Bunker Valentin 🇩🇪 The largest submarine bunker in the world
Blitzwinkel
Cool video, the music makes it. Located outside of Bremen, Germany, it is the largest submarine bunker in the world, if your world is Germany. The one in Brest, France, is larger. This one was never finished. If looks like a massive amount of concrete. It took 650,000 yards of concrete to build it. That is enough concrete to pave 13 miles of Interstate Highway. Considering that there are like a zillion miles of Interstate highways, this massive chunk is insignificant. How can that be? The mind works in mysterious ways.
When I was young I loved new things and hated old things. I was enamored with modern design, sleek, stylish and functional. I thought old designs were stupid and inefficient. After surviving three score and ten, my attitude has changed. I have seen too many new fangled things fail because of unforeseen events. Old things have problems, but mostly they keep chugging along. A corner may get knocked off, but it will keep on because that corner was there to get knocked off. It might not have been the original intention, but it worked out.
The facade on this cafe looks perfect, and it might be, but I suspect that if you were to actually visit the place and inspect this facade you would find any number of imperfections, but because of how elaborate it is, none of those are obvious. With a facade made of large plate glass windows, any imperfections would be immediately obvious because of perfect surface of the glass. You'd would need to employ someone full time just to wipe off the handprints because they would obviously mar the perfection.
Don't hear about things like this much. Petabyte. Huh. I can see how ten years of making ultra-high-speed videos could consume a large amount of storage space. I'm kind of wondering what he was using before, and how long it took him to load all of his old files onto his new server. A petabyte is a million gigabytes. At 2 gigabytes a second that would take 500,000 seconds. At 86,400 seconds a day that would take like a week. Given the way that doing anything with a computer involves a zillion times more time in preparation and setup than the actual operation, I suspect it probably took him at least a month.
Now I'm wondering how many of those files will actually get accessed before this server becomes obsolete and is replaced by a crystal the size of a sugar cube. I was going to say 'the size of a die' meaning a die like in dice, but that would be confusing, or would it?
Pretty good show except for all the faggotry. Dang nab it, why do they gotta be sticking faggots in all these shows? When I watch a TV show or a movie I want escapist fantasy where all the women are beautiful, the guys are all heroic, and all the characters are straight heterosexuals. I don't need any faggots besmirching my fantasy, they are repulsive and disgusting.
But what you gonna do? Kill all the faggots? Historically, that has been the preferred solution for some, maybe all, religions. Islam still preaches that. Mainstream Christianity seems to be learning to deal with them. Western civilization seems to consider faggots people, and killing people without permission from the lord high executioner is forbidden.
Faggots, except for being faggots, can be good people. They can be smart, productive members of society. As long as they can keep their faggotiness under wraps, I am happy to deal with them.
Lesbians I don't mind near as much. I like women, mostly because I am sexually attracted to them, so I can see why women would be attracted to other women - if they are good looking. As for ugly women, well, that's why god invented alcohol.
Anyway, enough about that. Back to the show and besides my previously mentioned objections, it's pretty great. We are looking at a niche of society where the law doesn't much matter. Well, it matters enough that our players will be careful to avoid involving the police, but that isn't really too difficult, if you have a brain and can use it. We have one group of people dealing in stolen information and another group that deals in bullets, and sometimes the information thieves hire the killers, and sometimes other people hire the killers to kill the information thieves.
Samuel, an ugly little faggot, got started in this 'society' as a gofer and moved on to become a triggerman. His sexual preferences aside, he is a reliable and loyal killer.
This little 'society' has been upset by the entrance of some new, unknown, players. Previously, everyone knew everyone else and everyone eventually knew what was going on. So and so took out the bloke that was skimming from that gangster, so and so works with that mean chick, that drug dealer is overstepping his bounds. That was the world they operated in. But now someone has killed the Chinese ambassador, his daughter is missing, and somebody killed a dozen of the drug dealer's henchmen, and nobody has a clue who this is. Smells like government agents to me. Could be the SAS, or maybe the CIA, or maybe somebody from Asia has come to town for a specific purpose.
