The Mother of All Dohickeys

Found on The Eco-Senior, via Audrey.

Thinking about Guns, Or Not

 Some gun people staged an event in the Broad Ripple neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana recently. Broad Ripple is home to View From The Porch and The Adventures of Roberta X. The event was called OBRWG (Occupy Broad Ripple With Guns) and was intended (I think) to demonstrate that carrying a gun is civilized and should not be prohibited.

One Indianian posted this message on an internet forum. I thought it illuminating.

"I will use my workplace as an example. I work closely with about 15 people. Two of us are gun guys and the rest are pretty much uneducated to guns and gun laws. When the OBRWG topic came up how do you think it went? I'll tell you it was ugly. They had made up their minds that it was a bad thing and noone would change that. Even though I didn't support OBRWG I still tried to explain some things to them but it didn't register. That was 15 people. 86% of the people I work with everyday believe gun carriers are wrong, on power trips, have hidden agendas or are looking for trouble. Now imagine how a whole city thinks." - jd4320t

For cogent explanation of pistol packing, see this post by The Munchkin Wrangler.

Via Roberta X.

The Future Connectivity of All Things, Large and Small

A post by Patrick J. Kiger on the Discovery website asks if connecting everything to the internet (top men are working on this as we speak) is a good idea. I am sure it is. Who will benefit is another matter. I could see it bringing the internet to a crawl when everything decides to talk at once, either because of a programming error or because of intentional monkeying by a new gang of merry pranksters, or not so merry pranksters, for that matter. I can see whole server farms come crashing to a halt because the immense flow of data uncovers some fatal weakness in a data farming algorithm. I can see corporations internally crippled, and eventually collapsing because an overworked key programmer cracks under the strain of trying to keep his colossal master placated and running smoothly. The CEO, unable to comprehend what is happening will steadfastly deny there is any problem at all while the remaining inept minions will scurry around ineffectively trying to patch things up enough to keep the ship of commerce afloat, unaware that the vessel has cracked in half and nothing they can do will save it.

But these kind of disasters will be rare events, kind of like police beatings of innocent suspects, and mostly it will work smoothly and will be a great boon to mankind. Although with the way things are going I am beginning to wonder if my vision of ancient Egypt as an empire of high-technology might have some real basis.

Quote of the Day

“Years ago, I used to listen in the car on my way to reporting gigs, and I’d notice that I disagreed with everything he was saying, yet I not only wanted to keep listening, I actually liked him." - Ira Glass talking about Rush Limbaugh in an old story in the New York Times by Zev Chafets.

 Make no mistake: in my book Rush Limbaugh is a flaming jackass. I've only heard him a couple of times, briefly at that, and my mind was set.

Normally I try to refrain from writing about people I disagree with, I don't want to give them any more publicity than they already have. Rather I try to write about good ideas. I don't always succeed, but I try. Picking a fight with someone like Rush is like throwing gasoline on a fire. He thrives on that kind of thing.

He reminds me Michele Bachmann, the insane, which reminds me of the Borgia family. We have immersed ourselves in a television series about the Borgia family the last couple of days (available from Netflix). I find myself exclaiming "they're insane!" at least a couple of times every episode. Maybe they are, but more likely they are just human, just like Rush and Michelle and you and me and everyone else on this planet.

Via Dustbury.

Update: We just finished watched the series, and I discovered that it is NOT the Showtime version which debuts next month, but a different series from Europe. Too bad these two groups couldn't have gotten together to produce an extended series.

Comedy. Or Not.

I watched a couple of episodes of Breaking Bad last night. Netflix has it labeled as a comedy, but it seemed more like a horror show - just one disaster after another. It was so extreme I wondered if maybe I just wasn't getting it. I asked my college age son about it and he thinks it's funny, so I don't know.  It reminded me of True Lies with Arnold and Jamie. The opening scene (at 55 seconds in the trailer) has Arnold having a running gun battle with a bunch of bad guys on skis. He manages to reach his accomplice in their getaway vehicle, a big old bread truck. Both doors are open and the driver is leaning forward talking to Arnie. Arnie tells him to sit up and he does and Arnie fires shot through the truck, the bullet passing right in front of the driver and hits a bad guy who has just appeared on the far side of the truck. It was one of the funniest scenes in the movie and the audience roared, me along with them. It was just so over the top that it was funny. A friend of mine went to see this movie and we were talking about this scene and he didn't get it. What's so funny? A man was shot and killed. What is everyone laughing about?
Reminds me of a couple of movies by the Coen brothers that I expected to be funny, but really weren't. Also remember reading something about how the Coen brothers make people laugh at things they normally wouldn't laugh at. And then there was Danny DeVito's War of the Roses, that was supposed to be a comedy, but was really very sad.

500

Following a link to the BBC I got an error page with this charming little character. What was weird is it wasn't an image, or at least not an image according to Firefox. Some html voodoo I suppose. The light gray blocks surrounding the image did not appear on the original page. I am not sure where they came from.

