Blogs I Read

There are five or six blogs I read every day. Not all of them get updated everyday, but a couple usually are. And they post links to other stuff, and if I am interested in the post, I will follow the link. I hardly watch TV at all anymore, except sometimes I wll watch something I have recorded from the military history channel, usually about WWII. That's always interesting.

Blogs I read:

• Dustbury
  
• View From The Porch
  
• The Adventures of Roberta X
• Stu Savory's Blog
• Syaffolee
• Rocketboom

And then there's Elena, who did the photo essay about Chernobyl.

Gmail Email

I had an email conversation with Chip and Stu about email. Naturally, I waxed eloquent, so I am reposting my thoughts here.

I have to recommend gmail. No spam, and as far as I can tell, no missed messages either. Also, you don't need your own computer to check your mail. Of course, on the down side, you need a reliable connection to the internet. High speed also helps.

Yahoo mail gets a black mark. I have an account there I use in my ongoing job search. It works pretty well, but it did put a couple of messages from a prospective employer in the SPAM folder where they sat for a couple of days before I noticed them.

I also have a hotmail account that I use for all Linux related stuff. It doesn't get much traffic. It was a while before I realized the incongruity of using a Microsoft product to work with the Anti-Gates.

[The orginal message I got from Stu was sent as a BCC (Blind Carbon Copy).] Also, there was no indication that I was a BCC recipient. I have used BCC a couple of times. Once it worked very well. The original recipient received no notification that anyone else got the message, and the BCC recipients were notified of such. Another time I tried it the original recipient was notified that it was also sent to other people, though not to who they were. I found that unacceptable.

Fantasy Fireplace

I have two gas fireplaces in my house. In our previous house we had two wood burning fireplaces. Word burning fireplaces are a pain. You get to deal with wood: buy, haul, split, stack, protect from the rain, carry it into the house. Starting the fire is fun, and watching the wood burn is enjoyable. But then you get to deal with the ashes, shovel them out of the fireplace, carry them outside and dispose of them. Wood burning fireplaces are a big pain. Of course if you have a truck, or even just a trailer you can drive out to the national forest and cut your own wood for free. That is if you can afford the gasoline, which as we all now know depends on the whims of the gods of gasoline prices.

We only used one of the fireplaces in the old house. When we built the new house, we opted for a gas fireplace. Did not want the hassle of a wood burner. And when we finished the basement, we opted for another gas fireplace. Of course at this point putting in a wood burner would have entailed some major structural changes.

But every now and then, when the economic news looks particularly grim (Natural Gas prices up a gazillion percent!), I think that maybe a wood burner might have been a good idea.


This leads to thinking about living off the land and building a cabin in the woods using nothing but an ax and my bare hands. (Yeah, right, like that's gonna happen. That's why the title is what it is.) So if you're going to build a cabin in the woods, you are going to need a fireplace made of rocks. Given what we know about fireplaces, would it be worthwhile to try and design a better fireplace made of rocks? I like to think it would.

First of all, the fireplace would be in the center of the room instead of in one wall. Once a fireplace gets warm, it is going to radiate heat in all directions. No sense radiating heat to the outside. Second of all, build a channel to conduct outside air to the fire, so you are not pulling heated air out of the room. Third, build the fireplace over a big pit, with a door to the outside so you don't have to clean out the ash but once a year. I suppose the biggest improvement would be putting doors on the fireplace so as to make it more like an stove, but making doors out of stone that could be easily moved might be a bit of a trick. Might could use a couple of ancient Egyptian stone masons.

Update December 2016 replaced missing image.

Secrets of the Pyramids

My friend Jack was telling me about a new theory a Frenchman (Jean-Pierre Houdin) has come up with to explain how the pyramids were built. I, for one, never worried too much about it. I figure a bunch of guys got a bunch of rocks and piled them up and presto, there you go: a big pile of rocks. But for some people, that wasn't good enough. Seems they found some really big rocks very high up in the pyramid. That along with the huge volume of rock involved overall caused them to wonder just how did these ancient (ignorant, unskilled, third world peasants) people get those big rocks in place? Just how would you would build such a massive stone edifice using only sticks and stones and strong backs?

A number of theories have been put forth over the years, but none have stood up to scrutiny. Now along comes this wiseguy Frenchie, and he's got a new theory. The best part is that this theory involves secret tunnels that no one has actually seen. Dassault Systems has a web page with a 3-D graphics presentation that explains the whole thing. It's kind of a CPU/Memory hog, but I was able to run it on my four year old Dell. All this make my conspiracy antennae just quiver with anticipation.

