We have a replacement for Global Warming.

Now that global warming is getting debunked, the disaster industry is looking for a new menace. They think they found one.
Solar storms.
Sounds bad doesn't it? There is a bit a added drama in the reference to "every eleven years the sun goes ballistic" . What is the author talking about? He is referring to the sunspot cycle. The number of sunspots rises and falls on an eleven year cycle. This was discovered back in the 1600's. Sunspots do effect the earth's ionosphere, a fact well known to high frequency radio operators. Radio propagation is best at sunspot maximun, and worst at sunspot minumum. Radio amateurs have known about this for nearly 100 years. Nothing new here.
Now the disaster industry is beating the drums about a massive solar storm knocking out the electric power grid.
Highly unlikely. All those wires running thru the air get struck by lightning, every day, thousands of times. A lightning bolt can do real damage, start fires, blow out electrical equipment. Nothing keeps out a lightening bolt, the voltage is high enough to arc thru any amount of insulation, including thousands of feet of air. A bolt struck the powerline leading to my mother's house a few years ago. It destroyed her satellite receiver and burned the insides of her CD player black. Took out some light bulbs too. But the electric grid kept right on working, her lights stayed on.
Bottom line, the electric grid shrugs off lightning hits strong enough to fry consumer electronics.
No solar storm is going to be a strong as a lightening hit.

can we believe CBO estimates?

CBO Congressional Budget Office, makes predictions of Federal government revenue, deficits, debt, and so on. Typically they are asked to predict the effect of laws (Obamacare, Bush tax cut extentions, hiking taxes on the wealthy) upon the Federal fisc. Unfortunately, CBO predictions are often pure BS. For instance CBO predicted that Obamacare would save money. Yeah right.
CBO predictions are based upon unrealistic assumptions. Such as, Congress won't ease the Alternate Minimum Tax (which they do every year). Or that Congress won't pass a "doc fix" easing Medicare fee cuts (which they do every year).
The House of Representatives spent today arguing over reform of the CBO estimating process. The Republicans want more realistic estimates. The democrats stand foresquare for bull crap estimates.

Romney wins Florida, Thank Goodness

Big relief last night. Mitt beat Newt decisively in Florida. A good thing. Mitt can beat Obama, Newt cannot, Newt is too flaky, and has accumulated too many enemies over the 30 years he has been in national politics.
Unless something really strange happens, Mitt will get the nomination, and Newt will go back to consulting.

It's baack

My old friend virus DOS/Alureon.A popped up yet again today. His footfall is heavier and louder now, I pretty much knew I had a virus as soon as he showed up. I ran the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool (January version) and if found him. Only took 4 hours of scanning.
But the damn thing has gotten wilier. The fix I posted about earlier this month no longer worked. Alureon has figured out how bollix the ComputerManagment/Storage/DiskManagment tool I used to blow his partition away last time. The tool still starts, but Alureon has done something magic to cripple the tool and make it ignore the hard drives. It just shows the DVD drive.
However antivirus MalWareBytes has gotten stronger and was able to find Alureon on a quick scan and blow it away.
I don't know what security hole in Windows is letting this bastard in, but Microsoft hasn't patched it. Thanks Bill Gates.

Voter ID

Listened to a long talk on NHPR about voter ID. It gets down to "show a picture ID (driver's license for real people) in order to vote." Such a law failed to pass in NH just the other day. Can't remember if the Gov'not vetoed it or they didn't have enough votes.
Trouble is, none of the three guests on the show were willing to admit that we had any voter fraud in NH. So if we don't have a problem, why are we agitating for more red tape? I mean our polls are all manned by public spirited, un-paid volunteer citizens who get up early and work late on election day. God bless them. I don't want to make them do even more unless there is good reason for it. If we don't have a problem, why make things harder for everyone?
Plus, my town is so small everyone knows every one, and the volunteer poll workers pretty much know every voter.

Boondoggle

The Wall St Journal reports the Pentagon spent $330 million to develop 20 fifteen ton bunker buster bombs. Wow.
That's $16.5 million per bomb.
Bunker busters are nothing new. British genius Barnes Wallis invented the first one back in WWII. Wallis' "Tallboy" weighed six tons, and the later "Grand Slam" weighed ten tons, the heaviest that 1940's aircraft could get off the ground. These bombs have a very strong steel casing and when dropped from high altitude, they penetrate deep into the ground before exploding. The casing has to be very strong, in one case, old cannon barrels were used to make the bomb casings.
Nothing here to justify a $16.5 million price tag.
Looks like a good place for some defense budget cuts. Better here than cutting 89,000 soldiers and marines.

Computer Movie Reviewer

Good old Netflix keeps throwing up movie suggestions " You ought to rent this one" to me. And Netflix does pretty well, most of the suggestion are things I like. Netflix claims to select each movie suggestion "because you liked Such and Such".
This means that Netflix has a way of classifying movies, so that given one movie the customer likes, the computer finds movies of a simular classification system.
I'd love to know just how that classification system works. How much weight is given to who stars in the movie vs subject matter, vs era, vs who knows what? Surely a classification system that matches my personal likes and dislikes so closely could tell us something about what makes a good movie and what makes a crummy one.
Hollywood could use the help. They have been making more crummy movies than good movies lately.