Just tried to look at the html. This version of Firefox (7.0.1) does not have the View Source command. And the two editors I tried (Gedit and Bluefish) both locked up while trying to edit it. Though that could be because Linux is Lovely.

Storytellers

Nobody knows what is going to happen. Given what you know about your situation, you could make some predictions on what is likely to happen, but you do not know. A big rock could fall out the sky and crush you. That would kind of put a crimp in your plans. The odds are slim that such a thing would happen, but it is possible. Closer to home you can be pretty certain that things will go as you expect them. The farther from home you look, and the more people that are involved, the more uncertain the future becomes.

The world is a complex place, and it is especially complex for humans who can comprehend just how complex it is, which can make decision making difficult. For some things we rely on our instincts to guide us. We are fundamentally animals, and we have a full set of instincts. For many other things, we depend on our minds to make a decision. But some questions are very complex, and trying to figure out the best decision can be time consuming and arduous. In most cases a decision is not critical. Should you have a Coke or a Pepsi? Should you take the freeway or Main street?

But other decisions, should be given a little more thought. Unfortunately, there are some questions where there is just not enough information available. The future is unknown. All you can do is place your bet and hope it turns out okay. Our beliefs help us decide what to do in cases like this. And where do our beliefs come from? They come from storytellers.

We start off nursery rhymes and stories our parents tell us. We move on to school where we pick up more stories, probably as many from our classmates as we do from actual school. And then there is church and TV. TV. Hoo boy. All kinds of stories come out of that box, and most of them only serve to reinforce the stories we already know.

Who are our storytellers? Some of them. like teachers and preachers, have spent years studying a subject and their stories can be considered to at least partially convey the information they have acquired. Others were born with the gift of gab, and by persistent practice have come to be known far and wide. Talk show pundits, for instance, and some preachers for that matter.

This is how wars get started. Somebody stands up and starts telling stories about how we need to fight the enemy and the people around him listen and, if they like his presentation, they will start believing his story. The speaker doesn’t know if going to war is the right thing to do anymore than anyone who is listening to him. But by saying it, and repeating it over and over again, he can sell the idea to all those listening to him, and eventually, by gum, we get a war.

What Goes Around

We watched the latest episode of The Good Wife the other day. Just now I was looking at a TV schedule and I noticed that the name of the episode was Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. I would like to think they got the idea from me, but the phrase has probably been around since the dawn of time.

Power to the People

I've had this idea knocking around in my head and I haven't done anything about it so I thought I would just write it up here. Feral Genius was without power for a week or so, a couple weeks back. Why not get a generator, Jen? Compartment, that's why, which got me thinking, why not? Because the CO (carbon monoxide) will kill you! OMG (oh my gawd) we're all gonna die! Never mind that we have all kinds of appliances that burn fossil fuels in our houses without killing us. It should be possible to set up a generator so that is properly vented and therefor safe to use inside, but that could be a lot of hassle, and we would probably lose a few people while we got all the kinks sorted out. So what else we got?

You could leave the generator down on the street and run an extension cord up the side of the building. As long as you weren't than ten floors up (one hundred foot extension cord is the longest commonly available), and you lived in a crime free neighbor hood where no one would ever dream of stealing your generator. Or you could put it on the roof, as long as it wasn't more than ten floors up, and you could get there, and there was a flat place to put the generator. Lot's of if's, and's or but's here.

How about we hang it outside a window from an arm that holds it a couple of feet away from the building? Hanging in mid air, no one is going to steal it. It's close by, easy to refuel. It's outside, the regulation two feet from the building. Perfect, as long as you keep your windows closed, and you've got the gap where the extension cord comes into the house sealed up.

There. Another big idea. Go ahead and run with it.

Air Compressor Project

A couple of friends of mine are attempting to resurrect an old air compressor. It is not a particularly worthwhile project, a new compressor can be had from Harbor Freight for a little over a hundred bucks. Still, a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks, and if they can get this thing working they will have acquired an air compressor for free. And they won't be giving the evil Red Chinese any money.

The problem is that the bottom of the tank has rusted out resulting in multiple holes. Jack has a welder, and they thought this would a perfect opportunity for the welder to earn it's keep. So they fired it up and poured a mess of liquid steel on the holes. Did not quite do the job. Seems someone tried to patch it before by brazing it, and then our two heroes tried to weld over it. Welding on top of brazing doesn't work too well. So they got serious and cut the whole rotten, patched and repatched mess out of the bottom of the tank. Inside they found a serious pile of rust, like two or three cupfuls, and this is only an eight gallon tank.

The cut out piece, previous patched, is lying on top of the tank.

The pile of the rust is a little hard to see in this picture. It is blatantly obvious in person. Perhaps the flash reduced the contrast between the pile and the sidewall of the tank.

