You know, you can just wander over to NASA and see about a zillion photos from the moon mission. I was just a little kid at the time, but I remember gathering around the teevee set to watch… to see… well, I’m not sure what we were looking at. It was a blurry black and white video of a guy in a white deep-sea-diver-looking space suit climbing down a ladder. I think. On a tiny teevee screen, it was essentially a Rorschach blot for each viewer to puzzle over.
The still photos, however, are very detailed, and wonderful to look at. According to NASA, this is the most popular image they’ve got:
That’s Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon. You can see the first man, Neil Armstrong, reflected in Buzz’s visor. Buzz’s real name is Edwin Eugene, so I’m not surprised he wanted to be called Buzz. Buzz is like a lot of the first astronauts. He went to West Point and got a degree in mechanical engineering. Then he became a fighter pilot during the Korean War. He flew 66 missions and shot down a couple of MiGs. After that, he got a doctorate in astronautics from MIT and became an astronaut. If you’re wondering who used to be astronauts, imagine if the captain of the football team was also the Valedictorian and a combat jet pilot.
His doctoral thesis was titled: Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous. I don’t have any inside information here, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts that it wasn’t plagiarized from Wikipedia. Well, that’s a pretty safe bet, as it was maybe the late 50s, but he didn’t copy it out of the Encyclopedia Britannica, either. People used to have to do something original to get a doctorate. And if you have a skeptical soul, and wonder if maybe some MiG kills are just tall stories from fighter pilots, remember that even back then, they put cameras on the guns in Sabre jets:
Buzz got featured in Life magazine with that one.
You can do a lot of interesting things with images now that weren’t possible just a few years ago. A fellow decided that he’d remove the gold tint from the image of Aldrin’s visor, and see what he could see in the visor. This is what he discovered.
Let’s zoom in a bit:
Yup. That little blue dot was me, watching on the teevee. Littel Known Fact: I’m the first person to photobomb a moon mission image. Although, for some inexplicable reason, the Guinness Book still disputes my claim. I guess I’ll have to eat 66 grapes in three minutes using my feet. Again. I did it before, but I didn’t know there was a contest.
The cable company did me a favor yesterday and turned off my cable service.
Now don’t get me wrong, we don’t get cable TV. Cable service is the only practical way we have of getting Intertunnel access ’round here. It’s not bad, exactly; but it ain’t good, either. It cost rather a lot, if you ask me, because they’re endlessly trying to get us to sign up for their bundled TV service, and it’s only a few dollars more than the wire and the modem we get from them. I don’t think you’re paying full freight for those two hundred channels of Dancing With Honey Boo Boo’s Bachelorette Fringe Mentalist: Special Victims Unit — I think I’m paying for them, and you’re all watching them. I still think I got the better part of that deal, however. The clerks at the cable place are endlessly fascinated with my wife’s obduracy in this regard. How could you go five minutes without TV? Are you deranged?
Well, yes, we are deranged, but what’s that got to do with it? Five minutes without TV is just fine, thanks, and we’d like to follow it up with another five minutes, and another, ad infinitum. But five minutes without Intertunnel access is a form of death sentence for us. We rely on it big time.
When I logged on yesterday, early, I got a bizarre message, purportedly from Time Warner Cable. It was a warning that a computer that was using my modem was infected with some form of the Zeus Trojan virus. It directed me to press a link at the bottom of the page to fix it. There was a problem. I didn’t believe the thing I was looking could possibly be legit. It had the font choice, layout, grammar, and syntax of a letter to the editor from someone that wore a hockey helmet and licked the window on the bus to grammar school, published in Highlights Magazine. I wish I took a screen capture of it, because I can’t really do it justice by describing it. It had yellow, blue, and red letters mixed in with black text. It was more absurd looking than a 1040 form.
I tried to ascertain if it was legit, but my Internet service was deader than disco, of course, so, how could I figure it out? We don’t have a landline phone, either. They’re always trying to sell us that to go along with How Gilligan Met Your Mother The Survivor On Hawaii Five-O. So I had to call the cable company on my cell phone. If the acoustics of the room and the demeanor of the people in it are any indication, Time Warner’s customer service is being subcontracted out to someone straining on the pot in a public men’s room in Bedlam.
