A Bureaucracy of One

Wednesday Post - Extra Crispy Edition

I have spent the last two days working outside in the sun, and I am baked. Fried. Toasted. But not actually sunburned. Banana Boat sunscreen may not be the best, but it sure beats getting a visit from the Melanoma Fairy. Here is a really good article on how UVA/UVB radiation causes skin cancer, and why you shouldn't waste money on anything over SPF30. Go read it. 

 

I don't have much tonight. As I intimated in the first paragraph, being in the sun for two days straight has left me drained of energy and bereft of imagination. However, in addition to the Youtube video of how to build a joule thief  I was (and still am) going to close the post with, I just got an email from Google saying that I have been invited to Google Music Beta. No big deal.

No, really, it isn't a big deal. Anyone could sign up for the beta, I just don't think many people wanted to. Or, they've opened it up to the second (third? Maybe fourth?) round of suckers volunteers. And from what I've gleaned from a quick Google (ha!) search, it could take awhile for me to get all four thousand, six hundred and sixty-one songs to upload. Stupid throttled upload speeds. That's what the "A" in ADSL stands for, you know, "Asymetrical". Almost all DSL lines (and cable too) have vastly lower upload speeds than download. There are reasons for that.

 

So, what is a joule thief? It is simple circuit that allows you to run a 3v LED off of a 1.5v AA battery. Why is this cool? Because you can take your "dead" batteries and power your nifty little wine bottle LED lamp -the one you made yourself using a few off-the-shelf parts, and that you point to as justification for your 1-bottle-a-day habit- with them. Hmm...maybe that should be my next project?

 

On ADHD and Wikipedia and the Ridiculous Optimism of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

A nice little graph showing page views for my blog always pops up as soon as I open the dashboard. It's a nice bit of ego-boosting, or would be if I ever got more that barely-double digit pageviews in a day. I bring it up because the graph of the past week of traffic nicely mirrors my own feelings about this 30 Day Challenge; nothing on the first day, followed by a slow rise over the next two days, which leads into a sharp climb for two days. And then comes the inevitable crash when readers/I realize there isn't anything of interest going on. Then there is a small bounce over the last two days indicating a low-level interest still burning in a few die-hards.

Masochists, the lot of us.

Now, once more I was going to try and write a poetry-centric post, using some of the many fragments of poems I have written over the past months, but rather than finish the one I had been working on at work, or transcribing the rest, I allowed myself to get distracted by a post over on io9.com about an abandoned Russian airfield.

This led to an ADHD-fueled tour of Wikipedia starting with the Tu-22 bomber, and ending with the KS-1 Komet. Stops along the way also included the entries for the bouncing bomb; the definition of a "fleet in being"; and the Tallboy, a precursor to today's bunker buster bombs.

The pictures of the Russian airfield, and pictures from the West Coast mothball fleet, also put me in mind of just how optimistic so many apocalyptic stories are when it comes to technology. Nearly all of them have the plucky survivors of whatever flavor armageddon is popular at the time finding and salvaging weapons and technology from hidden bunkers that have survived the ravages of time. The most egregious example of which is the the Fallout series of games.

Seriously, take a close look at the decrepit hulks of those ships, and the empty shells of those Russian aircraft, and tell me with a straight face that anything made in the last fifty years would last twenty years unattended, nevermind one hundred and fifty!

Also, enjoy this Tiny Desk Concert by the Kopecky Family Band.

 

Nothing Substantial Is Said In This Post

Oh look, I'm stalling. On any given night I will reach a point in my internet-trawling where I will have already caught up on the going-ons of my usual haunts, but I keep looping back through them hoping something will have changed. This point generally occurs around eleven pm when I should be going to bed, but I have also known it to happen whenever I am faced with a task that I don't (for no good reason) wish to complete.

Such as putting together a non-crappy post during a 30 Day Challenge.

Now, I actually had a couple ideas for posts as I was driving to dinner tonight, but once I got home there proved to be a few intractable problems. For the first idea I needed a clean recording of Leona Naess' "I Tried to Rock You", but my goto place, Youtube, had no video I wanted to use. 

For the second idea I needed at least three more hours than I had available at the start of this post. As it is, after talking to my new roommate about local hiking trails, REI locations, and the local flora and fauna, I now have 29 minutes 'til post time, and not a damned thig to show for it.

So, [NARF!] What do are we going to do this time, Ego?

The same thing we do every time, Id...MAKE S*** UP! 

Have you seen this video? It's of a solar prominence that on June 7th burst forth from the Sun like an inflamed appendix a over-ripe pimple on a teenager's face Meatloaf on his motorcycle on the cover of that one album with that one famous song, c'mon, you know the one - yeah, THAT one!

