09:27 – I see that David P. Goldman believes that Ted Cruz is our last, best hope. Wishful thinking, boy. I agree that I’d rather see Cruz as president than Trump and certainly than Clinton or Bern the Commie. But I don’t believe it would make much, if any, difference to how things unfold over the coming years. Things might be a bit better under a Cruz presidency, but all it would really mean is that our slide into dystopia would be a bit slower. Nothing can stop it now.
Barbara is going to cut my hair this morning, and then we’ll do more work around the house.
Barbara’s drink of choice has always been sweet iced tea, which she makes up in gallon pitchers. I’d always drunk mostly Coke, but I’ve cut way down on that. I used to go through maybe ten 2-liter bottles a week, and now I’m down to more like one a week. Instead, I’m drinking iced tea, so Barbara is now making at least twice as much as she used to. One of the things she picked up at Costco the other day was two boxes of tea bags, 624 total bags. That’s enough to last the two of us three to four months at our current consumption rate. It also cuts down on our cost for Coke by about $500/year. From Barbara’s point of view, the major advantage is that we won’t be adding to the hundreds of empty 2-liter bottles that I save for LTS food and water.
14:21 – What a relief! I can finally work normally again. I now have Linux Mint running on a new hard drive in my old Core i7-Extreme system, with all of my data migrated over and all the programs I use installed. The sticking point was these damned powerline Ethernet adapters, which I simply couldn’t get to work between the WiFi router and my little corner in the dining room that’s now my office. Just now, I installed the D-Link DWA-140 USB WiFi adapter, which Linux Mint recognized automagically. All I had to do was enter the password for the WiFi AP. Our Internet service is nominally 20 megabits/s down and 2 up. I just ran the HTML5 speed test from bandwidthplace.com, which tells me I’m getting a 21 ms ping with about 11 Mb/s down and 4 Mb/s up. Not bad, given how far I am from the AP.
We finished watching the final season of Justified the other night. Like the other seasons, it’s set mostly in Harlan County, Kentucky, which is only about 160 miles WNW of us in Sparta. As Barbara said, she’d be as careful back in the hollows around here as she’d be if we were living in Harlan. My attitude is that pretty much everyone around here minds their own business, so if we mind our own business we should be fine, but Barbara does have a point.
Water!
24oz hot and filtered through coffea beans in the morning.
Last night 64oz purified to aprx 5% alcohol slightly flavored with hops.
Officially a senior citizen today. 41H
Happy birthday! That’s a bit more than two years off for me. I turn 3Fh on 6 June.
You did it right, dkreck. Do the drinking and partying thing the night before so that when you wake up on your birthday you feel a year older.
Well last night was all moderation. I had three Firestone DBAs and an Irish Car Bomb. Feel fine today. I had a lamb burger too so maybe just a little wooly this morning.
I approve of puns! Though you get only half credit because your pun had no sexual innuendo.
Although… if you look at it closely and tilt your head just right, we can get some sexual innuendo out of that one. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say no more, and blame it on the beer if anyone mentions it.
Ewe are right.
Well, since I’m the math retard here, what is all this “h” and “Fh” stuff?
Beeyooteeful sunny day with blue skies.
hexidecimal
Geeks 😛
Hexadecimal – 65 and 63.
@nick – Geeks
Thank you
and that pretty much goes for all the regulars here.
I wonder if “Geek” is or will be one of the current 58 recognized forms of “gender”. Of course there any many types of “Geeks”, I bet more than 58 in the “Geekdom” group alone, many of which (in the Millennials) are virgins and get their jollies through their VR goggles.
@OFD, you are not alone, I’m a math retard too. When it comes to math, if it weren’t for my “paper brains” (now digital) I’d have no brains at all 😉
Edit: added “Millennials” to further distinguish a subset of “Geeks”.
