This latter statement is gradually becoming moot, thanks to the efforts of another Japanese person with a tv personality.
Now, speaking as someone who has spent 65 of my almost 80 years, dealing in electronics, I have yet to detect an error or distortion of what you can see on your tv screen (the last 54 years in broadcast engineering) that was not completely and absolutely explained when analyzed, by General Relativity, including time dilation in an electron beam caused by the combination of its mode of amplification, velocity vs distance traveled, plainly visible on the video monitoring scopes at the voltages commonly used in Klystron amplifiers.
String theory, until it can make a testable prediction, which it has not in nearly 45 years, is to this old, un-papered but practicing engineer, strictly a means to keep a chair funded at some university whose management doesn't understand that a great number of us who do deal with relativistic effects on a daily basis, think its the pure stuff usually found, still warm and smelly, behind the male of the bovine specie. IMO they should close that chair and use the money to reduce tuition costs for other, far more practical subjects of study. But they cannot even think of doing that. They'll give the themselves a nice comfy raise instead.
Not in the short haul because the mass that creates the gravity well usually stays within that galaxy. Long haul, as in several trillion years, the two black holes will orbit as before when they both were just stars, but the gravitational waves they emit is a loss of system energy and they will slowly spiral into each other until they merge. But that may take longer for most of them than the universe is old. We are actively looking for the gravity wave that would indicate two such black holes have merged as it will have a distinct waveform.
Actually, and this was only my 2nd position east of the river, I am in north central WV. And I probably work too cheap when I do, because I don't mind "keeping a hand in". And while I can walk to fishing water, the fish seem to have a different little black book than I used in western SD's Black Hills 50 some years ago. But I have enough hobbies to keep me out of the bars, which also counts heavily. Deer hunting, and I like venison, is spotty as I can no longer run up and down on these right in your face hills, and I can't find a boot that is both comfy and keeps my diabetic (I'm a DM-II for the last 30 years) feet warm. But I still hit the range, punching paper to "keep a hand in".
Speaking of fishing, one of my 2 year jobs was in N.W. NM., Farmington TBE. So yes, I have fished the world famous San Juan River below the Navajo Dam. Its barbless hook rules there, and its crazy, you have to wear long johns inside your chest waders 3 miles below that dam as its 600 feet deep and a bottom dumper. In 115F air temps, the water is maybe 35F, and the 12" Brown you just pulled in feels like he's frozen solid when you grab him to unhook and release. But he put up a fight all out of proportion to his size. You can't help but give them a salute as you place them back in the water.
Its been quite a ride so far, and I don't regret too much of it in the long view although my first wife had a stroke at 34 and died. With 3 kids, that was a rough couple years before I found some help willing to say I do.
But I'll not bore with a really long winded session of blowing my own horn.
Hotlanta is someplace I might like to visit, for 2 or 3 days... But an old uncle once said that company was like fish, should be thrown out after 3 days.;-)
Is the new opportunity worth the hassle of starting over in some locale where the COL is 3 times higher, your rights are much more restricted, no big game hunting because of the population density precludes the use of even a bow and broad heads, despite the fact that you'll wreck a car a year running into said big game, and its 4 hours to someplace where drowning a worm might get you fish for dinner.
That occurred to me when a head hunter called me, offering 10% more to be the Chief Engineer at a tv station in the top 25 market. But it would have come with all of the above limitations. Even at 200%, which said tv station could well afford, it wasn't worth it to me.
Basically I had found my place back in 1984. I can walk to hunt deer or fish, COL is 1/2rd that of the big city, the house that came with the girl I married in 1989 has been paid off for 15 years, and stayed here till I retired 12 years ago. Technically, my reputation for being able to walk on water when the boat has already sank has been well established, and I still get yells for help occasionally. As a technician who can actually fix things, I am a C.E.T. & have what used to be a 1st phone license before the commission threw us under the bus, we are a dying breed, literally, and I find that I have, at nearly 80 yo, inherited some of the local radio broadcasters, because the engineer they were calling when the cash cow laid down and went dry, had died.
But the surprising detail most find hard to believe is that I am not a "papered" engineer, I have an 8th grade education, but was good enough with electronics that I quit school in the middle of my freshman year in high school, mostly due to health/allergy problems, and went to work fixing what was then these new-fangled things called televisions. Circa 1948-49. And yet the medical help locally available is pretty good. In early June, about a month ago, I woke up, just barely conscious and couldn't breath, on the bedroom floor while trying to tie my shoes to take the better half out for dinner, a pulmonary embolism that damned near punched my ticket. The better half, sitting in the car waiting, finally came back in to see what the holdup was & called 911. They got me to the local shop, started the clot-buster, and shipped me off to a larger facility. I am not 100% yet, but getting there, and TBT I feel better now than I have in years.
The guy from ultrasound looked at my heart with its blown up 2x right half as it was trying to pump into the blockage, for about an hour. I presume looking for places that ought to be bypassed or stented, couldn't find any and said once its shrunk back to normal, you ought to be good for another decade. 2-3 months to shrink again. Sort of feels like getting a warranty renewal but there is no such thing in life.
So I'll be here to pester you folks for a while yet, offering my comments on having observed life for nearly 80 years now. Some comments will come from my experience as a working joat, I am a decent mechanic and am now playing with smaller CNC machinery. I've also made some furniture & remodeled a few guns over the last 50 years.
I rather enjoy being close to the biggest frog in the pond, even if the pond is just Pedersons Puddle. It has its advantages.
I am for it, as long as it isn't also construed to discourage the boys. That's the last thing we need to do to our "educational" indoctrination system.
In fact, anything that undoes the dumbing down to match the lowest achievers that has been done in the last 80 years or more needs to be undone itself. Reading comprehension for instance, went down when they dropped phonics back in the 40's. That was a monumental mistake IMO. So now, in 2014, we have 3+ generations of people who cannot read the daily fish wrap in 15 minutes, even if it doesn't have anything in it but Ford advertisements. Not only that, but the writers (I hesitate to call them Journalists) of 75% of that drivel have no real command of the English language, both in terms of sentence structure, and spelling.
