It's out, it has made the WSJ best selling hardback fiction. Subtitled "Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard". I enjoyed it. Rick Riordan started writing about Percy Jackson, a teen aged New York kid who gets mixed up with the gods of Greek mythology. Those were good enough to get the first two books made into fairly decent movies. This book has a teen aged Boston street kid get mixed up with the gods of Norse mythology. As a long time resident of Boston, I enjoyed the various local references, Longfellow Bridge, Charles St, Boston Aquarium, Bunker Hill, all places I have been to and know fairly well.
It's a "young adult" book but I liked it, even if I am no longer a young adult. The protagonist is a decent teenager, who is given (stuck with) a horrible problem, he rises to the occasion, and with some help from his friends, wins thru in the end. There is a gutsy girl friend, some strange relatives, and some difficult to handle gods. Good fun.
Monday, November 16, 2015
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Picking a College
College is VERY expensive. Too expensive to waste. You go to college to improve your prospects of a good job after graduation, to learn something of value, and to graduate, actually get that degree.
You want to avoid colleges like Mizzou, which made nationwide headlines after it's president resigned under pressure from black radicals. No teaching or learning is gonna happen there, not for months, and a showing a Mizzou degree to an employer will get you laughed at now.
So how do you weed out the crazy places? Well, first off, visit their website. What activities do they take pride in? Opening a new laboratory or running off a climate change demo? Check the student groups on campus. Chapters of things like the American Physical Association or IEEE are good signs, chapters of ACLU or SDS are bad signs. Count the faculty, tenured professors and part timer "adjunct" professors. Count the student body. Divide students by faculty members to find the student faculty ratio. Count the number of courses offered. Sort the courses between real learning (English, physics, history, math, etc) and talky talky courses (gender studies, sociology, anthropology, ethnic studies,art history, etc.). Remember that professors of talky-talk courses are apt to egg students on to doing political demos with non negotiable demands.
Visit the campus and talk to students and faculty. Get the students to talk about the faculty. If the students are contemptuous of the faculty, that's a bad sign. If the faculty are contemptuous of students, free market capitalism, American exceptionalism, and first amendment freedoms, that's a bad sign. Read the posters on the bulletin boards. Find some college blogs and read them when you get home.
You are looking for a place with a reasonable campus attitude, like we are all here to learn stuff, and we understand that as American college students we have it pretty good in life. You want to avoid a place full of grievances, racism, class envy, and spite. If everyone is mad at something or somebody, the place may blow up either while you are there, or after you graduate, reducing the value of your expensive degree.
You want to avoid colleges like Mizzou, which made nationwide headlines after it's president resigned under pressure from black radicals. No teaching or learning is gonna happen there, not for months, and a showing a Mizzou degree to an employer will get you laughed at now.
So how do you weed out the crazy places? Well, first off, visit their website. What activities do they take pride in? Opening a new laboratory or running off a climate change demo? Check the student groups on campus. Chapters of things like the American Physical Association or IEEE are good signs, chapters of ACLU or SDS are bad signs. Count the faculty, tenured professors and part timer "adjunct" professors. Count the student body. Divide students by faculty members to find the student faculty ratio. Count the number of courses offered. Sort the courses between real learning (English, physics, history, math, etc) and talky talky courses (gender studies, sociology, anthropology, ethnic studies,art history, etc.). Remember that professors of talky-talk courses are apt to egg students on to doing political demos with non negotiable demands.
Visit the campus and talk to students and faculty. Get the students to talk about the faculty. If the students are contemptuous of the faculty, that's a bad sign. If the faculty are contemptuous of students, free market capitalism, American exceptionalism, and first amendment freedoms, that's a bad sign. Read the posters on the bulletin boards. Find some college blogs and read them when you get home.
You are looking for a place with a reasonable campus attitude, like we are all here to learn stuff, and we understand that as American college students we have it pretty good in life. You want to avoid a place full of grievances, racism, class envy, and spite. If everyone is mad at something or somebody, the place may blow up either while you are there, or after you graduate, reducing the value of your expensive degree.
Democratic TV Debate last night
It came on late, 9 PM. We are down to Hillary, Bernie, and O'Malley. Due to the Paris massacre, they opened up with foreign policy. All three tried to sound tough without talking about sending US forces to deal with ISIS. No one mentioned Obama's troop withdrawal from Iraq that turned the place over to ISIS. O'Malley wanted more and better intelligence. He failed to mention that intelligence does us little good without the will to act on it, to strike the enemy. All three were four square for doing something, but they all avoided promising real action. Everyone was in favor of having the locals, Turks, Sunnis, Saudis, Egyptians, anybody except Israel, get in the fight.
