Crystal Radios and the Zombie Apocalypse

By Bobby Winters

For those who’ve been following this space for a while, this is another adventure in the tradition of the Potato Cannon and the One-Piece-at-a-Time Computer. A notion came into my mind that I wanted to make a crystal radio.  Their is one important difference.  I remember the moment I decided to make the potato cannon: I saw rednecks on TV creating explosions and generally having fun, and I wanted to reclaim my heritage.  I remember the moment I decided to build a computer: I had extrapolated from how to make a potato cannon to how to make an IED and decided I didn’t want to wind up on some FBI watch list.

But I have no memory of the moment I decided to make a crystal radio.

I suppose, like all things, pieces of the desire to do this have been floating around in me waiting for a key ingredient, but that key ingredient came in so slowly that I didn’t recognize it as happening.  One day I simply knew I wanted to do it.

Why make a radio?

Radios are cool.  They are Einstein’s spooky action at a distance embodied.  Some guy--maybe far around the world--talks into a microphone it goes out into the air and you can hear it thousands of miles away.

You say, yes, that is cool.  Why do you want to build one?  You can buy them cheaply.  Heck, you own several already.  

Okay, there is something about being able to do it yourself.  It’s the difference between winning the affections of a real, live woman in all her complexity and buying them. One requires some virtue on your part, and the other only requires that you have cash.

Then there is the Zombie Apocalypse thing.

There are certain skills we should cultivate in the event of a Zombie Apocalypse.  

Please be aware that I am only speaking of the Zombie Apocalypse metaphorically.  In less colorful terms, we creatures of modernity are so far removed from nature and are so reliant on the tools of high civilization for our very survival that we begin to feel rather exposed.

If there were a Zombie Apocalypse how would we be informed of the coming Zombie Hoards.  There would be no news from cable-tv; those folks are almost zombies already.  There would be no power from the electric grid.  There would only be lone, isolated Ham radio operators transmitting reports using batteries charged by wind power.  Those who know how to make crystal radios will be able to hear their transmissions and be ready when the zombies arrive, waiting for them with their potato cannons.  (After the potatoes run out, zombie body parts will be used.)

I’ve been doing research on the Internet and have found a wealth of information.  At this point I am one 1N34A diode away from having the parts I need to make the radio set.  I went to Radio Shack and all I could find was a 1N40A diode.  Although, I have to say that on YouTube I found the plans for a so-called Foxhole radio that uses a razor blade and the stub of a number two pencil in place of the diode.  I’ve got to think that if you can get a razor blade and a number two pencil to work then going from 1N34A to 1N40A isn’t going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference.

In the mean time, I have enlisted the help of Lydia.

Back when daughters one and two were younger, I’d bought an AM radio kit, but couldn’t get them interested.  The kit had lain untouched for years.  Saturday afternoon, Lydia and I put it together. We can get exactly one station: KKOW.  We listened to a little of a basketball game.  She was hooked.

As she took her long, thin fingers and maneuvered the resistors, capacitors, and transistors into place, I saw something else begin to happen, something exciting.

Next Saturday the crystal radio.  Then I replace the diode with a razor blade and a number two pencil.  Then we figure out something about tuners and amplification.

We will be ready for the zombies when they come.

The Tin Can Telephone Part II

By Bobby Neal Winters
            This is a continuation from The Tin Can Telephone on my other blog.

It is tempting to say that teaching is all about communication.  There might be some validity to that, but the plain statement itself would be easy to misinterpret. Teaching is not about getting information from the head of the teacher to the head of the student.  Something like that will no doubt happen along the way, but it is a part of a much more subtle process.  It is a process whose subtlety I appreciate more with each passing year.

One can model the teacher in front of the classroom with the tin can telephone as I did earlier.  The teacher speaks, puts slides up, hands out activities, i.e. is a transmitter.  The students listen (or not!); they take notes (or not!).  That is, they are receivers.

I wrote earlier of the transmitter and the receiver each having code books.  This is true in the classroom as well.  The thing is this: everyone has a different code book.  As students, part of the education process is learning the teacher’s code book.  As a teacher, part of the education process is to facilitate this happening.

The difference in code books has been recognized more widely than just me. Each year a particular liberal arts university sends out a list of catch phrases and historical events that have over the life time of typical professor.  Many of these are drawn from popular culture and would be used by academics who are trying to bridge the gap with their students.  Along with the phrases and events is the assurance that the students were not yet alive when these phrases and events were current.

While others no doubt interpret this differently than I do, this list serves as a reminder to me of the futility of trying to be the “cool teacher.”

