Hot and humid and more of each. Highest I saw yesterday was 94F in the shade, but it was hotter in the sun. Since it happened away from my thermometer, I’m ignoring it. Hah. Just like the rain. I only personally saw a very light spatter of rain. I know it rained heavily in some parts of town, because I saw the puddles and I asked people. But I’m ignoring that too. I can definitively state, from my own lived experience, that yesterday was hot at 94F but cooler than it has been, and that it only rained a tiny amount. That this is wrong is of no concern. Please fully fund my climate change study grant. I’m your kind of people.
Spent most of the day filling the back of my pickup with auction items. Then I dumped most of them at my secondary location. Took the rest home. Did a bit of troubleshooting on some items that didn’t immediately work, and got some results.
Cooked a couple of several-years-old steaks for dinner. Couldn’t tell them apart, despite being frozen for 2 and 4 years respectively. And they were delicious. Served them with canned corn from 2014, frozen naan bread, and pasta from a couple years ago. Those were all normal looking and delicious too.
Spent the evening looking at prices online to find cheap decking material for my temporary deck at the BOL. That led to the post title. There isn’t anything “cheap”. Sheets of OSB, plywood, and rigid foam are all 1-1/2 to 2 times more than they were. Prices have come down from their highs of a year ago, but they are still high. Even furring strips are expensive. More redneck engineering is going to be needed…
Today I’ve got a couple more pickups, and more domestic bliss. So I’ll be busy, and yet not feel like I’m getting stuff done. And compared to some, I’m a piker. Talked to someone in my circle of acquaintances that is slowly revealing more of their preps. Their family group is about 35 people, and they’ve got a shared ranch as a BOL. With a full surgical suite set up. That was the bit he shared yesterday. His pockets are deep, and his group is committed. He has access to a wide range of stuff.
He urged me to stack salt. We talked about the novel Alas Babylon, where the little town is coping well with their end of the world situation, except for the lack of dietary salt. THAT is killing people. I took that message to heart when I read it, and stacked salt some time ago. Not sure what I have in total, but I’ve got 5 gallons (30-40 pounds) of pink himilayan salt, and at least one other bucket of normal salt, as well as boxes of canning and pickling salt. I’ve got a smaller amount of iodized salt for the table too. Salt can be used for cleaning, and for preserving food as well as for eating. We also talked briefly about my “bread kit” buckets – one bucket with flour, salt, yeast packets, and a bottle or two of oil, and storing and using fat to “pot” or preserve meat.
The discussion was a nice validation of my own preps, with a good reminder of a basic prep item for long term survival, and some more exotic thinking about things getting worse than most people might consider. There are others out there doing what we do. They are planning, and executing. You are not alone, and there are serious people who are taking it farther than you…
So stack a few things. Consider your gaps, and fill them. Know that others are too.
nick
The advantage of salt is that it doesn´t expire. Well, unless… 😛
We have our mortage divided into three smaller pieces, and one of the pieces needs renewed now. Mortgages here are usually only for a few years, then they need renewed. You divide them into pieces to reduce risk, i.e., when interest rates go up. And, yup, rates are up. Not as high as 20-25 years ago, but definitely enough to hurt. About 2% over what we had before. If Putin would just stop his stupid war, rates would likely drop again. But he apparently doesn’t dare back off, or he might be the next one to fall out of a high window…
In other news, much of Western Europe is moving to the right, Spain being the latest example. The reporting is kind of funny: the press is fine with leftist governments, but when parties on the right start winning elections, it’s just terrible. That said, I wish parties would stop having “platforms” and just ask their constituents what they think about individual issues. Why do we have mix immigration limits with LGBT issues with agricultural subsidies? It seems kind of stupid…
Yep, the torrent nerds love to chop out all the commercials. I can barely watch something with the family if it has commercials. You save almost 20 minutes on an hour of TV show when the C’s are gone.
I have a tradition “SciFi Friday” I started decades ago with VCR/DVR and now streaming. I watch as much as I can of recorded TV on Friday. The rest of the week is reading and an occasional movie.
The resort we are staying at in Cancun has its own Cirque du Solei theater, 10. hotels, beachfront eateries, etc. We used a week of our timeshare and the cost came out to $300 for the week.
The bathtub is available for Mr. Nick to sleep in. LOL.
In 1971 to 1973 there was no Linux and the only computers filled large rooms, 64K of memory was 10‘s of thousands of dollars, and I was the tech support for the computer center. People asked me questions.
Do they have an X-Ray machine? EKG machine? Heart Monitor? And really important, anesthesia equipment. Even having one of those items would be impressive. Without the last item the surgery setup would really be almost worthless.
