Solstice - Full Moon - Lunar Eclipse - Overcast - Storm - Depression...
RenegadeMime was planning on spending the night sitting in the center of a ring of pebbles with a bottle of Canadian Club and a bonfire fueled with copies of 'Letters from the Legislature'.
I guess I'm not the only one disappointed.
Hee hee hee:
Its not every day I get to correct the RenegadeMime.
The number of four letter combinations is 456,976, of which at least 101 are actually words in English.
This is 226.48 pages at the rate of 25 lines per page at 80 characters a column.
But!
I can print at the rate of 300 dpi**, and leaving a comfortable margin gives me a working area of 8x11 inches per sheet of paper. A old style font can be printed in a 8x8 pixel block.
Adding a space character between words (five characters per word) gives me 24750 minuscule* words per page. That's the entire Tetragrammaton Set printed on 18.5 pages.
Or is it? Its the English Tetragrammaton Set. The Hebrew Tetragrammaton Set would have been different - its unlikely that all the same consonants were used. The bigger question is what the Tetragrammaton Prime Set is - and that means finding out how many sounds are used - and usable- in human speech.
*Capital letters would be 0.026 inches high!
**I may misunderstand this rating: is it dots per linear inch, or dots per square inch?
Its not every day I get to correct the RenegadeMime.
The number of four letter combinations is 456,976, of which at least 101 are actually words in English.
This is 226.48 pages at the rate of 25 lines per page at 80 characters a column.
But!
I can print at the rate of 300 dpi**, and leaving a comfortable margin gives me a working area of 8x11 inches per sheet of paper. A old style font can be printed in a 8x8 pixel block.
Adding a space character between words (five characters per word) gives me 24750 minuscule* words per page. That's the entire Tetragrammaton Set printed on 18.5 pages.
Or is it? Its the English Tetragrammaton Set. The Hebrew Tetragrammaton Set would have been different - its unlikely that all the same consonants were used. The bigger question is what the Tetragrammaton Prime Set is - and that means finding out how many sounds are used - and usable- in human speech.
*Capital letters would be 0.026 inches high!
**I may misunderstand this rating: is it dots per linear inch, or dots per square inch?
'New from the Colonel! Chicken and tits!'
Today I got into an argument at work with a co-worker (to use the noun loosely) over ancient Hebrew diacritical marks, and how they applied to the Tetragrammaton*.
An argument which I think I won, for it ended with him screaming uncontrollably "Chicken and Tits!" over and over again.
This made me laugh for the better part of a day.
I cannot understand why he chose this phrase, but I am guessing that perhaps he read an article on the subject that used the example of 'Chicken' and 'Tits' as words that would encode the same without diacritical marks?
Its really the only answer I can think of.
*This chap believed that all four letter words** were names of God. I suspect he never read the 'Nine Billion Names of God' story by Arthur C. Clarke.
** I wanted to print out the list and bring it to work until RenegadeMime pointed out the list would contain 67215243521100939264000000 'words'. Factorials defy intuition.
An argument which I think I won, for it ended with him screaming uncontrollably "Chicken and Tits!" over and over again.
This made me laugh for the better part of a day.
I cannot understand why he chose this phrase, but I am guessing that perhaps he read an article on the subject that used the example of 'Chicken' and 'Tits' as words that would encode the same without diacritical marks?
Its really the only answer I can think of.
*This chap believed that all four letter words** were names of God. I suspect he never read the 'Nine Billion Names of God' story by Arthur C. Clarke.
** I wanted to print out the list and bring it to work until RenegadeMime pointed out the list would contain 67215243521100939264000000 'words'. Factorials defy intuition.
"The Dead have no motivation"
Kai's sulky refrain from season two of Lexx ran endlessly through my head for the last two weeks as I battled a virus. Two virii, actually, and the second infection was my own fault.
The first one hit my while I cruised a wine-making forum: a TDS variant made itself at home and proved unwilling to vacate. I was running Avira Antivir at the time, an anti virus that up until that moment, I had been perfectly satisfied with.
No problem : everything was backed up, and I needed to reinstall the system anyways. It was a five year old XP Home, SP1 system that I was too damn lazy to setup fresh.
Re-installation was a snap.
Two hours later I was installing the last of my regularly used programs, when I had a lapse into idiocy and stuck an infected thumb drive into the nearest USB port.