New plan is to take a piece of plate steel they have lying around, form it to match the curve of the tank (I would like to see how they intend to accomplish that), and then weld it over the hole. Jack is a little concerned about the total air pressure that would be pushing on the patch, but hey, that's why you use a steel patch and weld it in place.

Dogs on Drugs

Heard a odd story at dinner last night. Woman has a dog, a nice dog, a very doggy dog, until she leaves the pooch alone at home. Then he turns into the hound from hell. Chews up the furniture, chews up the house, chews down the blinds. Unlocks the sliding glass door, opens the door, runs outside through the mud. Runs back inside, tracks mud everywhere. Repeat. Someone gave her a diagnosis of "acute separation anxiety" and a prescription for Prozac. The drug seems to work. Now the dog behaves like a normal dog whether anyone is with him or not.

Other odd thing is that you can get drugs for animals from people pharmacy's. Usually they are more expensive, but in this particular case they were a lot cheaper, like less than half.

Diamond Age

Technologists are forging ahead regardless. New super light material, might even be able to make it out of diamond, hence stealing the title from Neal Stephenson's book. Via Roberta X.

They claim it is lighter than air, but then it is mostly empty space, which is filled with air. I wonder what would happen if you wrapped it with saran wrap and then pumped all the air out. Would it be able to maintain its' structure and actually become lighter than air? Or would the outside air pressure crush it flat, or just enough to make it heavier than air? I like the idea of vacuum balloons.

Quote of the Day

“The court is not without some sympathy for taxpayers penalized for failing to pay a tax of which they were unaware. However, every citizen is presumed to know the law.” - Some Oregon judge.

"Every citizen is presumed to know the law." Hmmph. I remember learning when I was a kid that "ignorance of the law is no excuse". I can understand why some people get all worked up over "burdensome government regulations". Sometimes it seems like there is no end to them.

We could do away with most of our taxes if we simply replaced them with my glorious, extremely simple resource extraction tax. Everything that comes out of the ground - coal, oil, the metal from ores would be taxed at some minuscule rate. If we did that we could dispense with half the lawyers and half the accountants. Hmmm. That means we would then have a bunch of unemployed lawyers, and who knows what kind of trouble they would be stirring up. Probably start quibbling about my entirely reasonable and most wonderful resource extraction tax. Some people are just never happy.

Quote of the Day

People! Please remember this simple truth, that seems to elude so many seemingly rational people, "Projects are the means, Tools are the end." The mess is just an unavoidable side effect. -Marc Davis

It's a little hard to tell, but that is Optimus Prime lurking in the far corner.

Update November 2022 replaced missing picture.

Spreadsheet Monkeyshines

I helped out a friend with a spreadsheet. The outfit she worked for had upgraded their laptops to the latest and greatest version of Excel. What a painful experience. It is like opening the door to the control room of a nuclear power plant (or the cab of a steam locomotive). There are more bells and whistles than you can shake a stick at. I am sure that someone finds all these new features useful. I am also sure I really do not want to know about any of it. All I want is to make some updates to an old spreadsheet, close it up and go watch TV, or drink beer, or something, you know, useful.

The biggest problem, and I have to admit is probably not Excel's doing, is the way the spreadsheet slides around when I drag my finger across the touchpad. I want to move the cursor somewhere so I can click on something, and everything I was working on disappears and I am now on column UXQ and row 9 zillion. I tried deleting some columns to see if that would help, but no. Excel supports 16,000 columns, and as near as I can tell you get them all whether you want them or not. I finally struck on the idea of freezing some panes. Put the cursor in the lower right most cell and click on Freeze Panes. It's on one of the menus at the top of the screen, or is it the top of the window? I have forgotten. Actually, I am not sure I ever knew. I just looked through them all until I found the one I wanted. In any case this locked the portion of the spreadsheet I was working on in place. It actually contained all my data and the graph. We are talking about a fairly small data set here, fewer than a hundred items.

After that it was much easier to make the actual changes that were required. Of course easier is a relative term. This is the new Excel, and everything has been improved. Yeah, right. As far as I am concerned all they did was change the way everything works, so you have to figure out how to do what you want all over again. I just did this same thing last year.

On one hand I can understand software developers trying out new and different things. This whole computer thing is still pretty new. Who knows? Somebody might stumble on a new concept for a user interface that is a real breakthrough. On the other hand, having to spend two hours trying to figure out how the new stuff works so you can make some changes that would have taken fifteen minutes with the old stuff that you already knew how to use is counter-productive.

There are two trends in consumer software these days that I find irritating, useless and/or stupid:

• Social networking. Look at all the ways you can share your life with complete strangers.
• Super slick animated desktops. Look at the way I can pan and scroll with a flick of my finger. Never mind where I land, look at how cool it looks.

I am thinking we need two kinds of software. One kind that is full of gimicks and another that lets you get on with your job. Actually, these two kinds probably already exist. The first one is what you get on consumer devices. The other you have to actually seek out.

