Rioters storm Capitol Building

 I don't approve.  Rioters breaking into our legislative chambers is the sort of thing they do in South America, not in the United States of America.  On the other hand it does show we have a lot of really pissed off people.  Messing with the election will do this to people. 

   They should have had enough cops, secret service, capital police, US Army, National Guard, FBI, you name them, to keep the rioters out.  Somebody did not prepare properly for this one.  I don't know who "somebody" is.  Will our noble MSM mention the name? 

The DC mayor declared a curfew for 6 PM.  Too late, it is full dark at 5 PM in DC.  You want to get people off the streets before it gets dark.  

Let's hope things simmer down.  If this kinda stuff keeps happening, it will give Joe Biden a lot of grief.

If not Pelosi, who??

 TV newsies are doing a lotta talk about re electing Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.  They point out that the Democrats only have a 5 vote majority in the House and that 10 Democratic reps voted against Nancy last time.  But they don't talk about who might replace Nancy.  "You cannot beat somebody with nobody." to quote some old time politico.  Unless and until I hear a name, I don't believe all the "Nancy won't be re-elected talk".

Microsoft is out of the browser business

 At least looking at the page hits I get on this blog.  The two big browsers are Safari and Chrome.  Poor old Firefox is nearly gone, although it is still #3, behind Safari and Chrome.  Microsoft's Internet Exploder doesn't show, and that new Microsoft browser, Edge, doesn't show either.  Color them gone.

For that matter, Apple OS is giving me more hits than Windows. 

Road and Track: Best sports car ever

 They had a grunch of 'em, going all the way back to an MG TC.  Somehow they did not have a Corvette.  All American, cheap for what it did, very fast, good car.  I remember going up to Watkin's Glen NY many years ago to watch the Can-Am.  The Glen also ran off a "production"sports car race that weekend.  That year the only two production sports cars that competed were Porsche 911 and Corvette.  Nothing else in production that year was fast enough.  The 911 cornered better than the 'Vettes and would work past them in the corners.  After a couple of laps of hard driving a 911 driver might think he had it made.  Then came the back straight, nearly two miles long.  And we could hear the big Chevy 396 V-8's come on full song.  And the 'Vettes just out dragged the 911's, catching all the cars that had slipped by them in the Esses.  "There is no substitute for cubic inches".  

   After that long ago happy weekend I always considered Corvette one of the best sports cars in the world.

"New strain" corona virus

 

That new Corona virus strain.  The Brits announced that they just discovered it in Britain last week.  Now we have a Colorado man, with NO recent travel, has it.  I don’t believe the “new strain” travels that fast.  I figure the Colorado man caught it from someone in Colorado.  Makes me think that the “new strain” has been around, world wide, for quite some time, maybe since this whole Corona virus disaster started. 

   Does the “new strain” behave differently in patients than the old strain?  Higher death rate?  More infectious? Worse symptoms?  Do we have any clinical data (observations of real patients) to support any of these ideas?  I don’t believe computer models for this, I want real observations.  Far as I am concerned the computer models are merely a Wild Ass Guess (WAG) dressed up as real. 

   How do we tell the difference between patients with “old strain” and patients with “new strain”?

I suppose we use some kind of laboratory test.  This is not confidence building.  A commonly used laboratory test has a distressingly high (20%) false positive rate.  Is the test for “new strain” any more accurate? 

   So far my TV news has not given me backup information about the “new strain”.  For all I know “new strain” is about the same as “old strain”. 

Medieval technological advances.

   The middle ages invented or imported a lot of new stuff.  Far more than the preceding ancient world did.  The last invention made in the ancient world was the discovery of iron working by the Hittites 600 or 700 BC.  The Roman Empire at its peak, say 200 or 300 AD, did not have any technology that the Hittites did not have 800 or 900 years before.  That is a long time for stasis.

   The Middle Ages start after the fall of the Roman Empire and last until Columbus time.  We date the end of the Roman Empire with the deposition of Romulus Augustilus in 470 something AD and Columbus is 1492.  You can round it off and say the Middle Ages run from 500 to 1500 AD, a thousand years.  In that time Europeans invented or imported the following:

1. Trebuchet, a stone throwing machine powerful enough to break stone walls.  It was a weight driven machine, replacing classic catapults, which were powered by skeins of springy materials, perhaps human hair.  Unfortunately the art of making such skeins and keeping them springy has been lost since ancient times.  Trebuchets can be built on site from local timber and some rocks for weight. 
2. Magnetic compass.  We think this was an import from China.  Having a compass on board your ship greatly improved the chances of said ship returning safely from voyages.
3. Wheelbarrow.  Very simple device that greatly improves the amount of stuff that one man can move.
4. Wooden kegs and barrels.  They replaced the clay amphora used as shipping containers in classic times.  Lighter and more rugged than amphora which were just big clay pots.
5. Gunpowder and the fire arms to use it.
6. Lenses and eyeglasses.
7. Stern rudder.  Far stronger than the classical steering oar and less likely to break off in bad weather.
8. Printing.
9. Cast iron.  Classical black smiths only had wrought iron. 
10. Crossbow.  Powerful and accurate.  Although known in classic times it was only used for hunting.  You could train any man to shoot a crossbow well in a matter of weeks.  Robin Hood’s long bow, although effective, required a bowman to start shooting as a child and practicing every day all his life.  The supply of good bowmen was limited.
11.  Water mills.  Although known in classic times, the middle ages made much greater use of watermills.  The Domesday Book, William the Conqueror’s inventory of all the land and buildings in England, lists better than a thousand water mills in England by 1080 AD.
12. Horse collars.  Far more effective horse harness that greatly improved the amount of stuff a horse could move. 

 

How much money can the US print?

 Now that we have a totally fiat currency, a pure paper money whose value is set by public opinion, it is possible for the government to pay its bills by simply printing fresh new greenbacks.  On one hand, most of us believe that printing more money reduces the value of existing money, our savings.  On the other hand some of us believe that we ought to increase the money supply as the economy grows.  

Question, just how much new money is healthy growth?  Who knows??  

   Every year Congress is faced with a gap between obligations and tax revenue.  We spend more than we take in.  The only ways to fixing this are to spend less or hike taxes.  Congresscritters hate doing either.  Spending cuts cause howling from who ever gets cut off from the gravy train.  Pigs hate being pushed away from the trough.  Tax hikes provoke howls from taxpayers.  Congresscritters fear the howling means they will loose the next election. 

  Lately we have been able to keep things going by running a sizable federal deficit each year.  This year is going to be a scorcher.  In simply terms, the US government has been covering the deficit by simply printing more paper money.  So far, nothing too bad has happened.  Perhaps the healthy growth of the money supply, what ever that may be, is enough to pay off the deficit.  I don't really believe that, but it might be true.  Or, far worse, we are printing enough money to crash the currency, sometime in the future.  Maybe next year.  May be five years from now.  Who knows?  But a crash would be bad for us.  Foreigners would stop accepting greenbacks in payment for imports.  Stores would stop accepting dollar bills.  The economy would grind to a halt.  This happened in Germany 100 years ago.  The pain was so intense that the Germans still remember it.  

So, I fear that Congresscritters will continue to follow the path of least resistance and keep right on running big deficits until something really bad happens. 

 I got with the Christmas tree program. I bought the tree from someone in Littleton selling trees at the Meadow St-I93 interchange. That's the last picture of the tree on the roof of the Buick. I left it on the deck until yesterday then I brought it indoors, put the tree stand on it, and set it in place. It brought a good deal of snow in with it, which melted out into the water bucket of the tree stand. Got the lights on it and got them to light. I have a bunch of grandchildren coming over the put the ornaments on it. And I have munchies and drinks for the grownups. If you have any small children who would enjoy hanging some ornaments, come on over. Tomorrow, Thursday, 3 PM, 22 Ridge Cut Road, Mittersill.

Where did that massive hack of Dept of Energy come from??

Where did that massive DOE hack come from??       

 

Trump says it’s China doing the hack.  Biden says it’s Russia.  I doubt that either of them have any solid evidence.  I am talking about the big hack that penetrated the Dept of Energy last week; you know the dept that handles our nukes. 

I know that if I was a Chinese hacker I would try to camouflage my location on the net.  I would have an email account on a Russian email system.  I would use a Russian alias.  I would have social media accounts on Russian systems.  I would have everyone else on my team, and my superiors use my Russian email when they wanted to communicate. 

If I was a Russian hacker I would do the same stuff in reverse.  If I was a third world hacker or a criminal operation I would still use the big boys (Russia and China) for cover on the theory that nobody would believe I was capable of major league hacking and if I tried to look like I was a big boy  everyone would want to believe that. 

US history textbooks

 Anyone know of a good US history book for grade school?  I know some good ones, but they are all college level.  Starting grade school kids on Morrison and Commager isn't going to work.  I would like a text that tells US history straight, not the New York Times 1619 propaganda slant. 

Bullet proof armor

There used to be the Higgins Armory Museum out in Worcester Massachusetts.  Big building, three or four stories tall.  All filled with medieval plate armor.  The museum was put up by a Yankee millionaire who liked to collect armor.  His collection is what filled the museum.  I took my kids out the Higgins a couple of times.  They loved the place. Unfortunately the money ran out a few years ago and they had to close the museum.  A great loss.  

