One year ago today: August 31, 2023, even the birds huddle.
Five years ago today: August 31, 2019, yes, I’ve eaten kale.
Nine years ago today: August 31, 2015, they robbed my barber.
Random years ago today: August 31, 2020, Memphis.
Another early morning and here is my book from Dundee. Called “1421”, it is 456 pages of research into the Chinese claim of having discovered America in that year. I’ve always wondered what there was to that. There are an additional 150 pages on the techniques used, which is what caught my interest. Navigation. How did they do it and can it be proven? Technically, the answer is yes, because of those navigational records. They had a system of using the Pole Star and could extrapolate their longitude, sort of. This is a week of extra reading but I’m curious. More about this in today’s addendum.
Listening to the BBC excerpts, I think England is about to boil over. They’ve tabled some legislation that reporting a non-White for a crime is now hate speech. Civilians, including children, are being openly slaughtered in the open streets by Muslims, right under the noses of the authorities. History shows this will continue until a strongman arises, I’ll call him Cromwell, who knows it is not enough to stop the madness, you must behead those responsible.
I’ve documented before how MicroSoft equipment will uncannily crater on a Friday after closing fime before a long weekend. Yep, no Internet and all of my computers (three of them) are now crashed.
Ha-ha on the Foo Fighters, more like Goo Fighters, I never did like their music. When they refused concert admission to the non-vaxxed, that sealed them in the stupidity vault. But that didn’t stop them, one of their band members blew a fuse when their tune was used at a Trump rally. Grohler, or some furrin’ name like complained like a baby, only to find out later Trump had a license to use the music. These musicians forget they have to sell out to get a recording contract. Here are my favorite six replies to his on-line rave:
Tell them to call Trump's Infringement HOT LINE at 1-800-CRY-BABY
He needs the bud light treatment.
And now everyone hates them.
Tell him to make a donation to Kackles & Tampon Tim!
Open Foo mouth . . .insert Guitar!
If not for Cobain, nobody ever heard of him.
I thought he was a loser until I listened highlights of the Kamela show. Was it a newscast? An interview? She made a complete fool of herself, unable to fathom basic questions from a Democrat friendly journalist. This woman lacks a lick of common sense. Anyone who still wants to give her the nuclear codes has rocks in their head. She has had a hand in causing every one of the problems she say she will fix, if elected. They are even failing at fooling some of the people some of the time. Now comes the announcement by her running mate’s brother. Walz, is it? Anyway, his own brother says the guy is so slimy he has not spoken to him for eight years. And has reportedly announced he is willing to go on national TV to explain why Walz should never be allowed to make decisions that affect other people. Yes folks, it’s heading for a liberal bloodbath and that means sharp violence on their part.
Yikes, England is boiling over. For the birthplace of parliamentarism, they sure wait until things come to a head. I got in a good morning’s puttering, then off to the library before the heat-wave and attendant afternoon rainstorm. This makes the blog because it left me enough energy to finish up sorting the boxed tubes. The total prices now adding up are not encouraging. I may recommend the tube guy that we dump them for what we can get, probably less than $1 per unit. EBay is NOT the way to make any money selling these things, just as a supplement providing you have the time. As it stands, everything made so far will be eaten up by eBay fees before any profit is possible. And this is America, progress and profit are interchangeable and inseparable.
Tarns in New Zealand.
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Home and not motivated. My biggest accomplishment since getting back from Orlando is I slept 11 hours. Hold on, I do have some good news. I found another $14 in my pants pocket, plus the leftover from the trip, hey, I’ve go $39 and it is Saturday. Still at the library, I saved even more reading their copies of this months magazines, or what these days passes for them. Readier’s Digest and PopSci are now comic books. One article featured a oceanic research ship and a host of comparisons between themselves and Costeau. As if a government operation with a staff of 70 could ever stand even close to old Jaques.
Two articles mentioned the longevity of bats and six-gill sharks. I know the answer. These animals are able to shut down their metabolism while they are sleeping. I was at the magazine rack looking for woodworking magazines. But, as ever, the system always shuts down the best first and the library no longer stocks them. Good Housekeeping, Better Homes & Gardens, and Southern Living they got, but not a single issue on how those houses came to be. I am seeking some examples of specialty boxes I’d like to build. One, a small cabinet for a portable CD player that would normally require headphones. I have a small practice amp (Karera) I never use that I’d like to team together with a battery pack and a power supply.
