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Washer Collage
(31 Mar 2020 at 23:55) |
Hi! I've been stuck inside for weeks, probably just like you. I go out running every day, dodging people, but otherwise it's lockdown-mode. Our washing machine promptly broke, so I had to replace that thing. It became a project, because (aside from the difficult but mostly uninteresting process of getting it onto the second floor) one of the things that contributed to the last one's failure was its not-very-stable footing, and I wanted to do this one well. The thing resides inside a nice (but probably unnecessary) tile basin, which poses a few problems: It would make it impossible to get to the bottom doors on the machine, and it makes it impossible to adjust the feet in situ for leveling purposes, and the basin is not at all flat. The weirdly-shaped surface meant that my CAD prospectus was not very useful, which is annoying because I like to measure like 200 times in CAD and then cut once.
Figure 1. Click to zoom
The other problem is that I didn't have the right wood for this, and although Home Depot claimed to be able to do a same-day shipment, they gave me the runaround for over a week (I still don't have it). It's understandable, but our piles of laundry were getting a bit dire, so I just had to make do with what I had. In figure 1(a) I sawed through these 6x6 timbers with a 3.5" saw, which took like an hour. Then I used the also-too-small table saw to mill that into the smaller size I actually wanted (figure 1(b)). Then, I painstakingly test fit the logs in the basin, and sawed/planed/chiseled/sanded them until they were sitting stably on that curved surface without wobble. This was a real pain. The best advice I have for doing this was to get the tile sopping wet, then place the wood there for a moment, and then see where the high spots are based on where the wood is wet. (It would work better with some dye or something, but I didn't want to ruin the tile, ugh.) At that point we have some logs that were nice and sturdy, but not necessarily level gravity-wise. My solution here was router-out cups for each of the washer's feet, which I could set the depth of so that the washer would be level without any adjustment. (This also has the nice advantage that the washer can't jump around more than a few millimeters!) This was accomplished by using a laser level for an accurate level, and then putting some objects of fixed height (here the feet from the old washer, which will be disassembled for its more exciting pieces) into each cup, and iteratively routing the depth until they all touch the laser line exactly (Figure 1(c)). All that work paid off, though, because when we finally dropped the washer into place, it was as level as a spirit level can possibly indicate (Figure 1(d)). No pictures of the install here because this is like in my bathroom and that seems weirdly intimate to put on the internet for some reason.
SIGBOVIK is tomorrow, but this year there is no in-person event due to the shelter-in-place order! The proceedings is shaping up nicely though, and there is some "podcast" expected. I have a few silly papers in there, but I'll save those for tomorrow. No talks from me this year; the whole situation in the world has been sort of draining my creative energy, but hopefully I will start feeling good again soon. |  |
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It may be worth to reference the website "http://anselan.com/tutorial.html" from chapter 1.3 of "Is this the longest Chess game?", because that website also talks about the funny consequences of the rules of chess.
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| Neat! Well, too late to work in changes to the paper, but I like the puzzles there and I'm not surprised that the retrograde analysis guys make use of these corner cases. :) I disagree with "We don't have to consider draw by 50 moves," though; I think it's pretty clear that the 75-move version is compulsory and arguable that it applies to dead position! |
| Is it possible that the rules have changed since he wrote that? |
| Yes that's true. He says the "most recent laws ... in 2005" but the last revision was at the beginning of 2018. I'm not sure what changed there but these game-ending conditions are the kind of thing they do fiddle with. |
| Indeed, "http://blog.mathieuacher.com/LongestChessGame/" specifically says that FIDE introduced the 75 move rule in 2014. |
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