The thing is, with the math? I got taught arithmetic in elementary skool and had to memorize the multiplication tables (which I can still do) and a bunch of the rules and suchlike, which have all stayed with me and been occasionally useful. I could even grok plane geometry, but algebra left me cold as ice, like the song goes, and zero interest, esp. when taught over two years by the most boring old fossils in the skool system back then. And never had ANY use for anything beyond arithmetic in all the decades since.
So I’m basically a history and literature geek, who likes to tinker around with electronics and firearms. You can see the progression/transition I made from soldiers and cops to IT thirty years ago (and a lotta good it does me now!).
Household chores, errands and the Honey-Do-List this weekend; and I’ll be whipping up Easter dinner for us and MIL and Princess tomorrow. Roast beef and buhdayduhz and gravy and some kinda veggies and wife is doing a strawberry dessert, I guess.
When I was in MBA school, one of the guys in my class was an airline pilot. During one discussion, he explained how he’d gotten the result he needed using calculus. That seemed perfectly reasonable to me because I done exactly what he’d done. But pretty much everyone else in the class started mocking him, if not throwing things at him. When I was in high-school, pretty much everyone on the “college track” (i.e., the future STEM folks) took differential and integral calculus followed by differential equations. Nowadays, not so much. IIRC, there are even two AP Physics courses, one with and one without calculus. How can you do physics without calculus? It’s not possible.
So I saw this generator at Menards, and I’m trying to figure out what is wrong with it:
http://www.menards.com/main/p-1444451647177-c-10107.htm
If it will run for 11 hours at half load on one tank of gas, I’m thinking it might be an inverter generator which is a good thing. But at the price, I’m thinking it has to be Chinese, which as Nick pointed out is not good. Everyone feel free to chime in with your opinions.
Update: All of the Ford generators have similar runtime claims, so I don’t think it is an inverter/generator model. I also found it for $30 less from Overstock.com with free delivery. It sounds like it must be a very cheap generator, so I’m not impressed. But I’m torn, because even if it is cheap and Chinese, it can’t be worse than my current generator, which is none. Although I’m not in a hurry to buy one because I can get it from Overstock.com with free delivery. Which is a godsend for 100+ plus pound items if you are out of shape…
Out of my 400+ high school graduating class only nine of us took calculus. At 33h I’m probably one of the younger guys here…
Yeah, that sounds about right. I had a graduating class in 1971 of about 750. There were three of us in Miss Callahan’s senior independent study math class, and maybe a dozen more that took the standard math for college level students.
In my school we had 66 in our graduating class. Out of those six of us took calculus. School did not even offer the class as standard fare. So we convinced one of the math teachers to do the class before school official started. We got to school an hour before everyone else and took the class. With small schools it is difficult to get classes beyond the state mandated curriculum because of building and personnel resources. Kudos to the teacher, Lee Southern. He showed up at the 30 year class reunion and paid for all the pizza at Abbey’s Pizza, a local pizza joint. I doubt there are many like him any more. He gave up teaching and was selling saw blades, the huge stuff for sawmills, because the school system and the students were becoming assholes that no longer wanted to learn.
“How can you do physics without calculus? It’s not possible.”
The text for a physics course I did a few years back had a real (paper based) textbook that used calculus and a free online one that was calculus free. I may be a bit of a bigot, but I don’t see the point of doing physics if you aren’t handy with calculus.
I’m 0x33, and in my high school class of ~ 350 we had 25 or so in a Calculus class in my senior year. It was the first time proper Calculus had ever been taught in the county, and alas the person we drew as a ‘teacher’ couldn’t teach her way out of a paper bag. She might or might not have been okay at other forms of math, but since that year was my only experience w/ her I can’t say for sure. The dingbat who taught Trig & Analytic Geometry was much more interested in letting us know how she felt about JESUS, and I was one of the select few for whom she reserved her dislike.
