Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Geek bleg

Trying to stay in the 21st Century here, while bringing back a great old 20th Century custom...

The old 20th Century custom was to have and pass out "attitude cards". They were business-card size, and might or might not convey the giver's contact data, but they always conveyed his/her attitude. Usually, there was some sort of cartoon background printed on the card.

The new custom would be to have such a card, but with an RFID chip embedded in it, so when brought near a smartphone with NFC engaged (near field communications), the card would send itself to the device, and whatever data the card's giver wanted would be passed by NFC. It could pass Internet links, for example, to one's motivational blog-posts.

Yes, I know that I could do this now via my smartphone, but I think it would be nice to be able to actually GIVE the cards away as well. I realize that they would cost a few bucks per each to make, but I haven't a clue as to what to look for in the way of purveyors of such a technology.

Any help here?

 

Gun-free Zone app for I-Phone

Very useful, this app.

The creator must be be an Apple Jedi though, since he hasn't put one out on Android yet.

No wonder, since the JPFO article said that some Obama people and Demoncrrats helped put it together...

If you're of the Apple persuasion, you NEED this app.

Infrastructure vulnerability

The Interstate 5 bridge collapse in Skagit County, WA just showed a HUGE vulnerability for our transportation infrastructure.

The bridge, an overhead steel-truss type, of which there are 340 in Oregon alone, was taken down by an overheight semi-trailer hauling some sort of large steel cube structure, hitting one or two of the overhead truss girders. The energy delivered to the bridge was not very large, as the truck didn't wreck, but continued across the bridge, with the span falling after the truck was clear. There is some evidence that the bridge had been struck earlier by something, maybe a manufactured home, that left shreds of material on the same girders.

Assuming the truck wasn't overweight, and that hasn't been mentioned as a factor, this means that imparting a fraction of the truck's energy of motion at 50 mph or so to the bridge structure was sufficient to dislodge it from it's foundations and put the 165' span into the river.

Every wannabe terrorist now knows a surefire way to do great damage to transportation infrastructure.

The bridges have not been inspected for this vulnerability, either, so no one knows how many of the many thousands of the bridges around the country are at risk, but until proven otherwise, it must be assumed that all are at risk.

A simple idea can protect any bridge from this threat, and that is to install a massive steel arch at each bridge entrance to traffic, an arch just slightly lower than the overhead clearance, but an arch designed, when struck, to stop an overheight vehicle cold. There would have to be serious concrete design work done to anchor such arches, but that's what civil engineers do. This idea, or a better one, must be immediately retrofitted to every overhead-truss bridge deemed of national security interest. BTW, that means railroad bridges also.

This all seems to be of an immediate and necessary claim on available financial resources, but nooooo....

The local fishwrap says that building it's Taj Majal concept (the Columbia River Crossing) of a new Columbia River Interstate 5 bridge, a massive $3.7 Billion pork project, must have the highest priority. This calls for a slap upside the Editor's head with the proverbial Clue Bat, and I just delivered the same:

 Editors:

It's a twisted universe from which springs the idea that the I-5 bridge collapse in WA means we must hurry up and build the CRC.

The biggest lesson of the Skagit River Bridge collapse is that we must use all available money to strengthen our other at-risk bridges, not waste it building the Taj Mahal of all river crossings. If a glancing collision by one or two semi-trailers can put a bridge in the river, we must assure that all our other steel-truss bridges can't suffer the same fate, before we spend a dime on any new bridges. There are hundreds of these at-risk bridges in Oregon, and all must be immediately secured.

There is a national security aspect to this as well, since it has just been demonstrated that a quick, non-explosive way to destroy bridges has just been proven feasible.

It's like casting pearls before swine, however, isn't it?

Think like an engineer

I am cursed in my adult life with this mental affliction called "think like an engineer". On a rainy, miserable day in the PacNorWest, I sit and read my Friends' Facebook pages, and the affliction sets in when I got to this page belonging to a former member of my Yacht Club who now lives in New Hampshire.

Check this out. Beautiful covered bridge of the early 20th Century road-building era, right? It's in Swanzey, NH. 

Look again at the photo. Click to enlarge. See the sign reading "One Lane Bridge 3 tons"?

What does that sign tell an ENGINEER?

