Ulu

Instead of going to Mars we should just finish conquering Earth. We're not even close, but I didn't post to rant about that. Just about the silliness of seeing both those "headlines" on the same page at once. I was looking for one that said, "Corpse of Elvis discovered in Cryogenic Orbit".

I have a very difficult time trying to understand the desire to colonize Mars when it really does not have much water. What I’m saying is that there’s 3 feet of water under the south polar ice cap. A Big deal it is not. In order to colonize a place like Mars in any serious way people will have to make lots of water and whatever else they need, by having an energy source so abundant they are able to brute-force their way into terraforming(. If we could drop a big ice comet on Mars, To create an atmosphere plus a Lithosphere , men might have a chance of a sustainable life without such. (Well after 1000 yearss or so when the planet settled down) But that’s the sort of thing that we simply cannot do yet. But what the heck do I know? I’m just a grease monkey with too much education.

What you see above is what happens if I am dictating to my phone and I say “big smiley face”. It gives me the regular smiley face and writes the word big in front of it. Regular old?

Well I spell a word anyway I want, and you are quite welcome to understand it anyway that you want. Big ?

Not so rare as you must imagine.

From the WTF news team . . . How is an underwater lake not just a lake? Is it a lake of some other liquid that doesn't mix? My brain hurts. And on the very same day, On the very same page of MSN Newsfeed?? (OK I'm going for an aspirin now.) When you bury a lake, don't you get mud? ( . . . assuming you bury it in dirt, and Mars appears to be 99% red dirt.) So isn't the news, "RED MUD FOUND ON MARS in 3 LOCATIONS." I'll bet it sticks in yer tires . . .

I'm just 65 and I sure don't feel as confident. Not at all! Mainly it's the eyes, but arthritis doesn't help. I used to ride motorcycles almost 140 MPH and I won't go over 70 anymore. Even in the truck. In fact, since retirement I haven't felt the need to rush anywhere fast. Been there, survived it, got the t-shirt, and now I can poke along in the slow lane, without remorse or regret, in my dottage.

We took my Mom's keys away when she was about 81. Her eyesight was shot, and she was getting increasingly agitated when unexpected things happened. Fortunately she never did any damage. She didn't fight us, because she really didn't like driving. She never learned until she was 32. So we just had to drive her around, and eventually she didn't want to go out much anymore, so it wasn't an issue for us. Anyhow, it seems to me you are looking for some encouragement to be the good Samaritan. In that case go for it, and just understand the reward from others won't be what you may deserve. I know you're worried about buying trouble, and you can always stay home. Absent outside pressure, we move when our spirit moves us, and not before.

It’s all about body English. ?

Man that paleolithic concrete body filler must’ve been a hairy mammoth to sand and finish, but those were the days when labor was cheap. And there were no labor strikes. If an employee gave you any trouble you just bbq’d him and then invited his replacement over for dinner.

What can I say about my taste in noise? I’d like to hear smooth machinery that doesn’t sound like it’s trying to come apart. That’s one of the beautiful things about the Flathead Mopars.

I drove an 84 Dodge van with a slant six and it was one of the most rocksolid engines ever made. It didn’t make a lot of power but the power was always there because it had four on the floor. That’s the set up I might look for if I was going to do a six. But it’s as wide as a small V-8, PLUS it’s as long as a big block V-8. That being said I do prefer in-line engines over Bent engines. There is a great reduction in complexity, compared to a V. And I think they sound smoother. More coordinated. Of course nowadays they almost all are smooth as hell. Balancing technology has gotten really good.

Was this the first right hand drive car you've operated? I've never been in an RHD, so I don't know what to think.

I’ve never voted on a machine. We have always had paper ballots that you marked or punched, but I think we’re just discussing whether the saw will cut you deeper than the knife. My parents were in the military and often had to vote by mail. I have voted by mail, but I don’t consider it completely safe. Why would anyone? Of course my parents warned me, but even the post office itself tells you never to send valuables or cash through the mail. A lot of insurance is sold because we know their service isn’t 100% reliable. People want that assurance for important mail. The post office tells you that if you want to be absolutely certain mail was received you need a signature from the recipient. You must send “certified mail with return receipt requested.” I don’t see anybody asking for that yet. The cost is probably scaring people. All that being said, the huge United States Postal Service is probably the most reliable state sponsored institution in the free world. It is so large that it would be virtually impossible to corrupt the entire thing to act illegally. It’s like all these mass conspiracies people dream of. If they existed we would know, because in this life 3 people cannot keep a secret.

So far I don’t have any big complaints about the post office in Fresno and Clovis. At least no more than the traditional complaints that the post office has always suffered with. But I really am concerned about this voting by mail business, and some have raised the prospect there should be a true validation. That everyone should confirm their vote. Businesses typically do a double entry bookkeeping to avoid embezzlement or errors in tabulation etc. But maybe elections aren’t as important as we think.

I’m sure I read Sunpot and Cheech Wizard. He was your classic mad genius. But enough about that. I wanna see more about the Porsche. Is there a thread somewhere?

Vaughn Bode’? I got rid of all of that stuff before my kids were old enough to read. Is that the six-cylinder Porsche? I never really followed German cars very much.

