Pages, some stolen, some original

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

What, me racist?

The Archangel Michael trampling Satan - Guido Reni, 1636

There is another tempest in a teapot brewing over St. Michael and the Black Rifle Coffee Company because of some rumor.

The only people this affects are those who have pushed their way onto the stage and are being supported by a wave of public adoration. Make one little slip and the trolls will be all over you. Live by the adoration of your fans, die by being ignored.


Saturday, November 26, 2022

Soviet Ilyushin Il-28


North Korea's 1940s Bomber Still Serving 2022
Mark Felton Productions

The Il-28 first flew in 1948. And I thought the B-52 was old.

Nutcracker

Zinc Nut Cracker Set

We had Thanksgiving dinner yesterday instead of Thursday due to the scheduling demands of the medical-industrial complex. Andy brought a bag of unshelled nuts. I can't remember the last time I had an unshelled nut. These days if we want nuts we buy them already shelled. Now I know why.

When I was a kid we had a nutcracker set like the one shown above. I think ours was steel. I can't imagine zinc ones would last too long, but maybe they don't have to as people will quickly abandon them. I don't have one of those, but I have a pair of Channellock pliers, so I set to work. Dang, these nuts are tough and if you aren't careful you won't just crack the shell but you will crush the contents as well. Cracking the shell is just the first part of the job. Now you get to separate the bits of meat from the remnants of the shell. A pick like the ones in the above set would have been useful here. After maybe half an hour I had maybe a quarter cup of meat, and most of that was tiny pieces the size of a BB.

So now I'm wondering how commercial nut farms get the job done. Do they ship their nuts over to slave labor camps where impoverished peasants spend all day cracking nuts for their cup of gruel? No, this is America where everything is done by machine.


All In One Pecan Nut Buster
chris dailey

Near as I can tell, these machines are adjusted to the size of the nut and the nuts are squeezed between two wheels that just the right distance apart. This cracks the shell without smashing the innards. Then a fan separates the wheat from the chaff.

I probably cracked a couple of dozen nuts and I think I only got one half of one walnut out intact. All the rest were busted. I think I got a little better in cracking technique as I went on, but a hard limit on the crushing would probably have helped.

The nutcracker set included six picks. Why so many? Because it took six times as long to pick the bits of meat out of the broken shell as it took to crack. You could have six people sitting around a table with a bowl of nuts. One person takes a nut and cracks and then hands the nutcracker to the next person. Now they set to work picking out the bits of meat. By the time they are done, the nutcracker has made its way around the table and you are ready to crack the next nut. Not an efficient way of getting things done, more like keeping your hands busy while you are jabbering with your fellows. Kind of like wrapping coins or knitting.

P.S. I'm surprised no one has come up with a better manual nutcracker. Or maybe I just haven't seen one. A better nutcracker would need two things, 1) an adjustable stop to easily limit the amount of crush, and 2) a sliding action to roll the nut in between the two jaws. The sliding jaws would need to move a couple of inches to ensure at least one complete revolution of the nut. You may want to go for two revolutions, just to cover the off cases at the beginning and end of a crushing rotation.


Friday, November 25, 2022

Under the Queen's Umbrella - Netflix Series


Under the Queen's Umbrella | Official Trailer | Netflix
The Swoon

Here we go again with another Korean historical drama involving machinations in the royal court. It's mostly about the queen, the king's mother and the king's ten other wives and all the petty and not so petty intrigue going on. The king's mother seems to very pleasant on the surface, but it is slowly being revealed that underneath she is a murderous thug, just like everyone who has climbed to the top of the heap. The king's wives are all trying to promote their sons into positions of power, but like all teenage boys they just want to get out of the palace where they are confined and are constantly being watched. So far they haven't figured out that they are just pawns in this real life chess game and their lives may be forfeit if they are not played correctly.

Seems like we have seen a bunch of these kind of shows. I mean I'm starting to recognize some of the buildings and the costumes are all very similar. From the way they look they all seem to be set right around the same time. Shoot some of them may be about the same exact events, just told from a different point of view.