It says one of two things, possibly both:

1. The bridge is not RATED for a load over 6,000#, could be SAFE beyond that, but who knows?
2. The load-bearing surface (roadway) of the bridge is not rated for a "live load" over 6,000#.

Let's examine each case:

1. This is a longish bridge, say 200 feet long. It's components have to weigh at least 100 tons. What the sign tells us THEN is that the bridge is NOT CERTIFIED to take more than a 3% load past it's structural weight. ANY Engineer would deem that bridge unsafe to remain in use.

2. If the sign refers to the strength of the roadway (deck) of the bridge, it's not much more encouraging. The average sedan weighs 3500#, and puts that weight on the ground on four tires, each with a footprint of around 20 square inches (big, soft car tires). 3,500/80 means that deck can't take a pressure of over 44#/square inch, or 0.305 pounds per square foot. This article says that the first floor of your house is required to be able to withstand a "live" load of 40 pounds per square foot, and you certainly wouldn't drive a sedan into your living room!

Either the local/State Road Dept put this ridiculous limit on this bridge to preserve it from ANY further wear, or this bridge is in danger, SERIOUS danger, of falling into that river.

In the case of over-restricting the bridge, you ask yourself the question, "what is the Nanny State up to NOW, and why don't they build a REAL bridge I can have confidence in?"

In the case of the ugly loading numbers, you ask yourself the question, "why does the Nanny State even let this bridge continue to carry traffic?"

In either case, your Nanny State owes you some answers, Mizz Robin.

 

More Global Warming alarmism

Part Deux? Soixante Deux (62) is more like it. 

Here is some totally garbage alarmism from Ass Press.

Here is the opening statement:

"TELESCOPE, Grenada (AP) — The old coastal road in this fishing village at the eastern edge of Grenada sits under a couple of feet of murky saltwater, which regularly surges past a hastily-erected breakwater of truck tires and bundles of driftwood intended to hold back the Atlantic Ocean.

For Desmond Augustin and other fishermen living along the shorelines of the southern Caribbean island, there's nothing theoretical about the threat of rising sea levels."

Okay then, let's apply a tiny filter called Truth to this.

• Nowhere in the entire story does it ever say how much the sea level has risen.
• It does say that the Grenadans have done some ill-advised dredging in the area.
• Nowhere does it say that their man-on-the-scene has ANY credentials as either an engineer or a climate scientist, but...
• The article goes on to blame climate change anyway.
• The simple fact here is that there are two ways to flood a coastline: raise the sea level or lower the seashore. It definitely appears that the latter was done here, but yet the alarmism still continues.

This whole Ass Press article is a crock of crap.

I challenge the Global Warming Alarmist Fraternity to adopt the following manifesto of Truth:

• Every article on the subject of rising sea level damage shall be opened with a statement of just how high the sea level has risen, over a stated period of time. Not in storm surges, but permanent sea level rise, the ONLY indicator that can (or can't) show the truth of such claims. 
• When talking about sea level changes, ANY alteration to local ocean floors MUST be discussed, with an engineering-level statement of how those changes, natural OR man-made, affected flooding of the coastline.
• Water seeks a constant level, and is easy to measure. We know about tides, we can predict and measure storm surges, and all of those factors can be discounted to give us a true base water level. According to this interactive chart by NOAA, the sea level rise in Grenada's part of the Caribbean Sea is from 3 to 6 millimeters per century. The entire US East coast has a sea level rise of 3 millimeters per century, maximum. That's one-eighth of an inch, and one quarter of an inch, MAXIMUM,  in the South Caribbean Sea. Note that in AK, some sea levels are trending DOWN by a half-to 3/8" per year.

This alarmist article by Ass Press does no one any good.

Have you ever asked yourself just why, if all the Earth's coastlines are in danger of inundation from rising sea levels, that engineering to "save the coastline" hasn't even started yet, anywhere? Can you guess why that is?

In every engineering analysis of solutions to a potential crisis, the engineers will first ask the question, "is this crisis actually happenning or can it realisticically be expected to happen, and when?"

Of course there's no engineering, because that question has already been asked, and the answer is, always, "come back to the engineers when you have data showing an actual threat".

That's the name of THAT tune, "Actual Threat". As currently measured, the actual threat, if present trends continue, will not occur for several to many centuries.

