Reader Tips

Reader Tips 40 Comments
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here is Mr. Thomas Dolby performing Budapest By Blimp ¤, from his Sole Inhabitant Tour, live in Boston, in 2006 (10:27).

Update at 08:34: The first race of America’s Cup N°33 has now started, video is available at americascup.com.

Update at 11:30 ~ USA 17 has taken the first race by about 5%. The rigid mains’l performed very well. It will be interesting to see what happens in race two, especially if the winds are significantly stronger. We may be in the process of dumping a lot of “conventional wisdom” here 😉

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

40 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  2. Al Gore’s Weather (AGW): Good news. We have a winner. Pure white.
    … and in conclusion:
    “Forecasters say more snow is on the way with one storm heading into the southern states and a possible new storm hitting the Northeast by early next week.”
    …-
    “Official: Snowstorms Cancel Most Flights Since 9/11
    Blizzard Shattered Century-Old Records, Affects a Million Airline Passengers”
    “Wednesday’s storm broke a centuries-old seasonal snowfall record in the nation’s capital — more than 55 inches have fallen so far.”
    http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/snow-cripples-east-coast-cities-airlines-move-thousands-travelers/story?id=9804739

  3. I was just reading that the winter snowfall total for Baltimore already represents a 420-year return period, and that’s only if it doesn’t snow again. If they add another 20 inches before the winter ends, it could get up near a thousand year return period on this winter.
    This is clearly an event more anomalous than just the routine argument about whether climate change is real or not. This could represent climate change of the opposite kind to that being imagined by the IPCC and the AGW lobby.
    Coming so soon after the historic snowfall winters of 2000-01 in Newfoundland, and of 2007-08 across New England and eastern Canada, this begins to suggest a natural trend towards much more severe winters, at least in eastern North America, but then also China has had two very severe winters in the past three, and even western Europe has now had two cold winters in a row.
    The Little Ice Age took many decades to take hold, and then lasted the better part of five centuries with three main waves of cold separated by two rather bland warmer periods not as warm as our recent past (the 20th century warming and Medieval Warming Period are about on a par despite what the revisionists have been saying).
    On the larger time scale, these winters may not mean all that much if we return to a pattern like that of the 1980s (but really for eastern North America, the only really mild winter period was 1987 to 1992, nothing much considering that 1949 to 1953 was probably warmer).
    At the very outside edge of probability, this is presumably the sort of huge snowfall anomaly that might precede a glacial episode. At least we know for sure how to prevent that !!! (drill baby drill).

  5. If the boats don’t sail on Friday the America’s Cup will no longer be taken seriously.
    Next thing you know they’ll want to race only on lakes.

  6. I would like to see, TJ, twenty-story high multihull sailboats race each other at sixty kilometers per hour, at least once in my life. After that, the A/C process will decide what the next A/C challenge is, which is fine with me.

  8. It is a mistake to confuse The Internet with any particular application that connects to it, Xiat. Citizens’ Band radio went through a bubble phase too, but that says nothing about radio per se. The modern global infrastructure dependency on The Internet doesn’t care whether or not the web-o-sphere, or the blog-o-sphere, or the anger-o-sphere survive ~ The Internet has work to do.

  9. When you get tired of the CBC insinuating that everybody in the military is a potential serial killer because Russel Williams, just ask them if it’s safe to let their children near CBC employees,
    “Waldman, a regional web developer at the CBC’s Manitoba headquarters, has been indicted on a charge of travelling with the intent to engage in sexual activity with a minor. If convicted, he faces up to 30 years in prison and/or a fine. ”
    cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Crime/2008/01/18/4779689-sun.html

  10. CB Radio during the heyday was a blast.
    We shot skip and talked QRP [low power = 25 watts] over very long distances when conditions were right and that was VERY often in the 70s -80s.
    Talked LSB from my bush cabin, Beaufort Mtns mid Vancouver Island to north of Edmonton one day and then Thompson the next and once in a while to Ontario, Japan or Australia, [ just enough to say 73s from BC].
    Locally, we enjoyed long interesting debate and everyone came away better informed.