The science department wasn’t a lot better off. There were two classes of algebra based Physics, taught by a guy who was only a dissertation short of his PhD, but the rest of his day was taken up by things like ‘Consumer Math’. And Chemistry was worse. The teacher was grossly incompetent. And student from my high school who went to the local community college was restricted from taking anything but introductory freshman Chemistry, because the CC’s science department head, herself a PhD chemist, knew just how bad the high school teacher was. Anyone else who went off to college thinking they’d had Chemistry in high school simply got thrown into the deep end.
How silly of me. I said it can’t be worse than no generator, when if it ruins something I plug into it, it could obviously be worse than no generator.
My high school class was a hundred-something, in a small town in the Adirondacks. They offered a calculus class for seniors which was billed as AP but didn’t get you out of having to take first semester college calc. That was it. That was the most advanced math offered. I don’t know how many students took it. The teacher had been extremely boring in trig, and I wouldn’t think he was any better at calc. It’s possible he perked up with a smaller class, but I doubt it. He was past retirement age, and teaching for just another couple years until his wife, a teacher at the same school, could retire.
Which is a godsend for 100+ plus pound items if you are out of shape…
^out of shape^getting old
Fixed that for you. I am becoming painfully aware of what were minor twinges at age 25 are now week lasting sleep interrupting pain at age 55.
I’m the old timer here at 71B.
Had an excellent physics teacher in year 11 and 12 (same guy), the school’s chemistry master in Year 11 and a no hoper in Year 12. I and two other boys complained to the chemistry master and the drongo was replaced by a guy who really knew his stuff. 40 years later I still remember the stuff he drilled in to us.
The Year 12 maths teacher was a tall goddess who unfortunately left at the end of term 1. Her replacement was competent but, as a guy, didn’t have such interesting shock absorbers.
I’ll claim the the title of youngest (most immature?) guy here. I turned 32h two weeks ago on pi day.
Now for something completely different. Last Sunday I managed to stick a small nail about 1cm into my finger. I’m tough (let me have my delusions) so I pulled it out, expressed some blood out the hole to be safe and put a bandage on it. Within 24 hours I had a raging infection spreading down my finger at a visible rate. I went to urgent care, got a shot of broad spectrum antibiotics and I am on a 10 day course of oral antibiotics. All is well.
This could have killed me in a week without treatment. What if the urgent care clinic wasn’t there? I’m not necessarily talking about EOTWAWKI with no medical care. What about a few days delay because of natural disaster or terrorist attack? What if the hospitals were overwhelmed with cases of an epidemic or wounded and I was triaged as only having a “boo boo on my finger”?
I have food, water, electricity, and self defense. My prepping attention is now turning to the medical side of things. Advice from you oldsters welcome. Mr RBT how extensively do you plan to cover medical/first aid in your book?
I love power line Ethernet but was having fits with the one in my upstairs office. It would work great for weeks then become useless, then mysteriously start working again. I checked everything. Only much later did I discover that whenever my wife plugged in her cell phone charger down stairs in her office, the adapter would quit. Both sets of outlets are on the same circuit and her Chinese no-name brand charger seemed to be creating enough line RF to block the signal. I bought her a US made charger and problems disappeared.
Re: the generator:
3500W is on the low side. Might run the fridge and freezer plus a few lights. But not much else.
Hi. I’m SteveF. Perhaps you’ve never met me.
A few years ago, when the boys were teens and the youngest had just gotten out of diapers, my wife complained to all and sundry that she had four kids, not three, and that I was the most immature of them all. That’s as may be, but I brought in most of the family income and was the one everyone turned to to fix things and take care of problems, so it’s obvious that maturity is grossly overrated.
@dave,
It’s $317 on amazon, which is way less than the quote Menards gave me. That said, it’s the equivalent of ONE 20AMP outlet. Take everything you want to run, plug it into one outlet in your house and see if it pops. If not, you’re good.
That covers capacity. But not quality. It apparently doesn’t have idle control, so it will run full out all the time, so I don’t know why they quote run time @ half load. I found a spec that lists 76 db noise at 21 ft. That’s not horrible but it’s pretty loud, especially under your carport, or on the patio behind the house.
