$32 million for a drone???

The TV says the USAF drone lost over the black sea cost $32 million.  You can buy a low end Russian jet fighter for that.  Gold plate much?? 

Silicon Valley Bank.

This bank had $200 billion plus in deposits, mostly from companies.  It had companies that deposited $20 billion apiece.  Sooner of later any half way competent company can find far more profitable uses for $20 billion, more profitable than leaving it in the bank.  When such a company withdraws $20 billion to do something it’s gonna shake the financial stability of the bank, even if it does have another $180 billion in the til. 

   I believe the thinking in bankers’ minds assumes that the depositors’ money is very small compared to the banks total assets.  And that they have a lot of depositors but they don’t all withdraw their deposits at the same time. 

  I’m thinking that Silicon Valley ignored all this and did not worry when big depositors made big withdrawals.

Biden promised to make all the depositors whole without laying the burden on taxpayers.  He is gonna have FDIC pay off everybody.  Of course FDIC gets its money from taxpayers, and $20 billion depositors take a lot of paying off.

 

The Federal Debt limit.

 We are approaching it.  It should hit sometime in September.  Last time, maybe ten years ago, the newsies cried and wailed that the US was going to default on its debts.  Not true. Never happened.  The Federal government collects enough taxes to pay about 65% of its debts.  The other 35% is paid be selling treasury bills (soundest investment on the planet). Last time my mail got delivered (the post office is nearly independent these days.  They don’t do checks for Social Security any more, the computers do electronic funds transfer right into my checking account.   I wasn’t due an income tax refund, so shutting down the IRS didn’t bother me.

   They did furlough a lot of federal bureaucrats.  Tough on them but my sympathy for bureaucrats is limited.   Plus as I remember they all got their jobs back with back pay. 

   So the newsies, even the Fox newsies, are wailing on the air that we are going to default on our debts.  Did not happen last time.  The Party of More Free Stuff (Democrats) has proposed trillions of dollars of new pork spending.  If the Republicans have the stones they should tell the Democrats, we won’t raise the debt ceiling just to pay for their pork.

Let’s make the rails safer.

Norfolk Southern has done two massive train wrecks inside of a week.  There is the East Palestine wreck and now a second wreck not far away from the East Palestine wreck.  Most of the time derailments leading to train wrecks are caused be faulty track.  Around here main line track at White River Junction is so old that I can pick spikes out of the ties with my fingers.  They run AMTRAK passenger trains over that bit of totally worn out track.  I’ll give the railroad this; they limit the speed of the passenger train to 30 mph over this bit of dead track.

   What we need is a public written document describing what properly maintained track is and how to inspect it.  Best issued by a private railroad association, not a government bureau.

   After a train wreck the railroad’s insurance company should inspect the track.  If the track fails to meet documented quality, the insurance company should refuse to pay off to the railroad.  For backup, if trackside land owners, local governments or businesses feel the railroad is running unsafely they can inspect the track themselves and sue the railroad if they find it running on dangerous track.

    The East Palestine train wreck is hard to explain.  The hotbox caused the truck to burst into flames 6 to 8 feet high.  There is a bit of video tape that shows this.  Why the train crew failed to stop the train after seeing the flames is strange, and no newsie has been intelligent enough to ask Norfolk Southern about it.  Hotboxes have been a hazard to railroading since its beginning two hundred years ago.   With 200 years of experience to guide them train crews ought to know to stop the train and cut the hotbox car out onto a siding and leave it there.

China is out to replace the United States as most important world power

I do not approve.  Here of some things that we should do to slow China down.

We ought to pass a tariff of 10% or maybe more on all Chinese goods.  That will cost the Chinese some business. The president can do this.  US tariffs are set by executive order of the president.

We should forbid US banks and other financial companies from loaning money to Chinese companies.  If a Chinese company needs to borrow money, it should borrow from places in China.  I believe this will require legislation in Congress.

 We ought to make a list of strategic items that US companies may not sell to China.  Semiconductors, small arms, ammunition, crude oil and refined fuels such as gasoline and diesel.  Coal, heavy weapons and their ammunition.  Aircraft.  A commission could come up with a more comprehensive list.  This ought to require legislation in Congress, but similar things have been done throughout the cold war on authority that I don’t understand.

