Tracy

I had a dream last night and Tracy was in it. Is Tracy an odd name? It kind of feels like it is, but I don't know if it is that unusual. Maybe it's because I didn't know anybody named Tracy when I was a kid. Well, except for Dick Tracy, and his name wasn't Tracy, it was Dick. Anyway, thinking about it, I could only think of three Tracys in my life.

Dick Tracy

Dick Tracy was a staple of the newspaper funnies when I was a kid. It was never funny, and I don't recall any of the stories, if there even were any. There were a whole bunch of oddball characters.

Tracy the Runner

I knew a woman named Tracy when I lived in Austin. She was tall and thin as you might expect a runner to be. She came this close to being famous - she was supposed to go to the Olympics but then Jimmy Carter had a snit fit and canceled our participation in the Olympics which kind of pissed her off.  She was there for the night of the mushrooms. There were four of us and each of us was one of principle elements - Earth, Air, Fire and Water. She was Fire, I was Water. She eventually married a good friend of mine in Austin. 

Tracy the Computer Scientist

Intel SatisFAXtion Faxmodem

I met Tracy when I was working at Intel on the SatisFAXtion. After that he worked on a database project that crashed and burned. Not sure what happened there. I remember him telling me that they were trying to do something that the underlying database software didn't support and their attempt to work around its shortcomings made the whole project so complex that it collapsed under its own weight. Later on he went to England (Oxford, maybe?) and got a doctorate in Computer Science. Last I heard he was working on using Deep Learning software to identify cancer in X-ray images. He gave us a very coherent explanation of what he was doing at one of our Thursday lunch bunches. 

Dream

Last night I had a dream. I was riding in a Volvo and Tracy the Computer Scientist was driving. I was talking about how things had changed in the automotive world in the last 60 years. I should have said 50. I'm 71, so 60 years ago I would have been eleven and was barely aware that cars had engines. Whatever, it was a dream. I was talking about how when you turned the key to start your car 60 years ago, it was always a crap shoot as to whether it would start the first time. Sometimes the switch would glitch and just nothing would happen. Sometimes the starter would just start to turn the engine, but then hang. Sometimes it would start but only run for a few seconds. In those cases you would get to try it again. Sometimes you would have to crank the engine for a long time before it would catch. Nowadays if you turn the key and the engine doesn't start immediately you may just as well throw the car away. 

We're driving in the country and we come to little town. There is a small park and on the far side is a group of people, a wedding party perhaps. There is a lawn between us and them. It's a little brown. There are people right up against the edge on the far side, but there is nobody on it. It's like it's a prohibited area, but there doesn't seem to be any reason for it. We drive by a building with a porch recessed into one wall. The floor of the porch is concrete and looks to have a slope of about a foot in six feet, which means it's too steep for tables and chairs and so there is nothing there.

Modern Cars

With the computer diagnostics needed to diagnose the problem and with the exorbitant price of fancy little do-dads that are custom to that particular make and model, the repair bill on a car that won't start is liable to be a thousand dollars even if there is nothing mechanically wrong with it. And you know that once one thing fails, it is just the first of an endless cascade. Better just get rid of it now and save yourself the headache.

Squid with Headlights

Taningia danae

This deep sea monster is equipped a couple of unusual photophores:

The size and shape of lemons—each nestled within a retractable lid like an eyeball in a socket—they are by far the largest photophores known to science.

Via Schneier on Security

Why Is the Establishment So Scared of RFK Jr.?

RFK Jr. and samples of the smear campaign being directed at him

Marie Hawthorne explains on The Organic Prepper. RFK Jr. has appeared on my news feeds a couple of times and he sounds pretty rational until you hear that he's anti-vaxx. That makes him a little suspect, but Marie makes the case that maybe he knows what he's talking about.

Does he have a chance of unseating the godfather of the Democrat mafia? One can hope, but politics is funny. Being rotten to the core seems to be more important than being smart, rational and competent.

P-51C

P-51C Thunderbird First Flight (1949 Bendix Race Winner)
AirCorps Aviation

That sort of looks like a P-51 Mustang, but where's the bubble canopy? It is a P-51, but it's the C model. The P-51 didn't get the bubble canopy until the D model. Of the 15,000 P-51s built during WW2, 12,000 were the D model, so that's what you usually see.

