Cold. Cold. Cold. BOL had a freeze warning last night. Houston was not supposed to get that cold, but 40F is still cold. It was 41F when I went to bed. Other than cold, should be nice.
Finished up this trip to the BOL yesterday. It was mainly a vacation, but I did make progress on a few things. We had guests so I couldn’t do any heavy work or shut off the water, but there are always ‘fill in’ tasks. Both the me and the wife relaxed more than worked this trip. I’m rationalizing that it’s important to do that to keep from getting burned out… yeah that’s it.
Sometime in the last two weeks I completed my 57th trip around the sun. Who would have thought I’d be here, or doing this? Not me. I didn’t think I’d make it past 26. When I did, I realized I needed to change my life if there was a chance I’d live for a while longer. 31 years later and I’m still here and still plan to continue. But every day after 26 years is a gift. Every single day. The good, the bad, the ordinary, or the days that I cheated death. All free and all good.
There’s a saying that you can’t kill a man who’s born to hang. Maybe that’s it. Somehow I doubt it though.
In any case, I’ll take it. And do what I can with it.
To that end, there is a list of stuff that I should/could/might get done here. I’ll be working that list. It’s the usual stuff, with some additional home repair and maintenance thrown in. And stacking. Or at least moving stacks, and maybe some organization…
Someone said 90% of success was just showing up. Well, I’ve been showing up for 57 years now, and plan to continue.
And continue stacking 🙂
nick
Many happy returns, Nick. Thank you for sharing your gift with us every day too, and please keep on keeping on.
I really liked the movie ‘Michael’. ‘Phenomenon’ not as much. Rather I liked both halves, but I felt like the first half of one move was spliced onto the second half of a different movie and I never recovered from the shift.
I had the same problem with ‘X-Files.’ I LOVED the show through the ‘Anasazi’ story line. Cool stuff and Scully starts to believe. But then the show resets and it i like that story arc never happened. I never recovered.
But I am weird that way.
@Lynn
“Wow, so do you wait for spring ?”
This year, yes.
Even earlier in March the sun angle is high enough that the car will warm under the ice and break the bond holding the ice to the car. On the sunny side it will come off in sheets. Turn it 280 degrees and clear the other side.
I remember a January ice storm when I was in high school. Cars were coated for weeks unless you had access to a warm garage.
Not weird. I notice that a lot when reading novels. There is often some kind of break in the story that imparts just enough disruption to put me off. It is usually something that a good copy editor would have noticed and corrected, but I get the impression that no-one copy edits anymore…
Everyone was out in Brenham on Sunday afternoon, risking rattlesnake bites to get that iconic shot of the kids and dogs in the knee high bluebonnets along the highway.
Earlier, at Fung’s Kitchen in town, the scene at 10:30, when dim sum service started, would have been considered a “superspreader” event three years ago.
Lots of “You Ain’t Got No Ice Cream”, especially from the woman who arranged a private room in back in advance for a party.
“What are you doing waiting in the looonng line? I know you.”
I expect that is largely true. More and more novels are published by the author. Unless the author pays an editor, it’s not going to happen. I’m already happy, when there aren’t any typos, punctuation or grammatical errors. Those really put me off fast…
37F this morning, still and clearing. Sun rose while we were waiting for the bus.
Thanks to all for the kind comments.
—–
Even with well produced books there can be story issues. I’m reading Her Brother’s Keeper by Mike Kupari (one of Larry Correia’s sometimes partners). It’s not bad it’s just missing something. There is a very awkward Deus Ex Machina transition that brings characters together, despite the plot lines suggesting that they would combine. Some of the characters don’t ring true, and the physics and economics of interstellar trading are abominable. It needs some story editing and a bit more thought about the background world building.
Better to armwave or just not mention details than to have poorly considered details, it’s SF after all, space travel is a given, and space trader stories have suspension of disbelief built in. No need to talk about ‘taking on fuel and reaction mass’ for a single stage to orbit classic 50s rocket ship, that then somehow ‘transits’ between ‘transit points’ in different systems. All that does is blow the suspension out of the water…
n
Andre Norton was very good at leaving out the details and just going with the accomplished facts. Very little detail on weapons, “distort”, etc that were needed, just the effects . Relieved us of “if I could just find an x-acto knife I could reprogram this chip”.