US college education falls into two classes.  Four years of American college education is a hoot.  All of us who did college look back fondly on our college years.  Chinese students who graduate from an American college take back good memories of their time in America and will make it easier for us to get alone with China in the future.  Chinese students who are just out of high school (18 years old), unmarried, paying full list price, we ought to welcome.  Older students, who might be applying to US colleges to learn up-to-date US technology or snoop classified research, ought to be subject to more stringent checks.

Marking your product “Made in America” increases the sale of the product.  We ought to have an organization the keeps track of the “Made in America” mark and require that only 10 or 15 % of the product come from China, the bulk of the product should be from the US or friendly countries.  This might also require legislation from Congress to achieve. 

We ought to ban Tik-Tok and the like.

 

 

Chevy Trax

I bought one. It is Chevy’s smallest SUV.  There is a bigger one with an instantly forgettable name, and then the big iron, Suburban.  I am single, children are grown and the Trax is big enough for me.  It comes with a four cylinder turbo charged engine with plenty of power for an SUV.  It is not a sports car, and I didn’t buy it as such.  I was more interested in the all wheel drive that gets it into (and out of) my brother’s unplowed driveway. 

    Good features.  The door handles are big enough to get my fingers wearing gloves all around them to tug open a slightly frozen door.  Windshield is good and big.  It comes with a radio dongle instead of a key.  If you have the dongle in your pocket the car will start and run. No dongle, no go.  The rear seats fold down giving more cargo space to the rear luggage compartment.

   Bed features.  Every thing is so complicated I cannot make the car do anything without holding the ¾ inch thick user manual in my hand.  I had to use the manual just to put gas into it. I haven’t found the trip odometer, or the water temperature gage.   The manual says the car lacks an oil pressure gage.  The rear window is not big enough and rear vision is limited on the sides.  The stylists were from the “black” school.  The instrument panel is black, the buttons on the panel are matching black, the floor mats and the whole interior are black.  The dome light fails to come on when I open a door.

You should buy a radial arm saw.

Reason?  They are very cheap and plentiful on eBay. 

In the old days, when I was a kid, most fathers had a shop, somewhere, the basement, the garage, and other places.  In those days, before chop saws, the shops had either a table saw or a radial arm saw (RAS).  The benefit of the RAS was it could be pushed up against a wall of the shop and work just fine.  Table saws, if they were to cut long stock, needed to be in the middle of the shop with clearance all around.  Both RAS and table saw cut with a disc shaped blade with teeth on the edge turned by a motor bolted to the blade center.  

To trim a 9 foot 2by4 stud to length on a table saw you have to brace the long stud to the miter gage which is only 6 inches long.  It’s very easy to let the long stud slip a tiny bit, and the trim cut is now longer a good square cut, it becomes a little bit off, and the whole project does not fit together a well as you would like. 

   With a RAS, I locate a work bench, the same height as the RAS table right next to the RAS table.  I lay the long stud on the workbench and push it up against the 4 foot RAS fence. With four feet of fence to guide it, the cut will comes out square in both directions.

   Some time in the 1980’s the safety gurus looked at the RAS and declared it too dangerous to use.  The blade could be in many different places, which made it easier to loose track of it and cut yourself.  Half the diameter of the blade was exposed and could do a very nasty cut if the used did not pay attention closely.  The safely gurus were so effective (destructive) that homeowners just stopped buying RASs.  By now I don’t know of any company that still makes them and sells them.

    But there are a lot of used RASs, in good shape, on Craigs list and other places for pennies.  I have seen RASs go for as little as $50.  Table saws will cost you more like $400.  They come in various sizes, from a big 16 inch blade down to a tiny 9 inch blade.  The big 16 inch blades are quite expensive, and unless you are doing timber framing, I would go for a smaller one.  I have a 10 inch RAS which is big enough for everything I do in my shop.  And 10 inch blades are widely available.

   Looking at a used RAS, trying to decide if it is good enough for your shop.  Plug it in, see if the motor runs and the blade turns.  Look for an iron casting for the arm.  The lightweight stamped sheet metal and plastic arms bend out of place during use yielding a cut that does not go where it ought to.  You want a round column with plenty of beef to it supported by a large and beefy bracket holding the column upright from the RAS frame.  The frame should be steel “C section” beams.  Check that the power head rolls smoothly all the way to both ends of the arm.  Check that the auto stops at 90 and 45 degrees are working.  Swing the arm back and forth and make sure the autostop clicks in and locks the arm in position.

