Morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read.
I’ve been studying on that picture of the pretty little airplane those whatchallit, Iraning people found in the sky and captured. I’m fairly impressed and would sure like to have me one, even though I haven’t figured out exactly how it works.
That airplane doesn’t have much in the way of control surfaces and weight-and-balance might be tricky. Not as much rudder on it as a person might wish.
I’m wondering if a person might lure one down with an orange jump suit, Helicopters and Orange Jump Suits. If those things are flying around some silly-assed place like whatchallit, Irang, where there’s nothing to see but a bunch of Persians, seems to me they’re bound to be flying around here where there’s really good stuff.
Anyway, they can’t be that hard to catch. A man with a CB radio might be able to snag one, I’m thinking, if the orange jump suit didn’t do the trick.
I’ll have to study on it after I’ve got it to decide whether it’s best to put a harness underneath of the hang-glider variety, or mount a saddle on top. I don’t like the idea of riding it bareback the way Slim Pickens rode that bomb. Until a person got the feel for it, that thing might just buck some.
Besides, I’m used to more rudder than that and I’ve never flown anything without a tail section. Likely I’d want to fly it around treetop level a while so I didn’t have too far to fall at first.
That line of misbehaving sunspots that were marching across above the equator so long finally got its comeuppance. Today there are only three honest-to-goodness ones and the litter of little peckerwoods just coming around the horizon.
Astrophysicists aren’t in agreement about what was getting out of hand up there, but many now assert it might be mud and all this rain that finally got it under control. There’s been so much rain lately every stick of firewood here’s been soaked, and even though cooling down Old Sol with wet firewood would be a big job of work, eventually it was bound to happen. Probably the reason for this cold snap, too.
But the other line of thinking among Hopi Elders, surviving Mayan track-of-time keepers, and the folks at BUREAU INTERNATIONAL DES POIDS ET MESURES, ORGANISATION INTERGOUVERNEMENTALE DE LA CONVENTION DU METRE, believe there’s a more novel reason that line of sunspots dwindled. They couldn’t stay in step.
Time, they assert, is so screwed up it’s impossible to keep anything going with any regularity and the sunspots finally just got too frustrated to keep trying.
There might be a lot to that. I get the email reports from the Hawaii Konate folk, and the circular always starts off with the caveat:
“Coordinated Universal Time UTC and its local realizations UTC(k). Computed values of [UTC-UTC(k)] and uncertainties valid for the period of this Circular. From 2009 January 1, 0h UTC, TAI-UTC = 34 s.”
Those uncertainties cover a lot of ground all over the planet and the people making a living trying to keep track of what time it is send out the Circular to advise interested parties of what time it wasn’t, mostly, any given day in cities of clockwatchers. But even telling what time it wasn’t has a considerable uncertainty factor, which they aren’t ashamed to admit.
I don’t know why they even keep those people on the payroll if they can’t tell us what time it wasn’t.
I’m going to kick this around with the cats and chickens. See if we can’t figure out a way to get a piece of the action on this timekeeping racket.
Some of you readers are a lot smarter than I am, and I happen to be stuck. I’d be obliged if any of you can wrap your minds around this problem and tell me how to do it.
One of the projects I work on daily involves series regularly scheduled ‘events’ happening across the world. Every day they’re conducted at the same locations and at repeated intervals, several hundred times each day for each location.
I know the precise geographic coordinates for the locations and the local times of the events. But one part of the experiment requires examination and comparisons of simultanious events, say, from a location in Australia, another in NY, another in Rhode Island, to keep it simple.
But two events happening, say, in Rhode Island and New York at the ‘same time’ by the clock are actually several minutes apart. They occupy the same time zone, but events in Rhode Island at 3PM aren’t the same events as those happening in NY at 3PM.
But even without taking DST into the equation, events in Australia might be 15 hours and 30 minutes later by the clock to be simultaneous with New York, or Rhode Island, and only one of the two. The event in one would be simultaneous with Australia several minutes earlier, or later, than the other.
