Crazy

I am fat and getting fatter, at least five pounds in the last year. I now tip the scales at 255 pounds. I probably should weigh something closer to 175 pounds. I have tried numerous schemes to lose weight but none of them have worked. I am pretty well convinced it's all in my head, but what can you do about that?
    Once more I am going to make an attempt. I have an idea for a scheme that might work. I let you know if it pans out. Or not. Meanwhile, I thought I'd see what the internet has to say and I found this quote on the dreaded HuffPost:

"What drives our behavior is not logic but brain biochemistry, habits and addiction, states of consciousness and what we see people around us doing. We are emotional beings with the ability to rationalize -- not rational beings with emotions. If we are stressed, depressed or addicted, no matter how good the advice we are given, chances are that we will not be able to act on it. The more primitive, emotional brain generally has precedence over the newer, more rational brain." - Dr. Rankin

I think that sums up the situation pretty well.

Walther CCP

I thought it was something new in semi-automatic handgun technology, but Queen Tam has pointed out that other people have used this same technique in other designs. So it's just business as usual, because most everything that people have been doing with guns for the last umpteen years are just refinements or variations of already well-understood techniques. Still, the technique is new to me, and I've already posted this, so we'll just go on.
    When a gun is fired, the explosion of force pushes the bullet down the barrel, but it also produces an equal pressure rewards on the shell. In order to get most of the force to work on pushing the bullet, you need to keep the shell in the chamber at least until the bullet has left the barrel. This isn't very long, you might be able to measure this time in microseconds, but it's kind of important.
    In automatics there have been two main mechanisms for keeping the shell in the chamber after it has been fired. One is by making the breech block (the chunk of metal that holds the shell in the chamber) big and heavy and putting a hefty spring behind it. This is only practical for smaller, less powerful rounds. 22's and I think most 380 caliber automatics, use this principle.
    The other is to make a complicated latching mechanism the keeps the block locked to the barrel until some very tiny time consuming action has taken place. The German Luger, the American 45 and the Browning Hi-Power all use their own particular way of doing this. It makes the guns complicated and expensive.

Walther CCP Mechanism

    Walther's method uses the high pressure gas produced by the explosion to push against a piston that retards the motion of the breech block. In effect, the gas is pushing on two things in one direction: the bullet and the piston, and only one thing in the rearward direction: the breech. It's also pushing on the frame in the rearward direction, but you are holding onto that piece with your iron grip so it's not going anywhere. It's also the piece in which all other action is compared.

Inspired by View From The Porch.

Browsers

I moved from Internet Explorer to Firefox many years ago to get away from the annoying pop-up ads that were proliferating like mushrooms on cowpies after a rainstorm. A year or two ago I moved to Chrome. I'm not sure why, maybe because I was using a bunch of Google's stuff, and I thought sure, let's go all Google. Then all of a sudden (around January of this year) Chrome seemed to get a lot slower. I suspect Google decided that most of their customers were using new multi-core machines and they decided to exploit that for some of their look-ahead kind of services. If you were using an older single core machine like me, well, tough, you aren't part of Google's target demographic and you and I don't count. So I moved back to Firefox. 
    I don't really understand the urge to keep modifying a browser, or any software application for that matter. If it works, leave it alone. If something is broken, yes, go ahead and fix it, but this constant tweaking and adjusting and tacking of new features is like super annoying man. Just stop it. Which is why I eventually stop the automatic update service that seems to come with everything these days. I would turn it off to start with, but that general means reaching into the bowels of the thing to figure out where the stupid turn-off-the-updates control is, and ain't nobody got time for that.
    Actually, I do understand the urge to update. It's the same disease the American car industry has had since, well, forever. Back when I was a kid style was everything, and every year there was something newer and flashier. Longer, lower, wider and faster seemed to be the theme through "my formative years". It's just one of the things we have to put up with if we want to keep the lights on at night.
    Firefox has developed an annoying problem. It seems to be triggered by playing YouTube videos in two or more tabs. I'm not trying to play them simultaneously, even a special guy like myself can only watch one at a time, but watch one, and then open a tab to watch another and things go to hell in a handbasket. The frame rate drops to one every couple of seconds, none of the controls respond. Sometimes the only way to kill it is with the Windows task manager (Ctl-Alt-Del on an XP machine).
    At one point I'm looking for help with this problem on the internet and I find a comment about Firefox's memory leak problem, and I'm wondering how would this guy even know about something like this? A little background: a memory leak is when a program requests a block of memory from the OS (Operating System) and then forgets to return it when it's done. It's usually considered a bug and someone (someone!) should fix it. The few times I have run into it, it has usually been a slow growing problem that didn't impact usability for hours or maybe even days.
    Firefox has locked up again, and I pull up the Windows task manager, and where's Firefox? Oh, there it is. Oh look, the memory number is changing. Oh, look, it's getting bigger. It's getting bigger by 100's of K-bytes a second. Oh, that kind of memory leak, one that gushes like a firehose. That's how whoever-it-was noticed it.
    I just pulled up the task manager to check the magnitude of my numbers, and Firefox is leaking memory right now, even though I haven't started any videos this session. It's not growing by leaps and bounds like it does when it has locked up, but it's still there, marching ever onward towards obilivion. At this rate it might take it a few hours to get there.