    So far so good.  You want to check out the seller’s place.  You want the RAS manual, the blade guard and the anti kickback fingers.  If the seller cannot find, or does not have these items, no sweat there are other places.  Other things you might be able to obtain from the seller is a dado set, extra blades, or a chuck for router bits or twist drills.

   When you get your used RAS home to your shop you want to give it some tender loving care.  Wipe it down with a rag moistened in paint thinner or charcoal light to get the dirt and saw dust off it.  Rub down the guide grooves in the arm in which the power head rolls.  Sawdust gets in there and then gets flattened by the rollers into a bump.

   If the RAS needs one, you want a nice new sharp carbide blade.  I use an ordinary blade with 20 degrees of hook, the normal amount.  The safety gurus claim the RAS wants a blade with zero hook.  I don’t believe the gurus, the ordinary 20 degree blade works just fine in my shop.  You can clean the black stickum off old blades by soaking them in a solution of laundry borax in water.

   Quite likely you want to make a new table and a new fence, since the old one will have all sorts of saw cuts in it.  Make the new table 4 feet long.  Make the width match the old table.  Particle board ¾ inch thick makes a good flat smooth table.  Counter sink all bolts down til the blade won’t hit them

   After installing the new table, you need to align your RAS.  If the have the manual, read up on alignment.  First thing is to make the new table flat to the blade.  With power off, lower the blade until it just scraps the new table.  Swing the arm as far as it will go in either direction.  If it swings and just scrapes you are good, if the blade digs into the new table somewhere and sticks, you have a problem.  The RAS manual ought to give guidance for this predicament. Then you need to check that the arm at right angles cuts square, and the blade is at right angles to your new table/ 

    Now to use the RAS safely.  Keep fingers (and hands and everything) at LEAST 3 inches away from the blade.  If the work is too small to hold and keep 3 inches back, throw that piece in your scrap box and find an bigger piece.  Make sure to maintain 3 inch clearance when you move the blade from behind the fence out to the end of the arm.

   That’s for cross cutting.  For ripping there is a bit more.  The teeth of the blade are moving towards the feed side.  If they grab and stick, the blade will hurl the work back at you at a scary speed.  Never stand behind the blade when ripping, stand to one side, so if it does kick back and throw the work it will just hit the shop wall, and not you. To begin a rip, tilt the blade guard down so that it only admits the work to the blade and blocks any fingers that might be riding on top of the work.  After the blade guard is set, then set the anti kickback fingers to stop the blade from throwing the work.  I use a push stick to push the last part of the work into the blade, rather than my fingers.      

    Good luck with your new RAS purchase. 

Cannon Mountain ski weather. 23-Feb-23

I got six inches of nice new snow on my deck.  My deck is easy walking distance to Peabody slopes over at Cannon. So if I got six inches, Peabody slopes got six inches. Cannon summit might have gotten a bit more.  Skiing ought to be really good this weekend.

You can teach your child to read.

The Internet is full of stories of public school were NONE of the children could read at grade level.  This is astounding and discouraging.  I went to public school many years ago, and things were not that bad, then.

First thing you can try is to get your kid out of the failing school and into a better one.  The Catholic Church runs many parochial schools, from kindergarten up thru 12^th grade that do an excellent job.  My three children attended parochial school even though we are not Catholic.  Best move we ever made.

Or you can teach the child yourself.  If you graduated high school you are better prepared for teaching than any education major out of college.  Motivation is a key step.  You need to read aloud to the child.  When he/she sees that Dad or Mom reads, they want to do it to. You need some good books, written for kids your kid’s age.  Weed out any books that go off into politics, or critical race theory or sex, they merely bore young children.  Dr Seuss is very good.

There are two ways to teach reading to children, phonics and the “whole word method”.  Stick with teaching phonics, whole word is unteachable and does not work in many cases.

For phonics the child needs to know the names of each letter of the alphabet and the sound each letter represents.  The Alphabet Song from preschool works well for this.  And the child needs to recognize upper and lower case letters and understand that the pronunciation does not change because of case. 

Now we can start phonics.  Start with simple short words like dog or cat.  Have the child say the letters of the word.  With some repetition the child will hear the letters and the word they form.  After some phonics work give the child a reward by reading something out aloud.

   After a while the child will be able to just look at the word and know its meaning, pronunciation, and some connotations and denotations that go with it.  This is the beginning of “whole word” method.  Keep up the phonics.  New readers encounter a lot of words they have never seen before, but they can sound them out and get them with practice.

