Cold this morning, warming later, but COLD now. And it was 36F last night at 11pm by the water. 40F at the house. At least for now we’ve gone straight from summer to winter, barely seeing fall at all.
Did my non-prepping hobby yesterday. Great to see the familiar faces, and a couple of new members, as well as some old members that don’t get to meetings every month. Didn’t sell much. That was a bit disappointing, but I’ll bring the stuff to the next sale and it might move then.
After that, I loaded the truck and headed out. It was late afternoon by the time I got here, already chilly and getting dark. I got my patio heaters ready, laid a fire, and ate dinner. It was a nice night to have the fire. Ate s’mores with D2 and W1… watched the stars move in the sky. Moon rose about 1015. Until then it was pretty dark and clear. Needed the fire and the heaters though. Damp by the water. And chilly. Did I mention chilly?
Wife got the bedroom flooring re-installed. Today we’ll probably do more work in the master bath, and the kids’ rooms. Then it will be back home for school on Monday. Short trip but more food and more stuff moved this way. And more work got done.
Always be improving your situation. Always be stacking.
nick
It is 38 F out here on the West side of the county this morning. The dog and cat went outside but it was too cold for them. The Siamese cat’s coat is about 8 inches long so he knew this was coming. It is 35 F just north of here so Nick’s BOL must be about 30 F at most.
I’ve had all three natural gas forced air heaters running all night. 65 F for our bedroom, 67 F for the kitchen, and the daughter is probably 69 F. At least until Mr. Biden takes away our natural gas in the name of science.
HMart run yesterday to top off our rice bin. $37.99 per 25 lb bag. Not our usual brand, but I can’t imagine that being any cheaper.
With the win in NV, the Dems took the Senate last night factoring in the tie-breaker from the VP.
On the plus side, I’m guessing that new Republican leadership is coming in the chamber following the debacle.
The daughter finds out this week what her obgyn recommends. She has polyps inside and outside her uterus. One polyp goes through the wall. My mother and I want her to have a hysterectomy but I don’t get to make that decision. My wife is unsure and so is the daughter. She is 35 and should not have children anyway due to the Lyme disease. A hysterectomy will make her anemia better, maybe even go away.
On an unserious note, while compacting the junk at the storage building, a polite term for dumpster diving, I came across $7 face value of silver halves and quarters. $10 face value is sold for ~$250 FRN at JMbullion, so… Bonus Day! 🙂
@Greg Norton
McConnell thought the most important thing was to ensure his power base by getting Murkowski re-elected. Then he failed to take care of business elsewhere. Epic fail. buh-bye.
Now if lightning would just strike a meeting of 3-4 Democrat representatives and spoil their lame duck majority so they can’t add another ten or twelve trillion to the debt before January.
Sunny and clear, and up to 45F now. I was asleep, mostly, so I don’t know what it was at 7am, but I’m guessing “chilly”.
The furnace keeps up very well, and it was even a bit warm in bed with the temp set to 72F. Time to get some breakfast going and work happening.
n
Judy Woodruff announced she will step down from the lead anchor position at PBS at the end of the year. This morning she was on CBS Sunday Morning and stated, among other howlers, that she could not understand why the nation was so divided. That’s like a serial killer getting caught in a blood-drenched room full of body parts and professing not to understand his arrest.
PBS News has been fully attached to the public teat for decades, yet makes no effort to do anything to represent all the electorate. You’re a parasite, Judy–go to hell.
Borrowing another joke from AoSHQ:
The Saturday Night Joke
A new monk arrives at the monastery. He is assigned the task of helping the other monks in copying the old texts by hand. He notices, however, that they are copying copies, and not the original books.
So, the new monk goes to the head monk to ask him about this. He points out that if there was an error in the first copy, that error would be continued in all of the other copies. The head monk says, “We have been copying from the copies for centuries, but you make a good point, my son.”
So, he goes down into the cellar with one of the copies to check it against the original. Hours later, nobody has seen him. So, one of the monks goes downstairs to look for him. He hears sobbing coming from the back of the cellar and finds the old monk leaning over one of the original books crying. He asks what’s wrong.
“You idiots”, he says, with anger and sadness in his eyes, “the word was celebrate!”