“Anesthesia equipment” also implies a crash cart and effective use of that requires appropriate training for everyone in the room to handle the contingency situations lest the patient end up like Joan Rivers.
Full surgical suite. That’s out there.
Before I criticize someone else’s idea of “full surgical suite”, I am interested in parameters.
What is the state-of-the-art we’re talking about, and what specific procedures are we talking about?
In WWII, impromptu hospitals were set up for wounded soldiers behind the front lines. Barely.
In the 1950’s, they did lung surgery on King George VI in a temporary operating room in the palace.
In Korea, MASH hospitals were set up in tents near front lines.
Were these ideal? Far from it. Were they better than prior wars?
Even if we aren’t talking about war, the state of the art in acute medical treatment has been improving over time.
I wouldn’t want to be treated without anesthesia.
I guess the summary is something like this:
There is a point of diminishing returns, where the next 10% of survival doubles the cost and complexity.
Harsh reality, but reality is often harsh.
Wouldn’t blood transfusion be a vital limiting factor?
You mean, dying of what should have been preventable causes after pointing out that “Michelle” has a package?
By saying it was “out there”, I was referring to the concept of attempting to build such a facility on a private basis as part of prepping. Whether or not it would work adequately is a separate issue.
@Ray – You had the hearing loss problem looked at, right?
Hot and sunny already. Gonna be hotter too! You betcha!
@Daryl,
that is an interesting question given the lengths I sometimes go to to save money. Funny thing is, I think of hanging clothes out as a midwest or east coast thing. It’s so humid here that they’d never dry, and it never even occurred to me. Our laundry machines are in an entryway that would probably be called a ‘mud room’ anywhere east of the Mississippi, and so the heat from the dryer doesn’t have a chance to affect the rest of the house. I will consider whether to use the oven, the smaller convection oven function in the microwave, or even just use the BBQ grill to avoid heating the kitchen while the AC is running. Some things I don’t cook as often in the summer, because they use the oven for too long. So I do think about adding heat to the house, just never thought about it with the clothes dryer. Of course if the grid is down, hanging clothes to dry will become commonplace again. I do have clothesline and clothes pins (somewhere.)
Funny note, when I was in Shanghai, I discovered that EVERYONE hangs their clothes out to dry. They believe there is a health benefit. The apartments all have special swinging racks that hold the clothes. Given how bad the air quality is, I would think the clothes would be dirtier after drying than before.
WRT vacation, yeah, it would be nice to just relax for a while, but Mexico isn’t my thing. An all inclusive, exclusive resort is probably the best and safest way to do that if you are going to, but still not my thing. My wife would enjoy it though.
n
@Lynn – I found the invoice for my upstairs AC replacement in April. It was two tons, gas-fired builder grade furnace, Trane XR14. $9500
Add $500 for the “smart” thermostat which would have been required for a variable speed system.
I had to remind the installer three times not to install the smart thermostat in a single afternoon.
WRT building your own medical facility…
Everything mentioned is something I’ve seen come thru the auctions. Patient monitors, xray, ultrasound, electro-surgery machines, smoke eaters, all the furniture and hardware, specialized surgical tool sets, all the expendables, lighting, etc. I’ve seen whole modern MASH units offered, and I’m not even on the ‘big boy’ mailing lists. Privately owned suites are not uncommon at a certain level.
Coachella music festival downplays their preps, but they supposedly have a full cardiac unit standing by. They will admit to “The event is supported with two 30-bed “MASH”-style air-conditioned mobile
tent units staffed by nurses, advanced practice providers and physicians,
including…” Their temp employment recruiting is looking for Critical Care Transport certified RNs among other specialties. The personnel and facilities are provided by a private company.
Getting the drugs and some of the expendables might be more difficult, but money always opens doors…
I’ve thought about it. You would want a clean room, good lighting, basic recovery support. You’d probably be looking to treat gunshot, penetrating injuries, C-section deliveries, bad cuts, compound fractures, and similar. I don’t think anyone other than Bill Gates would expect much more.
And it’s probably easier to find a surgeon or Dr, than a facility in a whole bunch of scenarios. At the end of the day, everything is compromise, some is better than none, and even your local vet does surgery in the back of his clinic… nothing magical about it.
nick
The facilities are privately owned and out there, and they get retired and upgraded, so they are available on the secondary market…
n
added– stuff like this https://blu-med.com/deployable-field-hospitals/
Ah, this is why our district finally deployed ‘stop the bleed’ kits. Not because I manuvered them into it, but because the State did.
From my trade magazine reading, wrt to the ill fated sub… and any US Navy knowledge–
Nice list of assets.
n
And this is interesting.
