Bayou Renaissance Man: A contrarian libertarian?

Bayou Renaissance Man: A contrarian libertarian?: Ace of Spaces has published an interesting manifesto of sorts, describing why the author has moved from conservatism to libertarianism.  H...

White Zombie

July 2010 PIR. The White Zombie, hitting 126 miles per hour in a quarter-mile drag race.

"On the outside, the White Zombie is a humble 1972 Datsun 1200. But concealed beneath its milquetoast shell sit two 9-inch electric motors, giving the White Zombie enough power to hit 60 mph in 1.8 seconds. It runs a quarter mile in 10.3 seconds — almost a whole second quicker than a Nissan GT-R." - From DARK HORSE: THE STORY OF A RECORD-SHATTERING, ALL-ELECTRIC ’68 MUSTANG BY MICHAEL ZELENKO.

I don't particularly care for electric cars. I mean there are a lot of good things about them, but they flaunt tradition, and traditions have been falling like ten pins lately. Is nothing sacred? Besides, they are expensive, their range is limited, the batteries are big and heavy and have to be replaced every few years. And they don't do anything for carbon emissions, unless you live in Arizona and get your power from a nuclear plant. And then you're just trading CO2 for neutrons.

Via Posthip Scott.

Liquid Body Armor

From Poland. Reuters has the story, so does Popular Science.

Chandelier Repair

GDCS* electrical fixtures. Tried to change a burned out light bulb in the dining room chandelier and the ignorant socket starts coming loose. Hang fire and tarnation. So I push the table out the way, climb up the ladder, disconnect the wires, unscrew the bracket from the ceiling and set the fixture down on the table. Now I can open up center section, expose the rats nest of wire and feed the wires through the support arm so I can move the socket out of the way so I can see what the problem is.
    See the little white square with the small hole in the middle, sitting in the dark recess of the brass shell? The white square is one end of a little bracket. The other end has a bigger hole and screws onto the end of the support arm. The bulb was stuck in the socket, so when I tried to loosen it, instead of the bulb coming loose from the socket, the socket tried to unscrew from the arm. Tightening the screw that goes in through the bottom of the socket would have also tightened this bracket onto the arm. If I had know that, or just tried it, I wouldn't have had to go through all these shenanigans. But then we wouldn't have this picture.

*Gawd Blessed Chicken Excrement

Pins

I'm going through my old computers, sorting the dead from the living. This one is dead, so I decide to open it up, see if just reseating some plug-in components will coax it back to life. This is what I saw when I pulled the heat sink off of the processor, or at least that is what I thought I was going. Confused the heck out of me. What is this? Looking at the motherboard I see what looks like a socket. I finally realized that the processor, through the miracle of heat-transfer goop, had stuck to the heat sink and my pulling on it had pulled all nine zillion pins out of their sockets. What's amazing is that I didn't bend any pins. I released the processor latch, pried the cpu off of the heat sink and stuck it back in the socket. It didn't help, the computer is still dead.
    There's really quite of bit of clever mechanical engineering in these machines. I mean just look at the size of this heat sink. It's massive! We're going to regret throwing all these obsolete machines away one of these days.

Pork Chop

We went to dinner at Foreign Cinema when we were in Frisco last week. Very trendy, kind of pricey. The type on the menu was too small for me to read comfortably given the low level of illumination, but I was able to make out the words 'pork chop' in the description of one item. It was delicious, and I don't just mean good, I mean really good. The girls, predictably, ordered the chicken. Jonbert, being brave, ordered the duck.

Hail Ceasar!

We had a hail storm Tuesday. Not one of your horrendous smash everything flat with golf ball size chunks of ice, just an ordinary storm of frozen rain. I was a little surprised to see that there was still some ice left Wednesday morning. It was sitting in the shade of an evergreen shrub by the front door.