Anyway, the video is of the eruption from a couple different NASA satallites, and it's pretty cool. If, you know, you're into that sort of thing.

 

What? No! I'm not judging you for liking that video. I mean, why would I post something if I didn't like it? Oh, right...because I wanted to torture you. 

That's not going to happen tonight unless...you hate X-Men, and think parody versions of Lady Gaga songs are gauché. And if that is the case, then I know exactly what I am going to get you for your birthday - an entire album sung by this guy!

 

Admit it, you chuckled when he made the mic move at the end of the video.

But lest you think me a terrible, terrible person (which I am, but I don't want you thinking that), I will leave you tonight with a song by my New Favorite Thing, Sarah Jaffe! Here she is singing "Even Born Again" live at a show in her hometown of Denton, TX.

 

'night, bitches! See you tomorrow when I will (possibly) regale you with tales of derring-do, and relate scenes from my (probably not) epic mountain bike ride! Or maybe it will just be more Youtube videos. You never know.

 

Phoning it in, One More Time

Alright yes, I have been phoning it in (once in a literal sense) the last few days. And tonight isn't going to be any different. I finally finished reading the FFIX Let's Play that I started nearly a week ago, and it was simply much more interesting than trying to dredge up something from the depths of the Internet. Don't worry, the FFIX LP is going to be one of the samples in my Let's Play post (COMING...at some point, maybe), and you can read it then.

You know, what the hell - I have twelve minutes until this needs to go live, so why not talk a bit about Final Fantasy IX? It was the last jrpg that Squaresoft made and released before they were bought out by Enix, and as far as I am concerned, the last good Final Fantasy game they made. From FFX on, the stories focused more on melodrama and emo whining than character development world-building.

FFIX, however, was filled with unique and interesting characters that lived in a fully realized world. Even the NPC's that you would only see once had little phrases and unique sprites that said more about them and their backstories than any main character from Final Fantasy 12.

Sadly, Squaresoft bet far too heavily on the uncanny valley, and when their cgi magnum opus tanked they became a prime target for a buy-out. It is everyone's loss that Enix did the buying.

Alas, poor Squaresoft. We hardly knew ye.

Tidbits and Nuggets

I finished Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Kroger this past weekend, and while it is a good book and one I would recommend to others, I would also caution anyone reading it to approach Krakauer's writing style with a grain of salt.  The man is not a subtle author, and his opinion is laid plain for all to see.  He also has a tendency to present two disparate things in close proximity to each other, so that the two become entwined (and nearly synonymous with each other) in the reader's mind, regardless of their real world relationship.  Specifically, he will write paragraphs detailing some aspect of the Mormon religion, and then launch into some frightening tidbit of Fundamentalism with nary a break.  While true that there would be no Fundamentalist Mormon faith without the mainstream Mormon church, the two are not nearly so closely linked as the book may make them appear.

Also, the descriptions of murders, and other behaviors, in several chapters are the stuff of nightmares.  Especially for an atheist. 

However, out of all the information the books provides, the two neatest tidbits that I came across are that two companies that are household names started out as religious communes.

Oneida started life as a commune in Oneida, NY in 1848, and then reformed as a joint-stock company when the commune broke apart in 1881, though it wasn't until the second decade of the 20th Century that Oneida began to focus on silverware.

The second company is Amana, originally Amana Refrigeration, and was founded in 1934 and wholly owned by the Amana Society until 1950.  And while the Amana Colonies are no more, the church still seems to be a vital part of the local community.

A Picture Worth A Thousand Dreams

I want you to look at this picture.  Not just glance at it, admire it, and move on, but really study it.  go ahead, I'll wait...

Done?  Good.  Did you notice that the astronauts are hanging 180 miles up in space?  That they are free-floating around a section of the largest man-made object ever placed in orbit?  That from there it would take them 243.5 seconds (or a little over nine hours) to free-fall to the ground after reaching a top speed of 1288.9 mph?  Did you notice how bright it was because the sunlight is unfiltered by te Earth's protective atmosphere?  Did the sense of unfettered freedom give you a sense of vertigo as your brain struggled to orient itself in an alien environment?

That, my friends, is how I feel when I dream. And it is ... AWESOME!

A Brief Interlude

This is not today's post.  Today's post will go up at its usual time of "holy-crap-what-time-is-it-I've-only-got-how-many-minutes-until-midnight?!".  However when I saw the below, I just had to share it.  