I can calculate minute-by-minute sidereal times for each of the locations, but establishing a baseline for the relationships in terms of simulataneity eludes me. I do all this on a spreadsheet. I know nothing about programming computers.
I’d welcome any suggestions. Particularly if it involves something automatic and repeatable. It’s probably something simple, even stupid, but I’d like to get past trying to figure out how to do it and get around to actually doing it.
Gracias, Old Jules
I’ve got to get going. I’ll be back online sometime later today.
Adventure wears a lot of disguises. In garage laboratories, in pens behind their homes, in backyards, they’re out there enduring the smiles and shrugs of the non-adventurous.
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Or this:
In the Sandia mountains east of Albuquerque, New Mexico, there’s about an acre of house and museum built by a man with his own idea of adventure. It’s called Tinkertown. Above the entrance there’s a sign, “HERE’S WHAT I DID WHILE YOU WATCHED TELEVISION”.
He adventured through life creating thousands of Rube Goldberg mechanical animations just to see if he could do it.
If he couldn’t create that animation, or make a Cadillac with the outer-surface covered by pennies, he wasn’t half the man he thought he was.
“We wonder what was the inspiration that could cause a man to spend 28 years to carve a Coral Castle from the ground up using nothing but home made tools. An homage to unrequited love? Perhaps to illustrate ancient sciences that defy gravity? Or maybe just sheer, raw human determination? The Coral Castle is an everlasting mystery to those who explore it.”
Or The Perfect Man Shrine, middle of desert nowhere, Columbus, New Mexico:
Human lives don’t last long. There are plenty of candidates who consider themselves wise and willing to tell us how we ought to spend ours.
The people who built it are dead, or too old to maintain it.
But maybe when we close our eyes that last time we’d consider it well spent if we just did something, sometime while we were stumbling through it.
I’d bet not one of the people above ever voiced the lament, “I’m SO bored!”
ERUPTING FILAMENT: Today, with little warning, a magnetic filament rapidly erupted on the sun. Between 10:30 and 11:30 UT, observers in Europe watched tendrils of hot plasma rocket away from the sun’s NW limb. Debris from the explosion is not expected to hit Earth. Images: #1, #2, #3.
Astrophysicists aren’t certain what he was shooting at, but several noted deer season recently opened. Others speculate Alpha Centauri was throwing bottles or tin-cans in the air for him.
With no flares of significance in days, the sun is strangely quiet. Nevertheless, the view remains dynamic. Rogerio Marcon of Campinas, Brasil, took this picture of the local starscape on Dec. 2nd. Using a telescope tuned to the red glow of solar hydrogen, Marco captured 20 billion sq. km of seething plasma and magnetic filaments; also included in the field is the dark core of sunspot 1364 (lower right). It doesn’t look very quiet. NOAA forecasters estimate a 30% chance of M-class solar flares in the next 24 hours. http://spaceweather.com/
Some astrophysicists noted 20 billion sq. km of seething plasma and magnetic filaments could be considered a middling lot, everything else being equal.
PHD candidates from UC Berkeley and MIT have gone on record with a theory there’s some kind of celebration going on up there. NASA space cadets believe otherwise, but refuse to elaborate except to darkly hint Old Sol’s expressing his displeasure about agency budget cuts.
Israel and the CIA aren’t saying what’s causing it, but are planning airstrikes on unnamed Central Asian targets in retaliation.
Confession #1: I’m in almost daily communication with the team of Toyota mechanical engineers who designed the 1991 Toyota 4-Runner and the Japanese Toyota assembly plant worker who tightened the starter-bolts on the one parked across the meadow jacked up and partly dissassembled.
Those men don’t need to have a command of the English language to be laughing and giving one another the high-five while saying: “Hahaha you Yankee pig! You’ll never get that starter off! Hahahaha! We nailed your young ass good!”
Although that bolt head is the ‘easy’ one, this American can’t get to it with any wrench yet invented for a straight-on shot. The mechanical engineers made sure of that. But the guy working in the assembly plant lacked sufficient confidence some can-do American wouldn’t come up with a way to put a wrench on it, so he torqued it down with a cheater-bar, thinks I.
