Wheels within Wheels

A Message to Garcia is a standard topic in leadership courses, at least in the ones I attended back in the 1970s. Lt. Rowan is held up as someone to emulate, although the assistance he received sometimes left him with so little control over his situation that he was concerned about where he was being taken.

I’d never read Rowan’s description of his trip, so that was interesting, and re-reading Hubbard’s essay was also interesting - I picked up on his examples about grammar and punctuation this time, partly because I had just read an essay on that topic, and partly because I’ve written about that particular topic myself.

I’ve known people who could and would, and I have no doubt that Cdr. Salamander is one, but Akbar Zeb is not a name I’d be comfortable using.

In one episode, the Goon Show told their version of the Robin Hood story. After he won the archery competition while competing in disguise, the following dialogue occurs:

“You pull a mean bow, archer.”
“Yes, it was given me by a mean uncle.”
“No, really, where did you learn to pull a longbow?”
“I took a postal correspondence course. The envelopes were six feet long.”

What brought this to mind was reading about a man who once mailed a building.

Not quite the witty title I wanted, but it fits the theme.

I missed this story when it came out, but it’s newsworthy because it’s a very low-probability event: a 14-year-old boy was struck by a meteorite last year.

Next, we have a claim that space aliens may not be friendly. Is this news to anyone? Besides peace-and-love-and-crystal-harmony types, that is? It’s not like there haven’t been books and movies addressing the topic before. Given the history of war between different tribes and nations, why would anyone presume that aliens would necessarily be peaceful?

One quote from the article is worth a little discussion:

Some scientists are puzzled as to why no messages have been sent back even though humans have been transmitting radio and television signals for the last century.

That’s actually a pretty stupid thing to be puzzled about. First, that would require another intelligence within 50 light years, and further presumptions that:

• They received the broadcasts and recognized them as a product of intelligence immediately.
• They deciphered them immediately.
• They decided to send a response immediately.
• They had the equipment available immediately for sending that response.

Just coming up with some simple points for each of the above:

• When the first pulsar was detected, some thought it to be a broadcast from an extraterrestrial intelligence, because it was considered too regular to have been natural.
• How long have we been working on Linear A? Would we ever have deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics without the Rosetta Stone?
• Let’s hope they’re not organized with bureaucracies. Perhaps they’re afraid we (or someone else) would find them and hurt them. Maybe they’re isolationists.

If they’ve got equipment to receive us, they’ve probably got equipment to send back, so that’s not necessarily a big objection. They may have reasons for not wanting to use it, or to broadcast at the necessary level to reach us. Then again, perhaps they have already responded to us, and we didn’t recognize it as a response, because it’s using a technology that they expected us to develop in the meantime.

It’s probably moot, though. A few months ago, I read an article that said that our broadcasts would sink into the background noise within some distance that I don’t remember, but was shorter than I expected. I couldn’t find a link to it to put in this post, but I did find this, which makes the same point. We do have equipment that can pull signals out of the noise, even if the noise is louder than the signals, but in that case, we know what kind of signals we’re looking for. That’s a lot different than, “There may be a signal here. It may be hidden below the level of the noise, and we have no idea what it looks like.” Searching for it in those conditions is a good recipe for ongoing employment, but not necessarily for success.

It may be moot for another reason, though. Technology marches on, and the changes and improvements have side effects. When I was younger, I used to see billboards across the southwest for radio station XERF, broadcasting from just across the border in Mexico with 250,000 watts of broadcast power. They were in Mexico because, among other reasons, it freed them from FCC restrictions on broadcast power. My understanding was that atmospheric skip meant that they could be heard across most of the US, at least at night. Recently, I’ve been hearing about low-power FM and neighborhood radio. Lower-power signals means a shorter propagation distance before it falls into the background noise.

In the early days of personal computing, back in the 1970s, I read about how some people were using AM radios to debug their programs: the switching frequencies of the digital signals in the computer fell into the AM range, so tuning between stations would let you hear a series of shifting tones that related to what the application was doing. In the days when some people only had lights and switches for I/O, that could be an important diagnostic technique. Nowadays, computers operate well above the AM range. They take less power (sometimes absolutely, sometimes merely relatively) than they used to, as well. I work in the field of embedded computing; Intel’s 80188 processor, which used to be popular for the purpose, consumed 800 milliamps if you were using the NMOS part. The MSP430 from Texas Instruments can require as little as a couple microamps. That’s not going to generate much in the way of radio signal.

So, I guess what I’m saying here is that it’s pretty unlikely that aliens shot the rock at the kid.

I was not aware of the aftermath of the Roswell UFO incident.

Everybody knows about “Heinz 57,” right? Do you know what the Heinz 57 are?

I think I’ve got a whole new set of objections to hymns now.

I had read that California is doing this. I hadn’t realized the Feds are following suit.

And this is just unbelievable. I wonder how long it took to get from the starting point to here? It’s obvious that Pelosi doesn’t consider global warming and carbon footprints to be a problem. As Glen Reynolds says, “I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who claim it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

” … I asked the boys in the lab for a solution.”

It shouldn’t be a position or a strategy, either.

I recorded the SOTU last night, because I wasn’t home to watch it live. I tried, I really did, but I just couldn’t watch all the way to the end. I left the room before it was over, telling Marion that it was all lies and misrepresentations, and I couldn’t handle it any more. Gerard highlights a comment here that expresses my opinion pretty succinctly. I won’t be going to Mass about it, though … I’m not Catholic.

Our current President is actively ignoring reality in favor of continuing with his chosen agenda.

• Not-so-subtle digs at global warming - excuse me, climate change denialists, ignoring the damning CRU data dump and other recent revelations.
• Saying “we’re so close” to passing the Senate healthcare bill that we have to continue, ignoring the fact that a Republican won “Ted Kennedy’s seat” by promising to oppose it.
• Talking about continuing earmark reform, ignoring the 9000-odd earmarks in the stimulus bill.
• Complaining that the recent Supreme Court decision will allow foreign corporations access to our political process, ignoring the fact that on his campaign website, the default, standard checks had been deliberately disabled, thus allowing effectively anonymous donations to his campaign from around the world.
• Calling for bipartisanship when the Democrats have shown that their idea of bipartisanship is that Republicans should vote for bills into which they’ve had no input.

And I would have been absolutely horrified, if I thought he had any idea about how things operate in the real world, when he said that because of our current budget woes, he was going to freeze portions of the federal budget next year, because “that’s how budgets work.”

Really? So, if I’m in debt now, with lots more money going out than is coming in, I should keep spending at my current levels this year, and next year, I keep my spending on movie rentals and lawn service at this year’s levels? That’s how budgets work? I don’t think so.

There are other things I could mention (cap & trade, energy, proposing budget cuts that will, over the next ten years, save about one month’s worth of our current budget deficits, and so on), but I have better things to do. This isn’t a website people come to for news and political commentary. I’m actually not sure how many people ever come here, to be truthful - I don’t track visitors.

The bottom line is that we have an arrogant and supercilious fool in the office of the President, and he’s lying through his teeth to us in order to enact changes that he knows the American people don’t want, and I’m sick of him.

Now that televisions are digital and flatscreen, is there a mellifluous phrase to replace “boob tube?”

Tommy James and the Shondells performed Crimson and Clover on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Now, aren’t you better for knowing that?

No? Didn’t think so. Can’t say it does much for me, either. And I like 60s music.

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