Our present system sits heavily on those blessed with a high IQ, teaching them how to scam for welfare rather than how to use those smarts to move us ahead. I don't personally care if the child with a lower IQ ever "graduates" from high school. But the child with an IQ in the 150 range looks at the subjects being required today, is bored out of his skull, and gets a poorer grade because he just doesn't care, there are many more important things to think about than a geography lesson based on a book whose copyright is 40 years old & 20% of the countries discussed don't even exist today.
I know something about that since I was one of "those kids". I quit school as soon as I could, and went to work fixing the then new tv's in the late '40's. Since, I've had fingerprints in some very unusual places, and eventually retired from a nearly 20 year stint as the very well paid, 30% above what the market size usually pays, Chief Engineer at a TV station.
Its a very short push to my 80th and having just survived a Pulmonary Embolism that about punched my ticket, I'm less inclined to STFU when something isn't right.
I tend to agree with the both are at fault scenario here.
But I'd be remiss to not mention one of apples former bad moves, trying to milk the makers of firewire equipt gear with a per socket royalty fee, the exact amount of which I have long since forgotten, after having effectively making it public domain by publishing the specs so every one would get it right.
In my limited experience with a Sony Handi-cam, sort of a compromise between very bad vhs, and hidef, a 720p digital video camera that recorded digitally on a metallic formulation of hi-8 tape, the firewire port on it Just Worked(TM), even for remote controlling the camera, using the now abandoned "kino" software package on linux. That camera is pretty good, putting its output on a dvd requires about half its sharpness to be thrown away in any format that will play on consumer grade dvd players.
Firewire had a huge advantage in that it did Just Work, and only one disadvantage that turned out to be pretty important, it didn't daisy chain like USB can.
USB, yet today, doesn't always work, primarily because there are so many excrement products for sale that should never have been allowed in the same room with a plastics molding machine.
But IMO, apple shot themselves in the foot on that one, guaranteeing that the standard would die with their outrageously priced royalty fee, so it died perhaps 5 years prematurely. Had they not done that, reneging of that unspoken promise of royalty free usage, its conceivable that it might have become daisy-chainable with hubs like USB is, but no one is going to put ANY R&D into something like firewire that is so encumbered by corporate greed. Their jacking it up to 800mbs was the swan song and a waste of time and resources. 400 worked just fine for hidef video work.
What we need now is a test suite for USB that will tell us instantly if that $10 USB dongle we just bought is fully compliant and will Just Work when we plug it in. But AFAIK, we don't have that yet. So we buy it, try it, and toss it when it doesn't work, because it costs more to take it back for a refund than the refund is worth, and somebody making shitty USB stuff gets to count the sale, when what they really need is a 4 year old kicking them in the shins.
That's a far better explanation than mine, thanks. My wet ram, at nearly 80, doesn't always recall the scale of the age, just that it was old and they paid a high premium for it because it was old & well "cooled".
I know that the detector tank in the bottom of Homestake is lead shielded, but that lead is very old, no newly mined lead in it. It had to be at least 100 years old to even be considered for recycling into that shielding. I used to live in Rapid City in the '60's, even have a wife I still miss buried there, but in those years, Homestake, 50 miles away in Lead, SD was an actively producing gold mine. And environmental disaster as it struggled to remain profitable, it eventually had to close, and I am glad that another use has been found for its extended underground.
The Lead/Deadwood area tried to survive on tourists, but I imagine much of that allure has faded after the state raided and closed the Pink Lady in the '70's, the countries oldest continuously operated whorehouse. The girls were clean, checked daily to keep them that way, and they contributed 5 to 7 million a year to the local charities. When they had the liquidation sale, somebody wanting a piece of history had to bid $50,000 just to get the front door. End of an era as it had been there, a fully functioning, locally respected member of the community for over 140 years. I felt a little sad at the passing of a legend.
A marble mountain? Here I've been under that impression that both granite and marble had a detectable amount of radioactivity of their own, so even given 20 miles of the stuff, there would still be a background count contaminating the data.. Can someone fact check me on that?
In fact, I was a lot newer than I am now the first time I was involved with a slit camera, in this case a 35mm with its horizontally running window shade shutter glue in about the 1/500th second position, halfway across the frame. Focused on the mirror on the finish line post at the greyhound track somewhat north of Rapid City, SD.
The film was pulled by a variable speed motor such that the dogs, as they crossed the mirror, weren't too badly lengthened or shortened, along with a digital clock that output to LED's in binary with the leds in the upper part of the mirror on the post so that the elapsed time track was a series of dashes above the dogs in the film strip. It ran in a darkroom so they could snip off the end of the exposed film, perhaps 9 or 10 inches long, drop it in some hot dektol, wait till the image was about right, drop it is some strong acetic acid, pull it up to look at it with a magnifying glass and post the winners blanket number and time, all in 15 to 20 seconds. The strip never was fixed unless 2 dogs were nose and nose, because it was about time for the next race to be off.
This was in the middle of the 1960's, and was by then _the_ method at racetracks all over the country, so it wasn't new then.
From the Grizzly's point of view, that is not possible. I think he equates most human intrusion into his world, which is wherever the next good thing to eat is, as competition for food, or as food.
Getting within perhaps 200 yards doesn't bode well for one or the other, depending on whether or not the human is suitably armed.
But I can certainly appreciate the thought, and you are right that they might be the first near extinction because of the false containment, but the devil is as always, in the details.
Prevailing winds if not disturbed by it, and they probably will be, will send the ash cloud east. Various estimates put the layer of ash on an Iowa cornfield from 6" to 40 feet deep. One estimate is as good as the next in this case because the magnitude of the Yellowstone blow cannot be known much before it blows. The correct term is S.W.A.G., which many here are familiar with.
And if as big an event as some have written, it will do more than "slightly" impinge on the world food production. While I'm not saying it will happen on such a scale, the potential to starve 99% of this planets population of all genus combined genuinely exists. IOW, an extinction event on a par with the KT Boundary 65 million years ago. Or worse. But the record seems clear that it will not be benign, there are known valid records here on this continent between the last blow 640k? years ago, and the arrival of the first humans perhaps 25k to 50k years ago. The rock layer between the surface today, and the KT boundary is a bit short on major bone finds.
And short of drilling into it, and removing that heat by using it for geothermal power on a scale that will run the rest of the planet, probably not a thing we can do about it.