 

Hot Box.

    Old railroading term for an axle running hot in its journal box.  Trains have a lot of axles, four per car.  In the old days, before 1955 or so, the axle bearings were friction bearings.  The end of the steel axle rotated inside a solid brass bearing inside the journal box (square box with a tip up lid on each axle).  The journal box was filled with cotton waste soaked in oil to keep the bearing cool.  Trainmen used to walk up and down the train carrying huge oil cans and giving a good squirt of oil into every journal box that needed same. 

Freight trains had cabooses, in which a couple of trainmen rode to keep an eye out for hot boxes. The cupola on top of the caboose was used to eyeball the train looking for hot boxes that might be starting to smoke. 

  When a hot box was spotted the train was slowed, taken to a siding, and the hot box oiled to make it happy.  Trains did not proceed with smoking hot boxes for fear that the hear might melt the end of the axle, dropping the wheel assembly crosswise onto the track, and causing a serious accident.

Roller bearings came into service in the 1960’s, and are universal today.  They are much less prone to hotboxes than the traditional friction bearings.

There is video from that train wreck in Ohio showing one of the car trucks not just hot, it was engulfed in flames.  The train crew should have seen it.  They failed to do so, and ran the train until the axle did fail and wreck the entire train.

The TV newsies haven’t asked why the train crew failed to pull off onto a siding.

Shooting down “objects”

Of the four “object” shoot downs, two went into the water and two went down above the Arctic Circle.  The Navy is still trying to salvage the big one shot down off South Carolina in only 47 feet of water.  I doubt they will ever salvage the one shot down into Lake Huron.   The winter weather around the two Arctic Circle shoot downs is so bad we may never find the wrecks.

Translation:  If we want to know more about these “objects” we gotta shoot them down over land, places with reasonable weather.  So far from four shoot downs we know zip.

A piece on the Internet claims the Sidewinder missile that missed one shot cost $439,000, nearly half a million, for an air-to-air missile.  Gold plate much? The first sidewinders came into service during the Korean War and only cost $10,000 apiece.     

Gold plating everything runs up the cost of defense.

 Gold plating is the tendency of our military services to require expensive and unneeded fancy equipment added to nearly everything they buy.  For example, the WWII Jeep did the job.  After the war we civilians could buy new Jeeps from the Jeep dealer for something like $3000.  First thing they tried was the “airborne Jeep”, made as light as possible to make it easier to parachute it from cargo places.  And it had the same swing rear axle from the GM Corvair that Ralph Nader condemned.  The troops rolled a lot of airborne jeeps over, often killing them selves.  And parachuting the “airborne jeep” would smash it up making it look like a beer can someone had stamped on.   I remember walking by the Aerial Port where there was a long line of beat up jeeps.  They had been used to practice parachuting them.  The old WWII jeeps looked dirty and battered but they looked like they could be made to run again.  The “airborne jeeps” were so bent out of shape that I don’t think they were good for parts, let alone getting them to run again.

   And after the “airborne jeep” faded out of memory, the services decided they needed something a little bigger.  They bought HumVees.  A new HumVee cost $60,000.  So expensive that only Arnold Schwarzenegger could afford one.  A far cry from the $3000 for a WWII Jeep (Jeep CJ). 

 

  Then we come to USAF.  I was maintenance officer in a squadron of F106 fighters.  Basically a good fighter.  Designed to shoot down Russian nuclear bombers coming at us over the North Pole.  It was fast, Mach 2, so it could catch anything, good range, it could fly from Duluth Minnesota to Tyndall AFB at the southern most tip of Florida without air-to-air refueling, or making a fuel stop.  It carried a big battery of missiles.  The ones in my squadron were built in the late 1950s and kept flying into the 1980s.  

  One big piece of gold plate on the F106, the Tactical Situation Display (TSD).  This was a 9-10 inch screen that was supposed to display your position, and the target’s position, like that groovy display in the Bond movie Gold Finger, the little display in the glove compartment that showed Bond’s car and Oddjob’s car at once.  Trouble with the TSD was it was totally unreliable.  Just the engine vibration from flying the F106 would break it.  We couldn’t get replacement TSD’s, we couldn’t get parts to fix the broken TSD’s, and by the time I joined the squadron the boys had given up on the TSD.  When it broke they just left it in the aircraft.  What’s worse, the TSD didn’t do anything that needed doing.  The F106 had very powerful radar in its nose that would show targets out to 200 miles.  It had voice radio to the ground controllers who were more than happy to tell the pilot about the target’s position, course, speed, and altitude.  Who needs a TSD with that kind of support?