Seeing as I was still shaking out bugs, I hadn't turned off the Autorun utility.
I watched in horror as a flutter of shortcuts appeared. Virus 2 installed itself:
W32.Ramnit.
Avira did nothing.
Now I could tell something was going on as my Google results were being redirected, so the fact that Avira said that everything was okay did nothing to help.
Some poking around with msconfig and similar tools led me to a respawning executable:
c:\program files\microsoft\watermark.exe
"Watson, the game's afoot!"
Several tedious hours later, I also uncovered
c:windows\system32\ssmypics.scr
c:\documents and settings\Robert\Local Settings\Temp\tmp\crypt_killexe.exe C:\windows\explorersrv.exe
The screen-saver was a cute touch: when I listed a directory with a screen-saver in it, WinXP runs the screen-saver in order t display the screen-saver's output as the associated icon.
So I had to use a terminal to delete it, and anyways, it kept getting respawned.
Time for more scanners:
Ad-Aware SE could not find it.
Emsisoft HiJackFree couldn't find it.
Clam AV could find it, but became infected itself, and could not remove it.
Moon AV could not find it
Norman Malware Cleaner could not find it.
IS360 ignored it completely.
AdvancedSpywareRemover ignored it.
By this point, infected files exceeded 22,000
Finally:
1, I manually killed every process that seemed infected;
2, I ran OTL with a configuration file for W32.Alureon ( I have no idea if this proved useful);
3, I ran ATF-Cleaner, and wiped everything I could;
4. I ran ESET online virus-scanner with phasers set to PARANOID.
This led me to:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Server\hlp.dat
Of course, when I unlocked and deleted that, I got the Blue Screen.
No problemo - ran the WinXP Repair facility, and when everything came back up smiling,
installed the AVAST 30 day demo.
AVAST had no problem finding lurking copies of the virus and wiping them clean.
Half an hour more tracking down and killing infected files, and everything seems to be running smoothly.
If you Google a virus name and add terms like 'fix' or 'repair' or (even the pitiful) 'help', you'll get an endless round of forums bloated with HijackThis ( ! (Is the exclamation point mandatory?)) logs and endless lists of 'scan this, try that ' style instructions.
This post is not intended to add to that hideous panoply, but to serve as a bookmark to myself, a reminder of what I did to Fix It.
And of course, to boast: Me, myself and I - 1, w32.Ramnit - 0 .
Kai's sulky refrain from season two of Lexx ran endlessly through my head for the last two weeks as I battled a virus. Two virii, actually, and the second infection was my own fault.
The first one hit my while I cruised a wine-making forum: a TDS variant made itself at home and proved unwilling to vacate. I was running Avira Antivir at the time, an anti virus that up until that moment, I had been perfectly satisfied with.
No problem : everything was backed up, and I needed to reinstall the system anyways. It was a five year old XP Home, SP1 system that I was too damn lazy to setup fresh.
Re-installation was a snap.
Two hours later I was installing the last of my regularly used programs, when I had a lapse into idiocy and stuck an infected thumb drive into the nearest USB port.
Seeing as I was still shaking out bugs, I hadn't turned off the Autorun utility.
I watched in horror as a flutter of shortcuts appeared. Virus 2 installed itself:
W32.Ramnit.
Avira did nothing.
Now I could tell something was going on as my Google results were being redirected, so the fact that Avira said that everything was okay did nothing to help.
Some poking around with msconfig and similar tools led me to a respawning executable:
c:\program files\microsoft\watermark.exe
"Watson, the game's afoot!"
Several tedious hours later, I also uncovered
c:windows\system32\ssmypics.scr
c:\documents and settings\Robert\Local Settings\Temp\tmp\crypt_killexe.exe C:\windows\explorersrv.exe
The screen-saver was a cute touch: when I listed a directory with a screen-saver in it, WinXP runs the screen-saver in order t display the screen-saver's output as the associated icon.
So I had to use a terminal to delete it, and anyways, it kept getting respawned.
Time for more scanners:
Ad-Aware SE could not find it.
Emsisoft HiJackFree couldn't find it.
Clam AV could find it, but became infected itself, and could not remove it.
Moon AV could not find it
Norman Malware Cleaner could not find it.
IS360 ignored it completely.