One of the clues that led Jean-Pierre to his theory was this image. It was generated from a set of gravity measurements taken in the 1980's. The less dense areas are indicated by the green color, and correspond to the idea of having an internal spiral tunnel.

I did a little looking to see just what kind of equipment would be needed to measure gravity accurately enough to be able to detect a tunnel. I found things like:

Tests run using Sundstrand vibrating beam accelerometers to sense microgravity are described. Lunar-solar tidal effects were used as a highly predictable signal which varies by approximately 200 billionths of the full-scale gravitation level.

and

Spring Gravimeters and Other Alternatives

Even now it seems to fall in the realm of scientific research, not a practical technique for which you can just buy a meter and go at it. Interesting that the two companies names I came across in all this are both big aerospace contractors: Hamilton Sundstrand and Groupe Dassault.

Modeling

Steve Duin writes a column for our local newspaper. He's been there for forever. Sometimes I read him. Yesterday's column was about family court:

It is, one lawyer said, "the Jerry Springer docket," the endless parade of family catastrophes -- marriage dissolutions, restraining orders, elder abuse, custody hearings -- that Springer would milk for brawls and ratings with the misfits willing to trade their dignity for that televised moment on stage.

I think this sentence explains a lot:

The guys battling restraining orders without a lawyer, their kids in tow because they can't afford day care, boxed in by a legal system that is ruled by the sort of discipline no one ever modeled for them.

He gets a description of people who show up here from an attorney:

"They're disproportionately poor," Diamond said. "They don't have a good sense of what parenting ought to look like because their own situation growing up was lousy. They're not fully in control of their emotions, and they lack communication skills: They're not able to identify a problem and discuss it without those emotions taking over.

"And most of the time they're young. Doesn't every 19-year-old have those issues? They aren't ready to have children."

Sales Guy Versus Web Dude

A little crude, perhaps, but stupidity has no bottom. From i-am-bored.com via Dan.

"The Web Server is Down. If you`ve ever called tech support and wondered what was going on, this should answer some of your questions."

Update: I originally posted this on Pergelator Lite, but that link quit working, so now we have a version from YouTube. I don't think it will ever go out of date. Did you ever notice that human and humor have the same root?

Update April 2019 added Red vs. Blue so I can find this again.

Update April 2021 replaced missing video.

Book: "Force Protection" by Gordon Kent

Force Protection by Gordon Kent

A military thriller I picked up in a bargain bin somewhere. Not a great book, but not a bad book either. The story is very Navy centric and involves an attack on a US Navy ship in Mombasa, Kenya. Always interesting to hear about someplace different. Don't think I've read anything about Kenya since "West With The Night", which was set in the early part of the 20th century. This story is set in the present day. Nairobi is the big city and is located inland. Mombasa is the port city and is located on the East coast of Africa.

There were a number of things in the plot that you could be pretty sure would never happen. I mean one incident could happen to one person in the course of their career, but to have a whole sequence of events, like the ones that happen to the protagonist's wife, would only happen in a movie script. But hey, it makes for an entertaining story.

Basically it's a story about what goes on in government/military circles when they are faced with a terrorist attack. There is the infighting between competing bureaucracies. There are a couple of unpleasant characters. But mostly it's about getting all the pieces in place to pull off an attack on a mercenary camp, and there are a bunch of pieces involved.

One interesting thing was their base at the airport. The marines setup a sandbagged machine gun post. I am not sure how much good that would do. If someone were to attack the people at the base it would be good to have, but it's not going to do much good for any aircraft coming or going. Airplanes are very vulnerable when they are on the ground, and airports are big places with a clear line of fire in every direction. If I was responsible for a military airbase, I would want a secure perimeter at least five miles from the center of airport in every direction. That's 30 miles of perimeter that would have to be secured. That would be tough, especially if you are operating out of someone elses' airport.

There was one line that stood out. I should have marked it when I read it but I didn't and it took me an hour to find it tonight, and I actually found two lines, but they both say the same thing:

A week ago, she had been riding high on the rush of astronaut training; now she was two thousand miles from Houston, and the people there thought that she was a liability. She could hear the words - uncooperative, grandstanding, aggressive. Violent. Self-centered. Not a team player.

Yeah!


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Update September 2016 replaced missing picture.