 

Some things we could do.  All these gold plate boondoggles are made in Pentagon meetings.  Mostly procurement paper pushers attend them.  We ought to require that specifications for weapons systems be reviewed and if necessary vetoed by operators, pilots, aircraft maintenance mechanics, submariners, navy officers, and others who actually know something.

 

W should insist that the armed forces buy stuff off the civilian market and not require (and get soaked for) a custom military only design.

The US Army is planning on a new rifle cartridge. And new rifles to shoot the new cartridge.

 The modern rifle appeared after the US Civil War, say 1870 or so.  These were Winchester and Marlin lever actions, early bolt actions, and other competitors.  They were mostly chambered for a .30 caliber center fire cartridge with enough power to take American game, such as elk, deer, buffalo, bear, and wild hog.  This rifle cartridge served well from the Spanish American war up thru WWII. Korea and Viet Nam. 

   During WWII the troops fell in love with full automatic weapons, the Thompson submachine gun and the M3 “grease gun”.  From the soldier’s point of view, the ability to point the weapon and hose down an entire enemy unit with one quick “BRAP” could be life, should they encounter a strong enemy unit in combat.  The American WWII sub machine guns fired pistol ammunition, the .45 caliber round used in the Army .45 automatic pistol.  The pistol run lacked the power of rifle rounds, but the recoil was light enough to permit full automatic fire from a 7-9 pound shoulder weapon.  The regular rifle rounds kicked so hard that they just drove the rifle up until it pointed at the sky. 

   After WWII the Army adopted the full automatic M16 rifle.  To get the recoil down enough to make the gun usable in automatic fire, the power of the M16 round (5.56 mm) was reduced quite a bit.  The real riflemen in the army still liked the WWII 30 caliber round, it reached out further, it could penetrate more body armor and it made a sniper more effective than the 5.56mm round from the M16.

   So after decades of grousing about the lack of power in the standard 5.56 mm round, the Army has announced it wants a 6.8 mm round (.270 a civilian gun shop would call it) The army claims that the small increase in bullet diameter will give a round with ballistics nearly as good as the antique .30 caliber rounds and light enough recoil to allow fully automatic fire from a 7-9 pound rifle.  

   Needless to say, adoption of the new recoil will require the army to replace all the M16 rifles with whatever will fire the 6.8mm round. And all the machine guns too.  This could become very expensive.    

What parents need to do about fentanyl. Before it kills their children.

 Six out of ten sample pills bought from street drug dealers contain enough fentanyl to kill.  Your children need to know this.  The MSM doesn’t talk about it, so unless you, the parent, pass the word to your children, they won’t know. Taking just one pill bought from a street drug dealer has a 60% chance to killing the child, right then and there. 

   The few times the MSM mention this tragedy they call it “a drug overdose”, implying that the victim took too much of the drug.  Better is to call it deliberate poisoning, because the drug dealer sold the child a pill with a lethal dose of fentanyl in it and when the child swallowed that one pill, it killed him. 

    If the children just have to get high, they should stick to alcohol or weed.  Neither of them is good for the kids, but they won’t kill them as quickly as fentanyl laced pills from the street will.  And, if the children just have to get high, they ought to do it in their rooms (dorm rooms) and not be out driving.  Just one can of beer can discombobulate a beginning driver and cause a fatal car accident. 

Biden’s State of the Union fails to impress.

 I stayed up and watched it to the end.  Biden ran on for an hour and twenty.  Biden failed to explain what he would do in a second term to pull the country out of it’s tailspin into the ground.  Biden did make a lot of claims that sounded false to me.  And he complained about stuff well within his powers to fix, without saying he would bother to fix them.  He complained about corporations who make serious money but paid no federal income tax.  That’s caused by a tax code loaded with loopholes, and an IRS that doesn’t audit the big boy’s tax returns.  Biden could fix both of these problems with executive orders or acts of Congress.  Biden said nothing about keeping Chinese recon balloons out of US airspace, or having a US Navy strong enough to keep the Chinese communists out of Taiwan. Biden apparently plans to continue current lefty greenie policies that give us $5 a gallon gasoline, $10 a dozen eggs and $10 a pound bacon. 

