I have cancer, blast it all.
It's prostate cancer. While that's what took Dad, usually this is the one you want to get because it's slow growing. Except for mine. Hey Borepatch - Nice Gleason score!
It seems that it's nothing but the finest, most aggressive prostate cancer for Mom Borepatch's little blogger.
And there's no waiting around for things to get scheduled and approved. Holy cow, things got lined up toute suite. I guess that's good, but it's not a great sign.
Huh:
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The Florida Department of Transportation on Monday revoked all existing permits for automated license plate readers installed by local law enforcement in state highway rights-of-way and said it will stop approving any new installations, citing an “exponential increase” in deployments, reports of misuse, data privacy concerns and “surveillance schemes.”
The Engineering and Operations Memorandum, signed by Will Watts, P.E., FDOT’s chief operating officer and assistant secretary, directs local agencies to remove the devices within 30 days. If they do not, the department said it will take them down. FDOT reserved the right to immediately remove any unit that poses a safety hazard.
From my perspective, the biggest immediate problem with the Flock system is that it has a very weak authentication and audit system. This likely makes abuse of the system hard to find. And given the widespread abuse that has been reported, that makes you wonder just how much abuse is happening.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, Flock. I mean, after all - if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to worry about, amirite?
Well done, FLDOT.
It's rare that we see an honest-to-goodness saint these days. It's even rarer to see one in the entertainment industry. Dolly Parton was one.
Her father never learned to read, growing up in Depression era eastern Tennessee, but she always said that he was really intelligent and always wondered what he could have done if he had had access to books. So she started her Imagination Library 31 years ago.
The charity has given away a third of a billion children's books. I don't think that I've seen anyone in my lifetime (celebrity or not) that has had this big a positive influence world wide.
As I said, a saint.
Her enormous success as an entertainer allowed her to do this. Here is a quick recap of just how enormous that success was. Note that the numbers are low because I took them from a 16 year old post, so she was even bigger than this:
Yet she said that the greatest honor she's received is a bronze statue
on the Courthouse lawn in her hometown. She was more properly called Dr.
Dolly Parton - she received an honorary degree for her decades of work
to increase literacy. Eastern Tennessee had a real problem with that
when she was born in 1946.
Through it all, she's kept her sense of humor. Famous (or infamous) for
her showy outfits and huge wigs (among - ahem - other things), she has
been known to say "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap." When Dolly was originally on the UK TV's Graham Norton Show, Graham was wearing quite a loud suit, for which he apologized. Without batting an eye, Dolly said Don't you worry yourself, my aunt had a sofa just like it. It was instant chemistry, and Norton and Parton became great friends, to the point where he recorded a duet of Islands In The Stream with her at her theme park, Dollywood.
Unusually for an entertainment celebrity, she was married to her husband, Carl Dean, for almost 60 years until his death. When asked if she was going to remarry, she demurred, saying I don’t think I’ll ever be married but once. I think Carl’s waiting for me on the other side, and if I turned up at the pearly gates with somebody else, he wouldn’t like that! He’d be saying, ‘Who’s that little [bleep]? You leave him outside the gates and if the Lord wants him in here, you get on in here with me!
Needless to say, The Queen Of The World and I are huge Dolly Parton fans. There's a real sense of loss in her passing, that we shall not see her like again. But our loss is Heaven's gain. Like I said, a saint.
So long, Dolly. Thanks for making the World a better place.
The Queen Of The World and I are saddened by the passing of Dolly Parton. But neither of us are unsure of whether she has been reunited with her husband of 60 years on the far side of the Pearly Gates. While she was not in this version of the song, I'd be astonished if she would not have been able to sing this from memory.
Scott Rank hosts the "History Unplugged" podcast. He excels at highlighting interesting books. We've seen him here before, talking about "The Rifle" where a veteran gets World War II veterans to autograph his M1 Garand, about the tank duel in front of Cologne Cathedral, and about an interesting conservative blog and podcast.
