Random Posts

[andydp]

Last week my neighbor told us the lights on the Ring garage light and camera weren't working.  Called the Ring help desk, did rebooting and trouble shooting no luck.  The sent a brand new item via overnight.  Just installed it today because its not windy, its just cold about 30.  Install wasn't bad at all, just took a long time (felt like it) because it was freakin` cold.  

Easiest part: scan the code, follow prompts, enter Wi-Fi password.  We're connected. We have picture and sound. I'll do fine tuning when its warmer, like in June.

If you don't have the Ring system its VERY easy to install.  Once the item was up, it literally took about five minutes for hookup to the Wi-Fi. The "Professional" plan, which includes 24 hour monitoring is $100 a year.  Excellent deal.  You can usually find their items on sale at Lowe's or Home Depot.  There are sales and special offers from time to time.  With one sale we got an Echo Dot.  

We have two outside cameras, two motion sensors one on the first floor and one in the basement.  We also have door/window sensors on the easily accessible or out of sight doors/windows.  Took us less than three hours to install including the removal of the old alarm stuff.

[LFC]

Jan 16, 2023 21:18:20 GMT andydp said:

Easiest part: scan the code, follow prompts, enter Wi-Fi password.  We're connected. We have picture and sound. I'll do fine tuning when its warmer, like in June.

We've had connectivity issues when we've experienced short power losses. Normally they're fine but sometimes with a loss like that we've had to completely reconfigure them, so keep your QR code or serial number handy. Also, some devices have taken hours to reconnect after a power glitch.

[LFC]

This looks pretty neat if they can pull it off.

NASA will invest $425 million to help Boeing develop a demonstrator aircraft for its Transonic Truss-Braced Wing design, which the space agency hopes will improve the fuel efficiency of commercial aviation.

In a press conference yesterday, NASA officials said a flight test of the aircraft is planned for 2028.

“It’s our goal that NASA’s partnership with Boeing to produce and test a full-scale demonstrator will help lead to future commercial airliners that are more fuel efficient, with benefits to the environment, the commercial aviation industry, and to passengers worldwide,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in an agency release. “If we are successful, we may see these technologies in planes that the public takes to the skies in the 2030s.”

The Boeing aircraft’s design looks, at a glance, like a traditional commercial jet. But has long, thin wings that reduce the craft’s overall weight. The wings’ thinness requires them to be supported from below by trusses. The design should also reduce the aircraft’s drag in the air.

Taken together, these innovations should reduce the aircraft’s fuel consumption by about 30% compared to the most fuel-efficient single-aisle aircraft today, according to NASA.

[pnwguy]

Jan 19, 2023 20:55:50 GMT LFC said:

This looks pretty neat if they can pull it off.

NASA will invest $425 million to help Boeing develop a demonstrator aircraft for its Transonic Truss-Braced Wing design, which the space agency hopes will improve the fuel efficiency of commercial aviation.

In a press conference yesterday, NASA officials said a flight test of the aircraft is planned for 2028.

“It’s our goal that NASA’s partnership with Boeing to produce and test a full-scale demonstrator will help lead to future commercial airliners that are more fuel efficient, with benefits to the environment, the commercial aviation industry, and to passengers worldwide,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in an agency release. “If we are successful, we may see these technologies in planes that the public takes to the skies in the 2030s.”

The Boeing aircraft’s design looks, at a glance, like a traditional commercial jet. But has long, thin wings that reduce the craft’s overall weight. The wings’ thinness requires them to be supported from below by trusses. The design should also reduce the aircraft’s drag in the air.

Taken together, these innovations should reduce the aircraft’s fuel consumption by about 30% compared to the most fuel-efficient single-aisle aircraft today, according to NASA.

They are going to need folding wing tips like the Boeing 777X, so that they can still deal with gate spacing at most airports.  The 777X has winglets that fold up the last 7 feet for that purpose.

[indy]

Jan 20, 2023 3:09:30 GMT pnwguy said:

Jan 19, 2023 20:55:50 GMT LFC said:

This looks pretty neat if they can pull it off.

They are going to need folding wing tips like the Boeing 777X, so that they can still deal with gate spacing at most airports.  The 777X has winglets that fold up the last 7 feet for that purpose.

Already part of the design. I think I read that once folded, the wing span equals that of a 737.

[pnwguy]

Jan 20, 2023 12:10:15 GMT indy said:

Jan 20, 2023 3:09:30 GMT pnwguy said:

They are going to need folding wing tips like the Boeing 777X, so that they can still deal with gate spacing at most airports.  The 777X has winglets that fold up the last 7 feet for that purpose.

Already part of the design. I think I read that once folded, the wing span equals that of a 737.