It does, and I can generally do it, until I run into somebody following a menu with zero common sense content AND an ego trip just because he/she is in a position of unlimited power to make my life miserable.
It generally doesn't take me long to deduce that, at which point its best to just STFU. But never smile unless its your own joke because you can't let the idiot know he has won this round. Don't encourage them.
What he/she fails to grok is that there are other, less freedom removing ways to get from point a to point b, and that I might just enjoy the trip since I may stop and smell the roses at my convenience. That's a bit inconvenient at 37k feet ASL.
I've driven over halfway across this country several times in my old GMC pickup for exactly the reason that a 4 or 9 hour detour trip to check on some of my old friends in old stomping grounds I have lived in, and which I still have kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids living in, was entirely at my discretion. I even detoured some on my way home from saying goodby to my oldest daughter (only one left, the younger of the two had succumbed a decade back to cancer) who was dying of cancer, at the house daddy built in '46, and which I wired at around my 13th birthday, to intro myself to the people living in it now, mooched a PBR since that was what they were having, and to find that my wiring job had only been updated from the 4 screw fuses I had put in the attic 65+ years back, to a 100 amp service about 2 years back, located in a small front porch someone had added years before. Then I got back on a local road (I was born there in Iowa) and drove another 150 miles, mostly in the direction I was going, and stopped to see my first wife's next in line. Now widowed for nearly 20 years, and living with one of her children in the same house she's been in since she married a fellow at 16 yo in the '50's. And still built pretty much like her older sister, nice set of 40FFFF headlights yet at 70+ yo. If I was free, and she wasn't so jaded about her situation I'd have made the offer to take her home. But it was plain she did have a guy, so I left it at that. We did had a nice visit, caught up some on the family gossip, and I got back in the GMC and motored on back to WV.
The fact that there will never be another engagement round with that industry, costing the industry an almost infinitesimal small figure just for me (but repeat for everyone else so impressed by it they follow suit), is totally lost on such a low functioning person.
Benjamin Franklin was right. He that gives up a little freedom for security, will have neither. And the cost to run all these 3 letter agencies and a military machine that is a total failure at winning wars, is the 2nd biggest item in the budget. SS is the biggest, supposed to have trillions in its balance, but don't open the vault to count it, all you'll find is IOU's from the treasury.
My daughters impending death leads to a ghost story about 2 days later, but I've already bored folks enough for one day, I need to go see about a script refill and a grocery list.
In my career, the TSA was a fact by the time I was being asked to go "put out fires" far enough away that flying was expedient. I served in that "fireman's" position for nearly a decade after I retired from the day to day trench warfare that trying to stay ahead of what was at times was the most destructive news dept personnel group ever collected, but which probably wasn't. But being the lone C.E.T. in the region, I learned that time IS money, and a laid up camera waiting for the factory to repair, at 3x the cost I could do it, was a money waster, with hidden costs in the ratings earned. So despite some legendary arguments with my GM's from time to time about the cost of said spares, in the end I won enough of those arguments that it got easier to "do it my way". But after the official dinner & Rolex presentation, I found myself being asked to go and fix some of the other facilities also owned by the same gentleman. But every time I flew, what I'd take along or try to, was more and more restricted each time. And each time it seemed like a balancing act to have enough tools to get right to work on arrival, or get thrown in jail with zero recourse against the arbitrary decisions of somebody on an ego trip, he's working for the TSA! One time, one of them threatened to confiscate a pair of 4" flush cutting diagonal cutters, without which you cannot clean up the bottom of a pcb after you have replaced a component on that pcb. Worth about a 30 dollar bill when you can find them, they cannot be found at the local radio shack or home depot. I talked him out of it, but why the hell should I have had to?
Then again, time can be saved with a handy Cessna and with my wife of nearly 25 years being pulled down by COPD, leaving her alone for extended periods of time is not a good idea. So rather than 3 days driving each way to get to the UP from here, when the time there to effect a patchup repair generally only a day or 2, I've had the Cessna and its driver come and get me.
I didn't consider that aspect of it until I was in Grand Junction, running that 4 station complex for almost 4 months while the commission was agreeing to the sale & the takeover logistics were being arranged, that I realized I had better not do that again for that length of time. But that, and a short summer in the UP while I rebuilt an old leaky, channel 8, 8 bay antenna that was destroying the transmitter with its high VSWR, were my last lengthy trips out.
And now my physical condition is going downhill, the diabetes is getting worse, so there is no way I can do even a 6 hour days work.
I was called up to our local AM'er yesterday because his transmitter let the smoke out of some stuff it shouldn't have, and by the time I had extracted the bad choke, about 10Kg worth, fried extra crispy by a gassy 807 tube, the "domino" that started it all, I had spent about an hour down on my knees. Today, muscle cramps, even though I'm eating tums & B vitamins like they were M&M's, are making it difficult to even walk around the house, let alone go out and shovel the approximately 1" of partly cloudy off the deck. That on the knees bit is also insulting the hell out of a knee I tore up back in September. I've had the obligatory 3 shots of Hyaluronan, at $150/copy, but the torn cartilage, if it heals, will be slow, the age, nearly 80, and the diabetes are both working against it.
So the TSA is no longer a worry for me, I simply won't fly commercially again. But because of the TSA, the airline industry 12 years after 9/11/01 is probably half the size that it would be without their arrogance and screw you attitude they inflict on the passengers today. All these mergers are, pure and simple, the effect of the TSA bankrupting the industry, its dying gasp that I hope never gets to the final one. The bottom line is that all these 3 letter agencies are such a huge brain on the economy that they are THE major contributor to the USA's decline into a 3rd world country.
Quite a few floors below the cloud of debris? And what pray tell is the source of the dust when the collapse is still 15 floors above the puffs of debris being blown out of the corners of the building? Where there were no windows?
And make no mistake about my feelings for the 3000 that died that day. IMO there should have been murder charges filed for every one of them.
Now, remember from what I have intimated in previous postings here as to what I was the last 19 years of my working life, the Chief Engineer at a TV station in WV.
Our satellite truck was first on the scene at Shanksville, to find access to the site severely restricted by a crowd of "security" people who intended to block access and totally control the pictures the media may have been able to take and upload. Just that took more time to arrange the logistics of getting that many people to the site in the about 4 hours it took us to drive. They would occasionally trot out a "piece of evidence" like that bit of landing gear and a partial turbine wheel. Both of which weren't anything that was ever bolted into a 747. 20% of the correct size. Or smaller.