He has a fascinating episode up about how analysis of ancient DNA is entirely rewriting our understanding of "Deep History" - things older than around 10,000 years:
Humanity’s story from 10,000 BC to 3,000 BC (from the end of the ice age to the beginning of civilizations) follows this pattern: primitive hunter-gatherers slowly progressed to farmers, then to village-builders, then to city-dwellers and kings. With enough food surplus to free up everyone from having to farm, religion, medicine, and art developed. But a revolution in archaeological science has completely rewritten the human past. Tools like ancient DNA sequencing, isotope analysis, LiDAR scanning, ground-penetrating radar, and high-precision radiocarbon dating are completely rewriting what we know about the ancient past. For example, the Natufians of the Levant, living between roughly 14,500 and 11,500 years ago, built permanent stone villages, stored food, buried their dead with elaborate grave goods, and developed complex social hierarchies — all before farming a single crop.
We’re going to look at other recent discoveries that have changed what we know about the Ice Age and Neolithic periods, and we’re joined by is Patrick Wyman, author of Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World. We cover the Copper Age megacity beneath modern Spain that was abandoned so completely it wasn’t rediscovered until the 1990s. We talk about Ukraine’s Trypillia culture, which built cities of tens of thousands of people, with no kings, no temples, and no walls. We look at the Neolithic mass graves of central Europe that shattered the myth of the peaceful early farmer, a single Polish burial site where DNA, isotopes, and radiocarbon dating together revealed a family massacre tied to the very moment steppe migrants were pushing into the region.
Highly recommended.
Admiral Collingwood was Nelson's second in command at Trafalgar, and led the second division of ships of the line on HMS Royal Sovereign. Because this was the Age of Sail and because the wind was so light, HMS Sovereign was under fire for an hour as it approached the French/Spanish battle line. But the day ended as Collingwood had predicted to his officers earlier. Now, gentlemen, let us do something today which the world may talk of hereafter.
As we are today.
The news is that the Union Jack flag flown from the Royal Sovereign was purchased at auction last year by a foreign buyer and was set to leave the country. As one of only three surviving flags from the battle, historic preservation laws were invoked by the UK Ministry of Culture and the export was suspended to allow local UK organizations to match the purchase price.
Well, that has been done, and the flag will be displayed at the Discovery Museum at Newcastle-on-Tyne, Collingwood's home town*.
Bravo Zulu to the donors for preserving part of Britain's Royal Navy heritage.
* And not just Collingwood - many of Royal Sovereign's crew came from Newcastle as well.
You should backup your data. You should have multiple backups of your data. You should have multiple rotating or rolling backups of your data. You should have multiple rotating or rolling backups of your data saved to different types of backup media. Ideally, you should have multiple rolling or rotating backups of your data saved to different types of backup media including off-site backups.
Evidently, a PBS station didn’t follow any of these rules. Instead they handed their data to a third-party, said “Here, we’ll pay you to store it for us,” and now they’re screwed because the company went defunct.
Le sigh. Lawrence brings the hammer down on their IT organization:
Nor can this PBS station plead poverty: “2022 their gross income was [about] $13.5 million expenses 12.8 million. Their net was 3/4 of a million. So the net that is what they got to keep after paying all the employee salaries, after paying the directors 700,000 bucks.” Yeah, they could afford a local backup solution.
And quite frankly, so can you. ASM826 and I wrote at length about this a decade ago.
They keep saying this every year, and I keep saying what I say every year. First, what they say:
July was “a wild weather month,” setting a record as the warmest month ever for the contiguous United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday.
Temperatures last month averaged 76.9 degrees Fahrenheit as above-average warmth blanketed the U.S., and several locations in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Montana saw all-time high temperature records since NOAA started keeping track in 1895.
Last month was 0.1 to 0.2 degrees warmer than July 1936 and July 2012, according to the agency. July also broke the record for the average low temperature, at 64.2 degrees, surpassing July 2022 by 0.7 degrees.
Notice how slippery this report is: several locations in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Montana saw all-time high temperature records. So what about the State high temperature records for those locations? And this is where I say what I've been saying for like a decade or more:
You want to see a real heat wave? Look at July 1936. Eleven States set high temperature records that stand to this day. That Wikipedia page is a little shifty on this, trying to hide the decline in record temperatures. You'll see an asterisk next to South Dakota, which the Wiki page says means Also on earlier date or dates in that state. So what was that earlier date for South Dakota? July 1936.Everyone is shifty on climate data. So what gives? It's the old expression from Statistics: if you torture the data enough, it will confess to anything. Here's how they torture the data:
Oh, and three more States set high temperature records the next month, August 1936. That makes 14 out of the 50 States suffered record high temperatures in the summer of 1936. That's almost 30% of the States.
