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This is a guide for how to play the game Guillotine. I normally like to link to the official game website, but in this case I could not find a publisher that admits to owning the game, so the best I could do is the rules.

It is a simple game, really. A smidgen of strategy, but more luck of the cards, so you can just play the game. But it is still fun.

Summer is in full swing in Michigan, which for me means two things: black raspberries and fireflies.

First: Black Raspberries

The black raspberries that I associate with summer are the wild type. I don’t know that I’ve had a cultivated variety of black raspberry. But the kind that grow like weeds around here are what I grew up with.

The only problem with them is that they’re small and it takes a lot of picking to get not much of a serving.

But it is the taste of summer.

And second: Fireflies

The fireflies that I associate with summer are the wild type. I don’t know that I’ve seen a tamed variety of firefly. But the kind that grow around here are what I grew up with.

Even though they’re not tame, they don’t really care about people, so you can easily catch them.

But after a couple of seconds, they realize need to be flying again so they take off.

And here are some shots of fireflies in action. I couldn’t persuade my iPhone to keep the shutter open longer, so I had to click whenever I saw a firefly start to glow. Look for the brighter streaks in each photo, streaks because fireflies like to move upwards while they’re glowing.

Both good things, but it seems that the peak of black raspberry and firefly season is also the peak of mosquito season.

With all the hubbub around the falling cost of solar power, I thought I’d look into it. Since there are hidden cost structures for those places that will install systems and rent it to you or no upfront cost but it gets incorporated into you electric bill or whatever other sleight-of-finances they think up, I’m doing this investigation on parts purchase alone.

And this is for the system I would want – full battery so it will work when the grid is down (yes, there are solar power setups that stop working when the grid is down, check that before signing up), no connection to the grid (avoids billing and meter issues, plus simpler and safer), and enough to power the fridge and freezer so we don’t lose any food (not trying to power the whole house).

Load Requirements
We have 3 different fridge/freezer appliances, and I added up the draw on each and the result was 600 watts.

Assuming each might run for about 8 hours a day: 600 watts * 8 hours = 4800 Wh, or 4.8kWh per day.

That’s the draw requirements, now on to solar panel sizing.

Panel Sizing
I need 4800 Wh per day. We don’t have the sunniest location, so I’m being generous by saying I expect 6 hours of sun a day. That’s to keep cost down, not for a decent buffer of solar power. This is going to be a minimally-sized system.

4800 Wh / 6 hours of sun = 800 watts. So I need solar panels that will output 800 watts.

That’s the panel requirements, now on to battery sizing.

Battery Sizing
There’s a balance between battery voltage and inverter availability and there are a few different ways to go here.

In general, 12-volt batteries are cheapest and easiest to obtain. And 12-volt power inverters are cheapest and easiest to obtain.

But 12-volt systems aren’t good for higher power output. They’re fine for a camping fridge or charging phones, but not for houses. You could do it, but you’d have some thick cables to handle the current.

In general, 48-volt inverters are good for houses. But 48-volt batteries are not cheap nor plentiful. You could make a 48-volt battery out of four 12-volt batteries, but then you have to worry about keeping them all balanced. If one battery gets low or goes bad, then it’ll take the others down too.

For my plans, I’m choosing the middle ground – a 24-volt system. It can handle higher loads with moderately-sized cables, and for battery balancing you need to manage pairs of batteries, not quads of batteries.

So I have 4800 kWh per day, and a 24-volt battery system (note: pick solar panels that can make a 24-volt output), so I need to size my batteries. 4800 kWh / 24 volts = 200 amp-hours per day of usage.

If I were to get 200 amp-hours worth of batteries, I could start with a full charge and go one day without sunlight before my fridge would stop working.

But the thing about batteries is that they don’t like being run all the way down. In general, you want double the battery capacity of your expected daily load. And if you want extra days of power (to survive longer with more cloudy days), you would keep adding capacity.

In my case, I’m going for typical use and not having to ride out a multi-day weather event. So 200 Ah * 2 = 400 Ah. I need to buy 400 Ah-worth of batteries.

Other Items
And I also need a power inverter good for at least 600 watts continuous.

One more thing: I need a charge controller. That goes between the solar panels and the batteries, to make sure batteries are managed well and not overcharged. Bad things happen if the batteries are full, the fridge doesn’t need to run so there’s no load, and it’s sunny so the panels keep pouring electrical charge into the batteries.

