sweet it is even worth the price of tears.

While we are talking about Oologah, Oklahoma’s Zach Bryan, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention his song--shared with Kacey Musgraves--”I Remember Everything.”

He captures in that song in a very few words what I am taking an essay to explain. (That is the power of poetry.) Memory is painful but we must remember.

I will now toss out a reference to a song by Lainey Wilson, “Wildflowers, Wild Horses.”

It is short and one might dismiss it as simply being a catchy hook padded out with enough other words to justify a song, but in those few words she manages to remind me of a type of woman that is unique to the West--in which I include the Great Plains. Those who knew my Uncle Neal would be familiar with that type of woman because they constituted a number of his wives. For my part, I grew up with a few, and the song brings up memories, but more from observation than experience.

As we get older and lose more people, we make the discovery that life is sweet. Life is a gift. Memory is a way we can squeeze more out of life. Even bitterness is a taste.  If you couldn’t taste any more, I think you’d even miss that.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

What’re you doing?

By Bobby Neal Winters

Everyone once in a while--or maybe even twice in a while--someone will ask me what I’ve been up to.

If they are from my part of the country they’ll say, “What’re you doing?”  

Well here goes:

Toward the end of last summer, I got a couple of pick up loads of rough-cut wood.  “Free” rough-cut wood.  I’ve got the quotes around the free because that feed wood has cost me quite a bit of money.

The first expense was in buying a DeWalt planer.  I am not going to tell you what it cost, but on a per pound basis it would be comparable to Eye of Round.  After getting the planer, I began the process of getting a handle on dust collection in my wood shop because planers generate a lot--and I do mean a LOT--of saw dust.  You can fill a five-gallon Home Despot [sic] bucket with saw dust quicker than Cooter Brown.

I got a Harbor Freight dust collector and built a lean-to on my garage to house it.  I will describe my results using language I’ve learned as an administrator: They were not entirely successful.

Now all of the wood was in my wood shop--a converted 2-car garage--taking up floor space.  I mean really taking up floor space.  I’ve got a tablesaw on a table with wheels on it. I’ve got the planer on a table with wheels on it.  I’ve got a glue-up table with wheels on it.  I’ve got a bandsaw with wheels on it.  I have a rack to hold my long clamps that has wheels on it.

That’s a lot of wheels, and the ideal implicit in all that is moving the items around to places that are more convenient.  However, all of the “free” wood was taking up space to the degree that everything might as well have been nailed to the floor.

Something needed to be done.

As they say, hindsight is 20/20, but I am a glass half-full sort of guy.  Indeed, it is a full glass. I’ve got a bunch of free wood; I’m having a blast making stuff with it.  Nothing but blue skies ahead, right?

What brought it all to a head were my “not entirely successful” efforts at dust collection.  The Harbor Freight Dust collector was not working for me.  Saw dust was getting loose and getting into everything.

Everything.

It was all up in my shelves in every stinking thing on every stinking shelf.  I wanted to clean the shelves off, but I could not because there was no floor space to put the stuff on.  I had half a dozen items on wheels and they couldn’t be moved because the wood was taking up all the floor space.

Now is the time to recall that I’ve written earlier about having built a lean-to to house the not entirely successful dust collector.

Had I not already filled that lean-to with other stuff, that would’ve been a good place to put the wood.  However, it had been immediately filled with lawn chairs and other items appropriate to the back yard.

However, having built a lean-to once, building another one was easy.

Not only was it much easier the second time, I did a much better job the second time around.

Apparently I can be taught.

I’ve moved a sizable fraction of the wood into the new lean-to.  The floor space that I freed enabled me to end the gridlock of my tables.  I’ve disconnected my table saw and my planer from the dust collector and have connected them to a shop vac instead and that is doing a much better job of dust collection.  

This will enable me to reorganize my shelves, and clean the saw dust off them at the same time.

In the meantime, I will be making a study of how to implement my dust collector in a more successful manner.

So that’s what I’ve been up to.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.