Science & Politics

The Road to Perdition
Because I can't hear the word without remembering the movie.

The Bandwagon of Perdition by Richard Fernandez has a good lesson for everyone, not that it's going to make any difference. We are all going down the road since that's where we are being herded.

Airplanes of the Day - Bell X1 & B-29

Bell X1 & B-29

Friggin' Air Force. Cold War thinking run amok.  I would think that raising the six ton X1 from a pit would be a heck of a lot easier than raising the 50 ton B-29. Shoot, you could probably just tilt the B-29 back on it's main gear enough to slide the X1 underneath. But I wasn't there, and who knows? The guy who built the lifts may have been Senator Pork's brother-in-law, and that may have tipped the political balance in favor of funding the X1 project. 

Via daily timewaster

Adjust Linux Mint Mouse Speed

I just noticed that portions of this post were dropped by Feedly, which I think is some kind of RSS feed thing, so if that's how this comes to you, you may want to go to the original post. Parts of this post are done using Courier font to differentiate my comments from actual Terminal I/O (input/output).

For this bit of tediousness, xinput is your friend.

Open a terminal window. Enter this command:

        xinput --help

xinput list will produce of a devices:

It comes back with a list. Velocity Scaling is the one we want.

    xinput set-prop 11 259 1

This is probably not a good fix in that it will need to be reapplied each time I reboot, but it's good enough for now.

I got some clues from the Linux Mint Forums, but there was a good deal of blather there as well.

For Men Only

The Couple That Refused to Die, For Men Only magazine cover, January 1967 - Mort Künstler

I'm flipping through the posts on Feedly and this picture pops up and it just stopped me. I mean, how much crazy can you pack into one picture?

Mort is a prolific artist. Wikipedia has a page about him. He also has his own website.

Via daily timewaster

Quote of the Day

Harriet Tubman

Andrew Jackson

I am once again treated to the spectacle of conservatives who are assmad (and liberals who are gleeful) that plans are moving forward to replace the founder of the modern Democratic party on the twenty-dollar bill with a gun-toting Republican. - View From The Porch

Wikipedia page on Andrew Jackson 

Wikipedia page on Harriet Tubman

 

Airplane of the Day - Douglas A-20 Havoc

Douglas A-20 Havoc - The Soviet Union's Favorite American Bomber
Dark Skies
I don't particularly care for the narrator's tone. Sounds like he is trying to make everything intense and ominous. Maybe that works for some people.

I am sure I have heard about the A-20 before, but nothing really stood out until Dark Skies tells us how the aircraft were ferried to Russia. They started with a route that took them to South America, across the Atlantic to Africa, up to Iran and hence to Russia. The second route took them across Alaska and Siberia using the Alaska-Siberia Air Road.

Wikipedia A-20 

Robotic Dogs

Spot's Got an Arm!
Boston Dynamics
The addition of the arm makes this machine appear to be much more useful. Via Borepatch.



Petoi Bittle, now available on Indiegogo - a Realistic Palm-sized Robot Dog for STEM and Fun
Rongzhong Li
This popped up on YouTube. It looks to be pretty robust. I expect we'll be seeing some interesting / surprising / worrisome applications for this tiny machine.


Why SpaceX Bought a Robotic Dog
Primal Space
This video gives some examples where this machine might actually be useful for things besides playing games.

With the advances in robotic technology, I think we need to be working on some kind of AI (artificial intelligence) personality module, something we could talk to, that could make wisecracks and provide snarky sound bites for the evening news, i.e. something people could care about, which is what NASA needs to keep funding space exploration.