Jackson School Road Visualization Video - October 2017
Our neighborhood is adjacent to Jackson School Road. This road is basically one and half miles of two lane asphalt with drainage ditches on either side. It was a typical rural road for motor vehicles, no allowances for pedestrians or bicycles. A few years ago they widened the asphalt by a couple of feet on each side to make room for people and or bikes or something. Now there're going burn $20 million to turn it into a suburban utopia. I suppose it's a good thing. There aren't many pedestrians, but the ones there are tend to make me nervous because of their proximity to the traffic lanes and because they are often women and children.
They say this road sees 7,000 cars a day. $20 million divided by (7,000 cars times 20 years) works out to about $140 for each car. Washington county just added a $60 license plate surcharge for road improvements. It's semi-annual, so it's only $30 a year, which is only about one fifth of what this road improvement project will cost.
I posted the video above not because it was particularly interesting, but because it shows what kinds of software tools are available to designers these days. A similar video could have been made 20 years ago, but it would have been a major engineering project. Now the software has been developed so it's just a matter of point and click. Okay, it's still a bunch of work, but it's a standard thing now, not some Computer-Aided-Fantasy.
I started readingFall by Neal Stephenson a few weeks ago. A big part of the story is what constitutes consciousness. When you are awake, you are conscious, when you are asleep, you are not. Dead to the world is a common way of describing sleep. I feel like my life has been continuous, but every time I fall asleep, I lose a bit of continuity.
It's only really a problem if you are trying emulate a mind with a computer. Theoretically, if you could create a digital mind, you could replace memories and the digital person would never now. Problem is could you really model a human mind with a computer? Maybe, but I think it is still a long way off. I suspect there may be thousands of layers of complexity and we have only scratched the surface. We may understand what we have found so far, but our understanding has now revealed another layer of complexity underlying what we have found. We will keep digging, but it's going to take some serious effort for a long time before we are able to accurately model a human mind.
Another foreign language soap opera on Netflix. Full of tears and agonizing, the basics of any soap opera, but it also has a slightly different take on the War On Drugs. It also takes you on a tour of of life in Mexico City, which is pretty cool. There is some action and intrigue which is great, but for every 30 seconds of something happening there is ten minutes of crying and agonizing. Alcohol helps.
The President is trying curtail the number of people being killed in the drug wars. He asserts that the Mexican drug cartels are pawns of the Americans. That's a new angle. It's kind of funny, we hear about all the people being killed in Baltimore and Chicago and I assume it is because of turf wars being fought by low level drug distribution gangs. And we hear about the thousands of people being killed in Mexico in inter-cartel conflicts. But we never hear anything about the big drug distribution networks in the USA, probably because they have a well disciplined army of publicists and lobbyists who make sure that nobody breathes a word. Or maybe it's just rigid discipline, i.e. anyone who opens their mouth quickly ends up dead.
The government buildings in the show have sort of an old, decadent ambiance about them, but looking for the real buildings, I didn't find anything comparable. Also, who is the President of Mexico right now? I don't even know. Is it because my memory is bad, or is it because our media is so USA centric he never gets mentioned?
The title - Ingobernable - translates as Ungovernable. I don't know to pronounce it so I say Ingo-bern-able which is undoubtedly wrong, but it helps me remember how to spell it.
P.S. I tried to post a question about the buildings on Reddit, but evidently my account there was hacked, as was my account on Twitter. And lately my computer has taken to claiming that my network connection has gone down, even when other tabs on my browser are still working. Me thinks the internet needs a security overhaul.
Borepatch puts up a post about music, science and logic and it got me to thinking. Remember when the destruction of the ozone layer was the big boogeyman? Now we have climate change and we're all going to die. How do these ideas become political movements? It occurs to me they start with a scientist who becomes enthusiastic about an idea and he starts telling people about it and one of the people he tells is a politician who is impressed with this scientist's enthusiasm and becomes convinced that "something needs to be done", and it grows from there.
Western Civilization is inexorably entwined with the Christian Religion, but the Christian religion has been been flagging lately, partly due to the whole mystical nonsense bit. The Ten Commandments were a good start, but somehow we got this whole celestial fantasy with angels and devils and heaven and hell and all that is having a hard time with our evidence based science.
Some (most?) people seem to need to believe in something outside of their miserable little lives, and if their religion doesn't pass the smell test anymore, well, they'll look around for something else, and hey, what do we have here? Looks like Global Warming might be the new religion. For some people anyway. For some people it might be cricket.*
* Apologies to Brian for implying that his affection for cricket might be a form of insanity, but his post on the subject warmed my heart.