BTW, the Ass Press article tries to blame "ferocious storm surges made worse by climate change". That's an apples and oranges discussion, and again, the alarmists will lose, because when you stack up hurricanes by the century or epoch, there's little to no change to report. Weather is weather and climate is climate, and there are few links between them.

Ass Press, get real or get out of here.

End of discussion.

 

 

Curious radar display

A fellow weather freak calls me up and says "look at the Southern Rockies Sector radar display", so I do.

There are three WSR-88D weather radar sites with their beam sweep stopped, and they are all pointing at the same place, a spot along I-10 in Eastern CA, somewhere around the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Station. That's the National Training Area for ground troops to practice in the dirt before they go to the Sandbox or the Stans.

For some reason, operators of those three weather radars pointed their beams at a certain spot and stopped the antenna rotation long enough to "light up" something. Now, the WSR-88D radar has a limited frequency range, and it is totally tuned to see one thing: water droplets (or ice crystals) in the air. But, radar is radar, so why would these operators be focusing their beams on one place?

Probably because they were asked to by the DOD. Something in the desert there is tuning up, and during that tune-up, they wanted an atmosphere saturated with radar energy, for some reason. There's no significant weather in that area. Overhead of that patch of ground is a military air area, and it's possible that an electronic warfare plane wanted to see all that energy to calibrate their set.

Or something....

About that season, Gaia...

Woke up at 0630, and the furnace was humming.

Furnace? 

Yesterday it was bright and sunny, with a forecast for the 70's all week.

Furnace?

Checked the thermostat, figuring I'd done something wrong when I changed the filter set and u/v bulbs in the air-purifier yesterday. Nope, it was set to 68, all indications normal.

Then I looked outside on the freshly-cut lawn whilst my first cuppa brewed up:

Yep, that's frost. Damn glad I didn't put in the annuals yet. Went to Weather Underground, and 3 miles West in downtown Gresham, the temp was 34, which means it's right near freezing out there. It is supposed to warm up to the mid-seventies today, though.

Monday Maudlin Meandering Manifesto

I have a few hours before the big fight to save the gudwife resumes, so here are some meandering thoughts I've been accumulating for a week or so.

• (Gun) Control: PawPaw skewers the traitorous Captain Mark Kelly with his sharp Acadian lampoon, and bastes him over a slow pit with his own juices. Laissez la Verite roule, monsieur!
• Our President: dares to flash his anti-semitism at Israeli defense policy. Here's a flash for YOU, Mister President: Israel is actually faced with nuclear annihilation should Iran get their nuke. We are only second on Iran's list. Being a small Nation, one nuke would do a lot of damage to the Israeli nation, whereas we could soak up one nuke and soldier on in the USA. If Israel is actually "beating it's chest", which I haven't seen, it's doing it as a means of issuing the strongest possible warning to Iran. Your "warnings" to Iran, Mister President, have no substance to them at all, and are taken as jokes, or worse, as Taqiyya in Qom and Tehran, so S.T.F.U., Mister President. BTW, the "beating the chest" remark is an obvious suck-up to Egypt's IMFWIC (Islamist mo-fo what's in charge) Morsi, and refers to his anti-semetic remark about the Jews being descendants of apes, so this is all about a bunch of anti-semites trying to one-up each other. Still think Obama isn't a closet Islamist?
• Nature musing: Do you read the venerable nature 'toon "Mark Trail" in the Sunday funny-papers? There is good stuff in there, and little of the usual earth-religion apple-crapple you get from other such sources. This weekend's enlightenment was about the genus Myocastor Coypus, better known by it's commercial name, Nutria, or it's local name, "water rat", except in Oregon, where "water rat" is the title given to OSU Beavers (by OU Duck fans, anyway). The story on the nutria was one of the usual meddling with nature and it's disastrous consequences. The prolific animal was brought here because of it's lustrous fur, and a commercial exploitation of that fur was made with varying success. Current exploitation of Coypus is to try to interest yuppies in eating it's flesh. One unscrupulous coypus farmer in Clark County, WA was discovered selling his skinned coypus carcasses to a local taco-shack chef, who put it in tacos and called it "pulled pork". While this sounds far-fetched, it's not, a good friend of mine from Seattle, down here to visit family, ate some water-rat tacos she picked up in Vancouver WA, got food poisoning from it, but had the left-overs to take to the King County medical officer, who positively identified it as water-rat meat, and had his counterpart in Clark County hammer the taco shack that sold them. I get a chuckle at the consternation of the enviros that all their precious wetlands are being done in by coypus, though, because, as the Wiki explains, they took care of this problem down Louisiana way by putting a bounty on the water rats, and .22s in the hands of hunters did the rest. Horrors! A GUN solution to a problem? Can't have that!

