Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category

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Another thing I did not know.

Wednesday, June 29th, 2022

This is not an endorsement, and I am not getting anything from anybody for this.

In addition to those fancy Japanese toilets, something else I’ve wanted in my house when I win the lottery is a GeoChron. Maybe more than one GeoChron: I don’t know that I need one in every room, but at least the office and bedroom…

Yes, they are rather expensive. But how can you put a value on having your office look like a scene from The Hunt For Red October?

There used to be (for all I know, still is) a PC program that worked as both a stand-alone executable and also as a screen saver, that emulated the GeoChron but with a considerable omount of flexibility. That included additional map packages and zoom ability. As far as I know, though, that hasn’t been ported to other platforms, and I’m not sure if it is even still maintained or works with new versions of Windows.

I hadn’t looked at the GeoChron website in a while, but I did today. Turns out: the GeoChron people have gone digital. It’s a box (“Is like: a very heavy candy bar“) that plugs into the HDMI port of your 4K TV or monitor and provides…a GeoChron. Complete with Internet connectivity so you can download more stuff. They even offer a Ham Radio Bundle.

Still a touch expensive, but: I can get a 4K (Amazon Fire) TV for $200. $30 for a wall mount. $100 for someone to install the wall mount. Suddenly, that $4,500 GeoChron is about $800. This isn’t quite couch cushion money, but it also isn’t lottery winner money.

Very interesting. Very interesting indeed.

Posted in Geek, Radio | Comments Closed

A little late…

Tuesday, May 31st, 2022

…for Memorial Day, and I don’t know how old this story is. (It just came across Hacker News, for what that’s worth.)

From Hodinkee, a story about a Rolex watch. The serial number dates it to 1947.

But there’s more to the story than it being an old watch. It spent 52 years buried in an unmarked grave…because it belonged to a CIA pilot that was killed in action.

The method for recovering the agent in question was not only difficult, but it was also dangerous. This was one of the first implementations of the so-called “All American Pick Up.” It was a technique that Downey and Fecteau had only recently trained for, and this was their first time trying it in the field. The agent on the ground would retrieve some dropped equipment: a harness, a pair of poles, and a length of line. He would then set up the poles, string the line between them, and attach the harness. The C-47 would then come in low and slow, trailing a grappling hook. The hook would snag the line, lifting the harnessed operative off the ground and into the air behind the airplane, where he’d be winched on board.

(Previously.)

Posted in Geek, History, Planes | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: May 4, 2022.

Wednesday, May 4th, 2022

David Walden. There may be some folks out there for whom that rings a bell. For the rest of the crowd, he was one of the pioneers of the early Internet.

In 1969, Mr. Walden was part of a small team of talented young engineers whose mission was to build the Interface Message Processor. Its function was to switch data among computers linked to the nascent Arpanet, the precursor to the internet. The first I.M.P. was installed that year at the University of California, Los Angeles. The I.M.P.s would be crucial to the internet until the Arpanet was decommissioned in 1989.
Mr. Walden was the first computer programmer to work with the team. “The I.M.P. guys,” as they came to call themselves, developed the computer in nine frenetic months under a contract secured by Bolt Beranek and Newman (now Raytheon BBN), a technology company in Cambridge, Mass.
The I.M.P.s served as translators between mainframe computers at different locations and the network itself. Each I.M.P. translated what came over the network into the particular language of that location’s main computer. The translation work of the I.M.P. evolved into today’s network routers.
The work of Mr. Walden and his colleagues was unprecedented. “They had no models to draw on,” said Marc Weber, a curatorial director at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “They were creating out of whole cloth a new class of machine.”
He added, “They took a very new idea at the time and turned it into a living, breathing, working machine with its own software and protocols that became an essential component of the network that grew to connect all of us.”

Noted: the NYT obit is by Katie Hafner. Her book with Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet (affiliate link) covers this and lots of other early Internet history, and I enthusiastically recommend it.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Kailia Posey, who was on “Toddlers & Tiaras” as a child. She was 16 years old, and according to her family, died by suicide.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Posted in Geek, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Things I was going to do, but decided against.

Saturday, April 9th, 2022

I was going to blog that NYT article about Russian soldiers in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, with some snarky commentary about how “We told them not to do it, that it was dangerous, but they ignored us” sounds like some places I’ve worked.

