Something about the Midwest always makes it hard to keep a consistent mood year-round. The weather definitely is a large part of it, since I think it feeds into the other great mood disrupter which is eating food that is sugary and/or not good for you. It's been a struggle lately with the weather teasing us like it's going to come out of being frigid and begin to warm up, only to go back to being intolerable. I want to plant things! I want to feel grass on my feet! I need to be around things that grow. Maybe when the season starts up I'll turn this into a gardening blog instead. I started some tomatoes, red onions, green onions, rosemary, and thyme indoors, however they all look pretty pitiful.
Anyways, I started taking St. John's Wort out of curiosity, as I had just finished reading Robert Sapolsky's Book Why Zebra's Don't Get Ulcers, and he had mentioned that St. John's Wort is the only known "herbal" remedy that has proven better than a placebo for depression and anxiety. Now, I'm not diagnosed with depression, but I am and anxious person, so I decided to just get some from the supplement rack to try it out. The first time I took it I definitely felt a mellowing effect. Afterwords though, the feeling was more muted and I feel like it leveled out my mood, both in good ways and in bad. Nothing major though. I may continue to take it sparingly but I don't thing I'll buy another bottle. Also if you're reading this and are thinking of getting some, just a warning it interferes with a lot of medications so if you're on something already, just don't.
That's all I really had on my mind today. I'm thinking I should probably cut out sweets for a while and see how I feel in a month.
I'm an engineer by trade, and I've had a fascinating set of problems in my lap recently where I have charged myself with reverse engineering a winch. This winch take a standard 1725 RPM motor as input and outputs about 1 RPM, delivering a large amount of torque across first a 123:1 worm drive, then a 118:11 Spur gear with a pinion coaxial to the worm gear. Quite a reduction of over 1700:1! Anyways, I'm not going to wade into the numbers, but I've been learning a lot about different gear types and trains and asked myself a lot of obvious questions like:
To the second point, turns out prime numbers are important in gearing. It means it takes may more rotations for the same two teeth to contact eachother again, making the wear even across the teeth. If you've got a 60 tooth spur and a 20 tooth pinion, well that's no good because every three rotations the same teeth are hitting. but with 11 teeth and 118 teeth, the same teeth are only going to contact once every 88 revolutions, I believe.
Then lastly, the worm is brass because it improves efficiency of the worm, bumping up that 60% number to something more like 65%. Also, conveniently the worm and the spur are about the same size diameter, which means less wasted space in the housing, which means less wasted material, and less oil needed.
That is all.