I haven’t spent the time to look at this in depth, but it is clearly meant to compete with the Honda
http://www.costco.com/Generac-2%2c000W-Running–2%2c200W-Peak-Portable-Inverter-Generator-|-50-State-CARB-Certified.product.100158318.html
It’s cheaper than the honda but gets some bad reviews for capacity. 77 db at 3 ft so REALLY quiet compared to the Ford.
The honda is the one everyone compares to:
http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200585434_200585434?cm_mmc=Google-pla&utm_source=Google_PLA&utm_medium=Generators%20%3E%20Inverter%20Generators&utm_campaign=Honda%20Power%20Equipment&utm_content=16673&ci_src=17588969&ci_sku=16673&gclid=Cj0KEQjw5ti3BRD89aDFnb3SxPcBEiQAssnp0gczm5o6ATXopeUl1g8cpWjcQAX5lb_qsCnup5AnhnIaAk118P8HAQ
But at $1000 plus it’s spendy, but with quoted noise of Super-quiet 53-59dB, it’s quiet. I’ve had a normal conversation standing next to it.
In the end, it’s a trade off, but I think you are better off spending 600 if you’re gonna get a noisy generator, and get all the extra capacity. Save up if you have to.
Unless the hurricane is headed your way….
nic
I’m 0b110010 in binary.
nick
OK, enough of this: I’m plain ol’ 62+, a couple of months YOUNGER than RBT. I had not planned, and do not plan now, to do physics or engineering, so the intense pressure for me here to learn calculus is…non-existent. Yes, they had Calculus and AP math and science at my high skool in the years 1967-71 but your northern correspondent did not take them; National Merit Scholars took them. I took AP English and American History, how you like them apples? And the college board exams in my JUNIOR year, where I scored in the 700s on those subjects (sucked at the math section of the SAT but nowhere near as bad as the average rug-rat nowadays). Couldn’t have made the Ivy League for college and probably not the second tier, either, but I was fed up with skool and living at home by then so at 17 enlisted to kill people for Uncle (and also our freedumb and liberty and other mythologies).
“My attitude is that pretty much everyone around here minds their own business, so if we mind our own business we should be fine, but Barbara does have a point.”
Mrs. OFD had a week’s gig recently in Prestonsburg, KY, and visited the Butcher Holler area; she reports that it is eerie and dark in them hollers and peeps are pretty isolated in some areas. Good to really know your immediate AO first and surrounding area after that, but exercise Condition Yellow-Orange caution accordingly these days. With the economy and job markets being the way they are, and with peeps being deliberately made fearful and angry via the pixels and noise, some folks gotta find alternative ways of making a living.
Today is the day Jesus was in Hell, telling Adam and Eve they could boogie on outta there to their awaiting thrones amid cherubim and seraphim. This day gets lost between Good Friday and Easter itself, which, as someone pointed out recently, has not yet reached the obscene level of commercial dreck that Xmas has.
Happy Easter, y’all!
0x44 here (that’s 68 to the math-challenged), and getting older and more decrepit by the microsecond! 🙂
So I did manage to hit a couple of sales today.
Got a nice tabletop humidor for $3.
And then at an estate sale, I bought a Faro CMS measuring arm system. Pretty much this one:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Faro-G08-02-4-Gold-Arm-CMM-Coordinate-Measuring-Machine-W-Case-Accessories-/131341785736?nma=true&si=sgkp4en3bFyi9f5D51G87aygipk%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557
only with a couple of pieces missing, like the power supply and mounting plate, and 5 years newer. I paid a whole lot less……… a whole lot.
You never know what you will find when you walk in.
