Touch

NASA's Orion Spacecraft

I saw a story the other day about how NASA is studying manual dexterity as it pertains to operating controls in spaceships during zero gravity conditions. The story kind of implied that everything was moving to Apple iPads, which is just the kind of moronic populism that NASA has to cater to in order to maintain their funding, witness Jeff Daniels' character in The Martian.

Avid S3 Mixing Console

When it comes to audio equipment, sliders were popular with some people and maybe they still are. They got some cachet when big mixing panels used in theaters and recording studios came out from behind their curtain. Oh, cool! thought I and a bunch of other people. They might be okay in their original applications, or where space is at a premium and you need to cram in a bunch of seldom used controls into a tiny patch of panel, but for everyday audio controls they suck.
    You grab hold of a rotary control it is easy to tell how far you have turned it, even if the knob is on a radio mounted in the dashboard of car that is bouncing down a pothole filled road. Try adjusting a slider under those conditions and you can't, not with any degree of precision. You can't even adjust a slider accurately without being able to see it so you can tell how far it has move. Okay, maybe this is a personal problem. Maybe sliders don't cause you any difficulty.

    I've been having trouble with Cruise Control in my truck, and now I'm having the same trouble with the power locks in the Hyundai. The problem is that sometimes when I push the button it does what it's supposed to, and sometimes it doesn't.
    I think I figured out what the problem is. When I first got these vehicles, when I pushed the button, I would wait for it take effect before I released. It doesn't take long for that to happen, a few hundredths of a second, I imagine. As time goes by and I become habituated to the way these controls work I start releasing that button sooner. Since this shit is probably computer controlled, there isn't a direction connection between the switch and the device, everything goes through the computer, and the computer is scanning all the controls and it can only do it so fast, so if you tap the button and the computer isn't looking in that millisecond wide space of time, it will miss and it will appear that the switch is flaky. So you have to adjust. You have to hold that button down for just a little longer, long enough for the computer to register your tap.
    Problem is that sometimes your tap comes at just the right time, and even though it is really quick, it happens to fall in that window when the computer is looking and so it works fine.

    I don't like these touch screens, no tactile feedback, you have to look at them to tell where to put your fingers, and they all seem to require different amounts of pressure. Knobs and switches are what I grew up with and if they were good enough to win the great war, they ought be good enough for going to Mars.
    Mechanical switches do have problems with reliability, they're mechanical and mechanical things wear, and eventually wear out and fail. The design and construction methods employed in building our spaceships determine their life span. Sometimes they don't make it that long, but sometimes they keep going long past their expiration date. If you have your choice of a component that will wear out and one that won't, it's probably a good idea to use the one with the infinite life.

Kepone

Chlordecone / Kepone 3D by GYassineMrabetTalk

Over on Facebook I see that Sara Tagay, a Kurdistan Freedom Fighter, has 'liked' a post. The post includes some pictures of dead men, presumably ISIS soldiers. Most (all?) of the comments are in Arabic, but there is a translate button. The first translated comment looks like this:

مصير كل من يبيع نساء الكورد The fate of both sell women chlordecone

OK, that's weird. It's a machine translation so it's not perfect, but you don't get a word like chlordecone because of a typo. That's pretty specific. But what the heck is chlordecone? Turns out it's a really nasty insecticide. It was so bad that "In 1975 Governor Mills Godwin Jr. shut down the James River to fishing for 100 miles, from Richmond to the Chesapeake Bay."

The stuff is persistent. It has a half life of about 600 years. A worldwide ban was set up in 2009. Banana growers in the French Antilles were using it up until 1993.

This is the kind of shit that gives big chemical corporations like Allied Signal,  the LifeSciences Product Company and, of course, Monsanto a bad name.

The world is really run by some remarkably stupid, vicious, short-sighted, people.

Mules at War

Mule Skinners attached to 2nd Battalion, 475th Infantry Regiment, Mars Task Force, lead mules through the swift river that impeded their progress to Bhamo, Burma, 1944.

This picture caught me eye, I'm not sure why. Maybe because I've seen several cool videos with horses today.