Then I went searching for an image to insert, and instead found this:

Which is why I’m not linking the article, and linking Nuclear Katie instead.

Posted in Geek, History, Media | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 24, 2022.

Thursday, March 24th, 2022

Madeleine Albright. WP.

Victor Fazio (D-California).

Mr. Fazio represented the Sacramento area from 1979 to 1999. As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, he helped bring home funding for numerous projects, including a multimillion-dollar environmental institute at the University of California, Davis. He also lobbied for the funds to protect 3,700 acres of wetlands west of Sacramento as a refuge; dedicated by President Bill Clinton in 1997, it is known as the Vic Fazio Yolo Wildlife Area.

John Roach.

He was instrumental in prodding Tandy to venture into the computer market. At the time, most small computers were sold as kits to be assembled by hobbyists, but Mr. Roach believed that consumers would welcome a model that they just needed to plug in.
His team presented the original TRS-80 prototype — cobbled together from a black-and-white RCA monitor, a keyboard and a videocassette recorder — to Tandy’s chief executive, Charles Tandy, and to Lewis Kornfeld, the president of RadioShack, in January 1977.
The Apple 1 had been introduced the year before, and Commodore and other companies were marketing their own home computers, but the TRS-80 (the initials stood for Tandy RadioShack) quickly became, for a time, the most popular computer on the market.

…

“We were finally able to ship some machines in September and shipped 5,000 that year, all we could assemble,” Mr. Roach said. “Our competitors shipped none.”
At just under $600 (about $2,700 in today’s dollars), the computer was relatively cheap (it was $399 if connected to a separately owned viewing screen). It was available in all 8,000 of the company’s stores.

Posted in Geek, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Happy Pi Day!

Monday, March 14th, 2022

This is the third year I haven’t been able to celebrate as I’d like to. Perhaps next year.

But in the meantime, please enjoy the day responsibly.

Posted in Geek | 2 Comments »

Tweets of the day.

Thursday, March 3rd, 2022

I have to ask you to trust me: this Dan Hon thread gets funnier and funnier to me as it rolls along, but I don’t want to spoil his best punch lines.

Also:

On the flip side, interesting thread from eigenrobot on the Cape Town Convention and seizures of Russian commercial aircraft:

Useful phrases in Russian. Use them at work when discussing projects.

Posted in Geek | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 1, 2022.

Tuesday, March 1st, 2022

David Boggs, co-inventor (with Bob Metcalfe) of Ethernet.

“He was the perfect partner for me,” Mr. Metcalfe said in an interview. “I was more of a concept artist, and he was a build-the-hardware-in-the-back-room engineer.”

Ned Eisenberg, actor. THR. He was a regular on “Law and Order: SVU”. Other credits include “Million Dollar Baby”, “Flags of Our Fathers”, and guest shots on “The Equalizer” (original recipe) and “Miami Vice”.

Posted in Geek, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

I like bagels.

Sunday, February 13th, 2022

Shot:

Chaser:

Posted in Geek, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 28, 2022.

Friday, January 28th, 2022

Dr. Johan Hultin. He was 97.

Back in 1950, Dr. Hultin, a pathologist, was having lunch with William Hale, a microbiologist. As the conversation often does, it turned to the 1918 flu pandemic.

Dr. Hale mentioned that there was just one way to figure out what caused the 1918 pandemic: finding victims buried in permafrost and isolating the virus from lungs that might be still frozen and preserved.
Dr. Hultin, a medical student in Sweden who was spending six months at the university, immediately realized that he was uniquely positioned to do just that. The previous summer, he and his first wife, Gunvor, spent weeks assisting a German paleontologist, Otto Geist, on a dig in Alaska. Dr. Geist could help him find villages in areas of permafrost that also had good records of deaths from the 1918 flu.

So Dr. Hultin went north to Alaska in 1951.