The dirt damage to the hill wasn't anything like you would expect a 747 could do, and there was no debris visible from where we were allowed to take a camera. We packed up and left at the end of the 2nd afternoon, as our guys were by then in bad need of a shower & clean clothes. But our driver was just curious enough to see if he could drive around and see the site from a different angle. Not so much, but sitting in the trees on the far side of that hill was a small bulldozer, one about the right size to have carved up the other side of the hill in 2 or 3 hours work two days before.
A rumor surfaced a couple months later that that aircraft's tail number was sitting in the back lot at Dayton AFB, but no one has managed a legible picture, so take that as hearsay.
You can say what you believe about me, we have a 1st amendment yet... But please look at the evidence and reach your own conclusions instead of asking for yet another glass of TPTB official koolaid.
FWIW, plug this into your calculations. Those buildings were loaded with asbestos, many tons of it and would have cost quite a few 10's of millions just to clear that hazard out before any legal demolishing could have been done. Food for thought.
And I am far from convinced, with all the legal crap put in the way, the first responders & survivors who have since passed from breathing that stuff, none got anywhere near the medical attention they deserved. Generally I think the expression is "thrown under the bus".
But like you, I am done. We are, within the limits of this media, incapable of changing the others already made up mind.
You have obviously not taken a good look at the videos. The demolition charges going off can plainly be seen below the main collapse. And why did WTC-7 fall hours later?
Long enough I missed my flight Anything electronic, like my Hitachi v1065 scope, and to be drug out (it was wrapped in a 2 week supply of clean whities in a rollabout suitcase at the time) and plugged into prove it was what it was, even if the dipshit watching the xray screen had no f______ clue what it did. I had to take the batteries out of my camera and throw them away even after I had taken his picture. And damn I hate dealing with people whose measured IQ is less than the eyelet count in their shoes. To me, it was pure and simple that he had the power to harass, and was enjoying the hell out of it. IMNTLBHO, some village was missing its idiot.
I am with a guy named Marion Morrison, I've been in the house he was born in twice, its a minor tourist attraction in Winterset IA, not far from where I was born, and whom you may recall as John Wayne, who once said that "stupidity should hurt", and this guy needed to hurt, bad.
Only occasionally in re work. I'm in the middle of doing our local AM'er, whose daytime transmitter let out a quite considerable and stinky quantity of smoke at sign on time this morning. Domino effect, a gassy 807 effectively crow barred the medium high voltage supply, doing a truly excellent job of toasting a 10 kg 10 Henry choke in the power supply. Old gates transmitter, all the worlds spares are up in PA someplace, and locked up by the current blizzard, so it could be Monday before I have the stuff to revive it. But he has a 50 watt nighttime box that sounds great, so he will survive till I can get the 1kw Gates revived yet another time.
As far as the digital, I missed that for the most part, we were still doing analog when we had a turkey dinner and I was given the obligatory Rolex watch at the end of June 2002. But I am still there often enough to be well aware of some of its problems, 50% of which have originated in a $15K Apple video server we bought 4 of, all with $0.12 bushing fans. All of which have now been replaced with in house built linux boxes with very high Iron contents. Our IT guy, who was a 17 yo when I walked in the door in '84, has turned into quite a computer whiz. 64 to 128 gigs of ram, and at least dual Zeons at 3.5Ghz or better. And up to 50Tb worth of drives in raid configs. 5% of the troubles we had from Apples coffee warmers. We do 4 digital channels out of there, and in a pinch, the newest server can do all 4, AND write two other programs into the raid array, all at the same time.
I try to keep up, but with my "other" interests, (cnc machine tools on a small scale, woodworking, a legacy computer) the wet ram gets overloaded easier than it used to. That is not a pleasant realization .:(
"i'm webmaster for bostoncamerata.org, the medieval music group mr. razgui has performed with:"
Unforch, I surmize you are 200% correct. But I would like to thank you for bringing yet another of our "governments" (insert laff track here(but push wrong button & get sob track instead)) completely arbitrary, and asinine to me, abuses of power.
I have no clue how long it will take him to replace those, but I hope he can. Unfortunately I'd also imagine we will never again get to hear him, in any US venue. I sure as hell would never again set foot on US soil, for any reason.
Nah, I've watched the progressive loss of our freedoms since the 1940's. And I've railed against it since. Dec 7 1941 was an eyeopener for me when I saw my father & grandfather crying after we'd heard the evening news on Grandpa's battery powered radio. They understood what it meant. But we rallied, did without, and whuped their butts in about 5 years and change, then taught them how to do business. 9-11, had it not been the demolition job it was, should have resulted in our ruling the middle east. But the stage was already set when Truman flew in and fired Mac because he wanted to stop the Mao driven Chinese on their side of the river. That, quite likely would have been one we lost fair & square.
But Ike was right, when he warned us, everything we've done since has been designed to entrench the military as a standing, and uncontrollable draw on the treasury.
One thing is glaringly obvious today, and that is that the present tyrannical situation could be a major source of energy just from the likes of Thomas Payne, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson's spinning in their graves. Its intolerable to me, but my kids grew up with it, as have their kids, and now my great grandchildren. And it makes me sad because of the things I got to do that they will never be able to do until our Constitution and Bill of Rights are restored to be the final law of the land. Like T. Jefferson said, "the tree of liberty needs refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants from time to time, and God help us if we go 20 years without it." The much needed reset, will not be bloodless. Will I live long enough to see it? I'd toss a quarter and call it heads, but some SOB would invent a law that says he can legally catch it and run while its in the air.
Slashdot Mirror
This latter statement is gradually becoming moot, thanks to the efforts of another Japanese person with a tv personality.
Now, speaking as someone who has spent 65 of my almost 80 years, dealing in electronics, I have yet to detect an error or distortion of what you can see on your tv screen (the last 54 years in broadcast engineering) that was not completely and absolutely explained when analyzed, by General Relativity, including time dilation in an electron beam caused by the combination of its mode of amplification, velocity vs distance traveled, plainly visible on the video monitoring scopes at the voltages commonly used in Klystron amplifiers.
