Whither the wired phone?

It's clearly on the way out.  I just bought a new one.  My phone service had been getting noisy and staticy with drop outs.  My children all insisted their phones were fine, it must be Dad's phone going bad. Phone in question was an AT&T (made in China) Trimline Princess model, maybe 7 years old.  Coil cord was looking a little frayed, but other wise it looked OK.  But, I took a trip to Staples in Littleton looking for a new plain old telephone.  I used to get phones at Radio Shack, but the Littleton Radio Shack died four years ago.       Staples did not have any standard desk phones anymore, you know, the ones with just 12 buttons to dial with, and the handset plunks down on top of, and crosswise to the bottom unit.  Like Western Electric used to make back in the good old days. Staples did have several humungous "office" phones, a zillion buttons, four lines, takes up your whole desk.  They had some more Princess phones, and just one desk phone.  It was an all electronic, speed dial, push button, speaker, caller ID, AT&T model CL2909, made in China, phone, in white, for a mere $32.  It was the only real desk phone in the store.  All the rest were either humungous, or radio phones, or tiny little phones that won't stay put on your desk.  So, if you have some phones around the house getting old and flaky, now would be a good time to replace them, while you still can. 
   All electronic wonder phone comes with a 43 page instruction manual, needs four AA  batteries, has a three line LCD display that includes a clock, a calendar, and a directory.   It wanted to be programmed for language, area code[s], clock set, calendar set, and some other stuff.  I managed to get thru all this with numerous retries.  A day later I find the clever little clock doesn't keep very good time.  It looses three minutes a day, which is pretty bad for an electronic clock   I have a 100 year old wind up pendulum mantle clock that keeps better time than that.  After a couple of tries I managed to program a couple of speed dial buttons.  And they worked.  I looked at the "directory" feature and decided it just wasn't worth it.  You have to enter the phone number, (not too bad) and then enter the name, using the number keys.  That was so complicated that I decided not to bother.  My desk computer holds my phone numbers anyhow.  The speaker button not only turns on the speaker (Living alone, I really need a speaker phone) but lifts the hook switch and leaves it lifted, which is equivalent to leaving the phone off hook.  Shortly you will hear that automatic voice from the phone company prompting you to put the phone back on the hook.  Useful feature that is. 

Snuff 'em or Snatch 'em?

TV news has been nattering about whether to launch a drone strike against an unnamed American working for the Taliban, or Al Quada, or some terrorist outfit. Drone strike means a hit with a Hellfire anti tank missile, and that's lethal.  Target will never talk again.
   We ought to fly some troops in by helicopter, snatch him, and bring him home for grilling.  If the nogoodnick is worth a drone strike, surely he knows something that we would like to know.  Like we did on Bin Laden, only take the bum alive.
   Or do we fear US courts setting him free after we get him back to Gitmo?  Or does the Obama administration prefer to snuff 'em rather than put them into Gitmo?   Or do we lack the stones to waterboard him til he talks?  You'd think if we are ready to kill him, that we wouldn't flinch from a little third degree.

Terminal Vagueness mars Astronomy abstract in Science

I came across this in a post on Istapundit, titled "Archeology of Stars".  I followed the link to a longish NYT piece by Curtis Brainard, and then I followed one of Brainard's links back to an abstract in Science.   Author was an MIT astronomer, Dr. Anna Frebel.    So I read the abstract, several times. 
   Lead sentence. "Current cosmological models^{1, 2} indicate that the Milky Way’s stellar halo was assembled from many smaller systems."   Hmm.  Tell me about those "systems".  Systems of what?  Stars, dark matter, gas and dust, Legos, black holes, auto parts?  Surely Dr. Frebel could have used a more specific phrase in the lead sentence.  The use of the verb "assembled" is off putting.  We assemble manufactured goods like cars, Ipads, TV sets.  Surely she doesn't mean the Milky Way galaxy was assembled in a galaxy factory.
   Her next sentence contains the phrase "galactic building blocks".  Maybe she was talking about systems of Legos?  Then she introduces the phrase "dwarf galaxies" but does not define it.  From context I think what she calls "dwarf galaxies" are what used to be called "globular star clusters". 
    Buried in the middle of the abstract we finally get down to the interesting stuff.  She has discovered an extremely iron poor star  in the "Sculptor dwarf galaxy".  Not being an astronomer, I don't know where the Sculptor dwarf galaxy is, but I guess it is a globular cluster attached to our Milky Way.  In short, something close by, or at least close compared to the quasars which are so distant as to be nearly as old as the Big Bang. 
   Why is iron-poor interesting.  Iron poor makes the star old, perhaps as old as the quasars.  The Big Bang is thought to have filled the universe with only hydrogen and helium.  The first stars lacked any heavy elements, and in fact created all the heavy elements by fusion.   Therefore an iron poor star is old because it formed before the heavy elements were made.  And, this one is close enough to get a good look at.  The quasars are so far away that little can be learned about them. 
   Dr. Frebel has made a very interesting discovery.  But her English language skills are so poor that she would have flunked high school English at my school.  Someone should give her a copy of Strunk and White.   She would become a more widely known astronomer if she would bother to learn how to write decent English. 