Prices
Here’s what I got for prices for those components:

• Inverter: $220
• Charge controller: $175
• Solar panels: $600
• Batteries: $1440
• Total: $2435

That was solar system cost, now on to payback rate.

Conclusion
Around here, electricity is about 10 cents/kWh. And this particular load is 4.8 kWh, so that is $0.48 per day that I’m trying to avoid with this system. That works out to $175 per year.

With a system cost of $2435 / $175 per year, that gives me 13.9 years to start coming out ahead with my system.

In general, the panels and inverter and stuff should last that long, except for the batteries. Which, of course, are the most expensive part of the system. The AGM lead-acid batteries I picked for their cheaper entry price will last about 7 years.

So before the 13.9 year payback period is up, I would have to spend $1440 again for another set of batteries, which bumps the payback period up, and then before that period is up, the second set of batteries would expire, requiring a third set, and then once more before we actually get to a point where the system has paid for itself before the batteries expire.

So really, the total cost is $2435 + ($1440 * 3) = $6755. And that’s a 38.6 year payback period. And then the batteries expire shortly after that anyway and you don’t get to turn much of a profit.

If I do ever setup solar power for my house, I will have to do it without a big battery bank.

Based on recent events involving power tools in the barn not working because critters chewed on the cords, today I am listing for you the worst animals to have on your property.

These are listed in order, with the first animal being the worst (most annoying).

• Woodchuck : They seem to have a knack for knowing which items near them are the most important to humans and then damaging them. Such as ignoring the cheaper 25′ extension cord and chewing through only the 100′ extension cord. And digging under the concrete slab floor. And digging behind the car tire so the car gets stuck when I try to move it and I have to get another vehicle to pull it out of the very small ditch. And so on.
• Deer : Deer are very damaging, but only to plants. Especially fruit trees. They are high on this list because their physical range requires so much work to defend against. You can’t just put up any old fence, it has to be high and sturdy.
• Chipmunk : These little guys like to dig. Whether it’s under my brick walkway or through the flowers I just planted, they get just about everywhere. I expect about a 10% loss of any flowers planted because chipmunks can’t help but go through new dirt (they seem attracted to freshly-dug dirt) and they don’t put back any roots they may unearth in the process.
• Raccoon : These are not as annoying as chipmunks – although it was a close call – because they are easier to get. Chipmunks are too small and fast. Raccoons do damage property, but there are fewer of them and they are large and slow. If I kept animals, such as chickens, I would put raccoons above chipmunks, since I know they go after small farmyard animals.
• Canada Goose : Noisy and messy and mean. They don’t specifically damage property like the critters I’ve listed so far, but they could damage you if you let them get settled and they start feeling territorial.
• Mouse : Messy, and they chew holes in things. Not a big deal, except we have a corn stove. I have to keep a tight lid on the corn storage, otherwise we end up finding little stores of corn in weird places, like in someone’s hockey skate that apparently looked inviting to a mouse to use as his pantry.

Note that this list is tailored to the Midwest. I’m sure there are worse things to have milling about the grounds in other places, such as mountain lions or chimpanzees.

Also note that I do not mind having skunks around at all. They avoid people and stay away from my stuff. I’ve never had a problem with them. I’ve run into skunks 3 times in my life, and each time the skunk had skedaddled out of sight by the time I realized it was a skunk and not a large cat.

This is your annual reminder that the term “summer solstice” means “the solstice that occurs during summer”, not “the start of summer”.

It is an astronomical term having to do with the position of the sun relative to the earth, and while it does affect the seasons, it is incorrect to assign June 21 as the start of summer.

It has felt like summer for a few weeks already. What is summer? What is any season? A season is a grouping of days with similar weather features. For example, winter: temperatures are low, plants are dormant. And fall: temperatures decrease, plants lose their foliage. And spring: temperatures increase, plants grow their foliage. And summer: temperatures are high, plants are fruiting/seeding.

From the viewpoint of an observer with no calendar, how would he know when spring ends and summer begins? It’s a fairly slow transition with no defined border, so people have tried to assign that border. But the summer solstice is the wrong border.