Eventually we get to the uber-secret society that has upset our apple cart, and being as we finished watching this show last week, I don't remember how exactly it played out, but I'm pretty sure it's pointing to a second season.
Reshaping History with Digital Sheet Forming
Desktop Metal
It's about time someone married sheet metal forming and digital technology. The video is basically an ad for Figur sheet metal forming machines, but these machines are wonderful. They are expensive, Google found a price of $500K, but when you consider a good sheet metal man is going to cost you $100K a year, and what that man can do in a week this machine can do an hour, you can see how it could pay off. It's not going to replace sheet metal stamping any time soon, but it's going to be a boon for people making one-off machines. It will be interesting to see how this changes sheet metal creations over the next few years.
Didn't catch what he was trying to say the first time so I restarted it. There are eight wires in an ethernet cable but only four of them get used and half of those are grounds. I think. In any case I only use four and it seems to work fine. There's probably a good reason for all the extra wires, but I just learned enough to get my computers hooked up and working. The reason I'm posting this is because of this comment from Reman1975:
I worked in IT for over 20 years, and the coolest thing about IT standards for me is how you can buy a motherboard from China, a graphics card that was made in America, Memory sticks that came from a factory in Japan, a CPU that was fabricated in Malaysia, and a SSD that started out in Korean, chuck it all together like Lego bricks, slap some OS install media in it that was based on work by a guy in Finland, and dispite these manufacturers/programmers never being in contact with each other, or even speaking in a common language, folks STILL manage to be surprised if everything doesn't just work straight from the first boot up.
This situations only possible because there's many hundreds of standards that cover every aspect of every single component that goes into a PC. These standards have been refined over decades to get to the point where it's not totally inconceivable that you could talk a non tech savy person through building a PC from a kit of parts OVER THE PHONE, and still have better than even odds of the finished result working as expected.
This remarkable situation is something that's never lost that sense of amazement for me.
Aircraft carriers are simple in concept - take a big boat, put a flat deck on top and load it with airplanes - but horribly complex in reality. The complexity arises from having numerous, large, complex systems crammed into a limited area AND then getting them all to operate together, all of which makes it very difficult to make them effective weapons. America has poured zillions of dollars and zillions of man hours into learning how to make them operate coherently. A few other countries have made a few, but I don't think any of them are as well prepared and effective as America's.
They are calling this an assault ship. There is a floodable well deck at the rear. It's 850 feet long. American nuclear-powered carriers are 1100 feet long. It has an electromagnetic catapult and possibly electromagnetic arresting gear as well. I suspect that the blue and white building sitting on the forward end of the flight deck is a temporary structure being used for the final fitting out.
Saw a video by a very annoying guy about Mike Vining, who was one of the first members of Delta Force. He was involved in a bunch of very sketchy stuff, like bomb disposal. He's still alive and just a year older than I am. Reading the Wikipedia story about him I come across this line:
"He has also written articles on naval postal history,"
Naval Postal History? What are you talking about? The Navy has a postal system? Well, I guess they would have to, wouldn't they? Letters to and from for sailors sailing around the world. This leads me to the Univeral Ship Cancellation Society which has a PDF about Naval Covers Fakes, Forgeries and Frauds.
On page 59 of this PDF we find a story by Mike Vining:
1931 Wilkins-Ellsworth Trans-Arctic Expedition
Sir George Hubert Wilkins, MC, and Lincoln Ellsworth secured use from the U.S. Navy of the soon to be scrapped submarine USS S-30 for an expedition to sail under the ice cap to the North Pole. They got close to the North Pole, but no cigar. They managed to return to Norway and submarine was scuttled off of Bergen.
I tried to extract the story from the PDF, but it was going to take a bunch of mucking around to make it presentable, so you're just going to have to go read the original.
The Genius Behind the Quantum Navigation Breakthrough
Dr Ben Miles
This thing is just nuts. Besides the subject matter, I don't think he actually names the genius behind this breakthrough. If he did, I missed it. I grew up hearing about inertial navigation and how these devices were big, complicated and expensive. Sometime between now and then, ring lasers came along, which was an improvement, but still comprehensible. Then came smartphones and MEMs and they just blew me away. I had been working in computers for a while, and all I had seen was bigger, faster machines doing gaudier and gaudier things. Then smartphone inertial navigation appeared and I was, let me just say this again, blown away.