Back during WW2, Eddie and his posse were heading out from Hawaii on their way to check out the military situation in the South Pacific. Their first stop was supposed to be Canton Island. Haven't I heard of that place before? Yes indeedy, it was a refueling stop for the China Clipper.
Southeast Asia, especially the islands between the mainland and Australia is complicated mess. It covers a large area, so distances are vast, but then you find out things like New Guinea is a stones throw from Australia. (Yes, that's Australia sticking up from the bottom of the map.)
The whole WW2 New Guinea campaign was kind of weird. There were a whole bunch of battles fought there, but they were just so we could build up enough clout so that we could attack the ginormous Japanese base at Rabaul on the neighboring island of New Britain, and then we didn't. By the time we had enough clout in the area we were able to blockade Rabaul, which made attacking it superfluous.
Paolo is an Italian singer who is also a lawyer, or vice versa. I really like the tune. The video, I dunno, pretty girls, but pretty much an alien world. Or maybe I'm just old.
A thoroughly unpleasant movie. Four guys who have been staging successful robberies for years pull one more heist and get killed.. They leave behind their widows, who decide the best way to correct their reduced circumstances is to do the next job they planned. The women are pretty good, but just about every man in this movie is some kind lousy dirt bag. The best part of it is that the worst of them get their just desserts.
The British Home Office has hit upon a new strategy to curb knife crime, by putting anti-stabbing messages on boxes of fried chicken takeaway in several restaurant chains in England and Wales. Critics are calling it racist. - RT
Uniberp is tearing out the old flooring in his cabin by the lake. Reminds me of when the boys and I were tearing out multiple layers of old flooring from the house on North Swenson. I even bought an identical crowbar. It's some kind of Stanley super bar.
Clint Eastwood is getting old. There's not much to the story. Guy grows flowers, alienates his family, goes broke, gets a gig hauling drugs for the cartel, makes some money, redeems himself a bit. The best part was just watching Clint. I've been watching him forever and now he is getting old. He is really starting to look like my father before he died. On HBO.
This video just popped up on YouTube. It's so unusual I just had to share. Does anyone really prefer those fringed-bathing cap headresses most of the girls are wearing? I much prefer the long hair on the lead girl. Probably makes me a sexist pig or something. That's okay, I'm comfortable with who I am. Oink, oink.
Video starts with expose' of YouTube's war on guns. Real video starts at 3:12
We've been watching Princess Weiyoungon Netflix, another historical soap opera with about a zillion episodes. This one is set in China round about 500AD. We're about half way through and some thugs pop up with automatic crossbows, which got me to wondering if there really was such a thing. Seems there was.
When I'm travelling, I divide the world into Spontaneous countries and Research countries. Spontaneous countries have a culture of caring about the pleasures of the table, so visitors benefit from what the locals take for granted. You can drop into almost any eating place and be confident of getting a meal that is at least interesting. Examples are France, Italy, Spain and Thailand. Research countries have a history of perceiving food as fuel, designed simply to build up strength for work. A visitor needs to do a lot of homework to find good cooking there. Examples are Britain and the US. - David Dale
OK counter-terrorist action-thriller. Excerpt from the Hollywood Reporter review:
In theory, Unlocked is a noble attempt to forge a female counterpart to Bourne or Bond. But in reality, it is seriously hobbled by a creaky script and clumsy performances. Apted has a respectable track record, but he can do little to energize a groaningly familiar Frankenplot that seems to have been patched together from half a dozen equally forgettable movies and depends on a string of increasingly implausible double-cross twists instead of generating its own innate dramatic tension. The apocalyptic bio-terror attack, an oddly amateurish scheme hatched by a handful of unhinged hardliners with poorly explained motives, is also fatally low on suspense. It even climaxes with one of those frantic race-against-time countdowns that long ago jumped the shark from action thriller staple to Austin Powers-level parody.
I didn't notice any "clumsy performances", but "Frankenplot" definitely applies. Should I mention that the "frantic race-against-time countdown" happens with our heroine dangling over the edge of an umpteen story stairwell? This happens near the end. It's like they've already done everything new they can think of, so they have to throw in some cliches.
Today is Annie Oakley's birthday. This video includes 20-odd seconds of her in action. Pretty good considering it was filmed 125 years ago. Ammo.com has the story.
Leaving the restaurant after dinner yesterday, we drove one block and ran into a cruise-in. The street was totally packed with people and cars, parked cars, cars crawling along bumper to bumper. We sat there waiting for a couple of minutes until some dude stepped into the travel lane and gave me room to pull into the line. I felt a little out of place driving my box stock Japanese SUV in amongst a passel of Asian hot rods and American lo-riders. The picture doesn't show how crowded it was, it was like going to the fair.