Nothing will happen in the Lame Duck session beyond another spending bill for the Ukraine debacle, which has bipartisan support.
I’m predicting Rick Scott will be the new Minority Leader in the Senate even though he was only peripherally involved in the beatdown of the Dems in FL on Tuesday.
The story that is emerging out of Florida this weekend is that DeSantis’ veto of the Legislature’s redistricting map and forcing redrawing three districts in particular may have saved the House majority for the Republicans, shifting the three from Dem to Republican registration edge.
Elections have consequences. Power has shifted in the party beyond abandoning Trump.
A final note (for now at least) on Alan E. Nourse:
I did several posts last night on AEN as an offshoot of some back-and-forth with @Lynn.
The first and often best reference for any science fiction author is ISFDB.org.
I pulled the list of short works and cross-referenced it with the four collections (Tiger by the Tail, The Counterfeit Man, Rx for Tomorrow, and Psi High and Others) published during his lifetime, plus Project Gutenburg. The list of works on the latter is focused on AEN’s short works not available in the collections.
My list has 59 items. The four collections and PG cover 48 of them. Of the remainder, five are only available as originally appearing in a pulp SF magazine, and the other six have also been collected in anthologies by Conklin, Merrill, et al. I would not be surprised to see PG fill in more of the blanks in the future.
I have a fond remembrance of reading AEN short stories, and largely overlooked the plot weaknesses and inconsistencies that are now widely recognized. I doubt most would hold up very well after more than 70 years, but at some point I may take the list and try a chronological reading.
>> Ate s’mores with D2 and W1
Hmm…still tempting fate there with the missus I see…
Tell us how you really feel. We can take it.
The latest “news” from IEEE. The Haskell fanboys (and they seem to be mostly male) have been working this obsession their entire careers, ever since they saw that book on the shelf at Borders in the 90s.
Every Borders seemed to have a copy of that book on the shelf.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/functional-programming
Getting my generation of developers to understand OO has been hard enough. Most of the programmers who started in the 90s went through Computer Engineering curriculums which lacked even elective exposure to Lambda Calculus. The generations behind us used Java and Python in school, respectively.
Functional programming isn’t going to happen on a mass scale, but, every now and then, a product is successful. From what I understand, WhatsApp was heavily into Erlang, which allowed them to achieve scale on minimal resources.
Jimmy Carter fan girl from Georgia who went from affiliate to network after he was elected President.
Geesh, how old is Woodruf? IIRC, she was around the same age as Brokaw, who went to DC from California with the victory of Reagan in 1981.
In yesterday’s discussion about Kodacrome and Ektachrome, I came across this:
Color film was built for white people. Here’s what it did to dark skin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d16LNHIEJzs
The video and the comments would make a rich source for a treatise on progressive bias, starting with the fact that no one has “white” skin.
One of the early comments:
In the black and white film period, Hollywood used garish colors if they would photograph well. Laurel and Hardy were meticulous in that respect, as is well-documented. Many professional still photographers were well-aware of the effect of color choices, and architectural and industrial photographers in particular were adept. One a more basic level simple contrast was a bigger problem–the light levels and distribution used to illuminate a stage or tv set is vastly different than the light used for day-to-day living.
Judy: 75
Tom: 82
>> The video and the comments would make a rich source for a treatise on progressive bias, starting with the fact that no one has “white” skin.
You prefer “Flesh,” perhaps?
Hat-tip: Crayola
“Sunday Funday: New Greta Thunberg Thermostat Scowls at You When You Turn the Heat Up”
https://www.ttgnet.com/journal/2022/11/13/sun-nov-13-2022-chilly-willy-today/
“”MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Google, the makers of the Nest™ thermostat that totally does not track your every movement and thought, has partnered with climate activist Greta Thunberg to make a thermostat that scowls at you when you attempt to turn the heat up.”
“The Greta Thunberg Thermostat™ also emits an audible, “How dare you” if it hears you emit dangerous methane into the atmosphere in the form of a fart.”