The mirror-like reflection in this puzzle caught my eye. Funny thing, Google can't seem to identify the car. Everybody and their mother has a copy of this image, but it's just used as eye candy to promote something else. I suspect it is a 1931 Cadillac V-16.
I am trying to understand why the Christian religion is dominate in some countries and not others.
I like the ten commandments and I try to follow them. I found this list on BibleGateway:
You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.
You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.
Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
I'm not sure about number two. I take it to mean it's okay to make images, but it's not okay to worship those images. Pictures Ferraris and Playboy Bunnies will undoubtedly doom me. We aren't going to talk about number three, but the rest of them are very fine.
Anyway, for a while now I've been kind of suspicious of Asia. Why is that place such a mess? They have plenty of smart people, but they seem to be constantly mired in squabbles. Then I read that story about what's wrong with India, and I go wondering - is that what's wrong with all of Asia?
And then I remember Mao's actions during WW2, when he took his army west and let the Nationalists fight it out with Japanese, and then when the Japanese were driven out, Mao swooped in and drove out the Nationalists. Wikipedia has pages on this.
Now I'm wondering if the Nationalists were a similar to the Indians as described in the linked story, and Mao was sick of their shit and decided to do something about it, and WW2 gave him the opportunity.
Now Mao was no Christian, but if you are dealing with a wretched hive of corruption and villainy, maybe a Christian approach is not what you need. At least not modern, Western one.
A Man on the Inside | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Comedy, not our usual fare, but funny. Ted Danson plays a widower who takes a job to go undercover in an old folk's home to find out who stole a necklace from one of the inmates. It's a very posh old folks' home, full of crusty old characters.Very lightweight. It's mostly Ted bouncing from one awkward situation to another with hilarious results.
The show takes a look at Alzheimer's disease, and it's not pretty. When a person's mind deteriorates to the point that they no longer recognize you, are they even there anymore?
A couple of weeks ago someone in the family was soliciting Christmas wish lists. I usually have a hard time with such requests, being as I don't need anything, or I want something unobtainable, like a rocketship. I don't know why but this year I didn't have a problem, fruitcake was at the top of my list, and my family delivered. It's delicious. Nobody else in my family likes them, or maybe they've never had the opportunity to try one. Am I willing to share? Hmmm. I dunno, maybe no one will ask for a piece. Kind of a problem since I am trying to lose weight, but if I hold it down to one slice a week I should be okay.
NOSFERATU - Official Trailer [HD] - Only In Theaters December 25
Focus Features
This afternoon the family made our annual pilgrimage to the movie theater. We went to see the latest Nosferatu. Creepy, creepy, creepy, but that's about all I can say for it. My mind was not engaged by any of the characters. The leading lady is either possessed or hysterical, and leading man doesn't do anything, rather things happen to him. He seems a bit out of his depth. Large numbers of rats are present in some scenes, and the plague plays a prominent role, and I'm wondering why nobody is killing the rats, but then I checked. The story is set in 1838 and the connection between rats, fleas and the plague wasn't established until 1898, so the movie gets a pass.
Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979) - Trailer
BFITrailers
I saw Werner Herzog's version of this story back in 1979. That one I was impressed with, though I can't tell you why. I just remember thinking it was a great film.
A few weeks ago St. John went to see the original silent version from 1922 at the Hollywood theater, where the sound was provided by the pipe organ that was concealed behind the screen. I've been to the Hollywood a few times and I never realized there was a pipe organ there.
Advertising 101, also, Propaganda 101. If you don't want the peasants to revolt, you need to master this concept. Master this concept. Master it now. Now, now, now, you grumpy old man.
The reason the recent Presidental election was so close (like less than one zillionth of a percent) is that both parties understand advertising and propaganda. I like to think that Trump won because there are more people with brains than there are brain dead democrats, but maybe not, maybe it was just a matter of which party did a better job of feeling the pulse of the country and successfully directed their advertising campaign to reach more people. In other words, maybe it was just blind luck that led to Trump winning.