Took the family out for dinner yesterday to celebrate the girl's birthdays. Montage is on the east side of the river, right next to the ramp leading to the Morrison Bridge.
We started with drinks next door at La Merde (you really gave your bar a shit name?) where they had this enormous NO MINORS sign. Must be eight feet wide.
This painting (SCIENCE) hangs in the dining room. The give away postcards of this one.
Montage Bar with broken frying pans
Notice the three broken frying pans hanging on the wall in the above image. I kind of wondered what the story was, but now that I've had time to reflect I'm even more curious. I mean, first of all, how the heck do you break a frying pan? There are no obvious signs of trauma, so how was it done? I suppose it could be done with fire and ice, but why? It's just weird man.
I had the chicken fried steak, mostly on account of not having seen it on a menu since I left Texas 30 years ago. It was fine, but it's really a meal for a hungry man, and being as don't do that much work anymore I seldom develop a real appetite. I ate the whole thing anyway and it left me contented.
The tab for drinks and dinner for six ran about $200. We were light drinkers, three of us were driving.
Bustedknuckles encountered some difficulties while working on an old Ford Bronco. I've run into some ugly mechanical problems, but his tale is epic. Beware, he uses some foul language. It's fairly mild compared to what you might hear in my garage when I run into these sort of difficulties.
Forbes has the story. Back when I used to run the Microsoft Windows operating system software on my personal computer, I used Kaspersky anti-virus software. It was much less hassle than McAfee or any of the other stuff that was floating around back then. I thought it was a little weird that it was coming out of Russia rather than the USA, but it was free and it seemed to do the trick.
Trying to secure all of the computers being used by government employees sounds like a thankless task, especially if they are in politics. Politicians, as we are constantly reminded, are generally idiots who at best can come up with endless stream of inflammatory one-liners. Maintaining a secure computer is beyond most of them, hell, it's beyond most people. Any system running anti-virus software is, almost by definition, insecure.
Me, I run Linux, and it mostly works, most of the time. But then I'm not working in national defense or politically charged situations.
Silly gimmick painting, but it caught my eye. When I first saw this picture, the device seemed familiar, like an electric razor, or an old remote control for a TV, or maybe some kind of printer. Phaser didn't spring to mind, but then I did a little checking.
Near the end of the Netflix seriesYankee, the anti-hero is proposing that the Mexican drug lords increase their production of fentanyl. I thought that was a dumb idea. Fentanyl is much more dangerous, do you want to kill off your customers? Heroin has a long history, people are familiar with it. Moving to fentanyl is going to cause problems. Evidently I was wrong, drug lords don't care about their customers dying, there seems to be an endless supply of people seeking relief from living.
Fentanyl is being used to make counterfeit prescription opioids.
This is a Post Card from the early 1970s. Flight between Tokyo and Paris was approximately 20 hours back then. Flight time today is like 12 hours. Why was it so different? Jet airliners, new or old, fly around 500 MPH. The USSR might have something to do with it:
I almost feel guilty about posting Veritasium videos. Almost every one he produces is great, so great that I can't really add much, but I'll give it a shot anyway.
The title on this one is poor. It might be better to call it How Cod Made the Vikings. He ties rickets, vitamin D and cod liver oil together. I remember hearing about rickets and cod liver oil a long time ago, but I never realized there was a connection, probably because rickets was never an issue. I'm taking vitamin D now. My wife recommended it.
Siege of Paris 885 - Jean-Victor Schnetz 1835
The bit about the Vikings laying seige to Paris was new to me, likewise the reason for the failure of the Viking's Greenland colony and
However, it was not until 1747 that James Lind formally demonstrated that scurvy could be treated by supplementing the diet with citrus fruit, in one of the first controlled clinical experiments reported in the history of medicine. As a naval surgeon on HMS Salisbury, Lind had compared several suggested scurvy cures: hard cider, vitriol, vinegar, seawater, oranges, lemons, and a mixture of balsam of Peru, garlic, myrrh, mustard seed and radish root. In A Treatise on the Scurvy (1753) Lind explained the details of his clinical trial and concluded "the results of all my experiments was, that oranges and lemons were the most effectual remedies for this distemper at sea.”
I did know that the Brits originated the regimented use of citrus, I just didn't know how that came to pass.