Like using ambient blutooth and wifi signals to ‘see thru walls’
n
I’ve seen papers about using ambient RF signals in those frequencies as “radar” going back at least a decade. It isn’t as much about seeing discrete objects behind walls as much as mass moving between the transmitter and receiving antenna(s).
I probably have a paper on the topic around somewhere. My thesis advisor in WA State screwed up by purchasing a whole bunch of 2.4 GHz SDR boxes from Ettus Research with the wrong data interface, which was very a very expensive mistake circa 2011-12, and, until they fired him, he was constantly looking for a project which would justify blowing a large chunk of the department’s budget on the gear which simply collected dust throughout his tenure.
If you want to detect drones, I believe current research is in the direction of stereo optical systems, similar to what we used to replace EM “loops” and treadles (think the hoses across the road) to detect cars in ORT situations at the tolling company. In fact, the system the company used started life as a sensor to mount on passenger airplanes which would detect incoming missiles.
Everybody wants to detect drones. And kill them. Do either reliably and you can write your own ticket.
n
No, the situation cleared up on its own. It has happened before, just not quite as severe.
64K of memory was 10‘s of thousands of dollars
Of course, that was 64K words of memory since it was unheard of to address bytes of memory instead of words of memory back then in the middle ages. Intel really threw the world for a loop when it brought out byte addressable instructions and memory. Of course, now every knows that addressing paragraphs (16 bytes) of memory is much more efficient.
No, the situation cleared up on its own. It has happened before, just not quite as severe.
Transient situations usually go away on their own, right ?
Until they become permanent.
All of us live in the land of denial. I need to go see a urologist, a transient situation is not transient anymore.
Well, my experiment of putting a 4 ton heat pump into my office building to replace the north a/c unit has bombed. There are no heat pumps available for six weeks. And that is just a guess I’ll bet.
So he is going to put a regular Ruud 4 ton a/c unit with heat strips for winter back in for me to replace my dead 19 year old R22 3.5 ton Trane. The new unit will be propane refrigerant. What could go wrong ?
It was 77 F on the north side hallway and 82 F in my office yesterday. I have a fan blowing high speed on me from the hallway. Sigh. If this goes much longer then I may go buy a window unit. But, I have have crank open casing windows instead of vertical sliding windows so that will be an adventure.
Vet is a whole different standard of care. I just spent 14 months, on and off, listening to Pinhead, the assocate vet at the local clinic advocate for euthanizing our cat before the animal finally passed as I held her during one of the attempts to keep her hydrated. The clinic owner was out of town during the last illness, and Pinhead wouldn’t even give subcutaneous fluids.
Don’t underestimate the difficulty of locating the labor to staff the facility. A lot of modern people medicine is based on indentured servitude endemic in the student loans required by many to participate in the medical education system in the US. With either a SHTF situation or, more likely before that happens, a blanket forgiveness of the student loans, a lot of the licensed higher end professionals will “shrug” and simply walk away.
At some point, I gotta find a reason to get in touch with the distant cousin who walked away from a high-end nursing license to run a sailboat charter in the Bahamas. I hear that story or a variation anecdotally all the time, but I’ve never talked directly with someone who has done it.
I’ve read somewhere the roll around a/c units that vent out the window through what looks like a dryer exhaust hose work pretty good.
Propane as refrigerant? Yeah, they use that stuff in turdworld places, why not here? What with the border being wide open and all.
Don’t call it propane. Call it R290.
As for what could go wrong, ever see “The Mosquito Coast”?
Nope. It was 64K bytes. This was a Burroughs machine, B-3500, which was character based, not word based. Every single byte was addressed individually. The only machine I have seen that could multiple two 100 digit numbers and get a single 200 digit result accurate to the last digit in a single instruction. It was also possible to divide a 100 digit number by a 50 digit number in a single instruction and have the result accurate to the last digit. To get really accurate calculations all that was necessary was to scale the numbers and the result by moving the implied decimal point.
It was possible to use instructions that used words but that was just for movement of data. The implied word was 4 characters and made moving data much faster internally.
The Burroughs large systems (which had barely been released) were word machines with 52-bit words (48-bits + 3 tag bits + 1 parity bit)
This condition has been reported before to the ENT doctor and the audiologist. Both have stated it is transitory and should not pose any problems unless it is prolonged. Neither defined prolonged. Hearing is a strange beast with tinnitus and other afflictions including loss of hearing and plugged up ears. There is little to nothing that can be done. A set of hearing aids is the best option.
Forgot the length of the result, 50 digits. I was also possible to divide a 100 digit number by a 25 digit number and get a result accurate to 75 digits.
Since there is talk about medical preps, we should look at what we are growing in our gardens.
