I have come across these shower spouts in hotels from time to time. It’s really frustrating when you’re standing in the shower, the water is on with just the right temperature coming out of the spout, and there is no lever to divert the water to the shower head.
What the heck?
Apparently some hotels got tired of naked guests calling the front desk in frustration because they could not figure out how to turn on the water in the shower, so they put up this sign at eye level:
Even with this sign, I’d venture to guess that many a patron that does not routinely read engineering blueprints cannot figure out what the drawing means.
The gist is: you pull down the spout ring, which you can’t even see is there when you stand in the shower, to get it to work.
Why? Why? Why?
Did some designer jump up and down and yell:
“Look, Ma, I made something really complicated that used to be simple, trivial and functional! Now everyone is going to need help the first time they use this shower!”
This is one of the highest resolution images of Pluto released so far. I have reduced the size so I can display it here.
I remember fifty years ago, as a young boy, reading books about our solar system, when images of the outer planets were fuzzy blobs at best. I am a techie, I am into science, and I am absolutely delighted that I live in a time and an age where I can see an image of Pluto, an object 4.7 billion miles away, with this clarity.
Light itself takes 4.6 hours to get there. The New Horizons spacecraft which took this picture, flying by Pluto at a speed of 50,000 km/hour, took 9 years and 8 months to travel there.
And I get to sit here and post this picture on my blog.
Landfall is a story about sending a message through time. It starts when the FBI discovers a space capsule in the remote mountains of Alberta, Canada, that was assumed burned up thirty years earlier.
The story jumps back between what happened 30 years ago (roughly the present time of 2015 when the International Space Station is in orbit) and now (presumably about 2045) with the FBI trying to figure out what happened.
The book caught my attention because it’s about “time” messages. The author does a good job telling the story, but I found it so preposterous and incredible, that I had a hard time taking it seriously.
Fundamental to the plot is the need for an astronaut, in this case one of the protagonists, to surreptitiously get launched into space and dock with the ISS, and then take away an experiment, all without being “noticed” or stopped. It’s obviously not possible to launch a rocket into orbit with an astronaut on board without anyone noticing. But that kind of thing is exactly what is going on in this story. There is fundamentally nothing wrong with that, but it’s just too farfetched to make any sense.
The book reads easily and I finished it in a few days. But would I recommend it?
I got a kick out of the first sentence: “So what’s the deal with the Pope? Do we like him … Do we not like him…?”
This shows how deeply important it is how we teach our children. They look to us to establish their own value system. That’s why children of Mormons become Mormon, children of Catholics become Catholic, children of atheists become atheists. What about children of illiterates? What about children of thieves?
We live in the Sonata Community in South Escondido, within walking distance to Lake Hodges, a major shopping mall, a large high school and a community park – and unfortunately, to Be Wise Ranch, an organic farm. One would think that’s a good thing. I believe in organic farming. However, organic farms do not allow the use of pesticides, and the result is that our neighborhood is infested with eye gnats.
I have lived in Southern California for 30 years. We have a near perfect climate all year round. We like to enjoy the outdoors, to garden, grow exotic plants, have a glass of wine on the patio, doze in a hammock. But we cannot do any of these things where we live. If I go outside and start washing my car, within 20 seconds I am busy swatting gnats from my face and ears. I cannot spend five minutes planning anything in the yard without being frustrated by constant gnat attacks. I cannot sit outside and read any time of the day. We can never have meals outside on the patio, something we love to do. We cannot entertain guests outside. It’s a nightmare.
I don’t know the exact statistics, but there must be many thousands of houses within a three-mile radius of Be Wise Ranch in all directions. All of these neighbors have this problem. They have petitioned to San Diego County for help. The farmer has provided advice and traps. We have tried to use the traps and they turned out to be useless. Yes, some gnats got caught, but those in my face must have been the smart ones.
Here is a “gnat fence” comprised of traps spaced six feet apart. This is within a few hundred yards of my house.
Traps like this surround much of the farm itself, albeit not as closely spaced. I didn’t see any gnats in any of them. Can you imagine this line of traps stopping a gnat infestation covering many square miles? It seems ludicrous, like a barbed wire fence stopping flying pigs. I predict it will be as effective as building a wall between the United States and Mexico.
But joking aside, I believe this is a placebo, put up by the farmer to make people feel better.
