Indianapolis

Downtown Indianapolis

For some reason, I always picture Indianapolis in sunlight. Maybe I've never seen a picture of it at night. Now for something completely different:

The Craziest Engineering Ever In History!
Theory Blazer

Kurt Vonnegut Sr., father of the author Kurt Vonnegut Jr., was the architect of this building.

Wikipedia has a page that mentions this operation.

Medium also has a page about moving this and other buildings.

10 Short Videos #25

10 Short Videos #25

Low Wages

Visual Capitalist posted a chart showing number of working people making less than $20 an hour. It lists the states in order of the number of people. I thought that was not particularly useful, I wanted the list in order of the percentage of the workforce earning those wages, so I asked Google to extract the text from the image and put it in a spreadsheet. Mostly I did this just to get a little mental exercise. Google does a good job of extracting the text, but it puts each item on a separate line, and I want all items pertaining to one state on the same line. I could do this by hand with any text editor, but being who I am, I went with using spreadsheet formulas. Was it any faster? Maybe, maybe not, but it was not tedious and I refreshed my spreadsheet skills.

The US States With The Most Low-Wage Workers

Original Rank	Percentage Rank	State	Thousands of People	Percentage of Workforce
27	1	Mississippi	581	52%
20	2	Louisiana	781	45%
30	3	Arkansas	541	43%
39	4	West Virginia	293	43%
22	5	Oklahoma	735	42%
21	6	Kentucky	739	41%
36	7	New Mexico	352	41%
5	8	North Carolina	1,800	40%
18	9	Alabama	821	39%
1	10	Texas	5,100	38%
3	11	Florida	3,500	38%
48	12	Wyoming	92	38%
7	13	Georgia	1,700	37%
15	14	Missouri	1,000	37%
17	15	South Carolina	824	37%
29	16	lowa	547	37%
11	17	Indiana	1,100	36%
32	18	Nevada	511	36%
37	19	Idaho	311	36%
33	20	Kansas	474	35%
14	21	Tennessee	1,000	34%
10	22	Michigan	1,400	33%
31	23	Utah	511	33%
9	24	Ohio	1,600	32%
38	25	Nebraska	298	32%
40	26	Hawaii	181	32%
44	27	South Dakota	137	32%
16	28	Arizona	963	31%
43	29	Montana	144	31%
6	30	Pennsylvania	1,700	30%
45	31	Delaware	135	30%
8	32	Illinois	1,600	29%
19	33	Wisconsin	808	29%
41	34	Maine	171	29%
47	35	North Dakota	103	28%
13	36	Virginia	1,000	27%
4	37	New York	2,200	26%
12	38	New Jersey	1,100	26%
46	39	Rhode Island	131	26%
23	40	Minnesota	659	25%
2	41	California	4,000	24%
42	42	New Hampshire	161	24%
34	43	Oregon	416	23%
35	44	Connecticut	380	23%
49	45	Vermont	67	23%
25	46	Maryland	630	22%
28	47	Colorado	553	21%
50	48	Alaska	161	20%
24	49	Washington	639	19%
26	50	Massachusetts	605	18%
51	51	D.C.	141	11%

10 Short Videos #24

10 Short Videos #24

Working

Workmen hammering rivets into a vessel - Fortunino Matania, R.I.

The Last Elephant Cage

The Last Elephant Cage
National Security Agency

Previous posts about these antennas:

• Luneburg Lens
• The Honourable Schoolboy by John LeCarre

Wikipedia has a page about these things.

10 Short Videos #23

10 Short Videos #23

1969 Chrysler 300

1969 Chrysler 300

Glory days, 440 cubic inch V8 engine, automatic transmission, 19 feet long, 4300 pounds of Detroit Iron.

English Electric Canberra

English Electric Canberra

Put this jigsaw puzzle together this afternoon and realized I had put up a post about the Canberra some time ago. That post pointed to the following video:


Canberra Over Stalingrad - Penetrating Russia's Area 51
Mark Felton Productions

Map from Google Earth:

Canberra Flight to Kapustin Yar

Wikipedia page about the Canberra.