String theory, until it can make a testable prediction, which it has not in nearly 45 years, is to this old, un-papered but practicing engineer, strictly a means to keep a chair funded at some university whose management doesn't understand that a great number of us who do deal with relativistic effects on a daily basis, think its the pure stuff usually found, still warm and smelly, behind the male of the bovine specie. IMO they should close that chair and use the money to reduce tuition costs for other, far more practical subjects of study. But they cannot even think of doing that. They'll give the themselves a nice comfy raise instead.
My $0.02, in 1934 dollars.
Cheers, Gene
Not in the short haul because the mass that creates the gravity well usually stays within that galaxy. Long haul, as in several trillion years, the two black holes will orbit as before when they both were just stars, but the gravitational waves they emit is a loss of system energy and they will slowly spiral into each other until they merge. But that may take longer for most of them than the universe is old. We are actively looking for the gravity wave that would indicate two such black holes have merged as it will have a distinct waveform.
Cheers, Gene
Actually, and this was only my 2nd position east of the river, I am in north central WV. And I probably work too cheap when I do, because I don't mind "keeping a hand in". And while I can walk to fishing water, the fish seem to have a different little black book than I used in western SD's Black Hills 50 some years ago. But I have enough hobbies to keep me out of the bars, which also counts heavily. Deer hunting, and I like venison, is spotty as I can no longer run up and down on these right in your face hills, and I can't find a boot that is both comfy and keeps my diabetic (I'm a DM-II for the last 30 years) feet warm. But I still hit the range, punching paper to "keep a hand in".
Speaking of fishing, one of my 2 year jobs was in N.W. NM., Farmington TBE. So yes, I have fished the world famous San Juan River below the Navajo Dam. Its barbless hook rules there, and its crazy, you have to wear long johns inside your chest waders 3 miles below that dam as its 600 feet deep and a bottom dumper. In 115F air temps, the water is maybe 35F, and the 12" Brown you just pulled in feels like he's frozen solid when you grab him to unhook and release. But he put up a fight all out of proportion to his size. You can't help but give them a salute as you place them back in the water.
Its been quite a ride so far, and I don't regret too much of it in the long view although my first wife had a stroke at 34 and died. With 3 kids, that was a rough couple years before I found some help willing to say I do.
But I'll not bore with a really long winded session of blowing my own horn.
Hotlanta is someplace I might like to visit, for 2 or 3 days... But an old uncle once said that company was like fish, should be thrown out after 3 days. ;-)
Cheers, Gene
The other side of that coin is:
Is the new opportunity worth the hassle of starting over in some locale where the COL is 3 times higher, your rights are much more restricted, no big game hunting because of the population density precludes the use of even a bow and broad heads, despite the fact that you'll wreck a car a year running into said big game, and its 4 hours to someplace where drowning a worm might get you fish for dinner.
That occurred to me when a head hunter called me, offering 10% more to be the Chief Engineer at a tv station in the top 25 market. But it would have come with all of the above limitations. Even at 200%, which said tv station could well afford, it wasn't worth it to me.
Basically I had found my place back in 1984. I can walk to hunt deer or fish, COL is 1/2rd that of the big city, the house that came with the girl I married in 1989 has been paid off for 15 years, and stayed here till I retired 12 years ago. Technically, my reputation for being able to walk on water when the boat has already sank has been well established, and I still get yells for help occasionally. As a technician who can actually fix things, I am a C.E.T. & have what used to be a 1st phone license before the commission threw us under the bus, we are a dying breed, literally, and I find that I have, at nearly 80 yo, inherited some of the local radio broadcasters, because the engineer they were calling when the cash cow laid down and went dry, had died.
But the surprising detail most find hard to believe is that I am not a "papered" engineer, I have an 8th grade education, but was good enough with electronics that I quit school in the middle of my freshman year in high school, mostly due to health/allergy problems, and went to work fixing what was then these new-fangled things called televisions. Circa 1948-49. And yet the medical help locally available is pretty good. In early June, about a month ago, I woke up, just barely conscious and couldn't breath, on the bedroom floor while trying to tie my shoes to take the better half out for dinner, a pulmonary embolism that damned near punched my ticket. The better half, sitting in the car waiting, finally came back in to see what the holdup was & called 911. They got me to the local shop, started the clot-buster, and shipped me off to a larger facility. I am not 100% yet, but getting there, and TBT I feel better now than I have in years.
The guy from ultrasound looked at my heart with its blown up 2x right half as it was trying to pump into the blockage, for about an hour. I presume looking for places that ought to be bypassed or stented, couldn't find any and said once its shrunk back to normal, you ought to be good for another decade. 2-3 months to shrink again. Sort of feels like getting a warranty renewal but there is no such thing in life.
So I'll be here to pester you folks for a while yet, offering my comments on having observed life for nearly 80 years now. Some comments will come from my experience as a working joat, I am a decent mechanic and am now playing with smaller CNC machinery. I've also made some furniture & remodeled a few guns over the last 50 years.
I rather enjoy being close to the biggest frog in the pond, even if the pond is just Pedersons Puddle. It has its advantages.
Cheers, Gene
I am for it, as long as it isn't also construed to discourage the boys. That's the last thing we need to do to our "educational" indoctrination system.
In fact, anything that undoes the dumbing down to match the lowest achievers that has been done in the last 80 years or more needs to be undone itself.
Reading comprehension for instance, went down when they dropped phonics back in the 40's. That was a monumental mistake IMO. So now, in 2014, we have 3+ generations of people who cannot read the daily fish wrap in 15 minutes, even if it doesn't have anything in it but Ford advertisements. Not only that, but the writers (I hesitate to call them Journalists) of 75% of that drivel have no real command of the English language, both in terms of sentence structure, and spelling.
Our present system sits heavily on those blessed with a high IQ, teaching them how to scam for welfare rather than how to use those smarts to move us ahead.
I don't personally care if the child with a lower IQ ever "graduates" from high school. But the child with an IQ in the 150 range looks at the subjects being required today, is bored out of his skull, and gets a poorer grade because he just doesn't care, there are many more important things to think about than a geography lesson based on a book whose copyright is 40 years old & 20% of the countries discussed don't even exist today.