Having wings on top of the fuselage instead of underneath likely changes a lot of the stress on it.  It's not like that's uncommon in aviation, but it might be more challenging with carbon-fiber tubing where the weight savings are focused on these days.  I guess with nearly a half billion in R&D assistance, they can work it out.

[goldenvalley]

My Apple Watch thinks I'm dead.  

Lately, emergency call centers in some ski regions have been inundated with inadvertent, automated calls, dozens or more a week. Phone operators often must put other calls, including real emergencies, on hold to clarify whether the latest siren has been prompted by a human at risk or an overzealous device.

“My whole day is managing crash notifications,” said Trina Dummer, interim director of Summit County’s emergency services, which received 185 such calls in the week from Jan. 13 to Jan. 22. (In winters past, the typical call volume on a busy day was roughly half that.) Ms. Dummer said that the onslaught was threatening to desensitize dispatchers and divert limited resources from true emergencies.

I'm sure this will help:

In a written statement, Alex Kirschner, an Apple spokesman, said, “We have been aware that in some specific scenarios these features have triggered emergency services when a user didn’t experience a severe car crash or hard fall.” The company noted that when a crash is detected, the watch buzzes and sends a loud warning alerting the user that a call is being placed to 911, and it provides 10 seconds in which to cancel the call.

10 whole seconds to pull off ski gloves, shove your ski jacket sleeve back a bit to get to the watch...all this after needing to at least sit up in the snow from a probably sprawled out position.

[LFC]

They are working on a vaccine for fungal infections, something that can plague those of us who are immunocompromised.

Researchers at the University of Georgia believe that they may have made a major step forward in protecting people from these worst-case scenarios. Their experimental vaccine is meant to boost protection in immunocompromised people against three of the most common groups of fungi known to cause fatal infections in humans: Pneumocystis, Aspergillus, and Candida. The vaccine is supposed to work by training the immune system to recognize a “pan-fungal” protein shared by these fungi, which should then strengthen our immunity against all three.

They have so far tested out their vaccine in mice and rhesus macaques. These experiments compared the outcomes of vaccinated animals against non-vaccinated animals after both groups had their immune systems deliberately suppressed and were exposed to the fungi. As hoped for, the animals produced antibodies against this pan-fungal protein. Overall, the vaccine was found effective at preventing invasive infections and deaths from the fungi. None of the vaccinated macaques exposed to Pneumocystis fungi developed the severe infection it can cause, for instance, compared to more than half that did in the unvaccinated group. The team’s results were published late last year in PNAS Nexus.

“Because it targets three different pathogens, the vaccine has the potential to be groundbreaking regarding invasive fungal infections,” said lead author Karen Norris, a professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at UGA, in a recent statement from the university.

According to research cited by the authors, around 13 million life-threatening fungal infections occur annually worldwide. A large bulk of these infections are caused by these three fungi, while they’re estimated to account for over 80% of fungal-related deaths. Other research by some of the same authors has estimated that fungal infections rack up $6.7 billion in direct medical costs annually in the U.S. alone.

Encouraging as these early findings are, though, the real test lies ahead. The team is preparing to start a Phase I trial of their vaccine, which will assess its safety and immune response in healthy human volunteers.

[goldenvalley]

Feb 6, 2023 22:49:13 GMT LFC said:

They are working on a vaccine for fungal infections, something that can plague those of us who are immunocompromised.

Researchers at the University of Georgia believe that they may have made a major step forward in protecting people from these worst-case scenarios. Their experimental vaccine is meant to boost protection in immunocompromised people against three of the most common groups of fungi known to cause fatal infections in humans: Pneumocystis, Aspergillus, and Candida. The vaccine is supposed to work by training the immune system to recognize a “pan-fungal” protein shared by these fungi, which should then strengthen our immunity against all three.

They have so far tested out their vaccine in mice and rhesus macaques. These experiments compared the outcomes of vaccinated animals against non-vaccinated animals after both groups had their immune systems deliberately suppressed and were exposed to the fungi. As hoped for, the animals produced antibodies against this pan-fungal protein. Overall, the vaccine was found effective at preventing invasive infections and deaths from the fungi. None of the vaccinated macaques exposed to Pneumocystis fungi developed the severe infection it can cause, for instance, compared to more than half that did in the unvaccinated group. The team’s results were published late last year in PNAS Nexus.

“Because it targets three different pathogens, the vaccine has the potential to be groundbreaking regarding invasive fungal infections,” said lead author Karen Norris, a professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at UGA, in a recent statement from the university.

