Hainan Island, China

There is a mystery island off the Southwest coast of Hainan Island, Red China. Now you see a pair of small islands:

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Now you only see one:

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Google Maps used to have an error reporting method right on the map, but I can't find it. You know, with the brouhaha over all the disputed islands in the region, you'd think people would do a better job of keeping track of where they are, or aren't.
I got started on this by looking at a map of China's smog, and I noticed this big ol' island hanging off the bottom of China. I have a hard time keeping Eastern Asian geography straight, probably because I never had to draw a map of it in elementary school. Even now I cannot tell you whether Tokyo or
 Peking is farther North.
Hainan is the name of the island and the province. The province composes some 200 islands. The big island is over 12,000 square miles. All the other islands put together add up to only 400 square miles, so if one of the small islands disappears for a while it's not going to have a big disturbance down at the bureau of important statistics. I didn't find anything else about the island that was particularly special (besides the nuclear submarine base), except for the annual fog:

From January to February, the island of Hainan is affected by thick fog, particularly in coastal areas and the northern part of the island. This is caused by cold winter air from the north coming into contact with the warmer sea, causing the moisture that evaporates from the sea to be condensed into fog. The fog remains from day to night, and is evenly distributed. Visibility may be reduced to 50 metres for days at a time. During this period, residents normally keep windows shut. The moisture in the air is so extreme that the walls in homes weep, and floors often accumulate a layer of water several millimetres deep.

Somehow that doesn't make it sound particularly attractive. Inspired by Comrade Misfit.

Bonus: Women training to be bodyguards here.

Update August 2020 replaced dead link.

Viva La Difference

Google Street View

We have a cat. He squeaks. I can hear him across the house, up the stairs, through the basement door. He squeaks when he wants something. In, out, food, petting, tail pulled, check on his food supply (this one is a little odd. It only requires that I walk out in the garage and look at his food bowl). My wife and daughter either don't hear him, or don't pay any attention. If he keeps it up, which he always does, it will drive me mad, so I get up and do something about it.
    My wife has a car. She complains about the brakes squeaking and the windshield wipers squeaking. The brakes I don't notice. The wipers, well, she might have a point.
    A couple of years ago I bought a set of new tires for this car. Went to some trouble to save some money. Had them shipped from Nevada and installed by a shop in Beaverton. Brand new tires are supposed to be ROUND and roll SMOOTHLY. From day one there was this annoying vibration in the front end on the freeway.
     I always intended to take it back and get it fixed, but it was my wife's car and she never noticed it, even when I pointed it out to her. Besides, I'd have to drive into Beaverton, and what if they have to replace the tire? They don't have any of these tires in stock, so I'd have to order a replacement and wait for it to be shipped out and then drive back to their shop again. What a pain.
     If I never drove the car, I probably would have forgotten about it, but every month or so I would have to drive it somewhere, usually to the airport, and that accursed vibration would be right there in the center of my consciousness. I finally got tired of this situation and took the car to the local Les Schwab dealer this week. The tire man tells me that the tread on one of the tires was starting to separate from the carcass and that's where the vibration was coming from. Then he starts going off on a tangent about how it was going to take him a couple of days to get some equivalent tires shipped in on account of they were some kind of special. I had no idea they were special. It took a bit to get him calmed down to the point where he could understand that all I wanted were some ROUND tires, whereupon they fixed the problem for $350, which I thought was kind of high for a couple of tires (evidently I've forgotten how much tires cost). I was happy to pay it if it would solve the problem. I'm not entirely sure that it did. I'll find out Saturday when I have to drive to the airport again. In any case, their shop is 5 minutes away, not 25.

Reverse Income Tax

Given the current state of our economy, I'm thinking that a benefit system that paid you in inverse proportion to how much you made might be a good way to help the unemployed and help get our economy moving again. I'm thinking a good balance point would be $25,000 a year. Below that you would get underemployment benefits, above that you would pay income tax. I don't know how much you need to survive these days, but I'm pretty sure you can do it on $1,000 a month. So if you earn nothing all year, you would get $12,000. If you earned $50,000 you would pay $12,000 in taxes.
     Before you get on your high horse and start belly aching about welfare queens, I'd like to make a couple of points. One is that we are currently spending a trillion dollars a year on welfare. Someone (I've lost the link) worked it out that that comes to $20,000 per person, so a family of four would be getting $80,000 a year. I'm pretty sure that isn't happening. Most of it is eaten up by the bureaucracy that administers the umpteen zillion programs that disperse all this money.
    Secondly, this is supposed to be the age of leisure. We aren't supposed to have to work so much any more. I mean that's why we have been automating our manufacturing, so people wouldn't have to do those repetitive manual labor type jobs.
    Increased automation means that every job now has a much higher capital investment associated with it. Capitalists are not going to invest millions of dollars in a new factory that will employ at best a dozen people if it is not going to make a profit, and if they do they will probably do it in China, which won't do us any good.
    People need something to do. If they don't have something to do, they will find something, and some of those somethings are liable to be very destructive, and they will not necessarily be confined to the person doing the destruction. Any kind of job is better than leaving idle hands. Even a make-work job is better than sitting around and watching day-time TV.
    There are numerous small businesses that could benefit from paying low wages. Businesses that might be marginal would have a chance to prosper. Businesses that can't afford to invest millions of dollars in automation. I'm thinking small, family farms, for one, but I think there are any number of small businesses that would benefit. I'm talking really small businesses, businesses with maybe a dozen employees, not small businesses as defined by the SBA (Small Business Administration) which is anything with less than 500 employees.
    I think something like this could be a great benefit to our country. It would put more people to work and it would put more money in their pockets, which would mean that more money would be getting spent, which would be great for our economy.
    I doubt whether anything simple like this has a chance of being implemented. Even if you could get a bill introduced in Congress, the politicians would twist it into some convoluted mess that would be unlikely to benefit anyone except their constituent bureaucracies.
    I was talking to Jack about this the other day and he tells me that Milton Friedman suggested the same thing once upon a time (1968).