When she needed to she could do enough of the nuts and bolts to thrill. The last gasp of the ancient Baldy refueling station in Galactic Derelict is memorable.
>> The receipt doesn’t say.
On the Napa site the same model battery now has 24 month free replacement. Five years ago, I don’t know.
@paul, could have a pro-rated warranty. Since you have the receipt, doesn’t hurt to ask, especially that you are purchasing the replacement from the same place.
Update on fractal auditing og voter rolls:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/a_gigantic_egg_all_over_brad_raffenspergers_face.html
The ProgLibLeftard response to this will be to make the data unobtainable in the future—doubtless by restricting access to propety rolls—so this needs vigorous support and pursuit as the only avenue that is likely to clean up the voter roles in our lifetimes. If that means enshrining access to the data in the constitutions, then so be it.
I hope that Dr. Valentine has been proactive in securing recent data from all 50 states.
And again, just for the record, I have said it before: 82 million my ass.
D4 and I got the Bosch dishwasher installed over the weekend. The “hole” is next to the sink with a janky piece of filler wood. I couldn’t anchor to it without being a little out of line. No biggie. I did have to make a trip to HD to get an adapter “Bosch drain hose to garbage disposer”. It doesn’t come with the brass elbow “water inlet to 3/8 OD water line” but I knew that and got one earlier. Quiet, and, the “Crystal Dry” feature works great. Some crystals in the DW that absorb water during the regular drying cycle that drys better. Then the crystals dry out and are ready for the next load. Yeah, another thing to go wrong.
Currently listening to the Loreena McKennitt SXM/Pandora channel. Gotta have me some Celtic music.
Can I upvote this 10 more times?
I don’t know what the warranty was on the old battery. I know I paid $136 with sales tax. The new battery, same model, is now priced at $180. I ended up with a $40 discount for a total of $151 with sales tax.
It makes no sense. It looks like I got a credit of 2.29 x 61, $139.69. A new battery for the price of 61 months of use on the old battery?
<shrug>
I think the credit is 2.29 per month of life on a 72 month / 6 year battery at the Suggested Retail Price of $172 that they sold me for $123. With a few months of slop in their math or a price change from when I bought to when the cash register was programed. $40 credit for one year left of the warranty is $40 either way.
The ProgLibTurds think ESG is a good thing:
Biden signs first VETO of his presidency by blocking Republican crackdown on ESG in 401Ks: Claims ‘MAGA’ House wing is putting retirement savings ‘at risk’ by getting rid of social and environmental factors
401Ks are for making money, not for some social emotional bullshit.
Next there will be a 10% tax penalty if your 401K is not climate friendly. 10% if it doesn’t worship LBGTQWERTYs. 10% if the Board is not “diverse”.
It doesn’t matter. The next Jesus President with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and control of the House will seize the 401(k) plans and private pensions.
I should look into when and how to withdraw my 401k. Fast enough to not lose all of it. Slow enough to not pay taxes. It’s a plan. Might not be a good plan.
As it is, my pre-tax contribution is still there. HEB’s match is what bounces up and down.
A belated Happy Birthday, Nick. May you live longer than Cowboy Stu. I believe he admits to be the one here with the most revolutions around our fusion reactor. I am only 77.
I am still lurking, but have been busy. Will be so for a while more.
Question for the hive mind here: what are your thoughts on media for backup and archiving? I need to buy one 1 terabyte storage device, and have not done so for several years. After a quick look, I was a bit surprised to see that various solid state devices are now roughly competitive in price with hard disks, especially for this data capacity. I am not sure I would trust critical data to a USB stick or an SD memory card, but have no experience with newer forms of solid state storage. Please read on.
Background. I converted to hard disks for backup and archiving way back when Bob wrote a lot about errors and error correction used by various media. He addressed mostly optical media, but compared this to tape and hard disks. I had successfully used tape for at least a decade, but was outgrowing the capacity of my tape system. After following Bob’s experience, and reading some of his books, I settled on hard disks. These have served me well, and are much more convenient than tapes.