   Higgins did show that plate armor was bullet proof.  Most of the suits bore a proof mark, a bullet mark where the maker had tested the armor by firing a bullet at it.  As time went on, guns grew more powerful.  There was a suit of plate armor at Higgins that sported the proper proofmark, but also sported a big bullet hole in the breast plate.  That bullet probably killed the wearer.   

   Early suits of plate were "cap a pied" French for head to toe.  These had plates protecting arms and legs, including lovely plate armor shoes to protect the feet.  One of these suits would keep out Robin Hood's arrows all over.  Guns hit harder than arrows, and in the 1400's when muskets came into use, they had to make the breast plate thicker to make it bullet proof.  To keep the weight down they dropped the cap a pied and left arms and legs unprotected.  The thinking must have been that a bullet in the torso was probably fatal but a bullet in a limb, while a bad wound, was survivable.  

   By the 1700's the muskets were powerful enough to pierce any plate armor light enough to wear, and so troops stopped wearing armor and just went into battle wearing a colorful cloth uniform. 

Wanna bet all those Chinese and Russian hacks are against Windows?

 Everybody runs Windows.  It is the most insecure operating system in history.  Stick a flashdrive into a USB port and Windows will upload and execute any programming that might be on the flashdrive.  Windows allows any program access to the internet without ever asking the user if this program is safe. Windows comes out of the box with a remote access loophole that allows foreign computers to gain complete control of your machine.  

 I have to believe that the agencies that got hacked this week were all running Windows.

They all should have been running Linux. 

Who dines outdoors in the snow???

 With a lotta snow on the ground, the TV is still talking about dining out of doors.  They showed a clip of a New York restaurant taking in the tables and chairs with a foot of snow on the ground. 

Election integrity

 Ideally, voters ought to appear in person at the polls, on election day, show their picture ID, be checked off on the registered voter list, and then vote on a paper ballot.  No ballots of any kind submitted or "discovered" after the polls close shall ever be counted.  Absentee ballots should be provided only for voters who have a good reason not to be able to get to the polls on election day, such as members of the armed forces stationed overseas.  Fear of contracting a disease is not a good reason for voting absentee.  Ballots should never be mailed out to anyone.  Absentee ballots must be picked up at town hall in person or by a friend or relative who has a picture ID and the voter's signed application form.  

   Ballots shall be counted by hand.  Ballots shall be stored after counting in case of a request for a recount.  

So far as I know, New Hampshire is in fairly good shape except for allowing the use of voting machines.

Super Cute.

 That Chinese spy Fang Fang, or Christine Fang is CUTE. super cute. A lot of guys would do most anything to get a chance to sleep with her.

What is the most eco friendly container?

 A lot of stuff from the grocery store has to come in a container.  Corn flakes, milk, Quaker Oats, ground coffee. And a lot of other stuff too.

Ground coffee is sold in tin cans, cardboard cans, solid plastic jugs and "paper" bags. I call the bag material paper but it probably has a lot of plastic in it.  Anyhow which of these containers is cheapest for the coffee company to buy?  Which container takes the least amount of energy to manufacture?  Which container uses the least amount of scarce materials like tin?  Which container can be recycled?  Which container is happy in a landfill?  Happy containers rust out in a few years.  Unhappy containers last for millennia.

Most of us would like to do the right thing by the environment, if we knew what the right thing was.  

Recent movie sound tracks unhearable

 Sound track first went to pot in Charlie Wilson's War some years ago.  They have not improved since.  Major beef, you cannot understand the dialogue.  Been a lot of movies and TV shows suffering from the curse of the sound man since Charlie Wilson's War.  

   It is not hearing loss with age.  I have no trouble hearing the dialogue on news shows and classic movies.  I have a collection of classic Hollywood movies, going back to Casablanca.  The dialogue in them comes thru clear as a bell.  

Some things any apprentice sound man ought to know.

1.  Don't mix the score or the soundtrack over the dialogue.  Mute everything but the dialogue when the actors are speaking.

2.  Place the mikes in front of and close to the actors mouths.  How you hide than from the camera is your problem, not mine.

3.  Actors must speak up.  Don't speak in stage whispers.  Speak as if you were acting in live theater and your words must make it to the last row in the back of the theater. 

If Biden becomes President, Trump ought to

 Get himself on TV, a nice talk show, and spend his air time flipping zingers at President Biden.  He could start with the Hunter Biden paid off by China stories, move on to zapping his cabinet picks, and give the surviving Republicans air time.  He ought to draw fantastic ratings.  If the TV moguls won't give him  a show, start up his own TV network. 

WWII was won at Pearl Harbor.

