The message is that there are known knowns:
There are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns: That is to say,
There are things that we now know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns:
There are things we do not know we don't know.
And each year we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.
— Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, transcribed from Broadcasting House's "Donald Rumsfeld Sound Bites of the Decade" 2008-04-20.
Following are some things that I know I don't know. If you would care to enlighten me, please transmit your wisdom to dave@flaterco.com.
Mystery since 2006-03-06: If they can put a man on the moon, why can't they make a sound card with a 44.1 kHz clock so that music from audio CDs wouldn't need resampling?
Added 2007-07-29
In theory, all rain falls straight down, lands on the roof, runs into the gutters, and is routed away from the house.
Uh-huh. In reality, prevailing winds blow an awful lot of rain onto the siding in front of the house, where it runs down until it encounters The Lip, which has the pretense of protecting the wooden trim beneath it from the water above (see Figure 3).
What it actually does is collect the rainwater and cause it to dribble out over, under, and eventually through the wooden trim at whichever point the water chooses to run over, thereby rotting out the trim and eventually the wall behind it. Note: The dents in the siding and in the lip itself were installed by the carefully researched, licensed, bonded, insured contractor that I hired to replace the rotten wood the first time.
Surely the geniuses who built this house had something else in mind? Where is the water supposed to go and how is this lip supposed to get it there?
2008-04: Different contractor looking to replace rotten wood agreed that this was stupid by design and recommended installing drip edge flashing all the way across under the J-channel. However, in practice most of the water leaks out at the ends or in the middle where there is a gap between the two pieces of J-channel. So I just caulked both ends and stuck a small piece of flashing in the middle to deflect the leaking water away from the trim.
2008-07: Water now seems to be flowing over everywhere except where I put the flashing. Something clogging the J-channel? Now I gotta drag my ladder back out front; sigh....
More ignorance coming soon.... Y'all have been too effective at answering my questions.