Big Stick Physics

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China’s Shenzhou-15 astronauts conduct secretive second spacewalk

March 4, 2023 /

Brave or reckless astronauts to take second EVA wearing spacesuits made in China.  I won’t even buy batteries or saw blades from Harbor Freight.  There is no way I’d go into a near absolute vacuum at 3 degrees above absolute zero in a Chinese spacesuit, unless I had no other choice.  Communist China may not have given them any other choice.

Side Note:  I always liked that the Russians are called cosmonauts and are from Star City.  Kind of poetic.   In Mandarin, what are astronauts called and did they invent a new character to represent “astronaut”?  Or is it a sequence of characters, like “man turtle bubble”

Tennessee and other states want deviants to stay away from children

March 3, 2023 /

As Tennessee, others target drag shows, many wonder: Why?   It may be because encouraging perverts to celebrate with children is depraved.

The protestations have arisen fairly suddenly around a form of entertainment that has long had a place on the mainstream American stage.

That such spectacles are now being portrayed as a danger to children boggles the minds of people who study, perform and appreciate drag.

I can understand why perverts wouldn’t want people to call them perverts.

This article is intentionally obtuse in support of depravity.  Everybody understands boys dressing as women for Halloween, Milton Berle doing it for a laugh or high school Powder Puff games.  That’s not what we are talking about.  Its transvestites, simulated strip shows and sexualizing children.

Passing a law may not be the preferred approach.  Conscientious parents are not concerned with unintended consequences of the law.  They will let it all burn before allowing their children to be seduced.  The best approach would be for degenerates to go back to the red light district or seedy part of town and remain in the shadows, while the people in positions of authority act like they care about the children in a community.  Failing that, good people should expose the child groomers, cut budgets and demand that staff changes.

Side Topic:  In the Woke world, why is cross-dressing acceptable?  It seems like the gender equivalent of wearing blackface.  Drag is even more egregious since the performer is portraying an exaggerated version of a woman.  Drag is analogous to Mickey Rooney wearing buck teeth and doing the, “Me so solly” routine in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

 

Cuyahoga County handing out to up to $5,000 for stores to stop using plastic bags

March 3, 2023 /

I’m not clear on the Cuyahoga County’s plastic bag ban.   The article says that North Olmsted opted out of the bag ban, but that’s the city were I am least likely to be offered a plastic bag.  Most everywhere else uses the typical plastic bag.

As an old school environmentalist, I don’t take my direction from NPR, but try to do some research and think things through.  I live in a modest house, heat mostly with wood and took my own silverware to school to use at lunch time.  I’m aware of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch , but also know that ocean garbage comes from cruise ships and Asia.  Americans are environmentally conscious.  I live next to a major highway, and hop the fence to pick up trash about once per year.  I get one garbage bag full in a third of a mile.  That ain’t much.

I replaced my cloth grocery bags a few years ago.  They were in good shape, but said “Finast” on the side.  I decided to splurge.  That is the beauty of cloth bags, they don’t split open.  Plastic grocery bags aren’t really single-use.  Most people keep some bags around, and pet owners need them for poop pickup.  Nobody tells the pets that a plastic bag ban is passed.  Pet owners start buying actual single-use bags.  That isn’t helping anyone.

Questions for the Covid Commission

March 2, 2023 /

The way the Covid-19 pandemic was handled was a shit show.  It’s over, but we have to do better than just never speak of it again.  Questions should be openly discussed so we learn.  The Norfold Group put together a reasonable set of questions.  I don’t care who funded them or the background of the doctors.  The report is so reasonable, it may become hard to find, so I’m backing the Questions for Covid Commission by Norfolk Group Full Report .

The executive summary provides ten concise questions, and they are:

  1. What could have been done to better protect older high-risk Americans, so that fewer of them died or were hospitalized due to COVID-19?

  2. Why was there widespread questioning of infection-acquired immunity by government officials and some prominent scientists? How did this hinder our fight against the virus?

  3. Why were schools and universities closed despite early evidence about the enormous age-gradient in COVID-19 mortality, early data showing that schools were not major sources of spread, and early evidence that school closures would cause enormous collateral damage to the education and mental health of children and young adults?

  4. Why was there an almost exclusive focus on COVID-19 to the detriment of recognizing and mitigating collateral damage on other aspects of public health, including but not limited to, cancer screening and treatment, diabetes, cardio-vascular diseases, childhood vaccinations, and mental health? 

  5. Why did the CDC fail to collect timely data to properly monitor and understand the pandemic? Why did we have to rely on studies from private initiatives and from other countries to understand the behavior of the virus and the effects of therapeutics, including vaccines? 

  6. Why was there so much emphasis and trust in complex epidemiological models, which are by nature unreliable during the middle of an epidemic, with unknown input parameters and questionable assumptions? 

  7. Could therapeutic trials have been run in a more timely manner? How was information on drug effectiveness and safety disseminated to doctors and clinicians? Were effective therapeutics easily accessible across the population? How did certain drugs become heavily politicized?

  8. Why did vaccine randomized trials not evaluate mortality, hospitalization, and transmission as primary endpoints? Why were they terminated early? Why were there so few studies from the highest-quality CDC and FDA vaccine safety systems? 

  9. Why was the USA slow to approve and roll out critical COVID-19 testing capacity? Why was there more emphasis on testing young asymptomatic individuals than on testing to better protect older high-risk Americans? Why was so much effort spent on contact-tracing efforts?