 

Today is 7 December.  Seventy nine years ago on this date the Empire of Japan attacked the US Navy at Pearl Harbor.  This was one of the decisive world changing military actions of the entire war.  In the space of a few hours it complete changed American outlook on the war which had been raging for two years already.  Pre Pearl harbor Americans were determined not to get sucked into another European war. Not matter what atrocities the Nazi’s or the Japanese performed, we were NOT going to jump into the war no matter what.  We had done that 25 years before.  We had beaten the Germans but the overall results were not so good.  We had loaned the Allies (British and French mostly) huge amounts of money.  After the war most everyone welshed on their war debts to us.  And a bunch of peaceniks started up the “merchants of death” business.  They claimed that the arms makers had set off WWI to improve their arms sales.  And we took a horrible number of combat deaths.  The British and the French took even more, but we didn’t care much about that.  The whole ball of wax and ill feeling was called isolationism.  It got to Congress where laws to prevent us from ever going to war again were passed.  Isolationism was so strong that even Franklin Roosevelt, probably the strongest US president of the 20^th century could not go against it. 

   In a couple of hours that Sunday isolationism disappeared.  The 3000 casualties at Pearl Harbor were shocking.  Sinking the entire Pacific battle fleet was shocking.  Being attacked on US soil, thousands of miles from anywhere in Asia where the Japanese were active, without a declaration of war was shocking. Sneak attack we called it.  Americans were mad and wanted to kick some ass. 

   We were well equipped to do so.  We had a population of 100 million or so in those days, twice as much as the British or the French, nearly as much as the Russians.  We commanded a rich continent that yielded all the oil, coal, iron, wheat, beef, copper, timber, every natural resource imaginable, as we would ever need.  We had an industrial base used to producing 4 million automobiles a year.  No one else could do that in 1941.  We shut down domestic automobile production and converted the car factories over to producing war material.  Jeeps, army trucks, semi automatic M1 rifles, tanks, B-24 bombers, strange little secret agent hand guns, just about anything imaginable.  Although we didn’t have much of an army in 1941, we fixed that rapidly.   We were able to throw an army into North Africa six months after Pearl Harbor big enough and strong enough to decisively beat the Germans, under Rommel.

   We unleashed a whirlwind against Japan.  We sank their carrier fleet at Midway.  We put the Marines ashore on Guadalcanal.  We threw in airpower and seapower and more infantry to hold Guadalcanal.  We launched a submarine fleet that sank the entire Japanese merchant marine by 1945.  We developed and dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Admiral Yamamoto said “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”  He had that right. 

   A more intelligent Japanese government would have gone far out its way to avoid antagonizing the United States.  We had absolutely no intention of getting into a war with them.  After we embargoed oil and scrap metal to them they could have bought all the oil they needed from the Dutch East Indies. 

Where did all the shaving cream go??

 My grocery store no longer carries shave cream.  Walmart had some but no brands that I reconized.  I wound up with a strange looking can, painted grey, and a no-name manufacturer.  It was the last can on the shelf.

  So what is happening?  Electric razors tanking over?  Guys working up a little lather from the bath soap bar?  Gels?  Guys giving up on shaving and growing beards?  Do I need to find a shaving brush and work up my own lather?  Anyone know?

And for that matter, Walmart no longer carries wool blankets.  They have nothing but fleece blankets, which are warm, silky to the touch, and cheap.  I was raised on wool blankets, we even had wool camp blankets at summer camp.  Do the kids go to camp with fleece blankets now?

TV still talking about who should get Corona virus Vaccine first

 Cool and all that.  But American industry will churn out enough vaccine for everybody in the world given a few months. 

They submitted the paperwork to FDA.

 And FDA is going to sit on it for two weeks.  Responsive they are. 

New US government computer model claims 100 million Covid cases

Of course, the model suggests that there are a lot of "cases" out their that didn't make the patient sick enough to see a doctor, or get tested.  Personally I believe that cases of a disease, corona virus or just plain old measles ought to diagnosed, by medical personnel, not guessed at by computer modelers.  Far as I am concerned, unless patient gets sick, shows symptoms, runs a fever, we don't have a case.  Right now they are calling every false positive from testing a case, even when the patient isn't sick.  And, this kind of imagineering of the number of cases, does crazy things to the death rate.  For the same number of deaths, if you call the number of cases 100 mil, the death rate drops down to practically nothing.   Plus we know that the medics are under a lot of pressure to call every death a Corona virus death.   

   There was a study, that got published and then got retracted a day or two later, that claimed that the over all US death rate (all causes) was about the same this year as it was last year before the Corona virus hit.  Which suggests that a lot of the deaths blamed on Corona virus would have happened anyhow due to patient age and other conditions.  

Anyhow, I am taking all the Corona virus statistics with a grain of salt.  Maybe a whole tablespoon of salt.  

