North Valley church’s electronic bells too loud, neighbor says

The pastor said he’s responded to the complaints by lowering the volume and moved the bells from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m., but he says they’re not going to turn off the bells completely.

Wonderful neighbors.

Centuries ago, I *suppose* there might have been a purpose in religious places instituting loud blaring “calls to prayer.” But we have these things now called “alarm clocks” and “phones” and such. So the use of such systems *now* smacks less of reminding people what time it is, and more of “lookit me, lookit me.” I wonder if the primary handbook of Da Church has anything to say on the subject. Hmmm…

6:5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
6:6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
6:7 But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.

Everybody has a role to play. Mine, it seems, is “cautionary tale.” So when I say to learn from my mistake… well, I guess I need to be more specific. So, I’ll just stick to the one that wound up consuming my entire Friday and into Saturday.

After unfortunate experiences and scares years ago, I’ve long since separated my internet computer from my work computer. If something horrid and malicious comes through those series of tubes into my internet computer, it might make a mess of my ability to go online and whatnot, but hopefully it won’t hop to computers with my drafting and CAD modeling and the like on them. So far that has worked.

A bit short of a year ago I found a “chromebook” in a pawn shop for all of fifty bucks. It was relatively new and had a bigger screen than the dinky little netbooks I’d used for internet work, so, after a factory reset (wiping out everything on the computer, including – presumably – spy and malware), it became my internet computer. And it continues to work fine, with only one problem: the hard drive is pathetically small, only 25 gigabytes. With just the most basic set of programs loaded on, more than 20 gig is already consumed. It’s forever trying to update Windows, but it can’t… the update requires 8 gig free, and there simply isn’t that much space available on the drive. A poor design, IMO.

Due to the space limitations, one of the USB ports has a tiny little USB drive permanently installed. All downloads are directed there. This drive, smaller than my thumbnail, has 128 gigabytes of storage space, which makes me wonder why the built-in drive is so tiny.

Anyway, the USB drive is slowly filled with images, videos and PDF files. Every few months I go through what’s on it, clean out the junk and save the save-worthy to other drives for permanent storage. I was going to do that this weekend. Friday morning, one of the first things I did was to take a look at the “download” directory for a file I’d downloaded from a government report server a while back. I saw a few things that weren’t needed so I deleted them. And that’s where things went wrong.

After i hit “delete,” it should have been just a quick flash, then done. But it took long enough to attract my attention… and I saw “now deleting 18 gigabytes.” Somehow the system decided to delete all my downloaded files, not just the one. I killed the process as fast as I could, but the bulk of the directory was cleaned out.

With a regular hard drive, this would be a minor irritation… just go into the “recycle bin” and restore the files. But with a USB drive, there is no recycle bin; it simply wipes out the files.

There are programs such as “Recova” that should, in principle, allow for the recovery of deleted files. when a computer deletes a file, the file isn’t truly gone; it’s still there, but the space it occupies is opened up for other files to come in and over-write. So since I started the recovery process essentially immediately, those deleted files *should* have been recoverable. But… they weren’t. The files were found, and a handful were ok, but the great majority of them were *somehow* already over-written, by files downloaded days ago. I don’t get how that works, but there it is. Hundreds or thousands of files were wiped from existence.

The remaining option: Firefox keeps a record of all downloads. In this case, back to early November. So I compiled a list of all the PDFs I’ve downloaded and started downloading again. That took hours.

Then the fun part: I had to go through all the PDFs. Most of the ones I downloaded were of no value to me, so when I’d originally downloaded them I looked through them and wound up deleting them. The record of downloads didn’t make that distinction, so I had to scan them all again, and again toss most out. Again. And those I kept, I had to copy out into PNG format all the images (diagrams of aircraft and spacecraft, naturally) that I wanted. Again. It’s now well into Saturday and I’m *mostly* done re-doing this work. Gah. The directory with the reports and images is now at 14 gig, meaning 4 gig has vanished. This, I presume, is due to files I downloaded prior to early November that Firefox no longer remembers. Gone for good, I suppose.

So, there ya go. Learn from my mistake and don’t do what I did.

Hmm. WordPress says the preceding blather amounts to 770 words, or a bit over two novel-length pages. One error caused by one erroneous keystroke consumed a day and resulted in two pages of probably unreadable text. I suppose if I find I can make a go out of my fiction writing (I’m still waiting to hear back about some editing for my first novel), I might take a stab at writing advice books. “Learn From My Mistakes, volume 1: Career” and “Learn From My Mistakes, volume 2: Romance.” Sure to be big sellers.

The sad thing about the Orion nebula, as with all of them, is that if you could actually be Right There, it wouldn’t look near as good with your own two eyes as those wonderful Hubble photos. Those photos are the results not only of long exposures but of image processing; if you were actually there, at best you’d probably be able to make out smudges of lightness. Certainly not the bright colors usually depicted.

