One year ago today: March 31, 2015, just not my type . . .
Five years ago today: March 31, 2011, some mobile home.
Nine years ago today: March 31, 2007, Costeau’s favorite wreck.
Random years ago today: March 30, 2014, interesting paragraph on illegals.
MORNING
I’m waiting for the “bank” decision, so you get some filler this morning. First, the book, “Swallowing Stones”. It leaves you hanging. It turns out the kid who fired the random shot in the air was so guilt-ridden that the book ends with himself ready to turn himself in. But you don’t know if he did, because several witnesses said while he ducked into the bushes with the Italian girl, he had left the rifle standing against the wall for 20 minutes. Anybody could have fired the shot that killed the neighbor and nobody would have noticed the report during all the fireworks.
There’s a card in the back that says Silver Trail Middle School. I looked it up, it is right out here on Sheridan. That would make sense. There is no silver and no trails in the vicinity.
I finally systematically did several navigational plots so I could compare the various methods side-by-side. There are two categories of plots, for exactness, when I say plot I mean the process of drawing lines and angles on a blank chart to “fix” ones position on the ocean surface by means of sextant readings and the use of special booklets containing look-up tables.
There seems no standard way of doing this, my five books show five methods. By comparing them, I see there are two common threads. One is to draw the chart with your AP (assumed position) at the center and plot your fix from there. The other is to put your DR (dead reckoning) spot at the center and use an offset distance to draw your line of position. Both will work, so I arbitrarily chose the AP method to practice with. It is more intuitive once you grasp that the tables are all based on how well you select this point.
Allow me to say something good teachers are not supposed to say. This AP is tricky, and can easily baffle the beginner. One is not supposed to “scare” the student by saying things like that. But listen to me, if you spook that easy, then do yourself a huge favor and stay the hell away from celestial navigation. It is not your imagination, the process is arithmetically complicated, at least when compared to cost accounting or advanced trigonometry. It was months before I could wrap my brain around it enough to become comfortable with the western hemisphere.
My advice to the new learner is to learn the math first. Why? Because if you cannot do that, you can’t navigate. Period. The snag there is most people who write the books want money for the effort, so they leap immediately to the flashy part of reading the sextant on the rolling deck. You too, can be the next Fletcher Christian.
But the sextant is the least challenging segment of the process. And once you get the math, it makes using the sextant almost instinctual. You’ll automatically reject the countless spurious readings that all users, even experts, are often dogged with. It is amazingly easy to get a wrong sextant measurement and only by having a grasp of the math can you reduce this type of error.
By the same or similar token, I round-of-bout admit most people could not possibly learn the math part first. Wow, I think Patsie finally agreed with me on something.
Buffalo skulls.
NOON
The waiting game continues. Here’s today’s mystery. I had two slow leaks, the scooter rear tire and the sidecar tire. Having time, I got out the water basin and was intending to find and plug the holes. Um, when I got out there this morning, both tires were inflated. Do you think the tire fairy came by overnight and filled the tires? It is now past noon, and they are still full of air. I don’t think it is supposed to work that way.
Just like I intend to do if they sell me the cottage, today I will sit and read a lot. I’ll continue my dissertation on celestial navigation. Now pay attention because none of this is in the books. These are my musing as I inch my way through material I find deep and difficult. This time, I stood back and looked at the Nautical Almanac instead of in it. Here’s my conclusion.
There’s a presumption the Almanac gives the sun and stars positions all over the planet. Well, forget the stars, you should not be sailing at night. If you think about it, the sun doesn’t really circle the whole world. It only goes around in that narrow band near the equator, between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Now here is your chance to use that imagination mom always said you had. The sun doesn’t move very much north or south in a day, but it moves westward at, what is it, 4 miles per minute? So that is 1/60th of 4 miles per second, and so on. Easy Newtonian physics. Distance equals rate times time, d=rt. Anyway, don’t quote me, figure out the speed yourself.
Some clever dude got to thinking, you know, why calculate every position, which would require 436,000 books. Why not just calculate the position every hour? There’s only 8,766 hours in a year, we’ve run these numbers before right here in this blog. Then, in the back of the book, just put a table with the minutes and seconds, and let the navigator add these offsets to the hour results. That’s your Almanac. Hopefully, this makes it easier for some of you to read the thing.
And that is my most advanced thinking on the topic at this time. The Almanac only lets you calculate exactly what spot of the Earth the sun is over and any given day, hour, minute, second, and tenth of a second of the year. You don’t need a sextant, just a damn good clock. Any quartz crystal is ideal, as you may be aware, I’ve been getting amazing theoretical results with an ordinary stopwatch set to Greenwich time, a.k.a “universal time”.
Wait, I can do better. That is not Greenwich time, but the average time between the two meridians in the time zone that Greenwich is located between. And everyone knows, the average is the arithmetic mean. Greenwich Mean Time. If I keep repeating it, I will eventually learn it.