His Dark Materials

 They made a miniseries out of the Phillip Pullman books (Golden Compass, Subtle Knife, Amber Spyglass).  It plays on HBO and I got the first season thru Netflix.  I started on the first disc, and have watched the first two episodes so far.  It's not bad.  The landscapes and cityscapes are well done and convincing.  The daemons are well done.  I assume both are all CGI. The interior scenes, especially of Jordan College are beautiful and well done.  The airships look good.  
    They gave black actors a lot of parts in this one.  They all seem to be pretty good actors.
    It doesn't move all that fast.  After two hour long episodes we have only gotten Lyra picked up by Mrs Coulter and brought to Mrs Coulter's London place.  Lyra has just decided that Mrs Coulter means her no good and she slips out the window and runs for it.   The girl they cast for Lyra's part is really too old, too tall, and not all that cute.  The Golden Compass movie had a better young actress for Lyra's part.  
    I read the books, some years ago, so I could recognize the major characters and know their names.  The poor second string characters don't get names.  Nobody ever addresses them by name, or speaks about them and gives their name.  If you haven't read the books, you will need to pay very careful attention to the plot or you will get lost.  
   All in all, it's pretty good, I plan to watch all the episodes.  

Lotta whining, lotta bitching, Senate grills Big Tech

The senate has spend all morning grilling Big Tech, Facebook and Twitter.  Senators have complained about them.  No senator had the stones to propose any concrete fixes.  Such as using Sherman anti trust to break both of them up for being monopolies.  Break them into smaller pieces, let the pieces compete against each other in the marketplace for users and advertisers.  That will force them to stop objectionable activities such as censoring conservatives.

Smokey and the Bandit 1977 Goldie Oldie

 Burt Reynolds and Sally Fields.  This one won an Oscar surprisingly enough.  Box office was good enough to make a second one in 1980.  Lot's of great cars.  They don't make cars like that anymore.  Enjoyable mindless watch last night.  Sally Fields does a great job.  She is cute, funny, and tough enough to keep Burt Reynolds more or less in line.  Jackie Gleason makes a great redneck southern sheriff. 

Unconvincing computer expert on Fox news

 He was billed as chairman of the computer science department at University of Michigan.  It was claimed that he had been studying voting machines for 20 years.  I did not catch his name.  He claimed that the voting machines were totally secure, no way they could switch Trump votes to Biden.  Spoke in generalities.  He did not address a number of items.  Can new code be loaded into the voting machine by merely inserting a flash drive into a USB socket?  How is the machine's code patched or upgraded?  What checks are performed to insure that ALL the voting machines have received the latest code?  What prevents a hacker from changing the code in the machines?  How old are the machines in service?  Were they manufactured by Dominion Software?  Who wrote the code in the machines?  What tests did he perform on voting machines?  How many machines did he test?  Do the voting machines produce a hard copy of the final vote?  A filled out ballot?  Are the voting machines connected to the public internet?  or to a private network?  What version of Windows are the voting machines running?  Have all the Microsoft patches been applied? 

   This guy did not convince me that he really knew what he was talking about.  I spent 30 years programming computers.

Impressive pro Trump Demo going on in DC

 It's live on Fox TV right now.  It is big, both on the ground video and airborne video show really impressively large numbers of people.  They all carry flags, US flags, Trump flags, all kind of flags.  It is a peaceful demonstration.  Nobody is throwing stuff at cops, they are not setting fires, they are not looting.  That is good.  They are marching down the streets, I don't know DC well enough to recognize which streets.  This ought to make Trump's day.  Might not get him elected, but it ought to warm his heart.  If the Republicans can muster this kind of support for the Georgia run off, it ought to give us two Republican Georgia senators and a Republican senate.  Let's hope.

The beginnings of Civilization, 20,000 to 8000 BC.

 I just watched a thought providing U-Tube video.  “The beginnings of Civilization, 20,000 to 8000 BC.  Civilization, (www.utube.com/watch $ v=bQxoZsHUw) by which they (and I) mean cities, needs agriculture to feed the city dwellers.  You cannot feed even a small town by having the citizens go out and hunt deer.  Hunter gathering can feed a family, or even a number of families living in a small village, especially in a location with warm winters.  But it cannot feed a city population of perhaps 20% of the population.  Plus, the meat from hunting won’t keep where as grain, flour, will.

    Obviously they cannot start farming until the ice age glaciers melt out.  Nothing will grow when there is snow on the ground all year round.  We used to think that happened 10,000 years ago.  Lots of recent archeology has pushed that back to 20,000 years ago.  We have some (not a lot yet) of archeological evidence of some agriculture getting started way back then, 20,000 years before present.  We don’t see real cities until 10,000 years ago.  Looks like it took 10,000 years for agriculture to develop into a city supporting force.  What took so long?

