When  life  Gives You Lemons...
August 31, 2012





When life gives you lemons, eat Cheerios.

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Music Association: George Harrison - What Is Life?

Nutrition Panel Association:  Life is whole grain oat flour, sugar, corn flour, whole wheat flour, rice flour, salt, calcium carbonate, disodium phosphate, reduced iron, niacinamide, zinc oxide, BHT, yellow 5, yellow 6, thiamin mononitrate, pyridoxine hydrochloride, riboflavin, and folic acid. Life is 120 calories per serving.






Tampa Fun and Games
August 30, 2012

There is fun in hot, humid, conventional Tampa.

Go to the Tiger Trail at Busch Gardens at either 12:30 or 2:30pm and you might have a chance to play tug-of-war with a tiger.



Very cool.

It's like playing with a cat with a shoelace... a very big shoelace. Plus it's exercise and a real connection.

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Music Association: Survivor - Eye of the Tiger








Sustained Waves and Wind
August 29, 2012

The debate as old as the adhesive bandage (Band-aid brand) is: fast or slow?

Do you rip it off quickly or slowly?

An Australian study tested the pain levels of 65 participants while Band-aids were pulled slowly or quickly off them. The 2009 study was conducted at James Cook University, Townsville (south of Cairns), Queensland. It was August, so it was winter.

The finding was that slow removal of Band-aids were more painful.

Of course there are variables, like hairs and how slow is slow.

Hurricane Isaac is slowly moving across New Orleans on the 7-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It seems like a slow removal of a Band-aid, testing the endurance of the city and its materials.

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Music Association: Pointer Sisters - Slow Hand









U.S. Hopes and Dreams
The U.S. Defense Industry is a Threat to the United States
August 28, 2012

The United States defense budget is astronomical.

It is a cash hog stuffed so full with money that it barfs money at insurgents (funding the Taliban) and dwarfs all other defense budgets. It is a gigantic sword of Damocles, held over the heart of America by the single hair of a horse's tail.

This week, the U.S. national debt will hit $16 trillion. If the national debt is a threat to the United States, the defense budget is the point of the threat.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has a Budget Simulator that enables your decisions to stabilize the federal debt. The problem with their Budget Simulator is that it is as loaded as loaded dice. Now, don't get me wrong -- I won; I dropped the deficit to 53% of the GDP, but I was just getting started. Not everything was on the table, not by a long shot, I'm looking at you U.S. defense industry (2013 DOD overview, greenbook, weapons, & research).

Defense over-inflators argue that cuts to defense will cripple the U.S. economy. However, a Cato Institute study indicates that defense cuts would actually accelerate economic growth.

Wait. What?

The Cato study assumes actual (real) defense cuts. The Budget Control Act "Sequestration" budget cuts might not actually cut the defense budget, because -- get this -- the military has funding it has never had to touch ($83 billion in unobligated balances).

And, at most, the Sequestration would drop the defense budget to 2006 levels, and  the military may not get candy from Minnesota.

The defense budget needs scissors to cut through all its paper tigers.






What foreign invaders?!? Communists? Terrorists? Iran? Israel? North Korea?



The Soviets faked their way through much of the arms race.  Fake Soviet missiles were paraded through Moscow's Red Square on May 9, 1965.  Three types of fake missiles on parade, including the GR-1, caused Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to boast that the Soviet Union was making them "like sausage." The fake missiles caused the United States to spend billions on missile defenses, even though the reality was the Soviet Union had 4 ICBMs, while the United States had 60.  "The myth about the Soviet missile superiority was convenient for both the Soviet leadership and the American military industrial complex, which was getting huge contracts," Vlast magazine said in 1998. [info 1, 2]

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States was left without an adversary. Enter the terrorists.

The very real attacks of September 11, 2001 were followed up with the ludicrousness of the Iraq War ($806,461,347,247+), TSA pat downs of the elderly ($60,000,000,000), and the Afghanistan War ($560,632,366,805+).  

Think about the term "weapons of mass destruction" - how vague can you get? War on terrorism - how vague can you get?

Reason is a casualty of the terrorism delusion. The Taliban gets funding from U.S. taxpayers.

Terrorism experts spouted off before the London Olympic Games about not being hired to criticize London's security and how that would endanger the games.

As reported here last February, Israel and the U.S. have been crying wolf [sources: 1, 2, 3] for years about Iran nearly having the bomb:

Israel wants to stop Iran. They may attack Iran. Emily Alpert at the Los Angeles Times put together this great list of Israel To Attack Iran headlines:

North Korea paraded some fake missiles on April 15, 2012 after a much publicized launch failure.  The missiles "appear to be a mishmash of liquid-fuel and solid-fuel components that could never fly together. Undulating casings on the missiles suggest the metal is too thin to withstand flight. Each missile was slightly different from the others, even though all were supposedly the same make. They don't even fit the launchers they were carried on."

