Somebodies' Future

Perturbator - Tactical Precision Disarray
And now for some pure entertainment, no story, no characterization, no cluttering up the scene with pointless dialog, just plain old action with some unbelievable stuff thrown in. Pure entertainment.

Conspiracies Я Us

Tashkent, Uzbekistan

I follow a bunch of blogs on feedly, some of them I read, some I just look at the pictures, some I skip over when they get too long winded for me. Most of them seem to be written by ordinary folks who happen to have access to a keyboard and the internet. Yesterday I came across one post about the Corona Virus that agrees with my view of the situation, and in this post I came across this passage:

". . . which mysteriously appeared at precisely the time the UK and US governments were desperately trying to get rid of me as Ambassador, just a couple of weeks after I had been finally cleared of all the false charges with which the British government had attempted to fit me up."

and I think 'who is this guy'? This guy is Craig Murray, former Ambassador from England to Uzbekistan. What a job, a diplomatic posting to the back of beyond. How do you manage to stir up so much shit from the middle of nowhere? He must be an energetic guy to get so many people mad at him. Anyway, from what I've read, he seems to have a brain in his head, so we seem to be mostly in agreement.

But then I thought about his call for restraint in media, for them to stop blowing this whole thing out of proportion, and I thought - who are you kidding? Asking social media to exercise restraint is like going outside in a hurricane and telling it to stop blowing.

Now my wife just told me that the NBA has cancelled the rest of the basketball season, and Trump has canceled all travel to Europe, and now my spider sense is tingling. Either somebody knows something they aren't telling, or somebody engineered this. Not the disease, any disease would do, what they engineered was the social response in hopes of shutting down the economy. The Illuminati are no doubt behind this. Who are the Illuminati? Nobody that anybody knows. Bunch of guys in a nondescript office on Wall Street, calculating the odds and placing their bets on the stock market, no doubt shorting most everything except Purell and TP. Probably got their start in social media engineering with one of social justice campaigns of the last few years. Probably lent out their expertise to the Democrats and Republicans for their political campaigns. And now they have created the perfect storm and they are going to make a killing on the stock market.

Still Corners - Black Lagoon

Still Corners - Black Lagoon (OFFICIAL VIDEO)
The video doesn't have much to recommend it. I mean, no Black Lagoon. I'd think you could make a heck of a video if could find a nice Black Lagoon to film. Whatever, I've been listening to the tune for a while and I really like it. I don't know what she's singing about, but a Black Lagoon sounds pretty cool.

I can't be sure, but it seems that ever since I signed up for YouTube Premium, the selection of music is getting better. I think I'd like to see the algorithm they use to recommend music. I can understand how they choose videos based on the text description, but how do you evaluate music? Do they have people listening to tunes and scoring the? Or do they have a computer program that eats the music and generates some kind of magical checksum?

HMS Royal George 1756

Royal George , a warning to all citizens of the future.


Sea Stories (FULL Audiobook)
Iaman has been listening to sea stories, and he found the The Loss of the Royal George worth sharing. This story is recited in the above video of Sea Stories. The book, and the story, can also be found on Project Gutenberg. I couldn't listen to the audiobook. I don't have much patience with recorded voices, but the written version is short and quick and a very grim tale. As Iaman says:

"What could go wrong?  Calm water, no wind, sun out, warm festive atmosphere."

The loss of the 100-gun First Rate H.M.S. Royal George at Spithead, 29th August 1782 - William E.D. Stuart (fl. mid-19th Century)
(fl. stands for Floruit, which means flourished)

Here is the table of contents for the audio book (top). I had some trouble locating the story I wanted so I started making my own table of contents before I thought to look in the comments where I found it, and not too far down either.

A Representation of H.M.S. Royal George of 108 Guns now lying sunk.... at Spithead, having been under water fifty one years. Mr Deane equipped in his newly invented Diving Apparatus.... in August 1832

This shipwreck was the scene of some of the earliest attempts at diving using artificial breathing equipment.

SpaceX Launch & Recovery

SpaceX Launch & Recovery

The Silicon Graybeard reports on watching a Falcon 9 launch from, and return to, Cape Canaveral.

This photo captures the entirety of the first stage's activity. The launch is the big, bright arc stretching up and to the left. At the top of the arc, the engines shut off, the second stage separates, and the first stage booster turns over. That is the blank spot after the end of the arc. The we have the bluish, fuzzy area. That is the booster firing an engine to cancel its forward speed, slow down to a stop and then accelerate back toward the launch site. This doesn't take nearly as much power as the launch because it is no longer carrying the second stage and it is almost empty of fuel, much like an empty beer can that still has a teaspoon of beer sloshing around in the bottom of the can that you can get if you tilt your head way back and hold the can near vertical.

Now it's heading back to the launch site. When it gets close, like a few miles, it fires the engine again to kill most of it's speed. That's the straight line just to the right of the main arc in the top half of the image. When it gets close to the landing site, it fires the engine again to drop its speed to near zero so it can touch down without damage.

Fuel management is critical. Start with too much fuel and you won't be able to slow down enough because you will be carrying too much mass. Start with too little fuel and you are liable to run out before you land. In either case you are going to crash instead of landing.

Kitchen Deconstruction

Existing Kitchen in New House

We started taking apart the kitchen in the new house today. There is nothing really wrong with it, it has all the modern conveniences and everything works. The biggest problem is that it's out of style. My main sticking point was that if we were going to move to another house, it would need to be better than what we have now. The new house has a view and a couple of big rooms and that was enough for me, but my wife has her own opinions and the big issue for her was the kitchen. So, new kitchen.

The kitchen has granite countertops and you think oooo, granite countertops, but granite comes in all kinds of mixes of colors and this one is just difficult to like. Drop any small thing, like a screw, on it and it just disappears. The color mix makes it impossible to find that screw. Of course you aren't normally going to be dropping screws on your kitchen counter, but I'm using the kitchen counters as a makeshift workbench while I am working on the house and screws are part of everything I work on. I imagine you might have similar problems with preparing food there, but we'll never know. The kitchen is being replaced and first part of that is taking the old one apart.

I expected the countertops to be attached to the cabinets with screws that screwed into blocks that resided in cutouts in the granite. I don't know why I thought that. Possibly I got the idea from watching too many shows about building ancient stone temples. Whatever. That was not the way it was done. They are glued to the cabinets with silicon adhesive and that silicon does not want to let go.

I was originally going to have ReStore remove the old kitchen, but a confluence of factors persuaded me to tackle it myself. But I am not seeing any way of getting these countertops loose, so I call ReStore and ask them how they handle it. The guy who answers the phone says he 'isn't afraid of granite countertops, he has a sledge hammer'. Okay then. That's one way to handle it, but I have this, probably wrong, idea that somebody might be able to use them. It's probably wrong because countertops are custom made for each kitchen and it is extremely unlikely anyone will be able to use them as is. And cutting them to accommodate a different layout is problematic, to say the least.

In any case, I want to get them loose from the cabinets without breaking them. We succeeded with two of them by pulling the cabinets out from under them. We only lost one small cabinet in the process, so we are getting there.

Stuff I found on the web today

A man is rescued from the French trawler 'Jeanne Gougy' after it ran aground off the Cornish coast, 1962

Bearded Man

The capitalist system has many faults, but it's kind of like democracy that way: it's the worst way to run an economy except for all the others.