Three villages seemed like they might have what he wanted, but when he arrived at the first two, the victims’ graves were no longer in permafrost.
The third village on his list, Brevig Mission, was different. The flu had devastated the village, killing 72 out of 80 Inuit residents. Their bodies were buried in a mass grave with a large wooden cross at either end.
When Dr. Hultin arrived and politely explained his mission, the village council agreed to let him dig. Four days later, he saw his first victim.
“She was a little girl, about 6 to 10 years old. She was wearing a dove gray dress, the one she had died in,” he recalled in an interview in the late 1990s. The child’s hair was braided and tied with bright red ribbons. Dr. Hultin called for help from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the group eventually found four more bodies.
They stopped digging. “We had enough,” Dr. Hultin said.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) Dr. Hultin wasn’t able to culture virus from the samples he collected at the time. But in 1997:

…sitting by a pool on vacation with his wife in Costa Rica, he noticed a paper published in Science by Dr. Jeffery K. Taubenberger, now chief of the viral pathogenesis and evolution section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
It reported a remarkable discovery. Dr. Taubenberger had searched a federal repository of pathology samples dating to the 1860s and found fragments of the 1918 virus in snippets of lung tissue from two soldiers who had died in that pandemic. The tissue had been removed at autopsy, wrapped in paraffin and stored in the warehouse.

Dr. Hultin got in touch with Dr. Taubenberger.

“I can’t go this week, but maybe I can go next week,” he told Dr. Taubenberger.

He went back and recovered more samples.

Dr. Taubenberger got all of the packages. The lung tissue from the Brevig woman was invaluable, he said, because the snippets of lung from the soldiers had so little virus that, with the technology at the time, the effort to get the complete viral sequence would have been delayed by at least a decade.
Using the tissue Dr. Hultin provided, Dr. Taubenberger’s group published a paper that provided the genetic sequence of a crucial gene, hemagglutinin, which the virus had used to enter cells. The group subsequently used that tissue to determine the complete sequence of all eight of the virus’s genes.

One of the things that truly impresses me about this story (besides the scientific angle) is Dr. Hultin’s interactions with the villagers of Brevig Mission. They let him dig up the graves and take samples: and they let him do this because he treated the bodies with honor and respect.

After closing the grave, he made two wooden crosses to replace the original ones, which had rotted. Later, he had two brass plaques made with the names of the Brevig flu victims, which had been recorded, and returned to the village to attach them to the new crosses flanking the grave.

Posted in Geek, Obits | 1 Comment »

Rules of the Gunfight.

Tuesday, January 11th, 2022

I did some training this past weekend at the KR Training facility. (KR Training, official firearms trainer of Whipped Cream Difficulties.)

Before I talk about this, I feel like I need to address an elephant in the room. It seems like there are two schools of thought in the gun blogging community:

  1. “Why aren’t you running out every weekend and traveling 500 miles, and then 500 more, to attend tactical operator fantasy camp where you learn how to operate tactically in operations using tactics? Aren’t you serious about this stuff? Don’t you have a job that lets you travel and pay thousands of dollars multiple times a month to take training courses?”
  2. “Fark you, I don’t have the time or the money to travel every weekend and play pretend ninja with my gun writer buddies. I have a job that doesn’t involve shooting guns or people, a family to take care of, and I don’t get free training classes because I’m a gunwriter.”

I hate to be lukewarm, but I totally get both sides of this issue. Training is good. Training is fun. I should do more of it. But I don’t have time or money to train every weekend, so I pick my opportunities carefully.

I’m lucky in that KR Training’s facilities are just a little over an hour away from my house (an hour and a half if I stop at Buc-ee’s on the way). I’m also lucky in that KR Training concentrates almost entirely on practical training for private citizens. (I do not get free training from KR Training, even though they are the official trainer of WCD. I would not accept free training if it was offered: I insist on paying real American money for their services. They do not accept Bitcoin or Dogecoin yet, as far as I know.)

In this case, KR Training was offering two classes from John Hearne. Yes, they were a little expensive. But I decided to treat this as a personal indulgence. I’ve heard Karl talk about Mr. Hearne’s presentations at the Rangemaster conferences, and figured this was worth taking a flyer on.

(These two classes were the second and third I have taken in roughly a month, so you can throw stones at me now. However, the first class was Red Cross First Aid/CPR/AED certification: also through KR Training because that was convenient, but you can pretty much do that anywhere these days. And you should, in my ever so humble opinion.)

tl,dr: If John Hearne is teaching near you, go if you can. He’s worth it.

I’m putting in a jump here because this is going to run long. I can feel it.

(more…)

Posted in Books, Endorsements, Geek, Guns, Leadership | 2 Comments »

Tweet of the day.

Wednesday, January 5th, 2022

Explained:

Runner-up:

Posted in Art, Geek | Comments Closed

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