I store some of the hard disks off site. Most are repurposed desktop drives in portable cases, and use USB connections for universality. I also have one 2.5” portable disk that I used to carry for file access and photo backup while away. I like the ability to disconnect all of them from all computers, because it keeps them powered down, and because it protects them from day-to-day malware threats.
Hard disks seem to retain data well when powered down. A plus is that they don’t wear out, since they are not run daily. I do exercise them periodically. The deepest storage disks are powered on for at least a couple hours every few months. I let them warm up fully, because I believe the fluid bearings might benefit from this. Even the oldest ones seem fine, but my scheme can tolerate a few failures.
The reason I don’t (yet) trust solid state devices is that I have had trouble with SD camera cards becoming unreadable after being unused for a few years. I probably shouldn’t be surprised, but some photographers I know have had similar problems, and don’t trust them. I have a small number of USB sticks, and have never had a problem with them. Finally, although it has a place, I won’t consider cloud storage for this purpose.
What do you think?
Send an email to press@twitter.com . Get an automatic response that contains only a ‘poop’ emoji.
@Nick: Happy Birthday!
Sometime in the last two weeks I completed my 57th trip around the sun. Who would have thought I’d be here, or doing this? Not me. I didn’t think I’d make it past 26. When I did, I realized I needed to change my life if there was a chance I’d live for a while longer. 31 years later and I’m still here and still plan to continue. But every day after 26 years is a gift. Every single day. The good, the bad, the ordinary, or the days that I cheated death. All free and all good.
Happy Birthday !
Heh. They should send an NFT of a poop image to the first hundred inquiries.
I’ve never understood the point of happy birthday wishes other than for small children and maybe for centenarians. Back in the bad ol’ days before antibiotics and vaccines*, when people were likely to die in any given year, it made sense. Nowadays, with mortality so low that most people die of wearing out, what’s the point? “Gee, congratulations on not killing yourself in some exceptionally stupid fashion in the past twelve months. Keep up the good work.”
* Yes, haters and troglodytes, vaccines have saved more lives than they’ve taken. People not much older than I had the daily risk of dying of polio, smallpox, tuberculosis, and any number of diseases which are now controlled in the first world. Alas, as the saying should go, good times make for soft heads.
The reason I don’t (yet) trust solid state devices is that I have had trouble with SD camera cards becoming unreadable after being unused for a few years. I probably shouldn’t be surprised, but some photographers I know have had similar problems, and don’t trust them. I have a small number of USB sticks, and have never had a problem with them. Finally, although it has a place, I won’t consider cloud storage for this purpose.
First, the number of fraudulent USB thumb drives for sale on Amazon and others is amazing. The thumb drive reports that its size is the correct value but when you try to write to it, you get a write error after a while. Trust nobody but new drives by big manufacturers.
https://datarecovery.com/2022/03/the-2tb-flash-drive-scam-why-high-capacity-flash-drives-are-fakes/
Second, hard drives used to last a long time and have good restart averages after sitting for years unpowered. But the new 8TB and larger drives use helium mixtures to cut windage losses and heating on the plates. The helium atmosphere is suppose to last five years. I have no idea what happens when the helium leaks out.
Third, I use Jerry Pournelle’s old rule, one backup equals one device. The minute you need more than one drive or one tape cartridge, you need to move to a bigger device.
Fourth, keep it simple. I use MS’s utility robocopy to make a mirror image of the drives being backed up. No compression or any other games. No proprietary software is required to read the backup. Plus the backup can be accessed randomly instead of linearly. With our 4 TB backups, random access is very important.
Fifth, have a rotating set of backup devices. I use three online drives and seven weekly rotating drives at the office for backups. At the house, I use a single online drive and three rotating backup drives for backup.
Sixth, own your backups. Backups on a cloud device are rented, not owned. And security is a huge issue. You are not paranoid, they are trying to get you.
I’ll agree to a point. I’ve taken every vaccine offered to me up until they changed the definition of ‘vaccine’ to include mRNA technology.