So it turns out, the message was legit, which I had long since figured out, but still couldn’t believe. I got a lecture I didn’t need from a series of people that undoubtedly sat in the back row in high school and didn’t raise their hands much about Intertunnel security, along with a helpful suggestion that I download some of their fine McAfee software. The man on the phone pronounced it Mack AFF ee, between wipes, I think, so I knew he was really tuned in to Intertunnel security. I asked him if I should kill someone in Belize to restore my service, but he didn’t get the joke. He turned the Intertunnel back on for me rather than talk to me any more. I got cracking.
Let me go on record here, and stick my neck out a bit, just blue-skying, really, pants in the breeze: I don’t think you want the Zeus Trojan Virus on your computer. Now, I don’t know you all that well; maybe you’d like it. You might like TV, so anything’s possible. So maybe you’d like downloading six separate virus utilities, all of which look exactly like another virus to my eye, and running them all, some two or three times, on six different computers, each one coming up clean, until you finally find out that Russian mobsters have install a rootkit, and have keystroke copying capability, on your ten year old son’s ancient,Vista-hobbled rattletrap computer.
Tovarisch, if you’re listening, I hope you’re getting rich selling all his Minecraft logins, but I am beset by doubts.
I mean,actually do? Not lord over. Not feast on. Not interpolate. Not pontificate about. Not sit astraddle until you’re given a piece. What can you do, and do productively enough to make it worth your while to do it, with at least something left over for others when you’re done?
My brethren the Celts were the first in Europe to figure out iron. Bronze folks couldn’t compete with iron when push came to shove (and stab). But societies can quickly become more sophisticated than a bellows, some mud, and a hammer — and what one man can do, another can learn. To achieve true sophistication is to swim forward, like a shark. If you stand still, you can’t breathe, never mind go backwards. Backwards is death.
Well, you can lard rather a lot of supervision on top of the iron age. The division of labor yields economies of scale that produce much greater wealth with less effort. The iron age version of fellows with green eyeshades can add value. Management and innovation increase yields. You can mass-produce pointy things to poke your neighbors if they invade and still have enough to eat. Pretty soon Bessemer is converting while Carnegie counts the beans.
But there’s a limit to it. Eventually people who aren’t adding anything to the finished products insinuate themselves between the goodies and the people that produce the goodies. They are parasitical. The parasitical are generally good at only one thing: Blame. It’s someone else’s fault that there are fewer pointy metal things than before they cashed their first paycheck, and why there’s less to eat, too, though they look like a dirigible while everyone else looks like broomsticks.
Sophisticated economies have a lot of places to hide in and around them. Not contributing, but not missing any meals because of it. The process from the genesis to the dissemination of wealth is obscured by the complexity that is required to avoid having everyone approximately as skilled at everything as everyone else — no more, no less.
Lots of people desire economies to be returned at least partway to a state of nature, so that they can understand them again. Gold bugs and communists have more in common than you might think. But I ask them, and you, once again, what exactly do you know how to do? That man in the video can make a pointy iron thing out of mud and sticks. If civilization goes pear-shaped, as so many seem to be fervently praying for, what use are you to him? Gisele Bundchen will be camped outside this guy’s door instead of Tom Brady’s if we go neolithic again. His only question to her might be, “How are you going to stomp straw into my mud with those stilettos on?” The rest is conversation.
The dogs have died, or run away. The fleas are abroad in the land. What do you know how to do?
Regular readers of Sippican Cottage know it’s all about the cutting edge here. Tech, tech, tech. So today we turn our attention to the thorny procedure for properly excabulating your pondrefact. Let’s dive in, right after I write “form factor” a couple times. I’m not sure why I just wrote “form factor,” because “form factor” just means “size,” but I’m in the Tech Union of Reporters and Drudges, (TURD) and I’m required to write “form factor” instead of “size” all over the place. Which begs the question; why doesn’t anyone know what “begs the question” means anymore, or how to spell “its”? And what’s with all the “quotation marks”?