Without being overly specific, there are a lot of plants that are classified as ornamental that have very useful medical properties. Yes, that one, if it will grow where you live – it’s too hot where a lot of us seem to be; there are a number of books about how to properly harvest it (knowledge is still mostly legal in the USA). Also, if you live somewhere where they will survive, a number of Brazilian rainforest plants could come in very handy. Read a little about Shamanism…
Where I live, some of the “ornamental” plants that get combined in other cultures are not allowed to be sold by the same nursery. Seller A may have plant X, but you have to go to seller B to get plant Y. Or etsy. Really. Get familiar with the Latin name and search for that.
In most places, it is perfectly legal to have these ornamental plants. If you mix them in with other ornamentals, your neighbors will comment on how pretty it all is. Don’t tell them anything but “thanks.”
If you live somewhere that allows growing MJ, you may consider allocating a little space for that. Harvest it, dry it, keep in in the freezer for when it is needed.
Tobacco and coffee may also be worth a look, depending on where you are. Those may help us get through bad times with a little bit of joy.
Tinnitus is strange. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes just a high pitch noise in one ear. Sometimes it’s a full concert of a forest of cicadas at full volume or crickets carrying on in both ears. I like the sound of both.
I can lay in bed and hear the battery operated wall clock in the bathroom ticking. And hear the fridge running. If Buddy the Beagle isn’t snoring like a chainsaw. In the living room I can hear the wind up clocks ticking, both wall mounted and the grandfather. I can hear the little deep freezer doing it’s high pitched freon noise. So, my hearing is ok. Sorta mostly.
Before I criticize someone else’s idea of “full surgical suite”, I am interested in parameters.
What is the state-of-the-art we’re talking about, and what specific procedures are we talking about?
In WWII, impromptu hospitals were set up for wounded soldiers behind the front lines. Barely.
In the 1950’s, they did lung surgery on King George VI in a temporary operating room in the palace.
In Korea, MASH hospitals were set up in tents near front lines.
Were these ideal? Far from it. Were they better than prior wars?
Even if we aren’t talking about war, the state of the art in acute medical treatment has been improving over time.
My father-in-law was a Army medic / X-ray tech/ OR nurse at Camp Jama in Japan at the end of the Korea war active hostilities. Camp Jama had 4,000 Army men plus many of their dependents, my wife was born there in 1958. They performed regular surgeries routinely, most of which were successful. However, they had a serious problem with after surgical care. My father-in-law was the only trained OR nurse and the minute he and the surgeon Major left, things got bad in a hurry. The surgeon Lieutenant was apparently worthless. They had a difficult birth for a senior officers wife, transitioned to a caesarean, both mom and baby survived. My father-in-law and the surgeon Major left at 2 am or 3 am in the night, came back in the morning and the officer’s wife had bled out, nobody noticed until too late.
They had about 30 quadriplegics moved over from South Korea, my father-in-law had to x-ray them every other day to make sure that their intestines were moving. He broke his back twice moving men from the bed to the gurney. He became a disabled vet at age 36 because of this.
BTW, my wife was a blue baby after birth. When they separated her from from her mom, she could not breathe. The head Army doc hurriedly built her an incubator with a high oxygen environment that she lived in for six weeks. She had a partial Hyaline membrane failure, like the Kennedy baby. She was three weeks late which saved her life.
https://www.childrenshospital.org/conditions/infant-respiratory-distress-syndrome-hyaline-membrane-disease
“DEVELOPING: Hunter Biden’s Lawyers Face Sanctions After Being Accused of Lying in Tax Case – Legal Team Has Until 9 PM Tonight to Respond!”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/07/developing-hunter-bidens-lawyers-face-sanctions-after-being/
“Hunter Biden’s lawyers are facing possible sanctions after being accused of lying to the clerk in Hunter’s tax fraud case.”
“Someone from Hunter’s legal team called the Delaware clerk and lied about their identity to remove testimony from the IRS whistleblowers from the court docket.”
Is lying to a federal judge a bad thing ? The federal judge is apparently pissed off.
Spent the evening looking at prices online to find cheap decking material for my temporary deck at the BOL. That led to the post title. There isn’t anything “cheap”. Sheets of OSB, plywood, and rigid foam are all 1-1/2 to 2 times more than they were. Prices have come down from their highs of a year ago, but they are still high. Even furring strips are expensive. More redneck engineering is going to be needed…
But the owls in the west coast tree orchards are happy !
I have one of those, and it works well. I’ve had to use it a few times, the last was when the capacitor crapped out on our main heat pump and had to wait 4 days to get a replacement in. We use it to keep our bedroom cool. I fire it up every 6 months (more if remember) to make sure it still works and lubricate things.
