March 20, 2020

Yesteryear
One year ago today: March 20, 2019, at the dam.
Five years ago today: March 20, 015, lazy Forida thieves.
Nine years ago today: March 20, 2011, “evaluate my needs”, indeed.
Random years ago today: March 20, 2013 , Christian Mingle, my eye.

           For lack of anything livelier today, here’s a shot of Chloe beside the finger-painting dubbed “Chinese Grafitti”. I spent the morning in Winter Haven, even managing to pick up a nearly new Whirlpool microwave for $20. I was looking for ideas on repairing the car fender and now I know Wal*Mart doesn’t sell such things. Is that because they require skill to operate? The plague scare still has the roads deserted, and one more I could get anybody to tell me where the Cuban body shops are. Has the world gone totally greedy on me?

           Here’s a view showing the crumpled parts of the car. I phoned Agt. M, who I’ve seen build complete new body panels, I believe some of his work has been displayed in this blog. If he heads up here for a few days and gets this done, that will save me a bundle. I’ve gone over the damage and if I can get it anything like smooth, then that’s the ticket. I watched videos on various dent-pulling tools but I can’t find the one that really yanks the bad wrinkles smooth. I can buy the whole quarter panel, but nobody will cut it for me or do just the labor. I’ll still looking around.
           For noon break, I watched “A Love Song for Bobby Long”. It’s okay, with Scarlett just starting to get bottom-heavy. Has she had her boobs done? They’re nice, but they were better before. Not tired enough for a nap, I read a few chapters on propeller airplane design. That could put anyone out, but I actually stayed awake long enough to learn a few things. For one, don’t do a victory roll over your home airfield. That happens mostly in the movies. It makes at least one of your wings break off. The list of dead pilots who tried it is long enough.

Picture of the day.
Russian Bentley.
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           Music. I’m getting reports back regularly now on my demo videos. Am I doing it right? It’s 50/50 on feedback. Some people can’t tell its harmonies, saying I’m singing the melody, and they are partly right. But I know I’m singing that melody in thirds above or (an octave) below. Yet why do some people not hear it? I’m satisfied it sounds better than singing the melody in unison, so I’m sticking with the plan. To me, I hear progress each time through the list as I memorize the notes better. Do real singers have to go through this?

           One aspect of the reports is obvious. Musicians are excellent critics. That doesn’t say it all, but these fit into two categories. Those that have been on stage with me and those who have not. Helpful, but least encouraging, are the latter. Good old Bradford shows how guitar players who have never spent any significant time on stage can have hopelessly high standards. I still listen, however, because I strive to meet many of those expectations. It keeps one off the sofa and is a great source of material for reverse psychology. Telling me what’s bad is good, especially if, musically, I suspect the speaker doesn’t like something because he can’t play it.
           If you’d like to try singing thirds, it requires finding the melody, then singing the same melody three notes higher. Start with something simple like “You Are My Sunshine”, but avoid “Happy Birthday” due to the octave note. I had to use a piano keyboard to find the notes. This doesn’t always work because sometimes you get a clash. That is what I’m working on so hard, to find the note that does work in those instances. I feel, intuitively, that I’m about half-way there.

           Then, I saw a bomb calorimeter for sale on-line. That’s the picture above. This is the device used to calculate the amount of calories in foods. I thought they still used it because it is milly-proof. You burn the food, you measure the temperature. Not so, and for those on a diet, this may be interesting. The dietary information on food labels is now usually calculated, not measured. When it comes to public good, how many people trust calculations done by government employees? You know, consumer price indexes, modified starch content, unemployment rates, that sort of thing.
           Instead, since it is easier to measure items like fat and protein, the government uses a conversion chart. So many grams of this and that equals so many calories, I think body fat is 9.45 calories per gram. The lab analyses the content and totals up the results. So now, you’ve go government employees not only using a chart, but adding up the totals. If you trust them, fine, but bear in mind these are the crowd who too often put the wrong man in prison. You can buy a used unit for around $8,000. They are mostly nowadays used to carbonize (burn) things for further tests, like carbon-dating. The specimen is burned in a small oxygen chamber.

ADDENDUM
           Cryptocurrencies again in the news, mostly government reports of losses. Countries with central banking systems are hardly going to praise something they cannot control. How about we take a look at how this “money” is created rather than how it works, or as the banks want you to believe, doesn’t work? Regular currency is regulated by a central banking system, which only works if people trust and believe the money is real. It isn’t. At the core, cryptocurrency is based on decentralized trust, which I’ll attempt to explain. Before that, I emphasize that one of the reasons I rejected bitcoin is because it is credit-based. Money owed to you floats around until the accounts are reconciled. I don’t like that at all.
           You see, that leaves a large (and tempting) float of money in cyberspace, and you can bet the finest computer criminal minds on the planet are going nuts to crack that code. The codes, called hashes, work because of the tremendous amount of effort needed to decrypt them, but there is no doubt the effort is constant. All the transaction of a given currency are kept on a public ledger that all can see, with a fee attached to the users who keeps tabs on the system. This is the element of trust, that there are zillions of people watching the system, and the trust is based on strings of hash numbers they introduce during the process. This is what they call block chaining. I’m not sure how this works, but they add a transaction that pays them. This is where “mining” comes in. People with enough time and computer power can introduce these small transactions and get paid.

           That’s the last thing for now I have against cryptocurrencies is partly philosophical. Nobody should be paid for watching their own money, and worse, that payment is created out of thin air, which ultimately weakens the entire setup through an electronic form of good old-fashioned inflation. Just like when the US & Canadian governments print paper money to pay their bills. Nor am I comfortable with the number of different currencies that appear every time I looked (see Wikipedia, no link). Of the 1500 or so that I’ve examined, including Potcoin (to pay for marijuana) and rejecting those that are masquerading Ponzi schemes, the only one of merit is Verge because, like real cash, the transactions are anonymous—to a point.
           Isn’t cash anonymous? Only if nobody knows you are spending it, nobody is aware of your personal behavior when doing so (profiling), nobody is watching, and both parties don’t know each other. But cash is still King, need I say more?

Last Laugh