There is no good answer to this. Be Wise Ranch can’t produce its product without its current practices. The neighbors living there are stuck. This isn’t going to change. If you live near an organic farm, you have to deal with flies. The rumor is that Bill Brammer, the owner of the farm, lives nowhere near here. The only solution is zoning. There should not be an organic farm near subdivisions of thousands of houses, a major high school, a major community park, and a huge shopping mall. But zoning requires political will.
The result is an inevitable drop in property values. There is no chance that I would buy an upgraded property in this neighborhood, knowing what I know now.
And now I have to go out and get the mail, swatting my way to the street and back.
I am fortunate. I have never had to use the services of Planned Parenthood. But I am a white male who was lucky enough to be born into and grow up in a stable economic environment. The current right wing in our political arena wants to defund Planned Parenthood, purportedly because the organization does mostly abortions.
Here is a chart of the procedures done by Planned Parenthood in 2013:
[click for source – http://www.politifact.com]This shows that out of 10,590,433 procedures, 327,653 were abortions. That’s about 3 percent of the procedures. In contrast, here are some claims by some Republicans:
[click for source – http://www.factcheck.org]These claims are obviously wrong at best, deceptive and skewed, or outright deceitful at worst.
I am not in favor of abortion. Being male, that’s easy for me to say. I have obviously never had one. But I don’t believe that our society has the right, or I have the right, or Tom Cole that the right, or Orrin Hatch has the right, to tell other women what to do or not do with their bodies.
More than 300,000 women annually find themselves in positions where they go to Planned Parenthood and eventually make the decision to have an abortion, whatever their reasons are. They make those decisions under extremely stressful conditions, economically, morally and psychologically. The last thing they need is some finger-wagging politician to tell them what to do. They need professional help from someone who is trained to help them, medically, if they decide to go forward, or psychologically, if necessary. This help cannot be legislated. It must be provided by qualified organizations, and Planned Parenthood is one of those.
We can, as a nation, remove Planned Parenthood. Then the 97% of the non-abortion-related services they are now providing will no longer be available. Those people needing those services will have to find other organizations, like Planned Parenthood, that provide those services.
If we outlaw abortions, that does not mean abortions don’t happen anymore, just like abolition in the twenties didn’t stop alcohol consumption.
I don’t believe that a single unwanted pregnancy will be prevented just because abortions are not legal. Women will still get pregnant, probably more of them, because there won’t be Planned Parenthood to help with contraception and education. With no ready services in this country, rich women will fly to Denmark, Holland or Germany to get the abortions they need. Those are the very few. The disadvantaged have to find back-alley quacks, or worse, cross the border to Mexico.
I do not understand what these Republican are trying to fix. We currently have a reasonably effective support system for unwanted pregnancies and contraception at the lower economic scale. Removing this support system will simply make abortions much more expensive, shift them underground, make them much more risky and of possibly criminal.
So what is it that drives these people to dictate their views to others and try to force their behavior? Don’t they know that does not work?
Rick Santorum has been ranting about the Pope’s statements about science, and particularly climate change. Here are two quotes:
“The perception that the media would like to give of Pope Francis and the reality are two different things…I’m a huge fan of his, and his focus on making sure that we have a healthier society…I support completely the Pope’s call for us to do more to create opportunities for people to be able to rise in society and care for the poor. That’s our obligation as a society.”
“The Church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think we’re probably better off leaving science to the scientists and focus on what we’re really good on, which is theology and morality. When we get involved with political and controversial scientific theories, then I think the church is probably not as forceful and credible.”
Funny how Santorum decides about “controversial scientific theories.” His bachelors degree is in political science, then he got a one year MBA, then and a law degree, with honors. No science there at all. That did not stop him from advocating teaching of intelligent design in schools by introducing what became known as the Santorum Amendment.
Santorum is not a scientist.
In contrast, Pope Francis has a Masters degree in Chemistry. Pope Francis has considerably more scientific credentials that many of our congressmen.
[photo credit: Win McNamee / Getty Images]Today Pope Francis addressed the crowd of 50,000 outside the U.S. Capitol from the Speaker’s Balcony. Among other things, surprisingly, he said:
And if there are among you any who do not believe or cannot pray, I ask you to please send good wishes my way.
I thought that was a powerful statement. I have been critical of the Pope in these posts and pages from time to time, but in the last few days in America, he has earned my respect.
He will have a deep and positive impact on the course of our world for some years to come.
During the Clinton years, the Dow grew steadily to record highs. Then Bush came, and his reckless economic policies turned a $200 billion surplus into a $1.4 trillion deficit. Along with that came a rocky stock market and a total meltdown at the end of his presidency.