“The Death Cure (Maze Runner, Book Three)” by James Dashner
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385738781?tag=ttgnet-20
Book number three of a six book young adult science fiction apocalyptic series. I read the well printed and well bound trade paperback published by Delacorte Press in 2013. I have purchased the next two books in the series from Big River and will read them soon, both are prequels to the first book in the series. The sixth book in the series was just released.
https://www.amazon.com/Maze-Cutter-James-Dashner/dp/B09YJBP6X5?tag=ttgnet-20/
I saw the excellent movies made using the first three books in the series a couple of years ago and decided to read the books finally. The third movie is somewhat faithful to the third book with Dylan O’Brien (Teen Wolf) playing the part of Thomas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_Runner:_The_Death_Cure
The basic premise is that the Sun goes wild and scorches the Earth in an event called the Flare, outright killing most of the people on Earth. And then a manmade virus rolls through the remaining population, killing many of them and making most of the survivors crazy. A group of kids wake up in a glade surrounded by a huge maze full of dangerous creatures and learn how to survive in very difficult situations. The kids make their way out of the maze and into the control room for the maze. A group of scientists takes them to a safe place and then sends them across the blistering desert. At the so-called safe place, the kids find out that there was another maze and another group of kids.
The survivors of the kids end up in Denver which is trying to keep the city free of diseased people. The diseased people are kept outside the city in a big camp. But, eventually the city is overrun by the diseased people.
Warning: Several of the kids are killed in the book and the movie.
The author has a website at:
https://jamesdashner.com/
My rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (7,607 reviews)
@Greg Norton:
The latest “news” from IEEE. The Haskell fanboys (and they seem to be mostly male) have been working this obsession their entire careers, ever since they saw that book on the shelf at Borders in the 90s.
Every Borders seemed to have a copy of that book on the shelf.
Which book, please? Neither you nor the author of the IEEE article says, and the only book by the article author that I can find on Amazon isn’t programming related.
The Haskell book I used to see at Borders wouldn’t be anything even remotely current. This would be something going back 20 years or more. None of the covers on Amazon look familiar.
Always enjoyed “Pine Green for the Goblins at Halloween, and “Burnt Sienna” for the Indians at Thanksgiving.
“Flesh” was one of at least three colors that was useful for skintones, often used in pairs and blended by the skilled kids. My Aunt Betty had a cracker tin with hundreds of broken pieces of crayon, and there was one color in there that worked really well. Problem is, I couldn’t match it with any of my “good” crayons in the 64-box. Later when I studied color and asked some questions about Crayola in particular, I found out that there were colors that had been discontinued, and some that had been acquired from another company. Coincidentally, one such company was Munsell, creators of a color classification system that predates CIELab.
“Etam: Mexico is Leapfrogging Canada in the LNG Export Race”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/11/13/etam-mexico-is-leapfrogging-canada-in-the-lng-export-race/
“The Mexican LNG projects utilize the web of gas pipelines bringing feedstock over the border from the U.S., in particular, the Permian and west – regions that Canadian gas can now access through the web of pipes stretching north into Canada.”
“The five Mexican projects under construction will export well over 2 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d) and are slated to come on line between 2024 and 2027. As with dental work and drinks and haircuts, things are much cheaper in Mexico – the five projects under construction will cost a fraction of Canada’s plodding beasts. One Mexican LNG hub announced in Sept 2022, capable of exporting almost 1 bcf/d, will cost $4-5 billion.”
I had no idea. But, Mexico does not have a good track record on running high energy and high precision projects.
@Lynn
I’d rather have one that reminds you to “open the skylight and turn on both ventilators*”.
SNL, Gilda Radner as “Tammy Widette”
@Greg Norton
An early edition of Simon Thompson’s book? There was one about 2000 that had a title bold enough to read across the room.
The Haskell book I used to see at Borders wouldn’t be anything even remotely current. This would be something going back 20 years or more. None of the covers on Amazon look familiar.
Thanks for looking.
An early edition of Simon Thompson’s book? There was one about 2000 that had a title bold enough to read across the room.