Grand Rapids

Pergiel Building
1036 Butterworth St SW
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Diligent daughter and I were looking at the Pergiel building (zoom in and you can read the name in the stone near the top) on Google Maps the other day. Today we want to look at it again, but we can't remember where it is or what led us to it last time. Went and rooted through my files and couldn't find anything. Finally pulled up Google Maps and searched for Sacred Heart church. Then I remember that the building was built at an angle, and there was a big dirt parking lot there. I noticed Butterworth runs at an angle, so I pulled up the satellite view and presto - there it is.

I writing this down so I will have some record of where it is. My grandfather built this building to house his bakery before WW2. Rumor has it that back then he was a competitor to Sunshine, but then the war and rationing and the draft came along and running a bakery got to be pretty thin. My dad worked there for a while before the army gobbled him up and shipped him off to Alaska and the Pacific.


Fun with Legos


20 Mechanical Principles combined in a Useless Lego Machine
Brick Experiment Channel

The Lego universe is constantly expanding. Seems like every time I take a peek into this world I find new  bits of Lego.

Via Ross

Soviet Spies

A huge poster, pasted on a corner site in Moscow, advertising the film Who Are You, Dr. Sorge? © Getty Images / Bettmann

RT has a story about Manfred Ramminger, a German businessman who stole a Sidewinder missile and shipped it to Moscow back in the 1960's. Not surprisingly he came to a bad end.

I found the above picture in that same story. The movie is about another Soviet spy who also came to a bad end. I find it a little curious that the film was shown in Moscow. Maybe I just can't quite grasp the version of double-no-good double-think that was en vogue in Moscow back in the 1960's.


Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Homemade, sort of, Electron Beam


Shooting an electron beam through air
Applied Science

You too can make your own electron beam using your molecular vacuum pump. You have one of those, right? I had one around here somewhere, didn't I? Hard to tell, there's so much stuff in this house it's darn near impossible to keep track of what I have. I was sure I had an oil drain pan here somewhere but after an extensive search we found nothing.

Needed the oil drain pan because I wanted to change the oil in the SUV. Usually I take the car to the shop for this, but depriving my wife of her car for even a few hours causes more trouble than I want to deal with. Plus our regular shop charges $80 for an oil change. Quick change places charge $30, or at least they did last time I looked, but my experience at those places has put me off. The guy at one place launched into a spiel to sell me fan belts and wiper blades. What part of 'no' don't you understand, dude? Geez. Another place had the guys costumed like old timey mechanics at Disneyland. WTF is this? I don't get it, I don't like it, and I ain't never goin' back.

So I went to NAPA and bought oil and a filter and it cost me $50. So maybe we can get another year or ten out of this engine.


Monday, November 21, 2022

Where the Crawdads Sing - Netflix Movie


WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING - Official Trailer (HD)
Sony Pictures Entertainment

A mostly pleasant little fairy tale starring Daisy Edgar-Jones as the swamp girl. Maybe I'm a little jaded from watching regular, big-city murder mysteries, but the heroine in this story seems a little too well put together. With what life has thrown at her you might expect her to be a little bit round the bend, but she's tough and she's smart and she seems to have survived with her psyche intact. Wikipedia can tell you more.

Reminds me of Alison Elliott in The Spitfire Grill, Jodie Foster in Nell or Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone.



Mercury Wells

Mercury well on Earth or Oil well on Mercury?

About 120 years ago there was a victorian businessman who specialised in products made using mercury, a liquid metal element. He made stuff such as thermometers, barometers and even the motor driving the time machine he had invented. One day potential investors visited and wanted to know where he got all his mercury from, as it was fairly rare back then, and they wanted to minimise their risks. He said, the mercury for the thermometers and barometers came from holes in the ground in Montana. And for the time machine? they asked of him. He replied "The time machine is from Hg wells."

Stolen entire from Stu. 

I went looking for a picture of a mercury well but found that mercury doesn't come from wells, it comes from mines. I sort of knew that, but there's always some whiz kid cooking up something so I wouldn't have surprised to find they were drilling for mercury and injecting high pressure steam or gasoline or something to liberate the mercury from its rock prison and send it up the pipe. Anyway, I go looking for a mercury mine and all I can find are mines that have been closed. There were mines in west Texas, and there were big mines in Spain, but now virtually all mercury comes from China. Tjakistan deserves an honorable mention by producing something less than 10% of what China produces. No one else produces even 1% of the world supply. And there''s no pictures of any operational facilities. I couldn't even find a satellite image on Google Maps. Kind of weird, but given its recently discovered toxic nature, not too surprising.

