I am, as you might have guessed, not your typical “cranky old man in the woods.”  Most old men in the woods don’t have a bunny for a honey, go shooting on their range regularly, surround themselves with wireless PTZ solar webcams, play at high speed Morse on the ham radio, or cobble up new and interesting 3D CNC and printer projects. Or run hydroponics for dinner salads or…well, if you’ve been around a while, you know our “range of thinking and doing” is reasonably expansive.

The root of all this is a lifetime of learning coupled with serious ADHD. All further enabled by having the good sense to pay off all debt more than 20-years ago.  Because when you “downscale” you wake up one morning and discover you can really go smashing about, trying to find your True Purpose in life.  I’m still looking…

One of the stops along the way was to write a series on UrbanSurvival called (this here) ShopTalk Sunday series.  But, realizing most people were not into fin-geeking, I also gave it a home at Ultra-Make.com.

This week, I killed that site.  Part of my borrowing son G2’s coping skills with ADHD: Focus on just a few things. And proceed for maximum effect at minimal energy expended.  Which – as Ultra-Make goes away, I have given my latest (hare-brained, wild-ass) Project (https://geneticcuisine.com) to one of our Peoplenomics subscribers.

Yes, it’s true, brothers and sisters:  You can do anything you set your mind to in Life. But the clock runs. Meaning you can’t get around to doing everything in life.

On the speed-learning, high-speed writing front, it’s been good. Downscaling – which is being serialized as it happens – will continue on Peoplenomics and it will become the 14th book. After that, a novel, or two, and (except for Peoplenomics) I expect to be mostly written-out.

If there was one article on the ShopTalk series that really stood out to me as the guy putting it down on pixels, it was this one that follows.  An oldie but goodie I hope you re-enjoy. Because this is the time of the year when, sun hanging lower in the southern sky on days full of snow and rain glare, you may want to play with better sun glasses designs.

I have had more eye surgeries than I care to remember.  So many, in fact, that it drove us to sell our beloved Beechcraft in 2017.  As luck would have it, not a huge loss, since being in our 70s at that point, mixing up with lots of people from coast-to-coast – while remaining vax-free – didn’t seem like the smartest thing to do.

So, this whole free invention, which I’m going to show you how to make was really the result of me a) having cataracts, b) having IOL lens implants, and c) having one of the little buggers displace when I jumped down from the tractor.  Three or four surgeries later, I’m 20:30 under ideal conditions, but that’s where our story begins.

A Sight-Saving Eye Fix

After multiple eye surgeries, there were two major “hangovers” from all the eye work.  The first was that the operative eye (left one) needs about a half-hour to start working correctly when I get out of bed in the morning.  The cornea accumulates fluid overnight. Edema. The world is “foggy” on rising.  The solution is a 5% hypertonic saline (such as Muro 128 (or similar generic) and a half-hour, or so, while the visual fog clears.  Not much can be done about that.

The other thing – and it’s a genuine pisser when driving, is that because of the implants the iris does not close down like a normal eye.  Mind you, I can see well, but where things get “dis-comfortable” is when there is a very bright light outside the car (bright, sunny, glare-heavy day) and it seems very dark through the sunglasses on the inside of the car.

Which doesn’t matter, except, seriously, it’s hard to see the speedometer readout on a bright day.

This is not a “George-only ” problem – happens to all of us to one extent, or another, especially as we age. The eyes get less responsive to shadows.  Contrast really begins to matter. Hugely.

How the Invention Hit Me

Last week, I was tooling up the county road toward our place in the woods (“No more than 5-over, officer, honest!”) and I happened to “flip up” my flip-up polarized clip-ons that go over the prescription lenses.

I noticed there was a spot – about where the bottom of the flip-ups was even with the dash on the old farm truck where vision was great. Shaded outside, bright inside. I could read my speed!

The effect isn’t as dramatic in these pictures, as it is with the real lenses, which I will show you how to make in a second, but it will give you a feel for what’s going on and how this makes light-sensitive driving damn near pleasurable again.

First, the normal bright light. This is sitting in the cab of the truck, sitting in the shade of the carport, but since it was a sunny day, you can still get an idea how the dash and speedo wash out into the shadows:

Now, here’s where we look at what the upper half of the flip-ups makes it look in the same conditions:

You can see – just above the lip of the dash above the bright spot – that the rest of the scene through sun filtering, but the bottom is clear and easy to see – even for old-man eyes.