According to research cited by the authors, around 13 million life-threatening fungal infections occur annually worldwide. A large bulk of these infections are caused by these three fungi, while they’re estimated to account for over 80% of fungal-related deaths. Other research by some of the same authors has estimated that fungal infections rack up $6.7 billion in direct medical costs annually in the U.S. alone.

Encouraging as these early findings are, though, the real test lies ahead. The team is preparing to start a Phase I trial of their vaccine, which will assess its safety and immune response in healthy human volunteers.

I've been watching The Last of Us on HBO based on the idea that a fungus has taken over a lot of the US so I'm more than ready to see some sort of vaccine.  

[goldenvalley]

This is cool.  Reintroducing martens (weasel looking critters) into Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission is going to host meetings for residents to learn about a mammal it may attempt to reintroduce to the state.

The American marten, according to the Game Commission, “disappeared” from Pennsylvania more than 120 years ago. The commission has been exploring the possibility of bringing martens back and said it found “martens would have sufficient habitat and pose little to no risk to other species.”

“... the American marten once was a common native species that inhabited forested areas within the state. The marten, belonging to the mustelid family, is the same size as the American mink having a similar length to a fox squirrel.

[LFC]

This was stupid with dials turned up to 11.

An employee of Catholic Charities of Omaha alleges in a lawsuit that she suffered emotional and physical injuries after an active shooting drill was staged at the organization’s headquarters last year.

Sandra Lopez said in the lawsuit that administrators did not warn her or other employees about the drill on May 19, 2022. One administrator who knew it was staged told her, “It is a shooting” as they ran out of the building together, according to the lawsuit.

Lopez said she first heard three loud bangs on the door of the office suite where she works and an administrator in the hallway shouted for people to get out of the building.

Lopez heard what she thought were gunshots and saw an employee on the ground outside the building, apparently severely wounded or dead, causing her to “fear for her life,” according to the lawsuit.

“The conduct of Catholic Charities caused Sandra Lopez emotional distress so severe that no reasonable person should be expected to endure it,” the lawsuit said.

Lopez’s attorney, Thomas White, said Monday that Catholic Charities intentionally injured Lopez and other employees by not informing them the drill was fake.

Denise Bartels, the executive director of Catholic Charities of Omaha, and the organization’s attorney, Heather Veik, did not immediately return phone messages and emails seeking comment on Monday.

[andydp]

We have given up on our old Canon Printer.  The printing has deteriorated too much.  I had the Geek Squad over to try a software and adjustment fix but no dice. Soooo a new Canon Printer (is coming) came today from Best Buy Sunday Monday.  The old one lasted eight years so I'm hoping to have the same luck with the new one.
New printer has been connected to WiFi and our equipment: PC,iPad, two i Phones. Took me about 20 min.

[LFC]

This is going to get passed around development departments real fast.

Ever find yourself staring at a tricky coding problem and thinking, “shit”?

If those thoughts make their way into your code or the associated comments, you’re in good company. When undergraduate student Jan Strehmel from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology analyzed open source code written in the programming language C, he found no shortage of obscenity. While that might be expected, Strehmel’s overall finding might not be: The average quality of code containing swears was significantly higher than the average quality of code that did not.

“The results are quite surprising!” Strehmel said. Programmers and scientists may have a lot of follow-up questions. Are the researchers sure there aren’t certain profanity-prone programmers skewing the results? What about other programming languages? And, most importantly, why would swears correlate with high-quality code? The work is ongoing, but even without all the answers, one thing’s for sure: Strehmel just wrote one hell of a bachelor’s thesis.

[goldenvalley]

Nature has a way of going back to what it was before humans engineered something better.  With the super wet winter of 2022/23 the farmland in what was once the mighty Tulare Lake is flooded.  

For the first time in decades, Tulare Lake is reappearing in the valley, reclaiming the lowlands at its historic heart. Once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River, Tulare Lake was largely drained in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the rivers that fed it were dammed and diverted for agriculture.

This month, after a historic series of powerful storms, the phantom lake has reemerged. Rivers that dwindled during the drought are swollen with runoff from heavy rains and snow, and are flowing full from the Sierra Nevada into the valley, spilling from canals and broken levees into fields that usually teem with lucrative plantings of tomatoes, cotton and hay.

Also alfalfa and nut trees...

There are many guffaw about planting crops in the desert...this was the opposite...all in the name of making money. There's a good book on it, The King of California, JG Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire.  This guy Boswell very cynically used federal money to create his empire...sometimes seeking federal money for flood control and sometimes for water supply.  The end result was massive farming on the dried out lake bed.

[andydp]

Today is a bit special:

World of the mundane: "I have the USAF to thank for the past 50 years." edition. USAF ? I thought you were Army. Fifty years ago today, I learned what one can find in an air base hangar: I found a tall strawberry blonde. The rest is history.