AdvancedSpywareRemover ignored it.
By this point, infected files exceeded 22,000
Finally:
1, I manually killed every process that seemed infected;
2, I ran OTL with a configuration file for W32.Alureon ( I have no idea if this proved useful);
3, I ran ATF-Cleaner, and wiped everything I could;
4. I ran ESET online virus-scanner with phasers set to PARANOID.
This led me to:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Server\hlp.dat
Of course, when I unlocked and deleted that, I got the Blue Screen.
No problemo - ran the WinXP Repair facility, and when everything came back up smiling,
installed the AVAST 30 day demo.
AVAST had no problem finding lurking copies of the virus and wiping them clean.
Half an hour more tracking down and killing infected files, and everything seems to be running smoothly.
If you Google a virus name and add terms like 'fix' or 'repair' or (even the pitiful) 'help', you'll get an endless round of forums bloated with HijackThis ( ! (Is the exclamation point mandatory?)) logs and endless lists of 'scan this, try that ' style instructions.
This post is not intended to add to that hideous panoply, but to serve as a bookmark to myself, a reminder of what I did to Fix It.
And of course, to boast: Me, myself and I - 1, w32.Ramnit - 0 .
Had a small amount of welding today, and as nothing went right , I can report two failures.
First: when out of welding rods for a simple stick welder, bare iron wire does NOT make a adequate substitute. Easy to melt the wire, easy to render the wire RED HOT so that it melts off the holder and falls onto, say , my pants.
Neither does nails.
Second: sprinkling on sand or potassium chloride does NOT make a useful substitute for flux.
That being said, the potash will vaporize, and its a little easier to strike a arc. But not easy enough to get the job done.
Turns out my welding rods were stored twenty-six kilometers away from where I thought they were.
Proper Previous Planning Prevents Pretty Poor Performance.
First: when out of welding rods for a simple stick welder, bare iron wire does NOT make a adequate substitute. Easy to melt the wire, easy to render the wire RED HOT so that it melts off the holder and falls onto, say , my pants.
Neither does nails.
Second: sprinkling on sand or potassium chloride does NOT make a useful substitute for flux.
That being said, the potash will vaporize, and its a little easier to strike a arc. But not easy enough to get the job done.
Turns out my welding rods were stored twenty-six kilometers away from where I thought they were.
Proper Previous Planning Prevents Pretty Poor Performance.
Found the problem with the starting motor: the clamps that hold the rotor wires on was loose.
Symptoms were that of all the sectors on the commutator, only that one showed no circuit to all the others, only to its opposite sector.
Oddly, it was not the sector that showed the severe arc damage, it was the next sector in rotation.
One problem down, sixteen more to go!
Symptoms were that of all the sectors on the commutator, only that one showed no circuit to all the others, only to its opposite sector.
Oddly, it was not the sector that showed the severe arc damage, it was the next sector in rotation.
One problem down, sixteen more to go!
Tore the Farmall's starter down. A rather simple machine:
It was not turning unless I tapped the case with a hammer.
There is a couple of spots where the commutator is really eaten away:
Brushes look brand new, and with only a little arcing damage. Now to turn down the commutator ....without a functional lathe.
This should be an interesting weekend project.
It was not turning unless I tapped the case with a hammer.
There is a couple of spots where the commutator is really eaten away:
Brushes look brand new, and with only a little arcing damage. Now to turn down the commutator ....without a functional lathe.
This should be an interesting weekend project.
I drink coffee and tea at work, and face a daily problem with sugar.
I have a cup, but no spoon ("There is no spoon!") , so stirring in the sugar is problematic at the best of times.
I tried to address this with the Tea Flake
but there is certain practical difficulties - not the least of which is using the communal pot of coffee...
Putting only a little coffee in with the sugar and swirling vigorously will work to some extent, but I am impatient.
Now if the the cup was properly designed, as the fluid is poured in, the flow could be 'turbulated'*
to maximize the dissolving rate. A lot of work has been done to minimize surface turbulence; I want the opposite.
At the very least, I think I kind of built in funnel would increase the fluid speed at the cup bottom, keeping the sugar grains tumbling in the flow until they are gone. If the bottom of the funnel is twisted to encourage a vortex, I suspect the grains would concentrate at the center of the tiny whirlpool, and merely increase the local sugar concentration would actually allowing mixing. Of course, if the vortex was sized right, the grains would dissolve locally, and then as the cup was filled, the vortex would collapse and the sugar solution would mix freely.