[click for source]Since Obama took office, the Dow has been climbing steadily.
And still, our illustrious Republican candidates all tell us that Obama’s presidency has made our lives so much worse than they were when we had Bush.
It’s dumbfounding, how one can think that, given these charts.
This chart is only about the Dow. I could make similar charts about gas and oil prices, dependency on foreign energy, the value of the dollar, actual government spending, the number of people employed, the unemployment rate, on and on.
But Dick Cheney still calls Obama the worst president of his lifetime.
He must not have been alive during the Bush years, when he was co-president.
In the era where Republican candidates run on slogans like “Make America Great Again” I wonder what they are comparing against. Do they really want to go back to the Bush years? REALLY? SERIOUSLY?
They call Obama the worst president ever. Let’s remember that Bush turned a $200 billion surplus out of the Clinton years into a $1.4 trillion deficit. Let’s remember that when Bush left the economy was in free fall and the DOW at 7000. And yet, the parade of jokers on the debate stage are making stuff up out of thin air.
Obama the worst president every? REALLY?
Here is a post I did about a year ago and it’s as true now as it was then.
Here are some examples of where man has changed the face of the globe. It’s called manmade change, or anthropogenic change. There is no doubt that this was done by man.
The picture below shows the Neza Chalco Itza slum with its epic 4 million inhabitants. It is the world’s largest slum and has the highest crime rate in Mexico.
[click for photo credit]Here is another picture of a Mexico City slum:
[click for photo credit]Here is the Twin Creeks gold mine in Nevada.
“Twincreeksblast” by Geomartin – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons [click to enlarge]Then finally, a picture of the Chicago O’Hare airport that I took myself a few years ago.
Chicago O’Hare Airport, June 3, 2012 [click to enlarge]These are visible, tangible examples of anthropogenic change in the Earth.
I know this is anecdotal and not very scientific, but given these visible examples of what humanity has done to the planet, do we really want to believe that we didn’t modify our air just as drastically? Too bad we can’t see the CO2, and what it does to the planet. We’ll just have to wait a hundred years when our grandchildren won’t be able to walk in lower Manhattan or when most of coastal Florida will be under water. Let’s not even talk about New Orleans.
I wonder what our descendants are going to say in 2100, when they watch the 2015 videos of Marco Rubio or Scott Walker saying that they were not willing to jeopardize oil or coal mining jobs or have the price of gas rise, in the face of this hoax?
Carly Fiorina has no problem blasting President Obama for the Iran deal on national TV during the debates. She also had no problem selling HP equipment to Iran bypassing the sanctions when it suited her and her company.
Sales to Iran despite sanctions
Under CEO Carly Fiorina, HP sold over $120 million worth of its printers and computer products to Iran through a European subsidiary and a Dubai-based East distributor, despite U.S. export sanctions prohibiting such deals imposed by Bill Clinton’s executive orders issued in 1995. The story was initially reported by The Boston Globe, and it triggered an inquiry by the SEC. HP responded that products worth US$120 million were sold in fiscal year 2008 for distribution by ways of a company based in the Netherlands, Redington Gulf, and that as these sales took place through a foreign subsidiary, HP denied violating sanctions.
HP named Redington Gulf “Wholesaler of the Year” in 2003, which in turn published a press release stating that “[t]he seeds of the Redington-Hewlett-Packard relationship were sowed six years ago for one market — Iran.” At that time, Redington Gulf had only three employees whose sole purpose was to sell HP products to the Iran market. According to former officials who worked on sanctions, HP was using a loophole by routing their sales through a foreign subsidiary. HP ended its relationship with Redington Gulf after the SEC inquiry.
For a week now we have stayed at a lodge home in rural Montana. In front of a huge stone fireplace sixteen feet high, under giant barn beams that make up the ceiling, on a comfortable couch, the stars bright outside in the vast Montana sky, we watched the movie A River Runs Through It.
It tells the story of two brothers, Norman (Craig Sheffer) and Paul (Brad Pitt), the sons of a Presbyterian minister (Tom Skerritt), following their lives from early childhood in Montana in the early 20th century through their younger years into adulthood.
Norman tells the story from his point of view. He is the son that goes off to college and later becomes a college professor. Paul, his hard-living younger brother stays in Montana where he works as a newspaper reporter. The father and the brothers are as different as can be, except for their love of fly fishing. The river ties them all together.
Directed by Robert Redford and based on an autobiographical book by Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It tells a family epic and makes us think of what in life really matters.