Looking through some old blog posts this morning, I noticed that one post was missing an image. Fixing a broken post used to be easy, but somewhere along the way Blogger made some changes and now it's a bit of a trick. Here's my procedure:
right click on the title of a blog post and select 'Open link in a new tab'
go to this new tab, copy the title of the blog post (highlight the title and press Ctrl-C)
right click on New Post (somewhere in upper right corner) and select 'Open link in a new tab'
go to the new posttab, paste the title in the search box and press Enter. If there are several results you might have to look through them to find the one you want.
click on the title of the post you want to edit
edit the post
when you have finished editing, click on Update
go back to the previous tab, which should still show the original, broken version of your post. Click the refresh symbol (the circular arrow in the upper left corner). The repaired version of your post should appear.
Clickety, clickety click. All because Blogger took away the edit button.
Interesting few days in congress and actually a good class on government corruption. The ugly sausage-making of the system is completely exposed by these shenanigans. Trying to back the people into a corner, the resident GOP/POS Speaker Mike Johnson attempted to dump a 1,547 page “continuing resolution” (CR) which should contain a few lines of text stating simply that current funding will be extended for a specific period of time. Instead it included a pay raise for Congress, funding of a key part of the government censorship of the people and a defense for the January 6 committee from investigation.
The leadership of the House: Johnson, Scalise, et al praised it as a tough but fair bill. It wasn’t, it was pork. It wasn’t even particularly good for the GOP. Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and other conservative bloggers and influencers rose up against it. This is the key point, this was the people rebelling against a horrible omnibus bill disguised as a CR, not the dictates of Musk, Ramaswamy or Trump.
One more seismic event that I don't understand. Carolyn Porco (she led the imaging team of NASA's Cassini mission) went to a Taylor Swift concert and then wrote about her experience. I''ve heard a couple of Taylor's songs, but they made no impression on me. I don't even remember what they were, so all this blather about Taylor Swift makes no sense to me. Anyway, evidently Taylor's concert tour was exceptional in every way. Here are some numbers I pulled from the middle of Carolyn's piece.
Swift performed 149 shows in 51 cities across 21 countries on 5 continents between March 2023 and December 2024.
By its completion in Vancouver, Canada, on December 8, 2024 (the day after the concert I attended), the Eras Tour had sold a total of $2,077,618,725 in tickets to 10,168,008 people, breaking the previous record by a wide margin. And those numbers do not include a secondary market of ticket sellers, sales of merchandise ($200M in 2023 alone), earnings of $262M from the highest-grossing concert film of all time, and more. No other concert tour has come close.
This is quite the story. The author has a very low opinion of his fellow Indians. I copied the opening paragraphs here. The article is quite a bit longer. It was taken from a speech by the author. You can listen to it here.
Most Westerners know nothing about India beyond vague ideas about Hinduism, yoga, gurus, and maybe a dash of Bollywood. To such people, this article will be a rude awakening.
I grew up in Bhopal in central India. Since as early as I can remember, I worked in my father’s printing press. I studied engineering in the nearby city in Indore and went to Manchester Business School in Britain to do an MBA. I returned to India to set up a subsidiary of a British company, which was a huge success. When I lived in Delhi, I wrote for the mainstream Indian media. I traveled widely in India and around the world.
I had first returned to India with the idea of improving it, but after 11 years, I realized that India was a sinking ship, with worsening and increasingly shameless corruption, degraded people, and a society that was falling apart. I had never met an honest bureaucrat or politician. I applied to emigrate to Canada and my application was approved in a record three weeks.
I now advise East Asian and Western corporations on investing in India. Most of what I tell them sounds to them exaggerated, unrealistic, and unbelievable. After much dance, drama, and a great deal of lost money, they begin to believe what I tell them. However, this learning is never institutionalized because of a refusal to understand India. This is a form of political correctness, a poison eating away the innards of Western values.
I Bought a Broken 11 Ton Forklift, Can I Save It?