That said… this NASA simulation is pretty awesome:

President Giant Middle Finger apparently said something that has the snowflakes in a tizzy.

Two points:

1: He called countries that are, by any reasonable metric, bad places, a word that is synonymous with “bad place.” So it was expletive-a-riffic. Boo-friggen’-hoo.

2: He questioned why the US should want more immigrants from countries that are very much unlike the US as opposed to from countries that *are* like the US. This is not an unreasonable thing to question.

Is it unreasonable to prefer immigrants who can and will readily assimilate without going through a lot of taxpayer dollars? Is it unreasonable for the President of the United States to want to preserve and protect the *culture* of the United States?

A video of the 27 May 1956 “Yuma” test from Operation Redwing. This was a small “boosted” fission bomb… 5 inch diameter, designed for air defense use (back when nuking formations of Soviet bombers seemed like it was going to be a thing). The process was that a small fission explosion would set off a small fusion booster… not quite a true H-bomb. In an H-bomb, the fission bomb is “merely” the trigger… a several kiloton fission bomb sets off up to many megatons of fusion explosion, with the fusion yield being up to 20 times that of the fission. In a boosted weapon, a sub-kiloton or low-kiloton fission bomb sets off the fusion booster which doesn’t itself amount to a whole lot of “bang,” but it releases a flood of neutrons which makes that fission explosion a whole lot more efficient and powerful. The neutrons released by the initial fission explosion can cause the lithium-6 in the lithium deuteride booster to fission into tritium; the conditions next to the fission blast are hot enough that the tritium will happily fuse with the deuterium, spitting out neutrons which will race back into the fission explosion and cause more of the plutonium to fission. (Done right, a surrounding case of non-fissionable depleted uranium can add to the power of the blast, as the high energy neutrons from the booster are powerful enough to cause U-238 to fission.)

It’s all well and good, but the resulting bang is a little less impressive when the fusion booster doesn’t actually go off. Which is what happened during the Yuma test, resulting in a paltry 0.19 kilotons yield. Data is sketchy, but I’d imagine the goal was to get close to one kiloton out of the device.

The US territory – hopefully soon to be the sovereign nation – of Puerto Rico is still a major mess from last years hurricanes. Many theories have been given about why that might be, ranging from”well, it *is* an island, after all, cut off from truck and train resupply” to “they had lots of income but squandered it not on good infrastructure but on turning themselves into a pretty effective copy of your standard corrupt Latin American banana republic.”

But no. We’ve found the real source of the trouble.

Puerto Rico’s Biggest Newspaper: The U.S. Hasn’t Helped Us Because Of ‘The Jew’

Whenever there is a culture or a nation that fails because it is poorly conceived or constructed, you can bet that someone there will blame the Jews for it. I’m just shocked that I don’t see more War of Southern Aggression apologists blaming the utter failure of the South on some mysterious Jewish cabal.

Here is a thought-provoking video that attempts to answer one of the disturbing questions of our current age: where are all the Commies coming from? Three decades ago we saw Communism collapse int a heap, surely headed for the septic tank of history, where it belongs with fascism, hereditary monarchy and theocracy. But here it is, seemingly more popular than ever with the young uns.

Bell Helicopter has just released their concept for the cabin of an “air taxi.” From the looks of it, it is a sci-fi vehicle on par with the flying cars from “Blade Runner,” seemingly relying on anti-grav units for lift and magic for forward propulsion. However, I suspect the idea is that this is just a people-pod that would be either integrated into or picked up by a VTOL aircraft of some kind, probably a supersized quad-, hex- or octo-copter, like a giant Toys R Us drone. Oddly enough, the report makes no mention of that part of it whatsoever. It seems an odd oversight. But then the more dedicated webpage on the concept also seems to leave out that kinda important bit as well, so I guess Bell is sitting on it for the moment.

Bell Helicopter Makes Debut as First Major Helicopter Manufacturer to Exhibit at CES

The Curtiss-Wright X-19 was a reasonably successful experimental tilt-prop VTOL aircraft from the first half of the 1960’s. Two aircraft were built; one crashed, one is at the USAF Museum in Dayton (I believe it’s in a restoration facility). The Defense Technical Information Center has two CW documents in PDF format that cover the technology of the X-19 in some detail:

THE X-19 V/STOL TECHNOLOGY: A CRITICAL REVIEW – final report

abstract

THE X-19 V/STOL TECHNOLOGY: A CRITICAL REVIEW – technical report

abstract

One of the documents includes a fold-out three-view diagram of the X-19, scanned in glorious Extra No color two-bit black and white as two separate pages. I’ve stitched them back together and tried to make the diagram look reasonably good; I’ve uploaded the full-rez result of my effort to the 2018-0 APR Extras folder on Dropbox, available to all APR patrons at the $4 level and higher.