Of course, if the funnel was filled with the sugar and then the tea poured through, it might accomplish my desires without any vortex, even though everything is sexier with vortices.
I would post a picture to support this contention, but to the best of my knowledge, Angelica Bridges has never been photographed in a vortex, and even Leiticia Casta - despite being from Europe- has never been shot against the brooding waters of the Maelstrom.**
*'Turbulated'... I think I am only posting in order to invent new words.
** Which, of course, grumble over the bones of sad, fierce, brave Captain Nemo.
I have a cup, but no spoon ("There is no spoon!") , so stirring in the sugar is problematic at the best of times.
I tried to address this with the Tea Flake
but there is certain practical difficulties - not the least of which is using the communal pot of coffee...
Putting only a little coffee in with the sugar and swirling vigorously will work to some extent, but I am impatient.
Now if the the cup was properly designed, as the fluid is poured in, the flow could be 'turbulated'*
to maximize the dissolving rate. A lot of work has been done to minimize surface turbulence; I want the opposite.
At the very least, I think I kind of built in funnel would increase the fluid speed at the cup bottom, keeping the sugar grains tumbling in the flow until they are gone. If the bottom of the funnel is twisted to encourage a vortex, I suspect the grains would concentrate at the center of the tiny whirlpool, and merely increase the local sugar concentration would actually allowing mixing. Of course, if the vortex was sized right, the grains would dissolve locally, and then as the cup was filled, the vortex would collapse and the sugar solution would mix freely.
Of course, if the funnel was filled with the sugar and then the tea poured through, it might accomplish my desires without any vortex, even though everything is sexier with vortices.
I would post a picture to support this contention, but to the best of my knowledge, Angelica Bridges has never been photographed in a vortex, and even Leiticia Casta - despite being from Europe- has never been shot against the brooding waters of the Maelstrom.**
*'Turbulated'... I think I am only posting in order to invent new words.
** Which, of course, grumble over the bones of sad, fierce, brave Captain Nemo.
Wine De-Headachechulation.
I brew wine. I enjoy making it, but drink little - friends and family take care of the overflow.
In simple terms, brewing is a matter of using a liquid suspension of S.L. yeast cells to convert sugars to alcohols. Ideally, 100% of the sucrose, fructose and glucose is converted into ethanol : humanity's favorite poison.
Life being inherently messy, not all of the conversions are correct. Various other alcohols and aldehydes and produced as well, including methanol.
Methanol is poisonous - it is a ( the ? ) major contributor to the hangover headache (And don't whine at me about dehydration, as thats controllable with an intelligent drinking regime ).
Certain batches of my wine, while palatable, tend to give a nasty kick in the temples the morning after, and I'm prepared to blame the methanol for most of this.
Lacking magical ability's to dispel the methanol on command ( "I need a young priest and an old priest...") and also not being able to de-methylate by mental powers, it occurred to me that the wine might be treatable to remove the methanol by boiling.
As a rough rule of thumb, the various home distillation experts recommend throwing out the first 200ml of distillate when distilling spirits.*
This foreshot (assuming a 23L batch) contains the majority of the methanol. Now i don't need a still to try this. I just need to boil the wine until the volume drops by 0.009%...only a few minutes work.
A possible drawback is that the boiling temperature might alter the flavor.
Also easily dealt with - arrange a vacuum distillation rig with a pressure cooker and a scrap A/C compressor and boil the methanol off at room temperature.
I am aware that the other 'fusel oils' in the batch won't separate off this way,but as those compounds contribute heavily to the flavor, I'm willing to allow their presence.
I can't find any mention of this procedure on the Net - so the 14,530** headache question is: Does It Work?
*Obsession with distil-- prefix intentional.
**40 years of daily bingeing before hepatic failure, minus 80 days to observe sobereity on Pi Day and National Petunia Appreciation Day ***
***Walt Kelly would have really liked Talk Like A Pirate Day.
I brew wine. I enjoy making it, but drink little - friends and family take care of the overflow.
In simple terms, brewing is a matter of using a liquid suspension of S.L. yeast cells to convert sugars to alcohols. Ideally, 100% of the sucrose, fructose and glucose is converted into ethanol : humanity's favorite poison.
