Brent Laminack Home

Outfitter Under the Stars

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 13:44:32 -0400

Outfitter Under the Stars

A lot of modern literature leaves out that Vampires suffer from Arithmomania: a compulsion to count things. In this respect the most accurate TV portrayal of vampires isn’t The Vampire Diaries, but Sesame Street. Traditionally for defense one would carry a pocketful of seeds, like mustard seeds to scatter in front of the vampire, which would slow them down because they’d feel the need to count them all. Our original products were things like mustard and collard seeds, traditional crossbows with wooden bolts, silver crosses, garlic, etc. But then we got forward-looking and started app development. Our big one is the app that will count things for you. You snap a picture and the edge detection algorithm gives you a guaranteed accurate count. Of course we track our users and what they count. Industrial users are easy to weed out. We take special interest in users that count everything, and are mostly active at night. We then entered into a data sharing agreement with the FBI and Interpol. We correlate our nocturnal power users with suspected mass murder incidents. Did you know that the FBI estimates that at any given time in the US there are 50-300 mass murderers? Probably only about 10-25% of those are vampires by our estimates. To be clear, we don’t actually hunt those with bloodlust, we’re just the outfitters. There’s always a range of hunters from semi-pro to professional who need our supplies. We try to discourage the rank amateurs, as we prefer repeat customers. We resell wooden bullets that were designed for crowd control, and offer an increased charge behind them. A quieter option is our pneumatic-driven wooden harpoon: the Van Helsing. You do have to carry SCUBA tanks on your back to drive them, but they’re quite effective I’m told. Other big sellers are our semi-automatic and pump-action crossbows. The advent of full-spectrum LEDs had led to our new Cyclops 10 million candlepower flashlights with extra UV boost. Our users report they’re nearly as effective as native sunlight. Heck, they’ll even turn a plain-blood a bit crispy. Carry these and a six-pack of our garlic-infused flashbangs and you’ll be all set and we’ll turn a tidy profit. I hope you can tell from the above descriptions that new technologies have swung the balance of power markedly toward the vampire hunters. We were safely behind the scenes as anonymous arms supplier to the adventurous. At least we were until the day we got the email that simply read “We know who you are.”

Food Service Fits and Starts

Sat, 16 Oct 2021 13:44:32 -0400

Food Service Fits and Starts

The Price was Right Years ago, a group of friends and I went out for pizza every Friday night after work to the same restaurant. We were regulars and became favorites of the manager, Price. He was a good manager, skilled in his craft. One night he told us about food service managers he had no use for: the mom-and-pop shops. These were people who had no experience in food service management: didn’t know proper operating margins, organization, training, supplies, regulations, etc. Often these mom-and-pop operations start with a lot of their friends saying “You make such wonderful XYZ, you should open a restaurant.” Where I live, XYZ seems to be mosty BBQ. What are the most common where you live? The vast majority of these mom-and-pop shops fail quickly.

How Much Gold Does It Take to Make a Goldrush?

Fri, 29 Nov 2019 13:44:32 -0400

How Much Gold Does It Take To Make a Goldrush?

In touring the Dahlonega Gold Museum, they told us that during the Dahlonega Gold Rush (the first major gold rush in the U.S.) three million ounces of gold were mined. But how much is that, really? First, let’s get it to kilograms to work with it more. Precious metals are almost measured in Troy ounces, so if we go to Google.com and type in “3,000,000 troy ounces in kilograms” it tells us “93,310.4304 kilograms.” (or the hard way, 32.150747 troy ounces per kilogram) We take another unit conversion turn and find it’s about 102 short (English) tons. Ok, about 100 tons of gold makes a Gold Rush, but how large a cube would that be? According to the Internet, the density of gold is 19.32 grams per cubic centimeter, so: Dropping down to grams: 93,310,430.4 grams x 1 cm3 / 19.32 grams = 4829732.9 cubic centimeters. How long on a side is that? We take the cube root and get 169 centimeters, or 1.69 meters, or about 5 feet, 6 1/2 inches. So all the gold taken from the Dahlonega Gold Rush would form a cube about 5 1/2 feet on a side, that weighs 100 tons. If you’re interested, more information about Gold Rushes. Enjoy!

