Well, Tuesday has rolled around again. Trash Day. The single black plastic bag is out on the curb already. Oh, yes; we have a curb now. When we moved here, the road just sort of trailed off into the lawn. They repaved the street last year, and installed a sidewalk. Everyone still walks in the street. There are many mysteries in Maine.
Anyway, let’s clean out the browser bookmarks, with an eye toward additional mysteries:
Mechanical computers are cool. It’s a mystery why we’d ever rely on software to do this. If you had a watchmaker on board, you could fix this under fire. And he’d only take up one extra bunk. If the software went on the blink, you’d have to sail to India to pick up forty guys to patch the code. Wrong.
How Bad Design Killed 10 Sailors and Wrecked a Destroyer
In older ships, speed is basically controlled by a forward/backward joystick. Push it forward and the ship accelerates. Pull it back and the boat slows or goes in reverse. Less than a year before the accident, the McCain’s controls were replaced by a digital system that swapped out manual controls with touchscreens.
It’s a mystery why they didn’t have 40 coders from the Punjab onboard.
NASA acknowledges it cannot quantify risk of Starliner propulsion issues
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched inside Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on June 5. Their mission is the first crew test flight on Boeing’s capsule before NASA clears Starliner for regular crew rotation flights to the space station. But after software setbacks, parachute concerns, and previous problems with its propulsion system, Boeing’s Starliner program is running more than four years behind SpaceX’s Dragon crew spacecraft, which flew astronauts to the station for the first time in 2020.
Hmm. Software setbacks. It’s a mystery why Boeing doesn’t just install 40 extra seats on the next rocket to sort all that out. Er, 39. Someone named Suni is already up there.
The Feds Are Skirting the Fourth Amendment by Buying Data
The Supreme Court ruled in 2018’s Carpenter v. United States that the government must have a warrant to track people’s movements through their cellphone data.
But governments are increasingly circumventing these protections by using taxpayer dollars to pay private companies to spy on citizens. Government agencies have found many creative and enterprising ways to skirt the Fourth Amendment.
It’s a mystery why anyone is surprised by this. I’m sure people will put this article on their Facefriends page, to complain about privacy some more.
‘Rare species’ not seen in the area for 50 years spotted on Arizona trail camera
While many associate the ocelot with “rain forests and maybe South America or Central America,” the felines do roam all the way north into Arizona and Texas, Ragan said.
It’s a mystery why I didn’t know that ocelots used to live in Arizona, then they didn’t, and now they do again, apparently.
The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud
These cloud-based management platforms could, by accident, after a hack, or intentionally, simultaneously shut down all their millions of solar panels (permanently). And then the entire European electricity grid would collapse. Given the recent findings of fine ethical hackers (DivD) and the confirmation from Dutch electricity network manager (TSO) TenneT, this is not a theoretical scenario.
It’s a mystery why people don’t understand that when you hook up solar panels to the grid, the grid owns you, not the other way around.
Genghis Khan, born under the name Timüjin, was an unlikely candidate to unify the warring Mongol tribes of his homeland, much less found a vast empire. The future emperor was the son of an outcast family — a family abandoned by its clan to die on the steppes. Yet it appears that he came to believe that he was divinely destined to unify the world — all the land under Tengri, the sky god of his shamanistic religious tradition. In an ascent marked by incredible political and military savvy, he proceeded to defeat a long string of ever more powerful enemies.
It’s a mystery why more people get their info on Timujin by watching John Wayne and Susan Hayward movies, and don’t watch Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol movie instead. Especially since the whole thing’s on YouTub:
Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse.
Another niche upcoming TV set is the Telly. The company’s TVs are free but allow the startup to track their owners, and they have a secondary screen for showing ads, including when the TV is off (the secondary screen can also display information like the weather or sports scores). Telly’s prospective owners must answer a long series of questions, like if they’re registered to vote and who their cell phone provider is, with the data used for ad targeting. Telly has discussed further potential ways to commercialize TV watching, such as letting people earn gift cards by filling out surveys (also to help targeted advertising) on the TV.
It’s a mystery why anyone would allow this into their home. But plenty of people will. By the way, this is part of a real Sony patent:
It’s a mystery why you don’t just stream It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World from an mp4 file from a desktop hard drive, and ponder why the title of the movie was too optimistic.
Happy Tuesday, everyone. Don’t forget to put out the trash.
6 Responses
Great news about the Ocelot. I’ve seen a Mexican Gray Wolf there, caught Apache & Gila trout in the mountains, but I’d give a lot to see an Ocelot.
But would you give a fig to see a feral pig?
The epic story of the stranded Spaceliner astronauts gets better.
Turns out their special Boeing spacesuits don’t fit in a seat on the Crew Dragon.
So I guess they’ll haveta sit on the floor. Or ride with the luggage.
As regards the big kitties, there’s absolutely cougars wandering the south Texas Trinity River bottoms. I’ve seen the paw prints (the size of my hand) not 50 feet from the back door of the house I moved into, a number of years ago. The locals hang notices about them on the boards at local feed stores. They follow the deer. Makes for an interesting hunting season.
Please, please, please have the gods send me a cougar. I woke up last night at 1:28 AM to see a buck mule deer, humongous rack covered in velvet, staring in at me through the bedroom window. Durn near gave the wife a heart attack when I yelled at him and grabbed the flashlight to startle him away.
Didn’t work…he just tripped over the downspout on his meander back into the yard to eat some more aspen saplings with his buddy, the other humongous buck. I swear they are the DUMBEST cervines on four legs. I live inside the edge of the city limits so I can’t discharge a firearm, but I keep hitting them with the the rocks I throw at ’em. The jump and shudder, move 50 feet away, and look at me with an expression that says, “Wha…?” I’m thinking of buying a paintball gun with different colored balls. I’ll hit ’em once a day with different colors, and in a week they’ll look like circus clowns.
Can an ocelot take down a deer? It’d be worth importing them to NW Wyoming to give them a chance.
We have mountain lions! Had a mom and fully grown year old twins casually meander through our place a couple of years ago! Beautifully filled out and clean coats. We didn’t worry them a bit!
Anne:
We’ve got mountain lions here, too, but they stay up on the side of the mountain. The few times (in the past 5 years) one has come across the highway has been a major kerfuffle. Everybody freaks out, and the animal is usually shot by somebody claiming (a la South Park), “It was coming right for me!”
I was hiking up the side of the mountain a couple of years ago and came across fresh cougar scat and paw prints in the trail. That’ll make you look up into the few trees hanging over the trail for the rest of your hike. It’s just one of the reasons most people out in the wild here in WY carry a firearm.