Life being inherently messy, not all of the conversions are correct. Various other alcohols and aldehydes and produced as well, including methanol.
Methanol is poisonous - it is a ( the ? ) major contributor to the hangover headache (And don't whine at me about dehydration, as thats controllable with an intelligent drinking regime ).
Certain batches of my wine, while palatable, tend to give a nasty kick in the temples the morning after, and I'm prepared to blame the methanol for most of this.
Lacking magical ability's to dispel the methanol on command ( "I need a young priest and an old priest...") and also not being able to de-methylate by mental powers, it occurred to me that the wine might be treatable to remove the methanol by boiling.
As a rough rule of thumb, the various home distillation experts recommend throwing out the first 200ml of distillate when distilling spirits.*
This foreshot (assuming a 23L batch) contains the majority of the methanol. Now i don't need a still to try this. I just need to boil the wine until the volume drops by 0.009%...only a few minutes work.
A possible drawback is that the boiling temperature might alter the flavor.
Also easily dealt with - arrange a vacuum distillation rig with a pressure cooker and a scrap A/C compressor and boil the methanol off at room temperature.
I am aware that the other 'fusel oils' in the batch won't separate off this way,but as those compounds contribute heavily to the flavor, I'm willing to allow their presence.
I can't find any mention of this procedure on the Net - so the 14,530** headache question is: Does It Work?
*Obsession with distil-- prefix intentional.
**40 years of daily bingeing before hepatic failure, minus 80 days to observe sobereity on Pi Day and National Petunia Appreciation Day ***
***Walt Kelly would have really liked Talk Like A Pirate Day.
Spent a few hours browsing through the deeper recesses of RenegadeMime's digital libraries today.
I love to read, and as a result have read an enormous quantity of books: somewhat in excess of twenty thousand. I've read a little of everything, and an awful lot of science fiction.
( Does it show?)
I realized today that I've read a lot of philes as well.
Most of them are weird documents, a kind of surrealistic folk art. the information value is largely useless, and what is accurate is outdated.
But as a art form, they are quite fascinating.
They contain the strangest blend of naivety , hostility, and laziness that I have ever encountered. Are they the teleological cousins of the text porn stories that flood Alt.Sex.Stories and its ilk?
Are they going to be collected in some future date, archived and sorted, arranged by author and subject.
Is elderly versions of ACFST-X or Vortex going to interviewed by earnest Ph.D students?
I love to read, and as a result have read an enormous quantity of books: somewhat in excess of twenty thousand. I've read a little of everything, and an awful lot of science fiction.
( Does it show?)
I realized today that I've read a lot of philes as well.
Most of them are weird documents, a kind of surrealistic folk art. the information value is largely useless, and what is accurate is outdated.
But as a art form, they are quite fascinating.
They contain the strangest blend of naivety , hostility, and laziness that I have ever encountered. Are they the teleological cousins of the text porn stories that flood Alt.Sex.Stories and its ilk?
Are they going to be collected in some future date, archived and sorted, arranged by author and subject.
Is elderly versions of ACFST-X or Vortex going to interviewed by earnest Ph.D students?
Getting my first tractor bizarrely has a similar feel to dating my first girlfriend.
A previously unsuspected Rite of Passage, I guess.
This is a 65 year old Farmall A, equipped with a homemade pusher blade, and a accessory hydraulic pump that is rusted onto the PTO, and has its inlets & exits capped off.
It needs some tender repairs, but it does run!
Interesting to think that this was state-of-the-art for tractors when Doc Savage was being written.
Voyager 2 talks in code! Scientists need Enigma Machine to decode science
data!
Voyager 2 is sending back garbled data. The current hypothesis is that a bit has been flipped somewhere in its tiny computer memory by a passing cosmic ray. Hopefully its a reversible failure.
I've encountered bit flip errors under more mundane situations - we all have had a PC crash through 'Memory Parity Error' at one time or another.
( I used to have a PC that when overheated would die due to RAM errors ( A 386-SX at ambient temperatures of >30C (In a little shop with no air conditioning )))
However I ran into this problem one day with a cheap ($1 Cdn) calculator.
We were adding up long columns of numbers. My assistant was using the calculator, and I was doing it with a pencil. There were (legal) reasons for getting a accurate answer. I came up with one total, and she got another.