Household Chemical Formulas from a Bygone Era

Fri, 23 Aug 2019 13:44:32 -0400

Household Chemical Formulas from a Bygone Era

When I was a kid, I had a chemistry set. I wrote off to a bunch of scientific supply places for catalogs. This is part of my favorite. In addition to the standard catalog, the first part of the booklet was practical chemical recipes. I was fascinated. I’ve scaned and OCR’d them in below. DISCLAIMER: DON’T DO THESE!!! Some of them make me shiver, like the lead-based paints and glues. It is interesting, however to compare the modern smartphone sepia filter with the actual process. Make sure you click the “read more” at the bottom for the full contents.

Loyalty Cards, Digital Marketing and Cluelessness

Sun, 09 Jun 2019 13:44:32 -0400

Loyalty Cards, Digital Marketing and Cluelessness

Businesses keep making the same mistakes. Here’s one I see periodically, illustrated by a startup I consulted with briefly a few years ago. It was an app/discount card that gave people discounts at local businesses. Commonly 10% off or so. They had an online map showing where you could use their card. I knew they were doomed when I saw two florists on the map a mile apart on the same road. All their card did was spark a price war. Loyalty cards can be great, but there’s two sides to success. 1) The business should use programs like this to gain marketing insights into their customers so they can do personalized, one-to-one marketing. Kroger does a great job of this. The more you use your Kroger loyalty card, the more you get a personalized batch of coupons for stuff you actually use. The business gives up a share of the profit in exchange for greater insight into their customers’ habits, not just a hoped-for increase in sales volume. They can then use these insights to laser-focus their marketing efforts on their most profitable customers and drive better engagement, which then increases profits. 2) From the consumer side, a loyalty card is worthwhile if the more you use it, the more valuable it becomes. Chick-fil-A is a good example of this. When you start using their app, you get 10 points for every dollar you spend. Then you move up a level and start getting 11 points. Finally you can hit the top level and get 12 points per dollar. Thus the app ends up being 20% more valuable to the user. They also periodically give you a free sandwich or such. This builds on a positive reward feedback loop in the consumer’s brain and thus builds brand loyalty (by playing on the consumers’ sunk cost or loss aversion cognitive biases). Otherwise, the app or card just becomes a package of coupons that can be thown out without a second thought, much like bundles of physical coupons one gets in the post. Discount apps or cards that don’t gather valuable marketing insights for the business or become more valuable to the consumer over time are, in my opinion, doomed to failure. I’ve seen several of these come and go and have yet to be proven wrong.

Caramel-Nut Popcorn

Sun, 07 Jan 2018 13:44:32 -0400

Caramel-Nut Popcorn

Indredients

1 cup light brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/4 cup light corn syrup
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
12 cups popped popcorn (freshly poped is best)
3 cups nuts - coarsely choped (we use peanuts and cashews)

Procedure

Pre-heat oven to 250 degrees Farenheit. Mix: popcorn and nuts together and separate the combination into 2 square pans 13x9x2 (ok to use flat cookie sheets: a little messier, but cooks better) Combine: brown sugar, butter, corn syrup and salt in saucepan under medium heat. Stir constantly until mixture boils. Let boil for 5 minutes then remove from heat. Stir in baking soda until mixture foams (about 1 minute). Pour mixture over popcorn-nuts until evenly coated. Place pans into oven - stir mixture every 15 minutes (4x times) for an hour. Ready to eat. Eat warm or cold.

How to Play Rook

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 13:44:32 -0400

How to Play Rook

About Rook

In the days of my youth (mid ’70s) in a small town in Georgia, we teens would play Rook. There are a number of variations of the game as listed in the official rule book from Parker Brothers. The version we played wasn’t any of them. So in the interest of posterity, here’s the rules we went by:Rook is Parker Brothers four-suit numerical card game: “The Game of Games”. A Rook deck contains four suits: Red, Green, Black and Yellow. There are numbered cards from 1 to 14 in each deck. This plus the Rook Picture card gives us a total of 57 cards in a Rook deck. In a four-person game we take out the 2s, 3s and 4s. This leaves us with 45 cards we actually play with.

Rook Followup

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 13:44:32 -0400

Rook Followup

In response to my page about Rook, I got this response in April 2007: Greetings, I’m writing regarding the rules for Rook on your web page. I have been
researching this game, and summarized the main official variations. This
information may be useful to you - you can check out my following posts
(under the handle: EndersGame). As far as I can tell, the variation you
described is called “Buckeye”, and is so described in the book Rook in a
Book published by Winning Moves. Playing with regular playing cards
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/160917 Official Rules For Four-Player Partnership Rook
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/161214 These posts may also be of interest: Reflections on whether or not to use the Rook card
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/161213 Relationship between Rook and 200 (Deux Cents)?
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/160892 In short, I’ve discovered that there are two official variants for
four-player partnership Rook:

Bandwidth of a Minivan full of CD-Roms

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:44:32 -0400

Bandwidth of a Minivan full of CD-ROMs

First the Megabytes

Our minivan is a 1988 Plymouth Voyager (not the Grand model). Removing the back two seats gives a cargo space of 48 inches wide by 42 inches high by 72 inches long. CDROMs seem to fit nicely in a 5" X 5" footprint. At MicroCenter they were selling spindles of 100 CDROMs in a case about 8" high. Rounding this says that on the floor of the minivan would fit a matrix of 9 by 14 CDROMs and we could stack them 600 high if we had a suitable spindle. So our minivan could hold 9X14x600=75,600 CDROMs. What is the data capacity of such? At 650 Megabytes per CDROM, we come out with 75,600X650=49,140,000 Megabytes, or 49,140 Gigabytes or 49.14 Terabytes.

bandwidth of a prius full of thumb drives

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:44:32 -0400

Bandwidth of a Prius Full of Thumb Drives

First the Megabytes

According to the what I found online, the Prius has a cargo capacity of 21.6 cubic feet. A mid-high level thumb drive is the Patriot 64Gb drive. Product Dimensions: 2.1 x 0.9 x 0.4 inches ; 0.3 ounces. So each thumb drive occupies about 1.1 cubic inches. Allowing for some slack between the drives and not worrying too much about the close-packing problem, that gives us a capacity of 33,931 thumb drives which will weigh 636 pounds and cost us about $1.7 million at Amazon’s price of about $50 each. We could probably get a volume discount, though. The Prius has a total payload capacity of 825 pounds, so our driver will have to weigh 189 pounds or less. The total data capacity will be 64Gb X 33,931 or about 2.17 Petabytes.

Bandwidth of an SUV full of DVDs

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:44:32 -0400

Bandwidth of a SUV full of DVDs

First the Megabytes

A friend of mine owns a Chevrolet Suburban. The measurements were taken on his unit. (Thanks William and Josh). Folding down the back seats, the cargo space is 106 inches long, 62 inches wide and 36 inches high. DVSs seem to fit nicely in a 5" x 5" footprint. At MicroCenter they were selling spindles of 100 CDROMs in a case about 8" high. I’ll assume DVDs are about the same thickness. Rounding this says that on the floor of the suburban would fit a matrix of 12 by 21 CDROMs and we could stack them 450 high if we had a suitable spindle. So the suburban could hold 12x21x450=113,400 DVDs. What is the data capacity of such? At 4.7 Gigabytes per DVD, we come out with 113,400 x 4.7 = 532,980 Gb Megabytes, 532.98 Terabytes.

Mama Manno's Baklava Recipe

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:44:32 -0400

Mama Manno’s Baklava Recipe

Ingredients

1 box (1 lb) filo dough, defrosted according to directions on package
1 lb butter (salted), or 1/2 lb butter and 1/2 lb margarine
4 cups finely chopped walnuts (see note 1 below)
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

Procedure

Prepare syrup (recipe below) and let cool while making baklava. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Mix walnuts, sugar, and cinnamon together. Melt the butter in a bowl. Use some of the butter on a pastry brush to butter a 13x9 glass baking dish.Open and unroll filo roll. Keep the roll covered with a very slightly dampened towel all the time you’re not taking sheets off (see note 2 below).Peel one sheet of filo from the roll, place it on a flat surface, and brush it with melted butter. Use plenty of butter and cover the whole sheet but don’t leave pools of butter. (As you use butter don’t stir the solids up a lot, use the butter off the top.) Take another sheet, lay it on top of the first sheet, and butter it. Repeat with 2 more sheets of filo (total of 4 sheets, each buttered). Sprinkle 3/4 to 1 cup of nut mixture over this filo stack. Don’t put nuts closer than 1/2 inch to the short sides. Along one short side of the stack, fold over 1/2-inch of dough and butter the fold. Roll the stack into a log. Place the roll into the baking dish and butter the roll. Continue to make rolls with the rest of the filo, using 4 sheets for each.Using a sharp knife slice each roll diagonally into slices about 2 inches wide. Place baking dish in the bottom third of the oven and bake until very golden brown (“red”), about 25-30 minutes (use more time if necessary, be sure baklava is well-baked). Pour about 2 cups of cooled syrup over hot baklava. If all the syrup gets absorbed add more until a little is left around the rolls. When baklava is cool you make remove slices and place in paper muffin cups for serving.