I also got a nice older RF spectrum analyzer for $75 to add to the workbench. I got a hot air rework and soldering station for my birthday, and that should make repairs easier. ‘Course, I’ve got to reorganize the ham and electronic stuff. It’s really just in a big pile at the moment. Another project….
nick
DadCooks, you can retard mental decline* by learning new things, by acting young, and by keeping physically fit. I suggest you learn modern dancing — club dancing, that is, not “modern dance” which is all about creative expression or some bullshit that no one understands and no one cares about** — and then hit the clubs where college girls hang out and start dancing with and flirting with them. You’ll de-age yourself a decade in no time, I’ll betcha!
* Pun? Moi? Surely not!
** I had one artistic girlfriend (not autistic, an important distinction) a couple decades ago who tried to express something through interpretive dance. Damned if I know what it was. She was athletic and hot, so I was willing to overlook her flakiness. (And I was employed as an engineer and earning three or four times what she was making as a waitress and artiste, and therefore able to take her to restaurants and clubs and to buy her presents, so she was willing to overlook my one or two miniscule shortcomings.)
Failing the modern dancing routine and hanging out at clubs with young college grrls (horrific idea! or as the Frenchies say “Quelle horreur!), my PT routine is old-skool situps, pushups, stretching and hiking around the ‘hood/AO up here. Some days it’s pretty good, others not so much, between knees and lower back issues. I hope to iron those out soon. If we’d had decent snow, I woulda been out more often on the x-c skis or snowshoes.
For mental fitness I read like I’ve always read, that is, fanatically, mostly nonfiction, and I’m learning ham radio and network stuff, and moving into map reading/land navigation, also old-skool methodology, no GPS stuff. Plus SHTF community intel. And electronics.
I spend Sundays on Biblical and Catechism readings, plus RC theology, and am re-learning Latin and picking up classical Greek. Today was mostly a bust on that score as I’ve been prepping for Easter dinner tomorrow and taking care of exhausted spouse.
@JLP: Medical events have impressed us as well. I would certainly be gone to a blood clot I had last year. At least one of our kids would have died in infancy; possibly both. Life is a crap shoot, and the odds used to be much, much worse…
I agree on the learning new things bit. The problem is too often motivation. It’s very easy to turn on TV, or play silly ‘puter games.
I’ve done a couple of medical posts, but they were for first aid stuff.
I can list the stuff I bought, and I mention it when I get first aid stuff at sales.
Reference books and training are important. So is having the stuff to do something.
One thing, if you are getting older, and have heart troubles, talk to your dr about prescribing an AED for you and have your loved ones take the CPR/AED class with the Red Cross.
Lots of good higher level stuff here:
https://griddownmed.com/
on youtube, prepper nurse and nutnfancy have lots to say on the subject.
nick
BTW, if you haven’t done wound management lately, it takes WAY more supplies than you think, and you don’t want one injury to use up all your supplies. Stock up.
OFD wrote:
“…and am re-learning Latin and picking up classical Greek.”
NT Greek takes about two years at five hours a week. I did the first year back in 1993, but my tutor (a 74 year old Anglican canon) died on me at the end of the year. He said I’d have to do another year to be able to read the NT in Greek fluently.
Brad wrote:
“Life is a crap shoot, and the odds used to be much, much worse…”
In about 1997 I fell and hit my shin *hard*. Took off a fair bit of skin, there was a lot of bruising. My GP said that 100 years ago it might have killed me.
I take it everybody here has had a recent teatnus shot.
31h here. The key to staying young is to have young children. Middle child just turned 6h (which, incidentally, is also 6o and 6d). Makes me feel like a spring chicken. And as good a reason as any to prep.
Exercise (physical) helps, too. I don’t feel as old when I get mileage in every week. Sitting around makes me tired.
Exercise (mental) helps keep me sharp. Reading, puzzles, debates, and work all come together to keep the mind sharp.
Like I said earlier, get the vaccinations for a 3rd world country or africa now, while you can. I don’t think there are any risks from the tetanus shot and it lasts 10 years.