Debt ceiling hike

Congress is playing chicken with the debt ceiling, again.  It's one of those things that must pass.  Treasury cannot borrow any more money, sell any more T-bills until the debt ceiling is raised.  About one third of federal spending is financed by debt.  Unless we raise the debt ceiling we will have to cut federal spending by a third.  Which is inconceivable.  All the wrangling over "sequester" and budget has only managed to slow the rise of federal spending, the Congress critters lack the stones to actually cut anything. 
   With a must pass bill, the Congress critters all say to themselves "I will attach my pet bill to the must pass bill and it will go thru too."   Trouble is, the obvious things to tie to the debt ceiling hike are spending cuts.  But after a year of wrangling, there are no more cuts left to cut.  Or rather, the cuts that have enough votes to pass have all been made.  The rest of the spending has die hard defenders who promise to open their veins on the floor of Congress and bleed to death right on Cspan if their pet bit of pork gets cut.
   Exhibit A.  The farm bill they passed a couple of days ago.  Pure pork, but they all voted for it.  And now, they will have vote for a debt ceiling hike. 
   We need to remember in November.  And we ought to remember who voted for that farm bill, rather than who votes to hike the debt ceiling. 

Car Talk

The TV news has been talking about a "Vehicle to Vehicle" system whereby  electronics in cars would talk to other cars and somehow improve safety.  Presumably each car says "Here I am, Please don't hit me."  Receiving cars would compare their position with the position of the broadcasting car and if the on car microprocessor thinks there is danger of collision it brakes or, more daringly, swerves to miss. 
   Let's skip over some technical problems, like jamming of the airwaves during those 12 lane bumper to bumper traffic jams we get on the New Jersey Turnpike, or the Long Island Expressway.  And accuracy of the GPS signals the cars would use to figure their positions.    There is only 12 feet of difference between a car safely on coming in the opposite lane and a drunk coming head on in your lane.  If the GPS is off by only a few feet in either car, the microprocessors will panic and jam on the brakes.  This I do not need after dark in a snow storm.  Then you get no protection against a car whose electronics are broke and is off the air. 
   The radio signals don't penetrate dirt, hills, Jersey barriers, any sort of obstacle that would block your sight.  In short, if you cannot see the other car, the vehicle-to-vehicle signals cannot get thru either.  So the system is no better than driving by eye, and I have a lot more confidence in my driving skills as opposed to a microprocessor's driving skills.
   This sounds like a pure cost enhancement to me.  Makes the car more expensive, harder to repair and less safe.
   The TV newsies have been nattering about privacy.  They fear the system will broadcast your name, driver's license number, and every place you drive to.  That may be a problem, but I'd worry more about having the brakes jammed on in bad weather and throwing my car into a spin, or swerving into a telephone pole when evading an imaginary obstacle.  

US diplomat can't tell friends from enemies

F**k the EU.   This from a senior US diplomat, Victoria Nuland, an assistant secretary of state no less.  I suppose Hillary hired her.  With a klutz like this in a senior position in the State Dept no wonder America has been loosing out abroad.  Victoria doesn't know that the Europeans are friends and allies, unlike say Iran, China, Russia, and the Norks.   Telling friends and allies to f**k themselves turns friends into enemies pretty quickly.  That Hillary would tolerate an idiot like this at the top of the state dept is nearly as bad a scandal as Benghasi.
   In addition to having destructive attitudes toward allies, Victoria has a brain made of solid concrete.  Everyone knows that the Russians have been tapping US embassy phones since Lenin's day.  To badmouth our allies and then discuss a new Ukrainian government over a phone everyone knows the Russians have tapped, is beyond stupid. 
   Betcha she keeps her job.

When does a recession stop?

Depends who you ask.  Economists call a time of falling economic activity a recession.  They used to call it a depression, but after the great depression of the 1930's they decided to use a less scary word.  Anyhow, a recession is over when things stop getting worse.  In the case of the current great recession (or Great Depression 2.0) things stopped going down hill back in 2009.   So economists will tell you the recession is over.  The Obama administration loves this interpretation, and the newsies (Democrats all) have picked this up and spread it around.
  Trouble is, things haven't gotten much better since 2009.  Economic growth has been very low, 1 or 2 percent, less than population growth.  When the economy doesn't grow as fast as the population grows, everyone gets poorer.  You have more people and less stuff, and so people get  less stuff.  That's been the story since 2009, five years ago. 
   Ask a typical citizen when the recession is over.  He will tell you it's over when things are back to where they were before the economy went down the tubes.  When he has a job again.  By that standard, and it's a reasonable standard, we are still stuck in Great Depression 2.0.