When I was a first year graduate student, teaching for the first time, I, along with the rest of the teaching assistants, met in a group for an hour each week with one of the math professors to talk about teaching.  As part of this, the professor said something I will never forget: “If you are a great teacher, your students might learn 90 percent of what you know.  When they teach, they will teacher their students 90 percent of what they know, and so forth.  We know the direction this sequence goes.  Before long, the student isn’t learning anything.”

I don’t recall the point he was making with it.  I remember much less than 90 percent of what he said.  But I have mediated on it over the years and have had some thoughts.  

The first is that my students have to be learning from people besides me.  And they do.  I only get them for a very short time.  They learn from people before me; they learn from people after me; and they are learning from other people at the same time.

The second is that students can draw inferences from partial information.  Knowledge does not consist of isolated data items; it has structure.  A contemplative mind grows knowledge.

The third is that we pass more than information.  If we do our job we pass a spirit that I would call a love of learning.  We can also sharpen a general love of learning into a love of our subject.

This third part is--to me--most important.  It is also the most difficult thing to do.  I am not sure that I’ve ever passed the love of learning to anyone, but I may have nurtured it in some or helped to focus a student’s love of learning on a particular topic.

It is in this part where the mysterious way that humans deal with other humans come into play.  The Duke of Wellington supposedly said that the Battle of Waterloo was one on the playing fields of Eton.  Our early lives do shape us far out of measure to the amount of time we spent living them.  For most of us, it wasn’t Eton which shaped us but our families.  We deal with other people in the modes we learned in dealing with our families.

When I as a teacher stand in front of my students, only in very rare cases do they know me as a person.  They will not know how to deal with  me as me.  They will deal with me as they would someone they already know that I remind them of.

When I was a graduate student, they dealt with me as a peer.  As I aged, they related to me like a cousin or a young uncle.  These days as I approach 50, having children in college myself, they relate to me like a father or--because of the gray in my hair--a grandfather.  I am not expected to be cool.  Indeed, it’s creepy when I try; not that I try.

This is the image, the persona I come to them with.  I don’t fight it.  Instead, I build on it.   They will take my being just a tiny bit grumpy in their stride.  Indeed, they expect it.  As I am aware of how they perceive me, I can use it to shape our interactions and to make aspects of myself--such as my love for the subject--be attractive enough for them to want to take it up themselves.  You can learn a lot from a teacher you hate, but a love of learning is not part of that.

To conclude, I will return to the tin can telephone model for one more round.  The last stage of the learning process is the student teaching himself, i.e. studying.  We who teach at the university often have the expectation that the student will already have this mastered by the time we see him.  I use “expectation” in that sentence not in the sense we really expect it, but in the sense we believe it is a standard the student should meet.

The reality is that many of them frequently don’t meet that standard.  They haven’t mastered the art of studying. Many professors would deny its their job to teach them.  I would say that it is often part of the job, and whether and how to do it is part of the art of teaching.

What You Are Prepared to See

By Bobby Neal Winters

When I first started writing about ten years back, I had a exercise I did.  I found stories in the Bible and wrote them up in modern style.  The one rule I had was that I would be absolutely faithful to what was written in that I would not subtract anything.  I kept the plot-line; I kept the dialog;  I would add flesh to the bone that was there, but I wouldn’t change the bones.

It was a remarkable educational experience.

The first thing I learned was that there is a lot that is open to interpretation.  An example of this would be in the story of Deborah and Barack. We know simply that Deborah was married, she was a prophetess, and she was a judge of Israel.  She lived under a tree known as the Palm of Deborah.

That’s it.

I chose to make her an old woman.  This, I thought, who work better with her character.  As she was living in a male dominated environment, I thought that making her a wise elder would work better.  As this was an age without modern dentistry, I chose to make her toothless.  As a part of this, I gave her the habit of sucking the pulp from pomegranate pieces and spitting out the seeds in a rather disgusting manner.

Because of this, I learned something else: when you mess with other people’s mental images, you get push-back.  I showed this to some of my friends who’d imagined Deborah as a princess between the ages of 30 and 40, with a mouth full of teach and a diadem on her head.  Apparently there is an old painting that depicts Deborah as such.

The artist had been doing his own interpretation.  There is nothing wrong with that.  He had his own reasons just like I had mine.  My point is that my reader had seen that interpretation first and had taken it up as her own and had imposed it over the story.