Let me tell you about another operation that is getting pretty damn slippery. Adobe, we already know they are intentionally releasing countless updates that force you to download the code. Force? Yes, Adobe never makes the updates backwards compatible, as do reputable software firms. Adobe also seems to have the collusion of sites like youTube, which will not play even the oldest videos if you don’t have the latest update. What’s that smell?
So over a period of time (not specified), I compared the number of bytes of code in each of these so-called “updates”. Many were virtually identical except for a few fragments that appear to do little except look to see when was the last update. When you think about it, Flash Player has been around so long that updates are basically meaningless. So what is Adobe up to?
What first set off my alarms with Adobe was the amount of time you must remain logged into their update sight for amounts to a tiny few lines of new code. The update should load lightning fast and then drop the link. But when Adobe began to open Internet Explorer on my system without permission, I lost all respect for both companies.
AFTERNOON
We all know those Windows people are gonads, but nothing proves it like their license expiry notice. I have a question for those azzholes: How can my Windows license expire soon when I’ve never had a Windows license? BWAAAA-ha-ha-ha-ha. I hope all of you MicroSoft people choke on a fart so some good company can get a chance to produce software that actually works. Oh, and take your corporate ethics with you. Actually, you have little choice since no way could you pull it out of where you’ve got it stuffed.
Many people hate MicroSoft as much as I do, but few have hated them for so long. Remember, I lived through the era when MicroSoft used every dirty trick in the book. They did not get ahead by producing a superior product, my god, that much should be obvious. They did it by cutthroat quashing or absorbing of all other startups using tactics perfected on the battlefield by IBM’s diabolical regiments of crooked lawyers.
I watch with glee, by the way, at each notch Windows is taken down. I also have no love for Linux, which the creators turned into space cadet code. But Windows 10 apparently has Linux command lines. Ah, another instance where the great assimilator becomes the assimilated.
And don’t be thinking MicroSoft is alone at being pricks. They are just the entity that’s most proud of it. Did you know some sources teach Millennials that MicroSoft is a successful business model that should be emulated? Proves that history is re-written by the victors. MicroSoft has no shame, at least even Nelson Rockefeller had the decency to time and again publish that he knew his dastardly methods were wrong to the point of evil but government policy left him no choice.
Heck no, MicroSoft has plenty of company at the top of the dung heap. Let’s see who rivals MicroSoft for long-term just plain being douchebags. Immediate the people who invented the quarter pound butter wrapper. You know the one, that you cannot unwrap the stick of butter no how without touching it or letting it flip an extra time and miss the dish. That’s been around before the war. And it took federal legislation to put those bastards out of commission that were cranking up the commercials on late night TV. There has never been a scumbag shortage in America.
Mind you, I also acknowledge that like the gangster era of 80 years ago, we also have another political situation that once more leads an entire generation with no real prospects of getting ahead unless they resort to crime. This time around, the crime is necessarily small-scale at the actual level theft takes place. You might say, crime has become digitalized. Instead of robbing you for thousand bucks, the new breed of criminal uses the system to steal a penny each from 100,000 people. It diminishes the chance of an individual pressing charges.
NIGHT
Brainstorming session. The spring buying season is over and it was a disaster. As for whoever is buying up all the property in Lakeland, we now speculate it might be some government agency. I mean, who else has the money or inclination to buy 37 houses per week? And the talk is the Canadian loonie is about to plunge to 40 cents as the oil market stays below production costs. I calculate from Kitco pricing that Syncrude needs to sell for $83 per barrel to break even.
So let me run that number. A loaf of bread will cost $15 loonies. You see, if the Frenchies quit coming back every year, the economy between Jupiter and Bal Harbor is doomed. That strip was precariously overdeveloped for tourism in the 1990s, but the number of Europeans has dwindled to, well, I’ve seen one this year. It is reliant on the stingy Canucks, who this year arrived in December and were leaving already weeks ago. I can tell you, they ain’t spending no $15 a loaf. Not with their own pending real estate bubble.
It would be freaky if all of it happens at once, but the pressure is on. Ottawa has been bluffing the world for years that their dollar was “resource-backed”. They kept prices so high the world has switched to substitutes and no way Canada can survive as a service-based economy with the east bleeding the west dry. Canada is the soviet union of the west.
Trivia. Texas requires that certain types of flasks used as regular equipment in chemistry labs be now registered with the government. Sadly, this ill-conceived “war on drugs” will result in a lack of trained chemists right when nanotech makes a breakthrough. I hypothesize making nanomaterial is too expensive, that chemicals will be manipulated to “grow” sheets of fabric or substrate.
ADDENDUM
Here’s something controversial. The media is again misquoting Trump to say he’ll allow rich Muslims into the States. But in a real way, that makes sense. It is well known, at least around here, that in third world countries the major trajectory to getting rich is to adopt our American social values. (The American way is to hire people rather than tax them.) Ergo, the rich ones come pre-assimilated.
Last Laugh
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