Watch Wes Work
Big piece of heavy iron that he bought for a scrap sale price. Everything is fine, except it doesn't run. Okay, if it doesn't run, you can't know that everything is fine, can you? But he takes a close look and everything seems fine, except for that one problem, which manifests itself in a very strange way. The starter turns, but the engine doesn't. How can that be? Internal combustion engines typically have a flywheel bolted to the crankshaft at one end of the engine. The flywheel has a set of gear teeth all around its outside diameter. The electric starter motor has a small gear that engages with the teeth on the flywheel to get the engine turning. When the starter motor is running you can hear that electric motor noise. If the gear is turning the flywheel, you can hear that noise as well. If all that is happening and the motor isn't turning, then either the bolts or the crankshaft are broken. A broken crankshaft would probably mean a new engine.
Heavy equipment is funny. I suspect most applications work the machines to death. They are expensive and you need to get your money's worth out of them. Hauling rock for a few dollars a ton means you need to haul a ginormous amount of rock to pay for the machine.
There are other applications (really? You have to say 'applications'? Can't you just say 'uses'?) where endurance is not so important. You just need a machine to do that one really difficult job once a week or whenever. The job has to be done and you need a big machine to do the job. I think that was probably the situation with this machine. If it was one of a fleet of machines being worked to death, they would have mechanics on hand to deal with it. If it was one machine dedicated to a particular role, and it's been there for ten years, and it breaks, it's just easier all around to replace it with a new one.
Koyaanisqatsi is a 1982 American non-narrative documentary film directed and produced by Godfrey Reggio, featuring music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage (some of it in reverse) of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. Reggio explained the lack of dialogue by stating "it's not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It's because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live." In the Hopi language, the word koyaanisqatsi means "life out of balance".
Is that a Saturn 5 rocket taking off? Yes and no. 22over7aintpi explains in a comment:
In case you were wondering there are two rockets featured in this sequence. The first is a Saturn V on the launch pad, the second is the first Atlas-Centaur Missile launched on May 8, 1962. No one was hurt in that explosion and clues to why it exploded are a flapping liquid nitrogen line by the vernier engine and the venting liquid hydrogen some seconds into flight. The failure was determined to be caused by an insulation panel that ripped off the Centaur during ascent, resulting in a surge in tank pressure when the LH2 overheated. Beginning at T+44 seconds, the pneumatic system responded by venting propellant to reduce pressure levels, but eventually, they exceeded the LH2 tank's structural strength. At T+54 seconds, the Centaur experienced total structural breakup and loss of telemetry, the LOX tank rupturing and producing an explosion as it mixed with the hydrogen cloud. Two seconds later, flying debris ruptured the Atlas's LOX tank followed by complete destruction of the launch vehicle. The panel had been meant to jettison at 49 miles (80 km) up when the air was thinner, but the mechanism holding it in place was designed inadequately, leading to premature separation. The insulation panels had already been suspected during Centaur development of being a potential problem area, and the possibility of an LH2 tank rupture was considered as a failure scenario. Testing was suspended while efforts were made to correct the Centaur's design flaws.
I prefer to think the dragon legends come down to us from a previous civilization that had mechanized, flying war machines like the A-10 Warthog. After that civilization collapsed and the art of heavier-than-air aircraft was lost, how would you explain something like an A-10 to your kids? "There were fire breathing monsters that flew through the air and destroyed everything in their path". That's how.
I like Graham Hancock, the guy who's always postulating the existence of an advanced human civilization a zillion years ago, except I just now had a thought. What if this advanced civilization actually created humans from the biological material at hand (like all the existing plants and animals)? Created us as an experiment, and when the experiment started to get out of hand, they bailed out. Kind of like the archetypal mad scientist in horror movies. He brews up some mystical stew in a large pot and it reacts too well, starts bubbling over and eventually expands to take over his lab, the building and the town. Yeah, at this point the mad scientist bails out and I suspect a similar scenario prompted our createors to bail out as well.
It is doubtful we would ever find any evidence of such a civilization on account of the ice age glaciers that ground everything to dust. And if we ever did find any evidence, I doubt whether we would recognize it, much less understand it.
I love AvE, he's great. Remittance Men is a term I've heard forever, but I never had clear understanding of just what was going on. Actually, I don't know that I've heard it before, I have come across the term in numerous stories that I have read. AvE's story sounds just like Wikipedia's explanation:
In British history, a remittance man was an emigrant, often from Britain to a British colony, who was supported by regular payments from home on the expectation that he would stay away.
