66F and only 90%RH this am. Winter is here.
Michael turns out to be a powerful and deadly destructive storm. There are pix elsewhere, please look at them.
Storm surge and flooding, and the destructive power of the wind are on full display in the pix. Keep in mind how quickly this storm became an issue. Storm forming – storm worsening but still no big deal – hey it’s getting stronger – get out or get KILLED!!!11!!!!111
I’m sure that for some it was a complete surprise. Which is why you have a plan made ahead of time.
n
OH YEAH, the financial reckoning may be upon us too, pay attention!
I smell a rat. Ok, not literally, I’m at my desk not in the garage…..
This morning I said to the wife, “Someone is lying.” Michael just didn’t kill 10,000 people. I’m really glad BTW, but we’re being lied to. NO WAY that damage we’re seeing was from an “almost” Cat5 storm. So who is lying? Well, NOAA I think. Turns out they “estimate” windspeeds based on models, not on the ground stations. WHO CARES what the windspeed is at 2 miles up, and based on a guess? Where is the “ground truth”? Local stations reported much lower windspeeds. Again, we care about wind at GROUND LEVEL, where the people and things are.
I’m not the only one either. Karl Denninger lives there and has some thoughts….
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=234333
He attributes it to politics, globull warmening doomers in particular.
In a coincidence, Borepatch discusses some of the climate data–
https://borepatch.blogspot.com/2018/10/just-how-bad-are-climate-temperature.html
n
Just another reason NOT to give money to my alma mater–
The first play of the season:
I can imagine, quite clearly, how horrible this is.
n
[snip] The first play of the season: [snip]
It sure sounds like a re-working of The Gift Of The Magi.
Meanwhile, on the ground, I’m being told of 130 mph winds at Tyndall AFB (the eastern end of which was where the eye hit) and at least one probable tornado that went though Panama City. A woman I know had to stay, she’s a lab tech at one of the hospitals, and they lost a bunch of windows on the 3rd floor as well as sustaining roof damage.
Like Nick, my first inclination is to doubt what I am told in the news. Not that I have any special knowledge of wind speeds or the damage that can occur, there is just no trust. A sign of the times.
Consider the benefits of living in a high-trust society.
And consider who is doing their level best to destroy that aspect of American society.
The Progressive progress continues.
Here is the math behind the insane $240/gallon of gasoline tax, “IPCC SR1.5 Carbon Tax Math”:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/11/ipcc-sr1-5-carbon-tax-math/
The carbon tax is nothing but a money grab AND a means of financially hurting the USA.
And as one commentator noted, the AGW and the carbon tax is all about a one world government. Run from Geneva. Be scared, very scared of bureaucrats in foreign places. They will not hear your cries of pain as they quarter troops in your homes.
Just like approximately every other anti-global-warming and anti-global-cooling program.
Eh, to echo the late, great OFD, there are probably more firearms in American civilian hands than in the entirety of forces under UN command. Very few are militarily useful (contra the hysterical claims of Dumbocrat politicians and MSM blowhards) but they’re good enough, and the typical American gun-owning civilian probably has more shooting practice than the typical UN dingleberry in uniform.
Eh, to echo the late, great OFD, there are probably more firearms in American civilian hands than in the entirety of forces under UN command. Very few are militarily useful (contra the hysterical claims of Dumbocrat politicians and MSM blowhards) but they’re good enough, and the typical American gun-owning civilian probably has more shooting practice than the typical UN dingleberry in uniform.
There are firearms in civilian hands today in the USA. Who knows about tomorrow when the progressives gain power again ? The progressives are playing the long game, the rot that they have accomplished in the USA since the 1930s is breathtaking.
The progressives will attempt to collect the civilian guns in the USA at some point. I doubt that I will see that point due to my age and Trump pushing that point back at least eight years.
What gubs? I’ve heard (at various times) Lake Champlain, Lake Erie, Brazos River, Allegheny River, Mississippi River, the Gulf, and assorted other waterways. It’s enough to make you wonder how ships can navigate with all those gubs in the water.
More seriously – molṑn labé. [expletiver expletiver].
Got a pair of Bose 301 bookshelf speakers at the Goodwill yesterday. Some moisture damage to the boxes but the speakers are pristine.
F ME! I’ve forgotten how good music sounds on decent speakers at a decent volume.
I’ve got Boston Acoustics for my TV 5.1 system, and they sound good, but they are essentially aluminum bodied bookshelf speakers with 3″ drivers, and there is a LOT of room “ambiance”.
I’ve got Acoustic Research bookshelves for my computer, but again, just aluminum bodied speakers with 2″ or 2 1/2″ drivers. Good speakers, and sound great for what they are. But small.
