One year ago today: January 15, 2022, last year’s cold spell.
Five years ago today: January 15, 2018, another useless guitarist.
Nine years ago today: January 15, 2014, with the same IQ . . . .
Random years ago today: January 15, 2009, don’t think too loud.
It’s early, it’s frozen, and I’m going out for a big breakfast downtown. Or maybe east to Combee. Call this Apple Sunday because I missed last month. And can anybody or anything be stupider than keeping passwords stored on somebody else’s computer? Another millennial hack just helped themselves to Norton’s “Password Manager”. The stolen accounts had one common feature – they were all single-factor authentication. I didn’t know anyone still used that. There are still 925,000 people that stupid over at Norton alone.
Myself, more coffee. Hmmm, getting low on Carnation. May have to use ordinary evaporated milk. The Miss Universe contest is now being run by a tranny. Go woke, go broke. If you open a bank account in China with American dollars, they give you a free COVID vaccine. I took the long way around to do some banking this morning, only to find the ATM rejected some of my large bills. That’s $50s and $100s that later worked fine in the Walmart self-checkout. Denmark has opened special slow checkout lanes for people who want to stand and chat. God, that must be a desperate existence.
I did a shop, some prices are dropping. Nothing new to report except this $5 bag of vegan marshmallows. I didn’t know they were formerly made of beef and lamb. That’s a joke, Tyler. The birds, well-fed as they are, can’t seem to get enough food. Mr. Downey landed a yard away from where I was filling the tray to get a helping. I’d put out more of a variety but I really don’t know what else they eat. They surely did take to peanut butter. It’s possible to tell when their feeding changes phase by watching what they prefer to eat first. These days it is seeds. Orange-infused budgie seed has always been a favorite.
Not rich, but enough money that they could not coerce you by that means. They still can, but compared to money, nothing else works nearly as quickly. And that’s how Florida manages to thumb its nose at DC. Now, Florida has refused to allow tracking of firearms and ammo purchasers. The Feds are incensed, but under the Constitution, there is nothing they can do. When they try the money strong-arm tactic, Florida does not cave. You see, Florida has enough money to take care of itself. There is no issue tried yet where the Feds could choke off the money supply to coerce Florida into cooperation. And that’s where I identify.
Next, I discover all this time I was thinking of the wrong movie. One of my favorites is “Evil Roy Slade”, but the movie I recalled was “The Brothers O’Toole”. This is a classic I saw in the late 70s and lost a potential excellent girlfriend over it. That’s another tale from the trailer court. Debbie B. What a gal. Anyway, this is the movie with the town of Molydenum that I mistook because one of the character is Evil Roy. I’m watching it now instead of bass practice.
More trivia. Most of the common side-effects of Lipitor, such as hemorrhagic stroke, arthralgia, diarrhea, urinary tract infection, insomnia, limb pain, muscle spasm, musculoskeletal pain, myalgia, and nausea, were discovered in the months after the patent expired.
Rolls-Royce robot ship.
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In the end, eating a bagel was my dietary splurge. I repeat, there was nothing new and taking the same route by van instead of sidecar yields no real adventure. I got home and escaped into a detailed book on navigation—and made a surprising find. I’ll detail, mentioning some of you may recall this decision so long ago. Accuracy. The tables go to the tenth of a minute (careful with your modular arithmetic) and rounded off a lot. Gee, I thought, rounding introduces an error and accumulates it. So up to today, I always did the calculations to the full available decimal point, and do not regret I learned it that way. What changed?
A paragraph about that accuracy, which was an explanation of why rounding was okay and in fact, preferred. How could this be? Navigation has been described as the art of useful estimation and today’s method (sight reduction) requires five different steps or stages. Each introduces error, from the shaky hand of the sextant, to the tired navigator who carries a decimal, to plain sloppy dead reckoning. However, such errors are small and tend to cancel each other out “to a degree” (my wording). Errors tend to be less than a minute which is one nautical mile (or 1.15 land miles). Still, why not strive for accuracy if it is available? Now I have the answer.
You see, in the end, the LOP is drawn on a blank chart, then crossed by other LOP lines, which are used to produce a fix. This chart must be large enough to give a meaningful swath, yet small enough to fit on your average small ship table. Are you with me here? Okay, stand back for a moment and examine the scale of the chart that meets these needs. Now look at the pencil lines used to draw the LOP. The thinnest useful pencil line is two nautical miles wide.
I tentatively planned on dropping downtown for one, but instead stayed home to cook the twenty pounds of chicken. That’s three large batches in the biggest pot I own. But reusing the broth gets it to a mellow stage perfect for sauces and gravies. I’m also having fun with “Take It Easy”, once again with those guitar fills that can’t be done easily by the other guy without breaking the rhythm. Whether or not this flies, this is how I get around to learning most new tunes any more. Contemporary music has no bass lines, the indie composers have reverted totally to tribal beats and I hesitate to classify new country as country at all. Real country doesn’t have symphony orchestras or even large horn sections.
Here’s some trivia. If you can’t put metal in a microwave, how come the whole inside casing is made of metal? Answer: the metal is flat and polished. It isn’t metal itself that causes arcing, but sharp edges where the microwaves can reflect onto themselves. If you put steel wool in there, it will catch fire. Same with really crinkly tinfoil. And what’s this theory that sailors aboard near the waterline don’t get as seasick as those in higher stations?
ADDENDUM
Celestial navigation is often called the art of useful approximation. Most books said round off each calculation, which I never did. My thinking was if the precision was available, it was folly to not use it. As long as my result was within acceptable parameters, that justified the extra work. Now I find out a practical fact says otherwise.
Charting a plot entails five stages from sextant to drawing the LOP (line of position). Each step introduces errors, though they tend to cancel out. Get within six nautical miles and be happy with your results. Well, not so fast, look at that final step, the navigation chart.
It must be large enough to convey perspective, yet small enough to fit on a ship's table. Over time this produced a uniform scale. You took a pencil and drew that final satisfying LOP. It turns out said scale meant the narrowest useful pencil line works out to at least two nautical miles thick. The most accurate fix involves three such lines. To strive for accuracy below that limit is futile.
Thusforth, I will now round my calculations to the full minute of an arc. QED.