   Well there are a number of technologies needed to make agriculture work.  First of all you have to figure out how to make grain (grass seed basically) edible by humans.  I cannot eat the grass seed I have in my garage for seeding the lawn; it’s mostly dried blades of grass, with very little carbs to it.  Wheat seeds are better, more carbs and less blades of grass.  The milling process, using mill stones, separates the dried blades of grass and grinds the carb part of the seed into flour.   Once we have flour we can brew beer, attractive because of the alcohol content and containing a fair amount of nourishment.  Today they sell Bud Light to the many customers who don’t want to gain weight.  More complex is learning how to get bread dough to rise, and figuring out that baking the risen dough yields tasty bread.  That might have taken a few thousand years. 

   Then we need some tools to till the soil.  I suppose with enough hard labor you can till a small field with nothing better than a digging stick, but I would not like to depend upon it.  To make a hoe takes metal.  To make a primitive plow (an ard they are called) needs a small amount of metal.  I suppose you can harvest the grain with a flint sickle but I think a metal one will work better.  Then you have to store the harvest in something.  Baskets, pots, or bags.  All of these had not been invented 20,000 years ago.  Pots only turn up 9000 years ago.  

   And then there is animal husbandry, which must have started with sheep and goats and pigs, with cows coming later.  Which needs shepherds and swineherds and goatherds to keep the stock on the farm.  And sheep dogs.  Must have taken generations to breed up sheep dogs from the hunting dogs and watch dogs.

We have evidence of serious irregularities

 That 6000 vote glitch in Michigan, where the Dominion Voting Systems software  turned 6000 votes for Trump into 6000 votes for Biden.  That Dominion Software program is used in every county in Michigan and in 30 other states.   I think some serious checking up everywhere that program is used is in order.  It would only take a few more 6000 vote glitches to elect Trump. 

Too much automation

 Michigan just discovered that election automation software furnished to the state by  Dominion Voting Systems  turned 6000 votes for Trump into 6000 votes for Biden.  Wow.  Did Michigan do any testing of this software before putting it into service?  And, more to the point, why are they using software to add up all the votes?  Surely this could be done the old fashioned way with pencil and paper?  Like we do in New Hampshire.

  

International Space Station (ISS) has been operational for 20 years now.

 Nice long piece in Aviation Week about the  history of ISS.  It got started under Ronald Reagan back in 1984, 36 years ago.  At the time the project was viewed as US-Russia cooperation deal intended to generate some friendship between the two countries.  And the Russians were allocated some of the early important and expensive modules, on the theory it would keep them out of trouble.  The original planning was to use the US Space Shuttle to lift the bigger chunks into orbit.  Good thing we got that part done before a second disaster grounded the Shuttle fleet for good.  As it was the Shuttles flew 37 missions to the ISS.  

   The major bit of information we learned from operating ISS is the bad effects of long term living in zero G.  As it was, the ISS astronauts were required to exercise like crazy every day, and even with all this effort, they all returned to earth seriously weakened.  They all recovered after return to Earth, but thinking about a crew returning from a long mission too weak to even fasten their seat belts is worrisome, to put it mildly.  Any long duration space missions, like to Mars or the asteroid belt will need space craft that supply artificial gravity.  Presumable this will be done with hoop shaped sections that rotate to provide centrifugal force as a substitute for gravity.

If they block you on Facebook or Twitter...

Start a blog instead.  They aren't censoring them, yet.  

TV is unGuided

 

TV Guide website is confused. I click on it and it comes up with the generic country wide menu, listing network names but no channel numbers. So I go thru the set your location razzle dazzle and get some channel numbers for Spectrum cable. Then it says you gotta login in order to save your location. So I have a username and a password. And then it asks for my email address. And I hit login and draw an error message "That email is in use". So it won't remember my location. It didn't used to be this way. Anyone have better luck with it?

Where did all the Macintosh apples go?

 MacIntosh, nice and crisp, sweet, good tasting apple.  Used to be most common in supermarkets.  Something happened and now all the markets have are apples with weird names.  And the weird name apples are mealy, not much crisp to them, not very sweet.  A low speed apple.  Bring back the MacIntoshes.

Gloves, color there of

 Now that Fall is upon us and it's getting cold, I see Trump wearing gloves to keep his hands warm.  Only Trump wears black leather gloves, that make his hands nearly invisible.  Trump uses his hands while speaking, gestures and the like.  Except we cannot see the hand gestures.  I recommend that Trump get himself a lighter colored pair.  Nice tan deerskin gloves like I wear for skiing and for driving.

Are there any never-Biden democrats??

 There ought to be.  It's obvious to anyone that Biden is too old, too frail, and too confused to make a good president.  His spoken plans, green new deal, ending fossil fuels, another national wide lockdown, more free stuff, terrible tax hikes. spell economic catastrophe.  If he dies in office, or gets booted via 25th amendment, Kamala Harris, the ultimate far lefty becomes president.  