I know something about that since I was one of "those kids". I quit school as soon as I could, and went to work fixing the then new tv's in the late '40's. Since, I've had fingerprints in some very unusual places, and eventually retired from a nearly 20 year stint as the very well paid, 30% above what the market size usually pays, Chief Engineer at a TV station.
Its a very short push to my 80th and having just survived a Pulmonary Embolism that about punched my ticket, I'm less inclined to STFU when something isn't right.
I'll sure 2nd that!
I tend to agree with the both are at fault scenario here.
But I'd be remiss to not mention one of apples former bad moves, trying to milk the makers of firewire equipt gear with a per socket royalty fee, the exact amount of which I have long since forgotten, after having effectively making it public domain by publishing the specs so every one would get it right.
In my limited experience with a Sony Handi-cam, sort of a compromise between very bad vhs, and hidef, a 720p digital video camera that recorded digitally on a metallic formulation of hi-8 tape, the firewire port on it Just Worked(TM), even for remote controlling the camera, using the now abandoned "kino" software package on linux. That camera is pretty good, putting its output on a dvd requires about half its sharpness to be thrown away in any format that will play on consumer grade dvd players.
Firewire had a huge advantage in that it did Just Work, and only one disadvantage that turned out to be pretty important, it didn't daisy chain like USB can.
USB, yet today, doesn't always work, primarily because there are so many excrement products for sale that should never have been allowed in the same room with a plastics molding machine.
But IMO, apple shot themselves in the foot on that one, guaranteeing that the standard would die with their outrageously priced royalty fee, so it died perhaps 5 years prematurely. Had they not done that, reneging of that unspoken promise of royalty free usage, its conceivable that it might have become daisy-chainable with hubs like USB is, but no one is going to put ANY R&D into something like firewire that is so encumbered by corporate greed. Their jacking it up to 800mbs was the swan song and a waste of time and resources. 400 worked just fine for hidef video work.
What we need now is a test suite for USB that will tell us instantly if that $10 USB dongle we just bought is fully compliant and will Just Work when we plug it in. But AFAIK, we don't have that yet. So we buy it, try it, and toss it when it doesn't work, because it costs more to take it back for a refund than the refund is worth, and somebody making shitty USB stuff gets to count the sale, when what they really need is a 4 year old kicking them in the shins.
Well, I wondered from the headline, how long it would take for the applicable quote to show up, turned out to be first post. Amazing.
But. if you are going to plagiarize from one of Sci-Fi's truly great writers, unfortunately now past tense, at least give him credit for writing it.
Sir Arther C. Clark, T.B.E.
Sheesh, the chutzpah of some who write on /. knows no bounds.
That's a far better explanation than mine, thanks. My wet ram, at nearly 80, doesn't always recall the scale of the age, just that it was old and they paid a high premium for it because it was old & well "cooled".
Cheers, Gene
I know that the detector tank in the bottom of Homestake is lead shielded, but that lead is very old, no newly mined lead in it. It had to be at least 100 years old to even be considered for recycling into that shielding. I used to live in Rapid City in the '60's, even have a wife I still miss buried there, but in those years, Homestake, 50 miles away in Lead, SD was an actively producing gold mine. And environmental disaster as it struggled to remain profitable, it eventually had to close, and I am glad that another use has been found for its extended underground.
The Lead/Deadwood area tried to survive on tourists, but I imagine much of that allure has faded after the state raided and closed the Pink Lady in the '70's, the countries oldest continuously operated whorehouse. The girls were clean, checked daily to keep them that way, and they contributed 5 to 7 million a year to the local charities. When they had the liquidation sale, somebody wanting a piece of history had to bid $50,000 just to get the front door. End of an era as it had been there, a fully functioning, locally respected member of the community for over 140 years. I felt a little sad at the passing of a legend.
Cheers, Gene
A marble mountain? Here I've been under that impression that both granite and marble had a detectable amount of radioactivity of their own, so even given 20 miles of the stuff, there would still be a background count contaminating the data.. Can someone fact check me on that?
Cheers, Gene
You might want to be careful who hears you say that. According to some interpretations of the NDAA, there are people who would make that happen.
In fact, I was a lot newer than I am now the first time I was involved with a slit camera, in this case a 35mm with its horizontally running window shade shutter glue in about the 1/500th second position, halfway across the frame. Focused on the mirror on the finish line post at the greyhound track somewhat north of Rapid City, SD.
The film was pulled by a variable speed motor such that the dogs, as they crossed the mirror, weren't too badly lengthened or shortened, along with a digital clock that output to LED's in binary with the leds in the upper part of the mirror on the post so that the elapsed time track was a series of dashes above the dogs in the film strip.
It ran in a darkroom so they could snip off the end of the exposed film, perhaps 9 or 10 inches long, drop it in some hot dektol, wait till the image was about right, drop it is some strong acetic acid, pull it up to look at it with a magnifying glass and post the winners blanket number and time, all in 15 to 20 seconds. The strip never was fixed unless 2 dogs were nose and nose, because it was about time for the next race to be off.
This was in the middle of the 1960's, and was by then _the_ method at racetracks all over the country, so it wasn't new then.
From the Grizzly's point of view, that is not possible. I think he equates most human intrusion into his world, which is wherever the next good thing to eat is, as competition for food, or as food.
Getting within perhaps 200 yards doesn't bode well for one or the other, depending on whether or not the human is suitably armed.
But I can certainly appreciate the thought, and you are right that they might be the first near extinction because of the false containment, but the devil is as always, in the details.
Cheers, Gene
Prevailing winds if not disturbed by it, and they probably will be, will send the ash cloud east. Various estimates put the layer of ash on an Iowa cornfield from 6" to 40 feet deep. One estimate is as good as the next in this case because the magnitude of the Yellowstone blow cannot be known much before it blows. The correct term is S.W.A.G., which many here are familiar with.
And if as big an event as some have written, it will do more than "slightly" impinge on the world food production. While I'm not saying it will happen on such a scale, the potential to starve 99% of this planets population of all genus combined genuinely exists. IOW, an extinction event on a par with the KT Boundary 65 million years ago. Or worse. But the record seems clear that it will not be benign, there are known valid records here on this continent between the last blow 640k? years ago, and the arrival of the first humans perhaps 25k to 50k years ago. The rock layer between the surface today, and the KT boundary is a bit short on major bone finds.
