Wing suit demo by Jeb Corliss

Jeb Corliss wing-suit demo from Jeb Corliss on Vimeo.
Digital daughter sent me the original link on Wimp.com. They don't support embedded video, so I tried some other sites. YouTube sticks advertising on it. LiveLeak cuts the sides off on the embedded version. Vimeo wins.

At the very beginning, up to about 15 seconds, there is a very faint smoke trail coming in from the upper right corner, above the mountain. Then it appears to disappear behind the mountain. Around the 35 second mark I see something appear in the lower right quadrant, dropping and then shooting across the screen. At first I thought they were unrelated, but then I put it in full screen mode and I saw that both trails were part of the same flight. I was able to track him zig-zagging down the face of the mountain, well, except for a couple of spots where he disappears in front of a patch of snow.

Update February 2017 replaced missing video.

Bahrain Banks Association

The Bahrain Banks Association? Where the heck is Bahrain? Isn't that the little filthy rich island nation in the South Pacific? Oh, no, that's Brunei, which occupies a small part of Borneo. Bahrain is in the Persian Gulf between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, another tiny, filthy rich country, and just down the shore from Kuwait and Iraq. Yeah, okay, another filthy rich, tiny little country. You know, there are getting to be a lot of these things. Someone should do an inventory sometime.

Anyway, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is holding a reception for the Bahrain Banks Association in Bahrain today. Well, isn't that special. U.S. business community making nice with rich foreigners. Maybe they'll lend us a couple of trillion dollars. That seems to be our stock in trade these days, borrowing money.

Here's what caught my eye. This is at the Southern end of the island and is easily visible on Google Maps. The ring road is approximately a mile and a half in diameter. I suspect it's a housing development. Seems to be the latest fad in the Mid-East.

Bahrain Circular Development

Via Just An Earth Bound Misfit.

Update February 2016. Replaced embedded map with screen shot. Could not persuade the embedded map to show the correct area.

Connections?

I read the comics in the paper every day, and one of the comics is Doonesbury. About a week or so ago he was talking about how large segments of the population believe in all kinds of wacked out stuff and how rationalists are a distinct minority. Then he goes off and spends a few days talking about how Afghanistan is the new Vietnam. I mention this one at lunch and Don mentions the pipeline, you know, the one they were building in the James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough. I like this theory because it goes along with my money-is-the-root-of-all-evil theory of Global Domination. Except there is no pipeline. Way back in 1998 there was a agreement in place with the Taliban to build one across Afghanistan and Pakistan to deliver natural gas to India, but that agreement fell apart and a few years later we decided to get involved. So it could be that we invaded Afghanistan to ensure that the pipeline would not get built and so deprive India of a source of cheap gas. Or it could be that we really are there to combat terrorists. Like Jack said, even it the US was not involved, given the general situation over there, it seems unlikely that a pipeline could ever be built, much less be a success. Some people are still talking about building one, but it seems even less likely now.


I was talking to an old friend last night and mentioned that darling daughter is now in Uganda, and this reminds Jody of Darwin's Nightmare. Seems someone introduced Nile Perch into Lake Victoria (the largest fresh water lake in the world, never mind wikipedias claim that Huron and Michigan are one lake. If they were one lake, why do they have two names? Just another example of American's claiming to be bigger and better than everyone else). This fish pushed out the previous residents, destroyed the subsistance fishing industry (can you call substitance anything an industry?) and created a new export industry. So now we have Russian jet air freighters flying in plane loads of arms and ammunition and flying plane loads of fish filets to Europe. Meanwhile the locals can't afford to eat the fish.

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So everything points to Doonesbury.

Downtown

Thursday night I took the Max (the local train) downtown to a software developer's get together at the Thirsty Lion. I got off the train at the Oak Street station and my short walk to the pub took me by a couple places I knew. I would never have guessed that I would find so many places I knew all in one go. First was McCormick & Schmick's (Seafood Restaurant). My wife and I eat there occasionally, but I have never been able to find it reliably. I know where it is approximately, so I drive to the general area and then wander around till I stumble on it. Practically next door is Apple Music. I was just down there with my son looking at guitar amplifiers. I bought one of those $100 specials they throw in when I bought him an electric guitar. He has outgrown it. He claims the sound is terrible. I wouldn't be surprised, but I really have no idea. After all, the sound of screaming hot rod engines is music to my ears. I don't claim to appreciate the finer nuances of actual music.

Around the corner I find a whole bunch of TV news vans pulled up along the curb. Oh, s**t, this must be the "Zone" where we had several people shot the other night, two fatally. What an effed up thing to happen. One of the girls who was shot goes to my son's high school. She is an exchange student from Ecuador. She caught a bullet in the thigh, but she is going to be okay, physically anyway. They released her from the hospital and she is planning on staying on.

The shooting was a friggin' disaster. Near as I can tell, the shooter wasn't a gun nut, wasn't even a nut case, just an ordinary guy who went off the deep end.


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In the next block was the pub, where SAO's DevSIG was meeting. I stayed for an hour or two, talked to several people, and then walked back to the train station. Took me about an hour and $2 each way, door to door.

The Official Website of the Prophet Mohammed

There are Muslims and there are Muslims, just like there are Christians and then there are Christians. Some people subscribe (regardless of their religion) to the "you pray your way, and I'll pray mine" point of view. Others do not. Some religions carry the "we are chosen people of god and everyone else is a heathen" to the point where they should not be allowed to mix with civilized people. Or else we should ALL get out our whacking sticks and join in the slaughter.

There is something fundamentally wrong with our relationship with Saudi Arabia.

Mohammed has a website. You will be offended. I hope.

Got started down this track via a post from Dustbury.

Quantum Figments

I had the opportunity to step on the gas this afternoon and enjoy a brief moment of sudden acceleration. People enjoy this. People enjoy shooting guns. Both involve acceleration of pieces of metal. With cars you have a large piece of metal accelerating on the order on one gravity. With firearms you have small bits of metal accelerating at hundreds of thousands of gravities (One Gravity is roughly 10 meters per second squared. So a hundred thousand gravities is roughly one million m/s^2). Acceleration is indistinguishable from gravity (theoretically speaking anyway). Could your brain be detecting a disturbance in the gravitational field caused these accelerations? Could that have anything to do with why people enjoy this things?

Context shift. A common story element involves people who know each other well, like twins or spouses, separated by a long distance, something bad happens to one, and the other senses it instantly.

I wonder whether these two phenomena might be related. Theoretical physicists have been talking about quantum entanglement for 75 years now, more or less. How a pair of particles can become entangled, and then when separated by even a large distance, one will react when something affects the other. Action at a distance that defies the law of relativity.

Could our brains be quantum activity detectors? Could twins have particles that were entangled in the womb and then separated as they grew? As far as we know, the brain runs on very low level chemical and electrical signals. Could there be even lower level activity going on that we do not yet know how to detect? (The old you don't know what you don't know issue.)

At this point most of all of this stuff could be explained by other factors, or written off as coincidence, but I just wonder ...

Good Ol' Commie Propaganda

Maybe. I found this while I was looking for a recording of "Brother Ivanovich's turn to throw the bomb". I am not quite sure what it is, but it is entertaining, regardless of what you may think of it.

Why couldn't I find a recording of the "throw the bomb" song? Could it be that it is now (gasp!) politically incorrect? Or maybe it's just culturally insensitive? Well, I think by depriving me of an easily accessable copy of a recording of this song "they" are being culturally insensitive to me. Ah'm a gonna sue!