Yuck, Exercise

I am supposed to be getting some exercise and losing weight. I make vague attempts intermittently, but it's really pretty boring. On the plus side I do generally feel better when I do get some exercise. Mind you, we are not talking anything strenuous here, walking a couple of miles maybe.

The problem with walking is you have to deal with cars. Wherever you go, you eventually have to cross a street or a driveway and Murphy's law says that even if there is only one car within a hundred miles, it is going to arrive at that cross point at exactly the same time as you are, and then you have the who-has-the-right-of-way business. If you let the car go first, you are delayed much less than if the car has to wait for you. If the car lets you go first, that's nice, but what if there's a maniac (or an incompetent driver) behind the wheel who is just waiting for you to step in front of them before they mash on the gas pedal? I mean you wouldn't step in front of someone pointing a gun straight ahead would you? It's okay, you go ahead and cross in front of me, I promise I won't pull the trigger. Usually they don't, but about the time you finally get halfway across, they are tired of waiting and as soon as you are clear they gas it, leaving you with a bad taste in your mouth for moronic motorists everywhere.

Then there are stairs. Stair climbing is much more intensive, and I should be able to get a useful amount of exercise in much less time. I looked into this once before and I found several places that gave the number of calories burned per flight of stairs, but I don't remember the exact number. This time when I look, all I can find is number of calories burned per unit time, well, except for this one page, which references two other pages that have vanished. What is this? Some kind of conspiracy to eliminate useful information and replace it with useless information? Why, yes sir, that is exactly what is going on. How perceptive of you to notice.

Per unit time is not necessarily a good way to measure this sort of thing. A person will burn a 100 calories covering a mile whether they are walking or running. You would think that running might burn more, but it doesn't. It might be more difficult, but that is more a reflection of your level of fitness and how hard you push yourself. Running is more stenuous, so you will be burning calories at a faster rate. On the other hand, it will take less time to cover that mile, so you won't be burning calories for as long. Walking takes longer, you are burning calories slower, but you burn them for longer, so it comes out about the same.

Anyway, climbing stairs burns about 16 calories per flight, 10 calories going up and six calories going down. So climbing six flights of stairs should be the equivalent of walking a mile. I guess I
I'll give it a shot.

Challenger 2 MBT Tank Promotional Video

Tam provided the link to this video. I posted it here for a couple of reasons. One is that I saw a new word: Mantlet. It appears at the 4:55 mark, to wit: "Thermal Imaging Camera on Gun Mantlet". I think the camera is the box mounted on top of the barrel just in front of the turret, so I am suspecting the mantlet is the small shield that moves with the barrel when it moves up or down. It's such an odd word that the Google spellchecker doesn't recognize it.

Another reason is that they identified the music as being "Mars, Bringer of War" composed by Gustav Holst. I don't have much interest in classical music and generally am unable to identify any of it. Yeah, it's classical, that's nice, I'm glad you enjoy it. I especially don't care for the lighter stuff, though it can help set the tone in movie scenes. I do like the heavier stuff a bit more, but once again, only if it is paired with an appropriate video. So I like that they have identified the tune. We shall see if I am able to identify it the next time I hear it.

The last bit of interest is the gyro-stabilised gun. Being able to hit a target with a cannon usually means precision aiming from a stable platform. I think in WWII most shooting from tanks was done while stationary. They've been trying to build a tank that could shoot on the run ever since, and I think they managed to do so sometime in the last ten years. The video doesn't do a real good job of illustrating just what this gun can do, but that would be difficult without getting all technical and boring.

USB and You

USB can be handy for connecting up electronic do-dads, but why does everything have to a have a different style connector? My camera has one, the external hard drive has another, and neither one is the same as the one that plugs into the computer. And while we're complaining about this, let's complain about having two different sexes. I mean they are electric connectors for Pete sake, they aren't animals. Why couldn't they have made a hermaphroditic connector? I suppose that's like complaining about the announcers on televised sporting events: pointless.

As you can see from the photo, SONY has dealt with this problem in a different way. They have a full size USB connector that retracts into the case. This way there is no cap to lose, like on your thumb drive, and you could plug it directly into your computer or you can use the included two inch long cable. Not quite sure what the point of the cable is, other than it lets you turn the device right side up, which makes it easier to read the screen. In case you are wondering what it is, it's Stereo digital voice recorder. The wife brought it home from work today.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Daylight Savings Time

If you are a Luddite like me, your computer reverted to standard time last weekend. Since the rest of the world doesn't change until this weekend (or maybe next weekend, I really don't know), you are living in limbo. Sometimes it's five o'clock, and sometimes it's six. My cousin John posted this on his Facebook page and I think it's worth sharing with y'all. (Did I really say sharing? Gawd, I'm slipping into foolspeak).