So we did it again.
Again the totals disagreed,but her total also disagreed with her previous
total!
I took the calculator this time, and we tried several more times.
The manual addition came to the same total every time, but it wasn't the same as the calculator offered.
What was happening was that if we added this column:
24
30
55
37
23
--
159
we would get 139 if we entered it as 24 + 30 + 55 + 37 + 23
But if we mentally grouped figures as we worked, to speed things up:
54 + 55 + 60 we would get, say 142
And of course, 24 + 30 + 55 + 60 would get 146.
A pocket calculator has a very small chunk of RAM that is divided into registers. I doubt very much that any kind of parity check is run on them at boot.
These registers are used to store the intermediate values of each calculation.
Somewhere in one of the registers there was a stuck bit ( Chances favor that it was stuck on binary 0 )which served to mutate each value when it was entered into the register. 11111111 (255) would become 11111101 (253), perhaps, 00011000 (24) would stay unchanged, but 00011110 (30) would become 00011100 (28), 00110111(55) would become 00110101 (53), and so on.
If the damaged register was being used for the sum total, then the answer would be wrong by the same amount (in binary) every time, no matter how the parts were added up.
It was sobering to realize I was holding a calculator that appeared to give correct answers , but was wrong. We take those little machine's accuracy for granted.
I regret not keeping the calculator: it was a novelty then, but philosophically the event has stayed with me.
data!
Voyager 2 is sending back garbled data. The current hypothesis is that a bit has been flipped somewhere in its tiny computer memory by a passing cosmic ray. Hopefully its a reversible failure.
I've encountered bit flip errors under more mundane situations - we all have had a PC crash through 'Memory Parity Error' at one time or another.
( I used to have a PC that when overheated would die due to RAM errors ( A 386-SX at ambient temperatures of >30C (In a little shop with no air conditioning )))
However I ran into this problem one day with a cheap ($1 Cdn) calculator.
We were adding up long columns of numbers. My assistant was using the calculator, and I was doing it with a pencil. There were (legal) reasons for getting a accurate answer. I came up with one total, and she got another.
So we did it again.
Again the totals disagreed,but her total also disagreed with her previous
total!
I took the calculator this time, and we tried several more times.
The manual addition came to the same total every time, but it wasn't the same as the calculator offered.
What was happening was that if we added this column:
24
30
55
37
23
--
159
we would get 139 if we entered it as 24 + 30 + 55 + 37 + 23
But if we mentally grouped figures as we worked, to speed things up:
54 + 55 + 60 we would get, say 142
And of course, 24 + 30 + 55 + 60 would get 146.
A pocket calculator has a very small chunk of RAM that is divided into registers. I doubt very much that any kind of parity check is run on them at boot.
These registers are used to store the intermediate values of each calculation.
Somewhere in one of the registers there was a stuck bit ( Chances favor that it was stuck on binary 0 )which served to mutate each value when it was entered into the register. 11111111 (255) would become 11111101 (253), perhaps, 00011000 (24) would stay unchanged, but 00011110 (30) would become 00011100 (28), 00110111(55) would become 00110101 (53), and so on.
If the damaged register was being used for the sum total, then the answer would be wrong by the same amount (in binary) every time, no matter how the parts were added up.
It was sobering to realize I was holding a calculator that appeared to give correct answers , but was wrong. We take those little machine's accuracy for granted.
I regret not keeping the calculator: it was a novelty then, but philosophically the event has stayed with me.
I observed something odd about a month ago, and I can't find anything to verify it.
I try to be a careful observer, and there were witnesses, so I'm not talking about a hallucination or a dream.
I was driving to Moncton from Sussex along the four-lane highway, in the afternoon.
I was the passenger, and my wife was driving. We were just short of Petitcodiac...perhaps a kilometer away from the offramp. The highway is divided by a strip of land about a hundred feet wide, with small trees and shrubs.
An aircraft was flying down the strip of land towards us. It was a white aircraft, driven by a single propeller, with a Tee-tail configuration and no apparent markings or identification numbers.
The skin had the glossy sheen of fiberglass gelcoat.
I can't remember if I could see landing gear or not. There was no windows, and it carried a black
pod on its back. The pod was quite large, perhaps 1/3rd the volume of the fuselage.