But “lives” doesn’t mean there are no other adverse effects, and it’s become clear that no one has been interested in tracking real adverse effects until very recently.
You listed several deadly and debilitating diseases. Curiously, you included TB. The vaccine for that is not generally used in the US, and is considered only moderately effective in the parts of the world where it is used.
The level of informed consent in the US has, for my whole life, been “Your kid needs these shots to protect them”, with never a mention of adverse effects nor risk analysis.
A few proven vaccines against known killers – No problem. How many of these shots fall into that category? What are the risks of being exposed to the disease? What are the risks of the vaccines themselves? Has anyone told you? Has anyone even measured them?
“Gee, congratulations on not killing yourself in some exceptionally stupid fashion in the past twelve months. Keep up the good work.”
– for some of us, and for some years, that is an accomplishment worth of celebration!
n
I don’t trust any of it.
I had tape back-up that took a day or so to back up and verify a hard drive that well, CDs hold more data. Hard drive fails, install a new drive, and Windows and all that hassle with IRQs, then try to restore anything from the tapes? Oh hell no. “This tape needs to be formatted”. Really? I was looking at that tape a couple of weeks ago just to see if I could and it was fine.
That went in the trash with WfW3.11 when I installed Win95 on a freshly built PC.
CDs have been hit or miss for me. It’s the drives. Pretty sure though the software is suspect. Nero Burning Rom never actually worked for me worth a darn but hey, I might be an idiot. Sure, write at 40x doesn’t mean you can actually read it next month. So I write as slow as the software allows. Yeah baby, take your time and use that Superman like laser vision to burn data pits real good. Seems to work.
Zip Drives were cool. Ditto for MO drives. In 1997. Never a problem with either. Got a new PC and yeah, sorry, ain’t paying $300 for a new SCSI card for a $450 PC. On the plus side, I cleared out a lot of clutter.
I don’t try to back up everything anymore. Just Thunderbird, Firefox bookmarks, Pictures, My Documents, and Music. If the hard drive fails I’m re-installing the OS so why back that up?
I’m all SSD now. No problems.
I have a sub-domain called photos and that’s good as long as I pay the web hosting bill. That’s sorta Cloud but the sub-domain isn’t linked to from anywhere.
Agreed, lpdbw. I didn’t want to write an essay as a footnote to my main point.
I’ll also note that my youngest kid apparently skated through just before the recent, enormous ramp-up of the pediatric immunization schedule. It’s possible for parents to decline some large fraction of the shots, though NYS is attempting to make that much more difficult.
I agree with Lynn’s backup thoughts and most of Paul’s. I back up onto DVDs and 4TB spinning hard drives. DVDs are for convenience and inexpensive distribution to offsite storage, and also because I still have most of a 100-disk spindle that I bought years ago. DVDs are not for long-term storage; they’re trustworthy for five years and then become increasingly less so. Make sure to have multiple drives in case of read problems.
Spinning metal is for long-term storage, ten years or more, but I copy to new drives more often than that, after first comparing the files on multiple drives.
Like Paul, I don’t do full-drive backups, mostly just the stuff that I create. I use my own scripts for doing so, with a fair number of manual steps which weren’t worth the effort of automating. (And because in checking over a backup log manually I might spot things that I wouldn’t have thought to have a script check for.) This has served me well for years, with only two problems that I recall: One because I forgot the password used to encrypt one portion of the backup – pure duh on my part. And Two because my computer’s hard drive was going bad and scrambled a few files and truncated some others, doing so in the same way for both backups so it wasn’t detected. When the drive failed worse later and I tried to restore from backup, I got mostly junk.
Yeah. My PC was doing some odd things. No BSOD excitement. Win7 was solid. But Firefox randomly puking and crashing the system? I’m doing nothing, I’m reading the comments on THIS site.
So let’s replace the hard drive while we can. I had a 2TB WD drive and it was maybe at most ¼ full. I bought a 1TB WD SSD. Acronis cloned the old drive to the new drive and compared to the last time I tried this, it did so perfectly.