Well, my experiment of putting a 4 ton heat pump into my office building to replace the north a/c unit has bombed. There are no heat pumps available for six weeks. And that is just a guess I’ll bet.
So he is going to put a regular Ruud 4 ton a/c unit with heat strips for winter back in for me to replace my dead 19 year old R22 3.5 ton Trane. The new unit will be propane refrigerant. What could go wrong ?
It was 77 F on the north side hallway and 82 F in my office yesterday. I have a fan blowing high speed on me from the hallway. Sigh. If this goes much longer then I may go buy a window unit. But, I have have crank open casing windows instead of vertical sliding windows so that will be an adventure.
Well, he found a four ton heat pump in Dallas and a four ton air handler, 15/16 SEER (dont ask me why there are two ratings). His install crew is going to install it on Friday. $14,230. He has to run new 18 gauge / 8 wire control wiring for the seven controls on the outside unit.
The four ton a/c unit with four ton air handler and strip heat is $13,200. So I am going with the heat pump.
A/C systems are going out of sight. I suspect that this is by design and inflating just like everything else in the USA.
Nope. It was 64K bytes. This was a Burroughs machine, B-3500, which was character based, not word based. Every single byte was addressed individually. The only machine I have seen that could multiple two 100 digit numbers and get a single 200 digit result accurate to the last digit in a single instruction. It was also possible to divide a 100 digit number by a 50 digit number in a single instruction and have the result accurate to the last digit. To get really accurate calculations all that was necessary was to scale the numbers and the result by moving the implied decimal point.
It was possible to use instructions that used words but that was just for movement of data. The implied word was 4 characters and made moving data much faster internally.
The Burroughs large systems (which had barely been released) were word machines with 52-bit words (48-bits + 3 tag bits + 1 parity bit)
Cool, learned something today. I was just used to Univac 1108s, CDC 7600s, and IBM 370s. Then we bought a Prime 450 and the world changed.
Probably SEER and SEER2. SEER2, which went into effecct on Jan. 1, is lower on the exact same equipment.
EPA bureacracy.
If you think that’s fun, just wait until Mayor Pete sets the official Federal speed limit back to 55 MPH and the “fudge factor” gets reintroduced to the MPG testing with the high speed tests removed.
Once again, I learned about a celebrity passing by reading between the lines from the video posting on Letterman’s YouTube channel this morning.
RIP. Something went seriously wrong in Sinead O’Connor’s head. The price of fame?
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2023-07-26/sinead-oconnor-dead
@lynn, glad you got it sorted out, I was just going to offer to bring a roll around unit over. I’ve got two in the attic here, a couple at the BOL and one or two at the secondary location. I’ve got a few of the regular window units stashed in various places too. Hurricanes happen in the summer…
Buy them in the off season to save money.
WRT vet vs Dr, well, what is true today isn’t a law of nature, and is pretty localized. I’m sure that there are hospitals in Haiti or Africa that would have to take several steps UP the ladder to get to the standard of a modern vet’s office in the US.
One of my pickups this week was a flip top bin full of lidocaine soaked bandages for burn relief. They were 6/$1, and there were a lot of lots. Burns hurt. REALLY HURT. Or they don’t hurt at all, which is worse. A bag of trauma pads, and a few bottles of OTC pain and allergy relief were in the lots too. I hope I never need the medical preps, even more than I hope I never need my other preps. But antibiotics and effective meds for pain are two miracles of the modern age. And they are CHEAP.
Surgical drape kits, the brown soap, sterile gloves, suture kits, and a variety of other stuff has found it’s way to my stacks over the years. Let it STAY in the stacks and I’ll be happy, but if I need it, it’s far better to have than to wish I had…
n
Sinead O’Conner had some serious mental/nervous system problems IMHO.
Something went seriously wrong in Sinead O’Connor’s head. The price of fame?
– no it was long before her fame. The hint was abuse, sexual mainly, at the hands of the Church or under the auspice of the Church. Reform school was likely heIIish too.
Loved her music at the time. She’s been getting airplay recently, heard her more than once, either on XM or the local audacy station, 95.7. They play a very eclectic mix. One DJ for all day. Strange, but my most frequent choice in the truck driving around town.
n
Bergdahl skates:
Soldier Bowe Bergdahl who was captured and tortured by the Taliban has conviction for desertion thrown out by federal judge
If the U.S. Army does not reply with a new court-martial proceeding, we’ll know the Obola fix is in. Disgraceful. The Army would be saying “Desertion, what desertion”? “He’s the victim.” As the comments stated, no mention of the troops killed looking for Bergdahl’s azz.
