One year ago today: May 6, 2018, there are no mistakes.
Five years ago today: May 6, 2014, best left to MicroSoft.
Nine years ago today: May 6, 2010, he lost $300k.
Random years ago today: May 6, 2006, where are the tributaries?
Is it the soil? The liatris stems are blooming five feet high and falling over. These are staked, notice the older blooms are already dying off. I invested in bamboo stakes at 50 cents apiece, but shortly I know where I’m getting all I want for the asking. I’m running all three A/C units and six fans, including the attic. She’s a nice warm one, and I have some stats. Month I was away coincided with the electricity bill, so I now know that on “vacation “ setting, this place used 11 kwH per month. The new panel is rigged so one switch shuts down everything except the fridge and security system. Water usage was zero and the recycling is a fixed $20. That’s the most fun for this morning, hope you liked it.
And I went at it, using my small electric chain saw and an extension ladder to trim close to a ton of overhanging branches in the front yard. If the breeze keeps up, look for another ton tomorrow. I can’t miss the opportunity even if it stalls my work on the interior. The insulation is a nice touch, with all three A/Cs running on medium, I can get the whole house down to “library uncomfortable” temperature. The bathroom is a problem, as the room is too small to put an A/C and leaving the door open to keep cool is, well obviously, not an option. I’ll search for a solution, I cannot be the only person who has faced this situation.
As usual, I got zero of the promised help on this work. It affects my diet and the amount of logs left over is getting to be a pretty pile. The work is lumberjacking, and that is a two-man job. I trim all the branches I can reach, but the really heavy parts have to be sawn until I hear a crack. Then the Swede saw until it gently bends to the ground. This part doesn’t always go as planned. Next, trim as much as possible from the part touching the ground that the rest can be dropped in bite-sized pieces small enough that they don’t break things like my bench, birdbath, you know, stuff I like to keep.
The relevance is that I have enough of those logs to build something, if I knew how. It seems a pity to slate all those logs to the incinerator. Maybe I’ll go on-line but the logs themselves don’t have many straight sections longer than a few feet. I was thinking of a bench in the front, beside the mailbox. The foot traffic on this street is more than usual and it is all neighbors. That alone sets this town so far apart from that third-world shithole called Miami. If you see anybody walking there, they either can’t cough up bus fare, lost their license, or they are casing your joint. Possibly all three.
In three hours, I cut eight smaller limbs and three six-inch monsters. Although only the larger pieces were casting shadows on the front yard, the opened up almost half the area to new sunlight, the first some of this ground has seen in years. I’ve got enough leaves to begin a compost pile, but that is a process I don’t know a lot about. The Reb does, so let me ask. I know she does it in a barrel, which now I’m lost on that. Before taking a break, I see that I have enough logs and large branches to make a fence of some kind. I just have no place to put such a thing. Maybe some planters? Help me out here, willya?
Here's a link to the most dangerous highways in Australia. It generate exactly 100 hits, so it stays.
34 slice toaster.
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This work is not impacting my weight. From the heavier duty work during and since Tennessee, I’ve upped my daily quota to 1400 calories, but this is scarely enough to maintain an inactive man. Between walking the dogs, my daily 5 – 7 miles on the bicycle, and work on the house, I’m probably expending twice that. But in the past two months I’ve gained six pounds. This is one of those out-and-out discouraging periods that cause most diet failures.
Shown here, but difficult to see, is a slight change in the color of the sand. It becomes somewhat more yellow. In a few minutes of digging, took the larger dirt pile to the upper right out of the hole. When I struck the yellow layer, in another equal time period, I barely got the smaller pile I’m pointing to. I normally bury posts two feet down, so I’m going to try using some kind of ramrod to loosen up whatever is down that hole. If not we do it the hard way.