Trying to get it loose repeatedly already has the grim prospect looming that I’m going to round off that head. If that happens I might as well take a cutting torch to the whole shebang and use it for a new chicken house.
The engineers did their job and the assembly-line worker did his. Now where did I leave that right-angle cutter and 300 foot extension cord?
But they had a backup plan. I’ve been talking about the easy one. This one I can’t even get into a position to see, but I think that might be it, back where I have to stick the camera in to try to get a view of it. I can’t think of a single way I’ll ever get a wrench anywhere near it.
Confession #2: I am the stupidest person you’ll ever encounter writing a blog on the Internet. The proof is enshrined here: The Communist Toyota 4-Runner. “But there it is. Hot diggedy damn!” “Easy! Easy money!” “Man, people pay good money to get to do a job as easy as this one’s going to be.”
Old Sol’s finally recovering some dignity, getting some of the southern hemisphere melodrama behind him. He’s spun around about 90 degrees and you can still see some of it lower right near the horizon. But all-in-all he appears to be getting back to the business at hand.
Nobody’s sure what the business at hand is, there’s a nice little solar breeze flowing out of that coronal-hole complex mid-south, leading us the way a hunter leads a goose he’s trying to shoot down. It ought to reach us around the 29th of November. Interesting stuff happening down at the south pole. Remember where you heard it first.
I went up to turn out Kay’s chickens just before daybreak and kicked up a herd of about 20 wild turkeys, which we haven’t seen on this property in a goodly while. But the country’s filled with hunters now, and there was some shooting not-too-far from the property lines yesterday. They’re skittish critters and might have decided this side of the fences is safer, everything else being equal.
I swung into Kerrville yesterday to finally pick up that primer-bulb for the chainsaw and get chain and bar oil. In the AutoZone store I noticed a couple of things I think might actually be worth buying as new tools after studying them a while. One is a ratchet with 1/4 inch drive on one side and 3/8 inch drive on the other. It has a comparatively short handle and a break just where the ratchet handle ends with a swivel on it to allow the handle to be bent allowing access to communistly personal space invaded places.
The other was a set of two box-end wrenches with ratcheting heads covering 8mm, 10mm, 12mm, 13mm, 14mm, 17mm, 18mm and 19mm. If someone had told me yesterday morning I’d buy some new tools if I went to town they’d have lost intellectual standing in my eyes.
But looking at these I’m figuring I’m a pretty smart puppy.
Afterthought: Jeanne found a discarded copy of Chancellorsville, by Edward J. Stackpole and sent it to me for my birthday. I’m up to my elbows in it, finding it particularly interesting because the Stackpole generation of Civil War historians have such different perspectives about so many facets of what went on in that war. He goes into loving detail about Hooker’s history, his behaviors throughout his career, his relationships with Lincoln and his various commanders and particularly with Burnside. I’d never read that scandalous self-aggrandizing report he sent in about Antietam before now. I’d also never encountered Grant’s “I consider Hooker a dangerous man,” appraisal of him.
If I’d been driving my own truck I’d have had Chancellorsville propped up on the steering-wheel reading it on the drive to and from Kerrville, is how seductive I’m finding the tome.
Old Sol coughed up a pretty good hairball yesterday. You can see a nice video of it here: http://spaceweather.com/ He’s evidently still got some internal issues to deal with, as well.
Astrophysicists speculate one of the planets might have sassed him, but renaissance theologians believe it’s something to do with counting tiny beings dancing on the head of a pin.
The attempted partial Solar eclipse in Antarctica was evidently successful and went without incident.
Down here at the Center of the Universe it’s stacking up to be a pretty good day. I’m thinking I might get the starter replaced on the 4-Runner and finally know whether that’s why it won’t crank.
I’ve promised the chickens they’ll have some Purina Cat Food soaked in the juice off some Elgin Sausage I’m having for lunch. The felines are settling for a can of Special Dinner.
All’s well here in the Center of the Universe.
