Hummingbird

Hummingbird

He's right in the center, facing right with wings swept forward. They are regular visitors to the patio. I think they like the Bird of Paradise flowers.

Hummingbird

Here he is all blowed up.

Walter Crane's children's illustrations

Illustration from Beauty and the Beast - Walter Crane

Flares into Darkness has a brief story and a bunch more of Walter's pictures.

The Boss & Stupidity

Stupid Hillary
I haven't verified whether Hillary actually said this. For my purposes it doesn't matter.

I don't like being the boss. Being the boss means dealing with people. Unfortunately, you don't get to choose just what kind of people you have to deal with. If you can put together a good team of pleasant, energetic, cooperative people, it can be great. But inevitably there is going to be someone who is causing problems. It might be an employee, an important customer, or a supplier who isn't holding up his end of the deal. And when you investigate the problem you find it's some kind of bullshit that wouldn't have happened if the dumb clucks who were supposed to take care it of simply did their job.

Fortunately I found a nice little technical niche where I didn't have to deal with very many people. It was a job so there were people, but the technical work pretty much consumed me. I only popped my head up out of my hole when I had an answer to the problem du jour.

Lately I've been thinking about the electorate, the citizens of the USA who vote. And then I was thinking about intelligence and how half of the population has an IQ that is under 100. I don't know very many stupid people, if I know any at all. I think the reason for that is that I tend to avoid stupid people. It's not something I do consciously. I'm not sure, but I think it depends on whether they exhibit any intelligence in our conversation. Or maybe that conversation has to tick several of my subconscious requirement boxes and intelligence is only one of those.

And then today I tripped over the meme shown at the top. You might be offended or you might be overjoyed by the appearance of that meme, but it doesn't mean she's wrong. It's just a plain fact, the country if full of stupid people and if you want to get elected you need to tailor your message to appeal to those folks who are only playing with half a deck.

We can have all kinds of highfalutin conversations about any number of esoteric topics, but that doesn't mean shit unless you are able to turn it into something you can sell to Joe Sixpack, and then sell it to him.

Now it might be that the intelligence of the average voter might be slightly higher than 100. It might be that people with low intelligence just don't vote. I'm sure someone has done a study on it.

Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Ethiopia has built a giant freaking dam on the Blue Nile River just a few miles from their northern border where the Blue Nile River crosses into Sudan. Al Jazeera has a story.

With a planned installed capacity of 5.15 gigawatts, the dam will be the largest hydroelectric power plant in Africa when completed, as well as among the 20 largest in the world. - Wikipedia

They started building it in 2011 and it started generating electricity this year.

I was thinking about putting up a post about this, just because I had never heard of this project before. Seems like I should have heard something about a big deal like this, but no. A couple of days ago I started reading Maelstrom by Peter Watts and somewhere in the first few dozen pages he mentions this dam. Well, I can't ignore a coincidence like this, so this post. I've read a couple other books by Peter Watts and he's pretty great.

Looking for information, I dug up some maps.

River Nile Map

Note that the Blue Nile branches off of the main river at Khartoum. It heads southeast toward Ethiopia and just after it crosses the border is where the dam is.

Google Maps doesn't do a good job of portraying waterways. Can't say as I blame them, only a small fraction of the population gets out on the water, and the government has a whole army of people devoted to mapping water. So if you want to look at maps of rivers, search for images of maps using your regular browser.

Still, Google Maps is terrific. Here we have two views of the area being inundated by the water being held back by the dam. Both maps are about 14 miles across. First is the map view:

Map View of Blue Nile Dam area

No sign of any lake. The black line along the left hand side is the border with Sudan. Now look at the satellite view:

Satellite View of Blue Nile Dam area

Not a lot of contrast between the land and the water, but if you look carefully you might be able to pick out the shore line and see that the lake is extensive.

Update two days later.

Main Dam and Saddle Dam of GERD (Source: Hydro World, 2016)

Looking at the satellite view of the lake I noticed a large, curved line in the lower left quadrant. A little digging reveals this is a three mile long saddle dam. The water hasn't reached it yet, but it means the lake is going to get a whole lot bigger in the coming years. The saddle dam is 160 feet tall. Not giant, but still substantial.

42 Days of Darkness - Netflix Mini-Series

42 DAYS OF DARKNESS (NETFLIX) TRAILER
ME GUSTA CHANNEL
42 Days of Darkness is a six-part series from Chile. It is partially based on the  disappearance in 2010 of Viviana Haeger from her home in Puerto Varas.

It's kind of an odd situation. The woman lives in a well-to-do suburb. Nobody saw anything, nothing is missing and there is no demand for ransom. The husband seems to be a bit of an odd duck which makes him look very suspicious, but not everyone reacts to stress the same way. Is he really guilty, or are they just trying to make him look that way? Local attorney Víctor Pizarro (played by Pablo Macaya) is trying to claw his way back to respectability. He and his cohorts conduct their own investigation and are the most entertaining part of the show. The family members are pretty miserable as you would expect them to be, but misery is not very entertaining.

Puerto Varas, Chile

Puerto Varas is in southern Chile, about 600 miles south of Santiago. In the show it seems to be raining all the time. That's not too surprising since Puerto Varas is at 41 degrees south latitude, which is almost a mirror image of the 45 degrees north latitude of Portland Oregon where it does rain for at least six months of the year.

Puerto Varas, Lago Llanquihue & Osorno Volcano

It is on the shore of Lago Llanquihue and a short distance from the Osorno Volcano. Mount Shasta in California is another big, fat volcano that happens to be located right around 41 degrees north latitude.

It’s not Hypocrisy, You’re Just Powerless

Feudal Japan

A good explanation of what's going on in the USA these days:

It’s not Hypocrisy, You’re Just Powerless - N.S. Lyons

A quick Public Service Announcement for Class B

If you are wondering who the "controversial Arab thought-leader" is, it's Osama bin Laden.

Hearing Test

You *HAVE* to try this! 😨👂
MoreAliA
Quick and dirty hearing test. I came across this a few days ago but when I went to look for it I couldn't find it. I thought, no problem, I'll just run a search on YouTube, I'm sure it will turn up. I mean, how many hearing test videos are there on YouTube? It turns out there are a whole boatload of them. I looked at a few, but they were either too long or they started at the high end of the frequency spectrum which means that when they start, if your hearing is as bad as mine, you won't hear anything for a long while. And it you're an old timer like me, you will suspect that there is something wrong with the computer or your speakers or the audio track on the video. I mean, back in the day equipment was flakey and whenever you needed to do something different there was inevitably a glitch that had to be straightened out. Nowadays things just work. Weird, man, but I still don't trust it. Anyway, finally did a search on my YouTube history and this video popped right up.

The first time I listened to it I wondered if there wasn't some kind of problem because the way the sound cut off all of a sudden. Could that be right? But I tried another another video on another computer with my wife and got the same results. My hearing cuts off right around 8,000 Hz, hers goes away around 12,000 Hz. People who say they can hear higher frequencies are lying. There are no higher frequencies - they don't exist.