Balloons.

The Chinese have flown a sizable balloon over the continental US.  The Chinese admit to ownership.  They launched it from Chinese territory and it crossed the Pacific, entered Canada, and last was heard from drifting across Montana.  The TV newsies have been going ape over it. 

 

The military has discouraged attempts to shoot it down, claiming that falling balloon pieces might hit innocent bystanders on the ground.  I have a little trouble believing that. Montana has a lot of prairie that doesn’t care what falls on it.  It isn’t the way things are in the middle of say New York City.

 

So far, the balloon looks like a civilian weather balloon.  Shooting it down, although attractive, is close to shooting down a civilian airliner that got lost and violated Soviet airspace, which happened maybe 10 years ago.  The Russians took a lot of flak over that.

 

Government briefers have implied that the balloon is maneuverable, implying it has an engine.  I don’t really believe that.  I suspect it is just a free balloon that goes where the winds blow it.  Prevailing winds over the US blow from West to East.  Give the balloon a few days and it will blow out into the Atlantic. 

 

If we really want to show the Chinese that we disapprove of balloons over the US, we can launch a few of our own balloons to drift over China. 

 

 

 

Global Warming

 It is 8 degrees this morning up in Franconia Notch.  I am listening to Biden saying that climate change is the most serious threat faced by mankind.  That sounds foolish to me on a morning this cold. 

How much does Patriot really cost???

Does the Patriot anti aircraft missile system really cost $1 billion per system?  A Patriot system consists of a tracked vehicle to carry the missiles and the radar, 6 or maybe 8 missiles and good radar.  They sell tanks for like $50 million and a tank carries an expensive high power gun that Patriot doesn’t need.  The missiles ought to go for $10 million or so.  The radar would be a phased array type, which is pricey, may $20 million. 

   Add it all up and we have a price tag of $150 million.   That’s not cheap, but is a whole bunch less than $1 billion which is the cost of a Patriot system according to the TV. 

   It would be nice if some newsies checked out the costs on Patriot.  If newsies can count that high. 

 

Baldwin either did not know or did not comply.

 When you pick up a gun, any gun, even your own gun, you check it for being loaded.  Pop out the magazine, swing out the cylinder, look in the chamber to be sure no live rounds are lurking therein.  Basic rule of gun safety.  I learned it at summer camp when I was twelve. 

   Looks like Alex Baldwin did not comply.  The TV doesn't talk about that much. 

The Federal Debt Limit

 It’s a law (buried somewhere in DC) that sets a limit to how much the US Treasury can borrow.  Lately US taxes have been high enough to pay 60% of federal spending.  The Treasury borrows the other 40% to pay the rest of the bills.  Now that we have hit the debt limit, and there is a good chance the Republicans will refuse to raise it, the Treasury is limited to selling off various assets.  Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has said this will keep paying the federal government’s bills until June of this year.

   Last time this happened, maybe ten years ago, the government shut all the national parks and laid off all the “non essential” government workers.   This went on for some months.  It didn’t bother me.  My mail still got delivered, Air Traffic Control kept the airlines flying, I wasn’t expecting an income tax refund so putting the IRS on furlough was OK by me, and Cannon Mountain is a state run park, not federal. 

   This time maybe we could do some belt tightening to keep the federal deficit down. Like laying off those “non essential” bureaucrats for good.  Cut appropriations for the FBI, CPSC, FAA, CIA, FEC and others in half.  Look at military spending.  See what we can do to end “gold plating” of weapons systems, and improve the ratio of “tooth to tail” of all branches.  And Congress critters and their staffs don’t get paid until the budget is balanced somehow, more layoffs or more borrowing or something.   

    

Fireball Cinnimon Whisky

 I had read somewhere that Fireball was the best selling whisky all over New Hampshire.  So, to see what it was I bought a tiny bottle at the State liquor store.  I mixed it with ice and club soda.  The result was not happy.  It had a sweet taste, like sherry.  Quite strong actually.  Not like the whiskey I usually drink which has a hard to describe flavor.  It's good that I bought a really small bottle of Fireball. 

What happened to the Neanderthals?

   It used to be that carbon 14 dating of Neanderthal sites and modern human sites showed a 20,000 to 30,000 year overlap.  The Neanderthals were believed to had co existed with modern humans in Europe for 20 or 30 thousand years. 