The Snowflake Mystery


The Snowflake Mystery
Veritasium

Snowflakes are amazing, even after we now have a theory about they get to be snowflakes.


Sunday, November 20, 2022

The Devil Makes Three - Champagne and Reefer


The Devil Makes Three - "Champagne and Reefer" [Official Video]
New West Records

This popped up on the YouTube rotation. I don't know about the tune, it's okay I guess, but the video clips are from Reefer Madness. I saw that movie once about 50 years ago but I recognized it instantly. Weird man.

The Devil Makes Three has been in rotation for a while now. I mostly like their stuff.


Saturday, November 19, 2022

The Drones Keep on Coming

Shenyang J-6 Drone

Shenyang J-6

My Daily Kona has a story about how Red China is converting their fleet of aging J-6 fighter aircraft into drones. They are old and obsolete but still serviceable which means they could make excellent attack drones. China has a several airbases that are just a stone's throw from Taiwan and since the J-6 is capable of Mach 1.3 it would take it about 6 minutes to cross the 100 mile wide Taiwan Strait.

Chinese Airbases near Taiwan

China has several thousand of J-6 aircraft. Should they convert them all to drones and use them to attack Taiwan, Taiwan would have its work cut out trying to shoot them all down. Anti-aircraft missiles would be the weapon of choice. Conventional anti-aircraft guns have a hard time against supersonic aircraft.

Of course China has got its work cut out converting these aircraft into drones, and then there's the little matter of making them work. Who knows what kind of problems they are going to run into, especially if they try to get them to fly supersonic. I don't know that anyone is building supersonic drones. Yet.

My Daily Kona lists five Chinese air bases that are near the strait. I couldn't find all of them. Wikipedia has a list of about 170 Chinese air bases. I picked five that sort of matched Kona's list and plotted them on a Google Map.

Hakko FR-300 Desoldering Tool


Lets fix 99¢ thrift shop VCR/DVD Player
jeffescortlx
3 minute excerpt starting at the 8 minute mark

Warms the frozen cockles of me heart to see this guy bringing this old electronical gizmo back to life. It's entertaining when you are awake in the middle of the night because you can't sleep, but the reason it's here is because of this gizmo:

Hakko FR-300 Desoldering Tool

I have repaired a couple of circuit boards* where I used a manually operated solder sucker, and those things are a pain to use. This gadget would have been wonderful except for the $300 price tag. There is no way I would have spent that much money for a tool I would likely use only a dozen times. But it's nice to see there is enough electronic repair business being done to justify the existence of this product.

300

The FR-300 has been superseded by the FR-301, but 301 just doesn't have the same ring to it as 300. I can just imagine the advertising announcer telling you to get your EF AR THREE HUNDRED today.

Electronics repair has got to be very odd business. Most electronic gizmos aren't worth the time it takes to open the case, and if they pass that hurdle you still have to sort out what went wrong and then find the parts. Sometimes the damage is visible, like in the above video, but sometimes it is invisible, like when the inside of a microchip fails. If the parts are common, you can probably get them from Digi-Key. If they are special, they might cost more the the gizmo is worth. I suppose that's why you don't see many electronic repair shops around any more.

*I remember using a solder sucker on a few occasions, but I can't remember whether that led to an actual repair. I might have just been fooling around.

Friday, November 18, 2022

Random Noise

Last week's Jumble

Veteran's day was last week (maybe?). It was accompanied by flood of posts thanking veterans for their service and lot of other useless blather. Okay, maybe it wasn't entirely useless, maybe it improved some people's outlook for a bit. But it strikes me as kind of weird. Maybe that's what we do instead of having a parade, or maybe that's what we do so all the people who didn't go to the parade (like me) get to hear about what all the good citizens are doing. Anyway, the military is part of our society. It's been part of human society for thousand's, perhaps even hundreds or thousands of years. It ain't going away anytime in the foreseeable future, and certainly not anytime soon. People in the military deserve respect, just like everyone else. That's a great rule of thumb, but it is not inviolable. If an individual does something rude, criminal or evil, that individual may be rightly condemned, but don't trash that entire section of society because of the actions of one individual.