It was flying within a hundred feet of the ground. Speed was difficult to judge, as were were traveling at 110km/h towards it, but it didn't seem to approach any faster than traffic in the opposite lane would. I would judge its velocity to be no less than 80 km/h and no more than 130.
It could see its wingtips rock back and forth through a few degrees as it flew - the day was quite gusty.
I have never seen a picture of an RPV like it, but I am quite sure that it was not a small plane. The legality of its actions seem dubious, flying that close and low to the highway and town.
A mystery, all the more irritating in the way I can find nothing to refer to.
I try to be a careful observer, and there were witnesses, so I'm not talking about a hallucination or a dream.
I was driving to Moncton from Sussex along the four-lane highway, in the afternoon.
I was the passenger, and my wife was driving. We were just short of Petitcodiac...perhaps a kilometer away from the offramp. The highway is divided by a strip of land about a hundred feet wide, with small trees and shrubs.
An aircraft was flying down the strip of land towards us. It was a white aircraft, driven by a single propeller, with a Tee-tail configuration and no apparent markings or identification numbers.
The skin had the glossy sheen of fiberglass gelcoat.
I can't remember if I could see landing gear or not. There was no windows, and it carried a black
pod on its back. The pod was quite large, perhaps 1/3rd the volume of the fuselage.
It was flying within a hundred feet of the ground. Speed was difficult to judge, as were were traveling at 110km/h towards it, but it didn't seem to approach any faster than traffic in the opposite lane would. I would judge its velocity to be no less than 80 km/h and no more than 130.
It could see its wingtips rock back and forth through a few degrees as it flew - the day was quite gusty.
I have never seen a picture of an RPV like it, but I am quite sure that it was not a small plane. The legality of its actions seem dubious, flying that close and low to the highway and town.
A mystery, all the more irritating in the way I can find nothing to refer to.
So yeah, needle crystals diminish in thickness when dissolving.
But they increase in length when 'un-dissolving' (or is that 'solving'?)
Subtleties, subtleties, subtleties ... the reaction is reversible, but it does not follow the same path.
Next time I do time lapse, I'm going to include a clock face in the frames to keep track of the flow of time. This one had a frame timing of about 3 seconds, and a total time of 85 seconds. Compressed to 5 seconds, we're looking at 17:1 acceleration.
I've got a small jar of saturated ammonium nitrate solution lying around, and it was casually exposed to -20C temperatures. The result is readily predictable ; a bunch of solute fell out of solution, and the tiny needle crystals at the bottom of the jar became honking big crystals.
I warmed it back up and everything ran backwards. It takes about twenty minutes to chill the solution down enough for the crystals to grow about 20X in length, so it occurred to me to shoot before and after pixs.
Then I thought about setting up a time lapse sequence. Among the problems of lighting and pose (still not yet settled), I wondered about keeping the camera warm and the bottle unfogged.
Inspiration strikes:
Oh wait, I don't need to chill the bottle, I can just let it warm up and reverse the sequence of photos. The video of crystals dissolving is the same as crystal growing.
Or is it? The crystals are needle-shaped, which implies that there is preferred points of growth, whereas dissolution should occur over the entire surface simultaneously, causing the crystal to get thinner faster than it gets shorter.
I am delighted by the question, and intend to test it.
I warmed it back up and everything ran backwards. It takes about twenty minutes to chill the solution down enough for the crystals to grow about 20X in length, so it occurred to me to shoot before and after pixs.
Then I thought about setting up a time lapse sequence. Among the problems of lighting and pose (still not yet settled), I wondered about keeping the camera warm and the bottle unfogged.
Inspiration strikes:
Oh wait, I don't need to chill the bottle, I can just let it warm up and reverse the sequence of photos. The video of crystals dissolving is the same as crystal growing.
Or is it? The crystals are needle-shaped, which implies that there is preferred points of growth, whereas dissolution should occur over the entire surface simultaneously, causing the crystal to get thinner faster than it gets shorter.
I am delighted by the question, and intend to test it.
I suppose am old enough now to be nostalgic.
I had a Castle Grayskull playset once, and its the only toy I regret losing.
Used a real mix of action figures with it - I think I probably owned more She-Ra and GI Joe figures than Masters of The Universe.
