Heat Sink

The boys put together a couple of computers, but the heat sinks would not attach properly so they were not making good contact with the CPU chips. Poor contact means poor heat conduction, which means the CPUs get hot which triggers the internal temperature sensors to slow down the clock. Well, the last thing we want is a slow CPU. I could have spent $50 and bought a different heat sink, but I decided to see if I could make this one work. I had the nuts and bolts, but I had to buy the aluminum bar stock ($3 or some such at Lowes). I was thinking I would need two bars, but the top one is superfluous, so I took it off. The heat sink has an internal spring. When you push down on it you can feel it give.
    The original mounting hardware for this device were these complicated plastic widgets. I suspect they may have been missing some springs, but it was a little hard to tell just how they were supposed to work.
    Works fine.

Pointing With Your Lips

As one Creek woman from Green Country, Oklahoma put it, “We don’t point with our fingers or hands. I think that it is not just rude, but also because some people use their hands for medicine, and so it creeps people out. It’s rude to make people feel like you might be doing something when you are not. It’s also bad to touch people you aren't close to unless you are shaking hands at certain times. Even then, many people are still uncomfortable about that...no touching and no pointing...may be someone puttin’ their bad on you”. - excerpt from Pointing With Our Lips by Corina Roberts

Seems it might be a thing with Hispanics and Filipinos as well. Via Post Hip Scott.

Perlan Project

 

Pressurized (!) Perlan Glider. 65 foot wingspan.

Some crazy people are going to try and fly a glider to an altitude of 100,000 feet over the North Pole.

Mother of Pearl Cloud by Luke Harrison

Evidently in the Polar regions there are some exceptional atmospheric conditions, especially where there are mountains nearby, which might make this stunt feasible.

On Aug. 29, 2006, Einar Enevoldson (left) and Steve Fossett set a new world glider altitude record. They wore NASA spacesuits to ward off the cold inside their glider's unpressurized tandem cockpit. The record was set in El Calafate, Argentina, in Perlan, a high performance research glider based on a German-built DG-505. Fossett and Enevoldson made the first glider flight into the earth’s stratosphere, reaching a height of 50,671 feet (15,447 m). They broke the previous record, set in 1986 in California, by 1,662 feet (507 m).

If the name Steve Fossett rings a bell, it's because he has been involved in a number of aerial adventures. He died in a small plane crash in California back in 2007. Einar Enevoldson is a former NASA research pilot.

Other altitude records:

• Amateur rocket reaches 121,000 ft 
• Helicopter Altitude Record
• Focke Wulf Fw 61 - luftwaffe test pilot Hanna Reitsch
• B-58 Hustler
• Pic of the Day
• Felix Baumgartner - Space Man
• Caproni Ca. 161bis

P.S. From Wikipedia's article: "A sailplane at 90,000 feet altitude flies in approximately the same aerodynamic regime--Mach and Reynolds numbers--to be experienced by a moderate size aircraft flying near the surface of Mars." 

Mt. Gox

Bitcoins?

Bitcoin raised its ugly head in an email conversation this week, and I put in my two cents:

I don't trust Bitcoin. It doesn't make much sense. You can make bitcoins by running a computer program to generate them. It takes a long time, ties up your computer, burns electricity, but all you get out of it is some number. I mean it's not good for anything except showing people that you have money and power to burn.

As I understand money, it's main purpose was to enable the government to levy taxes and then use the proceeds to buy weapons and pay soldiers. Originally it had inherent value because it was made of metal.

You can see that I'm not a fan of Bitcoin. Then California Bob mentions the Mt. Gox disaster. At first I thought it was a misspelling of Mr. Gox, but no, Mt. Gox is correct. Wikipedia's intro sums it up nicely:

Mt. Gox was a Bitcoin exchange based in Tokyo, Japan. It was launched in July 2010, and by 2013 was handling 70% of all Bitcoin transactions.^[1] In February 2014, the Mt. Gox company suspended trading, closed its website and exchange service, and filed for a form of bankruptcy protection from creditors called minji saisei, or civil rehabilitation, to allow courts to seek a buyer.^[2][3] In April 2014, the company began liquidation proceedings.^[4] It announced that around 850,000 bitcoins belonging to customers and the company were missing and likely stolen, an amount valued at more than $450 million at the time.^[5][6] Although 200,000 bitcoins have since been "found", the reason(s) for the disappearance—theft, fraud, mismanagement, or a combination of these—are unclear as of March 2014.^[7] There has been some speculation of hackers being responsible for the missing Bitcoins, but no case has been proven.^{[citation needed]}

