My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: everyone has, um, a (sandwich) price.

Me...thinking 'bout making a rich sandwich

Have you ever made food from scratch? If you said yes, you're probably thinking of cooking bread from flour and yeast and so on.

You probably aren't thinking of growing the wheat, harvesting it, milling it, and all that jazz. One guy in Minnesota, however, decided to actually cook a chicken sandwich from scratch. It took him six months and cost him $1,500.

Little bit ridiculous, right? We’ve evolved our modern society toward specialization in order to reduce the workload on people and prevent us from having to do such outrageous things.

The most interesting aspect of this is, of course, the salt: the guy from Minnesota had to fly to the West Coast to harvest his salt. If he wanted to be a purist, he would have needed to either walk all the way to the ocean or build his own airplane from scratch.

Obviously, that’s too much work for a YouTube video.

If he wanted to be even more of a purist, he would have needed to build all his tools himself. No stove; rather, an open fire. And no metal pot; he would have needed to fashion his own cookware instead. You can see how quick the absurdity things would’ve gotten.

So where am I going with all this?

I made me a sandwich…for $3.45

Believe it or not, I wanted to talk about survivalists. The typical survivalist strategy is to master a certain number of survival skills and to accumulate massive amounts of resources for survival purposes.

The missing ingredients? Almost everything, really. Our society has accumulated unbelievably huge quantities of knowledge dedicated toward merely keeping civilization running, mostly in the form of working professionals.

If someone were to make all of society's doctors disappear, we wouldn't be able to just set a bunch of people to the books and expect them to become doctors in a decade or so. Civilization reconstruction is a problem of a magnitude more significant than assembling a sandwich from scratch.

Any society emerging from survivalists in the wake of the collapse of civilization is going to be fairly primitive, by necessity.

And just to reassure Maggie and the kids and my gaggle of grandkids: I'm not investing in survivalist gear. Modern civilization is pretty durable. Gambling on it failing seems like way too much of a sucker bet to me.

My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: are we gaming the system? Nope, it's gaming us.

Do I look like I'm playing games?

When I was a little kid, I hated board games. Absolutely did not like them. Especially Monopoly.

Risk I could tolerate about once or twice a year. Chess and checkers I could tolerate. That was the extent of the games we had (so maybe my choices were too limited). On rare occasions, I'd get to try a game someone else owned, but there weren't a lot out there (so maybe I come from a place where people didn’t play board games).

Things stick with us. These days, I’m surprised every time I see someone's board game collection (so maybe everyone’s not like me).

We're in a veritable board game renaissance right now. Most estimates put the number published each year in the thousands.

Of course, a huge chunk of these games are still terrible. Many are incredibly complicated and take hours—or even days—to play. Which, I suppose, is just fine for those with that kind of free time, but most of us don't have such free time. Other games are spat out quickly…or are just mediocre rip-offs of another game.

Bored.

Still, and muffling my rant just a bit, there are probably a gaggle of good new games published every year.

I’ve picked up a few over the years that I've grown to like, mostly for my kids and grandkids. My favorite is one I bought for my grandkids: Master Labyrinth. I still drag it out whenever they come over, and I'm probably more excited to play it than they are.

While I was reading about board games, I decided to hunt down the oldest.

Senet, Backgammon, and The Royal Game of Ur are more than 4,000 years old. Go is about 2,500 years old, and Parcheesi is nearly 2,000. Tafl, a Viking ancestor of chess, is some 1,600 years old.

Yes. Humans have been playing games for fun for a long, long time. For better or worse. Mostly worse, I say.

This isn't just an old man rambling on and on about board games. Because I refuse to admit to being old…until I retire.

My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original posts. This week in my From the Archives series: how do you spice up long, desolate roads? With road trains, of course.

All Aboard...

Anyone who spends a lot of time road tripping has likely seen a road train, a semi truck with more than one trailer behind it. They only receive so much use here in the United States since they are difficult and dangerous to drive. Plus, they're usually limited to just two trailers.

If you want to see the really big road trains, you need to head south. A lot farther south.

Australia is the birthplace of the road train, where they first appeared in the Flinders Range of South Australia in the mid 1800s, pulled behind traction engines, giving them a much more train-like appearance.

Today, Australia still uses more road trains than the rest of the world combined—and for good reason. Australian roads are some of the longest and most desolate in the world.

