Seismic Exploration Ships

Ramform Titan seismic exploration ship. 342 feet long and 230 feet wide, tows 24 seismic streamers.

The search for oil continues. Now they are mapping vast areas of the sea floor using arrays of sonic sensors towed behind ships, ships that are custom built for the purpose. Fat Albert (above) is the latest model. PGS is the company behind this ship.

Polarcus Amani

The Polarcus Amani is a more conventional looking ship, but it was built specifically for this purpose as well.

Via Iaman, who sent me a YouTube video.

Soccer Moms' Revenge

Jaguar XKE, Honda Odyssey, Porsche 356

Grassroots Motorsports has a great story about driving and modern life. Via View From The Porch

Bullitt

Bullitt - The Chase (part 1)
The Outer Sunset area in San Francisco does not have the kind of terrain you might normally associate with San Francisco. Instead of endless steep hills, it is relatively flat, though the flat is slightly tilted toward the ocean. Noriega street rises 400 feet in 2 miles as it heads east from the coast.
    The streets are laid out in a strict rectangular grid and they are relatively wide. This means you can have a long view down any street in the area. What I found interesting about this is that after I had been there and seen it for myself, I started noticing that it was a popular location for car chase scenes for movies and TV shows.
    So I go looking for such scenes, there must be boatload of 'em on YouTube, right? Well, there might be, but I didn't find any. I did find the chase scene from Bullitt, which was the bestest chase scene ever in the history of the world. It's so good I watched it again, and then I got to wondering who the bad guys are. I mean everybody knows that Steve McQueen plays the hero in this story, but who played the bad guys? Nobody ever mentions them.
    I do a little digging and I find that Paul Genge played Mike, the shooter, and Bill Hickman played Phil, the driver. Never heard of either of these guys, but they both have long resumes on IMDB. They both died about 30 years ago, 20 years after Bullitt. Scott Rollins put together a tribute page for Hickman. He was a big wheel in the stunt driving world.

P.S. While I was rooting around I came across a list of all the movie shooting locations in San Francisco, all movies and TV shows since the beginning of time. It's kind of a long list, and it might be useful for some purposes. It gives the location, but you kind of have to know where that is for it to be of any use.
    Anyway, the interesting part is that it's a spreadsheet and you can muck around with it to your heart's content, right there on the web page, without having to download anything. Pretty cool.

Houses

Outer Sunset, San Francisco California

California Bob laments his housing situation:

Whenever people talk about the high cost of living here, my default position is "go somewhere else."  Now that I'm facing that prospect it's problem. . . .
The problem in a nutshell is Prop 13, which limits property tax increases.  This acts like rent control; once you buy a place you're locked into it.  If you want to move, you can swap your house for another of equal value, but your new property tax will be multiples higher.  So everybody's locked into these $1 million dollar shacks that they paid $200K for.  And fewer units on the market drives the price of available units skyward.

Vail Arizona

Iaman responds with a snapshot of living in sun-baked (-roasted, -scorched, -fried-to-a-frizzle) southern Arizona:

[M]any people move here to Vail AZ from CA, HI, CO, WA, OR  to get away from cost & congestion.  nobody pines for their homeland.  The summer heat here is, like the cold in midwest, one tends to stays inside in AC, but cheaper than midwest heating costs. A neighbors daughter lives in Alamos Mexico,  nice houses come furnished with a maid and handyman for less than SF houses.

Alamos Mexico

Party

Pants On Fire. Heh.