Military service has its pro's and con's. It requires obedience but it provides a certain level of support (food, clothing, shelter, okay shelter might be a little iffy) and medical care. On the downside there is the risk of being killed or maimed in combat, though I haven't been able to find out whether the odds of that happening are any worse than they are for the general population. Something like 90% of the military is involved in supporting the 10% who are actually in combat. What percentage of the general population is involved in turf wars over illegal drug distribution rights? 

And then there's free health care for life from the Veterans Administration. That is a benefit I am only now beginning to appreciate. If you are not a veteran, when you get to be old you start having to deal with commercial medical-industrial establishment and what a pain-in-the-keister that is. IAman spent some time in the VA hospital this year. Being in the hospital is no fun, but the administrative side was a piece of cake. All he had to do was show his ID.

Watching the Blazers basketball game last night, I was struck by the tone of some of the ads, especially MODA. MODA bills itself as some kind of health care company but I suspect they are actually just an insurance company. They are portraying themselves like a soft fluffy pillow that can support you. Nothing about how much it costs.

A third of the people in this country are making $100,000 a year or more. That's like 100 million. That's MODA's target audience. That still leaves 200 million who are basically second class citizens. Half a million are homeless. That's like less than one percent.

The VA spends about $100 billion a year on medical care.  There are roughly 20 million veterans. That's $5,000 a year per person, or about $400 per month.


Christhans is Coming

Die Hard Advent Calendar

That's Hans Gruber falling from Nakatomi Tower in the original Die Hard movie. 

Can something be simultaneously the best and the worst? This thing is totally tasteless and totally funny. Poor Hans, falling for 25 days only to land with a splat on Christmas. On the other hand no one deserves it more, he was the sleaziest villain ever.


Thursday, November 17, 2022

Not About Climate Change

Peter (Jeb Kreager) and Basil (Ken Leung) - Monique Carboni

Variety has a review of Evanston Salt Costs Climbing by Trish Deitch. It's a weird review, it's talking about how great this one act play is, but every other paragraph the dreaded Climate Change is thrown in like it's got something to do with the story. Near as I can tell, which could be completely wrong since I haven't seen the show, the only connection this show has with Climate Change is in the mind of reviewer.

The show is basically about two guys (above) who drive a salt truck during the winters in Illinois. You know, everyday life in a state being run into the ground by the dang fool Democrats. The show is being performed in New York City so maybe the reviewer is required to mention Climate Change in every other paragraph.

The reviewer included a nice succinct description of the set which I appreciate. A picture would be better, but a text description is better than nothing. Can't always get what you want and all.


Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Caveman Emerges


The Radiologist Goes to Therapy
Dr. Glaucomflecken

Houndsfield Units. Never heard that one before. 
The Hounsfield scale, named after Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, is a quantitative scale for describing radiodensity. It is frequently used in CT scans, where its value is also termed CT number. - Wikipedia

 

The Builders And The Butchers - Bringing Home The Rain


The Builders And The Butchers - Bringing Home The Rain
HazelEyedAndWild

Seems entirely appropriate for the times we are living in.


Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Goldfinger


Goldfinger • Theme Song • Shirley Bassey
HD Film Tributes

This post is kind of backwards. This tune is where I ended up, and it's pretty great, just like the movie. Of course I was only 13 when it came out so my mind was still very impressionable. Suffice it say I was impressed. We got to the song from this scene:


James Bond - Goldfinger - You expect me to talk? No Mr Bond I expect you to die!
Nick Blundell

We got here because I was thinking about my idea for a giant spaceship powered by a linear accelerator. I was originally thinking that it should be built in orbit around the Moon due to the economy of lifting materials from the surface of the moon, but then I got to thinking that if this motor is as powerful as it needs to be, the ship could lift off from Earth. It might not be able to carry all of the reaction mass it would need for an extended journey, but we can pick that up later. Lack of vacuum planetside might pose some technical problems, but whiz kids like nothing better than a challenge so I am sure they can sort it out. But the big issue is what kind of effect is a continuous thread of iron travelling at half the speed of light going to have on the Earth? Will it dig an asteroid sized crater? Or will it just bore a hole right through the crust and just become part of the molten center? Of course, it is not going to stay pointing perfectly in line with its original direction, it's going to be wandering all over the place. God forbid it gets out of control and tips over. Everything on this hemisphere is going to be in range. Maybe building it in orbit around the moon is a good idea.