[goldenvalley]

Mar 30, 2023 12:19:25 GMT andydp said:

Today is a bit special:

World of the mundane: "I have the USAF to thank for the past 50 years." edition. USAF ? I thought you were Army. Fifty years ago today, I learned what one can find in an air base hangar: I found a tall strawberry blonde. The rest is history.

It is very special!  Happy Anniversary of Your First Meeting!

[LFC]

Yeah, this feels pretty random though also kinda' funny.

[goldenvalley]

Apr 11, 2023 21:27:56 GMT LFC said:

Yeah, this feels pretty random though also kinda' funny.

Lordy Lordy, get out of a car while it's still in drive... Hope she didn't hurt anyone with her runaway car.

[goldenvalley]

[andydp]

Apr 20, 2023 16:35:46 GMT goldenvalley said:

I can hear them in the "ready room":  you first, no thanks, you go ahead.  I'm not going on that &^%$$ thing.

[goldenvalley]

I mentioned the Tulare Lake Basin in Southern California turning back into a lake.  Now what?  Dairy is threatened.  We won't be seeing food prices decline for a while between avian flu killing chickens, flooded fields of strawberries & other produce, and now dairy.

In January and February, beautiful, cold snows brought the snowpack in the southern Sierras down to 1,000–3,000 feet. Then before St. Patricks’ Day, all that low-elevation snowpack melted at once when the region was hit with a large, warm storm. And when all that water came down, the river channels just couldn’t handle it.

Two flood-control structures—Terminus Dam and Success Dam on the Kaweah and Tule Rivers—received about 500,000 acre-feet of water in a 48-hour period—so much flow that Lake Success’s old-fashioned spillway got stuck open. This torrent of Jupiter’s hand came down and covered the eastern Tulare region.

On Thursday, March 16, I started getting text messages saying, “We need real help.” On Friday morning, I got a frantic call from Eric Borba, a dairy farmer and chair of the Eastern Tule Irrigation District, saying that Highway 99 was about to get blown out where it hits Deer Creek.

We had to move 100,000 cows. We had planned for flood events—but not for moving 6,000 cows in five minutes. In some cases, these cows were going to die. We asked the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) for help, but they said, “It’s not a state flood control facility, so we can’t help.” The US Army Corps of Engineers said they couldn’t help because their jurisdiction stops at Lake Kaweah and Lake Success.

Sorry Wisconsin and Vermont...you're not the largest mild producers in the Us or even:

In the near term, I’m really worried. Tulare County is the largest milk-producing region in the world. A lot of dairies that were milking three times a day had to drop to two because they were moving the cows around. Yet we haven’t seen a precipitous decline in production yet; this month’s USDA reports will tell me how much of a problem we have.

Some dairies are not going to come back to life. We went from the whiplash of no feed last year because of drought to no feed this year because of floods. And if you can’t feed your animals, you send them to beef or out of state. These problems could force consolidation to move even faster than it currently is.

[andydp]

Still time to get ready !!

Mark your calendars !!!

Compost Awareness Week !!! May 7- 13 2023

[LFC]

May 2, 2023 13:31:57 GMT andydp said:

Still time to get ready !!

Mark your calendars !!!

Compost Awareness Week !!! May 7- 13 2023

I have a buddy who is part owner of a composting business. They compost supermarket food waste and literally tractor trailer loads of coffee grounds as well as some municipal leaf collections. I buy my mulch each year with beer though I pay for the delivery. (It takes about 15 cy to cover all our gardens. Yes, I pay somebody to put it down.)

The thing I really love is that I get a product they call "composted mulch." It's partly broken down so it works like mulch in the spring but by next spring it's broken down into pure compost. We've been putting it down for over 5 years and have never had to lift a scrap of old mulch like we used to.

[LFC]

This is insane.

[AnBr]

Fossil-rich Welsh quarry yields trove of soft-bodied animals at dawn of modern life

Bizarre six-legged creatures and other “surprising discoveries” begin to clarify evolution after the Cambrian explosion

Between 540 million and 485 million years ago, during the Cambrian period, so many new, complex animal life forms arose that paleontologists speak of the Cambrian Explosion or the Biological Big Bang. But by 400 million years ago, almost all of those species disappeared, eventually replaced by the ancestors of most modern animals. There have been few clues about what happened in between, but fossils from 462 million years ago recently discovered in a quarry in central Wales are filling in that gap, researchers report today in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

“It is wonderful,” says Douglas Erwin, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History who was not involved with the work. There are “some beautiful specimens, including some surprising discoveries.”