Willie's Reserve

Mary J. Wanna

Willie Nelson has gotten into the pot business selling his own line of get-high material. Here's a map of locations that sell their stuff.

Willie's Retailers

Kind of interesting that there is nothing east of Colorado and certainly nothing in Texas, Willie's home. I suspect that the mob is more thoroughly entrenched in the east and they are exerting all of their considerable political power to protect their black market business interests.

Via Iaman.

Factfulness

Factfulness by Hans Rosling

What we have here is a crusader crusading against ignorance. An admirable quest and it might eventually have some effect on the enormous amount of stupidity that currently blankets the world.

He starts (from the excerpt) by talking about the gap instinct:

I’m  talking  about  that  irresistible  temptation  we  have  to  divide all kinds of things into two distinct and often conflicting groups, with an imagined gap —a huge chasm of injustice— in between.

A huge chasm of injustice? That sounds like SJW (Social Justice Warrior) bullshit. A huge gap in knowledge and understanding, or a huge gap in social evolution maybe. Whatever, remove the irritating phrase "—a huge chasm of injustice—" and the statement is fine. We do tend to divide the world into two camps.

However, he just uses this as an example to show that what we decide is often based on incorrect information. One common division we make is between Western Civilization and the rest of the world, the uncivilized heathen. How do you classify a country as being good or bad? One way is by comparing infant mortality. Here's one chart:

Children and Survival

Looks pretty clear cut, all the heathen are living in the big box, all the good Christians are in the small box. But then he shows us another chart.

Children and Survival 2017

Not so clear cut anymore, is it? Problem is that the first graph is from 1965 and since then the world has changed and it has changed for the better. I suspect this may be why we have so many SJW's running around protesting about nonsense. They don't have any real issues to fight against, but they are still people and they still want a cause to believe in. If the leaders of the pack can't provide them with a worthwhile cause, they'll invent one of their own from whatever they find lying around.

Via Uniberp

Pressing On

Pressing On: The Letterpress Film - Official Documentary Movie Trailer
The rate at which old mechanical technology is being discarded is a little distressing.

I like books and newspapers. They don't require any technological connections in order to use them. Okay, I need my reading glasses, but they don't require any electrical power or batteries or a billion dollar semi-conductor factory to make them.

Being as printing presses are made or iron and steel, they do require the steel-making industry which you might argue was as big in its time as the semi-conductor industry is now.

Books and newspapers are essentially disposable. Yes, you can hold onto a book for years and some books have been around for centuries. Our on-line empire is stored in server farms which are very robust as the data is duplicated on several sites, but the reliability of that storage depends on the robustness of the organization storing the data. Infect an organization with a mental disease and all the data they are safeguarding is sudden at risk of disappearing. And it wouldn't have to be an actual medical disease, it could just be a change in attitude or a new belief, kind of like the way corruption infects some organizations.

The above video is a trailer for the film which has only been shown a few dozen times. I wonder whether they used real film to make the movie, or whether it is entirely a digital creation.

Via Indy Tom.

P.S. My Internet connection was down for at least five hours this morning. It was surprising how annoying that was.

Cross Check

2018 May 01 Wizz Air Low pass in capital city Budapest air show above Danube - Maria Bruscha

I've seen similar photos of airliners flying into Taipei, so I wanted to see if I could find this place on Google Maps.

3D view of Budapest

I did. It wasn't too hard. The S-curve shows up very well in the map. When you zoom in on a Google 3D view, Google doesn't just enlarge the image, it moves your viewpoint closer. To get the same perspective as the photo at top, you would have to zoom way out and then the resulting cropped image would be much smaller:

Same view, different viewpoint

Makes me wonder how much storage space Google has in their server farms. Also wonder how long it will be before airliner flight tracking programs start to offer a 3D portrayal of the airplane over a real-time, 3D background. Don't know what possible use that would be, but we seem to spend an inordinate amount of time on stuff that has no real purpose, kind of like this post.

Be nice to conspiracists

Be nice to conspiracists
S.G. makes some good observations about belief, religon and psychosis. He also has good advice which I doubt many people will heed. Still, he's trying and he deserves credit for that.

Glencoe High School Robot

Glencoe High School Robotics Team

Glencoe High School Roboitics team went to Houston for a competition with other high school robot builders. They came in fifth, which I think is pretty respectable for a small town high school. Okay, it was a small town when I moved here 25 years ago, but it's grown considerably since then, mostly due to the massive Intel presence. Think that might have had some bearing on their success? Glencoe is where my kids went.

Marmoset Coverage

In which is purchased Marmoset Coverage

Because I had to stifle a guffaw.