I tried to use the old drive while looking for some random file a couple of months ago and yeah, I just dodged a bullet. The drive spins up and then nothing. Explorer on this W11 box sort of crashes. Doesn’t take the system down. It’s like WordPerfect freezing and needing the three finger salute.
Perhaps the best backup is to use Acronis to clone everything to a new drive once in a while. Not sure how that would work with this PC, it uses a SATA drive stick and there’s just one slot.
Anyway. When I croak, no one at all is gonna give a hoot about anything on my PC. It’s going into a dumpster just like all of my other stuff.
I keep my files on the Synology NAS. It syncs with Dropbox. I want to add Backblaze, which is supported on Synology. I do keep a flash drive of important files and passwords I wouldn’t want to lose. If I lost all my data, life would go on. Retired and not responsible for other peoples backups anymore. I do protect the flash drive, and, travel with it. It’s an Apricorn Aegis Secure Key. Two, actually. One stays secure while one travels.
BTW, I archive one of my seven rotating hard drives at the office every six months. That means that I replace the rotating backup hard drive fleet every 3.5 years. That also means that I get a mirror image of our office LAN every six months so in case anything gets corrupted, deleted, etc.
I am now buying 12 TB external USB WD hard drives and thinking about moving to 14 TB drives now that the prices have dropped to $220.
https://www.amazon.com/14TB-Elements-Desktop-Drive-WDBWLG0140HBK-NESN/dp/B07YD3G568?tag=ttgnet-20/
BTW, I archive one of my seven rotating hard drives at the office every six months. That means that I replace the rotating backup hard drive fleet every 3.5 years. That also means that I get a mirror image of our office LAN every six months so in case anything gets corrupted, deleted, etc.
That was my seventh backup maxim.
Eighth, I never delete anything off a backup drive until it becomes full. Then I reformat the drive. Having your backup utility deleting backup files is just asking for a problem.
Homage to Dilbert:
https://www.gocomics.com/barneyandclyde/2023/03/18
That is hilarious.
“Latest Windows 11 update is causing slow SSDs & WiFi connections, BSoD, and more”
https://www.techspot.com/news/97973-latest-windows-11-update-causing-slows-ssds-wifi.html
Well that makes me want to upgrade to Windows 11 real bad.
“UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what user now?”
https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/17/ken_thompson_is_a_maccie/
“Although Thompson is now 80 years old, he most recently worked at Google, where he co-developed Go… although his hiring caused problems: he refused to take the company’s mandatory C proficiency test, on the feeble pretext that he designed the C language.”
Bold.
Hey Greg and SteveF, I have a question.
I think you married a lady from China. Can she read Chinese?
See, my Dad the jarhead spent some time in China on his way to wherever. Okinawa I think, a few weeks before the flag raising. And maybe then again for Korea. He had a Chinese coin on his key ring for as long as I can remember. So about 55 years.
If I take a picture and stick it in the the file folder on my site, maybe she can tell what it says and what year and all of that.
I don’t expect it to be valuable. I’d just like to know some of the history.
We are definitely in a recession. The price of crude oil in the USA has dropped to $68/US barrel and the price of natural gas has dropped to $2.33/mmbtu. The fossil fuel industry is starting to batten the hatches and prepare for rough seas in the very near future.
There is still a growth market in LNG exports. Four more LNG liquefaction plants are being built in Texas and Louisiana over the next four years at an estimated cost of $12 billion each. That will bring the number of LNG liquefaction plants in the USA to 24. I expect more to be announced and built.
I think I had the polio shot. Polio was still a thing. Same for TB. Which one has the booster on a sugar cube? Mom irritated the nurse because Mom insisted the shot was high on my arm so a t-shirt would cover the scar. The rest of the shots, I don’t exactly remember. Had chicken pox like everyone. Measles, same . Mumps? Don’t know. I remember my sisters looking like bullfrogs. If I ever had mumps it didn’t show.
I don’t know. Some vaccines are good. Like tetanus. Flu shots are a waste of time.
Sure thing, Paul. Or email the image to steven dot furlong at gmail.
I don’t know. Some vaccines are good. Like tetanus. Flu shots are a waste of time.
