Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

In a word, bad.  It's raining and the temperature is up to 40F.

The Weapon Shops of Isher by A.E. Van Vogt

Classic science fiction published in the early 1950's,  say 65 years ago.  The Weapons Shops sold fabuluous firearms, which among their other miraclous properties, would only fire when held by their rightful owner.  That was science fiction.
  Today we have Obama calling for the invention and production of such weapons.   But would anyone buy them? Most people, myself included, want a firearm that will reliably go bang when the trigger is pressed.  We don't even trust safeties, every shooter can remember the time he missed a shot because the safety was still on.  Which accounts for the popularity of the Glock handgun, it has no safeties. 
   If we don't trust simple mechanical safeties, who is gonna trust some micro processor based system that has to recognize who is holding the gun and prevent it from firing if it is in the wrong hands?  Not me. 
   I suppose such  Weapons Shop magic might work off a finger print sensor on the grip or an RFID tag carried by the rightful owner.  All of which stops working when the battery runs down.  To say nothing of gloves foiling the fingerprint sensor, or the owner forgetting to have the RFID tag on his person, plus a bunch of other Murphy's law failures.  
   I'm surprised that a president of the US can call for science fiction devices and nobody laughs at him.

Cars, Cars, and more cars

NPR this morning said that 17.5 million new cars had been sold in 2015.  Damn, that's a lotta wheels.  There was a time, back in the 60s, when a 5 million car year was considered good.  And consider that a car easily lasts 10 years these days.  Keep up a 17.5 million a year sales rate for 10 years, and you have 175 million cars on the road.  For a population of 300 and some million.  That's a car for every two citizens. 
   Then the NPR greenies went on to wail about the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE).  The sales figure are "cars and light trucks" and light trucks are selling well.  The light trucks (SUVs count as light trucks), get about 20 mpg at best, the little econobox cars might get 35.  Obama wants 50 mpg in a few years.  I got news for him.  We won't ever have a 50 mpg CAFE except by lying.  We do some of that already, flex fuel (gasoline or alcohol) cars give the CAFE a big boost just by bureaucratic fiat. 
   Was I Detroit, I'd make all my production "flex fuel" because it's easy and cheap to do, and I get all sorts of CAFE improvement for every flex fuel vehicle produced.  Just a little attention to gasket materials in the fuel system, using only gaskets that are alcohol proof, a bit more code in the microprocessor to recognize the fuel and for alcohol program the injectors to throw in a good deal more than for gasoline, and presto chango, I have a flex fuel vehicle.  Good for a 20 mph bump in my CAFE. 

Particles: Nova's story of the Higgs Boson and Large Hadron Collider

Nova on NPR ran this show.  The subject matter is fascinating, the mysterious "God Particle", the biggest particle accelerator ever built.  Claims to discover the basis of "the standard model" or the fundamentals of space time. 
   The TV show had a lot of shots of physicists and bigwigs partying and drinking champagne to celebrate major milestones.  Some cool shots of big pipes running down endless tunnels.  Shots of physicists bicycling to and from work. 
   It did not explain what the Higgs boson is, or why we expected it to exist.  No mention of the boson's mass, electric charge, spin, lifetime, or how we would detect one, should one form.  No discussion of the accelerator, what keeps the particle beam on course running down the pipes.  No discussion of what fields are used to accelerate the particles down the 50 mile radius particle racetrace.  No mention of how close to the speed of light the particle speed reached.  No mention of  how the accelerator compensated for the growth of particle mass as the speed of light is approached. No mention of what particles were accelerated, I assume protons, but it would be nice to know.  CERN had a serious accident in the early days, the particle beam came off the track and burned a hole thru the wall of the vacuum chamber.  They didn't bother to show the damaged piece of pipe up close. The camera swept over a stack of pipes, one of them was burned black on the outside, but that was it.
    They interviewed a number of the physicists, but they all talked about metaphysics, what it means, what it might mean, the goodness of doing it.  That ain't science.  Science is observations and measurements tied together with theory.  Nobody talked science.
   Really too bad.  I guess the TV show producers know little science themselves , and don't care much about it. 

Washing Windows 8, yet again

Killing off crapware, specifically hpservice.exe.  This baby shows up in Task Manager as a "process", ie a program loaded into ram and running, but does not show a window to control it or observe results.  I tried to DISABLE it in task managers startup tab.  Did not work, when I powered up next day hpservice.exe was still running.  Net searching had told me that hpservice.exe was not a regular Windows service but just got loaded by a key in the registry.  So I started up regedit (more difficult to do in Win 8 than in XP) and searched for a key that said "run" or "runonce" and the hpservice.exe name.  No dice.  Could not find the desired key let alone zap it.
   Went back to Task Manager, and yup, the SOB was still there, big as life.  Some fumbling around and I tried "Control Panel"," Administrative Tools",  "Services"  And there it was, a service, set to "AUTOMATIC" start, which means load and run every time the computer boots up.  I changed that to "DISABLED".  
   I checked for hpservices in Task Manager this morning, and he is dead and gone.
   Moral of story: Don't believe everything you see on the net. 
   And, Win 8 works just fine without hpservice.exe.

Do the NORKS have the H-bomb?

And does it matter?  The first fission bombs used in WWII had a yield that changed over time.  Up until recently the yield was "classified" but all writers said it was 20,000 tons (20KT) of TNT equivalent.  Recently, after declassification of 70 year old work, the yield is now given as 12 KT. These two plain straight fission bombs each leveled a city, with a severe damage radius of a couple of miles.  This is so bad, that it doesn't really matter if you have more powerful bombs.  A 20 KT yield fission bomb is so terrible that bigger bombs aren't that much more terrible.
  As a cold war stunt, the hydrogen bomb, a fission-fusion device was developed.  This device used a fission bomb's heat as a trigger to set off a hydrogen fusion reaction, boosting yield to 1000 KT (a megaton MT) And for a while in the 1950's the Americans and the Russians would exchange bragging rights to the greatest yield.  In actual fact, a yield of 100KT is enough to do anything that is needful.  The Minuteman missile warheads were all 100KT devices at a time when 1000 KT H-bombs were available.
   So now to the NORKS.  They have been  doing nuclear testing for some years now.  The first test was so puny (1KT) that we didn't really believe they had nukes until radioactive fallout was detected in the atmosphere, the seismic signal was so weak as  make us doubt the NORKS had done anything at all.
   So this morning, the NORKS claimed to have tested an H-bomb.  But the seismic signal was still pretty weak, about 6 KT yield, less than the Hiroshima fission bomb of 70  years ago.  Color me unimpressed.  Might have been a fizzle, where the fission bomb trigger went off but the hydrogen fusion reaction did not light off.  I don't think it's an H-bomb until the yield reaches 1000 KT, which is a long way from 6 KT.

The 11th Commandment (again)

Somebody is running a lot of TV ads, on Fox News, trashing Marco Rubio for missing votes in Congress.  The ads are sponsored and paid for by a PAC that I have never heard of before. ("Right to Rise"?)  I assume this PAC is working for some other Republican candidate, but I have no idea which one.
    Too bad the MSM doesn't take a look at this PAC and let us know who is really behind the "trash Rubio" movement.  Of  course doing a story like that would require getting off their butts and going out on the streets and doing some digging.  It's easier to just read the poll results over the air, and do a bit of pontificating.
   Postscript:
   I just googled on Right to Rise and  got some hits.  Wikipedia called Right to Rise a JEB Bush super PAC.