In this sense, remittance means the opposite of today's meaning of money that migrants send to their home countries.
This Made Up Language *Almost* Took Over The World
Dis-ambi
Dad burn French, so full of themselves. They are kind of impressive, or at least a large number of people thought so. My parents encouraged me to take French in high school, which led me to taking it in college. I absolutely hated those classes. They were all about conjugation and reading and writing, which I thought was a stupid way to learn a language. Learn something useful first, like learn to speak it. Once you've done that you should be able figure out the reading the writing yourself. Now I know a few French words and phrases, but probably no more than I know of Spanish. My knowledge of Spanish can be summed up in 'uno mas cerveza fria por favor' which means 'one more cold beer please'. I mean, what else do you need to know?
13 years for sound to travel from the Sun to the Earth, if sound could travel in space! Kind of puts that distance in a different light.
Are his numbers correct? Let's check. The sun is 93 million miles away, which translates into about 8 minutes at the speed of light. Since light travels at about one foot per nanosecond, we get:
Time for light to travel from the Sun to Earth
8
minutes
times
60
seconds
per minute
times
1
billion
nanoseconds
per second
equals
480
billion
nanoseconds
divided by
1
nanosecond
per foot
Distance to the Sun
equals
480
billion
feet
divided by
5,280
feet
per mile
Distance to the Sun
equals
90
million
miles
My 90 million mile distance is not bad considering I started with 8 minutes which is not a precise time. Now we calculate how long sound would take to travel that distance:
Distance to the Sun
take
480
billion
feet
Speed of sound
divide by
1,125
feet
per second
equals
427
million
seconds
divided by
22,791,600
seconds
per year
Time for sound to travel from Sun to Earth
equals
14
years
The difference between his time of 13 years and my time of 14 years can be easily explained by the different temperatures when measuring the speed of sound.
Kill Me Love Me is a 2024 Chinese television series based on the novel Chun Hua Yan by Hei Yan. It stars Liu Xueyi and Wu Jinyan in leading roles. The series premiered on Youku on October 14, 2024.
Synopsis
Ten years ago, during the war among the kingdoms of Dayan, Xiyan, and Nanyue, Prince Murong Jinghe of Dayan, renowned for his combat skills, led the Weibei army to significant victories against Xiyan and reclaimed Qingzhou city. However, on his return to court to receive rewards, all the civilians of Qingzhou were massacred and he was attacked by the common people who blamed him for the tragedy. The attack decimated all his forces and made him disable.
Mei Lin, an orphan of Qingzhou, swears to take revenge from Murong Jinghe and joins Shadow Works where she undergoes years of rigorous training to become an assassin. Soon the master of Shadow Works assigns her first mission which is to assassinate Murong Jinghe. Mei Lin enters the palace and waits for a chance to kill him not knowing that the one behind the Shadow Works is none other than Murong Jinghe himself.
(Jing=Jinghe)
We watched the last three episodes tonight. The bad General Mingju has finally gotten his wish: his king has ordered him to attack Qingzhou in order to gain access to a sacred mountain so that his lunatic king can gain immortality. His first act is to order his archers to shoot flaming arrows into a forest next to Qingzhou. This starts a forest fire and General Jing, our hero, deploys his troops to fight the forest fire, which leaves the town sparsely defended, which is what bad General Mingju was hoping for.
While the town is sparsely defended, General Minju attacks, but something happened, I don't recall exactly, and he falls back to regroup. Good General Jing uses this opportunity to mount a suicide attack on Minju's camp in order to destroy his supplies and his siege engines. Qingzhou has impressive walls. Siege engines would be useful if you wanted to attack.