This particular airplane was owned by Jimmy Stewart, famed actor and Brigadier General in the United States Air Force. In 1949 it was used by Joe De Bona to win the Bendix Trophy Race and by Jackie Cochran to set a speed record.

Aircorps Aviation is co-located with the Dakota Territory Air Museum in Minot, North Dakota. They have upwards of a dozen old warbirds in their collection, several of which are air worthy. The Minot Air Force Base is just down the road.

Via Brucexo

Schrödinger’s War – And Orwell’s

Thomas Cole The Course of Empire – The Arcadian or Pastoral State 1834

Raul Ilargi Meijer has a post on The Automatic Earth about the way the war in Ukraine is being reported. It's pretty entertaining and if he happens to agree with me, well, that's just a coincidence. He includes this quote about the recent dam destruction:

The best comment on Kakhovka I’ve seen perhaps comes from @CheburekiMan on Twitter: “Restoring water flow to the North Crimean Canal was top priority for Russia, the very first act of the SMO [Special Military Operation]. Before Kiev shut off the flow in 2014, the canal was supplying 85% of Crimea’s water. So much depended on it, from crops to industry to drinking water, that’s how important it is. Now the pro-Ukraine bleating sheep want people to believe that Russia would wreck the dam, empty the reservoir and cause serious harm to its own people by running the canal dry. It’s so bonkers that one has to seriously consider such ideas are the result of brain damage, or perhaps fetal alcohol syndrome.”

He also notes that Jacinda Ardern, a former Prime Minister of New Zealand, was made a dame. I'm not sure what to make of that. I seem to recall that New Zealand went off the deep end with COVID and gun control, but that's New Zealand, they're a tiny country in the middle of the ocean on the far side of the world. I'm not going to try and figure that out. 

Via Zerohedge

Hannah Duston

Statue of Hannah Duston - Haverhill, Mass

Bayou Renaissance Man has a post up about Hannah Duston:

Hannah Duston was the first American woman to have a statue built in her honor, in 1874. Today, what she did to deserve it might be called, by some, a monument to an atrocity. What did Hannah do? Hannah scalped the ten Indians who had attacked her farm, dragged her from her bed, and burned her house down before taking her captive and killing her six-day-old infant.

How was she able to scalp ten Indians? Well, they were dead. How did they die? Hannah killed 'em. You go, girl.

Curmudgeon’s Navel Gazing:

Abraham Lincoln by Alexander Gardner, 1863

Adaptive Curmudgeon put up an excellent post. The post has two parts. The first is about the nature of people. The second is about motorcycles. The first part is great, so I stole it:

Did I make the correct choice? Let’s back away from the trees of motorcycles and discuss the forest of life: Why do people do stupid shit? Some stupid shit is gloriously innocent: “Hold my beer and watch this…” Nothing wrong with that. Other stupid shit is so predictably doomed to fail it hurts to watch. That’s the shit to avoid!

Ever see people do stuff so absolutely mind bogglingly moronic you wonder how they derived the slightest hope it would succeed? Think of paths were people march into bad results that are more or less a certainty. The fool that smokes 3 packs a day while bitching about their health. The moron that’s always broke who just took on more payments. The dude who eats shit from his harpy wife until she takes half his money and runs off with the UPS guy.

Many of us sleepwalk into the woodchipper… repeatedly. We’ve all seen it. It’s a human thing. We need self-control to avoid predictable failures.

It’s hard to plumb an individual man’s mind. It’s easier to observe big groups as they take obviously unwise paths. This is best examined for a time and place far removed from your current situation; thus to avoid your own biases. War is often (usually!) avoidable and it’s always horrible. With 20/20 hindsight the precursors that created most wars seem unthinkably obvious.

I suspect the American Civil War was like that. Pressure built for whole human lifetimes. Nobody diffused it in advance. Few people correctly predicted the hell that ensued. Everyone thought it would be a spat… a faffing about… a skirmish. It was nothing like that. Americans were incredibly effective at killing Americans. Things happened in a way that didn’t happen in Britain or Brazil.

What’s weird is that it wasn’t sudden. The ethical division in the populace had been there literally since the founding. As Lincoln so eloquently put, we had four score and seven (87) years to sort our shit out. We didn’t. Many nations had to thread the same needle. Many did so without bloodshed. Why not us?