I read somewhere recently that the flu shot effectiveness is 40%. I do not know if this is for forever or just last year. However, that does seem to be a waste of time given that the flu shot makes me feel like crap for 24 hours.
On the gripping hand, the Spanish Flu of 1918 was certainly a nasty bug. I don’t know what the R was but, 25 to 50 million deaths of mostly young people across the world was dire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
I can’t help. My wife was deliberately raised to not know how to read Chinese or speak the dialect used in Taipei, where her mother’s family originates.
I have a mental block on the order of precedence chart which caused me no end of grief in new recruit training at GTE once the instructors decided that they could wash me out picking on that.
I survived the No Win Scenario just like Captain Kirk. I won’t say more.
A lot of the proficiency measuring tests/challenges used by the FANG are thinly disguised age discrimination, especially HackerRank at Amazon.
I saw the bit about Thompson going Linux. Mac OS X is a pretty good BSD Unix, which runs just about anything I’ve thrown at it out of Stevens, the Unix developer bible, but Apple is determined to make disposable computers and wall off the garden just like they did with iOS devices.
Raspian ships with a free Mathematica and Wolfram Language runtime license. I wonder if that was what made Thompson take a look at the platform.
I have a Raspberry Pi 400 plugged into an extra monitor and ready to go in a few minutes for Mathematica. Once my daughter got into the harder pre-calculus, I remembered that I’m not great at the trig identities either.
I have a Windows 10 license for my new desktop. I ran burn-in on the motherboard/CPU/memory today and will start shopping for an SSD.
I used to be pretty good at math, but a couple of traumatic brain injuries knocked that WAY down. And I’ve forgotten what I don’t use.
I used a lot of trig and circle functions when I was working for BigCorp. Triangles are great for locating stuff in the real world, and if you are working with projection screens in the shape of cylindrical sections, circle math is critical.
Still, that was all pretty basic stuff, but a good example that you might actually “use some of this stuff in the real world”.
n
Layering maps with different spherical projections is another example.
I tricked iOS into doing the calculations in grad school for one project, overlaying NWS radar images on top of Google Maps images, and the professor suggested an NDA.
The closest I can come to that was pointing out to interviewers that the C++ interview questions they were using had mistakes. I knew this because I wrote the magazine article they’d copied the questions from. And they made mistakes in typing up some of the questions or answers. (There were also mistakes in the printed article. I don’t think any of my technical articles escaped “corrections” by the editors, every one of whom was a recent English graduate, every one of whom was female, and every one of whom was sure that she knew better than the mere engineer who’d written the article.) (One of them also insisted that every “he” become “he or she” for equality. Never mind that this changed Donald Knuth from a man to a he-she thing decades before transmania hit the nation.)
The interviewers, by the way, didn’t believe me. They acknowledged that someone at the company had gotten the questions from a magazine but the author’s name had not been included in the retyping.
I have a Windows 10 license for my new desktop. I ran burn-in on the motherboard/CPU/memory today and will start shopping for an SSD.
If your new motherboard has a M.2 slot or two like my latest MSI board has, get a WD Black M.2 in 1 TB for $60. It is a screaming banshee, ten time faster than an SSD drive. Or get the 2 TB for $127.
https://www.amazon.com/WD_BLACK-SN770-Internal-Gaming-Solid/dp/B09QV692XY?tag=ttgnet-20/
Yes. I bought an Asus “business” motherboard for AMD AM4, and it has an M.2 slot.
I’m on the market for 2 TB.
Trig is fun. And useful.
Using trig identities in calculus is also fun. And useless. More so now than ever. They graduate from college now without being able to use a map, much less draw one.
Meanwhile, in other news, NYFS is preparing to eat itself:
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2023/03/20/crazy-new-york-law-may-tank-many-employers-n538084
Calling Mr. Heinlein: “Theyyyy’re here!”
@Lynn, @Nick – We ate lunch out of Phoenicia every day of our trip last week. The convention center/basketball arena area of Downtown Houston is pretty desolate. I don’t know if that is the economy or Covid.
Fortunately I like Phoenicia. The store smells just like the Greek markets back where I grew up in Florida.