We have a similar problem here. Our UPS terminal is on the poor side of the county 30 miles from us. Our FedEx terminal is on the nice side of the county only 5 miles from us. Most of the people working on the poor side of the county live on that side of the county. FedEx employees mostly live on this side of the county. Consequently UPS has a lot more problems with staff. We used to have to ship large heavy rolls of engineering drawings that required a hand truck. These critical documents never went through UPS or USPS. We always sent them by Fed ex, or a private courier if local. I really want to talk about the political situation at the post office right now, but I know better. Those things will all become clear in due course. I will only say that my experience with things lost in the mail is that they are truly and forever lost. I also see a tell-all book about the post office in our near future.

I have run a few similar units, but no clue about a manual. The copper coil is worth 10 times the rest of the unit, so that’s why it’s gone now. I had a good laugh when I read the number plate. Kidde owned Dura which sold Weaver, but the product was actually made by White-Rogers (pre-Westinghouse ?) then owned by Emerson. I used to work for a company that was owned by Kidde Co, and the organization was just as convoluted. We built aircraft service platforms, but our division was owned by a company which manufactured large mobile cranes. That was owned by a larger company (they, owned by Kidde) which also manufactured fire extinguishers and dishes and cheap stereos, watches & costume jewelry and household items. I was amazed when I saw the octopus of companies under the Kidde banner. Anyhow that aircraft platform business went bankrupt shortly after the end of Vietnam.

Nobody out here knows what the hellgrammite is so I had to laugh when I saw the Porsche. They were common in the Rocky Mountains and we used to find them for fish bait. We didn’t know what the hell a hellgrammite was & as kids we called them rock rollers. At some point it became a comic book character.

I’ve had a few painful joint injuries from things like skateboards and motorcycles and just playing basketball. I still live with some of the pain. It’s nothing really, but I do some kind of real work or PT every day to stay loose. I’d get all stove up just sitting at the PC all day, and I’m only 65. I worked a desk for 45+ years and I just can’t do it any more. I get neuropathy from the sitting and the PC makes my hands hurt. Writing with a pencil is torture, yet I drew engineering drawings all day with a pencil before PCs became common in the 80’s. I can go about an hour before I just have to give up and go work on the car or the saw or anything involving a large hammer or a pipewrench. I watched my dad on fentanyl for 6 mos while he died from cancer. OMG. . . just shoot me first. ;( I suffered a fractured humerus and never took more than aspirin. (OK, there was some bourbon too... I am not much of a drinkin’ man unless there is acute pain.) I take one aspirin, lutiene and some vitamins for macular issues (AREDS2) vitamin D, and 4 saw palmetto caps (which I think is a scam.) Nobody ever gave me long term pain pills. I have never seen a tramadol or a gabapentin. A few codeine pills from oral surgery was about all. Other than that I avoid the pharmacy entirely if I can.

The truth is that no school ever wants to believe that they are doing anything wrong, ever. If they ever start realizing that, the purveyors of our educational system will have a strange comeuppance.

I am amazed at how well educated people in prominent positions of public trust can be so ignorant. I’m not trying to be political or point fingers here because I see this from every side. I was watching an old clip about a political candidate, and they claimed that he spent $500 million (!) just to lose in the primary election. Now the anchorman speaking did not write his report, but you would think that as he read it an error would occur to him, and it did not. Clearly these folks don’t think about what they’re reading on Camera. Nor did his cohost show the reaction that any mathematician would, when this well-tailored Ivy League looking fellow declared that, “. . . there’s only 330 million people in the whole country! He should’ve just given every citizen a million dollars!” They thought this was a terrific joke, as of course you cannot simply buy everybody’s vote; but, no one noticed the gaping mathematical error. He could’ve really given every person in the country about a buck and a half, from his expenditure. Anyhow the story about the 75 mm drill bit reminded me of this fact. See, one of the things they drill into your brain as an engineer is that you always check those decimal points over like they are your own children. (The other thing is to account for every load.) Otherwise it’s enormously easy to make errors that are off by an order of magnitude. People are just not very good at numbers once they get above $100. But in the slide rule days where we didn’t have a calculator to place the decimal point, you always had to be thinking about this. Here in the computer age, nobody has to think about where the decimal point needs to go. Nobody bothers to think (is it reasonable?) about the answer. Unless of course you’re the person spending $500 million. I bet he thought long and hard about that. <Edit:> By the way, my wife is retired schoolteacher. She has a masters degree in education from California State University, and she fell for this one too.

Maybe the decimal point on the price was wrong too?

Somehow I missed this thread entirely but I have to tell you that I have been in a lightning storm at 10,000 feet elevation going over Yosemite into Nevada. I was riding my motorcycle and it was starting to rain hard. I was almost over the crest and it just turned into a deluge. Lightning was striking on the granite peaks above. My glasses face shield and windshield were fogging up badly, and I was following a very slow minivan through the two inches of standing water, which filled the road. I was sincerely worried about a lightning strike and as I rode slowly, I saw several other motorcyclists who had pulled over and were huddling underneath the worlds tallest Pine trees. Well that did look somewhat more comfortable than following a minivan through a rainstorm, but I always heard that you should never stand under a tree during a lightning storm. Meanwhile lightning is striking the granite peaks again and I’m trying to decide what to do. Quickly I decided that if I was going to be fried by a lightning bolt that I would rather die riding my motorcycle than hiding under a tree. I finally just rode it out until the rain stopped, and I arrived at Topaz lake a couple hours later, soaked but unhurt.