  10. Why was there an emphasis on community masking and mask mandates, which had weak or no data to support them, at the expense of efficient and critical COVID-19 mitigation efforts? Why did the CDC or NIH not fund large randomized trials to evaluate the efficacy and potential harms of mask wearing? Why didn’t policy recommendations change after the publication of randomized trial data from Denmark and Bangladesh which showed no or minimal efficacy of mask wearing by the public?

Covid remote learning corrupted good people.

March 2, 2023 /

When cheating becomes the norm, normal kids cheat.  During the summer of 2020, the administrative team for my school had time to plan for fully remote classes.  They made no provision for valid testing.   Teachers asked questions and suggested solutions, but no answers ever came.  Even worse, the administration kept insisting that students be shown grace.  In education-speak, grace means dialing down the accountability.

North Royalton students are generally honest and respectful.  I taught college-prep and AP courses, so my students were smart and ambitious, but not necessarily better people.  Most teachers changed their assessments for remote learning.  Some tried to hold the line by making it harder to cheat with more extended response questions, while others threw in the towel and went for multiple-choice questions.  It wasn’t long before this system corrupted students who wouldn’t have considered cheating.

To compound the educational dereliction, the administration gave students the option of remaining remote, after we went back to a hybrid schedule.  Those remote students remained in classes with in-person students.  The remote students cheated their asses off, while the responsible students took tests and quizzes in class.  For three quarters of a school year, some students took minimal interest in their education, but got the same or better grades than students who attended class.  I don’t stand by any of the grades I gave that year.

Dog shelter for my shelter dog.

March 2, 2023 /

Like normal people, Sparky is reluctant to do his nasty business if anyone is watching.  He’s not gun-shy, he’d pee on the pope in front of St. Peter’s Basilica if he needed to mark that territory.  However, It’s best to tether Sparky, and leave him for a while if he might need to poop.

Even with his Carhartt jacket, Sparky doesn’t like wet weather, so I made a dog shelter for my shelter dog.  I didn’t build a dog house, because he would be reluctant to crap inside.

From a prior experimental project, I had a bunch of 1 1/2″ Schedule 40 PVC pipe, so that seemed like good material for a structure.

  • The base pipes are filled with sand to keep it from blowing over.
  • The roof is 4 ft by 3 ft, with a 2/12 pitch.  That large because the sides are open.
  • The roof is white PVC so it stays cool in the summer.  They didn’t have polycarbonite.
  • The uprights aren’t glued in, so I can change the height if necessary. 
  • Since the uprights are detachable, it’s easy to store.
  • I painted it because I paint everything.

It doesn’t take Sparky long to wrap himself around the axle.  He is a smart dog, so perhaps he can resolve that dog puzzle.

 

Everyone needs a Bluetooth headset.

March 2, 2023 /

You should buy a Bluetooth headset like this.  During the disastrous remote learning of 2020,  I made frequent use of this headset.  I did quite a bit of testing with different equipment, and for the price, this is a good value.  The noise cancelling was effective at cancelling out ambient sound, but the fidelity isn’t great.  Your voice will be clear, but missing higher frequencies.

As you may know, I can go on.  A bluetooth headset is a great way to have a lengthy phone conversation while walking the dog or picking up around the house.  For under forty bucks, why not?

I don’t use those anymore.  I listen to audio books all the time and need hearing protection while I cut the grass for a few hours or use the chain saw.  I use the 3M headset because it is robust enough to take some abuse and only blocks loud or impulsive noises.  The sound quality is good for me, and the microphone is decent for phone conversations.  I wish I’d spent the extra ten bucks to get the version with the boom mike.  That would handle ambient noise better.

 

Books you don’t own.

March 1, 2023 /

E-books aren’t your books.

E-books aren’t your books.

Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.

You don’t own anything that is automatically updated or resides in the cloud. 

My policy of turning off automatic updates on my computers has surprised some tech-savvy friends.  Sure, there are security reasons to update a computer, but for the most part, updates never help you.  I manually update VLC to accommodate new media codecs, but that’s about it.  

Windows 11 doesn’t have the option to decline automatic updates.  The result is that the functionality changes in noticeable ways.  I used MS Video Editor to make instructional videos all through the Covid remote learning disaster.  I needed it recently, and found that it was gone and was could be replaced with MS ClipChamp.  I had other software available, so didn’t comply.

Google Docs and other cloud-based storage companies have considered making your own objectionable content unavailable.

Our technology is really astounding, but you can’t become complacent.  If you rely on streamlined cloud storage, online services or software that magically handles everything, your life is great, until it isn’t. 

More nuclear power in the EU

February 28, 2023 /

Eleven EU States Unite for Nuclear Power

Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Hungary, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia agreed “to support new projects” alongside existing nuclear plants, according to a statement released during a meeting of EU energy ministers in Stockholm.

Those are the eleven countries with their shit together.  Anyone serious about Climate Change and moving away from fossil fuels, must be in favor of baseline nuclear power.  Solar and wind power are not able to produce baseline power.  Ever.  There is not some breakthrough that is going to happen if we just cripple economies and force the issue.

Austria, Germany and Luxembourg reaffirmed their opposition in Stockholm to the development of nuclear energy in Europe.

For all of their technical acumen, Germany has a tendency to suspend their judgment and join the magical thinking parade.  

In the US, we aren’t even talking about it.  We tend to be overly optimistic and just assume that everything will work out.  That works until it doesn’t.

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