I think we deliberately chose to avoid resolving things and instead used it as a political hot potato; a loser’s game in the long run. We let a real problem become merely one-upmanship. Each new State became a brand new battle. “Will the new State side with Team A or Team B? How does the addition of that new State change the balance of power? Who gains? Who loses?” Two points of view never finding or seeking compromise. Keeping the kettle on boil instead of inching toward resolution. America played politics until things had already gone to shit and by then neither side could find a way out.

A forever game of political one-upmanship instead of resolving legitimate issues. Sound familiar?

The “States as pieces on a gameboard” thing still happens right now… or rather it’s frozen in a stalemate. Puerto Rico isn’t a State. It’s bigger than some States. It could be a State. Yet, if we add it, some would benefit and some would lose… so it stays balanced on the knife edge of a nation that has razor sharp political edges. Maybe that’s for the best, I’m not in Puerto Rico so I don’t know. But it’s odd that we went from 13 colonies to 50 states and then lost the use of the tool. (We last added states in 1959; Hawaii and Alaska.)

Existing States can be split as needed. It has happened before. West Virginia split from Virginia in 1863. Maine separated from Massachusetts in 1820. Now that’s considered “unthinkable”. If we split a State someone would benefit and someone would lose. Notice that release of pressure or responsive governance is irrelevant? It’s not even considered. It’s all about short term wins and losses in the forever game.

A rancher in East Rattlesnake, Oregon; where it barely rains, the neighbor is six miles away, and coyotes outnumber people has to live under rules made by a foreign power. His State is run from Hippietopia where it never stops raining, there are more lesbian drug dispensaries than tractor supply stores, and people consider skate boards a legitimate form of transportation. Chaining those two disparate worlds together is exclusively for the benefit of people who care for the game. The welfare of ranchers or skateboarders isn’t relevant.

The dude trying to run fence isn’t selfish. He legitimately chafes under regulations made by people who are unlike him and possibly hate him. His part of the State can’t split off because endless friction is not just tolerated but embraced.

How long has it been this way? Has the rancher eaten shit for his full 87 years yet?

Back to my original example, after decades of building pressure, Republicans elected their first president. The Republican party specifically supported abolition. It was a hotly contested election. As soon as the guy was sworn in, everyone freaked out. Sound familiar?

(I pause here to help uninformed victims of America’s dumbed down public schools. Many if not all societies had slavery at one time; from Aztecs to Egyptians, from Vikings to Venice, from Congo to Constantinople, Byzantium to Brazil. Slavery faded out in fits and starts (with many caveats); often due to boring economic factors or occasionally because of soaring enlightenment ideals. America’s transition involved the first Republican President; Lincoln. Even now people debate the way the mess happened. Ironically, most folks who riot in our urban areas on sunny summer weekends; gathering to piss and moan and stamp their feet at the base of a George Floyd statue erected on Martin Luther King Jr. boulevard have no idea of this. They howl against the party that took up arms to end slavery. Before you set out to change the world, read a book!)

To me, war seems the least wise way to resolve the situation. Why wasn’t 87 years enough to figure it out? Careers were made on the endless struggle. Lives were lived in support or opposition. Earnest, dedicated, citizens on both sides bled out together in Gettysburg. It could have been an eight decade series of committee meetings.

Here’s the lesson I take from it: Humans are herd animals. Once they settle on a path, change is beyond the mind of most humans. A self-actuated human can break free but the rest will plod, stupid and complacent, like robots. Each step is another step on a path that was laid out long ago. There will be times when someone says “this is stupid, lets see if we find a new way”… but it won’t resonate. Humans unthinkingly continue doing stupid shit until you bury them in box lots.

We all carry this weakness. Only the use of our barely understood monkey derived mind gives us a small chance to escape. When shit seems sketchy, a humble man will ask himself “am I the cause”. Maybe, if I’m on a track that’s “wrong” or “stupid”, I can figure it out in time. “Oh no! I’m being an idiot! I’ll stop following this path right now!”

When’s the last time you adjusted your sails to the changing wind? If you don’t occasionally change settings you’re not steering the ship. Fools take the next step because they already took the last one. Don’t be a fool.