Monday, November 14, 2022

Belousov-Zhabotinsky Oscillating Reaction


The Belousov-Zhabotinsky Oscillating Reaction
Tim Kench

NileRed Shorts did a video that explains how this is done. He uses a bunch of chemicals, most of which I had never heard of it, but the effect is very cool, so I dug around until I found this one. It reminds me of some of those fractal videos where you are constantly zooming in but the situation never changes.


The Peripheral - Amazon Series


The Peripheral Season 1 - Official Trailer | Prime Video
Prime Video

Tam turned me on to this one and it's pretty great. We've got a near future that looks like a reasonable extrapolation of where we'll be in ten years, and we've got another time line maybe a hundred years in the future that also seems plausible. What ties these two timelines together is communication. Nobody actually travels from one time to another, but they can communicate. This seems a little far-fetched, but then again how far-fetched would face-timing someone on the other side of the planet from a hand-held  device seem to someone from a hundred years ago? This is something we did at brunch the other day when my nephew called from India.

We've also got gunfights between rival groups of guys who know what they are doing and combat video games with various levels of immersion, some of which will never be possible (according to me, but what do I know?).

Only one episode per week so far.

Saturday, November 12, 2022

Map of the Internet

Internet IP Address Map

It will tell you where any IP address is located, but only in the most general terms. That can be useful if you want to know whether the server you are accessing is in China or Timbuktu. For instance, IP 69.168.83.86 is in North America, which we sort of already knew.

69.168.83.86

A Disturbance in the Force

Strain Wave Gear

Marc sent me a video about Harmonic Drives this morning. Okay, cool, I've seen these before, but wait a minute, how can that inner gear be rotating when there are teeth engaged at both the top and bottom? Turns out there are two kinds of these gear systems. The first is the Harmonic Drive.

 

Harmonic Drive
Also known as Strain Wave Gearing

The inner gear on a Harmonic Drive (the red one in the GIF above) is flexible. You can tell that it is rotating by focusing on one of the red teeth. You will see that each time one of the lobes of the green cam comes by, the red tooth steps from one blue tooth to the next.

That's fine and dandy, but a flexible gear? I was pretty sure there was a Harmonic Drive that used regular, made of steel, rigid gears. There is, but it's called a Cycloidal Drive.


Cycloidal Drive

In this one, the purple output shaft is connected to a disk with a bunch of pins that transmit the force from the yellow rotating gear. You could just hook the yellow gear to the output shaft, but then you are going to get some wobble. You could handle that using a pair of U-joints on either the input or output shaft. Probably the input, less torque there.


Friday, November 11, 2022

Dreamlandresort.com

Rumor has it that FBI raided the home of the guy who runs the dreamlandresort.com website in Rachel Nevada. The site is devoted to all things pertaining to Area 51, you know, the place where the gummit hides the UFO's and the aliens. This piqued my interest because I've seen at least a couple of movies where Area 51 played a part and I enjoyed those movies (Independence Day comes to mind). So let's see what we've got. We've got a Twitter thread offering up the internet's opinion. One of the subjects is whether the FBI has taken down his website (they haven't), but then the issue comes up as to whether then can take it down. Do they even know where it is? So sum dood looks it up and comes up with the latitude and longitude. Hmmph. How he'd do that? Well, it can't be too tough, so I thought I'd give it a go. I opened a terminal window on my Linux box and typed "ping " and then pasted the website's name. You didn't expect me to actually type it, did you? Of course, the Linux terminal window is old, so the standard cut and paste keys (Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V) don't work. You need to right click and select. Still, copy and paste is generally more reliable than my typing, especially for experiments where you don't know whether it is going to work or not.

Anyway, ping returns the IP address along with some gobble-de-gook about once a second. It will keep on doing this until you kill it with a Ctrl-C (yes, the same Ctrl-C you used to copy the URL. Different interpretations for standard commands on different planets). Take that IP address and feed it to iplocation.net and dumps a bunch of valuable data on your screen. Highlight that data, copy and paste it into your text editor, remove all the redundant stuff, Ctrl-A to select all, Ctrl-C to copy, open a spreadsheet on Google Drive, type Ctrl-V to paste it, do a little judicious editing and you get this: 


Geolocation data for IP addess 69.168.83.86

Wall, looky there, we gots sum nummers. Wonder what's actually there. Plotted on a map:

Geolocation data for IP addess 69.168.83.86

Most of the locations are right around Salt Lake City, but there is one in Las Vegas and one in the middle of a small lake in Kansas. Rachel Nevada is about 100 miles north of Las Vegas, about a half an inch on this map.