A short storm had me finish the boxed tubes, which I have not priced yet but this is not looking like a winner. Hey, this is the way things get learned. There are still around 500 unboxed tube but unless I find a hundred rectifiers, There is a tradeoff with eBay I have not yet calculated and I doubt it will be good news. I have still to pick out the best of the tubes for individual sale. The rest have to get dumped somehow. I’m thinking. As for learning, the tubes are pretty simple. They were mostly designed and built for radio and television, that they got applied to amplifiers was almost an afterthought.
No longer afraid to connect the tubes up, I will shortly attempt to get them to glow. I know there is a heater plate that normally works on 6VDC. It is the other plate that attracts the electrons that is up in the hundreds of volts. That’s the part that must have caused the city-wide current drains on the early computers. I simply want to see them glow, if I can, you’ll get some photos.
My 18V drill gave out today in the middle of a project. I know, everybody has moved on to 20V drills. But did they tell you those are around two pounds heavier. It makes a difference, plust the 20V are larger, making them trickier to get into tight spaces. Tomorrow I have slated to play through the entire song list, as we have not had rehearsal in a month. For the record, some of may oldest and best tunes are giving me trouble to play like I used to. Even my first standing ovation tune, “Last Train to Clarksville” is more of a challenge than it should be.
We drove over to the old club, like I warned, without constant new entertainment, it was dead until late when other places closed. And in this small city, there is no supply of new people, you work with what you got. Bringing back the old acts, unless they are live, slowly drains the crowd away. I got there at 9:00PM and there were twelve people, including a table of six strangers who sang Karaoke numbers few people recognized. I didn’t sing.
ADDENDUM
How does one go about verifying 500 year old accounts? There’s more to it than you’d suppose unless you had some background in navigation. That’s where I’m interested. The Chinese had been sailing nearby oceans for 600 years before Columbus. After reading about the discovery of the boatyards near Peking, I have no doubt they built some amazingly huge ships quite capable of crossing the Pacific. Which is where the verification process begins. Their daily logs describe events that could only be observed by being there
. The Chinese had very accurate records of star positions. They knew the world was round and knew about finding latitude by the noon Sun. Apparently they had a spread of observatories with gian gnomons floating on water to ensure it was level. That alone proved a ship could not be at any latitude that crossed dry land. I’ll learn more, but most intriguing is their descriptions of eclipses and comets, reporting angles that could only have been observed from locations in the Caribbean and North Sea. For example, the length of an eclipse is a very accurate indicator of where the observer was positioned. While this might be faked by someone willing to do the calculations, it would not explain how such a person could know there was open water at those coordinates.
There are the unexplained islands on maps that appeared in Europe after the Dark Ages. Other features show the earliest mapmakers copied from even earlier maps. My guess is these islands are really the shorelines of distant land masses, where the explorers only knew that area and left the surrounding parts blank. There are also too many reports of Chinese artifacts, like jade carvings, found in British Columbia, and why Columbus mistook some island tribes as Chinese. Plus the report by Drake that he observed a Chinese junk near Peru or the large shipwreck alluded to by Columbus near Guadalupe. Had it been a recent design, he would have said so, he was, after all, looking for China.
Archeologists have found Chinese coins and plates, which they explain away by ancient trading on the Pacific rim. But they don’t explain items like how the Chinese had carvings of penguins or brass plates unearthed in Florida (where the Natives had no draft animals or the wheel, meaning no way it got there by overland routes. And what about porcelain found in other far-flung localities? To me, the more likely explanation is very simple. The Chinese had a penchant for making discoveries but lacking the innate curiosity to do anything with them except by trial and error.
This is hardly surprising when you consider all Chinese captains, scientists, and the entire upper class of the bureaucracy were eunuchs. In China that means they lop off the whole hop-sing , not just the tentacles. In America, we do this to civil servants with a tool called “television”. We are not, however, barbarians. We first numb the applicants with a powerful anaesthetic called “public education”, and if that is not sufficient, we try “college”, which always works. The side effect is it turns boys into girls—but when you think about it, in their cases, what do they care?
Which brings me to a separate but related topic; these islands that keep disappearing. They are mostly in the polar regions. An airplane flies over a completely undiscovered land mass, which is gone by the time the government or military show up looking for it.
The theory I believe most is glaciers. As the glacier grinds its way down to the sea, some of them drag along a huge mass of rock at the bottom. It remains frozen in place as the new iceberg calves away and begins to melt. It is well known that icebergs often roll upside down during this process. Supporting this are the very rare photos I’ve seen of these high Arctic islands. They are relatively smooth but striated, as you would expect something dragged along for a couple hundred years under a million tons of ice.