And short of drilling into it, and removing that heat by using it for geothermal power on a scale that will run the rest of the planet, probably not a thing we can do about it.
Cheers, Gene
And if that is not enough to salvage this Republic?
It does, and I can generally do it, until I run into somebody following a menu with zero common sense content AND an ego trip just because he/she is in a position of unlimited power to make my life miserable.
It generally doesn't take me long to deduce that, at which point its best to just STFU. But never smile unless its your own joke because you can't let the idiot know he has won this round. Don't encourage them.
What he/she fails to grok is that there are other, less freedom removing ways to get from point a to point b, and that I might just enjoy the trip since I may stop and smell the roses at my convenience. That's a bit inconvenient at 37k feet ASL.
I've driven over halfway across this country several times in my old GMC pickup for exactly the reason that a 4 or 9 hour detour trip to check on some of my old friends in old stomping grounds I have lived in, and which I still have kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids living in, was entirely at my discretion. I even detoured some on my way home from saying goodby to my oldest daughter (only one left, the younger of the two had succumbed a decade back to cancer) who was dying of cancer, at the house daddy built in '46, and which I wired at around my 13th birthday, to intro myself to the people living in it now, mooched a PBR since that was what they were having, and to find that my wiring job had only been updated from the 4 screw fuses I had put in the attic 65+ years back, to a 100 amp service about 2 years back, located in a small front porch someone had added years before. Then I got back on a local road (I was born there in Iowa) and drove another 150 miles, mostly in the direction I was going, and stopped to see my first wife's next in line. Now widowed for nearly 20 years, and living with one of her children in the same house she's been in since she married a fellow at 16 yo in the '50's. And still built pretty much like her older sister, nice set of 40FFFF headlights yet at 70+ yo. If I was free, and she wasn't so jaded about her situation I'd have made the offer to take her home. But it was plain she did have a guy, so I left it at that. We did had a nice visit, caught up some on the family gossip, and I got back in the GMC and motored on back to WV.
The fact that there will never be another engagement round with that industry, costing the industry an almost infinitesimal small figure just for me (but repeat for everyone else so impressed by it they follow suit), is totally lost on such a low functioning person.
Benjamin Franklin was right. He that gives up a little freedom for security, will have neither. And the cost to run all these 3 letter agencies and a military machine that is a total failure at winning wars, is the 2nd biggest item in the budget. SS is the biggest, supposed to have trillions in its balance, but don't open the vault to count it, all you'll find is IOU's from the treasury.
My daughters impending death leads to a ghost story about 2 days later, but I've already bored folks enough for one day, I need to go see about a script refill and a grocery list.
Cheers anyway, Gene
In my career, the TSA was a fact by the time I was being asked to go "put out fires" far enough away that flying was expedient. I served in that "fireman's" position for nearly a decade after I retired from the day to day trench warfare that trying to stay ahead of what was at times was the most destructive news dept personnel group ever collected, but which probably wasn't. But being the lone C.E.T. in the region, I learned that time IS money, and a laid up camera waiting for the factory to repair, at 3x the cost I could do it, was a money waster, with hidden costs in the ratings earned. So despite some legendary arguments with my GM's from time to time about the cost of said spares, in the end I won enough of those arguments that it got easier to "do it my way". But after the official dinner & Rolex presentation, I found myself being asked to go and fix some of the other facilities also owned by the same gentleman. But every time I flew, what I'd take along or try to, was more and more restricted each time. And each time it seemed like a balancing act to have enough tools to get right to work on arrival, or get thrown in jail with zero recourse against the arbitrary decisions of somebody on an ego trip, he's working for the TSA! One time, one of them threatened to confiscate a pair of 4" flush cutting diagonal cutters, without which you cannot clean up the bottom of a pcb after you have replaced a component on that pcb. Worth about a 30 dollar bill when you can find them, they cannot be found at the local radio shack or home depot. I talked him out of it, but why the hell should I have had to?
Then again, time can be saved with a handy Cessna and with my wife of nearly 25 years being pulled down by COPD, leaving her alone for extended periods of time is not a good idea. So rather than 3 days driving each way to get to the UP from here, when the time there to effect a patchup repair generally only a day or 2, I've had the Cessna and its driver come and get me.
I didn't consider that aspect of it until I was in Grand Junction, running that 4 station complex for almost 4 months while the commission was agreeing to the sale & the takeover logistics were being arranged, that I realized I had better not do that again for that length of time. But that, and a short summer in the UP while I rebuilt an old leaky, channel 8, 8 bay antenna that was destroying the transmitter with its high VSWR, were my last lengthy trips out.
And now my physical condition is going downhill, the diabetes is getting worse, so there is no way I can do even a 6 hour days work.
I was called up to our local AM'er yesterday because his transmitter let the smoke out of some stuff it shouldn't have, and by the time I had extracted the bad choke, about 10Kg worth, fried extra crispy by a gassy 807 tube, the "domino" that started it all, I had spent about an hour down on my knees. Today, muscle cramps, even though I'm eating tums & B vitamins like they were M&M's, are making it difficult to even walk around the house, let alone go out and shovel the approximately 1" of partly cloudy off the deck. That on the knees bit is also insulting the hell out of a knee I tore up back in September. I've had the obligatory 3 shots of Hyaluronan, at $150/copy, but the torn cartilage, if it heals, will be slow, the age, nearly 80, and the diabetes are both working against it.
So the TSA is no longer a worry for me, I simply won't fly commercially again. But because of the TSA, the airline industry 12 years after 9/11/01 is probably half the size that it would be without their arrogance and screw you attitude they inflict on the passengers today. All these mergers are, pure and simple, the effect of the TSA bankrupting the industry, its dying gasp that I hope never gets to the final one. The bottom line is that all these 3 letter agencies are such a huge brain on the economy that they are THE major contributor to the USA's decline into a 3rd world country.
To relate the diffs of 50 some years a bit, I h
Quite a few floors below the cloud of debris? And what pray tell is the source of the dust when the collapse is still 15 floors above the puffs of debris being blown out of the corners of the building? Where there were no windows?
And make no mistake about my feelings for the 3000 that died that day. IMO there should have been murder charges filed for every one of them.
Now, remember from what I have intimated in previous postings here as to what I was the last 19 years of my working life, the Chief Engineer at a TV station in WV.