The overwhelming number of consumer cars and trucks we manufacture today are not capable of traveling between service stations in many parts of Australia on a single tank of gas. If you don't plan carefully, you WILL get stranded.

It's generally just a much better idea to fly wherever you're going. (Which most people do.) If you do decide to road-trip, though, you'll spend ages on the road without seeing anyone, followed by a massive road train almost knocking you off the road with the wind from its passage.

And it doesn’t stop there. Double road trains aren't a particularly big deal in Australia. The really impressive ones are the triples and quadruples. You'll want to just pull off the side of the road when one gets near. These are the biggest and heaviest road-legal vehicles in the world, often pushing 200 tons. (There are much, much bigger ones, like the Bagger 288, but they're certainly not road-legal.)

While dangerous, these cost-effective road trains have been vital to the development of many remote Australian regions.

My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original contributions. And so, my From the Archives series. This week: proper waste disposal is important, even in space.

Or: In Space, No One Can Hear You Take Out the Trash

My family goes to a lot of movies. We're not film buffs, by any means. Usually, we're looking for snappy dialogue and explosions.

A couple years ago, we saw the film “Gravity.” For those who haven't seen it, a runaway debris cloud destroys satellites and space stations. Even though the science in that movie was pretty badly off, in a lot of ways, something like it does have the potential to occur.

Kessler Syndrome is a hypothetical scenario dreamed up by a NASA scientist named Donald Kessler in the 70s. Essentially, it proposes that if enough objects are in low Earth orbit, collisions between them will eventually result in an enormous cascade of debris.

It's a pretty simple process: one piece of space junk slams into another, which sends debris scattering about.

Some of that debris hits another piece of space junk, creating another burst of debris, which slams into more space junk, and then maybe into a satellite.

Eventually, you have an enormous cloud of debris traveling through orbit. Each piece would be widely spaced, but even tiny bits can have insanely destructive power when moving that quickly. The cloud wouldn't take out every satellite, of course; it would stay in the same orbit, and many satellites would be in a higher or lower orbit.

A Kessler cascade could potentially make space travel impossible for millennia, completely blocking off that orbit. The debris wouldn't orbit forever. The drag from the miniscule amount of air at that altitude, along with a few other factors, would eventually clear the orbit again, though the process could take thousands of years.

Governments take the threat quite seriously. Satellites aren't allowed to launch unless they can be safely disposed at the end of their lifespans. The two most common techniques for doing so: dropping it back into the atmosphere or raising it up into a higher graveyard orbit.

People also have proposed gadgets for clearing the debris, including a device called a laser broom, which is precisely as cool as it sounds.

It all really just goes to show: proper waste disposal is important, no matter where you are.

My good friend Jeff Mann, the true Yard Ramp Guy, has asked me to revisit some of my original contributions. And so: my From the Archives series. This week: ah, that VHS technology has me all holiday-nostalgic.

The End of the VHS Loop

Maggie had me cleaning out the attic the other day, and I found a cardboard box filled with old VHS tapes. We hadn't used the VCR in something like a decade, but I managed to find it (in the garage, under five or six cans of paint) and hooked it up.

I went through some of our old home videos, and found that some worked perfectly fine and others didn't work at all. There didn't seem to be any real link between their age and how well they worked, either, so I decided to do some research.

There are lots of stories bouncing around the internet about how VHS tapes are supposed to stop working after ten years, or 15, or 20, but there doesn't seem to be any real consensus. People have written their anecdotes about all sorts of lifespans for the dumb things.

It turns out that there are a lot of reasons for the wildly different stories. First off, there was a lot of advertising done when DVDs came out—trying to convince people to switch from VHS to DVD, with the claim that VHS tapes wouldn't last very long.

And the conditions that cause the tapes to wear out vary wildly. VCR malfunction is the quickest cause, of course, but other factors include: rapid temperature swings, frequent use, low humidity, proximity to magnets and electronics, and storage conditions.

What makes it even more confusing is that many of the factors aren't even consistent. Infrequent usage can sometimes cause the tapes to fail, and frequent use can do the same thing.

The last movie released on VHS was “A History of Violence,” in 2006. I doubt that a copy of this will be the last movie ever watched in the format, of course: by that time DVDs had pretty much taken over the whole scene, leaving very little of a VHS market remaining. The “last view” honor will most likely go to someone's home movie, and probably within the next 50 years.