Growth

Lately there's been a lot of talk about how we can get our economy going again. Problem here is that I don't think anyone actually knows what makes our economy run. The one constant I have heard all my life is "growth", as in we must grow the economy. I was always a little suspicious of this constant promotion of growth. If we just stayed the same, that is we maintained the same level of production and consumption, the economy would grow anyway because our population continues to grow. More people need more houses, food, cars, roads and fuel. I can understand this, but it seems like the proponents of growth always wanted more than that.

There is the replacement of older stuff that has worn out, with newer stuff that is better made, or works better, or is more efficient. Most of the stuff people have, like houses, was made a long time ago and require lots of repairs and are not very efficient, so I can understand replacement.

Then there is the proliferation of new stuff that doesn't last very long and doesn't get repaired when it breaks, or doesn't get cleaned when it gets dirty, it just gets replaced. Things like cell phones, clothes and paper cups. Does anyone patch clothes anymore? I suspect this is one of the areas "they" are talking about when they are talking about "growth".

But what I think they really mean when "they" talk about growth is the proliferation of financial products/schemes that they pyramid on top of the old banking and stock market establishment. They pile up these financial products to dizzying heights, heights that would make Ponzi proud, and call it growth, when actually nothing has grown except they amount of money they have skimmed off into their wallets. The financial world is a strange and wondrous place.

Now we take a right turn into DVD production. This is connected to the growth question, but I'm just not quite sure how.

You can burn a DVD in your PC these days. It's a little time consuming, but it is not expensive. A burner can probably be had for less than $50, and a blank disk for less than a buck. That's fine if you only want to make one disk, but if you need to make a million or ten for a new movie release, that's not going to cut it. For that you need a press, and that is going to set you back a million or ten.

Finding information on DVD replicators was a little tricky. The first part was finding out that DVD production presses are called replicators. There are machines that will duplicate DVD's automatically using the burning technique. They are called duplicators and one of those might be able to turn out a hundred disks in a day. Replicators can turn out thousands of disks a day. M2 makes the SQ20 which can produce 33,000 disks a day. At that rate it would take a month to produce a million disks. Ten machines could produce ten million.

Peachy Jumble

Yesterday's Jumble (word puzzle on the comics page) had string that I unscrambled to CHEAP. When I went to solve the phrase at the end, I was two letters off. A little backtracking led me to conclude that the correct solution was not CHEAP, but PEACH. First time I've run across this situation. I kind of half expected it could happen, after all, how many five letter words are there? I wonder how many times I have unscrambled a word, just by luck, correctly, when there was an incorrect anagram lurking just around the corner.

Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Pink

The BBC has put together a new series of Sherlock Holmes mysteries set in the present day. I watched this episode the other day and it was pretty good. Not quite as real-life gritty as some of the other murder mysteries I've seen recently, more . . . playful, perhaps?

I may be giving something away here, so be warned. One of the elements of the story involves choosing one of two apparently identical bottles. The contents of one of the bottles is good, the contents of the other are bad. By the law of averages, one should have a 50-50 chance of choosing the good bottle. However, the villain of the hour has managed to rack up a string four good bottles in a row. Now how could he do that?

I gave it a little thought and I came up with a couple of ways, some more interesting than others. Not too long ago, a character on The Good Wife was asking Kalinda, the private investigator, about why people do things and Kalinda responded by saying it was either for love, sex or money, or some such. The character replies that people aren't really that simple, are they? And Kalinda says in my experience, yes, they are.

So here's one explanation for our villain's string of successes. He had prepared a script, and using an innocuous test, run the script by several unsuspecting people and watched how they responded. He may have had to tweak his script to get it just right, but after he had run it by 10, 20 or 100 people he had it pretty well dialed in and he was confident how his marks would respond. That's when he starts playing for real.

Then there's the simpler trick I just remembered. He could have marked the bottles with ultraviolet ink that would only visible to someone wearing special glasses, and as he was wearing glasses, they could have been special and so he could have easily told the two bottles apart.

Lastly, we don't really know that he had four successes in a row. If he was able to tell the bottles apart, if he got stuck with the wrong one, all he had to do was bale. His intended victim would appear to be the victim of a practical joke.