   Surely there are some democrats who fear this enough to withhold a Biden vote, or even, gulp, vote for Trump.  Could there be as many as 1%?  Or even 5%?

Postmark? What Postmark?

 All this talk about ballots postmarked by election day make me wonder.  And a court case about ballots that come in without a date. I get a lot of mail.  Some of it doesn't have a post mark at all.  Some of it has a post mark, but no date. The ones that went thru a Pitney Bowes postage meter have a date in the postmark.  How does one make sure his ballot gets a postmark with a date? 

  The date in the Pitney Bowes postmark is the date the company processed that batch of bulk mail.  Want to bet that mail doesn't get to the real post office for a day or two after the company processed it?  Or more?  

A lotta trashing of political opponents happening

 Scanning down my Facebook feed I get a Yuge number of political ads.  Most of which explain why the opponent is a no-good-nick.  OK, and I read them, but I figure the charges are over rated, if not down right false.  Nobody is running ads of the "If elected I will do this and that and the other thing to make your lives better."  It is easier to believe campaign promises.  As it is, if we elect any of these turkeys we have no idea what they might do in office.  Sad.

Who is going to win???

 

 I simply do not know. The polls suggest that Biden has a small to moderate lead. They said this last time, and were predicting a Hillary win right up until the last minute. The polls have some problems. They run a 1000 call telephone poll and get 100 sets of replies. The pollsters have to boil all those numbers down to a duality, votes for Trump, votes for Biden. To do this, they get the figures for Republican and Democrat registration for the district. Then they adjust the count, to match what they expect.

And there is the problem of the shy Trump voter. The left is so unpleasant toward Republicans that many of them simply refuse to express any party affiliation at all, not even to pollsters. Between all these factors, I believe the polls could be seriously in error.

And I see Trump rallies with tens of thousands of cheering people. I don't see any Biden rallies at all. Surely all that good Trump enthusiasm will show up in the election.

The Great Debate

Meh.  Neither Trump nor Biden made a serious gaffe.  I would rate it as a draw.  The two candidates did not interrupt each other like they did the last time.  An improvement.  Both guys threw out a lot of "facts", which I could not check, and in many cases I had never heard of before.  It is hard to evaluate arguments when the "facts" thrown out in support might be real and might be phony.  Biden denied taking any money from the Russians.  That's hard to believe.  If Hunter Biden received $3.5 mil from the Russians I cannot imagine that he did not split the take with "the big guy".  Nobody has denied the story about Hunter's Russian payoff.  Silence gives assent.  If they don't deny it, it is probably true.  Fox news has 12 days to check out Biden's "facts" and label some, or all of them false.  Unless Fox convinces us voters that Biden was telling really ugly whoppers, I think this much bally-hooed debate won't have much effect on the election.

Aviation Week proposes hydrogen to fuel airliners.

 Reason is that hydrogen burns cleaner than jet fuel.  The H2 burns in atmospheric oxygen and the result is just plain water, H2O. Whereas jet fuel, a hydrocarbon, burns down to CO2 and H2O.  The greenies love the idea of no C2O in the exhaust of jet liners.  Not mentioned is the source of all that hydrogen.  In real life, we get hydrogen by reforming natural gas, of which the frackers have given us a good supply.  Natural gas is a mixture of various hydrocarbons, methane CH4 being common.  There are a lot of other compounds in the natural gas, and reforming squeezes hydrogen out of the ones that have a bit more hydrogen than the methane.  So, to fuel up a single jetliner we need maybe 30,000 gallons of hydrogen, and makes that gives us another 30,000 gallons of reformed natural gas.  We may have squeezed all the excess hydrogen out of it, but it will still burn just fine.  So every gallon of hydrogen burned in flight, we burn another gallon of natural gas on the ground somewhere.  This is reducing CO2 in the air??  Never mind, greenies won't understand.  

To get enough hydrogen into the aircraft we have to liquefy it.  Takes a lot of refrigeration and a lot of pressure to get it liquid.  The aircraft's hydrogen tanks have to be very strong and round.  The standard aircraft practice of just filling up the wings with liquid fuel won't work, the wings cannot take the pressure.   Aviation Week didn't say much about that.  

   Every so often Aviation Week pushes something really crazy.  This year it is hydrogen.  Years ago they ran a cover story about a secret American single stage to orbit space plane that was actually flying.  That story ran in just that one issue and was never heard of again.

Big Tech censors Hunter Biden story. Sherman Anti Trust can fix.

 The New York Post broke a juicy story about Hunter Biden getting multi million dollar payoffs from China to get the Chinese an intro to Joe Biden, who was Vice President at the time.  Wow.  Twitter and Facebook decided to censor this story and they have been zapping off their site any mentions of it, copies of it, probably any post with "Hunter" in it anywhere. 

