Car of the Day

May not be slick, may not be fancy, and I'm not sure about the colors, but at least it's not another silver Honda. I like the chrome tailpipes under the rear fenders, nice touch without a lot of work. I wonder why the purple is flat instead of gloss. Is that the new thing? The roof has some kind of complicated design, I didn't get a good look at it. The white streak across the middle is on my windshield. Sorry about that.

Graffiti Hits the Mean Streets of Jackson School

Isn't it nice here in the Pipeline? Well, I guess. Found written across a nearby intersection. Have no idea what they are talking about, but then I'm not up on the latest gang lingo.

Fast and Furious

Fortune has a story about the BATF's Operation Fast & Furious. It starts with the premise that we do not want guns smuggled into Mexico. That seems like Mexico's problem to me. If they don't want guns smuggled  into their country, then it is up to them to do something about it. Now as the USA and Mexico are nominally on good terms, they might ask for our assistance in this matter, and perhaps that is how Fast & Furious got started: as a favor to a friend. On the other hand, if we want to prevent guns from being smuggled out of the USA, then that's our problem, but that's not what people are saying. Everyone is saying "stop guns from being smuggled into Mexico".

I've read some of the gunnies rants about the BATF, and I wouldn't be surprised if the NRA (National Rifle Association) was aiming for the complete elimination of that agency. I dunno what the BATF does exactly, but how many police forces does this country need? I mean you have your local, county and state police, and then you have the alphabet soup of Federal agencies: the FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, SS, BATF, and I imagine there may be couple of dozen others.

Then there are human rights. The right to bear arms is enshrined in our Bill of Rights, but the USA is one of the few countries in the world that allows ordinary citizens to own guns. What about all the other people in the world? Should they not also have that right? Take Mexico for instance. Presuming that guns are prohibited in Mexico (otherwise why would we even be having this discussion?), that prohibition has not done much to stop the bloody drug cartel warfare that is going on down there. Maybe Mexican citizens should be campaigning for their own second amendment.

And lastly there is whole business of illegal drugs. But I've already talked about that today.

Hat tip to Burro Hall.

Powers That Be

I'm reading the Christian Science Monitor's story about Obama Versus Aliens from other planets, and I suddenly realized that while democracy is a powerful force, it isn't the only force loose on this planet, or even in this country. I also started reading John Le Carre's Single & Single last night, which includes this little bit:

so that might have something to do with my revelation as well. The book dates from 1999, so the figures are a little obsolete. There are many areas that "public opinion" does not pay any mind, and when nobody is minding the store all kinds of criminal activity can flourish.


Hat tip to Tam for the Obama link.


A note about typographay: I used my camera to photograph the above passage, then Picassa and MSPaint to create the final image. I also found the passage using Google Books, but the typeface they used was funny:

I suppose it is readable, but I didn't like it, so I went with my hand cobbled version. I wonder if Google's choice of typeface is an attempt to foil OCR (Optical Character Recognition) programs.

Airlines

A while back I saw a story about how the airlines have never made any money, except for Southwest. (Here's one story, not the one I remember, but it covers the main point.) Oh, some of them may make money some years, but overall the airlines have lost 60 billion dollars since deregulation.

I was talking to my daughter about airline ticket prices not too long ago, and she was concerned about a $100 price difference in a ticket to Argentina. The deal was something like $1800 if you fly direct, or $1700 if you have a 37 hour layover in out-of-way misery land. I explained to her that if airfares were still regulated the fare would be more like $5,000 and so she shouldn't quibble about the $100.

Then I got to thinking about it, and I realized it wouldn't take a 250% price increase to alleviate most of the petty annoyances of air travel. (I'm talking about things like leg room, sit width, decent food, free baggage checking. I'm not going to even touch airline security, I'll leave that to Jennifer.) 10% would probably be more than enough, and would probably allow the airlines to make a profit to boot.

This says something about the people in the airline business, though I am not sure what. Once upon a time I heard something along the lines of "airlines are sexy". I never understood that, except that stewardessess are usually young, attractive women, who I find sexy. Maybe it's the engineer part of me, or the part of me that doesn't like crowds, or maybe it's just that I don't like sitting still for hours on end, but there is nothing I like about being a passenger on a commercial flight.

Chinese Astronauts Return to Earth

Chinese astronauts return to Earth
It isn't obvious at the beginning but the spacecraft is being supported by a parachute, it is just out of the camera frame for most of this clip. This happened about an hour ago. From MSNBC Via Google News.

Update March 2018 replaced missing video.

Cool, Cooler, Cooliest

Hey, look! It's a heat sink shaped like a fan, or it's a fan made like a heat sink! Yes, it's two devices in one! It's a combined heat sink and fan for personal computer CPU chips. Now wait a minute Bucky, if this thing is rotating, which it is, how do you get the heat from the CPU (which isn't rotating, being as it is connected to the motherboard by a couple hundred wires) to this fancy schmancy new combo heat sink and fan? That's the trick, isn't it? I read all about it, and I'm still not sure. This is what I got: there are two parts, the rotating heat sink and fan combo, and the stationary part, which is basically a flat heat pipe that sits on top of the CPU. The heat pipe is really flat, and the bottom on the impeller is also very flat. The two parts are separated by a very small gap, about one one-thousandth of an inch (0.001") and somehow the heat from the CPU is transferred across this gap. Whether it is by radiant energy or by convection I am not sure, but they seem pretty confident that it works. Might start seeing them in everyday computers before too long. From Scott.