2014 — 24 August: Sunday
Having spent some portion of yesterday evening enjoyably revisiting the 'Padua' High School, I now find it's not enough1 for me to be worrying about whether I live in last Sunday's 3D holographic mirage from another dimension? Oh no, not nearly enough. Now I have the microwave haze — an excess of gamma rays in the inner galaxy — that led to the idea of "Fermi bubbles" jutting tens of thousands of light-years above (and below) the Milky Way to contend with, too.
Where's Beowulf Shaeffer when you need him? And who (besides dear Mama) says SF has no predictive (or other redeeming) value?
If I didn't...
... know better, I'd say it was jolly nearly frosty out there "first thing". Tea helps. [Pause] This story, which is far from finished, is less helpful:
A 55-gallon drum of nuclear waste, buried in a salt shaft 2,150 feet under the New Mexico desert, violently erupted late on Feb. 14 and spewed mounds of radioactive white foam. The flowing mass, looking like whipped cream but laced
with plutonium, went airborne, traveled up a ventilation duct to the surface and delivered low-level radiation doses to 21 workers.
The accident contaminated the nation's only dump for nuclear weapons waste — previously a focus of pride for the Energy Department — and gave the nation's elite ranks of nuclear chemists a mystery they still cannot unravel.
Silly me. I thought they tried to contain these hellish brews by vitrefying them, not using oil drums. Gotta love that "laced with plutonium"... imagery. A horrific comedy of errors, indeed. With glowing reports, no doubt.
I confess...
... I didn't expect to see Jules Feiffer (last enjoyed in that "Annotated Phantom Tollbooth" this week) turning his 85-year-old hand to a graphic noir novel. Mind you, I suppose his play "Little Murders" (filmed in 1971) could now be seen as a harbinger. I wonder when that fled my shelves? Certainly more than 20 years ago (judging by one of my printed catalogues of that era).
The purification...
... of sewage that has been carried out at a San Diego pilot facility for the past five years has yet to overcome the 'yuck' factor.
Mind you, I don't see that pumping the output (after levels of purification that easily rival homeopathic dilutions) into a reservoir does much for the potability. Particularly if American teens continue to void their bladders into such repositories. And I note, with some disquiet, that their flow chart (sorry!) fails to include the necessary striking2 that would be employed by a "real" homeopath.
My habit...
... of glancing back through this ¬blog has just paid off. It was two years ago today that I disabled the "Distributed Link Tracking Client" service to enable me to dismount USB3-connected hard drives without being forced to restart the entire damn' OS. Of course, that was back in the halycon days of Win7... It took me nearly a minute to find where to find (and then disable) the same service (which was again running automatically, naturally) on BlackBeast's Win8.1Pro.
Right click on the re-instated "Start" button ==> Computer Management ==> Services and Applications ==> Services
Notice they forgot to rename "Applications" to "Modern Apps" :-)
When I have nothing more interesting to do, perhaps I will take a stroll through all the services that lurk under the covers. Though I can't for a minute imagine that Microsoft would ever leave any of the things running without good reason.
Over lunch...
... I was browsing a research paper (PDF file) touching on the need to contemplate the regulation of some new consumer devices that are in the areas of Darrold Treffert's research I read about last week. He doesn't get a name check, though his research does. A sentence on page 11 admits "There is also some evidence to suggest that TMS can unmask so-called 'savant-like' abilities." I didn't need any electrical cognitive enhancement of the sort claimed for these devices to deduce that a typesetter had specified an inappropriate code page, or done some mis-guided (and unchecked) global search-and-replacing while preparing this paper.3
The effects I noticed appear both when viewing the PDF file in the Mozilla Firefox browser and in the Foxit PDF reader. I don't have Adobe Reader on my system; it may well be OK if using that. [Pause] No, the ill-effects are also shown by the Adobe Reader (all 183MB of which have once again been expunged).
As I remarked...
... the last time it happened, it's not every day I find a previously-unpublished photo of Christa. This one looks to me as if it was taken in about 1970, probably during an Xmas break from Uni. As usual, she preferred jeans:
The Jean Seberg look-alike next to her is (I'm pretty sure) her sister-in-law Linda. The lady being proffered another drink, and the chap with the beard? Ask me something easier. After all, I wasn't due to appear in her life for another four years or so!
A moment's inattention...
... and now I have a chance to find out what my washing machine actually does on the as-yet untried #11: rinse and spin. Well, no use crying over spilt milk (literally). [Pause] It seems to have worked.