Even a simple thing like a trip to CVS involved getting the car out of the hotel garage.
heh
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/mentalhealthcondition.png
Early training for the Meezer Flex:
https://twitter.com/buitengebieden/status/1637192925997088768
Smooth out that little hesitation and the attack happens before he enters the hallway.
Ah, back to the roots of the interwebz and why they was created… cat vids…
n
In olden days there was a time before censorship by government/sweaty billionaires:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/3_years_ago_american_thinker_was_the_first_to_call_out_the_fraud_of_dr_anthony_fauci_and_was_viciously_attacked_by_the_wapo_nyt_other_msm_outlets.html
This, https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD_5-6zYW3VsC3XfRKA8drmYg82CzmxXibhBuZA0NZe-0sl20drHinqCyZqN95PSHKP-316m-XLCVMRb5MsAwB3heeNnNYPAWvRISI3JP7brOvptWo8DOspVCRwFj2jc993OrDRraMT2iR5MtgXqNkV5SH7pkUw4XPl5hdKjzYUezc17BpRLyehxcB1Q/s480/tumblr_1b97f6c164502a400773d0c49eed0d63_5b5b5246_500.gif from daily timewaster made me snort out loud.
n
Downtown Houston is pretty desolate.
— most of downtown is a ghost town because it is so freaking hot in the summer. The people move thru the tunnel system, which means not much street activity.
That area is a bit out of the way too. The ‘theater district’ has a bit more life, but not much.
n
Scottish Couple Plan to Drive “From Pole to Pole” in an Electric Vehicle
Essay by Eric Worrall
They plan to bring a portable wind turbine to charge the vehicle when sunlight is unavailable.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/03/20/scottish-couple-plan-to-drive-from-pole-to-pole-in-an-electric-vehicle/
Another farce.
Most public education deprived products of years of green-angst-washing have no idea that the trip is a scam from the outset, being under a vague impression that Magnetic North is close to Geographic North.
Without finding an envelope, 17000 miles in 300 days is 57 miles per day. Nissan Leaf gets 168 miles on a charge to a 59KWh battery, which at 90% is roughly 0.3KWh/mile. So they need 17.1 KWh/day
1000W of solar panels at 10% and 1000W of wind turbine at 20% (24-hr avg) would give them 7.2 KWh/day, or roughly 45% of their energy needs.
ADDED: Forgot to point out that this is lowered drastically by setup and takedown and not being able to charge from the wind while moving.
From this we can draw two conclusions:
Shame it’s too late to set up a volunteer network to track and document these scammers. Maybe not too late to wire a cell phone tracker to the underside?
I have a spare nickel. Does anyone want to bet against a carefully-excluded-from-camera caravan of support vehicles, along the lines of the American Pickers Parade? Found another nickel. How about a strategic breakdown requiring 3-4 days for Fedex to get a critical part to them, coincidentally a few miles from a large resort hotel?
ADDED: yup, nickle.
Without finding an envelope, 17000 miles in 300 days is 57 miles per day. Nissan Leaf gets 168 miles on a charge to a 59KWh battery, which at 90% is roughly 0.3KWh/mile. So they need 17.1 KWh/day
One of my employees bought a new Nissan Leaf Plus last year. It has a 62 kwh battery (air cooled) and reputedly is good for 240 miles. It has a high efficiency heat pump instead of the old electric strip heater that is a battery killer.
The regular Nissan Leaf has a 42 kwh battery (air cooled) and reputedly is good for 150 miles.
drwilliams says:
How do they plan to get from Tiera Del Fuego to Antarctica? The South Magnetic Pole is in the ocean close to Antarctica, but pretty much directly south of Tasmania.
Same way illegal aliens from South America march 1,000 miles north to the border carrying cell phones.
Forgot to point out that this is lowered drastically by setup and takedown and not being able to charge from the wind while moving.
why?, any PHB should say, if you are moving you are generating wind. win win situation
RE Backup
Never but never use any capacity that was not available since 2 years, i.e. HD more than 4 TB is ok, today. Why? early failures
Also, how might they plan to cross the Darién Gap?