Silicon Valley Redneck

I keep seeing this name in the news...

... and thinking ...

Isn't a "Hickenlooper" some kind of voracious caterpiggle?

Wait, ISIS just got a tank?

I thought they got one back in April.

Droughts, fracking...

Just saw a headline to the effect that the current drought won't impede fracking.  Not that fracking uses that much water, anyway.

But, if there's a water shortage?  Surely you just pump high-pressure oil into the aquifer, to free up more water... right?

Spurious?

Insty links to a site filled with spurious correlations.  Fun!

But: how certain are we, really, that the correlation between mozzarella consumption and civil engineering doctorates is truly spurious?

After all, pizza is the basic fuel of engineering students.

Sanity checks, lack thereof, software licensing division

Seriously, does anyone on either end of the pipe pay attention to these things?

Just skimmed through the license terms for a development tool, which is a free download from the chip vendor but includes a bunch of third-party code.

Goes into a bunch of detail about telecommuting employees, and maximum distance from the office, and securely signing in to the WAN over which the license server may be accessed, and....

Or, y'know, each telecommuting employee could download his own copy and take out his own free license.

Just sayin'.

Anyhoo.  Got the half-gigabyte download running now, and sooner or later will be playing with the tool, and probably the actual chip.  Might even get to use it for Real Work.  (If not, well: this part having come to my attention, I can see possible applications in some of my own prospective products.  Seems a remarkably cheap way to get a particular class of job done, assuming it will get the job done.)

Important scientific discovery

Three out of three cats surveyed are afraid of Squeaky Pikathulhu.

(I'd had the thing for years, presumably bought from Stuffe & Nonsense at one con or another, and never realized it had a squeaker until this afternoon when I took it down from the shelf and dusted it.)

Well, that one's easy!

Seems the latest menace is the Chikungunya virus.

I've heard of that one before, haven't I?  Causes broken windshields?

Try thawing the Chikun.

Infamous Toyota design flaw

Sometimes, a loose mat can get among the pedals, creating a hazardous condition.

This just happened to me, fortunately at low speed.  Only there was a one-letter difference.

A loose cat, as it turns out, can have much the same effect.  (And it was an aftermarket cat, though I understand the mat problem commonly involved aftermarket mats, too, so it's not all that much different.)

Sometimes, casting the lead role is easy

Seems a local theater company is doing a production of Harvey.

Dunno who's playing the title role, but there's no reason they couldn't use Claude Rains, right?

It's a ho-hey, hi-hey farmers bar yer doors

Out walkies at Rancho San Antonio toward the end of last week, I encountered this apparition:

(Though, if this cargo:

is gold then I'm Rumpelstiltskin.)

I promptly jumped to the obvious conclusion, i.e., that someone was making yet another music video of an Arrogant Worms song.

This, however, turns out to be incorrect; it seems that it's a float for a parade down Castro Street in Mountain View, a few days early for International Labor Day (and perhaps not featuring the more traditional ILD floats such as Bolshoi Ivanovich missiles).

Anyway, having that song running around my head caused it to collide with an old episode of Scrapheap Challenge, wherein one team crufted a side-wheeler boat out of a dumpster and a tractor, and this leads to a Project Idea, assuming I ever find myself with a large amount of idle time and space to play in: a side-wheeler pirate boat, powered by an obvious farm tractor.  And, perhaps, with the hull painted to resemble duct tape.  Tractor Jack's Fishin' and Pillagin' Charters!

Update: Yes, there were such things as sidewheel gunboats, and there are pictures and models out there, as reference points for "what this contraption built around a 1927 Fordson tractor aspires to."

Brain out of focus.

Having strange random thoughts.  Fer example: should be possible to do Postscript-to-G-code translation.  Which implies that a UN*X printer driver for a CNC router is a possibility.

Oh, look!  Someone's gone and done it!  Well, not the whole integration-with-CUPS thing, but the translation.

Just throwing out a pointless idea, here

(Though it is one that might sell, as a novelty item.)

Bacon.

Cook extra crispy.

Crush to a powder.

Package in capsules.

Bacon dietary supplement!  In handy capsule form!

The real trick is finding a supply of certified vegetable-free capsules made from 100% pig gelatin.  (Then give the empty capsules some time in the smokehouse.  Because Bacon.)

I also had a good idea this morning, but I'm keeping that one to myself for now.)

Distracted driving: a modest proposal

Well, there's some new foofaraw over (possibly fabricated) alarming statistics regarding car crashes and cellphone use, and a (surprise!) new call to outlaw, and perhaps prevent by technical means, all cellphone use in moving vehicles.