'Party' may mean a political party or if might mean a celebration of some sort. The celebration sort of 'party' means different things to different people. For me a party was defined by the physical factors: food, drink, music, dancing. I suspect that for many people, a party is a chance to talk to a bunch of people and the physics are only something to comment on. Mormon parties, for instance, have no music or dancing or alcohol, just food and talking, and the emphasis is on talking, and they seem to have a fine time.
    There are different kinds of talking, too. For me, talking is a form of communication. I only speak when I have something to say, and I only listen when someone is telling me something I need to hear. Other people, like my family, seem to thrive on constant banter. Maybe I'm slow, or maybe I am preoccupied, or maybe fighting with computer programs has altered my thought processes. Thought can flow through the narrowest of channels using assumptions and obvious information to leap from one subject to another. Computers don't do that. They are machines and they follow their programs with machine-like rigidity. Trying to figure out why a computer program isn't doing what you think it should be doing requires questioning all of the assumptions you made when writing it. It can be a colossal pain in the Watusi.
    Politicians when they are speaking are not trying to communicate information, they are trying to establish an emotional rapport with their audience. Facts are mostly irrelevant, which is why they are often accused of lying by their detractors. Note that their supporters don't accuse them of lying, they got the emotional message and they are engaged. Facts are irrelevant.
    You don't suppose political parties got their name because of all the hullabaloo (partying) going on at their conventions, do you?

P.S. I posted the graph a couple of days ago. It's taken me this long to figure out what to say.

Cold War Relic

California Bob is selling his Cold War era motorcycle. Raising a family might have something to do with it.

1983 BMW R65 For Sale

The BMW R65 is on the block.  I have acquiesced.  Any hope of any further fun in my life is foolhardy, I'm giving up.

Stamped in the frame, from the days when we used to have to discriminate between East & West Germany. Not that there were ever any East German goods for sale in the West.

His car may be going away too:

Meanwhile my BMW car lost a cylinder the other day.  I figured it was a coil pack, which looked like it was under warranty, so I took the car in.  It was indeed a coil pack, so they replaced all 6, plus new micro filter and wiper blades, fluids and tires topped-up, plus a nice car wash.  And a latte.  And I got to drive a new 528 for 2 days.  Took me a while to figure out how to drive it, they don't have shift levers or brake levers anymore, everything's buttons.  All gratis.
New coil packs might have cost me $150 but it would have taken me 2 days to put in.
I think I need to unload the car before warranty expires in January.

Nauru

The rock that started it all
The rock's story

Today I came across a feeble story about an Australian Refugee Detention camp in, of all places, Nauru (nah oo roo). Nauru is small island is the South Pacific. The name sounds familiar. It wouldn't be that island with the huge deposits of bird poop, would it? Well, yes, it would.

Okay, so maybe the crags were only 20 or 30 feet tall

    I remember hearing about this place when I was a kid and it was described as being a roundish island with a narrow strip of habitable land around the outside edge. The interior was filled with these giant crags of rock (2 or 300 feet tall in my minds eye) and all the space between the crags was filled with bird poop, which could be mined for use as fertilizer.
    Australia has a policy of not letting any boat people into the country on the premise that more people are drowned trying to make the crossing than actually make it, so by discouraging them, fewer people try and fewer people die. Sounds like fodder for a big political argument.
    The Australian coast guard sweeps the northern sea. Any boats loaded with refugees get picked up and shipped to Nauru, a thousand miles away. Australia pays Nauru handsomely for accepting these people and this seems to be the one bright spot in the Nauru economy. (The economy is really tiny, so any kind of government activity is going to have big impact.) The Australian taxpayers are footing the exorbitant bill, but that is the Australian taxpayers problem and I'll leave it to them.
    Nauru was riding high for a while on the bird poop business, but like many lottery winners the money wandered off, and the bird poop mining business removed all the bird poop, so now Nauru is reduced to  running a concentration camp for the white man.

Nauru Phosphate Mining

     Then there was the bit about how all the phosphate deposits might not actually be bird poop, but were actually fish poop that accumulated when Nauru was on the bottom of the sea. That's not a half bad theory. Volcanic action produces new islands all the time, well, at least occasionally. These new islands are usually made of molten lava, but I suppose a piece of the seafloor could be pushed up, intact. And if these phosphate deposits were made by birds, where are all the birds? And why is this island the only one with these massive deposits?
     Nauru seems to be a stellar example of the horrors of a welfare state. What those people need is a religion, a religion that would put them to work doing something strenuous. Like carving massive stone heads and transporting them to the coast.