10 Short Videos #22

10 Short Videos #22

Trichinosis

Pork chops in a skillet. (Elena Veselova/Shutterstock)

I've always stuck to pork that is well done, but I've always kind of wondered about trichinosis. I've made a couple of inquiries over the years, but I never got any kind of a helpful answer. Now we've got a story in Willamette Week that explains the current situation. Seems trichinosis has been pretty much eradicated from the farmed pork supply. It still exists in wild animals, so you want to careful about eating that bear you just shot.

Dream

A young woman comes down from upstairs and tells me there is a problem with the skylight, something about a curtain or a vase, so I go upstairs with her and I see there is indeed a problem - there is a big hole in the roof. I get all the way up and I see that half of the roof along with the upstairs ceiling has been torn off. There is no debris to speak of, it's just all gone.

10 Short Videos #21

10 Short Videos #21

Down Cemetery Road — Apple TV Series

Down Cemetery Road — Official Trailer | Apple TV
Apple TV

This might be a thriller, but it's a bit of a mess, but that is probably why it's so entertaining. We've got a bunch of curious characters, a bunch of villains, and a bunch of incompetence. It's all tied to the Ministry of Defense trying to erase the evidence of a chemical warfare experiment gone horribly wrong, all told in a fairly light-hearted fashion.

Our girl, Sarah, is played by Ruth Wilson, famous (to us, anyway) for playing the psychopath Alice in the series Luther with Idris Elba.

Headliner Emma Thompson plays Zoë Boehm, a private investigator. She and Sarah are the driving forces in this show, i.e. the troublemakers that C wants to shut up.

Adeel Akhtar plays Hamza Malik, or maybe Malik Hamza. In the cast he is listed as Hamza, but in the show he is always referred to as Malik, except for one case when his full name is used, but I can't remember which way it goes. Whatever. We've seen him in other shows, usually as a peripheral character, often as a policeman. In any case, this time he plays a fumbling, fawning toady, totally out of his depth, who has inexplicably been put in charge of the clean up operation. His  spectacular incompetence makes me wonder how he got put in charge of anything. I dunno, maybe only incompetent people are willing to work at such jobs because that is the only kind of job they can get. All you have to do is be willing to do whatever you are told.

The title comes from the poem Toads Revisited by Philip Larkin. Kind of a grim little piece.

Cast:

Actor	Surname	Title	Character	Surname	Role
Emma	Thompson		Zoë	Boehm	Lead, Joe's wife and partner
Ruth	Wilson		Sarah	Trafford	Our girl
Adeel	Akhtar		Hamza	Malik	Tool for C
Darren	Boyd		C.		Villain, head of some MoD outfit
Fehinti	Balogun		Amos	Crane	Killer, brother of Alex aka Rufus
Nathan	Stewart-Jarrett			Downey	Soldier, survivor of chemical weapon attack
Ella	Bruccoleri	Nurse	Steph	Ricci	Babysitter
Ivy	Quoi		Dinah	Singleton	Little girl
Aaron	Neil	DI	Ash	Varma	Police
Lydia	Leonard		Talia	Ross	Defence Secretary
Sara	Kestelman		Janice		Joe's mother
Joshua	James		Wayne		Mortician / Computer hacker
Pip	Torrens	Dr.	Isaac	Wright	Tool for C
Ioanna	Kimbook		Cheski	Galanis	Assistant to Defence Secretary
Gary	Lewis	Captain	Donny		Police
Sinead	Matthews		Denise		aka Wigwam, hippie chick, friend of Sarah's
Ken	Nwosu		Rufus		aka Alex, killer, brother of Amos
Tom	Riley		Mark		Our girl's twat of a husband
Tom	Goodman-Hill		Gerard		Rich douchebag, Paula's husband
Adam	Godley		Joe	Silvermann	Zoë's husband, Private Investigator
Sophia	Brown		Ella	Downey	Downey's sister
Steven	Cree		Bob	Poland	Police
Aiysha	Hart		Paula		Gerard's wife

IMDB has a lists 100 people in the cast, half of them only appeared in one episode.