Well, it's getting on towards time to pester a few more medical staff about the gudwife's program, so I'll sign off for now.

All y'all keep your BeeEss detector screens on Double-Front, you hear?

That GMO thing...

I've admired agriculture, mostly from a distance, all my life. Well, I did some grunt work on a pig farm for a little while in college. Hosing pig sheds out. 'Nuff of that...

You can't drive through a rural area anymore without seeing signs of liberal activism, literally. It's all around you. As the old family farms go broke because of envirowhacko regulation, liberals rush in with their money and buy them up, then pretend like they've been farming all their lives, and place signs advocating liberal causes along their highway fence lines. If you look at their fields, they are mostly fallow, or maybe have a cover crop on them. Seldom a cash crop. Never cattle. Posted against hunters, of course. I saw this yesterday on a trip up into Rose Valley along the Coweeman River in WA.

For liberal farm owners, raising cash crops would involve either doing it at a loss or using modern agriculture methods. Those modern methods include using hybrid seed, and that, HORRORS, means raising GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS! Horrors, can't do that. We must reject everything in agricultural science from Gregor Mendel's day up through to the present. Of course, most of these boneheads don't know Tansy from the mustard it hides in, so Tansy is coming back and making it hard for those who raise cattle. These agri-airheads totally reject the proven science of seed-hybridization to increase yield AND resist disease, and their pals in the entertainment industry all swear that dumping gluten from one's diet with make one Holy or something, so they spread these lies and damage agribusiness even further.

Look, we're approaching seven billion humans on this planet, and if we're to feed them all, we NEED every advantage that modern agricultural methods can give us.

Instead, this anti-GMO line of thinking works against the survival of those who starve. When you try to point this out to a liberal, though, you get either a blank stare, or some balderdash about "we're all better off eating the things that Mother Nature intended for us to eat". These cretins can't understand that we humans are the dominant species for ONLY one reason: we can THINK and use our brains to work with science, and so we can rise even farther above other lesser species.

One can only conclude that liberals WANT to starve a big chunk of the planet's population to death.

When you suggest to them that war works as well as famine to do that grisly job, they look at you as a barbarian. I didn't say that first, Robert Malthus did. 

Super Bowl AAR, the power dump

I may not be an electrical engineer, but...

The game was so-so, so I didn't stroke out in front of my new ghetto-screen teevee, but the most interesting part was the power dump, which some self-annointed engineer, hired for the purpose by Fox News, completely failed to explain this ayem, so here's my best:

Take the following facts in the following order:

1. It's New Orleans, which rebuilt the Super Dome after Hurricane Katrina, expecially the dome. One might reasonably expect that they refurbished or replaced the HVAC system at that point, so it's relatively new, and wired to the lates codes, or is it?
2. It's New Orleans, known for it's graft under previous Administrations.
3. The standard scam for building contracts (from the scammer point of view) is that I, the Administrator of the contract, award you, the subcontractor, a juicy sub-contract in return for paying me (kicking-back) 10% of the contracted amount for that subcontract. Because of that nearly-universal practice, the subcontracts are almost always shorted by the 10% as to their completion. In an HVAC contract, that shorting could easily be made up in the complexity and sufficiency of the wiring.
4. At half-time, there were a lot of pyrotechnics shot off, all generating a large amount of smoke, which had to be rapidly pushed out of the cavernous building in time to play the game within a few minutes. That takes huge ventilating capacity to accomplish.
5. The combination of bringing all the inside lighting back up to full-bright, and running the exhaust fans at full power to clear all the fireworks smoke, created a maximum load for the building's electrical system.
6. The cheapened wiring meant that there was a weak leg in the wiring system, and the emergency sensors detected a pending overload, and tripped the breakers, darkening half the stadium.

That's probably how it happened, folks. If it did happen this way, it will happen again. Maybe next time, it will be actually investigated.

Or, maybe you could just go to Ray Nagin and ask him what he did with the 10% of that sub-contract, get it back if he still has it, and fix the wiring of the SuperDome.