Have I mentioned how glad I am that I’m retired?
And plugs’ prodigy may still get some prison. Pass the popcorn, CornPop!
Is Mitch McConnell down for the count?
Pray he isn’t. The current Governor of Kentucky is a Dem pol with Daddy issues, and Rick Scott may try again for the Minority Leader position if McConnell is done.
I heard Plugs turned Mitch onto his ‘happy juice’ supplier.
Gotta be in the octogenarian club.
tRump though..
Not just removed. Sealed.
Hunter needs to plead guilty/be convicted of something for a pardon to happen. The problem is that future Federal prosecutors wouldn’t have any shortage of other crimes to send to a grand jury, including Burisma, which are detailed in the 400 page whistleblower testimony document which the defense tried to have removed and sealed from the court record.
Burisma was not covered by the plea deal.
Yes, very strange. Every time that I read a comment about it, mine starts up as it is going now.
“So much for sanctions and technology, redux”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/07/so-much-for-sanctions-and-technology.html
“A little over a year ago I noted that many Russian weapons were using US-made microchips and other hardware. Following the outbreak of the Ukraine war the USA implemented strict sanctions to prevent Russia getting its hands on US technology to power its weapons. However, it looks like they’re not working as well as they should.”
“The Lancet-3 has proven lethally effective in Ukraine. It has an eight-foot wingspan, weighs about 35 pounds and cruises at about 70 mph with a range of 25 miles and a highly effective anti-tank warhead: videos show Lancets apparently taking out Leopard 2 tanks and a wide range of other targets including artillery, anti-aircraft systems, personnel carriers, command posts. While there is a question over just what the hit rate is – misses may greatly outnumber hits – a large number of Lancets could do a lot of damage. Defense thinktank RUSI notes that the Lancet is becoming become Russia’s preferred weapon for counter-battery strikes, possibly for its ability to find and target artillery which has moved away from its firing position … the Lancet relies on an imported U.S.-made Jetson TX2 chip for its brains … this has already been superseded and NVIDIA now produce a successor, the Jetson Orin with around 200 times more computing power. It is an open question what sort of processors Zakharov can now acquire and in what numbers.”
I don’t want to go to war with these people. They are innovating at a high rate of speed.
>> I wouldn’t want to be treated without anesthesia.
Enough ‘shine and you won’t feel too much.
“The Last Shadow (The Ender Saga, 6)” by Orson Scott Card
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765344149?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number six of a six book science fiction series, The Ender Saga, also book number six of a six book science fiction series, The Ender’s Shadow series. I read the well printed and well bound MMPB published by Tor in 2022. There are actually some twenty books in the Enderverse now. I doubt that there will be any more books in either series but, one never knows.
It has been 3,000 years since the events in Ender’s Game occurred. Ender and his sister Valentine spent most of that time traveling at near speed of light between several of the one hundred planets settled by the humans after the Formic war, ending up on the planet Lusitania. Ender settled the last Formic Hive Queen there so there are three species living peacefully on the planet: Pequeninos who are native to the planet, Humans, and the Formic Hive Queen who has built a hive with many workers.
Bean’s children and grandchildren are still traveling at near the speed of light in an old space ship. Bean, the giant, passed away quite a while back. His children and grandchildren have fixed the gene in themselves that made them geniuses but caused them to continue growing all their lives.
The planet Lusitania has a problem. There is a virus there, the deadly Descolada virus. The other 99 planets were alarmed and then the Starways Congress sent a fleet to destroy the planet to destroy the virus. Jane, the AI on the Ansible, the instantaneous communication network between the hundred planets, managed to deter the fleet when the geneticists found a solution to the virus. But where did the virus come from ?
The author has a website at:
http://www.hatrack.com/
My rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.2 out of 5 stars (1,363 reviews)
Every time that I read a comment about it, mine starts up as it is going now.
Probably because you start thinking about it. The brain has a strong capability to ignore something after some time. When I was sprayed by a skunk when I was a teenager within a few hours I no longer smelled the odor unless someone pointed it out to me. Was that due to smell sensor fatigue or the brain just ignoring the issue.
I mostly ignore my tinnitus until I start thinking about it, or it is really quiet, or something dramatic changes in the volume or frequency (not how often, but the tone).
And today my tinnitus is much lower in level than normal after the two bouts of significantly changed hearing. As in the hearing change was very much muted and the tinnitus had a second frequency.
Also went and saw Mission Impossible and for once I understood the vast majority of the dialogue. Did the audio mixers do a better job? Different position in the theatre? Hearing was better? Or all three?