• Budweiser Clydesdales getting some exercise. Couldn't find this one, but there are plenty Budweiser ads on YouTube.
• Women rescuing horses in Holland.
• Getting mules to the front lines in WW2.

Girls with Guns

Kurdish YPG Fighter - Biji Kurdistan

Found this in a story about women fighting in Kurdistan. The Kurds don't seem to be exempt from the Middle East Disease. They are not just fighting ISIS and the Turks, they're also fighting each other. There are at least two, maybe three factions of Kurds, and while they might not be shooting at each other this week, that could change.
    I like pictures like this because it shows women standing up for themselves. Doormats are boring. Pinups are nice, but they are distracting. They only serve to keep you horny, which affects your judgement. Burqas aren't the answer because even those voluminous coverups can't conceal the swing of a women's hips, which has got to be the most distracting thing in the world, if you're paying attention.
    I'm looking at this gun and I can't figure out what it is. It almost looks like a movie prop that someone cobbled together out of bits and pieces. Then again, the world is full of odd-ball firearms, and why would you bother to fake a gun in an area that is supposedly overflowing with arms?

Update 6PM: Tam clues me in: "Indigenous .50 BMG anti-material rifle. Looks to be based on a fairly simple design common in the US among lower-end .50s." The Firearm Blog has a story, with pics. I think Tam is gonna be my next virtual girlfriend.

Quotes of the Day

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky sends an email:

"I'm glad that Sanders is running. A good way to bring important ideas and facts to people. His candidacy might also press the Dems a little in a progressive direction. In our system of bought elections he has scarcely a chance of getting beyond the primaries, and even if by some miracle he were elected he wouldn't be able to do anything, lacking any congressional representatives, governors, etc. As far as I can see he's a thorn in the side of the Clinton machine, which is not a bad thing."

Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders reacts:

“[I'm] not as pessimistic as Noam....He’s right, we live in an increasingly oligarchic form of society, where billionaires are able to buy elections and candidates, and it is very difficult, not just for Bernie Sanders but for any candidate who represents working families. But I think the situation is not totally hopeless, and I think we do have a shot to win this thing.”

Found on Alternet dot org. Do not confuse Noam Chomsky with Depak Chopra, which is something I used to do. I mean they both have sort of weird names. Noam is a pretty clear thinker. Depak peddles bullshit.

Oil Sands: Canada-, Utah+

Crown Asphalt Ridge LLC (Sept 2012)

There is a big oil sands operation in Canada. They were getting large quantities of oil out of the ground, but it was kind of a crazy operation. They were using heat to separate the oil from the sand, and they were burning oil to get that heat. It took so much oil to generate the heat they needed that it only paid when the price of oil was high. Since the price of oil has collapsed (what caused that anyway?) the Canadian operations are no longer viable and may already have been shut down.
    Meanwhile there is a small plant in Utah that is using a solvent instead of heat to separate the oil from the sand. They recycle the solvent so it seems like a better solution all around. It's a proprietary technology. It's still kind of new. People are going to want to see how well these pilot projects pan out before they go jumping in with both feet.

Rooftop Refuge

Professor Zhang Lin's mountain villa built on top of a Beijing apartment block.

I'm reading Mona Lisa Overdrive and I come across this scene where Mona is looking out a window of a high-rise in the Sprawl (New York City) and she sees this wild landscape built on top of the building across the way. There are rocks and hills and trees and even a mountain goat climbing around and nibbling on the shrubbery, and I think I've seen that before, but where? Or maybe I didn't see it, I just constructed an image in my mind the last time I read this book. What a minute, have I read this book before? I could have, it was written over 25 years ago, but I don't think so.
     But I do remember seeing this and I think it was a real place in China. A little Google and here we are. The doc who built it got an order to tear it down a couple of years ago, so it's probably gone by now, but it was very cool while it lasted.

Smart Phone Zombies

    A key element of the story in the book revolves around people operating virtual lives in cyber space. The New York Times just passed out a bunch of free cardboard widgets that turn your smart phone into a virtual reality viewer (essentially 3-D stereo). I'm pretty sure looking at smart phone that is a couple of inches from your eyes for very long is going to mess with your vision. Might be so bad that the smart phone zombies will start wearing a camera as well so they can where they are going when they need to walk around.