Zombie Detector

I replaced the motion detector by the front door and I took the old one apart just to see what was inside. Cracking it open was a destructive process - the case ended up in a pile of little plastic bits. I am puzzled as to how it operates. I thought motion detectors mostly relied on ultrasonics, but there is a plastic shield that goes in front of this thing. Plastic case, plastic horn, plastic shield.

The emitter / sensor is the small round can with the black rectangle on top in the center of the board.

Plastic feed horn, from the back.

Plastic feed horn in place on top of emitter / sensor.

Half of Nothing

I picked up a carton of Half & Half at the store the other day and when I get home I discover it is not Half & Half but some kind of alien disguised as Half & Half. It is in the same refrigerated display case right next to the real deal, the carton is printed with the same colors and the same logos. This is kind of BS that sends people over the edge. Death to Darigold and all their minions.

Glue & Mirror

The mirror in the basement bathroom tried to fall off the wall. Fortunately I noticed its' precarious stance before it let loose completely. Now how do I fix it? I mean the glass isn't broken, or even damaged. The glue that was holding it to the backing board was coming loose. There was just one larger patch near the bottom that was still hanging on. Yes, I could throw it out and just go buy a new one, but that goes crossways with me in about six different ways. Let's see if we can fix it.

Originally the mirror was simply glued onto the backing board, and the backing board has the hardware to hang it on the wall. Well, let's just get some glue and glue it on. Hold on a second there buckwheat, just what kind of glue are you going to use? I had a mirror replaced on our old Windstar and they used the wrong kind of glue and it destroyed reflective surface. I look on the net and I don't really find much. Everybody recommends Liquid Nails, but then they say do not trust the glue alone, use mechanical clips as well. As Snigs says, >.<.

I don't have any Liquid Nails and I don't want to go buy a whole big tube when I am only going to use a smidgen. I do have a tube of contact cement. If it works, great. If not, I'm not really any worse off than if the mirror had fallen. I use the whole tube and let it set for a day. It doesn't destroy the silvering, and it seems to hold just fine. But how long will it last? If it lets go, we are liable to have glass shards from here to Topeka, not to mention being out a mirror. Can we rig up some kind of mechanical backup? We can. I make up some clips from some brass picture hanging hooks and wire them to the backboard with safety wire. Forgot that two inches of the outer edge were translucent so you can see them. Two at the top at the 45 degree position, and two along the bottom.

Question is, are they stylishly modern, being all brass and stainless-ly, or simply hillbilly tacky? I suppose it doesn't matter, it's in the basement, it's on the wall, and it only cost a dollar (for the hooks). I count the glue as free, the tube was already opened and if I didn't use it for this, it would probably sit around until it was completely dried up and useless.

Update November 2016 replaced missing picture.

Bond Rates

Just happened to notice this poster in the local Edward Jones office. It does not mean much to me, I am not going to make any decisions about buying or selling bonds. I leave that to my financial adviser / broker. Yes, I know, there is an inherent conflict of interest in asking one person to do both jobs, but at least he is paying a more attention to what is happening in the markets. I look at my balance occasionally. Lately it's been going down, more than even college expenses can account for. If I only had a job, but that would require enthusiasm, something that is really hard to generate for the kinds of BS jobs that are out there.

It is a little worrisome that the lowest interest rates are below one percent. It is somewhat reassuring that none of the interest rates are even close to reaching  to ten percent.

George Orwell and Father Christmas

Who knew they were in cahoots? Claire Wolfe has an illuminating story about the totally innocuous, widely reviled Christmas Tree tax. Via Roberta X.

Battery Testing

Batteries are a perfect example of the double-edged sword of technology. They are really great in that they can put electrical power in the palm of your hand. They are really bad because if you are not careful you can waste a lot of money on them, you can ruin your expensive little play-pretty, or you could even hurt yourself.

Used to be there were two kinds of batteries: big, heavy lead-acid batteries for cars and such, and dry cells for your flashlight. But then some whiz kids started looking at them and we started getting all kinds of new, improved batteries that used things like mercury, cadmium, nickel, and now lithium.

We go through a fair number of batteries around here. Double A, triple A and nine volt are the most popular. Sometimes you have a play-pretty that isn't acting right and the first thing you do is replace the batteries. Sometimes that fixes it, sometimes it doesn't, but the old batteries end up in the discard pile. Given the price of batteries (EXTREMELY HIGH), my compulsive self requires that I sit down and test all of the batteries in the discard pile before consigning them to the recycling bin. Today I found two nine volt batteries that are probably still good. I say probably because they measure nine volts on my multimeter. Generally speaking, measuring the voltage on any kind of small battery, except for the lithium ones, can give you a pretty good indication of whether it is any good or not. If they show any less than full voltage I will toss them. By less I mean a tenth of a volt.

This test doesn't work with Lithium batteries. Fortunately I don't have many of those.

