by Nicholas -

Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy — p.153

If God was meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons. (p.153)

by Nicholas -

Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy — p.152

[The judge, after telling the tale of the murdered, gentleman traveler by the jealous, rural shoemaker, adds that the traveler’s wife was pregnant with a son]

Now this son whose father’s existence in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it is in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way. (p.152)

by Nicholas -

New HP 7585B Pen Plotter!

I picked up an old HP 7585B Pen Plotter via Craigslist. I’ve always wanted to experiment with a pen plotter. A recent visit to the Computer History Museum inspired me to poke around Craigslist to see what I could find. Sure enough, I found one for sale not far away. I’m convinced that one of the advantages of living in LA is that whatever it is you need, there’s somebody who has it. I set off with my friend Richard in u-haul pickup to go get it from a guy named Phil, who had it stored in a shipping container. Apparently he used it back in the day for printing circuit layouts which were photo-reduced and etched onto silicon. He used to design communications equipment for NASA. Funny the people you meet on Craigslist.

IMG_5467

These old HP plotters use are controlled via a serial protocol called HPGL. I found a python library called Chiplotle by Víctor Adán and Douglas Repetto at the Columbia University Computer Music Center. Chiplotle wraps HPGL commands in a python API. So my eventual goal is to get that bridge working, so that I can generate some experimental drawings with the plotter (Frieder Nake!).

With a little googling, I found PDFs of the original manuals on the wonderful HP Computer Museum: HP 7585 User Manual & HPGL Programmers Manual (you can also find the service manual on their site).

I had some time to work on it this week, so after an hour of wiping and cleaning (why are cans of compressed air so expensive?), I got the plotter powered up and running its built-in test drawing! I’m lucky that some of the felt-tip pens that I got with the machine still had some ink in them. I probably should have take a picture of the test drawing to include here, but I didn’t. I’ll certainly do another one, so I’ll post it later.

IMG_5474
The rear input panel.

First impressions: it worked right away, even though it’s a 32 year-old machine! Watching it draw is really fun and hypnotic. And, it’s really fast! Like, very fast. You get a sense for that at the end of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRUhtlRetXM

That’s it for now, more to come. This is really my first attempt at a “build log” and also my first attempt at blogging in general. I’ll use this project as a test case to see what the process is like, and how I feel about it at the end. I hope at least that it can be a repository of knowledge that I glean from getting this thing running. I guess that depends on how google indexes this, and whether anyone interested ever finds it.

by Nicholas -

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

A thin wail out of the darkness chilled them and set the grabbing for one another. Then the wail rose, remote and unearthly, and turned to an inarticulate gibbering. Percival Wemys Madison, of the Vicarage, Harcourt St. Anthony, lying in the long grass, was living through circumstances in which the incantation of his address was powerless to help him. [94]

by Nicholas -

18%

This fresh off the airwaves (of KCRW’s Left, Right and Center): Americans pay twice as much for healthcare than other advanced nations and receive inferior outcomes. The US expends 18% of GDP on healthcare, whereas the average of comparable nations is 8%. The next most profligate nation, France, expends 12%.