They manage to sneak into camp and kill a few of Mingju's soldiers before they raise the alarm and now their situation is much, much worse. They are near to getting wiped out and Pingyan, General Jing's sidekick, pulls off the most heroic death scene ever. He gets nailed to a post with some stout looking crossbow bolts. He is shot in the chest with three or four of these bolts, so we know he's a goner. (Yes, I know it's television, and people who we think have died get resurrected all the time, but in this series only the main characters get a second chance. Second string characters die once and they're done.) The bolts have no fletching and the main target of this raid (a big pile of industrial size firecrackers) is within sight. So here we go:
Pingyan pushes himself off the post, leaving big holes in his chest and the crossbow bolts stuck in the post. He picks up a big jug of oil, throws it into the air and then hits with a club or something and smashes it. Now he is drenched with oil. He now takes a couple of running steps, leaps into the air, flies over a flaming torch, which catches him on fire, and now he flies onto the pile of fireworks which dutifully explodes. That has got to be the most spectacularly heroic scene ever.
I am going to assume this guy believes what he is saying. I'm sorry, I can't hear any difference between old and new. Okay, I might be able to hear a slight difference, but not enough for me to say one is better than the other. It might be because I am old, or because my loudspeaker is weak, but I suspect my brain is not as sensitive to sound as some other people.
I was talking to a guy I know about tunes and he tells me he doesn't really care for instrumental music, he prefers singing. That shocked me. I never understood the popularity of opera. I find opera tedious in the extreme. Singing by itself is not my favorite. I like a tune with music, singing and lyrics that are clear. Lyrics don't have to be totally clear, nonsense is sometimes okay, and there are any number of tunes out there I have zero affection for. Rock and roll and jazz are more my cup of tea.
You might have seen the new Jaguar ad. Gawd awful if you ask me. This guy goes way back to the beginning and traces the history of Jaguar. I always liked Jaguars, I thought they looked cool. They had big engines, relative to the rest of the European auto industry, and the engines had dual overhead cams, which, to my teenage freakazoid mentality, was the very pinnacle of coolness.
I always knew that some car nerds worshipped the C and D-types, but I never knew why. This video shows us why.
There is an ad for some kind of bullshit that starts at the 4:30 mark and runs for a minute. Later on there is another ad for their T-shirt, but it only runs for 5 seconds. Since I can tolerate it, I am going to assume that you can to.
Damascus, Syria – There’s something different about Christmas this year, Damascenes say.
Although the decorations may have been more elaborate last year, Carol al-Sahhaf says this year’s festive mood is a cut above, less than two weeks after Bashar al-Assad fled and his regime crumbled.
On either side of the biblical Street Called Straight – or al-Mustaqeem or just Straight Street for short – lights and Christmas trees adorn the cafes, restaurants, shops and homes of Bab Sharqi, the neighbourhood nestled up to the Eastern Gate of the ancient Old City.
The alleyways around Straight Street are bustling, with a spring-like feeling in the air as shopkeepers repaint, dust off their shelves, and hang the green, white and black Free Syria flag.
Lights, cookies, and optimism
Al-Assad fled on December 8, and the country erupted into jubilation that lasted for days as Syrians celebrated the fall of the al-Assad family and the end of more than 50 years of brutal rule.
As those celebrations calmed, Olga al-Muuti told Al Jazeera, everyone turned to preparing for Christmas, New Year’s and Orthodox Christmas.
At work today, as the days wind down for me, I was amused to see an email regarding performance of some of my tech team, using the phrase "... who really hosed that up...". Entirely unacceptable in the passive-aggressive culture that is self-styled enlightened corporate profit gouging, this email set off a flurry of HR involvement, senior management closed door sessions, and gossip enough to choke a goose, which is fittingly appropriate, culminating with the offending party being taken to the parking lot and thrown into a uncovered manhole..
I laughed, said "Finally some plain talk."
I had to explain "hosed" to one person, and looked up the origin, found this:
Hosers are nearly always white men. A hoser is, to a great extent, the Canadian equivalent of American terms like “hillbilly” and “redneck” – though without the overtly racist connotations of the latter word. A parody of the Canadian public service announcement “Hinterland Who’s Who” states that, “The hoser is often found in clusters, in habitats such as the Tim Hortons parking lot, Harvey’s and hockey arenas. Feeding mainly on a diet of smokes, coffee, poutine and beer, the hoser is a colourful animal — and a slob."