The meter test works, but it's kind of a hassle. I have to hold the battery and two test leads and I don't have a gripping hand. And then I have to peer at the meter and try and make out whether it reads 1.5 or 1.4 volts. So I looked on Amazon for a battery tester. They have 2,000 different battery testers for sale. I am sorry, that does not really help me. Google wasn't any better. They found all kinds of outfits from hype-mongers to specialized industrial technologists.

I poked around for a while, but eventually I gave up and decided I would just stick with my multimeter, clumsy as it is.

Bank Fees

I like conspiracy theories. Sometimes they are just entertaining, sometimes they offer a surprisingly perceptive explanation of what the hell just happened. So, without further ado, here's my theory on the great bank fee imbroglio.

First, a basic explanation of how banks work. Banks make money by making loans. They get the money that they lend out from some great pie-in-sky outfit called the Fed. The Fed lends them the money at some rate that they pulled out of a hat. However, they will not just lend a bank as much money as they want. The Fed insists that the bank have some collateral, some actual cash on hand. You know, to keep up appearances, so they don't look like complete shysters. So the bank takes in a dollar in deposits from you or me or grandma, uses that as their good faith token, then borrows 5 or 10 or however many dollars the Fed will lend them, then lends that money out to businesses (mostly), who pay the bank interest. The bank uses the interest they receive to pay for their fancy building with the marble floors and gilded lilies, the exorbitant bonuses that go to their executives, the pitiful salaries for the tellers, and lastly to pay you and me and grandma some negligible interest on that token deposit on which this whole elaborate contraption is based.

But now times are tough. Banks are having a hard time finding customers who look like they might actually be able to repay their loans. So they aren't lending out so much money, which means they don't need to borrow as much from the Fed, so they don't need as much collateral in the form of deposits. Banks don't really want customers. They are a nuisance. They come into the actual building, take up space, and take up teller's time with their niggling little requests. The only reason they put up with customers is so they can get those deposits. But now they don't need as much in the way of deposits, so they don't need so many customers, so they came up with this scheme to drive them away. First by charging fees for things that used to be free, and second by goading / hiring some rabble rousers to make a big stink about it. The whole point is to drive away small, nit-picky customers, the ones who are liable to cost them more money than they are worth.

The only problem with this theory is that all those bank customers are moving to Credit Unions who seem to be glad to have them. I really don't have an explanation for why Credit Unions would want all these annoying customers, other than maybe they can use a big influx of deposits.

Deadly Dangerous Copra

Back when I was a kid in school, teacher learned us about copra. It's really important, and it's made from coconuts. I've never actually seen any. Then this morning Tam put's up a post about the guano islands, which leads to a reference to copra, and since I never found out just why it was so important, I have to go look it up, which leads to this:

"Copra has been classed as a dangerous good due to its spontaneously combustive nature."

Spontaneously combustive nature!?! That was something they learned us in shop class about oily, turpentine soaked rags. And here I had just found out how acetylene can spontaneously decompose and explode. That's two really cool burny things in one year!

Oh yeah, copra? They make coconut oil out of it.

The Fourth Man

I'm of two minds about this movie. On one hand, the main story line is kind of intriguing. We've got an alcoholic, bisexual Dutch writer who is apparently given to vicious daydreams and / or hallucinations, so you aren't really sure just what's going on. But all these incidents are kind of a sideshow to the main plot line, but they keep recurring, so maybe this guy is a little bit psychic. The main story is kind of weird too. This semi-creepy writer dude hooks up with a rich, young, beautiful woman, who you would think would be enough for any man, but he finds she has a connection with this other dude, who he is lusting over. Geez, this guy really is a waste. Anyway the story winds on, and there are enough weird little things going on so you are wondering just what the story is. Are we going to have a murder? Espionage? But then they get to the climax and the whole thing collapses in farce. Perhaps if they had been a little more deft in their portrayal it would have been better, but all when all signs are pointing to one thing, and the one thing turns out to a plastic flower that spits water in your face, well, maybe they couldn't have done it any better.

Internet Movie Data Base page.

Costco Executive Membership

I went to Costco the other to pick up a few items. When I get to check out, a woman employee starts telling me how I should sign up for an Executive membership, how it's a really good deal, how if I was an Executive member I would be eligible for another $75 in rebates (these are actual cash money rebates, not some nebulous coupon fluff), which is more than the extra fee for Executive membership would have cost. I decline, and she goes on, and the cashier chimes in. It was quite a spiel, but I still declined.

It might actually be a good deal, and I might still sign up, but the way they are pushing it bothers me. If it is such a great thing, why do they have to promote it so heavily? From the looks of it, it will cost them money. I pay a small fee now, and in a year I will get double my money back. What possible advantage is there for them? The only advantage I see is that they offer you more "services", which allows them to get their hooks deeper into you, which means they capture more of your business, and thereby make more money. I don't expect to use any of these other services, but I am afraid of being inundated with offers. The only offer I am interested in is a job. As long as it isn't testing. I hate testing.