Power went out to all the screens in the theatre about 2/3 of the way through the movie. Only the auditoriums were affected. Even the recliners could no longer retract. The hallways, snack stand, displays were all lit properly. Seems the city had a power failure that affected a significant portion of the city. The theatre must have two feeds, one for the auditoriums, the other for the rest of the building. The movie eventually got restarted.
When I was in the hallway some clod was complaining to the theatre manager about providing battery backup and generator for such conditions. Yeh, right. A bank of batteries to maintain the theatre until a massive generator gets up to speed would be extremely expensive. A theatre is NOT a critical element like a hospital. People not getting to see a movie is just inconvenient. There were emergency lights in the auditoriums and they worked. The guy was a real idiot claiming he was an electrical engineer. Probably played with toy electrical trains wearing an engineer hat and thought that made him qualified.
>> EKG machine?
I guess in a pinch one of these is better than nothing…well, my concierge PCP back in FL had a state-of-the-art office except for his EKG machine which was connected to a PC still running Win 98.
>> Wouldn’t blood transfusion be a vital limiting factor?
Not to the fresh corpse you pulled off the street.
>> I will consider whether to use the oven, the smaller convection oven function in the microwave, or even just use the BBQ grill to avoid heating the kitchen while the AC is running.
If I use the full-size oven I usually turn on the rangehood exhaust fan but not clear if it makes a difference. W2 insists pizza in the table-top convection oven comes out as good as from the rebular oven. NIMHO, and so f ar she relents.
Requires a subscription for the six tests. Whether a web connection is needed during the tests is unknown. In a SHTF I doubt their servers would exist or if the internet would even exist.
Just back from Lowes, which didn’t have what I needed – that being a handheld shower bracket made of metal rather than plastic, seeing that the second plastic one has now also broken. Metal one for a couple bucks more from the ‘Zon, delivered tomorrow.
Trip wasn’t totally a waste though as I did find a new, all-metal Moen three handle bathroom vanity faucet on clearance (mis-) marked for $1.17. Added to the eBay stacks.
Just back from Lowes, which didn’t have what I needed – that being a handheld shower bracket made of metal rather than plastic, seeing that the second plastic one has now also broken. Metal one for a couple bucks more from the ‘Zon, delivered tomorrow.
URL ?
I have not seen anything made of real metal on Big River.
The Russians are not going to lose the war.
To quote Corn Pop, “C’mon, man.”
To paraphrase “Cryptonomicon” – if it isn’t in your SBR, it should be – “Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre
Germansfascists, and he turns into Thomas F*cking Edison.”They’re not fighting Germans … yet. Well, at least not officially.
We use the gas grill for pizza since it offers very precise temperature control with the baking stone.
Once you get the temperature dialed in, the needle doesn’t move.
$5 HEB thin crust frozen pizzas come out tasting like the $20 individual serving pizzas at Fancy Lad California places or Mandola’s.
It’s Tom Cruise. He’s going to take the flick to Skywalker Ranch to mix properly in the big room like all the major players used to do.
The only Oscar “Top Gun: Maverick” won was for Best Sound.
>> Requires a subscription for the six tests. Whether a web connection is needed during the tests is unknown. In a SHTF I doubt their servers would exist or if the internet would even exist.
No, just for: “More arrhythmia detections available with a KardiaCare membership.”
And “Bluetooth enabled, no WiFi required.” No web connection required, creates PDFs of the tests.
Part of the tele-medicine kit I assembled during the Wu Flu. Also a remote stethoscope, BP, Pulse Ox and glucose readers. Mainly pro-sumer level items.
>> Just back from Lowes, which didn’t have what I needed – that being a handheld shower bracket made of metal rather than plastic, seeing that the second plastic one has now also broken. Metal one for a couple bucks more from the ‘Zon, delivered tomorrow.
URL ?
I have not seen anything made of real metal on Big River.
@lynn: https://www.amazon.com/BRIGHT-SHOWERS-Handheld-Adjustable-Universal/dp/B0B4V1DSL1?tag=ttgnet-20/
We’ve Got the Details of Hunter Biden’s New ‘Conditions of Release’
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2023/07/26/judge-hits-hunter-biden-with-new-conditions-of-release-after-not-guilty-plea-n2626253
This is the dumf*k that tested positive for cocaine and got discharged from the service when he couldn’t pass a drug test he knew was coming.
“c’mon man”!”