The old "fake missiles" scam -- it's like it is 1965 all over again.

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Music Associations: Dire Straits - Money For Nothing; Flying Lizards - Money; Steve Miller - Take The Money And Run; The O’Jays - For The Love Of Money; Pink Floyd - Money












I guess we all like to be recognized not for one piece of fireworks, but for the ledger of our daily work.


I was certainly aware that this was a culmination of the work of 300,000 or 400,000 people over a decade and that the nation's hopes and outward appearance largely rested on how the results came out. With those pressures, it seemed the most important thing to do was focus on our job as best we were able to and try to allow nothing to distract us from doing the very best job we could.

Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I've been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about a thousand separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have.

I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that's setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, "If anything goes wrong here, it's not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it." And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that's the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off.
 

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Music Associations: Joe Jackson - Steppin' Out & Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon












Henderson, Minnesota = Hummingbirds
August 22, 2012

One of our travel stops last weekend was Henderson, MN.

Henderson was celebrating its hummingbird fair.

We had just arrived in town and were talking with some people, when from out of nowhere, a teeny-tiny old woman zipped up next to us and said, "You have to come see a film. It's almost started." She zipped off ahead, her tiny heart beating 21 times a second. The people we'd been talking to looked at us with a look that said, "You'd better go."

The old woman zipped from event to event, stopping barely to smell the flowers.

Bossy little bird.

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Music Associations: Katy Perry - Hummingbird Heartbeat, Seals & Crofts - Hummingbird,
and The Beatles - Mr. Kite "The Hendersons will all be there..."










Minnesota Corn
August 21, 2012

Traveling southwestern Minnesota this past weekend, I saw corn crops. Healthy corn. And that's nationally weird, locally normal.

The summer 2012 drought decimated the United States corn crop, except in Idaho due to irrigation and in Minnesota due to rain. Minnesota had some drought and some flooding. It kind of evened out. In the past two months, the record high corn prices went up by 50%.

A few days ago I saw this corn, but I also saw corn that was half its height.

Many Minnesota corn growers took advantage of the early spring and planted early. In other words, not only did they escape the drought, but they doubled up on corn harvests. They already had one harvest; they'll have another before the season is out.

Impressive corn.

Take another look at the picture. Is there a message in the corn?

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Music Association: Hot Butter - Popcorn
Cartoon Association: Bugs Bunny - Rabbit Punched "Get your hot buttered popcorn, folks! Get it while it's hot. Get it while it's buttered." [Quoted by Bugs Bunny & Michael Jordan in an Air Jordan commercial from about 1995.]






Road Construction Humor
August 20, 2012


Is that a tennis court or a giant shoe print in the lower left between the two crop circles?

Construction continues at the Interstate 494 interchange with US 169 in northwest Bloomington. It's a non-standard interchange that caused the Minnesota Department of Transportation to battle for years with the U.S. Department of Transportation. Non-standard means funny.

Those aren't crop circles. They are comically-large roundabouts.

The reason why the crop circles, I mean, roundabouts are so large is that winter lasts half the year in Minnesota. Snow plows are the one type of vehicle designed not to do "donuts" (aka 360°). And yet that is what a roundabout is -- a donut. (Mmm, donuts...)

In addition to the unusual roundabouts, federal standards say this sort of major interchange needs eight ramps to cover all the possibilities of going from one place to another. MN-DOT is leaving off two to save money.

This past weekend I drove through the construction that barely resembles the graphical rendering above. After the intersection, heading south on US 169, the southbound lanes divide. Just before the divide, a sign says, "Use both lanes." And I'm thinking, "Wait, if I'm using both lanes, that means I'm driving on the line. And if I'm driving on the line, then I'm going to end up in that construction DITCH!!!"

Use both lanes.

That's ridiculous.

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Music Associations: Yes - Roundabout and
Hall & Oates - Ditch Girl







Syrian News
August 16, 2012

The news out of Syria is sketchy.

Organizations like Amnesty International look at aerial photos to maintain their relevancy in an area that doesn't accept outsiders any more than it accepts insiders.

Here is an aerial photo of Aleppo, Syria from the past few weeks. As a studier of aerial photos and someone who looks out airplane windows, I can tell you with complete confidence that the stripey area is farmland. It's a grain-type of crop, based on the photo's graininess.

I can also tell you that at one time a house was at the southwest corner (upper right) of the farmfield. Before that house, there was a house to the east of it (it left). I can also tell you that an orchard is on the land to the east (left). And the farmfield has been shelled.

Three possibilities:

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Music Association: Evanescence - Field Of Innocence
Steven Wright Association: "I have the worlds largest collection of shells.
You may have seen it, I keep it spread out on beaches all over the world."

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