The summer solstice has historically had a weather-related association. Think back to the time of Shakespeare. I would hope that you, dear reader, would recall the title of one of his plays (no expectation that you’ll know the plot or characters, just the title): A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When, historically, was the day of the year that was called “midsummer”? The day with the most daylight, of course. A lot of European countries still celebrate Midsummer in late June.

Anyway, my preferred time for summer is the 3-month block of June, July, and August. An acceptable alternative answer is Memorial Day to Labor Day, or perhaps from the first 80-degree day to the first 40-degree day after that, or perhaps from when the first rose bloom appears to when the chrysanthemums start blooming.

I have a disagreement with the people who decide on the color for the mute button for online meetings. The particular incident that brought the color problem to my attention happened to be Google Meet, but other programs such as Zoom also have the same issue. Of note is Microsoft Teams, which does not change color for muted versus unmuted, so it does not have this issue.

The problem is that the color was decided by extroverts.

Before getting into that though, a little bit of background: red is the color that has been chosen by society to mean “unsafe”. Whether it’s the color your car door locks change to when unlocked, or the color revealed on your firearm when it can be fired, things like that are considered unsafe and show a red color in that condition.

Now back to Google Meet. It was my first day back from a vacation, and it was my first meeting using Google Meet that day, so I was out of practice and my actions on the laptop were not back in habit yet. I wanted to be on mute, I saw the mute button was red, so I clicked it to make it not red, then I started talking to Some Wife (I think asking her what her sister-in-law called about) because it wasn’t my part of the meeting.

To me, an introvert, the unsafe mode of an online meeting is when my voice is being broadcast to everyone. Since red means unsafe, red to me means unmute. Not red should mean mute, because mute is safe.

But to the designers of that button or user interface, unsafe must mean no one can hear them, or whatever it is that extroverts want. Because when I clicked the mute button to make it safe, I actually unmuted myself and then everyone could hear me. I was glad other people had the option to mute me, which they did before too long.

On a related note, I’m glad for the programs that put a red border around your screen when you are sharing your screen to the meeting. That is unsafe too.

We have reached the end of the track season here, and one of the later meets reminded me of something that I feel like posting today. On certain events – I think this one was the 4×800 relay – the first 1.25 laps will have the runners stay in their lanes, but then on the back straightaway they are allowed to move over to lane 1. And there is usually an official standing at that point to both make sure people don’t cut over too early and also to remind them to cut over.

My experience as someone who understood math was that I did not cut over very quickly. And that frustrated the official, who thought I didn’t hear him yelling “Cut over!”, so he yelled more and louder at me.

Even all these years later, not many high school kids realize how much extra they are running. They just know that lane 1 is the shortest lane and thus they want to get to it as soon as they can.

It looks like this (not to scale, wrong number of lanes, other disclaimers):

The yellow star is where most runners aim to get, and the blue star is where I was aiming to get, and the green line is the start of the back stretch when runners could leave their lanes.

And now I’m going to add some geometry.

As you see, the distance I ran was line segment A, and other runners were choosing B+C.

Now let’s put some numbers in.

It doesn’t look like it, but the yellow dashed line is supposed to be a 45 degree angle. A standard high school track has 8 lanes of 42 inches each, so segment D is 28 feet

D² + D² = 1568, the square root of which is 39.6, so C = 39.6 feet.

Segment B is going to be 100 meters – 28 feet, so we end up with 300 feet.

Now for segment A. The Pythagorean theorem only works with right triangles, so this one is a little trickier. It’s also not enough just to know two length, we need an angle also.

Since I made angle CD to be 45, I know that BC is 135. So now we’re stuck using the Law of Cosines. I was hoping it would be easier, but that’s what I got.

A² = B² + C² – 2BC cos(A)
A = sqrt(90000 + 784 – 2*8400*cos(135))
A = 320 feet

So I would run 320 feet, and the opposition would run 339.6 feet, so I would get an advantage of 19.6 feet.

Your mileage may vary, especially if you’re not always in lane 8. And yes, it should be 7 lanes of width because no one runs on the outside of the lane so the 42 inches of lane 8 should be discounted. I’ll let you run the math on what the more appropriate number is. Just consider the 19.6 as the highest value it could be. Also, the opposition was not also in lane 8 with me, so no their distance would not be from the same point I was, as shown on the diagram (for illustrative purposes only).