Blog-O-Rama

Space Robot

I was thinking I ought to clean up the sidebar on this blog. It's long, how don't how many of the links still work. I do still use it occasionally, mostly to find a tag so I can pull up all the posts with that tag.  Typically I will use the browser's built in search function (Ctrl-F) to locate the tag I am looking for. Why do I use a search function to find a tag? I mean, you could just write it in the URL yourself (if you remember the correct format, which you would if did it this way). I'll tell you why. Because if you get it in wrong in the URL you have to wait a second or so to find out it was no good, but the on-page search function rewards you immediately if you type in something it recognizes. If you are as prone to mistyping as I am, you appreciate little speed improvements like that. 

So one of things I thought I should do would be to update the list of blogs I read. Some I still follow, like View From The Porch, shoot I want to give that gal a big hug. She has been the bright spot in my blog-o-sphere for as long as I've been playing this game. Others I don't. We may get to them later, or we might not. But Tam doesn't post that much these days, it might have something to do with her being busy with actual paid work. 

When I started thinking about this post, I thought I might start off with the blogs that just come to me right off, and that would be Knuckle Draggin My Life Away and The Feral Irishman. They aren't especially erudite, but I feel a certain kinship in a Homer Simpson kind of way. Knuckles (we call him Knuckles around here. Who am I kidding? There is no 'we' here, it's just me rambling on.) Like I was saying, Knuckles puts up a steady stream of posts about horrendously bad events. It's kind of hard to believe so many bad things are happening. It's kind of overwhelming. But if you think about the number of people in the country, even if there are a hundred of these horrible events every day, that's still only one event per year per ten thousand people. Hillsboro is not that big, it's only one hundred thousand, and we do hear about something bad happening occasionally.

But that's not why I read Knuckles, I skim the headlines on the horror posts looking the posts with a dozen funny memes. Those show up a couple of times a week (a day? I dunno). Skimming the headlines helps keep me grounded. There is a constant low level of bad shit going on all the time and you need to keep your wits about you. Don't let it rule your life though, hey look over here! A funny meme!

The Feral Irishman puts up a post every Friday with a zillion pics of nekkid chicks. I've spent some time there, but he keeps interspersing the girls with cars and steaks. I'm kind of over old American muscle cars. Oh, they still occupy a portion of my mind, but it's not as big as it was. They all just seem so crude in comparison to modern cars. Or maybe it's I just spent so much time working on old pieces of junk that I got a little jaded. As for the steaks, I'm on diet again and I don't get to eat nuttin. Bah, double bah and humbug. (He also does funny memes.)

I like the The Silicon Graybeard because he reports on the goings on at SpaceX, and he does it pretty reliably. I also like it because the guy messes around with radios and machine tools. He's a technical guy. The thing about space news is that you go long periods between something notable happening, so a lot of it is just filler, what kind of changes are happening, who's on first, that kind of thing. It takes that long because they are building something new. And big. I guess the reason I am taking more of an interest is that ever since SpaceX fired up, things have been happening, and happening often, not like the previous 40 years hardly anything happened.

Sending people into space gets people fired up like you never could with a mere probe. I was thinking that maybe we should give our deep space probes an A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) Module so we can talk to them. Give them a personality so we get verbal reports on what the probe is experiencing. You could probably pay for the probe with subscriptions to the daily probe report.

Of course, beaming that podcast back to Earth would require a radio, antennae and power pack big enough to get the job done. It would be best if it could be done in real time. You might be able to record 15 minutes of verbal reporting and then play it back over a period of 24 hours at a reduced bit rate, but that really wouldn't be the same, would it? It probably wouldn't make a difference to the power pack, transmitting X kilobits probably take the same amount of energy whether it is done in 15 minutes or 24 hours. 

I do all my blog reading on Feedly. It works pretty well, especially for ZeroHedge. The ZeroHedge website is loaded with ads, it's not as bad as big broadcaster sites, but it's still annoying. ZeroHedge has a bunch of posts about really obscure / technical / I-don't-even-want-to-know financial stuff. I mostly skip over them, but pretty regularly they'll have a post about what's going on in the world, and they're written by some pretty smart guys. Or at least they sound like smart guys. Or they agree with me. Yeah, it's probably the last one.

I like daily timewaster. He puts up, I dunno, dozens of very cool pics every freaking day. It's just a little overwhelming.

There's a few other blogs I read pretty regularly, but the names escape me at the moment, or maybe I'm getting tired and I want to finish this post and be done with it before dinner time.