Soundtrack seems to be all atmospheric, no tunes as such, all by Laura Karpman.

8 episodes 50 minutes each.

Elephant Hunting Returns

A pair of male elephants in the Okavango Delta, Botswana [Mike Hutchings/Reuters]

Botswana government has increased its annual trophy-hunting quota for elephants:

Botswana, a largely dry nation which is home to 2.3 million people, has more than 130,000 elephants, nearly one-third of all elephants in Africa. The African continent is home to some 415,000 elephants of the world’s 460,000 elephants. The rest of the world’s elephants are in Asia.

In 2019, the government lifted a five-year moratorium on elephant hunting to keep the elephant population in check and help generate revenue from trophy hunters for rural communities.

A preliminary government draft indicates that the quota for trophy hunting for 2026 has been raised to 430 elephants, up from 410 in 2025.

The move reflects Botswana’s general approach to the conservation of elephant herds.

In 2014, the country imposed a complete ban on trophy hunting but reversed that decision five years later, saying elephant numbers had risen too high and were threatening farmers’ livelihoods.

Now, the government allocates annual hunting quotas for more than a dozen species, including elephants, rhinos, and hippopotamuses.

Other African nations, including Namibia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, also have trophy-hunting quotas to manage their elephant and other wildlife populations.

Other posts about elephants.

Strange Days

Memorial bust honoring Ivan Kokovin (L) and Michael Gloss in Donetsk, Russia, December 9, 2025. ©  Donetsk Mayor Aleksey Kulemzin / Telegram

This is just the strangest thing I have seen in a while.

Memorial to slain son of senior CIA official unveiled in Russia

Michael Gloss volunteered to fight in the Ukraine conflict and was killed liberating Donbass

A memorial bust honoring Michael Gloss, the son of CIA Deputy Director Juliane Gallina who died while fighting for Russia, was unveiled this week in Donetsk.

10 Short Videos #20

10 Short Videos #20

10 Short Videos #19

10 Short Videos #19

Dream

I was making some repairs to an old, ramshackle, beach front store. I had to get a ladder and nail down half a dozen shingles on the roof of this single story building. When I came down an acquaintance drove up and complained about the way I parked. If I had pulled up behind the car ahead of me, he could have pulled in behind me, but as it was he was going to have to parallel park. Isn't that the way it always is? The situation was complicated by a section of yellow curb. A casual glance gave the impression that there was room behind my car, but if you step across the road, you can see that the restricted area was supposed to be a little longer, but the paint had been flaking off and was no longer clearly visible. Wouldn't make any difference to the meter maid, if one even showed up at this remote location. Anyway, he pulled a U-turn and parked in motel parking lot across the street.

10 Short Videos #18

10 Short Videos #18

Tatas for Toys

Tatas for Toys (thomas chamberlain/Tatas for Toys)

Strippers Are Now No. 1 Donor of Toys to Children’s Hospital in Portland, Oregon. Willamette Week has the story.

U. S. Energy Consumption

Estimated U. S. Energy Consumption in 2023: 93.6 Quads

Found this on Casey Handmer's Blog. Click to embiggenate. A quad is a unit of measurement equal to one quadrillion (10^15) British Thermal Units (BTUs). I suspect that Rejected Energy (the gray box in the upper right corner of the chart) is energy that is converted to heat and dissipated, and Energy Services (the block box in the lower right corner) is energy that was used for useful things. So roughly one third of the 93.6 quadrillion BTUs were used to do something useful, and the other two-thirds was was converted to waste heat. This is a bunch, but it is negligible compared to the zillion BTUs the sun delivers every day.