The reported warming trend appears to be driven mainly by rising nighttime low temperatures. Because climate “averages” combine daytime highs and nighttime lows, warmer nights can make the overall average look higher even when daytime high temperatures do not show the same increase.
...
NOAA adjusts older weather-station records to account for non-climate changes, such as stations moving, equipment changing, or observers recording temperatures at different times of day. Its Pairwise Homogenization Algorithm (PHA) compares a station with nearby stations to identify and correct apparent breaks in the record.
Remember, they adjust the measured ("raw") temperatures, but they don't adjust the record temperatures (because that would be way too shifty). So (as I've been posting for years), how much of the 20th Century's warming is from adjustments? It's 80%:
An interesting question is how much of the 20th Century's warming came from adjustments, rather than from raw data? A picture is worth a thousand words:And what Science®-denying Tea-Bagging place did I get that? From the Fed.Gov's weathermen, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).What you're looking at is the annual adjustment made to the raw temperature, for each year in the 20th Century. You'll notice that almost no adjustments are made to years up to 1960, and then a very interesting shape appears in the graph.
A hockey Stick.
So the data are fiddled to the point that over 80% of the reported warming cannot be found in the data as recorded. Its in the adjustments to the data after the fact.
And so we're left with three observations:
Hey, Bustah!
Two items of note here. First up, Baltic shipwreck champagne was destined for Tsar Alexander II:
Meticulous research into the bottles of champagne found in a shipwreck discovered in the Baltic sea south of the Swedish island of Öland in July 2024, has uncovered that they were destined for the table of Tsar Alexander II.
The well-preserved remains of the 19th century ship were found 190 feet deep by technical divers from the Baltictech Association. The ship stayed upright when it sank to the seabed, and the cold waters of the Baltic were ideal storage conditions for dozens of glass wine bottles and stoneware Selters mineral water bottles....
The team reached out to Louis Roederer to find out more about the bottles, perform chemical analyses of the liquid inside the bottle and advise them on recovering a few samples. As luck would have it, one of Roederer’s champagne experts, Peter Liem, is also an experienced technical diver, so he was able to go down to the wreck and point specific bottles to recover. One was tested in Sweden, and several sent to Louis Roederer ChampagMeticulous research into the bottles of champagne found in a shipwreck discovered in the Baltic sea south of the Swedish island of Öland in July 2024, has uncovered that they were destined for the table of Tsar Alexander II.
The well-preserved remains of the 19th century ship were found 190 feet deep by technical divers from the Baltictech Association. The ship stayed upright when it sank to the seabed, and the cold waters of the Baltic were ideal storage conditions for dozens of glass wine bottles and stoneware Selters mineral water bottles....
The team reached out to Louis Roederer to find out more about the bottles, perform chemical analyses of the liquid inside the bottle and advise them on recovering a few samples. As luck would have it, one of Roederer’s champagne experts, Peter Liem, is also an experienced technical diver, so he was able to go down to the wreck and point specific bottles to recover. One was tested in Sweden, and several sent to Louis Roederer Champagne House in Reims for analysis.
The champagne contains 110 grams of sugar per liter and 12% alcohol and it is not just still drinkable, according to Peter Liem, it is “glorious:”ne House in Reims for analysis.
The champagne contains 110 grams of sugar per liter and 12% alcohol and it is not just still drinkable, according to Peter Liem, it is “glorious:”
Actually, the floor of the Baltic Sea is likely to be an ideal storage environment to age Champagne. The temperature is just above freezing and doesn't change over the course of a year (or century).
Next up: Name of 8th c. Maya astronomer deciphered
A text of Maya glyphs painted on a Classic period (250–900 A.D.) building at the ancient site of Xultun, Guatemala, has been discovered to record an astronomical formula that concludes with the name of its author: “so says Sak Tahn Waax” (meaning White-Chested Fox). He is the first mathematician and astronomer in the Americas known by name.
The glyphs were in a hidden (lost?) room inside a pyramid. You have to wonder how much more hidden history is waiting discovery.
