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Went to Aunt Janie’s funeral today in St Clements Church, in St Bernard. Janie’s the girl in the foreground in picture of my dad’s wedding. What a babe! She had a long life, enjoyed golfing, was married, but didn’t have any kids. However that didn’t stop her from doting on all of us when we were young. Susie (Morton) Walker gave a moving eulogy. She suffered from Parkinson’s for years. She will be missed.
Greg
Looks like it’s going to be another hot one today! Boy, I’ll be glad when they figure some way to cool the air.. It’s not bad in here, though, these mud bricks make for good insulation.
The kid’s going to be 16 next month. He wants a chariot, for Gods sake…(and I do mean Gods…Whats Moses and those pesky Israelites thinking?). Does he think shekels grow on trees? And we don’t even have any trees… Maybe I’ll just ship him off to my cousin in Assyria, they’ve got plenty of chariots!
Everything is bugging me today.. What’s with my ancestors buried under the floor? Kinda creepy if you ask me… we should put them all in a plot of ground outside town!
And tonight we have to go the Temple AGAIN! for another sacrifice…at least they don’t use people anymore…
Well, off to work.. those oxen aren’t going to drive themselves…
Greg
The old 27 inch JVC is hitting the skids… when you turn it on it gets a bright thin line across a dark screen. After you beat on it for 5 minutes, the picture will fire up, and last for the night. I didn’t think I would have to deal with this till February of 2009 (when the analog signal bites the dust).. but realized that I have cable and would be able to put off buying a new tv for ever.
Apparently, the time has come, and it brings with it nothing but problems…
First, I have this neat cherry cabinet the old tv sits in, with shelves for nick nacks and a shelf for vcr tapes (they’re still in there..). There doesn’t seem to be a tv for sale that fits in this hole.. unless you get something smaller than your computer monitor..
Then, down at best buy, they have setup fees (around 200 bucks), because you just can’t take them home and turn them on (like the old one). You have to do all this arcane setting of things so that the image will be viewable!
Then you have to upgrade your cable to get HD.. that ain’t cheap! (But obviously I am…)
Then you gotta upconvert your dvd player…
Then HDMI, what is that all about?
Maybe I can take this thing in to get fixed…?
I prepped a new 2008 280hp 6 speed Aero X today. Before today I was kind of on the fence about this car.. gas is going up, and the latest offerings from Saab before this car was a 9-7 SUV (Trailblazer). I was kind of thinking that Saab needs some kind of hybrid or electric car or something, but they seem to keep making cars that get worse gas mileage than the one before.
Well. I gassed it up about 5 miles from the shop (57 bucks), and headed back. I was feeling kind of frisky and thought I would give this car a workout. Then a huge thunderstorm blew up, dumping buckets of water on the road. I didn’t even have to slow down, in fact, I just kept going faster… torrents of water or huge puddles or water washing across the road wasn’t an issue. Never once did I slip a wheel (18 inchers), and it was plowing thru some major water barriers.
I think I found this car’s forte. It was like the old Morris Garages motto… “Safety Fast!”
One of the recent Space Shuttle Discovery’s missions was delivering a new toilet pump to the International Space Station, to fix its troublesome toilet. Watching the docking on Nasa TV http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ was breathtaking!
It seems space stations have come a long way since the old Salyut and Spacelab days… For instance, the Salyut 6 had 90 sq meters of habital area, ran on 4kw of power, and could barely cram 3 guys inside it.
The present International Space Station, by contrast, has about 700 sq meters of area so far, with another 300 on the way, runs on 110 kw of power, and the new Japanese labs interior can strand an astranaut if he loses a handhold and drifts out into the middle of the room!