Our satellite truck was first on the scene at Shanksville, to find access to the site severely restricted by a crowd of "security" people who intended to block access and totally control the pictures the media may have been able to take and upload. Just that took more time to arrange the logistics of getting that many people to the site in the about 4 hours it took us to drive. They would occasionally trot out a "piece of evidence" like that bit of landing gear and a partial turbine wheel. Both of which weren't anything that was ever bolted into a 747. 20% of the correct size. Or smaller.
The dirt damage to the hill wasn't anything like you would expect a 747 could do, and there was no debris visible from where we were allowed to take a camera. We packed up and left at the end of the 2nd afternoon, as our guys were by then in bad need of a shower & clean clothes. But our driver was just curious enough to see if he could drive around and see the site from a different angle. Not so much, but sitting in the trees on the far side of that hill was a small bulldozer, one about the right size to have carved up the other side of the hill in 2 or 3 hours work two days before.
A rumor surfaced a couple months later that that aircraft's tail number was sitting in the back lot at Dayton AFB, but no one has managed a legible picture, so take that as hearsay.
You can say what you believe about me, we have a 1st amendment yet... But please look at the evidence and reach your own conclusions instead of asking for yet another glass of TPTB official koolaid.
FWIW, plug this into your calculations. Those buildings were loaded with asbestos, many tons of it and would have cost quite a few 10's of millions just to clear that hazard out before any legal demolishing could have been done.
Food for thought.
And I am far from convinced, with all the legal crap put in the way, the first responders & survivors who have since passed from breathing that stuff, none got anywhere near the medical attention they deserved. Generally I think the expression is "thrown under the bus".
But like you, I am done. We are, within the limits of this media, incapable of changing the others already made up mind.
Did you take another look at those videos before deciding that, or are you just repeating the "company" policy?
Those buildings survive on the rental fees they generate. Neither of the 3 were even 50% occupied.
You have obviously not taken a good look at the videos. The demolition charges going off can plainly be seen below the main collapse. And why did WTC-7 fall hours later?
Long enough I missed my flight Anything electronic, like my Hitachi v1065 scope, and to be drug out (it was wrapped in a 2 week supply of clean whities in a rollabout suitcase at the time) and plugged into prove it was what it was, even if the dipshit watching the xray screen had no f______ clue what it did. I had to take the batteries out of my camera and throw them away even after I had taken his picture. And damn I hate dealing with people whose measured IQ is less than the eyelet count in their shoes. To me, it was pure and simple that he had the power to harass, and was enjoying the hell out of it. IMNTLBHO, some village was missing its idiot.
I am with a guy named Marion Morrison, I've been in the house he was born in twice, its a minor tourist attraction in Winterset IA, not far from where I was born, and whom you may recall as John Wayne, who once said that "stupidity should hurt", and this guy needed to hurt, bad.
But this thread is about worn out.
Cheers (or maybe not), Gene
Only occasionally in re work. I'm in the middle of doing our local AM'er, whose daytime transmitter let out a quite considerable and stinky quantity of smoke at sign on time this morning. Domino effect, a gassy 807 effectively crow barred the medium high voltage supply, doing a truly excellent job of toasting a 10 kg 10 Henry choke in the power supply. Old gates transmitter, all the worlds spares are up in PA someplace, and locked up by the current blizzard, so it could be Monday before I have the stuff to revive it. But he has a 50 watt nighttime box that sounds great, so he will survive till I can get the 1kw Gates revived yet another time.
As far as the digital, I missed that for the most part, we were still doing analog when we had a turkey dinner and I was given the obligatory Rolex watch at the end of June 2002. But I am still there often enough to be well aware of some of its problems, 50% of which have originated in a $15K Apple video server we bought 4 of, all with $0.12 bushing fans. All of which have now been replaced with in house built linux boxes with very high Iron contents. Our IT guy, who was a 17 yo when I walked in the door in '84, has turned into quite a computer whiz. 64 to 128 gigs of ram, and at least dual Zeons at 3.5Ghz or better. And up to 50Tb worth of drives in raid configs. 5% of the troubles we had from Apples coffee warmers. We do 4 digital channels out of there, and in a pinch, the newest server can do all 4, AND write two other programs into the raid array, all at the same time.
I try to keep up, but with my "other" interests, (cnc machine tools on a small scale, woodworking, a legacy computer) the wet ram gets overloaded easier than it used to. That is not a pleasant realization . :(
Cheers, Gene
"i'm webmaster for bostoncamerata.org, the medieval music group mr. razgui has performed with:"
Unforch, I surmize you are 200% correct. But I would like to thank you for bringing yet another of our "governments" (insert laff track here(but push wrong button & get sob track instead)) completely arbitrary, and asinine to me, abuses of power.
I have no clue how long it will take him to replace those, but I hope he can. Unfortunately I'd also imagine we will never again get to hear him, in any US venue. I sure as hell would never again set foot on US soil, for any reason.
Cheers, Gene
Nah, I've watched the progressive loss of our freedoms since the 1940's. And I've railed against it since. Dec 7 1941 was an eyeopener for me when I saw my father & grandfather crying after we'd heard the evening news on Grandpa's battery powered radio. They understood what it meant. But we rallied, did without, and whuped their butts in about 5 years and change, then taught them how to do business. 9-11, had it not been the demolition job it was, should have resulted in our ruling the middle east. But the stage was already set when Truman flew in and fired Mac because he wanted to stop the Mao driven Chinese on their side of the river. That, quite likely would have been one we lost fair & square.
But Ike was right, when he warned us, everything we've done since has been designed to entrench the military as a standing, and uncontrollable draw on the treasury.
One thing is glaringly obvious today, and that is that the present tyrannical situation could be a major source of energy just from the likes of Thomas Payne, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson's spinning in their graves. Its intolerable to me, but my kids grew up with it, as have their kids, and now my great grandchildren. And it makes me sad because of the things I got to do that they will never be able to do until our Constitution and Bill of Rights are restored to be the final law of the land. Like T. Jefferson said, "the tree of liberty needs refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants from time to time, and God help us if we go 20 years without it." The much needed reset, will not be bloodless. Will I live long enough to see it? I'd toss a quarter and call it heads, but some SOB would invent a law that says he can legally catch it and run while its in the air.
Sigh....