Even though the 301 isn’t Dr Bose’s crowning achievement, they sound great esp driven by a 70’s era Panasonic amp.
I may find a way to keep them….
n
Got a pair of Bose 301 bookshelf speakers at the Goodwill yesterday. Some moisture damage to the boxes but the speakers are pristine.
F ME! I’ve forgotten how good music sounds on decent speakers at a decent volume.
Hook up the amp to a CD player output. No compression.
When I worked in Seattle, the Renton Fry’s used “Sting Live in Berlin” to demo speakers. The concert DVD has an uncompressed 2 channel track, no tricks. The sound is incredible with the right speakers positioned properly.
Ironically, Fry’s did *not* sell the disc in their video section.
yeah, my hearing isn’t as good as it once was, so I need LOUD to get nuance, or I need a really good listening room.
Funny how you learn not to hear the mp3 hash of the cymbals or certain vocals….
Of course, most of my listening is in the car, and it’s NOT quiet.
Now to get some vintage english mid sized vintage ready to sell. Hope they sound ok.
n
Well, they sound good, but only at high power levels. They must be pretty inefficient compared to the bose, as you have to drive them pretty hard to get the treble where it should be.
n
(I don’t usually sell speakers any more, because the people who buy them are super flakey, but the prices were too good.)
Funny how you learn not to hear the mp3 hash of the cymbals or certain vocals….
Artists who like distortion and overdrive effects sound terrible in MP3. OK Go immediately comes to mind.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think this is a
goodI mean “REALLY BAD” thing?Boston Dynamics has revealed a video of its terrifying Atlas robot running and jumping over obstacles with ease.
Um, I’ve seen how this movie ends….
n
However most CD’s pressed today run the audio to the max with lots of clipping on the loud passages. This can be easily observed in any audio editor (I use Adobe Audition). The clipping is controlled by whoever does the original audio processing limit the audio so that there are no clicks but the audio is still maxed out. Annoying it is. I surmise there is significant audio compression and expansion being used.
Telarc makes some incredible CD’s, proper levels, no clipping, no compression anywhere in the audio path. All very high quality equipment. I have many of the Cincinnati Pop’s Orchestra when it was conducted by Eric Kunzel (now deceased). On one of the recordings I could hear someone turning a page on some music sheet. Ears are not as good so I don’t hear it anymore. I had to use Bose headphones to really hear the sound. Now I don’t even remember the particular track. And the noise was indeed very subtle.
And on a side note the audio recording by the Beach Boys of “Wendy” you can hear someone cough about 2/3 of the way through the recording, the instrumental portion that was standard of music of the time period and genre. Really don’t know how some audio engineer let that one through unless it was too late to redo the recording and thus had to remain.
“‘Changed Forever’: Florida Panhandle devastated by Michael”
https://apnews.com/3cdbb4c6702f49eeae0d5fae6b917592
Wow ! That is probably mostly storm surge damage. Wave action on a structure is devastating.
Hat tip to:
https://drudgereport.com/
Stilts and code compliant construction seems to work….
n
Man, the intersection of Unicode and Fortran is eating my lunch today. Yup, there is no intersection.
And stick built structures seemed to fare badly.
n
Stilts and code compliant construction seems to work….
Very tall stilts ….
However most CD’s pressed today run the audio to the max with lots of clipping on the loud passages. This can be easily observed in any audio editor (I use Adobe Audition). The clipping is controlled by whoever does the original audio processing limit the audio so that there are no clicks but the audio is still maxed out. Annoying it is. I surmise there is significant audio compression and expansion being used.
By compression, I meant MP3 and whatever Apple uses these days, but, yeah, a lot of modern US albums are LOUD.
Apple uses AAC encoding I think to encode their music. It is supposed to be lossless encoding. iTunes will encode using MP3 or AAC and can convert from one format to the other. When I ripped all my CDs using iTunes the AAC encoding was used by default. I had to convert to MP3 to get the music on a thumb drive to play in my F-150 as Ford only understand MP3. Stopped doing that when I was able to get a subscription Sirius for only $5.00 per month.
Just checked. Downloaded songs from Apple are in AAC format.
Wow ! That is probably mostly storm surge damage. Wave action on a structure is devastating.
Fortunately, the Panhandle is still fairly sparsely populated. A hit like that on Tampa would be a $100 billion disaster easily.
Florida has been in a historic lull for hurricanes over most of the last century. Listen carefully to the global warming hysterics whenever they talk about Gulf storm intensity or frequency being the worst since record keeping began.
And stick built structures seemed to fare badly.
Cinderblock construction in a hurricane doesn’t fare much better. Straps help, but the fancy houses on the barrier islands have poured concrete exterior walls and get built on top of pilings driven deep into the ground.