I eventually carried this exercise out with several Bible stories.  At the end, I decided I would try to put them together as a collection, but they were just shy of what I considered to be book-length, so I decided to fatten them up a little bit.  What I did was to write a short story about a preacher who had been transferred to a church that had once had beautiful stain glass windows. The windows had been painted over by individuals--members of the church, pastors, etc--who found particular stories to be objectionable for one reason or the other.

In the story, the preacher cleaned the paint from the various windows, revealing the story beneath.  Each one of these cleanings served as an occasion to insert a story. ( I admit the conceit of thinking of myself as someone who was similarly revealing a previously concealed story to the reader.)

This not only served as a framework for placing these stories together and working in a bit of didactic explanation as well, but it serves as a metaphor for how controlling information controls understanding.

There is the old story about the three blind men who feel different parts of an elephant and come to different conclusions as to what sort of an animal it is according to whether they feel its leg, ear, or trunk.

One might assume for the sake of the story that these men had been blind from birth and had never seen and elephant and that they had never fully experienced an elephant before even in a tactile way.  If they had, then they might have been able to have an insight from even a partial input.

I gained a greater insight into this during my trip to South America.  Those of you who grew up during the same era as I will, perhaps, remember Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Wild Kingdom was hosted by a fellow named Marlin Perkins.  It featured trips to the African Savanna and the jungles of South America.  I also received a steady diet of other nature programs featuring floats down the Amazon.  Then, of course, there is the by now classic movie Romancing the Stone with the drug dealers and treasure hunters.

Given this sort of input, it’s a wonder I had the courage to go.  My courage was bolstered by those who had been there before me and told me that I could do it.  Indeed, I not only did it, but I took my family with me, and we wouldn’t trade for it.

The thing is that South America is not a fishing village on the Amazon or an alligator farm owned by a crazy drug-lord.  We are prepared to see it that way by what gets through on our TV and movies. The truth is rather more complex.  In Asuncion, Paraguay you can stand in a neighborhood and see a horse-drawn cart collecting trash and a pickup truck with boys in the back texting on cell phones.  There are three centuries going on at once.

Quite frankly, there were times when I thought that, if I knew more Spanish, I could easily go native because I had more in common with the folks there than I did with the folks either in the Northeastern US or on the West Coast.

When only minor excursions out, I’ve lived my life in Kansas and Oklahoma. This is still the frontier. We have a strong, agrarian strain.  On one strip out of Asuncion while I was there, I saw a huge billboard with a couple of cattle on it.  It read “Mas Pasto, Mas Carne.”  This translates as “More Grass, More Meat.”  Having grown up on the farm report, I knew I was among my own kind.

It would be easy for me to go all paranoid here and say there is a conspiracy to make us think of South America and the rest of the world as being backward.  This conclusion awaits a more careful argument.  It is much easier to believe that most Americans live in cities and have a certain filter they put on the rest of the world.  They view South America as backward and so concentrate on what fits that image, filtering out evidence to the contrary.  

The hard truth is that these same people view most of the United States outside of the city limits of certain selected cities as being backward too.

When we go to the movies and watch television, we know that we are viewing fiction, but even fiction is set within a certain realistic context, so it is easy to be led astray.  I have two examples where my personal experience has been illuminating.

In the movie Fletch, starring Chevy Chase, the main character takes a trip to Provo, Utah.  Provo, in that movie, is portrayed as a very small town.  Indeed, it is purported little more than a pig farm.  I took sabbatical there in the academic year 1995-96 and one of the reasons I chose it was my impression that it was a small town.  While I knew it was more than a pig farm, the expectation I had for it was quasi-rural.  Imagine my surprise when I arrived and discovered that Provo, a town of 90 thousand, is located in the Utah County metro area with a population of a quarter million people.  In fact, as most of the population in Utah is concentrated in a corridor around Interstate 15 that is about ten miles wide and a hundred miles long, you could say that it is part of a city of a million.  

An error in the other direction comes from one of my favorite episodes of the X-Files.  It was set in Connerville, Oklahoma and featured Lightening Boy. This was very interesting to me because I grew up twelve miles north of Connerville.  I’ve friends buried in Connerville.  Connerville consists of a couple of churches, a few houses, a cemetery, and the Blue River Bar.  That’s it.

In the X-Files, it had a hospital with rather impressive scientific resources.  There were things pictured as being in Connerville that are not available for a hundred miles in any direction.

And, of course, in each case the picture painted was done that way because of the needs of the story.  There is no harm intended.

But unless you’ve been to Provo or unless you’ve been to Connerville, you don’t know.