Portland Trailblazers v. Houston Rockets

This is game six of the playoffs, played in Portland. Games won so far in this series is Portland 3, Houston 2. Last few minutes of this game were intense. The two teams had been neck and neck for most of the game. The Blazers were within a hairsbreadth of winning this game and cinching the series. The crowd was on their feet hollering. The decibel meter shows 120. Then the refs make two bad calls in Houston's favor, one after another, the crowd is booing. Houston scores and they are up by two points. There is 0.9 seconds (nine-tenths of a second) left on the clock. There is not enough time to shoot the ball, much less make any kind of play. Portland inbounds the ball to Damian Lillard, Trailblazer whiz kid, who is running across the court to receive it. Running puts him a couple of steps away from the Houston defenders. He catches the ball, turns and shoots and makes a 3-pointer! Portland wins!

Battle of Sinop

Russian stamp, Battle of Sinop, 2003 (Michel № 1128, Scott № 6800)

I have been playing Numbrix online ever since my newspaper flaked out. Along with the puzzle today there was a question about the exploding cannon balls used in the movie Pirates of the Carribean, which got me intrigued being as I am big fan of Patrick O'Brian's stories about the British Navy in the days of sail. So I go to Wikipedia and start reading up on cannons used on sailing ships in the 1800's and I find that back in the glory days when they were battling that pipsqueak Bonaparte, solid iron cannonballs were the order of the day. It wasn't until the middle of the century that exploding cannonballs came into common use. At the Battle of Sinop in 1853 the Russians made good use of exploding shells and destroyed the Turkish fleet. This event foretold the end of wooden ships and launched the Crimean War.

    This is all ancient history, but then I notice this stamp (above), issued in 2003. Me thinks Russia is feeling their oats once again.

    Sinop is on the northern coast of Turkey, and midway along the southern edge of the Black Sea and almost directly across from Sevastopol, Russia's big Navy base in the Crimea. Bigger painting of the battle here.

Uranus - The Other Blue Planet

You can barely see it here. Uranus is the blue dot about one inch from the top left corner of the image. From Cassini, via CICLOPS. Saturn is roughly ten times as far from the sun as the Earth, and Uranus is about twice as far as Saturn. The fact that we even know that it is there should tell you something about how big it is. Cassini took seven years to get to Saturn.

Girls with Radios

New York, 1917. "Helen Campbell." A Hunter College student licensed as a wireless operator during World War I. Bain News Service.

Not as scary as Girls with Guns (or girls with guns), but maybe it should be. I'm not sure which is cooler: the exotic hardware or the diagrams on the wall. From Shorpy via Posthip Scott. Because Roberta X.