Of course if you have an iHassle, your pondrefact is bound to be based on a SnowWeasel entabulating fissile, and you’re going to need more than a firm grip to get at it; you’re going to need an iDriver.Unsure if you’re using an iYapple product? There’s two ways of identifying the product without an owner’s manual. First, look in your wallet. If there’s any folding money left in there, you’ve probably got a MicroSauce. If you don’t have a wallet, or if you have a wallet with velcro on it and keep it in your front pocket, you have a Linus. Another way to determine what kind of rig you’ve got is to check the power supply:
If you see something that looks like this, you have an oak baseboard, and ungrounded wiring even though there’s a three prong outlet. Also, your painter has delirium tremens and no dropcloth, and the crazy lady that used to live there put a piece of wallpaper over the hole the drunk electrician made in 1957 when he first tried to chop a hole in the baseboard and then realized there was a steam pipe in there. Never mind all that; the power supply’s white, and Steve Jobster loves that shite. It’s an iHassle
Luckily Steve Jobster has already thought of everything, at least as far as billing goes, and there’s a iWebsty you can access on the Intertunnel. (or if you’re older than 40, you can just turn it on and look at it instead of “accessing” it) If you’re using one of MicroSauce’s old viewers to look for the iDriver, because the lithium/paxil battery in your iHassle is dead and you can’t even spot a seam, never mind a screw, goddamnit, don’t despair. Just “M”power your CuRT and transNavigate to the caramel button on the iDriver at the iWebsty.
OK, now press the caramel button that looks like a Sesame Street manhole cover. Everything you’ve ever done, seen, or mumbled to yourself will immediately be uploaded to an NSA computer in a bunker in Montana, and if you have a credit card on file at iYapple, it’s going to get more exercise than a crack-addled triathlete. Never fear though; bin Laden’s dead, and they’ve already kicked in the door of that guy that uploaded The King’s Speech to the Pirate Bay, so the entire NSA’s hanging around doing nothing right about now. Just call them up and ask them what iTeration of the iHassle you’re running. If you’re using a MicroSauced product, you can skip the call to the NSA and just look for a big, metal plate riveted to the back of the box near the fan that sucks up all the dust bunnies and hurls them at your fatherboard. The fatherboard can be identified by the scorchmarks around the processor from trying to play videogames with all the shaders enabled, and the four cracks in it from the big metal plate’s rivets sticking through the case.
Alrighty then, now that we know what we’re running, lets look around the back and locate the pixel reservoir. Just follow the silver wire until you smell pixels. If you’re new to Tech Tock, we’ve discussed pixel odor at some length; but if you want to jump right in, they smell vaguely like radons, carbon credits, or the fellow in the last cubicle with the ponytail and the blotchy skin that wears sandals and doesn’t trim his toenails much.
Great. Now on to the exasoperating system you’re running. Look for the place the cable company still owns somewhere in your house. You’ll find one of three transmogrifiers, depending on your exasoperating system. It’ll be one of these three types:
On the left is the MicroSauce compatible innerface. The lights flash on the front to attract the attention of Walmart shoppers, but they don’t mean anything, so forget them. On the right is a rare black iInterface, but it’s all swoopy and curvy and falls off the table top a lot from lack of friction, so you know it’s a iYapple. The middle one is a Linus. It’s all about the command line, baby! OK, now let’s get to the meat of the process — the pondrefact:
That’s a pondrefact in the classic configuration. The pixels are routed by political affiliation. All the blogposts accusing the current president of being a secret Moslem Kenyan smoker are emitted through the red pixelpipes, the Twitter streams of pictures of the last president with a Hitler mustache are blasted through the blue tubes. It’s all about the tubes, people.
Alrighty, now reach in past the fan motor or the iSink and dust off the bolts on the pondrefact:
Now, replace the crystals with carbon-neutral lodestones or one of those black toenail things with all the memory in it.
Voila! Your pondrefact is now excabulated. Now you can get back to writing your sparkly vampire fanfiction and writing mock reviews of three wolf t-shirts on Amazon without fear of a breakdown.
Tag: She blinded me with science
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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