Selco talks about people dying from infection due to lack of antibiotics and hygiene during his conflict. Everything he writes is worth reading from a prepper standpoint. Even OTC drugs will save lives in prolonged crisis. Triple antibiotic cream, other creams, soap and scrubs. Adding even a small injury to a body already stressed can be disastrous.
Animals are going to be a big risk if there is a big or long term event. Rabies, mange, fleas. Rodent and pest populations will explode. Coyotes are already a problem in rural areas and are increasingly a problem in urban areas too. I’m guessing New Orleans had a BIG problem, but like so many of their problems it just wasn’t talked about.
Given the situation in Brussels, it’s time for a review of iodine prophylaxis and sources too…..
nick
“NT Greek takes about two years at five hours a week.”
That sounds about right; not quite as long for the Latin, and I’ve already had it in classes several times since high skool, when I did two years of it. I’m not gonna be doing much NT in Greek; the KJV or Douay-Rheims is good enough for me and done by guys WAY more expert than I’ll ever be. My purpose in learning Greek and Latin is for poetry.
As for the med preps, it’s taking way longer than we thought just to get Mrs. OFD off to a full physical, for starters. And then our main concern is her life-threatening thyroid meds and heart stuff, plus vision. After that, we can figure out what to stock up on besides the usual emergency stuff.
@SteveF – thanks for suggestions. I do what I can do and now anything that puts even the slightest stress on my knees and ankles is a no-go, I have essentially no cartilage left from my lower back to my toes and that greatly limits what I can do. I had Polio at 22-months (affected my left side) and was told I would never walk. Well I proved the doctors wrong, but I had 3-times-a-week Physical Therapy until I was 18. To this day I have to do daily stretching exercises as I have muscles in my left leg that do not work so they must be constantly stretched.
So I concentrate on brain stimulation. One thing I like to do is pick a topic and follow it around the web to find all the conflicting views. RBT’s Journal and you folks provide an endless supply of topics.
WRT an AED, we have it plus I have a resident Surgical RN who really has experience using it as well as CPR (note, the new training for civilians CPR is chest compressions only). We (me, wife, son, daughter) all have our Advanced CPR cards which allows us to do the whole chest compression breathing thing (though mine has lapsed). We all have Advanced First Aid cards and carry emergency first aid kits that are stocked like an EMT’s bag but with the drugs. My wife has an AED in her car. Fortunately she has never pulled up to an accident where the EMTs were not already there, but she is prepared.
My story regarding math is a book. The Reader’s Digest version boils down to: I was good at math until the “new math” of the early 60s (7th & 8th grades). When I got to high school the school district came to the brilliant conclusion that “new math” didn’t work so back to the traditional system. The only math I was good at was geometry, got an A in that. I barely got a D in algebra the year before. Then there was advanced algebra and calculus, D in both (all my other grades in high school were A so that math ruined my GPA). Four years of math was required when I went to high school.
The folks who know how to teach math is the Navy Nuclear Power Program. They cut out all the bull-shit, get down to the meat and showed all the tricks and shortcuts. I aced all my math in Nuke Power School (graduated first in class with a 4.125, got some extra credit). I can slide rule with the best of them. On the submarine we used to have slide rule competitions between the Electronics Technicians, Electricians Mates (what I was, EM1SS), Interior Communications Electricians, Engineering Laboratory Technicians, and Sonar Technicians. We held the competition on the mess deck and the other crew members would watch and bet. Submariners will bet on anything 😉
There goes the timer, cinnamon rolls are done so you guys are spared…
“I was good at math until the “new math” of the early 60s (7th & 8th grades).”
BINGO!
For me it was the “new math” of my fifth-grade through eighth-grade, which I HATED; I can still see the textbook now; it was a yellow paperback. My dad, an engineer, would try to help me with it but even HE threw up his hands and basically said “eff it.” I also did well in plane geometry and got A’s and B’s. Algebra, invented by the musloid scum, is for the birds, probably vultures. Yes I know, not very charitable of me on Easter, but there it is.