Driving up Germantown Road from St. John a couple of days ago I noticed a US Navy ship and I thought I'd like to get a photo of that ship. Problem with Germantown Road is that there are very few places where you can pull off the road, and it's busy enough that I didn't want to just stop in the middle of the road. Now if I had a proper camera, I could probably have got a shot of the ship just by pointing my camera out the window and pressing the go button.
Sidebar rant: But I don't have a proper camera, instead I have a fancy-schmancy smartphone. It takes great pictures, much better than my last smartphone, or maybe I've just subliminally modified my phone handling so I am now compatible with the smartphone's preferred method of behavior. Anyway, taking a picture with a smart phone requires, multiple fingers, multiple touches and the patience of a saint. For someone who grew up with mechanical switches that reacted instantly, all these new-fangled electronic gizmos with their multiple milli-second delays are effing bullshit.
Today I thought I would make an effort to try and take a picture of this ship. First I took off driving directly towards the ship. Big fail. No roads come anywhere near the docks. Most of the land is given over to parking lots for imported cars, it's all private industrial stuff, no ger-finger-pokin-tourists wanted.
Cross the St. Johns bridge and head up US Highway 30. Not a tourist friendly area. Cliffs on the south side of the road and tank farms on the north side. Took the first photo from an entrance to one of these tank farms.
Another terrible picture of MV Bob Hope -or- MV Fisher
Took this from another pull-out a little farther up the road. Not looking good here. Turned around and headed back toward the bridge and found a side road so I pulled over.
NW Hoge Ave
And, oh look, there's stairs going up the hill, maybe I'll get high enough I can get a decent shot. The stairs are something else.
Stout, industrial strength stairs
that go way up the hillside
but ultimately don't go anywhere.
Seriously long stairs that got me high enough up to get the next photo
MV Bob Hope -or- MV Fisher
VesselFinder reports the MV Bob Hope and the MV Fisher are both in Portland. I only saw the one ship. Looking at Wikipedia's photos, they appear to be identical. I don't know whether the report showing that both MV Bob Hope and the MV Fisher are in Portland is in error, or the Navy obfuscating their ship's locations, or whether I'm blind and the ships are here.
Went to Costco two days ago and this guy was into front of us at the checkout line. I know you can get a permit for concealed-carry, but I'm not sure what the rules are for open carry. In any case, I don't know if anyone besides me noticed, and nobody made a fuss.
An 80-year old man in Finland created a belt-fed .22 caliber machine gun out of an electric drill. The cam-driven weapon had a firing rate of 420 rpm (for comparison, the US M3 Grease Gun is 450 rpm). The man was not prosecuted, but he had to give up his creation.
In ancient times, demand was strong for scribes who could write and copy texts day in and day out. Only a small minority had the stamina and ability, and they enjoyed reproductive success.
'Reproductive success', now there's a loaded phrase. Here's the opening paragraphs:
The Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) is a brain region that helps us recognize written words and letters. Without it, reading requires much more effort. When a man suffered an accidental lesion to his VWFA during brain surgery, he lost much of his ability to read while losing none of his general language abilities. After six months, he had partially recovered, but reading still took twice as long as it had before (Gaillard et al, 2006).
The VWFA is composed of neurons that were once used for face recognition:
Thus, learning to read must involve a ‘neuronal recycling’ process whereby pre-existing cortical systems are harnessed for the novel task of recognizing written words. … [Such areas of the cortex] possess the appropriate receptive fields to recognize the small contrasted shapes that are used as characters, and the appropriate connections to send this information to temporal lobe language areas (Dehaene & Cohen, 2011)
This neuronal recycling seems to have become hardwired, at least in some people. After Swiss preschoolers played a grapheme/phoneme correspondence game for a total of 3.6 hours over 8 weeks, an MRI scan showed their VWFAs preferentially responding to images of strings of letters. Yet only a few of the children could actually read, and only at a rudimentary level (Brem et al., 2010).
Humans may have initially identified words by using face-recognition neurons. As reading became more important, natural selection favored those humans who could free up more of their face-recognition neurons for reading. This selection eventually created a large neuronal population dedicated solely to word recognition, i.e., the VWFA.
He goes for a bit. I tried reading the rest of it but got bogged down. You may enjoy it.
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