In the middle of nowhere seems to the unifying element here. Makes me wonder where they got these locations from. Did some computer algorithm generate them by timing how long it takes a packet to make the round trip? Or did someone just give a street address when they signed up? Or did someone just throw darts at a map? Or maybe everything to the right of the decimal point is just garbage and the location is only accurate to plus or minus ten miles.

And how is it we have multiple locations for a single IP address? IP addresses are typically assigned dynamically, so the same address can be assigned to different locations at different times. Haven't figured out what's going on here, except that maybe routers remember having the address at one time.

I don't know if I learned anything here. It did keep me occupied for a couple of hours. Better than playing solitaire I suppose.


Election


Devo - Freedom Of Choice (Video)
Warner Records Vault
Freedom of choice is what you got, freedom from choice is what you want.

Just a couple of items that seem appropriate just now.
It is as difficult and as dangerous to try to liberate a people that wishes to live in slavery as it is to try to enslave a people that wishes to live in freedom. - Machiavelli
Frank Zappa


 

I'm Confused

Bad Decisions

ZeroHedge has a story about the Rapid Dragon palletized weapon system. It can be used to drop cruise missiles out of the back of a C-130 transport aircraft. They talk about how it can give us some kind of tactical advantage. I don't know about that, it looks like just another defense contractor boondoggle to me, but hey, maybe it could be useful in some screwy situation. Of course, screwy situations is about all we've got these days. 

But that's not why I'm confused. Here's what got me:

"It puts this thing within range of Russia," Special Operations Command Europe’s Lt. Col. Lawrence Melnicoff was quoted as saying of the new parachute dropped long-range missile which was tested. "We are intentionally trying to be provocative without being escalatory."

Provocative without being escalatory? WTF? A kinder person might say the warmongers in Washington are gambling that their provocations will not result in a nuclear war. I suspect they really want a nuclear conflict. Fuck Joe Biden and whoever is pulling his strings.


Thursday, November 10, 2022

HTML Embedding Images

Whenever you insert an image in a Blogger post, the path for the image gets written twice. Being as Blogger creates horrendously long pathnames for these images, the html, if you look at it, looks like a pile of garbage. I see that and I think WTF? But then I put it out of my mind and concentrate on what I am trying to accomplish and that is often to move the image to where I want it, not where Blogger in its infinite stupidity has put it.

Anyway, I got to wondering about this today and I did some checking. The first time the pathname is used is in the a tag which is simply a link. The second time the pathname is used is in the img tag which is what causes the picture to be displayed. If you click on the image in a published post, it will take you to the original image which may be much larger (or smaller) than the published image. If you remove the complete a tag, then clicking the image on the published post will take you to the same image with the same size as it is in your post.

Here is an image inserted using the Blogger. Clicking on it will take you to a much larger image.


Here is the same image inserted the same way, but then I edited the html to remove the a tag. Clicking on it will take you to the same size image.


The link will have a slightly different pathname than the image pathname. Evidently different size images will get stored in different directories.

Estate Dream

I have a piece of land. It's at least a couple of acres, maybe more. There are some old asphalt paths near the house and the pond. There is also a long concrete sidewalk that leads off to who knows where. The asphalt paths are deteriorating and there are weeds growing up from cracks in the concrete. There is one large expanse of asphalt where several paths come together. This section is also rather steep, too steep for easy walking. Osmany has engaged a crew to do some cleanup. From a distance I see one guy walking across a field of grass carrying a weed eater. Inside I'm talking to a man about coming up with a plan to improve these paths.