  11. Appreciate the guest bloggers, but damn Kate… you have your way. Love your pithy take on things. Why you aren’t syndicated is a mystery to me.

  12. Me too, TG, indeed, I was an undergraduate electrical engineer at the time. Nevertheless, our reminisces over that historical technological experience are as relevant to the use of Citizens’ Band radio today as the current web-based applications bubble is to the future of The Internet; that is to say: they’re largely irrelevant.

  15. Sorry Vit, I was using shorthand
    By “free” I meant unconstrained by locality.
    It’s a progressive journey, but cost for long distance when I was a kid was prohibitive – you wouldn’t want to share ideas by phone, you would just yell “hi” to your relatives with something that sounded like someone was rubbing plastic bags together in the background.

  18. Humm, nobody’s around – I also like the story about the song “Daisy” in part 3/5 – so THAT’S why they chose that song for HAL (cf IBM frameshift +1 alphabet) for Kubrick’s 2001!!

  19. Woz combined streamlined and simplified chip or IC circuit design.
    This really enabled economical PCs for us the peoples.
    The Simplified part was the brightest advance.
    Look at designer / engineers today. So many foolishly make electronics too feature rich. There is little chance we will use 10% of their mostly odd and nearly useless functions.
    Also the cool stuff is often black with tiny markings and labels. You need a flash light to hit the right buttons.
    I use a white Mactac kind of applied label to power and function buttons so that I can operate music equipment in low light or near darkness.
    It should be designed that way in the first place.

  22. Just caught a story of some 30 olympic athlete’s barred from coming to the games because they failed their drug testing.
    Kind of ironic that the Olympic committee would get “roid monkey” Ahhhnold to carry the torch in Vancouver. Wonder if he had to pee in the bottle prior to carrying that torch.

  23. “Amnesty defends link with former Guantánamo detainee Moazzam Begg
    Amnesty International is facing criticism after suspending a senior official who went to the press to accuse the organisation of double standards over its links with the former Guantánamo detainee, Moazzam Begg.
    Gita Sahgal, the head of the gender unit at the human rights group, said that she was suspended “within hours” of the publication of an article based on an e-mail she had sent to her bosses criticising links with Mr Begg.
    She approached The Sunday Times with her story because, she claimed, Amnesty had ignored her warnings that its work with Mr Begg “fundamentally damages” its reputation. She said that it had erred in allying itself with Mr Begg and his “jihadi” group, Cageprisoners, to fight for the closure of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.”
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article7024388.ece
    …-
    “Communist Sympathies of Amnesty International
    In his 1980 book “Inquest on an Organization Above all Suspicion: Amnesty International,” French journalist Hughes Keraly exposed the truth regarding a left-wing bias that has always swirled around Amnesty International.
    His exposure of communist infiltration, while no surprise, is sad given that Amnesty has, indeed, done significant work in exposing human rights abuses around the world.
    Unfortunately, their work appears to have been tainted by an agenda that magnifies and in some cases manufactures the abuses of freedom-oriented regimes while minimizing and ignoring the abuses of the regimes of the totalitarian left.
    This is instructive regarding the danger of placing monitoring responsibilities into the hands of a so-called “Non-Governmental Organization” (NGO) like Amnesty International, which affiliates with the United Nations.
    This affiliation, in effect, grants this un-elected and un-accountable bureaucracy an appearance of authority and legality.
    Keraly, a sympathizer of Amnesty International at the time, went to Chile in 1979 to search for 10 men whom Amnesty had reported as having disappeared as a result of their opposition to the government of Gen. Agusto Pinochet.
    To his astonishment, Keraly found all 10 men living openly and unmolested.
    It is interesting to note that Amnesty had previously failed to investigate the activities of the Stalinist Allende regime, one of the most brutal in Latin American history.
    Instead, Amnesty engaged in an unrelenting 20 year propaganda campaign against Pinochet, while he was struggling to restore democracy and prosperity to his grateful nation and while he defended his people against communist trained, armed, and supported militias as well as an influx of communist agitators from all over the world.”
    http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/631062/posts