I can see that we could use a better form of money. Gold backed money is nice and solid, but it ties up huge quantities of gold, one of the more useful metals. Then again, gold is relatively scarce, and keeping vast amounts of it locked up doesn't prevent it from being used, you just need to make sure you are making good use of it. Most all electronic devices use a tiny amount of gold for electrical contacts and bonding wires on integrated circuits, but the amount is miniscule. I suspect there isn't a tenth of a gram in an entire desktop computer these days, which only amounts to $2 worth.
    And then there is gold jewelry. I suspect more gold is lost from everyday wear of gold than the entire electronics industry uses in a year. No one notices because the loss is so miniscule, but there are so many people wearing it that the loss must add up to something.
    Fiat money (which is what most everyone uses these days) depends on good management by the government. Foolish governments try to print more to pay their bills, but they don't fool anyone, at least not for long. Witness Zimbabwe, which recently was unable to print any more money because they could not afford to buy any more paper or ink. How low can you go?
    The USA and Argentina are both running inflationary schemes. Argentina's may be a little worse (read steeper rate of devaluation), but we are both suffering from it. Why, I remember when I was a boy gasoline was 25 cents a gallon. Now it's over $4. Dang nab politicians. Never mind that it took 40 years to get there.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

Russian Kobalt-M Spy Satellite

Some people spotted a fireball in the sky last week over the Southwestern USA. They put their heads together and concluded that it was a Russian spy satellite. Russia says no, their satellite came down safely in Kazakhstan a few hours earlier. Okay, so maybe it was part of the satellite that the Russians didn't care about, in which case both versions of the story could be sort of true. But that's not what's interesting.

Last Week's Fireball Observations

     The satellite came down safely. Who bothers to recover an unmanned satellite? That is a whole lot of effort and expense for something that isn't carrying any passengers. What could this satellite be carrying that would be worth that kind of effort? Would you believe film? Can you believe the Russians are still using spy satellites that use regular film cameras to record images? The USA used to do that back during the cold war, but we moved to digital imaging a long time ago. The Russians are still doing it, or at least they were last week. I guess they do have digital spy satellites now. They just put this one up to stand in for one of their digital ones that crapped out.

The part that bothers me about this is that a film based system has got to be a zillion times more expensive per image than a digital one, and here the whole world is crying about how broke we are and we haven't got enough money for teachers or schools or food or roads or just about anything and we need to raise taxes to pay for all this stuff, but we can't raise taxes because everyone is too broke to pay any more taxes. And here's Russia, broke as of a couple of years ago, blowing a kazillion dollars on an obsolete spy satellite.

So all those people who are in charge are a bunch of lying sacks of shit. On the other hand, maybe that's what it takes to keep the lid on things. Or maybe nobody has a better idea.

P.S. I first encountered the title phrase when I was around 20 years old, and it really resonated with me. The Vietnam War was in full swing and I had just started noticing that what was going on in the world did not quite jibe with what I had been taught in school. Now I've got kids of my own going through this same thing, which reminded me of this phrase, which prompted me to try and find out where it came from. Firesign Theater is the answer. Never cared much for their recordings, but this title really struck me.

More about the Kobalt-M spy satellite here.

Update March 2017 replaced dead links.

Pic of the Day

PACIFIC OCEAN (Sept. 7, 2014)  USS George Washington passes the island formerly known as Iwo Jima. U.S. Navy photo by Trevor Welsh. Click to embiggenate.

Quote of the Day

View The Madmen of Benghazi in a larger map

Would that we had the stones to actually carpet bomb.  You haven't won until your enemy knows in his bones that it's over.  Precision pinpricks don't do it.  If they want jihad we really need to show them how that tune is played. - jsallison commenting on the USA's assigned task in Iraq War 3.0  (on one of Dustbury's posts).

P.S. I'm reading The Madmen of Benghazi, a thriller by Gerard de Villiers. He's talking about all these towns in Egypt and Libya, so I decided to find out if they were real, and if so, plot them on a map. Many of the names recall WW2 battles.The light blue markers are in Libya. Tripoli is the farthest left and Benghazi is next. That was a surprise. I thought Benghazi was a suburb of Tripoli. The reddish ones are in Egypt. The purple ones mark Cairo. The blue marker is Eilat, Israel.
    I was surprised to find that they were all along the coast. I thought there was some kind of green along the North African coast, but I guess not. And there is no sign of Qaddafi's great irrigation project, at least not at this scale.