Recently we noticed a small puddle near the septic tank. This was surfacing effluent. Effluent–the watery discharge that normally flows from the tank into the drain field for natural purification by the soil–had stopped flowing through the underground pipes and found its way to the surface.

Yesterday we had the septic company come out to pump the tank so we could begin working on the problem. The technician found a surprise. The inspector had gotten it wrong. The tank he found was only the first of two. The effluent had been coming up through a gap in the lid of the second tank which was set slightly lower than the first.

We still don’t know what is causing the stoppage. It could be a collapsed line, some other kind of blockage in the pipes such as tree roots, or the soil may be suffering from reduced hydraulic capacity for any number of reasons. Not only is the cause a mystery but we don’t even know where the drain field is. I suspected there might be one about 60 feet away where two or three strips of grass thrived even during last year’s drought. However, that area was not in the direction that the outlet pointed. I decided to dig in and see what I could find before asking for professional help. Here is the hole I dug:

Septic pipes

Of interest are the terra cotta fitting, the gaps and loose joints, and the 90º elbow. (Incidentally, near the surface in the corner of the hole I found a dented wheel hub. I have no intention of moving it. Knowing this property, it would not surprise me to find it attached to a complete automobile buried upside-down.) The elbow turns the flow in the direction of the grassy patch, suggesting that our drain field actually is all the way out there.

After all of that digging by hand, I threw up my hands and called the professionals back. Tomorrow we should have a digging crew to unearth and inspect enough of the line to confirm the cause of the problem. If we get our wish, they’ll be able to fix it on sight and leave us with a reasonable bill. We really don’t want to pay for a new drain field or anything more major than a bit of digging and 4″ PVC.

Wish us luck.

The real threat is more general, more widespread, and more dangerous than Islam. It took something as extreme as Islamic extremism to trigger a cultural awareness of it. Unfortunately, like the ringing of an alarm clock, the first thing to awaken consciousness is for a time the only piece of reality about which we are aware. Islamic extremism is the alarm clock.

The supporters of the minaret ban see the growth of the Muslim population as an aggressive cultural invasion. They don’t see an immigrant minority that deserves state protection. They see settlers from a destructive culture claiming their country. They feel vilified within their homeland by outsiders and they are afraid that their politicians will continue to insist on irrational “religious tolerance” despite the intolerant attitudes spread through Islam.

National Islamophobia is a phase whose time has come. It is extreme, prejudiced, and wrong, but it is the natural reaction against the wrong actions of extremists trying to universalize Islam. Two wrongs do make a right when everyone learns a lesson. The lesson here is that no protection for status, be it religion, race, sex, or what have you, is deserved when it is used for harm.

Religions have been invoked to excuse atrocious behavior since ages before the life of Muhammad. So have other statuses such as race, color, nationality, and sex. The world tends to absolve these harmful trends after a reform and some generations. And the human race eventually learns a lesson.

I see the minaret ban as a sign that the world is just beginning to reject religion as an excuse for bad behavior. Peaceful Muslims will work with non-Muslims to prevail over the radical perversion of Islam. This time will pass into history and be replaced by a time of rational discrimination and careful tolerance. I hope I’m right, the sooner the better.

I was thinking about this while spooning up a dish of Ben & Jerry’s 30th anniversary celebratory ice cream flavor, Cake Batter. I wondered what machinery had achieved the perfect swirling of ice cream flavors and gooey frosting. I have toured their factory in Waterbury, Vermont, and I even stood nearby while it was being built, but I’ve never seen up close the twirling, swirling nozzles. I wondered about their capabilities.

We had a 9-pin dot matrix printer when I was a kid. Eventually we got a 24-pin model that printed nicer-looking fonts, followed by a laser printer and a color bubble jet. I disassembled each one to see how it worked, or I read about it if the mechanism was too small. I found that if you ran a page enough times through any printer, the ink would build up on the paper until eventually the printer jammed. 3D printing is easy to imagine but not so easy to do.

Now if Ben & Jerry’s ice cream swirls could be created in a pint of ice cream by moving a rod having individually-controlled swirl ports, you might be able to print messages inside the pint, to be successively revealed by spooning away layers from the top. This has the obvious difficulty of the effect of the rod moving through the ice cream, swirling into oblivion whatever was deposited before.

It would be better to squirt the ice creams and swirls simultaneously into the pint to form one layer at a time. Having on its pint-wide print head a grid of nozzles arranged horizontally, the machine would print while moving the head vertically through the length of the pint. If it had the ability to control the nozzles to squirt different ingredients, the machine would be a 3D ice cream printer and my dream come true.

All of the forgoing occurred to me between bites of Cake Batter ice cream. These thoughts occupied a small part of my mind through the day until I began to think back on older printing technologies. Most interestingly, all of the laser printers I had seen contained a heating element called a fuser which baked the toner that had been deposited on the paper. What if you could automatically deposit cake batter and bake it by layers? You could extrude a fully-baked cake with a different birthday wish in every slice.

One mechanism appeared to me: tiny, retractable, non-stick heating elements would extend into the printed batter at the rate of print head advance, effectively staying put in the batter until it has finished baking and then retracting into the print head to be deployed again. Another idea involved inflating tiny balloons with hot liquid to bake the batter and then deflating them, mimicking the natural consistency of cake with the voids left behind.

I imagined that the resolution of such printing would be directly limited by the composition of the cake. Air bubbles are transparent holes that transmit color from the solid parts at their boundaries. Higher resolution would depend on smaller bubbles. Up to this point I was thinking primarily in the visual field. Bakeries and consumers already have access to frosting printers, which are simply Canon bubble jet printers with edible sheets of “paper” and edible inks, but this is 2D printing and not what I wanted to think about. Continuing on the 3D track, I thought separately about flavor printing and structure printing.

Flavor printing can be imagined very simply in one dimension by equipping a sausage mill with computer-controlled nozzles, each one adding a different ingredient to the filler and being turned on and off to create a pattern of flavors that the eater would experience in a sequence of bites. It is easy to expand the concept mechanically into two and three dimensions, printing out multi-flavored cakes or gelatin molds. I don’t know what consumer need this would fill. Still, I’d like to see it done.

Structure printing (creating, say, a frosted yellow cake in the form of the Statue of Liberty) brings up an important consideration: the physical properties of the food. Where are the compression strain diagrams of yellow cake? What is the tensile strength of frosting with and without coconut? How best to anneal the chocolate rebar?

If you know any mechanical engineering grad students who secretly wanted to major in home economics, or vice versa, please send them a link to this post. I would love to consult on any project that stems from these ideas.

I’m going to propose that the architectural committee select four new exterior colors: a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one.

Do you think they’ll get it?

“You ain’t no kind of man if you ain’t got land.” (Who said that?)

I’m sure the exhilaration of lawn mowing will wear off tomorrow morning when I try to finish the job and find my arms too heavy to lift.

Does your home insurance policy cover loss or damage caused by a meteorite?