Too Much Information

My older son is just like me, except for the ways that he isn't. In those cases he is exactly the opposite of me. Kind of like a mirror image, or my evil twin, or maybe I'm his evil twin from another era. In any case where I am enthralled with all things mechanical, he is absorbed with words and music. We were talking about this the other day and he mentioned that my interests were arcane and when I inquired which subject he was referring to, he replied "all". I was a little taken aback. I thought all of the subjects I find fascinating would fall under the classification of "useful", I mean if you ever needed to rebuild our great industrial empire from scratch, I think I have pretty good handle on most of the knowledge you would need. Of course, that is unlikely to happen, but sometimes a bit of my arcane knowledge comes in handy for fixing things around the house, like a broken toilet. On the other hand, with our thoroughly interconnected and thoroughly interdependent society, you don't really need to know any of this stuff. All you need to do is be able to talk to other people and you can quickly locate someone who does have the requisite knowledge.

Anyway, due to my continuous collection of arcane knowledge, my brain might be full. The battery on my camera died, so I plugged the camera into the USB cable thinking it would recharge. I mean it did this the last time it died, so it ought to do it again, right? Except it didn't. I left it plugged in for a couple of days, you know, just in case it was really slow, but it didn't help. Well, fine, I've got a charger for my old camera, maybe I can use it on this battery (even though they are different sizes, maybe the contacts have the same layout), so I reach in the drawer where I keep the battery charger and out comes a battery charger for this camera. Where the devil did that come from? I don't remember this thing. It must have come with the camera, I mean it says Lumix right on the front, and this camera is only the Lumix thing I own, so it must have come with the camera, but I had completely forgotten about it. Huh. I wonder if there are any good pictures on the camera. I guess we will find out.

Town Without Pony

I'm back. My gardener cut the wire and it took like forever to get it fixed, but now I'm back and reading Dustbury and he points at Pope Hat, who I read sometimes, but not usually, but this post is just the snarkiest. I smiled. I'm still smiling. My face is locked in a grin. Or a grimace, I'm not sure, I don't have a mirror handy. Anyway it's very funny.

Smokin'

U.S. Army Cpl. Jacob Bath enjoys a cigarette during a break on Forward Operating Base Farah, Farah province, Afghanistan on April 7, 2009. U.S. Air Force photo by Jonathan Lovelady.

I was stunned when I came across this photo on Military Photos dot net. It was the first time on that site that I had ever seen a member of the US military smoking.

System console for the AN/FSQ-7 computer system, circa 1960. It includes the OA-1008 Situation Display with a light gun (at end of cable), cigarette lighter, and ash tray (left of the light gun). 

The AN/FSQ-7 computer system was part of the Defense Department's early warning radar network. Photo by Joi Ito.

Today I'm looking at US radar systems and I come across this photo of a radar operator's console from 1960, where the cigarette lighter and ashtray are standard equipment. What a difference 50 years makes.

Now that you mention it, it's kind of funny that new cars still come equipped with ashtrays and lighters. The ashtray in my nemesis, the Chrysler Sebring, fits in a cup holder, and is removable, so maybe even the auto industry is changing.

Let The Spirit Move You

Fun with Tires

Blowing Up an Airplane Tire | I Didn't Know That

The video of the IL-76 skating on ice got me to thinking about how hard the ice must be and how big the tires were, which led me to this video from National Geographic. They use water now.

The tires on big aircraft are big (about four feet in diameter), but not a lot bigger than they used to be. We had a big, tractor towed chemical sprayer on the orchard and it rolled around on a couple of big aircraft tires. I imagine that the materials used to make these tires have gotten a lot better.

Orchard Sprayer

Update April 2021 replaced missing photo and dead link.

Anti-Spam Turing Test

I dunno if it's my eyes, or my monitor, or whether these cryptic decoding tasks are getting harder, but some of them are almost impossible to decipher. I failed the first one over at Tam's just now, so when the next one popped up, I said screw this and brought the hammer down. Press Print Screen, which sends a screen image to Picasa, which I leave running most all the time, switch to Picasa, Enlarge and increase the Fill Light and here we have something that, while still nearly illegible, I was at least able to correctly guess the correct values. In the original image the '3' in 3409 was totally obscure.
     To get this image here I had to repeat this process, because Picasa's Export function will not enlarge images even though I clicked Resize to 800 pixels. So I took a screen shot of the enlarged image (yes, a screen shot of a screen shot) and cropped that, and that's what we have here.

P.S. The Turing Test is old idea proposed by Alan Turing for determining if you have an intelligent machine. If you can't tell whether your corespondent is human or not, it passes the test. Since we do not have any intelligent machines yet, if you can decipher these characters, you must be a real person.

Google, the Big Fat Jerk

MY header image disappeared a couple of days ago, so I complained on the Blogger help forum. This morning I got a response, of sorts:

The circle and dash (in this case elongated circle) is an indicator of a permissions problem with an image. Where did you get the image? Is it your own uploaded from your computer? In that case, check the albums at www.picasaweb.com where our uploaded images are hosted and make them public. If the image is from a source other than your own, then you apparently do not have permission to use it.

WTF?!?! Doesn't someone have to complain first before they start with this kind of ham-handed crayola? Anyway, I looked on Picasa, and I couldn't find it. Of course now that they've opened this box they are probably going to complain about all the pictures that I liberated from the clutches of the evil internet. So look while you can, before the thought police start busting heads.

Anyway, I reloaded the header picture. We shall see how long it lasts this time. Jerks. I should go take a new picture. This one is old. The place is twice as big now.