Man, the intersection of Unicode and Fortran is eating my lunch today. Yup, there is no intersection.
Our challenge at work this week is the requirement from one customer to capture plate images and tag reads from a vehicle moving through a toll plaza at 100 MPH.
I tried out the test vehicle tonight. Challenger R/T.
That would explain the inch deep grooves in the concrete on either side of the lane……
n
Very very weird that the gulf has a hurricane and it’s not affecting us at all.
Quite a strange feeling.
n
Very very weird that the gulf has a hurricane and it’s not affecting us at all.
Quite a strange feeling.
n
DO NOT ATTRACT THE ATTENTION OF THE HURRICANE GODS!!!
Geez, Nick! Now you’ve gone and done it! 🙂
[snip] Panhandle is still fairly sparsely populated. [snip]
Mexico Beach in particular is very sparsely populated. The year round residents are few in number, as a rule those folks live in the older concrete block homes. The really nice places along the edge of the beach are almost 100% vacation places. Also along the shore are a few condo buildings, hotels, & restaurants, along with the main canal that parallels US 98 and is normally full of fishing boats. Tyndall AFB is just to the east of MB; there was video floating about yesterday of much of the base’s infrastructure damaged, and a lot of that is to the west side of the base. West of that you get Panama City & its bedroom communities, much of which is fairly densely developed. Any shots you see of large stands of forested areas are almost certainly tracts owned by St. Joe Paper. West of the bay you get to Panama City Beach. The beach itself is more or less lined with various large condos and very expensive private vacation homes. However, when you get very far inland you are into regular people’s homes that are occupied year round (like mine). And in what is sure to draw howls of outrage in a couple of weeks, the tax bills for 2018 are due to be mailed November 1. This won’t sit well with people who HAD a beautiful home right on the beach that was valued at $500,000, but the bills are based on the value as of January 1 2018. The total population of Bay County is ~ 175,000, the overwhelming majority of whom live within 5 miles of either the Gulf shoreline proper or the bay structure.
As of last night the highways in & out of the county were blockaded, only service & repair crews were being allowed in. Cell phone service was spotty, as the system is overwhelmed and there are reported to be many towers down; conventional telecom & electricity is essentially all out of service too. One good thing about the electricity is that most of the development of the last 40 years has used underground utilities for the neighborhoods; once they get the trunk lines active (still a major task) big chunks of land come back in service quickly. Natural gas service only covers a small part of the area. And of course there’s a boil water notice in effect.
I’m hoping to leave my place of refuge on Saturday. I did manage to snag 60 liters of water and 4 each 5 gallon gas cans last night. Today I’m going to try to do some shopping for food that doesn’t have to be prepared. Alas, for all the talk of prepping on this site my economic circumstances of the last few years haven’t allowed me to create a stockpile, let alone have an off site cache.
Greg, if someone is passing by a plate reader at 100MPH, what is the optimal distance to hit the brakes to make the car dip so the reader has the most trouble getting a good image? Asking for a friend.
Mythbusters did a series on avoiding plate readers. Nothing worked. Sprays, Fresnel lens covers, etc. Only thing that worked was on a car traveling in excess of 150 mph (I don’t remember the exact speed) as the delay in getting the camera to take the image put the car too far away. The technology has gotten really good.
What I have been told that is effective is to place a bike rack in the hitch on a pickup truck and put a bike in the rack. That effectively obscures the plate from being seen but is still considered legal. At least that is what a “friend” told me.
And that’s why FRONT plates are required too. And you are likely to get facial recognition off that same camera, although that may not be implemented.
Tx is grabbing bluetooth signatures for traffic flow times, nothing really stopping them from reading your car’s bluetooth at the toll either…
“In a sluggish economy, never mess with another man’s livelihood.” applies to the .gov rent seekers too.
n
Constant surveillance —
“WaPo Journalist Khashoggi Wore Apple Watch That Recorded his Own Murder in Saudi Embassy ”
“Ali Al-Ahmed: The Turkish government has proof that Khashoggi is dead. They have audio of the incident. It was recorded from his Apple Watch that he was wearing according to his iPhone… The Apple Watch not only recorded the event but it gave the specific time and location. ”
I’m interested in plate reader software as well, but for something more mundane – timing runners in a race. Any chance it would work with 3″ numbers, on the front of a person, and crossing an imaginary line? They won’t be going more than, say 15 miles/hour.
Um, I’ve seen how this movie ends….
The big argument against a gun confiscation is that the confiscators are greatly outnumbered by the gun owners. If even a small percentage of people resist the confiscation the confiscators numbers get depleted very quickly and they stop.
If the confiscator is a mass produced robot……….