    Then there was a recalibration of the Carbon 14 data that showed the Neanderthal sites disappeared about the same time that sites of modern men appeared.  Which leads to the obvious conclusion that Neanderthals lost the competition with modern man and were wiped out.  Unpleasant idea, but likely.

Carbon 14 data is tricky.  Energetic particles from the Sun and cosmic rays strike ordinary Carbon 12, and turn it into radioactive Carbon 14.  This has a half life of 14 thousand years, a good long time.  Living organisms take in both sorts of carbon.  When the organism dies it stops taking in carbon.  By measuring the radioactivity from the carbon 14 in the organic material we can tell how many years has passed since the organism died.  It’s a delicate measurement; the radioactivity of the Carbon 14 is not very strong, compared to say Uranium.   It gets even weaker as time goes by, 14 thousand years, Carbon 14 half life, reduces the radiation by half. 

  I am not hep to just how the Carbon 14 dating was adjusted, but the result moved the oldest Neanderthal sites back 20 to 30 thousand years, putting then up again modern men moving into Europe. 

 

 

 

How many more pieces of classified will turn up?

 So far we have four separate stashes of classified on Biden owned houses or rented offices.  Wanna bet some more classified will surface shortly?

1917 (Movie title) 2019 (date movie released)

In the height to World War I (1917 was the last full year of the war, armistice was declared in November 1918). Two British infantry men are sent on an important mission to deliver orders calling off an attack planned for the next morning.  The movie starts with long long shots of our two heroes striding thru trenches, walking across no man’s land, walking across a green pasture with a couple of cows grazing is it.  Scenery is not all that pretty and nothing happens. 

   While hiding our in a ruined barn watching a dog fight, one of the planes crashes right into the barn.  They pull the pilot out of the burning wreck.  Dunno what the Kaiser told his pilots, but this one, after they save his life, pulls out a gun and shoots one of them.  His buddy puts some rifle bullets into the German pilot and then comforts his buddy as the buddy dies in his arms. 

   The survivor does eventually make it to the unit he set out for and delivers the written orders canceling the attack.  End of movie.

    I was not impressed.  The protagonists never do anything memorable, they just act as targets.  They do a lot of walking, and hitch a ride on and army truck, but this isn’t all the interesting.    

Notices to Airmen.

 That’s what they were called back in the 1960’s when I was serving in the Air Force.  They listed things pilots needed to know before a mission, things like closed runways, Military flying exercises, new high tension power lines.  I hear our transportation secretary had the time to rename the Notice to Air Missions.  Airmen was too sexist for Mr. Buttigieg.  While having time to fiddle with the name, he did not have time to make sure the system was in good enough shape to continue producing NOTAMs to pilots.  I am so glad Mr. Buttigieg is so woke as to change names but not make sure the system works. 

In the Air Force we never took classified home.

 My Air Force service was in the 1960’s.  Each office in the unit had a safe for classified.  If I needed to read a piece of classified, I went to the unit office.  The NCOIC (NCO in Charge) would open the safe.  I would sit and read the classified in the office.  When finished I would hand the classified back to the NCOIC and he would lock it in the safe.  We never took classified out of the office, let alone home. 

  The TV news is chewing over Biden's (and Trump’s) numerous stashes of classified at the former President’s and serving president’s homes.  We would not have allowed that in the Air Force when I was serving.

Gas Stoves

Speaking as a cook, gas stoves are far better than electric stoves.  Gas stoves are hotter, boil water faster.  Turn down the heat on a gas stove and the heat goes down, right now.  Turn down the heat on an electric stove and a long time goes by, burning your food, before anything useful happens, like the heat going down. 

   Gas burns clean, far cleaner that the wood fires that heated human’s caves for 500,000 years in the past.  Far cleaner than smoke from a cigarette, of heaven help us smoke from, a cigar.

  Gas stoves use almost all of the heat energy in the gas to heat the food.  Electric stoves only use 40% (at best).  Back in the electric plant fuel is burned to make steam to turn steam engines that drive the electric generators.  Hot high pressure steam goes from the boiler into the steam engine.  Much cooler, lower pressure steam comes out of the steam engine.  Only while the piston of the steam engine can keep going down, expanding the hot steam, converting heat energy into mechanical energy, does the heat energy of the fuel get converted into electricity.  For current technology, only 40% of the heat energy goes into making electricity, the other 60% goes into heating up the plant’s cooling system.