This search string led someone in Tooele, UT to my blog.

how do i listen to 97.1 zht on my droid

So many things wrong with that search string that it's difficult to know where to begin.  Firstly, let's ignore the fact that someone actually has the desire to listen to 97.1 KZHT; we know these people are out there, but we don't need to speak of them.  With that out of the way, let us focus on the other problems.  1) Someone out there owns a DROID, and I don't.  This is of primary concern to me after yesterday's article.  2) They wish to pollute that fine device with the auto-tuned dreck that drips from KZHT like so much ichor from the squamous underbelly of a particularly loathsome copyright lawyer.  3) The owner of this miraculous device has no frickin' clue how the internet works.

The first two problems stand by themselves and have no answer.  They are what they are and can only be "solved" by ignoring that they exist.

Problem #3 however, requires an answer, and it is simply that one cannot listen to 97.1 KZHT on one's DROID as there is no app for it, yet.  A little internet-matlocking leads me to believe the Broov Adore app might be ready soon, but I don't know if it supports the particularly noxious effluvia that flows from KZHT like raw sewage through the open sewers of the internet.

Thank you, and good day.

Whoops Published it w/o a Title First!

Okay, I've got nothing to say, and little time to say it in.  I'm going to a AAA hockey game tonight for a friend's birthday and I don't know if I'll be back before midnight.  Hence the slapdash, quick-n-dirty post for today.  I give you James Burke's Connection Ep. 2!  Watch in amazement as host James Burke takes you from a touchstone in the Eastern Mediterranean to the most pivotal event in the 20th Century!  Really, it is very fascinating.  I mean, every time I watch it I keep feeling fascination.

Actually, it's Ep.2 pt1, but the links for parts 2, 3, 4, and 5 are included after the episode ends. 

Space is big!

I got it covered, I tell ya!  I am all over and on top of it, and have it dialed in six ways from Sunday!  So that means that I have not had a tab with this page open for the last week, with the intention of posting it as soon as I ran across it.  Got that? There is no way that I would be too lazy to post something!

Good, now that we're clear on that let me introduce you to what we are talking about today: new pictures taken by the recently repaired Hubble Space Telesc-...

{sigh} This was supposed to be funnier.  See, in this space here, where this sad and depressed sentence is being read by you, dear reader (singular, since there is rarely more than one), was supposed to be a picture that said "Technical Difficulties - Please Stand By While the Author is Distracted by The Internet".  I even had the picture chosen that I would use!  Alas, I am utterly devoid of any talent when it comes to GIMP, and none of my pitiful handful of friends that do show a spark of talent for photo manipulation are online at the moment.  So, the joke fails, as does much in my horrible and misspent life.

But you know what is awesome?  What keeps me from crawling under my covers and kicking this mortal coil via self-inflicted dutch-oven?  AWESOME PICTURES OF THE COSMOS, THAT'S WHAT!  For reals, it is both humbling and life-affirming to be able to look deep into the mysteries of space and be utterly stunned by the sheer scale of the Universe.  Below are some of my favorite images from NASA, and here is where you can find the hi-resolution originals.  CHEERS!

   

Two Consenting Adults, One MRI

Glory be to the Age of Information and Enlightenment that we live in, for it gives us MRI porn.  

And while we laymen make light of the brilliant minds behind such an endeavor, we must remember that scientific progress is more often made by some saying "You know what would be cool...", than by other, more serious, means.

via io9.

This is What Stupidity Looks Like, and Yes, it is Painful (Slightly Disturbing Image)

Phishing Scam Alert!

If you get a text message on your phone, or an email, stating that this is XXX Financial Institution and that you credit/debit card has been deactivated; please ignore it and delete the message.  Should you call the number in the message you will only find an automated response asking for the card number, expiration date, and security code.  This automated response IS NOT from your financial institution and by entering the requested information you have just given the scammers full use of you credit/debit card.

One of these texts was just sent to me, and a little judicious Googling turned up a couple warnings from others who've received the same message.

The Catbird Seat

I have been aware of the expression "sitting in the catbird seat" for most of my life, but it was only while watching the World Softball Series these last two days, and listening to one of the announcers use it several times, that I finally became curious enough to try and discover what the phrase means, and where it comes from.

Alas, the Wikipedia article is not nearly as helpful as I would wish it to be; saying only that the expression is mainly attributed to baseball broadcaster Red Barber, and that it may refer to the bowerbird of Australia.  A little further internet-matlocking gave me this link, and the tidbit of knowledge that the catbird is in the same family as the mockingbird, and that they like to sit in the highest point possible to sing their songs.

Now, back to video games.  They entertain me.