These space stations still have their problems tho. Recycling issues, radiation from space, and a lack of gravity still cause health woes…
And they still only have one toilet!
greg
The Chandra Telescope is a space based telescope like the Hubble, only it deals in Xrays. The Harvard/Chandra team have spotted what is going to be the next big thing (next to the big bang that is). 2 huge galaxies have been busily colliding for the last million years, and while that does happen from time to time, these 2 galaxies have huge super massive black holes at their cores. They are only 3000 light years away from each other (just around the corner in astronomical terms) and will crash into each other, causing distortions in the space time fabric and enormous bursts of gravitational waves!
This event will happen in the next couple of million years, but Dr Roger Brissenden of Harvard says their team is ready, and is already designing instruments to capture the event!
greg
The Journal Nature this month had an article on 2 scientists that extracted proteins from a 68 million year old Tyrannosaurus thigh bone and found that its closest living relative was a chicken! This is amazing that they could even get any matter out of a 68 million year old T. Rex, but even more amazing is the implications for evolution and the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
The claims of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky are now starting to make sense. According to them, Dinosaurs and Man roamed the earth at the same time, and that there is no such thing as evolution. Once a few cave men came across a dino that had been hit by lightning and found out they tasted like chicken, they were done for. They ate them all! You notice there are no more wooly mammaths around… They ate them too! Sabre tooth tigers, the Dodo, passenger pigeons, the whole lot. If we hadn’t learned to domesticate animals we would have eaten ourselves out of house and home.
I heard that the aliens at Roswell tasted good to…
greg
The tailight has undergone a metamorphosis in the last couple of years. From Henry Ford until the new millenium, the humble tailight hadn’t changed. It was very simple, all that was involved was a battery.. a wire to the tailight switch, a wire to the tailight, and then a wire back to the battery. Easy to understand by any human, and easy to diagnose. All you needed was a $20 test light and possibly (but not necessarily) a schematic.
Come the new millenium and the age of the computer and things are different. Tailights (the kind that still use a bulb, that is) now consist of a battery, a wire to the switch, a wire to the bulb, a wire to a computer, and a wire back to the battery. They now work by pwm (Pulse Width Modulation), which means you feed a bulb with power from the battery, and the ground side is pulsed by the computer. The frequency of the pulse determines how bright the bulb is. This does have several advantages, like the brake lites and tailights can all be the same bulb (simplifying logistics.) With the computer involved, you can also have any bulb take over any other bulb’s function. (like if a brake lite bulb fails, the tailight bulb can take over its function.) Diagnosis is more difficult, however. Now you can’t use a testlight because it’s impedence can blow the computer. Now you need $500 Digital Multimeters and a $4000 Scan tool to talk to the computer.
The net effect is that to install tailights in your car, it used to cost the manufacturer about 20 Bucks. Now it costs 500 bucks..
I think they call it progress…
greg
It has recently come to my attention that the do it yourself craze has reached a new level. Not only can you change your own oil, redo your own kitchen, or do your own personal makeover, but you can also build your own (very rare) WW2 fighter plane! Since you’re still not allowed to build your own airplane you will have to get an airframe and powerplant license from the Federal Aviation Administration. Then you can get the airframe newly made from Flugwerk. http://www.flugwerk.de/
These guys are turning out newly made airframes from the original dies and machine tools that made the originals. Next you’ll need a motor. Since the original BMW 801 powerplants are extremely rare, a better alternative would be the ASH-82. This is a Chinese made, Russian copy of a Wright Cyclone. The engine is available and has comparable power and looks to the original. All you have to do is put it all together and away you go!
You might want to get a few flight lessons first…
greg
Listening to podcasts lately? one on journalism, and the way the news media doesn?t decide anymore what you listen to and when and where you listen to it? it used to be at 6 and ll on tv and radio, and in the newspaper in the morning? now its whatever you want to listen to and when you want to? mp3 and video players and the internet have seen to that..
And what else is changing..? how about the music industry. The record labels are going crazy now trying to hold on to the old paradigm for the music industry, and they got fat at one time, but now? With file sharing and bands starting to break out on their own, some new record companies are starting to sell services to artists. How can they serve the artists, instead of how can the artist make them money..
What else is changing? (What isn?t)
greg
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