Tag: defensible times
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Aphid Day 2026
Aphid Day this year is Oct 4, fairly typical. I’ve been seeing a few aphids in previous days. Today they gave a nice clear signal that summer is over, filling the air as soon as the sun brightened. This summer was milder than usual thanks to Nature, but holocaustier than usual thanks to our fucked…
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Holding the territory
Congress is passing a very small law that could have a large effect on the Foy Rebellion, the return to analog skills. They passed a provision requiring car radios to keep the AM band. Why is this little piece of law important? A communication system needs both mouths and ears. From telegraph to telephone to…
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Also
I’ve pulled these 1948 election news clips into my bedtime playlist again. The big entertainment shows were carefully preserved. Networks and sponsors archived full seasons on transcription disks so they could rerun if needed. News wasn’t officially preserved. Why would you want to rerun last year’s events? We have only a handful of scattered clips…
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Trump, Taft, Truman
In terms of parallel logic, Trump should have renamed Lake Ontario to Lake New York, not Lake America. It isn’t called Lake Canada! The parallel is deeper than logic. Populism means localism above all. Real populists are loyal to their own place first, then secondarily to nations and not at all to planets. A real…
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Happy 100th, KCRC!
Speaking of radio log books and such, KCRC in Enid is celebrating their centennial. I remember when they celebrated their 50th! For many years KCRC was the first station in log book alphabetical listings. They didn’t try for the honor, just outlasted some stations with lower letters. CRC stood for Champlin Refining Co. The other…
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Nice to see a tradition
Radio Caroline, the tacitly approved “pirate” station, got in trouble by announcing the death of King Charles. A technician was debugging one of the control computers and came across the digital “tape” prepared for the event. Hmm. What is this? Let’s listen to it and find out… He thought he was listening privately but instead…
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Bet on a bet
I’ll go out on a (so far unburned) limb with this one. Premise 1. Arsonists are at work in several areas, not just the Catholic Criminalities zone west of the river. Some of them are clearly homeless or crazy, some are driving cars. Some are using matches, some using blowtorches, some tossing lit plastic bottles…
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Trying to Ctrl-Z
At the start of 2025 I vowed to pull away from the tortures of 2020. Three years of horrible nastiness from all levels of government and business made me hard and cold. I don’t like being hard and cold. I’d rather feel proud of doing the right thing. I’m also trying to restore (where possible)…
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2038 bug starting to appear
After the Y2K hubbub was calmed down by intense and NECESSARY programming work, the next date problem will be in 2038, when the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970 overflows a 32-bit integer. Newer systems store time in a 64-bit integer, which won’t overflow for hundreds of billions of years. This item in the…
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Inadequate story
Via LiveScience. Students at a tech school in Rome had been exploring under the school for a long time, as students will do. Last year they finally told their Latin teacher. She brought in archeologists who excavated more of the filled in parts. Turns out the caverns were once an above-ground mansion owned by the…
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We could
Long quote from David Lilienthal’s magnificent little book on the TVA. = = = = = There is a grand cycle in nature. The lines of those majestic swinging arcs are nowhere more clearly seen than by following the course of electric power in the Tennessee Valley’s way of life. Water falls upon a mountain…
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1891 teeth
The British government has ruled that Google must allow publishers to opt out of being eaten by AI. This is a good move, but it’s only one company and one country, and it DOESN’T REQUIRE PAYMENT for the gobbled-up material. It’s time for a new international agreement with enough teeth to bite back. A similar…
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He’s doing the boomer thing!
Via Spokane News again: Here’s a modern dude more in line with the boomer spirit! Not calling the Fire Dept, just being a normal young fool. East Sprague and South Dishman Rd, Police Activity Reported for a male climbing the billboard pole and railroad overpass. #Update reported a male trying to impress a female with…
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Got to do the boomer thing
Via Spokane News: 7500 East Buckeye, Reported teens climbed up on the roof of the school and now one requesting the Fire Department to help them get down. Even if we wanted the fire department we couldn’t reach them in a tricky situation. We KNEW help wasn’t available, so we DIDN’T get into tricky situations…
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Why was EFI late?
Random Ynot thought. Most automobiles received electronic fuel injection in the 80s, after computers and software took over electronics. Sophisticated analog EFI would have been easy in the 1930s with a little imagination. Bendix tried to introduce a transistor system in 1957, but transistors weren’t ready for the task yet. GM, Chrysler and AMC offered…