Wikipedia article on Negative Income Tax

Explosive

Det Cord Christmas Tree
Came across this video the other day and at first I didn't think much of it. The first time you see it being set off it happens so fast that there is hardly anything to see, but then the slow motion replays start and, yes, you can see the Christmas tree shape.
    Detonation Cord is a plastic tube filled with a high explosive. Once you set off detonation cord, the explosion travels down the cord very quickly, faster than anything else on Earth except maybe electricity, light or thought. Much faster than a speeding bullet, faster than an ICBM. The speed of detonation is right up there with the orbital velocity of satellites, as in miles per second.
    I'm guessing RatedRR (the guy who made this video) used a couple of hundred feet of Det Cord in his Christmas Tree, so the whole thing blew in like one one-hundredth of a second (25,000 / 200 = 125). The first slow motion explosion takes 15 seconds of video time, and given a frame rate of 24 frames per second, that means his camera was operating at 45,000 (125 * 24 * 15) frames per second. You aren't going to find a camera capable of these kind of speeds at your local Target, at least not this week. Access to high explosives and super-high speed cameras kind of makes me think he has military grade connections.
    These high explosives are really very strange substances. You can do pert near anything you want to them, hit, cut, punch, shoot or burn and they will just lie there and take it. It takes a blasting cap or some other kind of high explosive to set them off. Very strange stuff indeed.

Friendship is Madness

Little Maddie is one of the characters Bigshot Toyworks is developing  for a series of animation shorts and toys.

I've never been a fan of H.P. Lovecraft. Some of his ideas of massive, unknowable evil are kind of interesting, but the one time I tried to actual read one of his stories I fell asleep halfway through the first page. Just awful.

    I kind of like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (MLP:FIM for you acronym aficionados), at least I don't have anything against it. Seems like a fine show. A little to saccharine for my taste, but I tend toward the sour side of life.

    Friendship is funny though. When we were kids, nothing was more important than friends. Then you grow up and if you start a family, and if you aren't made of money, money becomes more important. Actually the way it works is that your wife becomes more important, and money is important to the wife. After all, once you get pregnant you are kind of in it for the long haul and unlike promises made by people, money can be squirreled away.

    BiGSHOT seems like a big deal, lots of energy, lots projects, and supposedly lots of products, but for all that, there seems to be almost nothing available. I mean Ebay found four (count 'em, 4!) items. One toy store that lists them has nothing.

    I suppose it could be that they are too busy creating stuff and don't have the time or inclination to productize their creations, or maybe it's just not worth it. I mean where would you spend your time: on a licensing deal that will net you three cents each on 10,000 copies, or ten grand for a couple of weeks work developing a new character? I'm just spitballin' here, but this just felt like a massive disconnect.

    Once again, all Dustbury's fault.

Pokemakeup: MissingNo by nazzara

I want to pat my own back for this. Ok, more like my brother's back.He reminded me of way way back when we played Pokemon Red. If you did some conviluded random thing and you had a certain item in a certain spot in your inventory you would find the glitch MissingNo and it would copy you item..over a hundred times? I forget the exact details but it was pretty funny.

I am constantly surprised by the effort expended on makeup, eye makeup and fancy nail polish designs in particular. I shy away from tattoos, they seem too personal.

    I have only a vague idea of what the caption is talking about, and have no idea what connection it has to the makeup. Perhaps if you have been there it will make some sense to you.

    This is all Dustbury's fault.

Guantanamo Bay: US hails 'milestone' release of Chinese Uighurs

U.S. Navy ships in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. 1903. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The BBC has the story. None of this story makes any sense. Who hails this? Why is this a milestone? They are going to the Czech Republic, which says they are not "terror suspects". Story doesn't say what we think they are. If they are terrorists, why are they being let out? If they aren't, why were they in there? Did somebody make a decision on this, or was this just a whim of some guy, some where, some when? Also:

In April US President Barack Obama renewed his call to close the prison, labeling it inefficient and harmful to America's international standing.

What? Who's in charge? Isn't the President in charge? Who the heck is he calling? His evil twin? Christ on a crutch, the more I hear, the less I like. So what else is new, Ducky?