When I lived on the farm 50 years ago, I spent some time repairing broken machinery. Nuts and bolts became my friends and I soon discovered that just a few common sizes (1/4", 5/16", 3/8" and 1/2") covered 90% of what I needed. Most nuts and bolts were coarse thread, but every once in a while I'd come across a fine thread, or a 7/16" fastener. They came in different lengths, but most applications weren't too picky about the length. You could often use a longer one where a shorter one had been. I had a set of jars to hold the various sizes. I was prepared for any kind of mechanical breakdown.
Then along came metric, and then somebody gave the Chinese a screw machine and my carefully organized set of nuts and bolts quickly became irrelevant. Having a small set of fasteners that will cover 90% of your requirements is a good thing. When that set only covers only obsolete machinery that no one uses any more, it's kind of pointless.
This seems to have been a recurring theme throughout my life. Just about the time I have mastered a a machine and have all the tools I need to deal with it, the machine has become obsolete and my carefully organized set of tools and parts have become useless. This trend became even more pronounced when I started working on computers.
People like stability, safety and security. They like being sure that they will have something to eat and a comfortable place to sleep. They also have an appetite for new things. For some people, news reports satisfy that urge. For others it might be new stuff like clothes or cars or toys. For others, it's entertainment in the form of movies, music or sports.
Labor Unions focus on stability, safety and security. They want the same job, doing the same thing every day. Businesses like that too. When you have a smoothly running, profitable operation, everyone is happy. Problem is that nothing lasts forever and these days if something lasts ten years it's something of a miracle.
The Great Gatsby and his Duesenberg
When I was a kid back in the 1950's, a millionaire was something exceptional. A billion dollars was unimaginable. A few years ago I watched Flags of Our Fathers and towards the end of the film they are talking about fund raising and how they needed some billions of dollars to finish the war. Then I found out that the phrase 'a million here, a million there and pretty soon you're talking about real money' wasn't about millions, it was actually about billions and it wasn't from the 1960's, it was from before WW2.
How Big is a Trillion Dollars?
You don't hear much about millionaires anymore, billionaires are the hot topic. Every once in a while a news report will mention a trillion dollars, usually in context of whole US economy. Then I come across this report where there is 15 trillion dollars sitting in funds that are paying negative interest rates. Normal people invest money in things that have some kind of positive return. You give your broker $100 and in a year, if all goes well, you get $105 back. With these negative return investments, you are essentially paying them to hold your money for you. It's cheaper than buying a vault and hiring a security force to guard it for you, but that's about the best you can say for it.
There is an unimaginable amount of money out there looking for something to do. That might be why there are so many start-up companies being formed. People are looking for places to invest their money, so almost anyone with any kind of half baked scheme is able to get funding. Many of these will fail, but some of them will succeed, and a few of them might be a spectacular successes.
The fact that interest rates are so low indicates that not enough people are coming up with schemes to make money, or they aren't talking to the right people. Or maybe people are only looking for simple schemes that don't require funding. Complex schemes require working with people, after all, is a difficult job. Some people are good at it, but like most talents just because you are good at one thing does not necessarily entail that you are good at anything else.
I'm not a big sports fan, though I can enjoy watching a game now and then. To me, the ten second post game interviews are just absurd, but some people seem to enjoy them. Something like this would dumbfound them, I'm sure.
Mostly I don't like Pinterest because there is seldom any information about the pictures that get posted there, but then I realized it's great for funny stuff because everything I want to know is in the image.
I mean the world is full of bizarre going-ons, an ancient shipwreck full of sculptures could have been found off the east coast of Africa. I was so excited about this that half way through I stopped watching it so I could dig up some information for a blog posting, and that's when I found out it was all fake. The movie is a really good fake, though. The setting, the equipment, the acting were all thoroughly convincing.
The whole thing was a project by Damien Hirst who is famous in the art world (a fantasy land that operates in the upper stratosphere of society) to promote his show in Venice. His fame seems to come from the weird-ass art he produced. I mean is a dead animal in a glass tank full of formaldehyde really art, or is it a scientific specimen?
Stellar Orbits Around Milky Way's Central Black Hole (1995 - 2195)
I remember seeing something like this a while back, and I just came across it again onStarts with a Bang! It's just the coolest thing ever. The video is speeded up by a factor of two hundred million, but as I recall there are some planets that are so close to the center that they have an orbital period measured in days. How they managed to collect the data in order to produce this video borders on witchcraft. YouTube blurb:
This demo shows the observed and predicted orbits of thirteen stars that were used by astronomers at the Keck/UCLA Galactic Center Group to predict the position of a huge black hole at the center of the Milky Way. This data was provided by Andrea Ghez and Jessica Lu. The animation spans 200 years between 1995 and 2195.