The House You Live in

By Bobby Neal Winters

I like watching other people work with concrete.  This may be because my father was a truck driver who hauled bulk cement to road jobs and ready-mix concrete outfits. In the summer, of 2007, we did an addition to our house and I enjoyed watching the masonry crew pour the footings and then lay the cinder block foundation.

Once you have the foundation, you attach a floor to it and then you put up the two-by-fours that frame the walls. Then you put the roof on.  Once the roof is on, you can hang the drywall.  That’s how we do it here.  My house is an old house, so there are parts of it that have lathe and plaster walls instead of the gypsum drywall.

I imagine one can follow a line of historical continuity all the way back to the way things were done in England.

My family and I spent July of 2009 in Asuncion, Paraguay where I was teaching Introduction to Analytic Processes at Universidad Catolica.  We stayed at a bed and breakfast called El Rinconcito while we were there.  During that time, another house was being constructed across the street.  This house was made from brick, and it was interesting for me to see how they did it.  

Instead of just pouring a foundation, they had poured a frame.  They must have had forms in place to hold the concrete in place while it was being poured, but they were gone by they time we arrived.  Within the concrete, they had put four-inch PVC pipe as conduit for plumbing and electrical connections.  

The roof was framed by four-by-sixes and constructed out of ceramic tile.

When we first arrived, they were in the process of laying the brick. Each of the bricks was six inches by six inches square and two inches thick.  They would’ve stopped about any bullet you could’ve shot at them. Before we left, they had the exterior walls up and were putting stucco over the brick.

I feel safe in guessing that the PVC pipes within the concrete framing is a fairly recent innovation.

One weekend while we were in Paraguay, we took at tour of eastern Paraguay where the old towns have such names as Jesus, Trinidad, and Encarnacion.  There are old missions in this area which were abandoned in the 1700s.  In looking at them, I saw a continuity in the architecture with the house across from El Rinconcito.  I imagine there is a continuity in construction techniques as well.  

These old missions, with the churches, the monk’s quarters, and the walls surround them, were built by people who’d come over from Spain and brought their techniques with them.  Those had come from the old Roman/Mediterranean tradition.  

It sort of reminded me of a book entitled The Shape of the Liturgy by Gregory Dix who follows the shape of churches as they evolved from the Mediterranean-style homes used as church-houses in the early Christian era to the sorts of churches I saw in Paraguay in the old missions.

Every generation learns by watching the generation before it.  We hope to keep the good stuff and to add to it what is needed for the present age.  The PVC pipe as conduit in the concrete framing struck me as a clever solution to marrying the solid construction of the ancient era to the modern amenities of indoor plumbing, electricity, and even computer network cables.

When I visited Siberia, during June of the year 2000, the group I was with was taken on an excursion to to the village of Balshoye Galoustnoye.  While there, we visited an American ex-patriot who was building his own traditional Siberian home.  It was made of huge logs from the larch tree.

There was no foundation as we understand it and the larch logs sat on the ground to allow for the expansion and contraction due to the extreme winters.  The logs in the wall were made to fit together tightly and the cracks were sealed with mortar to keep the Siberian wind from whistling through.

In the middle of the house was a huge oven.  It was designed so that the grandmother and the baby could sleep on top of it.

Each of the houses I’ve described has a particular appearance on the outside.  They represent particular styles that are recognizable to folks who’ve been around the block a time or two.  What you see on the outside builds particular expectations for structure on the inside.  You see the stucco and the tile roof, and you expect the connections going back to the Caesars.  

This sort of architecture manifests a depth of knowledge that has been tested by time.

The Siberian home embodies wisdom as well.  It doesn’t have the grandeur the brick house picked up through the various empires on the northern rim of the Mediterranean, but it embodies the simple wisdom of survival.

In my mind, these the houses in Asuncion and in Balshoye Galoustnoye are represent a deep, durable sort of reality that I hold dear.  When we juxtapose the typical American house against these two we see that it is something different.  There is more emphasis on the surface in the American house than in the depth.  This is not necessarily meant as a criticism; it is simply an observation that might be a window to another aspect of the real world.

The sheet rock and two-by-fours that form my walls are descendants of the lathe and plaster.  The lathe and plaster hearken back to the chinking between the logs in an house not too different from the larch house in Siberia.  When sheet rock is hung, there are gaps between the pieces.  These gaps are first taped and then mudded over in the same spirit that stucco is put over the bricks in the brick house in Paraguay.  Pipes and electrical wire and run within the walls between the sheets of drywall, and you can put insulation in between as well.