Probably this one (ignore the “1840” publication date):
https://www.amazon.com/Haskell-Functional-Programming-Simpon-Thompson/dp/0201403579/ref=sr_1_1?crid=13IWXQXATXR0X&keywords=0201403579&qid=1668381042&sprefix=0201403579+%2Caps%2C104&sr=8-1&tag=ttgnet-20
There’s also this moldy oldie:
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Functional-Programming-Cambridge-Computer/dp/0521277248/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1DO6IV8BWEA4U&keywords=0521277248&qid=1668380970&sprefix=0521277248+%2Caps%2C141&sr=8-1&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.006c50ae-5d4c-4777-9bc0-4513d670b6bc&tag=ttgnet-20
Ooh that smell
Can’t you smell that smell
https://areaocho.com/this-smells-2/
The latest “news” from IEEE. The Haskell fanboys (and they seem to be mostly male) have been working this obsession their entire careers, ever since they saw that book on the shelf at Borders in the 90s.
. . .
Functional programming isn’t going to happen on a mass scale, but, every now and then, a product is successful. From what I understand, WhatsApp was heavily into Erlang, which allowed them to achieve scale on minimal resources.
Yep. FP isn’t for the unsophisticated and unmotivated, i.e., the majority of today’s so-called programmers.
Home again. Power was out at some point. I think I need a plug in mechanical clock, so I can see how much it’s offset from current time. I don’t have a good way to know how long the power was out.
House is warming up. Wife set the temp to 66F and that’s where it was… on the heat setting, not cool…
n
I have been unable to escape some of the “analysis” of the election, and very little makes sense, until now. Mark Levin and guests have some cogent things to say about it. Watch today’s episode of “Life, Liberty & Levin” on your usual outlet. He and guests have some of the best thoughts on why some of this happened that I have seen. Yes, I am a Levin fan. He has a good combination of former insider along with a sharp legal mind.
@Nick, I used to use an electromechanical clock and a digital clock to tell how long the power was off and when it came back on. Be sure to use a digital clock that starts counting up from 0000 (clock midnight) when the power comes back on.
I just retired this setup about a year ago, after our local utility upgraded the yard that serves us, as part of a road widening project. We used to have an average of ~10 outages of less than a minute per year; most were only a few seconds, the result of auto-restore, but they still made clock resetting a pain. Now, almost none. Too soon to say, but in almost three years, we have only had three outages, one lasting only about a second. One was a planned maintenance outage, and the most recent about two minutes.
This seems pretty good, but the maintenance outage was annoying. Our power is routed in line from the source. Fifty years ago, Edison often had two or more paths from the source to a neighborhood. This meant that several kinds of failures affected fewer than ten houses. That architecture is no longer considered economical, and reliability is lower. We seldom have widespread outages, because our weather is pretty benign. Even our 7.1 earthquake produced only a flicker in most of our area. That’s really good.
When we bought this house, power was solid. We went years without an outage, and even thru several major storms. But after Harvey, we’ve had frequent outages. Most only last an hour or two, but that is a lifetime compared to what it used to be.
Crumbling infrastructure is a bad sign. I’m glad your provider has been winning the war with entropy.
n
“Carbon Budget 2022: “Nine Years to Save the Earth” from Climate Change”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/11/13/carbon-budget-2022-nine-years-to-save-the-earth-from-climate-change/
“According to the United Nations, gas projects launched in response to shortages created by the Ukraine war could destroy the world. Though we have an extra year over their 2019 11 year warning.”
We are all going to die.
I have two original Asahi Pentax Spotmatic bodies and a small assortment of lenses, including a 50mm f/1.4 Super Takumar lens. That lens was plenty good on film, and I took a lot of pictures with it. It is pretty sharp from about f/2.8 through f/11, and it produces good contrast for such a big lens. The lenses are one reason I bought a Pentax K20D dSLR. (The other was that it was the first for Pentax with a CMOS sensor, plus sensor-shift stabilization.) I thought I might get some use out of those lenses, but I was mostly wrong. I do most of my shooting with motionless subjects, so auto focus and automatic aperture control are not missed. I also thought the large aperture might be a plus over the lenses I bought with the new digital body. Nope. There is severe vignetting, especially at larger apertures, and the edge sharpness is noticeably poor. So much for that lens.
I had expected some of that, but it was bad enough to make the lens unusable. The reason is that digital sensors “like” the light rays to hit he sensor at as close to straight-on as possible. Just as a quick test, I have an optically good 400 f/8 lens, so I slapped it on. Wow! Sharp edge to edge, with no vignetting. Seems to prove the theory. Trouble is, I have very little use for a 600mm equivalent lens, especially that slow.