A Week in the Life:
Sunday: Hunter Biden tests positive for xxx. FJB: “Pardoned”
Monday: Hunter Biden tests positive for xxx. FJB: “Pardoned”
Tueday: Hunter Biden tests positive for xxx. FJB: “Pardoned”
Wednesday: Hunter Biden tests positive for xxx. FJB: “Pardoned”
Thursday: Hunter Biden tests positive for xxx. FJB: “Pardoned”
Friday: Hunter Biden tests positive for xxx. FJB: “Pardoned”
Saturday: Hunter Biden tests positive for xxx. FJB: “Pardoned”
Scientist who claimed to have discovered room-temperature superconductor has another paper on the verge of retraction
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2023/07/26/scientist-who-claimed-to-have-discovered-room-temperature-superconductor-has-another-paper-on-the-verge-of-retraction-n567312
He should jump into climate research, where smoothing, infilling data, stitching together disparate data sets, and over-tuning models are requirements, not defects.
mini stroke.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/mitch-mcconnell-escorted-away-after-freezing-during-news-conference
Total vapor lock.
n
OHHH! SHINY!!!
Alan says:
After TEOTWAWKI, the survivors can plant poppies and go back to using laudanum.
For various reasons, this may seem a bit disjointed, and some of the details may be time-blurred.
Here’s a fairy tale.
Back in the day, one could not help but have compassion for a man who lost his wife and daughter in a terrible car accident. Both of his boys were very seriously injured as well, so he was sworn in as a very young Senator in their hospital room. I believe they both had brain injuries.
One of them, by accounts of people for whom I have risked my life (and vice versa), was an upstanding young man. His brain injuries eventually became a cancer, and he died. The other needed help that never arrived. This was a known condition in the area and affected a certain wrestler with a famous last name, too. The gravy train would stop if treatment started.
A little while after the horrifying accident, the father of the boys decided that he needed a little action and remembered a certain hot blonde who was married to the owner of a really fantastic music venue/college bar. She had a Corvette from her hubby, but this other gentleman was driving it, and backed into another car. As usual, he said he would pay the bill but then never did. The aggrieved owner of the damaged vehicle tracked down the owner, and it turned out to be this club owner, who was very surprised that some man had been driving the car and promised to pay $650 for damages. If memory serves, the divorce ended with the hot blonde getting nothing.
One can be really perturbed by the behavior of the son, but the problem is really due to the father’s ambitions. I am not making excuses for the son, but one might want to say a few prayers for a child that was horribly damaged and never received treatment because it would reflect poorly on the father.
End of fairy tale. I guess it was kind of Grimm.
After TEOTWAWKI, the survivors can plant poppies and go back to using laudanum.
Yeah, I just read about using laudanum in the “World Made By Hand” books. Apparently the distillation is a little tricky and the dosage is even more trickier. Too much and you drift off forever. The books are highly recommended.
https://www.amazon.com/World-Made-James-Howard-Kunstler/dp/0802144012?tag=ttgnet-20/
The books get more and more tough as they run out of the tetanus (lockjaw) serum and many other drugs. Polio, encephalitis, flu, infections, measles, diphtheria, etc, etc, etc.
45 years past time to pray for the child.
No one forced the crack pipe into his hand.
The as yet un-indicted co-conspiritors have been adults with agency and the ability to choose right from wrong for decades, and have chosen to do wrong.
While the reminder IS appropriate, I’m all out of milk of human kindness when that pair comes to mind. The harm they continue to inflict on others far outweighs the harm inflicted on them.
n
The Internet does not lack for pictures of the swearing in ceremony held in the hospital room.
Other than Beau Biden’s broken leg, the boys appear unscathed, without any obvious treatment for a head trauma, but most reports have Hunter Biden being released shortly after arrival at the hospital, following treatment for a minor skull fracture.
Hunter Biden was sufficiently coherent in his younger years to graduate from Georgetown and Yale Law, academic accomplishments which exceeded those of the much heralded Beau, who graduated from U. Penn and Syracuse Law.
Beau Biden died from Glioblastoma, and head injuries don’t even rate as a risk factor, with the most significant contributor being heredity at 5% of cases.
Emerging research just within the last few years is hinting at a link between some forms of brain cancer and head trauma, but searching around, none of the news reports of the accident I see report any injury to Beau Biden beyond the broken leg.
I disagree. Russia’s solution in WW2 was to throw enough cannon fodder at the enemy to slow the Germans down, then let Winter and logistics do the rest. That’s the classic path of “land wars in Asia”.
The thing is: that only works as the defender. Attacking Ukraine, they don’t have the Winter/logistics advantage. They can only rely on cannon fodder. According to the British intelligence briefs I occasionally read, Russia has so far suffered about twice as many casualties as Ukraine. Since Russia and it’s client states are more populous, they may still win with cannon-fodder, but it’s not a given.
I would consider British intelligence to be suspect at this point.
The entire intelligence apparatus leadership in the US has been compromised. NSA, CIA, and FBI. Why wouldn’t the same be true in Britain?