None of which addresses the problem of distractions caused within the vehicle, by spouses, kids, dogs, cats, parrots, hookers, huntin' buddies, and so forth.

I propose that all new cars be equipped, and all existing cars be retrofitted within the next three years, with a separate, soundproof driver's compartment, with all built-in distractions excluded.  So, no radio, CD player, and so on.  And no non-driving controls nor indicators to fiddle with nor look at: no climate controls (driver's compartment temperature will be preset at the factory, and can be adjusted by a licensed service technician), no GPS, and so on.

Definitely no cupholders, nor ashtrays.

And the driver's compartment must be treated regularly with a persistent pesticide, to prevent the distractions posed by mosquitoes, spiders, and suchlike vermin.

We must rid our highways of the scourge of distracted drivers!

Remember: if it saves only one life....

This calls for a song parody

The latest Actively Disengaged comic is just crying out for "The Terrorist", to the tune of "The Idiot" by Stan Rogers.

But I like being free and that makes me a terrorist, I suppose.

Sorry, nothing beyond that one line just now.  Needs someone with time on his hands.  And, maybe, talent or something.  Fill in NH, or TX, or perhaps TN, ND, or SD as the destination, and CA as the origin....

Afterthought, after putting on a Stan Rogers CD en route to morning walkies: the perspective needs reversing, too, from "it's dry, dusty, brown, and horribly industrial here, but at least I have a job" to "it's all green, and I have elbow room, and the cost of living is low, but at least I can go out at night to look at the stars without getting arrested."

Outdated product placement

While, it seems, the Waterman's Ideal Fountain Pen is a fine implement for writing about Nothing, it is no longer available in stores.

I don't care what day it is.

If those three fuzzballs want π, I want to see mittens!

Chemical flashforward

Or, DMSO > LSD!

Been smelling Something Odd since yesterday evening.  After a bit of reflection, I identified the mysterious smell as that of DMSO: specifically the pseudo-smell sensation one gets after applying the stuff to one's skin.

Only I hadn't.

This morning, though, I took some of the stuff from its escape-proof container (no, it hadn't been leaking) and goobered it on my sore back.

And the smell is gone!

Apparently it has endochronic properties, like a reannual wine or the White Queen's finger.

Gigabytten by a bug?

Well, well, well.

El Reg links to something at La Dog Trainer claiming that some coupon company did some kind of survey which ended up showing that many Americans think that a gigabyte is an insect, HTML is a sexually-transmitted disease, USB is a European country (c'mon, everyone knows it's a European bank), and so on.

Curiously, no one seems to be linking to the original source.  I guess using hyperlinks can infect your computer with HTML or something.  Heck, even Google (a Russian novelist, usually good at citing his sources) doesn't seem to have a link to it.

Even I don't provide a link.

Anyway.

Before you start crowing over the appalling ignorance of the online-coupon-using American masses, consider this: how many people, given such a survey, would actually try to give the right answers?  As opposed, say, to picking the silliest answers on offer?

More lame science

On the latest Pinky and the Brain and the Three Stooges:

1. Ping-pong ball slows down as it approaches the closed end of the (mostly-) evacuated barrel. Duh.  Even without blow-by, there's some air ahead of the ball, which will be compressed.  The packing tape holds it in.  I'd assumed that the evacuated-barrel ping-pong-ball accelerator would have the end closed by some little disc held in place by vacuum (OK, by outside atmospheric pressure), so oncoming pressure buildup would blow it off.

2. I'd also kinda assumed that the logical step after the pressure gun was just to evacuate the barrel of the same old pressure gun.  Did they try that and not show it, or...?

3. In the final encounter of supersonic ping-pong-ball vs. porcine appendage, the high-speed footage made it look remarkably like the air stream was doing most of the damage.  This would be consistent with my suspicion at the beginning: yeah, a supersonic ping-pong ball would be dangerous, but whatever's keeping it supersonic is probably more so.  And, if you're in an environment where a ping-pong ball can continue moving at 1100 MPH for a nontrivial distance, you've got bigger worries than ping-pong balls.

4. If reinforcing materials were allowed for the cannonballs, why not for the tube?  Why not make the cannon out of Pykrete?

Drawing lines in the sand

Ya think maybe President Beeblebrox has delusions of being Bugs Bunny?

Somehow, I don't see the Tsar obligingly playing the role of Yosemite Sam.