Words of the Weasel Pt 9 Nuanced

After the Obama-McCain show at the Saddleback church last night, the CNN after action commentators repeatedly describe Obama's talk as "nuanced", or "highly nuanced". Doesn't sound that bad does it? Actually, I thought Obama was vague and evasive. McCain on the other hand came right to the point. The audience, gave Obama some polite applause, but the gave McCain a whole lot more. When asked if he believed in the existence of evil and what would he do about it, Obama spoke at length, without getting to the point, McCain's first words were "Defeat it".
So, "nuanced" is a democrat's word for vague and evasive.

Lakes of oil, on Titan

Aviation Week has an image of a 150 mile long lake of liquid hydrocarbons on Titan. It even has a beach. They figure it is oil because it's so smooth and dark that it has to be liquid, and the only thing that stays liquid at Titanian surface temperatures is stuff like ethane. Water would be frozen solid and hence not show up as dark and smooth as this lake does.
Too bad it's on Titan. We could use it here.

Space Shuttle Tank workforce layoffs coming

Aviation Week reports that Lockheed Martin will begin reducing the 2445 man workforce on the Space Shuttle external tank project. That's the big round tank that goes inbetween the two solid rocket boosters. It's just a tank, no engines, avionics, or auxiliary equipment.
2445 men to make a handful of tanks a year? Used to be a whole fighter wing, 90 aircraft, flying 100 combat missions a day, only had 900 men on the ground. That's crew crews, armament men, mechanics and electronics techs. Them tanks must be hand made, and accompanied by a mass of paper work as big as the tank to have 2445 guys charging tank work on their time cards. Can you spell featherbedding?

Tractor Supply, a small box store, opened in Littleton

A small box store going for the guy business. Eclectic mix of hand tools, automobile parts, garden stuff, pet feed, some clothing of the work boot, cowboy hat and blue jean sort. Brand new store building, across the parking lot from Wal Mart. All merchandise marked "China". The marketing dept was live wire enough to mail me a "grand opening" flyer with a $10 discount card.
So I visited them. Walked clean around the store looking at stuff. Despite the discount card, got out again with out buying anything. Didn't need car parts, the hand tools were nicely chromed and polished but I couldn't help wondering if the underlying steel was any good. Didn't have anywhere to stash a 50 pound sack of cat food, and cowboy hats aren't my style. I wish them luck, but they need someone else's money, rather than mine.

Save the world for $10 billion

The Wall St Journal had Newt Gengrich and Jerry Brown each explain how they would improve to condition of the world if they had $10 billion to spend. As one might imagine there was a divergence is approach.
Jerry plumped for improving efficiency of appliances and cars and such, conserving energy. He would blow his money on efficiency programs. Hmm. Are not the current prices of fuel and electricity incentive enough to sell the most efficient possible devices and hand the expense? Look at the Prius sales compared to SUV sales this year. Prius is efficient and expensive and selling well. They are giving away SUV's and pickup trucks cause nobody wants to pay for filling 'em up. Far as I can see, Jerry's plan won't anything that the free market isn't already doing. I'm sure he could spend the $10 billion. What ex politician ever had trouble spending money? But it won't make any difference.
Newt on the other hand, favored offering prizes for technology we need. Like a malaria vaccine, a cheap sea water desalinization process, cheap travel to low earth orbit. I was a little disappointed in Newt when he proposed a prize for a hydrogen car engine and a nuclear fuel rod recycle plan. Ordinary car engines can run on hydrogen, and nuclear fuel rods can be recycled for a profit, they are rich in valuable uranium and plutonium. The only reason we don't recycle them now is fear that the plutonium might get diverted into terrorist nukes. I used to think Newt was well informed. Not so sure about that now.

Forty days and forty nights until the sewers back up

We are working on forty. By my count we are up to twenty back to back rainy days. We now get "Emergency Flood Warnings" with an attention getting urk urk urk noise on the FM radio. We have grass assaulting the house 'cause it's too wet to mow. It's so chilly we light the fireplace, in August. Must be more global warming...

Bloatware

Finally upgraded the home computer inkjet printer. The ten year old HP 600, with the erratic paper feed, got retired to the town transfer station (aka dump) and replaced by a one year old HP 4260, kindness of youngest son who won't be needing it at college.
XP's plug&play detected the new printer but lacked a driver for it. Since all good drivers are on the net, I was able to down load the right one from the HP website. 35 Megabytes of printer driver. Oink. The old 600 driver came on a pair of 3.5" floppy discs, total capacity 2 megabytes. So, software to do the same task, has grown 17.5X fatter over ten years. Are all the competant programmers retired or what?
Also noticed the new drivers didn't use plug & play (aka plug & pray). HP was very firm about loading the driver BEFORE hooking up the printer, which totally defeats the plug and play logic in XP. Plug and play was supposed make driver loading dead easy for the user. XP polls the hardware to see what was out there at each boot time, and only if it can't find a driver does it go thru the "New hardware detected; Please insert diskette" routine. Good idea, but MS never got the bugs out of it I guess. I did a plug&play driver back in Win 98 days, and the intense pain required to get it to work is still fresh in my memory. Looks like the pain is still there, causing the HP guys to bypass plug&play. One of the reasons for XP's sluggish boot up is all the time spent polling all the hardware, every time it boots.