  24. You should have read two years ago the inflated assurances that ‘government IT always does it right, unlike private companies’; and the vicious insults hurled at me when I dared to cast doubt on security of medical records of the Canadians in case government went ahead with computerization.
    Fast forward 2010:
    “The Vancouver Coastal Health Authority’s computerized health system failed to protect confidential records, according to a scathing audit by B.C.’s auditor-general. The VCHA’s record system was found to have “serious security weaknesses” that made client information privy to thousands of users who otherwise shouldn’t have had access, the report found. “Maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of individuals’ health-care records is profoundly important, so it was of great concern when our examination revealed grave deficiencies in the security of this system,” said Auditor-General John Doyle.”
    Does it right, indeed!

  25. Al&Moh’s ‘Toon Time: Oink.
    …-
    “Religious Strike in Norway”
    “The cartoon that Dagbladet used on its front page resulted in mass demonstrations, the burning of flags, and probably a suicide attack back in 1997, when a Russian immigrant in Israel, the then 28 year old Tatiana Soskin, had put it up all over Hebron. She had to appear in court, and was later sentenced to two years in prison. Lars Helle seemed not to be aware of the fact that it was the very same cartoon that he had put on his front page that caused the mass demonstrations in Hebron in 1997.”
    http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4312

  26. Hey all.
    I’ve scrolled “Go Canada Go!” on my palm to support our Olympic team and for a little satirical fun.
    Feel free to follow suit. Perhaps we can tick off a few leftards who hate SP and hate the Olympics as well.

  27. With No Disrespect to My family & friends from the States.
    But Why? is Arnold(the terminator)Schwarzenegger carrying the Olympic Torch.
    “Torch relays last laps set Olympic fervour ablaze”
    ctv.ca
    Pic Arnold!

  28. Good morning Vitruvius
    The phrase “the end of the Internet” parallels the cartoon “honey, I finished the Internet”. Saying that, I have to disagree with your strained reductionism, because the impact of Internet on society is far beyond use of technology. The infrastructure is one of the layers; use of information and/or communication are merely a functions. It would be awkward to use phrase relation technology, while any effect, consequence, result label as “work done”, although “social networks” is in use. Some argue that the invention of language is at the core of origin of consciousness, then of course there was printing press , radio and tv accelerating change in every aspect of our (human) life.
    Chatroulette , which I may never use it for the same reasons I don’t own tv – I don’t have a need for it and I find my distractions in other places, amplifies certain characteristics of the Internet: ephemeral nature , speed over experience, diversity among imperfect. Sure, these are bubbles, but the key is not in theme as much as it is in arrangement.

  29. Add: to 11:52 post
    Re The O Torch & Terminator.
    Its all Stephen Harpers fault! If they were in the House then maybe Gary Lunn could be questioned as to why?
    (sarc)

  30. Quote of the day:
    “Politicians would make terrible engineers, overloading and stressing supporting structures beyond their capacity.”

  31. brianr fyi
    The torch has been carried by many different foreigners this year. Arnie’s not the only one, just the best one.

  32. Georgian luger died this afternoon in an Olympic training run in Vancouver.
    The video is gruesome – he’s going down the track at race car speeds, loses control. leaves the track and smashes into a I-beam, stopping him immediately.

  34. never mind matt found it at ctv
    geez poor bugger, sad so sad to have your dreams cut short like that.

  36. Not healthy to go looking for a morbid vid-clip.
    Good for Google. The crushing physical death of anyone is never anything the sickening.

  40. That’s a convincing win for BMW – Oracle in the America’s Cup, thanks for the updates Vitruvius,, BBC has some static reportage, as well as the interesting tidbit regarding the breadth of the win, the 5% that you note as the margin of victory translates over the 40k race to a 15 minutes margin.

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