TV is still talking about UFO's

 Flying saucers or UFO's are not new.  They first made the newspapers back in 1947.  A private pilot flying a light plane out west somewhere, Oregon perhaps, reported seeing one (or maybe more, I don't remember) and the papers printed his story.  It caused a nation wide sensation, and sure enough a lot more were seen and reported in the following years.  I saw one about 60 years ago.  It was 50 years ago that Duluth scrambled fighters after one.  So they are not new, they have been flying around, doing their thing, what ever it is, for a long time.  

  The TV has shown some gunsite pictures of UFOs that are hard to explain.  I will leave it to others to attempt explanations. 

They ought to be able to keep the business running without computers

 The recent hacks of Colonial Pipeline and JBS meat packing shut down production after ransomware attackers encrypted all the files on the company's computers so that they could not be read or written.  I think that the pipeline should have been able to keep pumping and the meat continue to be cut and packed even though workers could not access computer files.  

  Company suits need to understand that computer security needs to be taken seriously and needs some money spent on it.  Both Colonial and JBS have lost barrels of money by shutting down.  I say the basic operations of any company should be able to keep running while the company computers are knocked off line.  Management should investigate and see why this cannot be.  I will bet that a lot of the stuff done by computer could be done by hand or with pencil and paper and training the crew to do so is not all that hard to do.

In the case where computers are essential to some process (CAD/CAM for instance) they need to designate the computer as "critical" which means take extra care to keep it backed up, keep it off the public internet and keep it in a locked room.  Have IT hand deliver Micro$oft patches on a DVD rather than allow the computer to download them over the internet. 

Greenies want to burn more fuel.

 

The greenies are pushing to remove natural gas from buildings and homes.  They think the all electric home produces less carbon dioxide emissions.  This story was front page on yesterday’s Wall St Journal.  This idea is a looser in the real world.

   The electricity has to be generated by real power plants.  Fake power plants (wind and solar) cannot be depended upon to produce electricity when needed, leading to blackouts like they had in Texas last winter.  Real power plants burn something (natural gas, coal, wood chips, anything) to make steam to drive steam turbines which drive the generators.  Due to unbreakable laws of thermodynamics, only 40% of the heat energy gets turned into electricity.  The other 60% is carried off by the plant’s cooling system.  And the same 60% loss occurs in gas turbine plants. 

   Whereas a gas stove or water heater puts almost 100% of the heat energy into heating pots on the stove or water in the water heater.  Natural gas burning appliances will save 60% of fuel compared to electric appliances.  And gas stoves are better than electric stoves, they will boil water faster and when you turn down the heat, it goes down right now.  Turn down the heat on an electric stove and it takes a while before the pot cools off, leading to burned food or boil overs. 

Dr Seuss is still #1 Best seller

 Second week in a row.  Best seller in hard back fiction.  Take that Amazon. 

Improvements in police work

In the face of a storm of criticism of law enforcement, I beg to differ.  Cops as a rule are conscientious public servants, polite, brave, skilled, good people.  There are however a few things we could do to make things better.

1.  Forbid no-knock raids.  Bust down someone's door at 0'dark thirty, and they will shoot to kill, every time.  Most of the time the cops shoot the victim, occasionally the victim manages to shoot a cop and gets himself put on trial for murder.  The original excuse for no-knock raids was to prevent drug dealers from flushing the drugs down the toilet to prevent them from being used as evidence against them.  That is not a strong enough reason to justify starting a gun fight where someone gets killed just about every time.

2.  Look for more non-lethal weapons.  Tazers seem to have worked out.  Tear gas works.  Flash bang grenades are used.  There are probably other things out there.  We ought to find them and make them available to cops on the street.  It's worth spending money on equipment that saves lives. 

3.  Repeal as many non essential laws as we can.  Eric Garner was killed during his arrest for selling single cigarettes on the street.  Far as I am concerned American citizens have a right to sell anything they like.  Garner died because the police were enforcing a law that should not have been on the books. There has got to be more laws like that which we could repeal.

Prevagen

 I have been seeing the ads for this stuff on TV.  They claim it improves your memory.  That sounded interesting, I am getting older and my memory is getting worse. So, first couple of times I got to the medicine section of Walmart I could not remember the name of the stuff.  I did remember it was made from jellyfish, but that didn't help find it on the shelf.  Anyhow I did remember the Prevagen name when I got to Walmart just the other day and found it on the shelf.  $60 for a bottle of 30 pills.  $2 a pill!  That's a ripoff.  So I didn't buy.  After I got home, I googled on Prevagen and up popped a lot of really negative comments and reviews.  FTC and FDA and AARP and others are against the stuff.  So much for magic memory cures.

Where do UFO's come from??

 Good question.  Asking this question only make sense if you think UFO's are space ships with live crews on board.  If you think they might be mirages of some kind, then they don't have to come from anywhere.  Other than Earth, nowhere in our solar system looks like it can support much life.  Mercury is airless, waterless, and very very hot.  Venus is not much cooler, the surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead. Mars is nearly airless and cold.  Jupiter is a gas giant with no solid surface anywhere near the top of the atmosphere.  Jupiter's satellites are unpromising for life.  Ditto for Uranus and Neptune.  Uranus satellite Titan might support some weird kind of life that lives at temperatures far below water ice.  Pluto is frozen solid, colder than frozen. 

   Perhaps they come from another star system.  The physics we know now limits everything to traveling at light speed or less.   There might be an advanced physics that permits faster than light travel but we have not found it  yet.  The closest star is Alpha Centauri, four and a skosh light years away.  The others are all much further.  Gotta wonder about what sort of culture sets out on four year or more (each way) trips all that often.  

   Suppose they have faster than light?  I would expect an alien ship boosting up to light speed or braking down from light speed to show a very bright glare from her engines.  Something easily seen from earth.  Some years ago we launched a Saturn 5 after dark.  The glare from it's engines, just kerosene and LOX, lit up the entire east coast of the US.  I have no idea how faster than light engines might work, but I expect they would use more power than simple chemical engines. And there is always some waste energy that comes out as light.  Which is why I expect an alien faster than light drive to be super obvious in operation.