Now, you will want to apply some care and caution in how you make your version of these “special glasses” up, because if you look down by moving your head, you will suddenly see why I cut up a pair of flip-ups to get the improvement!

(Look at the speedo, right?)

The effect – in real life – is even more pronounced because these shots were taken with me holding up the half-glasses.  When you cut down the clip-ons, the line of demarcation is across the top of the whole lower field of vision.

You’ll want to cut your flip-ups so that when on, and you’re sitting in the normal driving position, the bottom line will be visually lost in the horizontal top of dash clutter.

Making Your Own

To make these all you need is a cheap five-pack of various color flip-ups you can buy on Amazon for $14.00.  Like these.

Next, the sharp scissors and a steady hand.  (I put a grease pencil mark on the first pair, but if you just take off 1/4-an inch until it’s close…no worries!)

I also got a little “arty” by making the outside droop a bit lower – the idea being this would reduce side-light coming in.  But in the end? They work fantastic.

Honestly, I don’t know why these haven’t always been on the market.  If you use them, you will notice an immediate improvement in the form of better cockpit awareness (if flying, it will make watching airspeed and the runway in the bright approach onto a south aligned runway a piece of cake. The brightness will be close to identical.

And if you need to screw with the GPS or phone (bad dog! no texting and driving! bad dog!) it’s all kinds of easier, faster and safer.

This is also about the best example of how TRIZ thinking works I have stumbled into in a while.

Those “half glasses” that people wear, for readers, are just the opposite (positioning-wise) from what the Sun demands. Here’s all it takes:

No idea why noone has patented this, but here it is – in the public domain for you – and all because you’re now going to tell 10-million of your closest friends about what a bitchin-cool site Ultra-Make is  (You saw that pitch coming, right?) Or, send me a penny a pair? (Update: No money, so I killed the whole siite…)

Advanced readings: 40 Principles: TRIZ Keys to Technical Innovation and the classic The Innovation Algorithm:TRIZ, systematic innovation and technical creativity.

Now, go out and bang something…

Effective next week (it will be part of my phasing into retirement), one of the weekly UrbanSurvival columns will disappear.  But it won’t be a “regular thing.”  Because sometimes, I do shop projects that are way cool.  Other times, the news (or markets, or politics, or wars, or [etc.]) demands attention.

Sure, it’s a bit like going to a casino – which is also on our To-Do list around here, if G2 can ever move back and settle into a more rural (and stable) life.

I’ve had some insights lately into how Luck runs.  Came from following the Global Consciousness Project and how the red dots happen before major global events.  Augmented by something called the “magic figure-eight” of casino gambling.  This last is where the research is screaming to be done.  But, it also applies to PowerBalls and whatnot, too.

The idea is that LUCK has a TIME-OFFSET.

When we go to a casino, for example, the ringing of bells, buzzers going off, and the flashing lights, will tend (over an evening of play) to be “going around the room in a big figure eight pattern.

But, Ure’s key insight is that luck is going around long before the payoff lines are revealed.

Luck in these kinds of games runs 5-15 seconds ahead.  Because the outcome is cast when the “wheel is pulled” and the RNG ([pseudo] random number generator) locks.  But there is a time delay.

This led me to the idea that all varieties of “luck” have a baked-in time element to them. A PowerBall winner’s fate is not sealed at the drawing; rather it’s going to happen from the minute they buy that Big Winner.

Some people have a gift for this off-set.  My (could be late, by now) friiend, Todd out in Las Vegas, had an uncanny way of being able to “see the future” of horses before the starting bell.  Made him a well-respected, nationally ranked nag-picker.  But there’s always LUCK.

And LUCK seems to have a temporal offset to it.

Which is why I love to spend time in the shop, cutting on wood, varnishing, drilling, sanding, and all that.  Because each and every one of us is a walking pile of offsets.”  Luck, love, fortune, or misfortune.  Offsets from the Mercury Retrograde – a whole field of “offset humans” who haven’t figured out their place in the Great Architect of the Universe’s scheme to deal with things.

But even now, there’s a slow developing appreciation that it’s a lot less obvious, irf you were going to run a Universe, that doing so with offsets along the temporal axis would keep most people off the scent of unbounded ownelrship of their own lives.

And spending time on that problem seems like a more immediate payoff goal than crafting another post for Ultra-Make.

Write when you get rich,  (Which should come immediately upon figuring out your personal offsets…)

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