Still, I suppose I should sign up. Money for nothin' is pretty attractive. I am already adept at discarding spam, whether it is the electronic or paper variety, so a small increase in volume should not have a big impact on my mental health. I just find it odd that Costco would find it worthwhile to promote this thing that apparently costs them money. Those hooks must be really valuable.

The Masses Versus Useful

After I put up my post about the movie Hanna, I thought that maybe I should have included a picture of the Nazi wind tunnel, so I went looking for one. I remember seeing a whole photo essay about the place, lots of really cool pictures with lots of abstract shapes, kind of science-fictiony. I found bupkis. Oh, I found a few photos, but the only ones that looked anything like what I remembered were stills from the movie Aeon Flux.


OK, I'm old, and memory is not totally reliable, and supposedly it gets worse as you get older, but this is just wrong. Did those pictures, the ones I am thinking about, just vanish? Did someone take them down? That would be weird. And then I noticed that most of the pictures Google was returning were pictures of celebrities, or of people anyway. Has the people's penchant for pictures of other people taken over Google's search engine? I mean their photo organizer Picasa is totally centered on people. It can even identify the people in your pictures.

But this is not what I want. If I have one picture of people I know, that is plenty. I don't really understand why you would want more than one, and I certainly don't need any pictures of celebrities, I don't even know them. Yes, I realize that pictures of celebrities can be found on my blog but I believe it is always in relation to a movie, and those posts are about the story, not the actor.

Then I got this email from High Performance Computing this morning and I realize that the mass market is now feeding on itself. The amount of gossip is growing so fast we now are dedicating an entire industry to studying it. This looks like a giant case of GIGO to me.

So while the mass market has led to mass production of fiendeshly clever devices, the application of these devices has now become almost totally focused on gossip. Any useful application of modern computing/communications only exists on the fringe of this giant chatroom, and is apparently subject to being pushed off the edge whenever the volume of chatter gets a little too loud.

Hanna

Movie website.

A pretty interesting movie, especially the first half when you don't really know what is going on. After a while it becomes apparent that we have an evil agent working for an evil government agency that is out to kill our two heroes in order to eliminate any evidence that the evil agency, whoever they are, were ever involved in some reprehensible scientific research, or whatever they were doing. Cate Blancett plays the role of evil agent, and she plays her role well. She pulls out this West Texas accent whenever she want to convince someone of her good intentions, which I did not understand. Is that accent supposed to be folksy and downhome? Wouldn't a pleasant tone of voice do as well? Why use the Texas accent, unless we are trying to pass along the message that maybe you shouldn't trust someone just because he has folksy, downhome accent?

The longer the movie plays, the less things make sense. When Hanna is initally captured she has no trouble killing everyone within sight, but soon after that she starts letting people off. Some are reasonable, they were no immediate threat, had not harmed her, and did not appear they would be able to hurt her. Others were obviously bad guys, they were a serious threat, she had the means to take them out, but she lets them go. As near as I can tell, this was only to prolong the chase scenes. And then there's the old sneaking up while the camera isn't looking business. I hate that shit. Once in a while, it's okay, especially if it is believable, but you only get to do it once per movie. You pull it more than once and you are being a jerk.

And then there's the denouement. Cate in dress shoes (at least they weren't spike heels) and business dress chasing a teenager around an abandoned amusement park, and she catches her? Who are you kidding? At that point it has pretty much fallen completely apart, but don't fret, it's almost over.

The first part of the movie, set in some snow bound woods, was really good. The parts with the hippiesque family were pretty good. We don't find out what happens to them, but given how evil these evil agents have been up to this point, it's probably not good. There was a chase sequence in some concrete tunnels that I think may have been shot in the old Nazi wind tunnel in Berlin. That was kind of cool.

Update October 2015. Replaced movie site link, replace missing picture.

Quote of the Day

"They really should allow guns on planes. If you're going to need one at school, in church and wherever, why wouldn't you need to defend yourself in the air? Besides, to be really second amendment-y, they should just hand out guns at check-in. You never know when someone wants to snatch your freedom." - Dave in a comment on Burro Hall.

Handing out guns at check-in is one way to deal with the threat of potential terrorists. Only problem is I am pretty sure a majority of air travelers would not know how to handle a firearm which would lead to a profusion of accidental discharges, which would not be a good thing. I wonder how many people in your average plane load do know how to handle any kind of gun, much less some random government issued handgun. I suspect the numbers would be pretty low, like zero, which means the terrorist, if there was one on the plane, would win, if he could outshoot the crew.

Gas

Contrary to what hippies think (since I know what other people think, being omniscient and all), our civilization runs on petroleum, about a hundred gallons a month per person. Specifically, gasoline. Oil causes all kinds of problems, mostly because we use so much of it, there are buckets of money involved, and well, that kind of explains it, doesn't it?