After the first commercial break, they changed the subject to free stuff, how much each candidate would furnish, how high they would set the federal minimum wage ($15 vs $12), and how a few harmless soak-the-rich taxes would pay for it all without raising the national debt. Right.
I went to bed before it was over. God help the United States if any one of those turkeys becomes president.
After the first commercial break, they changed the subject to free stuff, how much each candidate would furnish, how high they would set the federal minimum wage ($15 vs $12), and how a few harmless soak-the-rich taxes would pay for it all without raising the national debt. Right.
I went to bed before it was over. God help the United States if any one of those turkeys becomes president.
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Paris
First, my sincere sympathies for the victims of this unprovoked terrorism. To loose a loved one to terrorism is a greatest sadness I can think of.
The only thing for us to do, is get them before they get us. Obama is worthless for this, he lacks the stones to even call them Islamic extremists. Maybe the French can lead the way, they are a second rank industrialized power, with an army. They could whip a third world insurgency. If they wanted to, they could send a decent sized force to Syria to clean house.
The only thing for us to do, is get them before they get us. Obama is worthless for this, he lacks the stones to even call them Islamic extremists. Maybe the French can lead the way, they are a second rank industrialized power, with an army. They could whip a third world insurgency. If they wanted to, they could send a decent sized force to Syria to clean house.
Washing Windows 8
The Micro$ofties stuffed Windows 8 chock a block full of crapware, programs that suck up RAM and CPU time but don't actually do anything for you. Every so often I go out on a crapware hunt, and I always find something. Today I scored three kills. First off is a program "DasHost.exe". It is supposed to alert you to incoming email, sometimes. My email client, Thunderbird, has been successfully detecting incoming email for years with out it. After a net check, the consensus of opinion was "worthless", so I went after it. It's a service. Services are little (and some times not so little) programs that Windows runs behind your back. They all suck up precious RAM, and hog CPU time. They show up in Task Manager as processes and there is a special Windows program to manage them. Go to Control Panel. Pick Admin. Tools. Pick "Services". Find "Device Association Service. First STOP the Device Association Service. This shuts down the copy running in RAM at that moment. Then hit "properties" and change the startup type to "disabled". That preventsWindows from starting it up on the next boot.
While you are in there, find service "Themes" and give it the same treatment. Themes suppores the fancy Aeroglass look in the display. It sucks up a lot of CPU time and I don't like the look, I prefer the standard old Windows look.
My last kill today was "Power2Go Gadget". This is not a Micro$oft program, and several websites called it useless. It is NOT a service, so you cannot zap it thru the Services program, like Dashost and Themes. I found it with Task Manager, and the Windows 8 Task Manager can stop it, and prevent it from reloading (disable it). I'll double check tomorrow to see if it stays dead, but it's stopped now.
For doing all this, laptop feels livelier, it can keep up with my typing now.
Be careful messing with services. Back in XP, there were a couple of services, Remote Job Entry for one, that were essential to Windows. If you disabled Remote Job Entry in XP, Windows would never boot again. The only fix was to reinstall Windows from scratch, a tedious task, especially if you lacked the install CD-ROM discs. I suspect the Micro$ofties have planted similar booby traps in Win 8, but I don't know what they are. So don't disable anything unless you are sure, or have searched the internet and found an authoritative site like Black Viper to say that you can disable it without a disaster.
While you are in there, find service "Themes" and give it the same treatment. Themes suppores the fancy Aeroglass look in the display. It sucks up a lot of CPU time and I don't like the look, I prefer the standard old Windows look.
My last kill today was "Power2Go Gadget". This is not a Micro$oft program, and several websites called it useless. It is NOT a service, so you cannot zap it thru the Services program, like Dashost and Themes. I found it with Task Manager, and the Windows 8 Task Manager can stop it, and prevent it from reloading (disable it). I'll double check tomorrow to see if it stays dead, but it's stopped now.
For doing all this, laptop feels livelier, it can keep up with my typing now.
Be careful messing with services. Back in XP, there were a couple of services, Remote Job Entry for one, that were essential to Windows. If you disabled Remote Job Entry in XP, Windows would never boot again. The only fix was to reinstall Windows from scratch, a tedious task, especially if you lacked the install CD-ROM discs. I suspect the Micro$ofties have planted similar booby traps in Win 8, but I don't know what they are. So don't disable anything unless you are sure, or have searched the internet and found an authoritative site like Black Viper to say that you can disable it without a disaster.
Friday, November 13, 2015
Doing National Hari-Kari
World War II was a total disaster for Japan. They suffered enormous casualties, we sank their navy, we sank their merchant marine, we nuked their cities, and the ones we didn't nuke, we firebombed. Then we occupied the Home Islands, hauled Japanese leaders up in front of a War Crimes Trial, imposed a new constitution, and rewrote a lot of Japanese law to make it favorable to free market capitalism and democracy. We ran the place until the 1950's.