So maybe thats why my imagination is filled with brooding titanic fortifications, and wicked brunettes.
You know, people talk about She-Ra being a really empowering character for young girls, but I don't think any have remarked upon the roles of Evil Lyn, Cat-Ra and Teela on young men's minds. Powerful, beautiful women without being 'Barbified' or butch.
I had a Castle Grayskull playset once, and its the only toy I regret losing.
Used a real mix of action figures with it - I think I probably owned more She-Ra and GI Joe figures than Masters of The Universe.
So maybe thats why my imagination is filled with brooding titanic fortifications, and wicked brunettes.
You know, people talk about She-Ra being a really empowering character for young girls, but I don't think any have remarked upon the roles of Evil Lyn, Cat-Ra and Teela on young men's minds. Powerful, beautiful women without being 'Barbified' or butch.
In the last three weeks, I've encountered three different PCs that have all died the same death: Crusty Brown Goo Release.
There is nothing wrong with the chipsets - all three rendered useless by capacitor failure.
Its a bitch soldering in replacement caps.
They are all PIIIs or better - in fact, the last five years, I've probably seen ten or eleven systems dead from this.
Its stupid that it should fail that way.
I have Pentium 100's that have run for over 15 years without a problem. The sysadmin monitor processor for RenegadeMime's Epicentre cluster was a 486 SX, and at 19 years of age was cycled on and off every six minutes for months on end.
Without problem.
Of course, everyone knows that this is stupid and wasteful and irritating and yada yada yada.
It was while I was waiting for the soldering iron to heat that I remembered something, a paragraph from T.J.Bass's incomparable Godwhale:
'...neck and shoulder circuits were bright and shiny, winking back at him with silvery beads and wires. The neural web inside the skull resembled a dusty cobweb - soot. He pulled down the viewer and attached it to his forehead. Blowing carefully with his nitrogen gun, he checked each chip.
"Here it is! Another of those damned Hive chips exploded." he pulled over his forehead brace and leaned into it as he made the microcuts. "I don't know if its worth it. I seem to spend more time putting these in and taking them out then you do using them." '
The Hive's high tech products tended to fail after a short service period, often by the growth of single-crystal whiskers that ended up shorting out the chips. Here I have expensive and complex circuits dying because they could not use a decent quality electrolytic capacitor.
This is ridiculous : electrolytic capacitors should have a service life of decades. Not a couple of years.
RenegadeMime wants to point out that he used a 486SX for the process monitor because he had one lying around and without the co-processor it wasn't fast enough to bother using in the Epicentre's processing cluster;and that he used it for so long because it worked great and there was no need to tear it out.
So There.
There is nothing wrong with the chipsets - all three rendered useless by capacitor failure.
Its a bitch soldering in replacement caps.
They are all PIIIs or better - in fact, the last five years, I've probably seen ten or eleven systems dead from this.
Its stupid that it should fail that way.
I have Pentium 100's that have run for over 15 years without a problem. The sysadmin monitor processor for RenegadeMime's Epicentre cluster was a 486 SX, and at 19 years of age was cycled on and off every six minutes for months on end.
Without problem.
Of course, everyone knows that this is stupid and wasteful and irritating and yada yada yada.
It was while I was waiting for the soldering iron to heat that I remembered something, a paragraph from T.J.Bass's incomparable Godwhale:
'...neck and shoulder circuits were bright and shiny, winking back at him with silvery beads and wires. The neural web inside the skull resembled a dusty cobweb - soot. He pulled down the viewer and attached it to his forehead. Blowing carefully with his nitrogen gun, he checked each chip.
"Here it is! Another of those damned Hive chips exploded." he pulled over his forehead brace and leaned into it as he made the microcuts. "I don't know if its worth it. I seem to spend more time putting these in and taking them out then you do using them." '
The Hive's high tech products tended to fail after a short service period, often by the growth of single-crystal whiskers that ended up shorting out the chips. Here I have expensive and complex circuits dying because they could not use a decent quality electrolytic capacitor.
This is ridiculous : electrolytic capacitors should have a service life of decades. Not a couple of years.
RenegadeMime wants to point out that he used a 486SX for the process monitor because he had one lying around and without the co-processor it wasn't fast enough to bother using in the Epicentre's processing cluster;and that he used it for so long because it worked great and there was no need to tear it out.
So There.
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