Tipping my hat to the literati and music lovers among you readers I’m offering this today:
I was actually planning to use the Greg Brown version of this, but couldn’t find it. The cats and chickens are unanimous in thinking the Brown version is better but they agreed this one will do while Brown’s off hiding from the law or whatever he’s doing these days:
There’s a heavy fog hanging over the valley this morning and it’s full of deer moving around ghost-like hoping for a shot at some chicken-feed.
Big news among the cats and chickens: There’s a stray cat hanging around here, might be feral, or mightn’t. The cats are fairly upset by it, though after watching it a few days I think it might be a pretty good cat. Haven’t decided what to do about it yet. I can’t count higher than four when it comes to cats, and I’ve already got four firmly in place.
I’d been having a lot of problems with MS EXCEL overloading the RAM on any machine here because of the file size I’m prone to work with.
I emailed Ed Hurst [Do What’s Right]a couple of weeks ago and asked whether he knew of a piece of spreadsheet software that would do most of what EXCEL would do without all the bells and whistles clogging up the works. In a short while he sent me a link to Libra downloads. The download was a lot larger than I could handle on a dialup, so my friend Rich in NC, downloaded it to a CD for me and mailed it to me.
I’m still learning how to use it, but it appears to be able to do what I need doing as well as doing it without demanding a National Defense Department supply of RAM.
Thanks Ed and Rich. I’m obliged to both of you.
The Dell Optiplex 745 I bought for $50 in a thrift store to replace this gradually dying machine I go on line with has turned out to be a hermit. It didn’t come with an internal modem, and it refuses to recognize the external modem I use for this machine. Works okay otherwise, but I wasn’t needing a machine for offline work. I’ve already got one of those I do most of the math and whatnot on, so this one’s just a box sitting there twiddling its un-powered thumbs wondering why it doesn’t have a monitor, keyboard, mouse nor nuthun to allow it a closer look at the Universe.
Worked on the Toyota some yesterday without getting it standing on its hind legs howling to be turned loose on the world. Didn’t get the starter off, but got my hands greasy enough to think I might as well have. Probably more on that today if the weather cooperates.
Maybe something else later if anything happens and I don’t get lost in the fog.
Old Jules
“You ask me why I drive a ’56 souped-up Ford Deluxe with high-compression heads and overdrive?”
“A theory,” Robert Frost observed, “If you hold it hard enough and and long enough gets listed as a creed.” “And people build castles on it,” observes Old Jules.
A September report from CERN giving results of neutrino experiments might rattle some expensive real estate underneath castles so solid we don’t even think of them as ‘theory’. Neutrino bunches, they found, were moving at speeds higher than light speed. 60 billionths of a second faster than light doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough to raise a lot of naysaying and protests the results couldn’t be valid.
The experiments were repeated, this time taking into account the factors that might account for result errors. Now those results are out. Those Communist neutrino SOBs are STILL going faster than light speed.
Lousy news for all manner of certainties of physics stacked precariously atop old Albert’s theory that became a creed. But nobody cares about neutrinos anyway and how fast they go. The smart approach would be to just ignore it and not let it foul the nests of everyone working on all manner of important other theories they figured on becoming creeds.
But if you can’t trust a neutrino, who can you trust? What other Communists and anarchists are skulking and going faster than light and not getting caught at it because it would violate the speed limit and nobody was playing cop?
The world of people who call themselves scientists because they’ve read and memorized what people getting their hands dirty put forward as theory and adopted it as a creed to say back and forth to one another doesn’t like to be banged around this way. Yanking the rug out of things they memorized creates all manner of conversational difficulties. Now when they say something they memorized there’s a chance someone who memorized something different will say that back. Instead of two people reassuring one another how mutually smart they are, how well they both understand everything, you get this pack of mooshy uncertainties and blank looks.
All because of something so small nobody can see it anyway.
Who cares how fast a neutrino goes, anyway? It doesn’t exceed light speed because 10,000 grant applications are based on premises relying on light speed being the speed limit.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 