I was a little math wiz, way above my grade level, but then had a couple of blows to the head. That took me back down to maybe high normal. I hated new math. My 6th grade teacher used the 50’s high school textbook with our advanced track classes. Modulo, number bases, exponents, etc, but when I changed schools to Jr High, we were back to long division and colored sticks to learn fractions. I dug in my heels and said F this. I never did well in math again, except Geometry in HS.
I got off to a poor start in HS, and by my senior year had to ditch all my challenging classes and take the easiest stuff I could in order to get my GPA up. It worked, but a better choice might have been to try doing well all along….
Very few people understand math well enough to teach it well.
I will say, I used trig and geometry on an almost daily basis for years in my job. I could do complex 3D layout and machine alignment with measuring tapes, math, strings, and plumb bobs faster and better than most others could do it with a Total Station. There is a place for the Total Station (computerized theodolite/transit/measuring tool) but one is not always available.
nick
My HS Chem/Phys were algebra based and you had to have two semesters before you took them. I had great Chem/Phys teachers in HS. Uni was 3 semesters of calculus in a row. Then, as a maths major, various weird courses, like “Geometry from a Non-Euclidean Viewpoint” and “Theory of the Number Line”. Prob/Stats, etc.
K-12 in Wisconsin for me had no counting sticks etc. Rote learning and practice with practical exercises.
Today is the day Jesus was in Hell, telling Adam and Eve they could boogie on outta there to their awaiting thrones amid cherubim and seraphim.
huh?
“It worked, but a better choice might have been to try doing well all along….”
I shoulda tried harder, too, and buckled down, like the nerds in the National Merit Scholar group, but:
1.) Teenage boy with jumbo dose of testosterone, evidently.
2.) Read what I wanted to read; to hell with everything else.
3.) It was the late Sixties. LOTS of distractions. For example:
Rock music and rock concerts, all over eastern MA.
Dope of all kinds available, plus booze.
The 6PM nightly nooz, featuring 50% riots in burning cities across the country that make Ferguson and Ball-More look like Sunday skool picnics at the beach, and 50% body-count stats and guys humping rucks in single file through jungles in SEA. With, in my senior year, the body of my best friend’s neighbor’s kid who’d been a couple of years ahead of me, returned from ‘Nam. U.S. Army Infantry. Name on the wall: Paul Cahill.
So…not a whole lotta incentive to sit in the house and study Al-Jubba or Calculus or Physics. Esp. not with four siblings bouncing around like ping-pong balls, too.
Don’t ask me how he does it, but my son is totally visual in all things. He has a form of high functioning autism. He does not see words, he sees pictures. He did not “read” until the 6th grade. He finally got a teacher that would listen to me and not consider him “retarded”. The school district kept trying to put him in “special ed”. Teachers expected him to recite books word for word, instead he tells the story and its meaning just by looking at the words. With math he visualizes the solutions, in 2D, 3D, 4D, and who knows what other D. Even though he can do a lot more he enjoys his job as a drafter using Solid Works (he won all the Solid Works and Auto CAD competitions he entered while he was in college, good scholarship money). His current employer loves how someone can describe how something is to be and before they know it he has a complete CAD package of the project. The fabricators on the floor love his packages because they work the first time. He produces 3 to 4 times as much as the other drafters who all have way more “experience”. His boss can only give him a 3% raise every 3-months, which he is doing to catch him up to the “senior” drafters. BTW, he designs totally custom titanium wheelchairs that are sold worldwide.
If I had not been a pest during his grade school years the “state” would have put him in a “Group Home” and destroyed him, as they do to so many like him (I have a niece who is autistic, 5-years older than my son, she is a vegetable in a “Group Home”). Not everyone fits into the mold some in society demand. He has been poked and prodded by doctors and Universities around the U.S. trying to put a label on him, they can’t. Guess what idiots, you cannot pigeon-hole everyone. BTW, I absolutely refused the “drug therapies” the wanted to try to make him “normal”./soapbox off
Back to my math, even though I barely passed the math classes, I aced chemistry, physics, and biology.
