… can now be yours. To rent, at any rate.
Seems somehow odd that a famous writers apartment is still available for rent, but there it is.
It’s pet friendly, so feel free to bring along your shoggoth.
Say “howdy” to this nightmarish cosmic horror I encountered a day or three back. Abdomen about 5/8″ diameter.
ISIS is like a pack of savages, capable of little more than cheap thuggery on a large scale. But they seem to have some long term dreams and goals involving nuclear annihilation:
This is no doubt just the insane dreaming of a bunch of rabid knuckleheads, but it is instructive as to the mindset. Where would ISIS actually get nukes, though? They won’t be stealing them from the Israelies, and the Iranians probably wouldn’t want them to have nukes. The Pakistanis, perhaps. Fortunately, the one source that ISIS *could* have tapped for nukes, the Iraqi nuclear weapons program, was finally and permanently dismantled in 2003.
Imagine a world where the ’03 invasion of Iraq didn’t happen (perhaps Gore won in 2000). So by 2005 or so, the inspection regime ends; the Iraqi nuke program recommences. By 2015 the Iraqis have themselves some nukes… as do the Iranians and the Saudis. Saddam kicks the bucket in 2016; Iraq falls into civil war, with the Saudis pushing in from one side, the Iranians from another, perhaps the Syrians from a third side. A pseudo-ISIS forms, this time armed with Iraqi nukes and Iraqi nerve gas and Iraqi bio weapons. Let the chaos begin!
A graphic showing the relative footprints of nuclear, solar and wind facilities for the same approximate power output.
Solar plants could improve substantially in efficiency, perhaps gaining two or three times as much energy per unit area. Wind, though, is probably about as efficient as it is going to get. Nukes could potentially get smaller.
Now this is interesting… small book printing and binding company in San Francisco that makes books the way they were made a century ago, using machines a century old. Books are the sort of thing that can be fairly and properly produced in as cheap a fashion as possible. Many novels rate little more than the cheapest possible printing, good enough to last a few readings. Some rate no more than a pile of electrons for reading on a tablet or some such. But some books really would be appropriate for this sort of hand-made effort. Use the right materials, and these books could remain a millenium from now.
I’d love to see someone take one of these and reverse-engineer it into a pencil case. Or perhaps a stand to hold your smart phone for taking selfies or some such.
Take it to school! Impress your friends! Claim free swag!
Saw this at a roadside rest stop day before yesterday. Through random happenstance, I was on the scene before the police or other emergency personnel; fortunately the driver, the sole occupant, was standing some distance away, unharmed and on the phone to someone. I can proudly say that I was relieved to find that I didn’t have to make the decision of whether or not to try to pull someone out of that.
Someone else there on the scene in an RV mentioned, rather hesitantly, that she had a fire extinguisher. My point of view was based on two points:
A fire extinguisher would be unlikely to put out *that* fire (the truck driver told me that he had *just* filled the tank, so there were a whole lot of gallons of gas in it), and would stand a good chance of endangering the person wielding it. At best, you’d turn an “utterly ruined” truck into a “pretty much utterly ruined” truck. When the police arrived, their response was the same… cordon it off, let ’em burn until the actual firefighters showed up.
Until I found that the sole occupant was fine and standing *over* *there,* I had that uncomfortable feeling of “this is *really* gonna hurt” as I pondered the possible need of pulling someone out of that. Fortunately, sometimes the only real solution available is to do nothing., and this was one of those times.
Just a few days before that, I knuckled under and bought one of those $40 dashcams from Wal Mart. It records videos in 3 minute chunks, immediately starting a new file after the end of the previous one. When the memory card is full it deletes the oldest file and starts a new one, thus keeping a constant “loop” of video. Once I pulled away from the scene I decided to back up the relevant clips from the dashcam; there were four or five that covered the incident from the time I first saw smoke until I pulled away. The first video ends just as I pull into the rest stop. The second video, with the bulk of the “action,” such as it was… is corrupted and won’t play. *Of* course.
My old laptaps battery was turning into mush, so I ordered a new one. But the new one seems to have a problem… as soon as the power cord is unplugged, the computer shuts off, deader’n hell. Do I have a defective battery, or is there a problem with the computer? Sadly the old battery, which at least held a *bit* of a charge is unavailable.
There will be a drawdown in blogging for a little while. No, I’m not dead.