Oroville Dam, Part 2

Lake Oroville Spillway March 2, 2017
Little bit of damage to the half-mile long spillway here. You can see the undamaged spillway on Google Maps now. Part 1 here. Via Post-hip Scott.

Blast from the Past

Vickers V.745D Viscount, mid 1960's at Buffalo International Airport

First turboprop powered airliner (1948). Look at how long the engine nacelles are.

Newspeak

“The Keystone XL Pipeline is currently in the process of being constructed, so it does not count as a new, retrofitted, repaired or expanded pipeline,” the White House spokeswoman said. - Politico

All I can say in response is:


cream - i'm so glad

New Computer, Again

Grub Boot Loader

My computer bit the dust last week and since the motherboard was less than two months old I said enough of this shit and bought another, newish computer from Amazon for a hundred bucks. It came with Windows 7, which I didn't want, but it was easier to just buy it that way than to look for something more particular. Likewise, it came with a mouse and keyboard that I didn't need either, but who's got time to read the fine print?

Hooked up the hard disk from my old computer to the new one and when it didn't boot I installed a second copy of Linux Mint in a new partition. This evidently fixed whatever was ailing the disk because now it will boot either copy, and when I boot the old copy all the programs I installed and all my files are there still there. Very cool.

I thought about deleting the 2nd copy of Linux, after all it's taking up almost 40 GB of space, but figuring out the steps necessary to accomplish this would mean scanning a bunch of pages of instructions to find the three lines I need and I ain't got time for that. Besides, if it went squirrelly once it might do it again and I'd have to do another installation so we'll just leave it and maybe its ominous presence will be enough to ward off further problems with this disk.

Now all I need to do is convince the boot loader to load the old system instead of defaulting to the new. This requires reading more pages of geeky gibberish but I stumble over something called the grub-customizer, and three commands, complete with all the secret syntax, to be entered at the terminal needed to install it, which I do, and it works, as long as you install it in the right partition which I didn't do the first time so I had to do it a second, but the second time it worked and now it will automatically boot the system I want. So I am happy. For the moment.

Funnies

I've gotten out of the habit of reading the paper because The Oregonian only shows up twice a week now. But it showed up today, and these two comics tickled my funny bone, so I'm sharing.

Matilda

2013 Tony Award Show Clips: Matilda
Saw this show at Keller Auditorium last night. Great fun! Because it is a musical there was a bunch of singing and because my ears are not in tune with the singers voices, much of it was incomprehensible. No matter, the story came through as well as all the jokes. Mr. & Mrs. Wormwood (Matilda's parents) and Miss Trunchbull (her teacher) were done as caricatures, and it would be hard to find worse people to be in charge of kids.

Some people were impressed with the lyrics from the songmeister, Tim Minchin.  You can listen to the songs and read the lyrics on YouTube, or read the lyrics as text and listen to advertising here.

LSD

An artistic representation of LSD (in blue) fitting into
a serotonin receptor (the white ribbon). Bryan Roth

The guverment is hatching an evil mind control plot. Oh, wait, that's what the news media does. Here the NIH is poking around in molecular chemistry. The linked story gives a brief overview of what they have learned, but it poses more questions than it answers. They give names to some chemical constructs, but no explanation. Feel free to look them up and study them on your own time. That can be done with some time and money (for text books / academic access). This stuff is obscure enough you aren't going to find it on Facebook or any of those other useless social sites.

The questions that come to my mind is how they devil did they come by this information? How many people have been working on it for how long? What kind of machines did they use to get their images and other data? What kind of techniques did they use get the samples to a place where they could analyze them? How much of it was done in a laboratory using test tubes and petri dishes, and how much was done in a cluttered office, hunched over a computer keyboard?

Dr Becky Smethurst

For example, I'm watched a video about Dr Becky Smethurst, a woman astronomer, and this scene pops up (above, at the 7:38 mark) and look at the size of that display! I would like to have a display that size, and I could have one if I were willing to spend the money, but I'm not. What I have is perfectly adequate, or at least I tell myself it is. Of course, that's what I told myself when back when VGA was all the rage. With 640 by 480 you could get 80 columns of text on the screen, which was same number of characters you could get on printed page (12 characters per inch with a one inch margin on either side, more or less). That was great until I saw a Super VGA monitor and suddenly my horizons expanded.

I suspect researchers (whether chemists or astronomers) spend 99% of their time getting all their ducks in a row, an instant or two to collect their data and then a bit spent writing up the results. And if you don't get good data on your first attempt, you get to do it all over again.

Original link via Indy Tom.