@pcb_duffer
” Alas, for all the talk of prepping on this site my economic circumstances of the last few years haven’t allowed me to create a stockpile, let alone have an off site cache. ”
–seriously!!!/??????!?!?!?!?
I’m glad you’re safe, and have water. I’m shocked that in several years you haven’t been able to put $100 aside in canned goods? That’s between 100 and 200 cans of food, and will feed a single person for over a month… or as long as 2 months. If you shop weekly, that’s one can per shopping trip.
I’ve said it before, but perhaps not often or clearly enough.
Prepping does NOT have to be expensive, or time consuming, or happen all at once.
The easiest and cheapest way to do it is to simply buy more of what you normally buy. Or if you don’t buy canned goods (other than tomato paste) — start adding canned food to your shopping trips. You can build up a little at a time, until, like saving money, you realize you have significant resources. The money goes even farther if you buy rice, beans, or other “staples” but they do take a bit more effort to store long term. Flour water, salt and oil will make tortillas or pasta and feed you for a long time or extend what you have.
I’ll put up some links to previous discussions later.
In the mean time, I didn’t realize you were in the path. I’m glad you are safe.
Please continue to share your experiences with the recovery as that is helpful and is a different perspective.
nick
No front plates in TN.
For Nevada:
Front plates are optional only if 1) the vehicle was not designed for a front plate and 2) the manufacturer did not provide an add-on bracket or other means of displaying the front plate. (NRS 482.275)
My Subie and MrsAtoz’s Battle Wagon don’t have a front bracket nor was one provided. Probably an end around by Dealers not provided the bracket. When I got my Camray in Tejas, the dealer came right out and screwed one on the front. Ugly.
Greg, if someone is passing by a plate reader at 100MPH, what is the optimal distance to hit the brakes to make the car dip so the reader has the most trouble getting a good image? Asking for a friend.
Plate images are backups to the toll tag for this particular customer.
Vehicles going through the plaza without a payment will trigger a beacon alerting law enforcement further down the road.
I’m interested in plate reader software as well, but for something more mundane – timing runners in a race. Any chance it would work with 3″ numbers, on the front of a person, and crossing an imaginary line? They won’t be going more than, say 15 miles/hour.
Look into Open LPR and similar projects.
Vehicles move much more predictably than humans in, say, 30-40 feet of linear distance. Face recognition would probably be more reliable.
Budget food prep post from RBT-
https://www.ttgnet.com/journal/2015/01/10/saturday-10-january-2015/
although his idea of budget is much higher than ‘one can a trip’.
n
iSpy has a LPR add on that might be adaptable…
n
Or print QR codes on the runner’s bibs
n
Obscuring a plate is a good way to say ‘Please pull me over officer’. I was pulled over because the ball on my bumper made it hard to read my license. Lets face it, he was just snooping as it was about 6pm and I’m sure he was looking for DUIs. Another time I was pulled over by a CHP for exceeding the speed limit (about 42 in a 35). He was burning that stretch of downhill road likely because someone living there was complaining. Checked dl, reg and ins before walking to the front to see if my plate was there. It was and I only got an unwritten warning to slow down.
California requires both plates on all trucks and cars. Fixit ticket if cited for missing front plate but while those were once just that, the courts now impose a fee so look for about 25 bucks to comply, more if you need to acquire a plate from the DMV.
and
Both of those are interesting, but not really options.
As it stands right now, the state of the art is RFID (and similar) tech that senses the chip passing through the reader field. That’s all well and good, but there are hurdles that make that less than 100% reliable. Water, for instance, makes the HF RFID into crap. Hardware is $5,000-$20,000 (depending on brand & options), and the recurring cost is $0.60 to $1.50/runner.
An alternative is a person at the finish line running a time machine (a fancy, printing stopwatch) to record finish times, then matching those times with the (barcoded) tags collected at the other end of a finish chute. That’s cheaper but time-consuming. Recurring cost is $0.20/runner, and the hardware is $1000.
In both cases, I use a cheap camera as a backup to review results, and I depend on the bib number to help me fix things.
LPR (may) offer the best of both worlds. I need low cost (or I might as well spend the money on a GOOD chip system) and the optical backup.
It’s an idea I toy with. I’ll be checking out the Open LPR option. A couple of years ago it wasn’t ready.
Thanks.
Tx is grabbing bluetooth signatures for traffic flow times, nothing really stopping them from reading your car’s bluetooth at the toll either…
The legalities of tolling with Bluetooth are dicey. Plus, at high speed, it isn’t as reliable as you might think. We’ve spitballed automatic HOV enforcement grabbing phone transmissions, and it was discarded as unworkable for now.
Traffic flow analysis with Bluetooth works because even if you only get 1 out of 10 cars, you still get useful data. Tolling enforement requires as close to 100% reliability as possible.