So, don’t wish for a digital back for your Pentax, at least not for that lens. I have a friend who has an original DSLR that is a Nikon film body converted at the factory to digital. I think it was Fuji branded. It weighs a ton and cost a ton. Today, it is just a curiosity, but in its day it was groundbreaking.
I think it was mostly journalists that drove adoption of pro level dSLR cameras. The ability to see and send the image trumped a lot of other considerations.
n
Well, it looks like I won this telescope…
Zhumell Z8 dobsonian. It got good reviews for a beginner scope, it’s big, so my wife should be happy. I got a significant discount off retail price, and no shipping charges.
So that is one more thing off the list. And if she gets more serious, we can upgrade, if she doesn’t end up an enthusiast, it was an inexpensive way to find that out. I appreciate the suggestions, even if I didn’t end up following them, but taking the easy way out….
n
(the other ‘scope this week went cheap, at about $300 for a vintage 8″ with mount, unknown if the mirror was in good shape or not though.)
The current House projection is 216 dumbrocrats and 219 repuglicans. Looks like some more fake ballots are needed for Pelosi to remain Speaker.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-elections/house-results?icid=election_nav
Some summary thoughts on photography.
In my freshman year at college in 1963-64, I worked three jobs. One was for the yearbook, and was critical to doing photography under a lot of different conditions. It was all black and white, usually Tri-x developed in Acufine. I usually shot two rolls a day, five or six days a week, plus the occasional evening. I developed and proofed most of my work, but did not do the final prints for scanning. Darkroom work was drudgery. There were two other photographers, and all the group shots were done by a studio company. I mention this because it gave me a real appreciation for meeting deadlines with a good (not necessarily great) product, and getting it right the only time. Low pay, but great experience.
I also worked for a regional magazine. It was usually a “mug shot” once a month, easy, no darkroom work, and paid very well. Hard job to get, but rewarding. Compare the two and see the lessons.
As a result of that early work, I have always liked B&W photography. It has a certain purity. I also learned about composition from art books, something I tell beginning photographers. The technical aspects of photography should be learned so well that they become second nature, allowing one to concentrate on the subject matter.
The third job was working for the campus TV studio. They taped lectures. Yes, there was remote learning waay back then. It was different, though. The lecturer only did about half the class, and a teaching assistant in the classroom finished and answered questions. It seemed to be quite successful, although I never took any courses that way. I was essentially a broadcast engineer for the studio. Poor pay, but the experience got me a job with the local (Detroit) ABC TV station the following two summers. Great working environment and high pay. Lots of overtime opportunities, too. The big league with about fifty top-notch engineers and another twenty other staff. So great that five years after graduating I considered making broadcasting a career. Didn’t want to live in the Detroit area or a major city like NYC or Hollywood. Also didn’t want to spend at least ten years waiting to become a director, which was my goal. Serious dream, but only a dream.
That college studio was garish, but for a different reason. A local paint store donated their extra paints. Somebody had the idea to mark a grayscale with numbers. Paint samples were compared to the scale, and the closest number was marked on the can. It was B&W TV. When the set designer wanted to select a “color” they just used numbers. The set looked awful in real life, but just fine on camera. It was always fun to see the reactions from visitors.
So much for boring y’all.
Regarding memory cards, I have had several SD cards fail. These had their files copied off, but I had kept them as sizes grew; they also served as a kind of extra backup. Some were about ten years old, and hadn’t been read or powered on in at least five years. They were unreadable with two kinds of fix-it software. Just dead, I guess. Word to the wise.
I saw the IEEE article praising functional programming (via Slashdot). Basically, the guy is saying that functional programming would solve all the world’s ills. Surprisingly, the guy isn’t that young, but he sure is naive.
First, true functional programming is probably beyond the capabilities of the bottom half of programmers, probably more.
Second, the guy is touting how you can program “free of side-effects”. That’s great and wonderful for the small computational core of an application, but: literally everything else *is* a side-effect. Data storage? User interaction? Communication with other programs? Mananement of hardware? All side-effects. Side-effects break the functional paradigm, and you wind up with ugliness.