On the other hand, we have a boatload of Natural Gas, sometimes it is more than we know what to do with. It is great for any energy hunger operation that isn't going anywhere. You can run a pipeline and suck up all the gas you want or need. For powering any kind of vehicle, it is a little more problematic. You need a big, high pressure tank to hold the gas. You can get such tanks, but they are expensive and they are big.

Then I got an idea. Natural gas and oil are both hydrocarbons, which means they are composed of the elements hydrogen and carbon. Natural gas is mostly methane, which has a chemical formula of CH4, which means one carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms. Oil is composed of chains of carbon atoms surrounded by hydrogen atoms. They come in a variety of lengths. Tars are very long chains, oils are composed of medium length chains, and gasoline is made of a variety of shorter chains. Methane is like a chain with a length of one.

Cracking is a process they use in the oil refineries to break long chains into shorter ones. They use it to turn things like tar, which is like the bottom of the barrel (literally and figuratively), into gasoline which is worth more. So we can break chains. Can we make chains?

What we need is a breakthrough in chemical engineering that would allow us to build up long chain hydrocarbons from short ones, like methane. We need a breakthrough because no one has figured out how to do this on an industrial scale for a low cost. If we could do this, we could be making gasoline out of natural gas, which would give us an alternative to getting oil from the Middle East, and could postpone a war with China and India over oil.

Quote of the Day

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." ---Thomas Jefferson, 1816.

My outlook toggles between dark and light. It's been pretty dark lately (we are all doomed), but this morning a little light crept in in the form of this quote. From Gunsite, Via Tam.

Thinking is hard work, especially about things that are not intrinsically interesting. Most of our everyday lives exhibit little, if any. What's worse is that most of what you hear on TV is spoken by people who have given little, if any, thought to what they are saying. They open their mouths and stuff, to put it nicely, comes out.

Tab Clearing

Links to amazing / interesting / weird stuff I've come across this week.

• Chicken Tax via Dustbury
• Older Peron Transgression via Tamara
• Sheep eating grass via Scott

Title stolen from Tam as well.

Contact

The switch controlling the gas fireplace was being flaky. Push it once and the fireplace comes on. Turn around five minutes later and it has gone out. Flip the switch and it comes back on again. Probably because it's the wrong kind of switch. It's a standard household light switch, good for 15 Amps and 120 Volts and it is being asked to switch 800 millivolts and some small number of milliamps. I imagine that the load is not enough to keep the contacts free of corrosion. They are probably brass, and a thin film of corrosion is all it would take to keep it from working. So I go to Home Depot and buy a new switch for $2.50 and install it and the fireplace seems to be happier now. Just for grins, or because I am compulsive this way, your choice, I take the old one apart. Here, for your amusement is a picture of the contacts from the old switch.

Disaster

The Chrysler Sebring, the one my son and I spent the summer overhauling, has blown up. Coming up grapevine hill after lunch yesterday I gave it the beans and in response got a loud noise. It made it to the top of the hill but as soon I shifted into neutral the engine died. I pulled over and called for a tow.

Up till then there was no indication that there was anything seriously wrong. There were a few minor problems, like the clunk in the suspension, the whine from the alternator, something snapping down by the fan belt,  and steering wheel was on crosswise. But no indication of a real problem. Except for maybe the heat. Drive across town and the motor gets warm, as it should, but open the hood, and it seems really hot, like an oven, or an overheated motor. But we never got any of the conventional indications of an overheating motor. It didn't boil over, it wasn't loosing coolant, and the temperature gauge never got above the half-way mark.

So I don't know what went wrong. Maybe the block and heads were not flat enough. Maybe the head bolts should have been replaced. There was one funny thing, and that was when we filled the radiator with coolant it did not take nearly as much as I expected it too. So maybe there is something plugging the cooling system. But if that's the case, what's the deal with the temperature gauge? I don't know what went wrong, but things have definitely gone South and I am very unhappy.

To assauge my suffering I sit down to watch an old episode of Top Gear and they are doing a retrospective on the Rover V-8. This is interesting and a little painful. My first car was a 1963 Buick Special that I bought from my father for its' trade in value of $150. It had an aluminum V-8, the same engine that a couple of years later would become the Rover V-8, which would be used in a variety of British cars for the next 40 years.

Cars powered by the Rover V8 engine

Top Gear collected an entire fleet of cars powered by this engine for this picture. In the three years that General Motors produced this engine, they built 750,000 of them, which is more than the British built in the next 40 years*. General Motors quit building the engine because there were too many problems with the corrosion in the cooling system, due to customers using the wrong coolant in the aluminum engine.

Huh. Imagine that. Cooling problems with an aluminum engine. In case you didn't know, the engine in the Sebring is aluminum. Something is rotten in my garage and I want to find out what it is. Whether I will or not is another matter.

* Autocar has an interesting story about the Rover V-8.

Update August 2023 replaced missing picture and added YouTube link.