   This particular story is so juicy that I think most of us have seen it on other media.  But, I don't think it is right for a couple of big silicon valley companies to be censoring stories, let alone juicy stories.  What to do?

Use the anti monopoly provisions of the Sherman Anti Trust act to break both companies in half.  Each half gets half the users, half the advertisers, half the offices and employees.  Both half get new names.  Both halves will work hard to please their users and advertisers, lest said users and advertisers flee to the other half.  That will work better that any sort of government regulation.   

First snow of the 2020-2021 winter up in Franconia Notch.  We have 4 1/2 inches of wet snow down and it is still coming down lightly.  They haven't plowed yet. 
 

Columbus

 You gotta respect Columbus.  By opening the America's to European exploitation he doubled of tripled the amount of land that all of European history had played out in.  The western frontier, land for all, the Homestead Act, was only possible after Columbus discovered all that new land.  A European history that played out in the limited land of Europe would have been "nasty, brutish, and short".

   Columbus, for a tarry handed seaman, was all sorts of persuasive. He got the queen of Spain to hock the crown jewels to finance his first voyage.  He needed the money to charter or buy Nina, Pinta and full rigged ship Santa Maria.  

Columbus was a canny seaman.  He knew the Atlantic winds, way back in 1492.  He understood that the trade winds, a little south of Spain, blew toward America.  Once he got there, he knew that the westerlies, north around the latitude of New York, blew steadily back to Europe and he used them to get home.  He had a better understanding of North Atlantic winds than Christopher Jones, skipper of the Mayflower, had 130 years later.  Jones sailed into the teeth of the westerlies on his way to Plymouth Rock.  He nearly did not make it. 

Anyhow, lets keep Columbus day as it is.  If we want to do an American Indian day, pick some other date. 

Judge Barrett hearings

 Democrats are saying that Judge Barrett will strike down Roe vs Wade, Obamacare, Obergerfell (sp?) (the gay marriage ruling) and I forget what else.  I am pretty sure Judge Barrett will rule in accordance with the written law.  If that causes her to strike down any of these Democrat sacred cows, too bad.  Congress can pass new laws anytime it feels like it.  If they have the votes.  Getting enough votes to reinstate Roe vs Wade might be tough.  Same goes for reinstating Obama care or Obergerfell (sp?) 

Faith and Justice

 

Religious faith is a good thing for judges to have.  Religion is the origin of our notions of right and wrong, good and evil, moral and immoral, just and unjust.  Moses brought the 10 commandments down from Mount Sinai a very long time ago.  Religion also speaks of mercy, as well as justice.  Justice needs to be tempered with mercy. 

   I think Judge Barrett’s Catholic faith makes her a better judge. 

Judge Barrett hearings.

Been watching the Senate  judicial committee warming up for hearings on Judge Barrett.  Instead of discussing Judge Barrett's qualifications, fitness to serve, and  judicial philosophy, the Democrats used their time to trash Trump and whine about Senate refuse\al to consent to Merrick Garland's appointment back in 2016.  

   The true purpose of hearings on Supreme Court nominees is to inform us voters as to the fitness of the nominee to serve.  We know that Democrats all hate Trump, we have heard that before.  And events from way back in 2016 are also well known and of little interest in 2020.  We really want to hear about Judge Barrett.  I suppose the lack of Democrat discussion of the nominee means they have been unable to find any dirt to smear her with.  Be thankful for small favors.

Peak Leaf Season in Franconia Notch

I fired up the Buick yesterday and did some cruising around looking for good leaf pictures. 

Mt. Lafayette from Lincoln.  Winter is coming.

Hard working tree.  This one looked a lot more colorful by eye than it does in this photo.

Lafayette from Peabody slopes.  Note Eagle Cliff in foreground.  Winter is coming.

Lafayette again.  I could not decide which of these two photos was the better one.

Good bright red tree at Mittersill.

Nobody makes campaign promises anymore.

 Used to be, candidates would promise to do all sorts of good stuff if elected.  And, when elected they failed to live up to their promises, we voters and the newsies got all over their case.  Not any more.  Neither Trump not Biden have promised a thing this year.  We cannot trash the winner for reneging on his campaign promises, 'cause he never made any.  With Trump, it's a good bet that he will keep on doing what he has been doing for the last four years.  With Biden, or rather with the people who are "advising" Biden, it's hard to tell.  They have let a lot of far left talk drift out to the electorate, and the electorate has been lukewarm to negative on it, and they have stopped talking about it.  Anything might happen.  I don't see much dynamic leader left in Biden, not at his age.  He could just go with the flow until he dies in office.