But what is on the outside doesn’t necessarily tell you much about what’s on the inside.  There are thousands of different types of siding each designed to give a different impression.

Vinyl Siding

By Bobby Neal Winters

Back in the summer of 2004, my house needed painting.  I’d done this a couple of times before and thought that I’d gained as much from the experience as I could. I didn’t want to spend the money to hire it done, so I reached out for another idea and found one: vinyl siding.

My idea was this: The amount of work required to do this would be about the same as required for painting if you took all the preparation into account.  It would cost a little more, but once I was done it would be done forever.  As I said, this was my thinking.

I planned this as a project that would be spread over three years or so.  The first year, I would do the north side of the house, which faces the street, and the west side of the house which, for various reasons, was easy to do.  The second year I would do the side toward the driveway.  The third year I would do the south side of the house which had various problems associated with it and I wanted to be more of an expert when I got there.  

I did learn a lot during those first two years and part of that was that I didn’t want to personally hang vinyl siding on the back side of my house.

There were other great truths that I learned, however.

Vinyl Siding is a system.

That’s right.  It is an intricately developed system.  It has been designed with the idea that a weekend handyman such as me can buy certain parts, follow certain directions, and get decent results. Let me explain.

The idea is to put vinyl siding over your old wooden siding.  The old wooden siding is somewhat rough and uneven.  This makes it difficult to cover.  This problem has been dealt with long before you, Mr. Weekend Handyman, have come on the scene by the invention of something called fan-fold.

You may have seen fan-fold and not known what it’s for.  For all the world, it looks like some sort of insulation.  It is a quarter-inch thick piece of Styrofoam-like material that folds much like an old-fashion paper fan.  You unfold it, press it flat against the wooden siding on your house, and nail it to your house with a special sort of nail.  

When you start nailing fan-fold to your siding, you read the directions looking for something specific on how you are suppose to do it. How are you supposed to line up your nails?  Exactly how far apart should they be?  You look, but--in stark contrast to later parts of the project--you get no tight specs.  You are just supposed to do it.

When you do get it up, you notice that the rough, uneven surface of the siding has disappeared and has been replaced by a flat surface.  Indeed, it is a flat surface that will let you start a nail quicker than anything else you’ve sunk a nail into.

After you get the fan-fold up, you have to frame it all in.  This is where it gets kind of persnickety.  You have to have your horizontal strip that frames the bottom level; you have to have your vertical strips that frame the side plumb; you have to nail your nails in just tight enough, but not too tight.

But if you take care with the level and the plumb-line, then the rest follows along pretty easy.

And when you get a few strips of your vinyl siding up, it becomes clear why you don’t have to be so careful with where you put your nails on the fan-fold: It’s all going to get covered up.

This was my great gestalt about vinyl siding.  It is all about appearances.  Let’s say it again. From the beginning to the end, it is about appearances.

You put paint on your house to make it look better.  Yes, it makes the wood last longer, but it’s really about looks.  You don’t want to live in a house that looks like its on poles down in the Mississippi Delta. Vinyl siding is just a means to achieve the same goal.

My real epiphany came when I got to the soffit. This is the underside of the part of the overhang of your roof. My soffit was ugly, nay even scary-looking.  The vinyl covered all of the ugliness, all of the terror. It was beautiful.

Now, I do understand, that vinyl siding doesn’t get a lot of respect out in the world.  It’s not exactly the way the Rockefeller's would do it.  Yes, a house of stone would be better.  Or a house of wood that was carefully scraped with the aid of a blowtorch and then painstakingly repainted on a regular schedule.

Here’s the deal.  You can’t tell the difference between such a nicely scraped and maintained house and vinyl siding from the street.  

What’s more, during my second year of hanging vinyl siding, I began to take pride and care with my work.  I would look up at places that weren’t perfect and they would jump right out at me.  But then, after I waited a few weeks and forgot about my boo-boos, I couldn’t tell.  They disappeared because I didn’t remember where they were.

I figured out that no one else could tell either.

This is a theme that permeates much modern construction: It is all about appearances.  Many solid-looking “concrete” buildings are a frame with a wire-mesh attached and concrete sprayed on the mesh.

If you’ve seen The Matrix there is a scene in a lobby where the walls appear to be solid marble.  When the machine guns get going, we see that it’s just marble veneer.

My final epiphany was that this doesn’t stop with siding or construction:  It’s true about people; it’s true about businesses; it’s true about institutions.

Now, there are some solid buildings out there that are rock from foundation to roof, but there are so many that just look that way, it’s hard to tell.  Knowing that you have to look, might put you a little ahead.