Jack's Jury Duty

My friend Jack got called for jury duty yesterday. For him, it's a short bus ride downtown and parking is expensive, so he took the bus. The bus is loaded with high school students on their way to school wearing their Halloween costumes. He gets to the Multnomah County courthouse where he sits and waits in a large room with 200 other people. The City of Portland, the most populous city in Oregon, is in Multnomah County, so this is the big deal in courthouses as far as Oregon goes.  At least the chairs are comfortable. Seems someone has set up a deal where you can donate your jury pay (which is some miserable amount like $10 a day) to buy better furnishings for the waiting room, like tables and chairs and TV's.

First off they need 20 or so people for a Grand Jury, which means you will be "serving" for 30 days. (Please Lord, don't pick me.) Then they pick off groups of 20 so for all the various trials going on.  Jack gets sent to a courtroom where a partially crippled woman is suing two drivers and one passenger for pain and suffering incurred from two parking lot bump-into-another-car accidents. The plaintiff's lawyer has quit.

Everybody's in the courtroom, then all the involved parties go to another room and (it's secret, we don't know what they were doing in there). They come back and it looks like it's going to trial, so now we need to select a jury. They question the jurors as a group, and some individually. In the end they excuse all but 13, 12 for the jury and one alternate, and Jack is excused.

So Jack goes back to the waiting room and waits some more. They call another 20 or so people to hang around for the rest of the day, just in case something comes up,  and the rest, including Jack, are free to leave. Another civic obligation fulfilled.

Nursery Rhymes

I'm reading Dustbury this morning which leads to What do you do with a drunken sailor? which I haven't heard in a zillion years, which leads me to the Roud Folk Song Index, which leads to my making a list of all the tunes I recognize from the list in Wikipedia. The full list has a zillion entries, but the Wikipedia page only lists about 750. Most of them I have never heard of, but then I see one I had forgotten about, which leads to looking at the next page, which leads to another tune I had forgotten about, and so I ended up reading all the way to the end. I was surprised to see how many songs about Robin Hood are in this list. Some of the tunes are just short little nursery rhymes, some have been recorded recently and become pop music hits.

        "The Streets of Laredo" (Laws B1)
        "Frog Went A-Courting"
        "The Twelve Days of Christmas"
        "Green Grow The Rushes Oh"
        "Banks of the Ohio"
        "John Barleycorn"
        "The Elfin Knight" (Child 2) (also "Scarborough Fair")
        "On Top of Old Smoky"
        "London Bridge Is Falling Down"
        "Buffalo Gals"
        "Old McDonald Had a Farm"
        "The Old Gray Mare"
        "Red River Valley"
        "Haul Away Joe"
        "Git Along, Little Dogies"
        "Cotton-Eyed Joe"
        "Old King Cole"
        "Blue Tail Fly"
        "Oats Peas Beans and Barley Grow"
        "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean"
        "Blow Ye Winds"
        "Blow the Man Down"
        "Rock-a-bye Baby"
        "Sweet Betsy from Pike"
        "The Ballad of Casey Jones"
        "Poor Wayfaring Stranger"
        "Cripple Creek"
        "Home on the Range"
        "Tom Dooley"
        "Turkey in the Straw"
        "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep"
        "Three Blind Mice"
        "Skip to My Lou"
        "The Arkansas Traveler"
        "Tom Dooley"
        "Shortnin' Bread"
        "Shady Grove"
        "Yankee Doodle"
        "Barnacle Bill"
        "There Was a Crooked Man"
        "Pop Goes the Weasel"
        "Auld Lang Syne"
        "The Farmer in the Dell"
        "Midnight Special"
 6487.  "Little Bo Peep"
 6489.  "Hickory Dickory Dock"
        "Big Rock Candy Mountain"
        "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands"
        "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star"
        "Polly Put the Kettle On"
 7922.  "The Muffin Man"
 7925.  "Ring a Ring O'Roses"
 7992.  "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum"
        "Do Your Ears Hang Low?"
10266.  "Jack and Jill"
        "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe"
11586.  "Itsy Bitsy Spider"
        "Camptown Races"
        "Michael Row the Boat Ashore"
        "See See Rider"
        "Rub-a-dub-dub"
        "Humpty Dumpty"
13027.  "Little Jack Horner"
        "Sing a Song of Sixpence"
13497.  "Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater"
13512.  "Ten Little Indians"
13711.  "Wee Willie Winkie"
13902.  "Jack Be Nimble"
15220.  "Go Tell It On the Mountain"
15472.  "Do Your Ears Hang Low?"
        "It's Raining, It's Pouring"
        "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe"
        "There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe"
19236.  "Row, Row, Row Your Boat"
19334.  "Old Mother Hubbard"
19478.  "Hey Diddle Diddle"
19479.  "Jack Sprat"
19532.  "Georgie Porgie"
19621.  "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son"
19626.  "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary"
19772.  "As I was going to St Ives"
19777.  "Simple Simon"
        "Little Miss Muffet"