And for the record I am 65.5 years, rode hard and put away wet most of my life.
BTW, my cinnamon rolls were GREAT this morning.
Huh?
Apostle’s Creed.
I can still see the textbook now; it was a yellow paperback.
The SMSG–Student Math Studies Group–series; the high school I attended in the early Sixties used the algebra, trig and calculus volumes. I began my college career as a biology major but soon realized that I hated, hated, HATED lab work so I switched to math.
The 6PM nightly nooz, featuring 50% riots in burning cities across the country that make Ferguson and Ball-More look like Sunday skool picnics at the beach, and 50% body-count stats and guys humping rucks in single file through jungles in SEA.
Not to mention various assassinations and the 1968 Democrat convention riots in Chicago, a rerun of which may be coming to Cleveland this summer, only this time starring the Republican party.
“The SMSG–Student Math Studies Group–series…”
That’s IT! Now I remember the acronym, too! Boy, did those books suck.
“Not to mention various assassinations and the 1968 Democrat convention riots in Chicago…”
That’s right; multiple assassinations of MAJOR political figures; if it happened now it would be comparable to Obola being murdered, along with either Cankles or Sanders, probably the latter, and Reverends Sharpless, Jackwagon and Fartinacan all at once.
“…a rerun of which may be coming to Cleveland this summer, only this time starring the Republican party.”
No kidding; the BLM, SJW and FSA mobs will in full swing, even with MASSIVE security in place. Or they’ll put in bare-minimum security to make it look good and then watch as it all blows up and then they have to get SERIOUS.
Obola being murdered, along with either Cankles or Sanders, probably the latter, and Reverends Sharpless, Jackwagon and Fartinacan all at once.
I’m in Heaven, Seventh Heaven…
Sing it, amigo!
” Or they’ll put in bare-minimum security to make it look good”
During the last couple of riots, there were an awful lot of outdated beater squad cars, sitting suspiciously alone…and after the fire, you get a nice shiny NEW car.
I’m not the only one who noticed.
Methinks some folks who think they know how to work it for their own benefit, are gonna find out that once you set the blaze, it goes where it goes, and you can’t do much about it. Sometimes the boy with the matches gets burned up too.
nick
“…are gonna find out that once you set the blaze, it goes where it goes, and you can’t do much about it. Sometimes the boy with the matches gets burned up too.”
There it is.
This also goes for the top nabobs and bonzes ruling the country about now, as they blithely be-bop around the world striking matches and tossing them around at random. Europe is about to find that out in a yuuuuge way soon as various ISIS guerrilla units start creating events that make Paris and Brussels look like suburban Long Island lawn parties. The governments and security forces will find pretty quickly that they’ve bitten off far more than they are prepared to chew. And what’re the odds, ya think, of any of our own bonzes and nabobs learning anything from it, let alone taking appropriate steps?
Then again, this could be exactly what the regimes want.
Maybe I’m an optimist, but I don’t expect much of the latest ISIS threats. The nutcases in Brussels weren’t (imho) remotely commanded from anywhere. I expect they were local nut-jobs, and ISIS is only too happy to take the credit.
OTOH, there are a lot of local nut-jobs., so who knows…
Seems to me that part and parcel of immigration processing should be explicit testing: Is this person willing to accept that their way is not the only way; more, that the majority of the culture they join does not share their views? If not, then they really don’t want to be here anyway. Sure, some will try to fake it, but that’s hard to do over weeks and months of processing. You would filter out lots of troublemakers that way.
Not going to happen, though. Even though (or because) the SJWs have overplayed their hand, I’m afraid that the power shift is going to be too dramatic. The pendulum rarely stops halfway; it swings over into the opposite extreme, which is likely to be right-wing nationalism in a couple of decades.