A worse outcome to a war is hard to imagine.
And the leadership that took Japan to war with the United States knew they would loose. And they did it anyhow. There was an independent staff study by top Japanese academics predicting total disaster. There was Admiral Yamamoto who had spent a lot of time in the US, spoke English well, and he said "For the first six months we shall run wild, but I have absolutely no confidence after that." There was Matsuota, the foreign minister who had grown up as a foster child in California. The Japanese knew that America had a huge population, a vast national territory, highly industrialized, blessed with abundant natural resources, and out weighed and outclassed Japan in every category. They knew war with the US would lead to defeat.
And, they should have known that they didn't need to go to war with the US. Japan's national goal in those days was to take over China. They had made a good start, and there was no reason to beleive that they could not finish the job. Japan was depending upon imports of iron and steel and crude oil from the Unitied States. And we did not approve of a Japanese takeover of China. We finally imposed an embargo (traditional American action) upon Japan.
This put a bind upon the Japanese. They all knew that they would run out of steel and oil in a matter of months. But, there was plenty of oil in Dutch Indonesia, not far away. Hitler had invaded and occupied Holland, which left the Dutch colonial regime in Indonesia kind of blowing in the wind. Japan could have obtained plenty of oil from Indonesia, either by trade or by force.
We, the Americans, would not have approved, but we had Nazi Germany to deal with. The entire American establishment, political, military, business, the papers, all agreed that proper US strategy was to do Germany first. Germany was bigger, stronger, more advanced, and closer than Japan. Plus the isolationists made life difficult for the Roosevelt administration to do anything internationally. The Japanese should have known that they could do pretty much anything they wanted on their side of the Pacific, and all the Americans would do about it is write diplomatic nasty grams.
But, the Japanese plowed ahead and attacked Pearl Harbor. They didn't have to do it, it led to a disastrous military defeat, they knew it would, but they did it anyhow.
A worse outcome to a war is hard to imagine.
And the leadership that took Japan to war with the United States knew they would loose. And they did it anyhow. There was an independent staff study by top Japanese academics predicting total disaster. There was Admiral Yamamoto who had spent a lot of time in the US, spoke English well, and he said "For the first six months we shall run wild, but I have absolutely no confidence after that." There was Matsuota, the foreign minister who had grown up as a foster child in California. The Japanese knew that America had a huge population, a vast national territory, highly industrialized, blessed with abundant natural resources, and out weighed and outclassed Japan in every category. They knew war with the US would lead to defeat.
And, they should have known that they didn't need to go to war with the US. Japan's national goal in those days was to take over China. They had made a good start, and there was no reason to beleive that they could not finish the job. Japan was depending upon imports of iron and steel and crude oil from the Unitied States. And we did not approve of a Japanese takeover of China. We finally imposed an embargo (traditional American action) upon Japan.
This put a bind upon the Japanese. They all knew that they would run out of steel and oil in a matter of months. But, there was plenty of oil in Dutch Indonesia, not far away. Hitler had invaded and occupied Holland, which left the Dutch colonial regime in Indonesia kind of blowing in the wind. Japan could have obtained plenty of oil from Indonesia, either by trade or by force.
We, the Americans, would not have approved, but we had Nazi Germany to deal with. The entire American establishment, political, military, business, the papers, all agreed that proper US strategy was to do Germany first. Germany was bigger, stronger, more advanced, and closer than Japan. Plus the isolationists made life difficult for the Roosevelt administration to do anything internationally. The Japanese should have known that they could do pretty much anything they wanted on their side of the Pacific, and all the Americans would do about it is write diplomatic nasty grams.
But, the Japanese plowed ahead and attacked Pearl Harbor. They didn't have to do it, it led to a disastrous military defeat, they knew it would, but they did it anyhow.
Hoot, the movie
A heart warming flick about three decent kids, who manage to do some good. Came out a long time ago, 2006, low budget ($16 million) didn't make the nut. Too bad.
Logan Lerman has the starring role. In 2006 he was only 13 years old. He plays the role well, at least as well as Daniel Radcliffe played Harry Potter at age 12. A couple of other child actors who I never heard of before play the other members his gang.
Enjoyable. More so than the average new flick today. Netflix has it.
Logan Lerman has the starring role. In 2006 he was only 13 years old. He plays the role well, at least as well as Daniel Radcliffe played Harry Potter at age 12. A couple of other child actors who I never heard of before play the other members his gang.
Enjoyable. More so than the average new flick today. Netflix has it.
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