It’s gnat season in Florida. There are more species than I know, but it’s the ones that bloom that wreck your summer days. There a fly-sized insect with red eyes that is swarming this year, so be sure you have bug cleaner in your windshield washer. They can’t fly fast, so riding the bike is okay, but they get in the way when you stand still and get in your house, car, shed, whatever the instant you open the doors.
For afternoon break, I continued watching documentaries on US military hardware. The accurate versions seem to be the British reviews, but all these have that same irritating “next generation” edge, where every weapon is better than the last. The reality is they are getting more complicated, and history has shown repeatedly that complex machines are vulnerable to seemingly minor punctures and jolts. By the late Viet Nam war, the finest US fighters were still being shot down by primitive MiG 17s, who just would not cooperate. Why them dirty Commies would not cooperate by getting into dogfights.
The Brits are not much better. Their only weapon of note is the Harrier jump-jet, and it has a nasty habit of disappearing on “night patrol”. Even stealth technology is over-specialized. It’s been downplayed, but two drunks in Kosovo with a Soviet era anti-aircraft cannon shot down a $42 million stealth fighter by the expedient of firing ahead of where they heard the exhaust roar.
In my estimation, the one truly effective development in ground warfare is the cluster bomb, and you generally need an airplane to deliver it. For those not familiar with the technology, a large container of smaller “bomblets” are ejected at a pre-determined altitude and throws them into a pattern that maximizes the spray of lethal metal particles over a relatively huge target area. Terrorist hate these weapons and hate them even worse now that they are delivered by drones. While other weapons have advanced applications, such as fuel-air explosives and tungsten darts, these tend to have specialized uses. But a cluster bomb, well the best defense other than being behind something thick is to just not be around when it arrives.
I rate the Abrams tank as a white elephant, and still wonder what the true stats are on American military aircraft crashing with each other and flying into mountainsides. AWACS are a first target, I’ll wager every enemy has a secret missile developed that has no use but to home in on them. These days, you don’t attack the enemy’s military, you attack his supply system. So yes, I tend to view weapons designed to fight weapons as an outdated concept to begin with. There was a military genius who proved this in the 1900s by winning every battle where he could get at the enemies supply trains and lost every battle where he couldn’t. However, people like the Washington Post and New York Times say not to call him a genius, so I won’t.
ADDENDUM
Here’s your free mini-essay article, these days better than magazine quality.
A.I., will it be real intelligence, or what, in our troubled times, passes or it? This is a serious question. Consider what majority rule did to computers, the Internet, and university degrees. Darwin projected that evolution was always toward average—and I suggest he missed something I’ve said another way, that average can get so far from ideal, it impedes progress. Millions of fat people tilt the scales, literally, enough that average becomes dangerous. When the average weight of Americans hits 250 pounds, that predicates extinction.
You see, zillions of people lacking intelligence above ape-level are having the same averaging effect on A.I. algorithms. Is that clear what I mean? There are so many stupid people nowadays that if you strive for average or even above average intelligence, your algorithms are missing the mark. You begin to get the “MicroSoft-Google Effect”. That’s where products that have never worked right are designed for tremendous idiot-appeal and become standards.
For instance, although I’ve switched to Office Libre for my tablet word processor, I still conduct the extra step to save the files in Word 2003 format. Why? Because it is a standard and I may need to open my files at a library or another computer which only has that program. In forty years, MicroSoft still hasn’t got it to work right.
An early example of bad averaging is the application of A.I. to retail sales on-line. Low prices attract searches, but more searches flag an increase in demand, and up goes the price. Is this intelligence? To the squadrons of coders over at Google and MicroSoft—probably. They cannot see problem with linking searches with demand, but in fact there may be no cause-and-effect happening at all. Yet up go the prices. Duh. This mentality is what creates thousand-dollar Uber fares on New Year’s Eve. Causality has always been a problem in the application of statistics. It requires real-world knowledge to get it right. The ivory tower cocoon people of the C+ coding generation sorely lack that experience.
Admit it, the picture of my post hole is more exciting than the lives of most liberals.