Substitution Cipher Based on The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript is a hand written book from the 15th century. It is written in an unknown language using unknown characters. People have been trying to decipher it since forever, but as yet there has been no success. There are a couple of theories on what it is, one of which is that it is just gibberish written by a madman. Another theory is that it is an encryption of a text in another language like Latin. Today I found this post on Schneier on Security:

Here’s a fun paper: “The Naibbe cipher: a substitution cipher that encrypts Latin and Italian as Voynich Manuscript-like ciphertext“:

Abstract: In this article, I investigate the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript (MS 408, Yale University Beinecke Library) is compatible with being a ciphertext by attempting to develop a historically plausible cipher that can replicate the manuscript’s unusual properties. The resulting cipher­a verbose homophonic substitution cipher I call the Naibbe cipher­ can be done entirely by hand with 15th-century materials, and when it encrypts a wide range of Latin and Italian plaintexts, the resulting ciphertexts remain fully decipherable and also reliably reproduce many key statistical properties of the Voynich Manuscript at once. My results suggest that the so-called “ciphertext hypothesis” for the Voynich Manuscript remains viable, while also placing constraints on plausible substitution cipher structures.

The first problem anyone attempting to decipher this manuscript runs into is deciding just which symbols are letters, since the symbols tend to run into each other. And then there is the problem of assigning tokens. Only after that is done can you begin trying to decipher it using a computer.

 

Peace through having a bigger hammer

 Aerial Refueling the B-52 by Senior Airman Jessica Do

The above image headlined this announcement:

Valdai Club to Discuss the Results of 2025 in the Area of International Security

I found the combination a little unsettling. I shouldn't, but I did.

USS Arizona

 USS Arizona (BB 39) upon completion of modernization at Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, Virginia, 2 March 1931.

This was fifteen years after she was launched and ten years before Pearl Harbor.

USS Arizona (BB-39), a Pennsylvania-class battleship, was built at the New York Navy Yard, Brooklyn, New York, and was commissioned in October 1916, serving in the Atlantic and Mediterranean areas until 1921 when she was based in Southern California.   Modernized in 1929-31 at the Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, Virginia, she returned to the Pacific after transporting President Herbert Hoover to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.   From 1940, Arizona and other Pacific Fleet battleships were based out of Pearl Harbor.  On December 7th, 1941, she was moored in "Battleship Row" when Japanese carrier aircraft attacked.  Hit by several bombs, her forward ammunition magazines exploded, wrecking the ship's forward hull and collapsing her forward superstructure, which caused her to sink with the loss of 1,177 of her crew.  Arizona's hull is now a tomb for those who lost their lives.   In the early 1960s, a memorial structure, the USS Arizona Memorial, was constructed over her midship hull.  Operated by the National Park Service, the shrine is a permanent memorial site at Pearl Harbor for those who lost their lives at Pearl Harbor and for the servicemembers who lost their lives in the Pacific War. - National Museum of the United States Navy

Modesty

An airman inspects his B-25’s four nose mounted .50 caliber machine guns. The .75mm cannon can be seen on the lower right portion of the nose.
Note the machine guns mounted in pods on the outside of the cockpit.

I'm reading Indestructible by John R. Bruning. It's about Pappy Gunn and his experience fighting the Japanese in the early days of WW2 in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. It's a bit of a slog, about half of the book is repetitive emotional clap-trap, but the actual story is fascinating. I'm a little past half way through and he is the process of mounting eight 50 caliber machine guns to the nose of a B-25. His group is also involved in flying missions out of Charters Towers, Australia, supporting the garrison at Port Moresby, New Guinea. On page 300 we get this report of one flight to Port Moresby:

After work after weeks of working long hours and stifling hot hangers, those flights to Moresby afforded him the chance to air himself out a bit, much to the astonishment of the skeleton crew who ran with him. 

