Tag: Metrology
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Raking record
Time to start the roof-raking record for this winter. As always, this should be in my private daily worklog, but I started doing it here, so I’ll continue the tradition. Last winter was EASY. Only three rakings, and the first was 12/31/21. This winter is likely to be harder than average. We started with a…
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Like Hank says….
In a topic with very little definite (unclassified) information available, a well-regulated imagination is more important than math. Well, actually that goes for all topics. Math is not the foundation of the universe or the foundation of anything. It’s an occasionally useful descriptive tool. Here’s what happens when academicians try to discuss life on other…
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Fishbowls
Cultural circles are never measurable from the inside, because the baseline is invisible. Old Soviet joke: In the midst of the Cold War, the CIA sends its best spy into Russia. He has spent the last 10 years learning how to blend in with the locals. He speaks perfect Russian, he can dance the kalinka…
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A clear view of exp vs linear
One basic fact about money is always understood by the plutocrats but never explained to the peasants. We hear inflation numbers or exchange rate numbers, and the influencers of “left” and “right” base their appeals on these fake numbers. Even the bitcoiners, who claim to be entirely outside government and banking, always treat official “inflation”…
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What would Proverbial think?
If the proverbial Martian picked up scenes like this while monitoring Earth TV, what would he think? People are standing and sitting bent over. Many of them are using crutches and canes and wheelchairs. If he was a proverbial evolutionist as well as a proverbial Martian, he’d automatically assume we were dropping back to quadrupedal…
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Aphid Day 2022 (tentative)
Oct 8, 2022, temp 78. We’re getting a fairly good swarm today so I’ll do the reprint. In the last few years the aphids have pulled a headfake before the serious swarm, so this is tentative. The weather.com forecast agrees with the aphids that it’s all downhill from today; the NWS forecast sees a few…
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VR = Casino
An article at Coindesk points to a jarring dissonance in numbers. A metaverse project called Decentraland has an average of 38 users each day. (Defined as people who log in, not just momentary views.) Decentraland has a stock “value” of $1.3 billion, meaning that idiot venture capitalists have used it as a toilet to throw…
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Out of all the parks
Thomas Harrington hits all the balls out of all the parks with this article. He focuses on 1990 as the coup when the Bush family took over the world. Harrington also kicks the alleged “independents” who were “independent” on every issue until the NAZI TORTURERS bought them off. We’ll never know which of them were…
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Booms and busts
An essayist at Medium gives us 12 quotes from Beat Generation philosopher Alan Watts. I read the piece to see if his selection was the same as mine. Nope, it was disjunct. He remembered and treasured the stuff that I had tossed aside as mystical drivel. I read Watts when I was about 14, and…
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It’s all in the deltas
UD notes the death of Frank Drake, father of the Drake Equation estimating likely planets for intelligent life. Drake was working at the Green Bank Radio Telescope during the early days of radio astronomy, in the late 1950s, when he was inspired by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison’s famous 1959 paper in Nature about using…
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Mother-in-law, cliff
Classic mixed feelings about this headline at Eurekalert: Exposure to past temperature variability may help forests cope with climate change On the one hand they’re still running the “climate” genocide. On the other hand they’ve finally accepted that Lamarck and Lysenko were mostly right and Darwin was mostly wrong. I’m going to take this as…
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Latest Kirn quibble
Kirn’s latest pithy point: We need a few experts on the history of experts. Such a figure could estimate their average accuracy. My guess is that it hovers between 1 and 2 per cent. If it were any higher, we would not have needed new ones every few years. This is a beautiful observation about…
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Big money, bad science
The title is gruesomely and torturously true of Big Science itself. No explanation needed. Oddly, the correlation also applies to radio and TV shows about science. Among discussion-type shows, the elite academic “roundtable” shows and elite quiz shows like Information Please generally spewed old worn-out cliches that had been disproved for many decades. The UFO…
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Permitted concerns
Random thought about media vs experience. The current Officially Permitted Concern is inflation. Politicians and central banks are “responding” to the “public will” on inflation. Does this agree with my experience? No. I’ve never been bothered by inflation. In 1973-74 I was driving long distances for work and pleasure, and I wasn’t bothered by high…
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What am I comparing with?
Lately I’ve been fussing about low quality and low quantity of online stuff. Substack is low quality and low quantity. Straight Arrow News is good quality but low quantity. What’s the baseline? What am I comparing them with? I’ve said that old newspapers and broadcasts had a much better mix of topics, a “substantial and…
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