One year ago today: August 19, 2013, Idaho bedroll.
Five years ago today: August 19, 2009
Ten years ago today: August 19, 2004, the Hubble flubble.
And if you are not a subscriber to Dan Lewis' Now I Know, you are missing a good one.
MORNING
Amtrak is back in focus, but many months from now at the soonest unless I do something last minute. My mild-mannered romantic view of train travel has deep roots but every trip was presumed to be in the summertime, when all the trees and leaves are green. I have never taken a winter trip and I should. I watched winter train video and it the landscape looks bleak, but it is the view of where I was raised. We had a south facing window that overlooked a dip in the terrain, making the lights of towns forty miles to the south visible at night.
History shows that the age of real invention was the late 1800s and early 1900s. I can’t help thinking that a lot of things were invented just because they were not there before. Like the motorcar and telephone. It took years to get people to begin using these things. But it was also the age of the solitary thinker. By the Second World War, it began to require teams of scientists to make progress. And a lot of government funding. By 1970, it was accepted that all new developments came from the big labs.
Since then, nothing. Even the Internet was an adaption of off-the-shelf components. But on the scale of the invention of the airplane or the computer, nothing earth-changing has come along in decades. We need that alpha event more than ever. The world has hit an invention bottleneck. This generation’s greatest ideas are a sideshow compared to the ‘60s.
Our honorary club member from Singapore has taken interest in our proposal to develop the “chip kit”. However, he advises us that most of the world, that’s the part outside of California, uses kits that are more toward a larger project than something useful around the house. I never quite thought of it that way, so give me some time to look into it. As usual, because it is useful information I seek, there will be practically nothing on the Internet. Just Amazon trying to sell me a book, as if I asked for advertising and they are happy to oblige.
By mid-morning I was back at my favorite bakery. They brought me chocolates and postcards and spices only available in Hungary. They were waiting for me when I rode up, so I was there an hour as all the news and gossip had to be shared. Along with my monster sandwich, I waited since July for a decent sandwich in this town.
NOON
And I read the newspaper. This picture is from Paris, but first, the other stuff. Um, I know that sometimes the items I mention here are covered in other media. But I don’t watch or read other media for news, so if I duplicate what you already know, it is not because I expect to inform you. It is because I have an opinion on the matter. And this time, I definitely do. First the “streamers”. Sorry, there are no pictures of this in action, just a few lame video commentaries.
Streamers are the birds that “ignite in midair” as they fly above the mirrors of a solar furnace electrical plant, such as the Ivanpah facility. I never considered that could happen, but it was written up in the Herald today. Pelicans, crows, whatever, their goose is cooked. What should we do personally about this? Pass the barbeque sauce, that’s what. It is only 5 square miles of desert. That’s less than the combined kitchen space of KFC.
The family of that gang in Redlands have been awarded $600,000 for wrongful death. What kind of nonsense is that? That’s like rewarding Al Capone’s family. These families know darn well what it going on and are neglecting their American duty to inform the police. Their “son” (as if he’s a child) comes home at four in the morning with computers and credit cards, yet they say nothing. The “son” is a 39-year-old ex-con gang member. The gang got gunned down. All of them Mariel boatlift-grade scum. Good riddance.
Now in contrast, take these Europeans. Suave. They know how to knock over a convoy for some real cash. No shots fired. These guys are smooth, like man, I've seen Die Hard. That crook had charm. I know that this Paris heist must have been on the television. Clockwork efficient, but it leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Here are some of them:
What was $335,000 in cash doing at an embassy? Any embassy.
Why was it being transported to an airport by a prince?
Do they expect us to believe eight gunmen in BMWs planned and executed this daring plan for a lousy $41,875 each?
Okay, how much did they really get? Or what were they really after? The pocket change is the cover story and a weak one at that.
Somebody in Paris is lying through their teeth. Those in the know say they're all lying. After all, they are French. We should glad they don't surrender to the thieves. Anyway, these gunmen were far too slick to be after chicken feed. I hope the robbers get away; the French, you see, will never suspect an inside job. It isn’t politically correct. And the Americans would appoint a committee to investigate that would still have no answers nearly fifty-one years later. Want to stash the cash from the police, guys? Hide it in a book of ethics.
EVENING
I was a good boy and ran over my lines for the gig this Saturday. But it is becoming evident on the newer material that some of the other band members are not doing their homework. You’ve heard me before—I have never seen a guitar player learn a new song from scratch in less than several months. I know it happens, but I’ve never seen it.
So here I introduce a new term, “guitar rot”. That is where the guitar player, over time, doesn’t review his own standards and begins to drop chords and forget riffs. Instead of literally cleaning up his act, he develops the attitude that the rest of the band is supposed to “follow” his mistakes. His last band could, but he never suspects that’s why they are his last band. Anyway, that’s “guitar rot”.
ADDENDUM
I leaned back, pinched my eyes, and took a look at my celestial navigation study. It’s enough to realize I am spinning my tires here. I’ve gone through this before, the solution is to divide it into smaller chunks, that is, “bite size pieces”. The chore is that there is nobody who will show you where the dividing lines ought to be. That’s how come they are “experts”, one supposes. I’m going to stop at the bookwork part, the calculations of position. That leaves the other side of the coin, the physical plotting of position, as a separate topic.
And there it stays until after I nail the numbers part. I’ve done it in sections, I’ve done it in pieces, it is a matter of looking up numbers and adding them. Yet it is so persnickety that I cannot guarantee the same result time after time. My error still averages in the hundreds of miles.
I see now that the mathematicians have taken out the complex calculations, but they’ve substituted complicated procedures instead. Any little error gets propagated as you go. At some steps in these tables, you are reading the difference between what you found and the next column while trying to remember if the sun is in the same hemisphere. It’s like they want you to stand on your head, too.
By comparison, the plotting will now seem a breeze. I’ve done it a few times for practice. Admittedly, I think that is the neatest part. The fancy compass and those parallel rulers, why, all the ladies will just swoon. There's something about a man with a pair of parallel rulers. You might say, Glenn, I have a pair and you don't. Ha, been waiting years to use that one.
To break down what I've learned, it is that navigation is the process of finding out how close you are to a known point, that point being where the sun or some other object is directly above the Earth's surface. Then you compare your sextant reading to the reading you would have gotten at that point. The snag is that at least one of the points is moving all the time.
You have to freeze them. Both points thus have to be calculated and compared, that is most of the job. Estimation is part of the deal, you have to be able to do it at least reasonably well, but it is easier than you think. I know I'm 2819 miles from Boise, Idaho. But it is more accurate to say I'm 9 miles from Ft. Lauderdale. Fun, or what?
Did I just say “persnickety”?
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