He donned an aboriginal loincloth and would stretch his shirt and slacks out behind the pilot seat to let them get some air, too. This cost him dearly once when somebody opened a side window in the cockpit somewhere over the Coral Sea the sudden jet of the slipstream into the cockpit blew his clothes into a whirlwind. Before he could catch them, they spun right out the side window. Normally, that would just have been an aggravation, but Pappy's pocket contained at least $1,000 in pay and poker winnings. The actual amount varied on the telling and retelling by his pals but even worse was his arrival at Port Moresby in nothing but a loin cloth. As they parked at the Airdrome there, a group of females - either Red Cross workers or nurses - showed up with coffee and snacks for the crew. Pappy refused to get out of the cockpit. Always modest, the idea of a woman other than Polly [his wife] seeing him in such a state roused him to panic fury. He demanded that somebody get him a change of clothes, and when his crew wouldn't stop laughing, legend has it he threatened to shoot them. Somebody finally got him a shirt and a pair of slacks he dressed while muttering a constant stream of invectives, then dropped out of the B-25's hatch and stormed off.

Charters Towers to Port Moresby

Update next day replace Darwin with Charters Towers.

Addiction

District Attorney Nathan Vasquez. (Nathaniel Perales)

Oregon has been trying to figure out what to do about recreational / dangerous / addictive / narcotic drugs for a while. We haven't found a solution, but we keep trying different things. Some people say we should just lock up all the drug addicts, but keeping people in prison costs a lot of money, and the prisons are overcrowded anyway, and nobody wants to spend more money on prisons. Anyway, Nathan is going to try tightening up the existing laws. We shall see if that makes any difference. Willamette Week has the story, wherein I found this quote:

Finallynelson50, via Reddit: “Clearly, none of you have ever had an addiction to drugs problem. This new shit on the streets is bad. Starts out delivering an immense high and you love it. Feels like everything in your life has just disappeared. Abused sexually, physically, emotionally, childhood issues, you name it, it’s all gone for the time being. Then you notice that you need more to achieve the same high. You want to quit, but you can’t! No one except an addict knows what it feels like to get ‘SICK,’ you’d literally sell your soul to not get sick! It literally makes everything in your body excruciatingly painful like you can’t imagine. Most users you see out there are looking for the drugs so they don’t get sick. None of you know what you’re talking about. The only thing that this is going to do is keep the jails full! And that, of course, makes the government money.”

I don't see how keeping the jails full makes anyone any money, unless it's a private prison, and I don't think we have any of those here in Oregon.

 

10 Short Videos #17

10 Short Videos #17

10 Short Videos #16

10 Short Videos #16

Ferrari/Maserati Engine That Lasted 5 Minutes - Quattroporte GTS - PT6

Ferrari/Maserati Engine That Lasted 5 Minutes - Quattroporte GTS - PT6
M539 Restorations

I don't understand why I watch some videos and some I quit after a couple of minutes. It's kind of like reading books. Sometimes I'll pick up a book and start reading it and it will just grab me and I can't put it down. More often I will read a bit and get bored and set it down.

I suppose this one sucked me in because we're on the track of a mystery. Near as I can make out, it was running on dirty oil that caused some minor damage that started the bearings down the slippery slope to failure. I wonder if analysis of the old oil might have revealed impending doom. But even if you were alerted, what a pain to pull the engine out of this car. He must have pulled a zillion bolts before he was able to examine the rod bearings.

Remind me never to buy a car with a turbocharger. Nice, fancy jet-age power, but stuffing one under the hood of most any car is going to make any repairs twice as difficult and twice as expensive.

2022 Ferrari 296 GTB

There might be another reason I watched this video and that is I was reading about Ferrari's merchandising business, how they make more off of Ferrari branded T-shirts and jackets than they do from selling cars, which prompted me to go look on E-bay where I typed in Ferrari and I got back a bunch of Ferrari automobiles. I was expecting the usual kind of E-Bay crap like coffee mugs and planters, but no, there were a bunch of Ferraris on there, and there was a very nice looking one in South Carolina for $20K which got me to thinking about buying one. That is a really stupid idea, I hope I don't fall for one of my whims.