Mediæval Bæbes

Via Dustbury.

Quote of the Day

    "In 2007, the Center for Automation in Nanobiotech (CAN) outlined the hardware and software platform that would one day allow robots smaller than human cells to make medical diagnoses, conduct repairs, and even self-propagate.
    In the same year, the CBS network re-aired a program about the effects of propranolol on sufferers of extreme trauma. A simple pill, it had been discovered, could wipe out the memory of any traumatic event.
    At almost the same moment in humanity’s broad history, mankind had discovered the means for bringing about its utter downfall. And the ability to forget it ever happened."

Now that would be scary. From Amazon's description of First Shift, a Science Fiction novel mentioned by Roberta X.

Zero Dark Thirty

Osama Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad Pakistan
More pictures here

    A fine film. With all the spy books and movies I've consumed I think I'm beginning to get an idea how this surveillance business works. It's expensive, time consuming and horribly boring. It takes a certain kind of person to focus on so little for so long with so little to show for it. And then there's the logic you need in order to piece together what's happening from the most disparate of clues, or just as likely, the lack of clues.
    The movie makes a big deal of out how they used special "stealthy" helicopters for this mission. If they did, it's really a well kept secret. I suspect they were regular old Blackhawk helicopters. They may have had some special modifications, but they weren't completely different. The best description I found was on Shadow Spear dot com:

The SEALs flew into Pakistan from Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), an airborne unit of the United States Army Special Operations Command sometimes called the "Nighthawks," provided two modified Black Hawk helicopters, and two Chinooks as backups. The 160th SOAR helicopters were supported by multiple other aircraft, including fixed-wing fighter jets and drones. According to CNN, "The Air Force also had a full team of combat search-and-rescue helicopters available."

Kathryn Bigelow directs. I've heard of her before.
The practice compound in North Carolina (one of the pictures in the linked photo album) isn't there anymore.

Update November 2019 replaced dead Picasa slideshow with single image and link to Google Photos album.

Cash or Credit

$200 just doesn't go as far as it used to. I use my American Express card for gasoline and airline tickets, but for most everything else I prefer to use cash. Food especially, I bought it, I ate it, it's gone. Who needs a record of that? It's not like I'm going to return it or anything. Paying cash eliminates bookkeeping for all my trivial expenses.
    None of my kids use cash for anything. They have debit cards and they use them for everything. But what about the extra bookkeeping you ask? What bookkeeping? Balance a checkbook? Yeah, sure, later, dude.
    I have to admit I've gotten a bit slack myself lately. I will look at my bank and credit card statements to see if there is anything funny, but I haven't bothered to actually reconcile a statement in a while. This is why credit card fraud is so rampant. People who make a hundred purchases a month are not going to remember every single one, and since they haven't discovered an error in lo these last umpteen years, it is unlikely there is going to be an error this time, and you want me to spend an hour of my time checking to see if there might be a $20 fraudulent charge on my account? You're kidding, right?
    So nobody notices and card thieves get away with it. As long as they spread their fiscal mischief around it is unlikely they will get caught, and so a new industry is born.
    But $200 doesn't go very far anymore. $200 is what I can get from the ATM. I might be able to get $300, but 300 doesn't add up nicely. Five times 200 is a grand. To get to a grand in $300 increments you need three and a third. Last time I checked ATM's would not hand out $400. Too much money all in one spot. What I should really do is go to the bank and get a larger sum like $500 or $1000, but even though the value of the dollar has dropped I am still leery of carrying that much cash around with me. Losing my wallet with $200 cash would be unpleasant, but not the end of the world. $500 on the other hand, that's a chunk of change. I would be seriously perturbed if I lost that much money. Never mind that I haven't lost my wallet or a noticeable amount of money in, like, forever.

Ice Cold Concrete

Stockholm Ice Bar

Everyday I go out into the garage to feed and water the cat and clean the litter box, and I usually do this barefoot because feet can be washed. Step in something nasty with your shoes on and it can be the very devil to get them clean again, not to mention that you may not notice it right away and you may track nasty stuff all over the house, and then you've got an even bigger cleaning job. Plus I suspect that going barefoot makes me a little more alert to what's on the floor so I might be able to avoid the mess in the first place.
    Anyway, it's been getting colder outside (January in the Northern temperate zones) and I've been secretly feeling pretty tough, going outside in my bare feet. Until yesterday. Yesterday I noticed that my missing newspaper was under my truck, but after doing the kitty chores my feet were too cold to spend any more time outside. I've been doing this for weeks, why would I suddenly get a case of cold feet?
     My friend Jack has been working on his Martini project out in his garage, and while it was cool out there, up until a couple of weeks ago it was tolerable.
    What has happened is that the concrete floor in both our garages has cooled off. The concrete is a big heat sink and so while the temperature is fluctuating, it averages  it out. But once it gets cold and stays cold for a week, well, all that heat sunk into the concrete leaches out and you are left with a stone cold floor.

Update June 2018 replaced missing picture.

Soviet Yak-38 Vertical Take Off & Landing (VTOL) Jet Fighter

Yakovlev Yak-38 Soviet Naval Aviation
yolkhere
There are a couple of views of the Yak-38 sitting on the deck in the first part of this video. I'm watching this and I see the air inlet hatch open behind the pilot and I think that look's just like the F-35. Those dang Russians are pretty clever. They had a VTOL jet fighter 40 years ago, and we're just now getting around to building our own.
    Well, they were able to design one and make it work, but it was not what you would call a rousing success. Also they went broke and we didn't, so neener, neener, neener. I found this summary on Fiddler's Green, a paper model site.

Preceded by the Yak-36 'Freehand' and the barely related yak-36M, the USSR's first operational VTOL aircraft was the Yak-38 'Forger'. Superficially similar to the early Harrier, the 'Forger' was burdened with two extra lift engines, which increased the basic weight and reduced the fuel capacity. Payload was about one-third that of the Mk I Sea Harrier and endurance in hot weather about 15 minutes. A constant problem was ingestion of exhaust gases back into the engine, which caused power loss. Failure of one lift jet (which had an operating life of only about 22hours) would cause an immediate uncontrollable roll. The 'solution' to this was to fit a system that automatically ejected the pilot in the event of an engine failure. Unsurprisingly, as many as one-third of Russia's 'Forgers' were lost in accidents.

They only built 231 of them compared to more than 1600 MiG-29's.

Fiddler's Green has a several pictures of the Yak-38, including this one:

Seconds later , as you can see, two tiny turbines started to whirr and then the Yak 38 magically jumped from my hand and attacked the dog sitting under the kitchen table.

Update April 2022 replaced missing video with a different one.

New Sniper Rifle

Being able to hit the mark at long distances means holding very still while you are squeezing the trigger. People being built the way they are with finger bones connected to hand bones connected to arm bones, and muscles likewise, squeezing the trigger means your whole body is moving. The motion might be imperceptible, but an imperceptible movement can still throw your aim off enough to cause you to miss your target. Moving the tip of the barrel one thousandth of an inch translates to one inch at 500 yards. This gun is crazy. The scope is full of computerized video gear. Making a shot takes two steps. The first step is to "mark" the target. Basically, you tell the computer what you want to hit by selecting a spot on a video image. The second step is to make the shot, basically just like you would without all the fancy electronic gizmos. You try and hold the cross hairs on the target and you squeeze the trigger. For a human operated gun, the cross hairs are going to be bobbing and weaving all over the place. With a regular gun, you just keep squeezing the trigger and hope that when it goes off the crosshairs are on the target. With this gun, you squeeze the trigger and when the crosshairs coincide with the spot you previously marked, the gun goes off.
Story on ars technica dot com.