Firefly Aerospace

Firefly Engine Test

Iaman tells me that there is rocket company in Cedar Park, Texas. Cedar Park used to be a podunk town somewhere northwest of Austin. Now it's part of the greater Austin metropolis. Firefly Aerospace builds rockets for putting small satellites into orbit. Frigging rocket engines are horribly inefficient. I mean look at that exhaust. 90% of the energy that is released in the burning of the fuel just gets wasted.

Fast Forward

My computer display screen has been acting a little weird, so I consult with the cloud:

I've been hearing about 4K video for a while now. I ignored it when it first came out because, like any new technology,  it was expensive. (Just for a baseline, anything that costs more than a dollar and a half is expensive.) But now you can buy a 4K computer display at Costco for $300. That might be worthwhile, especially if this display is flaking out.

P.S. I tried copying the discussion from the forum, but Blogger has it's own rules about how to handle things and the copy-and-paste didn't work so well. So for my next trick I took a screen shot of the forum discussion, cropped it with Pix and inserted it here. I tried resizing it a couple of times by changing the height and width parameters in html, but I ended up with the original dimensions of the image. As the best compromise between being a readable size and fitting on the page. It looks like shit right now. It's all fuzzy like it was compressed and then expanded. Stupid Blogger, why can't you just render the image as it is? Maybe it will look better on the finished page, but I doubt it.

Anita Ward - Ring My Bell

Anita Ward - Ring My Bell
We're watching snowboarders in the halfpipe in Korea this evening and this song pops up somehow (in an ad maybe?). Supposedly back in 1979 it was a number one hit. In 1979 I was in the middle of Computer Science course work at the University of Texas in Austin and I have no memory of this song. It resonated with my wife though. I suspect the difference was due to the cultural divide between rock-and-roll and disco. Huh.

Flour

Butte Creek Mill, Eagle Point Oregon

Posthip Scott sent me a story an old mill in southern Oregon that burned down a couple of years ago. Seems there is another old mill not too far away that they are going to be able to use to rebuild their own.

In 1870, there were 22,000 water-powered mills in the United States.

Pendleton Flour  Mill
Near as I can tell, other than a couple of specialty mills, this is the only one left in Oregon.

It's Twoo! It's Twoo!

Why are we so divided? Perhaps because nothing has happened to upset our apple cart, and if the apple cart is not upset, then everything people (on both sides of the divide) believe must still be true. This might be why we have wars - sometimes we just need to upset the apple cart in order to destroy people's erroneous beliefs.

Tali shows that we're open to new information – but only if it confirms our existing beliefs. We find ways to ignore facts that challenge our ideals. And as neuroscientist Bahador Bahrami and colleagues have found, we weigh all opinions as equally valid, regardless of expertise. - NPR Hidden Brain

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

Lighthouse, because a lighthouse is a prominent landmark in the story.

Annihilation is a science fiction novel set in the not-too-distant future. We have an area has been declared off-limits by the military because of an 'ecological disaster', which sounds just like something that the military would do. But they are lying, or maybe they really don't know what is happening in this area, but for sure some weird stuff is going on, so they send small groups of people in to try and figure out what's going on. These explorations all end in disaster, so it's kind of like a common horror story that way. A lot of what the characters do doesn't make much sense, but then the people who would volunteer to go on a suicide mission with no real information may not be the most stable: We're going to drop you off in the wilderness with a bunch of other lunatics, all armed with guns and notebooks. When you have gathered enough information, your leader will arrange your extraction. No, we're not going to tell any of the rest of you how to get back.

Destroyer of Worlds Starfish

Our narrator is a biologist who tells about her cosmic / drunken experience with a Destroyer of Worlds starfish. The story was very readable, it flowed along smoothly enough except the bumps when someone does something stupid.

Underground Tower

This underground tower at the Quinta da Regaleira provided the inspiration for a similar structure in this story.

This book is part one of a trilogy which has been combined into one large book.  Something strange happens to the narrator, though we aren't sure what. The rest of the trilogy might tell you but I won't be reading it.

SuperPunch provided some links.

Reading

ERROR #1

I'm working on simple C program to experiment with pipes. All it does it take a line from the keyboard, prepend it with a time stamp and write it to a file. A call to the time() function will deliver the time. I could use it as is, it's just a big integer. It would be nice if you could format it as a calendar date and time. I'm looking at the appendix of my C programming manual and there are calls for converting time from this format and writing the time in that format, but there doesn't seem to be one that will do what I want.

    time_t time(time_t *tloc);

There are basically two ways of dealing with time. One way is to use a big integer to store the number of seconds since the beginning (which varies depending on what planet you live on) and the other is to break the time into days, months, seconds and mintues, etc. and store all these various values in a data structure.

    time_t mktime(struct tm *tp);

mktime() will take the data structure and convert it into a number of seconds, but I cannot find one that will do the conversion in the other direction. I ran into this problem umpteen years ago and spent a few days writing my own routine to perform the conversion. Now I'm reading the appendix and I'm thinking it's really weird that there isn't a function to do this. I'm hoping I'm wrong, because I don't want to have to dig out my old conversion routine because that's just more code I have to look at and think about and that's going to distract me from what I am trying to do.

    struct tm *gmtime(const time_t *tp);

So I look more closely at these routines in the book and I finally realize that they are using the same variable name tp as a pointer to the two different variables used to store the time. No wonder I couldn't figure it out last time. Couldn't they have used two different variable names, like tip for time-integer-pointer and tsp for time-structure-pointer? I guess you're supposed to read the whole declaration and not just the variable name. Bah.


ERROR #2

Newman's Coffee

I went to Freddies yesterday to pick up some groceries. One of the items on the list was Newman Decaf Coffee pods for the Keurig coffee maker. Freddies has a whole wall of coffee in 47 flavors. I find Newman's Coffee right off. There are three kinds there, but none are decaf. I carefully look over the entire wall and notice that Starbucks takes up a good third, Dunkin Donuts has noticeable presence and there are 20 or 30 (or 40) other brands there as well, but no more Newman. I do this at least twice and finally conclude that the three boxes I spotted originally are the only Newman pods available. Now I re-read the labels again and I realize the first box is actually decaf. I can only conclude that I read the label as Special Dark instead of Special Decaf, which is what it actually says. Why would someone label decaf as special? Is there a regular decaf? Marketing is getting way out of hand.

Being able to read is fundamental to getting along in today's world, and being able to pick out minuscule differences is a useful skill to have if you are programming computers. And here I detected two failures to detect differences in two days. It might be distressing if I wasn't immune to self-criticism.