Wednesday, November 9, 2022

The Gray Man - Netflix Movie


THE GRAY MAN | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

An action packed thriller. You might think it is reminiscent of James Bond, but the violence is so over the top, so gratuitous that it is ridiculous. Ryan Gosling is Sierra Six, a secret CIA assassin. His last mission was to kill another guy who's dying words are that he is Sierra Four, another one of these secret CIA assassins. Hmm, maybe his boss isn't being entirely truthful. Well, since the CIA is known hot bed of prevaricating slimeballs, that's not much of a stretch. Sierra Four hands Six a memory card containing a bunch of documents that supposedly incriminate the boss. The boss wants that card back in the worst way and since Six is not forthcoming, he calls up Mr. Mayhem himself and gives him an essentially unlimited budget to get that card back. This whole business is basically ridiculous. Since digital media is so easily copied, why would anyone think this is the only copy in existence?

When Mayhem's crew makes an attack it looks pretty ridiculous. I would think one person with a little slight of hand would be a better choice for recovering a trinket, but these guys go full metal jacket, laying waste to people and buildings with heedless abandon. But isn't it the nature of bureaucracies that they promote stupidity? The CIA guy has a practically unlimited black ops budget and if the information on that card finds its way into the hands of his boss, that gravy train might come to a stop, so he's pulling out all stops to get it back and he gives Mayhem $10 million to do the job. $10 million dollars can buy a lot of mayhem. And how do you explain this catastrophe? You blame it on unknown terrorists.

Makes me wonder how many 'terrorist attacks' were actually done by some country's government.

Tuesday, November 8, 2022

Drones Really R Us


Flying Through Giga Berlin
Tesla

It's a very swoopy, zoomy kind of video, so it's kind of fun to watch, but there are a couple of things worth noticing. One is making this video. I imagine there some parts might be speeded up, and there are some cuts where there could have been a crash, but it looks pretty damn seamless. Flying through the inside of a car being assembled and not smashing into one of the robot arms that are reaching to do actual work (not just making a stupid movie to entertain the mindless masses) is a pretty good trick no matter how you do it. I don't think it was faked, I mean with all the insanity running around loose these days, it could have been, but I prefer to think it was really recorded by some dude flying a drone, some dude with some excellent piloting skills. I wonder how many hours it took him to get this good, or did he just pick up controller and instantly know how to fly it like James Bond? Yes, I'm supposing it was a guy. If it wasn't, let me know and I'll put up a post about her because guys love chicks who are competent and savvy.

The other thing is what it shows about cars being made. Taking sheets of steel and stamping them in a giant press to form them into an entire side of the cabin, and casting big chunks of a aluminum to become part of chassis. The amount of engineering that went into designing those parts, the machines to make them and then the tooling needed to adapt those machines to make those parts is tremendous. But once you get all that done, Bob the drone can turn out one bazillion dollar part after another. The cost of the labor to assemble an automobile is pretty much fixed - x dollars per car. But the upfront engineering expense might be on the order of a billion dollars. You need to sell 100,000 cars for $20K each to pay for that. If you only sell 10,000 cars, you are going to have to sell them for $200K each.


Deadwind Season 3 - Netflix Series


DEADWIND Season 3 Trailer
Original versions

Sofia Karppi (Pihla Viitala), the lead detective, and Sakari Nurmi (Lauri Tilkanen), her sidekick, are investigating a series of gruesome murders that are happening on a daily basis. Plus we have drug dealers,  an evil pharmaceutical company, family problems as well as a cold case involving Karppi. There are also some bits about the history of medicine, so there is plenty to keep our little minds occupied.

A mosaic of Hippocrates on the floor of the Asclepieion of Kos, with Asklepius in the middle, 2nd–3rd century

The killer leaves a symbol with the bodies of the people he has killed. Eventually they discover that it is a predecessor to the Caduceus that medical-industrial establishment uses today. So they go back to Hippocrates (460 – 370 BC), who lived on the island of Kos, the same island that a couple of people in the story visited. Turns out the symbol is sold as a tourist trinket all over the island. So things are getting tied together. I did not find any evidence of this symbol being a real thing, but does it matter? It works in this story.
Helsinki to Kos - 1,600 miles

In Episode 7, just after the 5 minute mark, Nurmi quotes Paracelsus (1493 – 1541) , father of toxicology, from the 16th century, saying "the dose is the poison", which leads Karppi to look at the problem in a new way. Supposedly the pharmaceutical company is trying to develop a new drug to help drug addicts break their addiction. But now Karppi wonders if maybe they were working on a new, undetectable poison. Might be a lot of people interested in something like that. Might also explain the rash of dead bodies that have been showing up.

