One year ago today: March 4, 2025, the bad floor.
Five years ago today: March 4, 2021, desolate.
Nine years ago today: March 4, 2017, most were train depots.
Random years ago today: March 4, 2016, have you had breakfast?
Another day of random energy levels, let’s check the news. Hmmm, a US sub sank a warship, that’s a first since 1945. Then again, the Iranians never had enough of a navy to escort their own. Democrats who up to a month ago were screaming voter fraud was a hoax and now howling as they start losing. The midterms, I predicted, will be no side-show this time around. Trump is about to
Seriously, this is a real island, and you can guess its name. I found while practicing the navigational exercise below. Even got the sound hole. It is uninhabited, but maybe send the Hippie there. He’s looking more like Ben Franklin every year. Now, back to navigation.
Let us calculate a star position at 09:52:40 today local time (using our 2014 Almanac). That is 13:52:40 GMT and let’s choose the star is Procyon. Airies is 15 357° 12.9’ and the sidereal angle is 244° 50’. Allowing for the 52 minutes 40 seconds past the hour we were offset by 628° 14’, which is really 268° 14’ with a declination of 05° 04’N. Converting to Googletalk, that is -268.224°W by 05.64N. Yes, this is an exercise to see if my brain is still working.
Here we are, in the Indian Ocean. Procyon was southwest of the island of Great Nicobar Island, a possession of India. Home to a forest tribe called Shompen and some sea turtles, these will be gone by 2050 as India builds a billion-dollar deep container port and moves 650,000 people to the island. They plan it to be “The Hong Kong of India” and knowing the natives have no disease resistance. Total population, around 300.
You first.
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A few of my birdies have returned. Keeps me company while I sat up all afternoons streaming movies and making sure my Arduino is functioning. I do not know why it lost sync but it is fine now. Soon, I’ll wire something up but the last few days I’ve had a series of false starts. I get the brain part done and then drain to zero soon as the slightest muscle part looms. Each is a repeat without any gain or sense of healing.
I’m concerned that I now have two wounds that are not healing My leg and my chest now has a small gap. Will these require stitches? My notes from the doc do not mention this, only if the site is red and sore.
Later, I was all evening tinkering with Arduino code. Except for the brain, this is a no-strain activity, I needed a brush-up on quirks not mentioned in the manual. For example, Arduino beginner’s material is keen on making lights blink and soon everyone wants to make them fade. The code adds a 5 and once it equals 255, (maximum 8-bit value), it subtracts the five. So you get a nice light that slowly fades off and on. Of course, you want to speed it up, so you change the 5 to a 10.
Now it only brightens, it won’t fade. So you try 12, and 20, nothing works. The problem is that unless the value you choose is a factor of 255, the formula never equals 255. Try 15 or 17. This short video shows the experiment. That’s just a red flip phone in the foreground, the Arduino is back left with a green pilot light showing it is powered up. The small breadboard is the circuit. I could not find a 100 ohm resistor so I used a second (green) LED. The Arduino is so weak it will not burn out most LEDs if your forget the resistor.
ADDENDUM
COBOL. The language I did not brush up on because the pay sucked. IBM (the only remaining user) is famous for screaming they can’t find people while paying half the market rate. Today I’m double-glad for it seems a startup company has developed some AI software that writes flawless COBOL code, kind of. I’d love to see the output. One aspect of the language I loved is that correctly written code was right all the time, that is 0% errors. You could be certain any mistakes were bad input.
There is also a rule of thumb that IBM charges the customer ten times what it pays the programmers. If true, this AI app should be no surprise. You interact with COBOL everytime you use an ATM or airline—which also explains why the language is so long-lived. Any replacement would mean downtime these companies cannot afford. That could change if the code becomes practically free and instant.
How the AI works is it can take old COBOL code one section at a time and re-write it as parallel “modern” code that can be run simultaneously and tested for accuracy. Yes, this still leaves too much in the hands of the wrong people, but it is a vast leap forward to replacing COBOL. Too bad, as the language was human-readable.
I found some samples of the generated code. It has the same faults as all C code—unreadable commands, abused punctuation, and cryptic lines that have nothing to do with program logic.