Was the FAA system that crashed this morning running Windows??

 

FAA tried to make a nationwide failure sound a little better by calling it "glitch".  A better word for a 

nationwide failure is "crash".  

Windows is so full of holes the any sharp high school kid can break into it and do anything he wants. 

It is only fit to run games for children.

Lets hear it FAA.  Were you running on Windows?

Preview

Science was invented in the middle ages

   The Ancients did not have science.  The Hittites were the last to invent/discover something important, namely how to smelt iron back about 800 BC.  The Romans in 200 AD did not have any materials or tools that the Hittites did not have a thousand years before. 

Science is a way of looking at the world.  Science takes facts, from observations, and from experiments, and forms theories that are supported by those facts.  Science does not take ancient authors writings or popular ideas into account, only facts.  Roger Bacon spelled out how to do science in the 1300s.  Science has been very successful.  In the last thousand years we have developed gun powder, printing, electric telegraph, steam railroad, radio and TV, automobiles, aircraft, and a whole raft of  stuff that makes modern life a whole bunch more comfortable than it used to be.

When reading about scientific discoveries you should look for the facts behind the discoveries.  If there are no facts given in what you read, it is not science.

Science is dynamic, it keeps finding new stuff.  When I took geology in college, many years ago, the professor did not believe in plate tectonics.  Now, 60 years later, everybody knows about and believes in plate tectonics.  New science starts small, with perhaps just one article in one journal.  At first few people know of the new science and it is called “tentative” (maybe true maybe not).  As time goes on more and more people learn of the new science and it becomes widely known and accepted.  When it gets written into college textbooks you can say the idea has become generally accepted.  Acceptance is rarely one hundred percent.  For instance we still have people who believe the earth is flat.  When you are looking at science you need to be aware that not all the ideas called scientific are generally accepted. 

 Republicans need to do a RINO hunt.  Nineteen House RINOs denied the Republican party a Speaker of the House from the Republican party.  Dunno what happen next.  This could be the start of two years of  deadlocked votes in the House.  Democrats could not have hoped for anything better for them.  I don't have a list of the RINOs, none of them are from New Hampshire.  We don't have an Republican House or Senate members.  We had chance to vote out three Democrat Congresscritters last month, but it didn't happen.  Too bad.

Watching the crowds at midnight.

 Usually I fall asleep long before midnight on New Years Eve (or any other night for that matter).  This year I took an evening nap at 4:30.  I woke up at 11:30 so I turned on the TV and watched the New Year’s festivities at Times square and at Nashville.  Big crowds both places.  Everyone looked happy, smiling and laughing, some hugging and kissing, a little singing.  I came away thinking America is still in fairly decent shape if we can put forth such large happy crowds. 

Trump’s Taxes

   Democrats forced Trump’s income tax returns into public knowledge.  Trump managed to pay a surprising low income tax.  Absolute zero one year, and just a few hundred dollars in other years. 

Of course, Trump does not do his own taxes.  He hires the best tax lawyers and tax accountants that money can buy.   They found loopholes and special deals scattered throughout the tax code, and used them all. They probably stretched one or two of them farther than anyone else ever did. 

  The IRS is supposed to check or even audit the tax returns of wealthy taxpayers to keep them straight.  IRS never objected to the Trump returns.  It may be the IRS failed to check Trump’s returns, or Trump’s tax people were smarter than the IRS tax people (not unlikely).

   It is a long standing principle of US law that is a perfectly legal to arrange one’s affairs to minimize your tax liabilities.  Trump obviously did a fair amount of this.  It’s perfectly legal.

   Until the IRS comes right out and accuses Trump of tax evasion (they haven’t)  I am going to believe that Trump’s tax returns are legal. 

   We should straighten out the incredible complicated US tax code.  The whole thing fills shelf after shelf.  It is written in lawyer speak which confuses us regular people.  Those of us who still do our own taxes only have J.K. Lasser’s book.  In one 8 ½ by 11 paper back only ½ inch thick, J.K. Lasser gets every thing we need to know packed into a lot less that the shelves and shelves of binders holding the whole tax code.  Those who don’ use J.K. Lasser take their records down to H & R Block and they get them out in good enough shape to prevent an IRS audit of the tax payer. 

Happy New Year

 What more can I say?