Flak tower in Rajamäki

In the course of their investigation they pay a visit to a Flak tower. It might be the only one in Finland. It's 30 miles north of Helsinki. Rumor has it that it was built to protect a nearby distillery that was busy producing Molotov cocktails. Never heard of anyone producing Molotov cocktails on an assembly line before.

Porsche Tacyan Turbo

Nurmi has new fancy car - an electric Porsche. Never mind the Turbo name, it has no turbocharger, it's all electric. Scenes with the car include whining electric motors. I wonder how realistic that is. It could be spot on or it could be amped up for effect. Sounds are funny, sounds you normally ignore can wreak havoc with audio recordings.

Somewhere in there is a scene where our heroes are in a bar having a beer, and the beers are Coronas. Struck me as funny. Ooo, look at us drinking imported beer. Kind of like drinking Heineken over here. There is also a nightclub called Kansas. Over here it sounds absurd, why would anyone want to name a nightclub after the middle of nowhere? To the Finns, the state of Kansas might seem like a dreamy fantasyland.

Season 1 post. Season 2 post.


SpaceX Raptor Engine

SpaceX Raptor 2 Engine

The Silicon Graybeard has a post up about SpaceX's engine building program. They're looking to reduce the cost of building a Raptor engine from $2 million down to a quarter of a million. With progress like that we might actually be back on the moon by the end of the decade.


Monday, November 7, 2022

Drones Я Us

Shark reconnaissance drone

The Shark is entirely a Ukrainian creation.  
It carries a day-light camera, a thermal imaging camera, a video camera and a radio transmitter in a gyro-stabilized camera pod that is fitted under the nose of the fuselage. - Defence Blog

Seems drones are all the rage these days.

REMUS 620 UUV(unmanned underwater vehicle)

The REMUS 620 UUV is is made by HII (Huntington Ingalls Industries), the largest military shipbuilding company in the United States. It's powered by batteries like a torpedo, but it has a range of 275 miles. Plus it has an electronic brain so supposedly it can find it's way home if it every gets lonely. Defence Blog talks about how it can be loaded up all kinds of gizmos, they don't say anything about a warhead, but they don't say that it can't.

P.S. When I saw HII in the Defence Blog post I thought it said HILL. That's what you get when you use them cheap fonts where you can't tell a lowercase L from an uppercase i.


Could this be the reason for the war in Ukraine?

© Getty Images / Jake Wyman

Could this be the reason for the war in Ukraine? 

I found this on RT, but they are quoting the Financial Times. I haven't verified that the quotes come from FT, but I have heard this story elsewhere. 

Aggregate net income for publicly listed oil and gas companies operating in the United States exceeded $200 billion for the second and third quarters of the year, according to analysis of earnings reports and estimates carried out by S&P Global Commodity Insights for the Financial Times.

The media outlet reported over the weekend, citing the analysis, that US oil producers have cashed in on a period of geopolitical turmoil due to the conflict in Ukraine that has shaken up the global energy market and sent prices skyrocketing. The $200 billion figure, which included supermajors, mid-sized integrated groups and smaller independent shale operators, marks the sector’s “most profitable six months on record and puts it on course for an unprecedented year,” it wrote.

“Operating cash flow will likely be record-breaking – or at least very close to it – by year’s end,” executive director for upstream equity research at S&P, Hassan Eltorie, told the FT.

Okay, there's been a lot teeth gnashing over the price of gasoline and how it's all Biden's fault and Biden is going to fix it, both of which are balderdash. I say that because I don't think Biden is operating independently, I think he's just a puppet and someone is pulling his strings. 

Or it could be that he's just a member of 'the club' that actually runs thing and they needed a front man to go out and tell stories to the press and they picked Joe. Doesn't matter whether the stories are true or not, just as long as they are really stupid or insane because that's what you need to get people's attention these days.

So what the club decided was that the oil companies weren't making enough money. Then they wondered how they could fix that, and then they had a good long think and said "why don't we start a proxy war with Russia?"

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what happened. If you want to stretch your imagination, imagine that the Russian arms makers were in on it. They needed more money to build up their armaments and what better way to do that than to increase the price of oil that Russia was exporting.

New World Order, bah! It's never gonna change, the world has always been run by the rich and that's the way it's going to be.