Cheeto Jesus may be many things, good, bad, and ugly.... but he is an undeniable master at directing conversations and eyes. In just a few tweets, he has made Cortez, Omar, Tlaib, and Cummings the very face of his opposition. (I don't call them the face of the Republican parties opposition, because I am quite certain the Trumpster is for himself, and not for any party. The 'pubs hate him as much as the 'Dems do, and Trump was registered D for almost his entire life before swapping out just to run for election.) In any case, he manages to control the thoughts of millions of people through nothing more than short comments. He's moved into so many peoples heads, they can't help themselves but jump at his every word, if unsteadily so given the knees jerking up and down like reciprocating saws. Hell.... NPR will likely be bankrupt in about 5 years, since their entire business model has shifted to 'Orange Man Bad 24/7' over the last few years. I doubt they can transition back after Da Trump is out of office. Prediction.... Whoever becomes the D's anointed candidate for 2020, Trump will tweet his high esteem for. That person will immediately be gutted like a fish, and used by the DNC as a bus drive-line oiler for the rest of the election season. It's Trumps political world, and he runs it 280 characters at a time.
"Cheeto Jesus". Heh.
I'm not sure exactly what a "bus drive-line oiler" is, but it sound pretty awful.
The Legend of Drunken Master (7/12) Movie CLIP - The Axe Gang Battle (1994) HD
Watched this old Jackie Chan movie on Netflix last night. I'm watching this scene and I realize this is where Quentin Tarantino got his Crazy 88's for Kill Bill. Also, I think I've seen this tavern in other movies, like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, although the set seems to have been spruced up, and that might have been done to make it look more like it did a thousand years ago when the Chinese empire was in its glory.
The Correspondents - Fear & Delight (Official Video)
This just popped up on YouTube. The tune is light, the words are glib, but the video is very clever.
It has gotten 4 million views. Think other people find it entertaining as well?
When I was kid, I thought the automated, drive thru car washes were the cat's pajamas. We probably only went once, they cost money you know, but evidently it made an impression. Since I got married, and appearances are important to SWMBO, and I had more than two nickels to rub together, I started using the local car wash, which made my inner ten-year-old very happy. Not so my daughter. Girl can travel the world without having to call home, but can't go to the car wash without her pappy. Now I know why.
I've never been very good about keeping my cars clean. As long as they ran, that was enough. I did thoroughly clean a few cars, but that was usually because I was putting them up for sale.
A few months ago I took my car to the car wash. I heard a bang, it seemed to come from the car in front of me, a late model Toyota Prius. They stopped the car wash to fix the problem, and then they restarted it. A few seconds later my car is where the previous bang came from and now something is beating the tar out of the side of my car. Seems a big rotating brush had snagged the side view mirror of the car in front of me and ripped it clean off. When my car got to that brush, the mirror assembly was still caught in the brush so every time it went around, my car got beat.
Kaady did right by me, they paid to have the body shop fix it and paid for a rental car for me to use while mine was in the shop. Cost them $2,000. They also gave me a bunch of passes for free car washes.
2016 Mazda 3 Roof Trim
Yesterday, my daughter comes by and she wants to get her car washed. Usually her husband washes it by hand, but he is tied up with work, so she's going to help him out. So we go to the car wash. Halfway through there is a big bang. We look at the car afterwards and don't see anything. Once she gets home her husband takes one look and notices that one of the trim strips that line the edge of the roof is gone. I managed to retrieve the trim strip from the car wash. It is a piece of aluminum with some plastic clips to hold it in place and at least one of those clips is broken / missing. So we are going to have to find a new way to attach it. I think a generous application of silicon sealer will do the trick.
I could holler at Mazda and Kaady, but being as the damage easily can be repaired, it's probably not worth the hassle. Mazda and Toyota may want to try making their cars more car wash resistant. I mean, a car wash brush shouldn't be able to rip things off of your car. Or maybe Kaady needs find some snag free brushes. Or they need to ban me from their car wash.
Concerning the football match, we later read this:
It is incredibly moving to watch a line of just six horses effortlessly holding back 35,000 fans. The relationship between the police and the British public may be troubled, but judging by this night at least, it seems the force’s equine members still draw a healthy respect.
Healthy respect? My guess is it’s more a case of everyone knowing that hurting human cops is okay, because all’s fair in love and rioting. But hurt a horse, and the whole world considers you scum. I remember the IRA hurting a horse, and the reaction from everyone was: right, that does it. I do not like the IRA any more. Bombing humans to death in places like Manchester and Ireland. That’s okay. But, a horse? Now they’ve crossed a line.
