Downstream prosperity

Via Chris Lynch, this is a very interesting post: 

You’ve probably heard of the PayPal Mafia. When eBay bought PayPal in 2002 its founders took the money, scattered, and built the next generation of digital monopolies.

Peter Thiel founded Palantir and seeded Facebook. Reid Hoffman set up LinkedIn. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen started YouTube. Max Levchin founded Affirm.

Elon Musk—who had merged X.com into PayPal two years earlier—went a different direction. He took his payout and leased a small warehouse in the El Segundo area of LA.

He bolted a sign on the front that read “Space Exploration Technologies Corp.”

We all know where that's gone. 

Most people still think SpaceX is “just” a rocket company. But it’s actually a machine for producing world-class talent. A talented engineer takes a job at SpaceX, learns the Elon Musk “way” of solving impossible problems, then graduates as a force of nature ready to transform other industries.

After meeting dozens of SpaceX graduates in warehouses across LA, I’m convinced:

The SpaceX Mafia will create more wealth than the PayPal Mafia—possibly more than all of Silicon Valley combined.


If you can track only one alumni group in business today, this is the one. SpaceX is the new Harvard.

A hedge fund buddy of mine told me: “I’d pay real money for a database of ex-SpaceX employees.”

The article then goes on to list four companies founded by SpaceX alums - the "SpaceX Mafia" who are already solving really hard (and expensive) problems.  Only two are space companies. 

 Highly, highly recommended.

The 2026 sports photo of the year

The horse on the left is Golden Tempo, a 23-1 long shot who won the Kentucky Derby.  The jockey is Jose Ortiz who won the Kentucky Oaks race yesterday - only the ninth jockey to win both in the same year.

The horse on the right is Renegade, at 4-1. The jockey is Irad Ortiz, Jr., Jose's brother.  Irad has won the Belmont Stakes twice.

That's a horse riding Dynasty. 

Efficiency and the Space program

danielbarger left a comment to yesterday's post about Starship:

As long as we are limited to chemical rockets where 90% of the weight is fuel and rocket with only 10% payload we will never be able to make use of the solar systems resources efficiently. The problem is there is no viable alternative...not even a theoretical one. It's an enormous hurdle to becoming a space faring species.

I have two comments.

1.  Efficiency factors into the price.  Starship may get the cost of payload to orbit down to $50/pound.  That's what King Crab costs.  It's hard to call this "inefficient" when it is reducing cost by three orders of magnitude.
2. Agreed with danielbarger and others that this does not get us to Interstellar travel.   The DC-3 didn't get us to the moon, either, but it was a damn fine start.  

I'd like to see where things are 30 years from now.  For sure we won't still be on Starship but we will be a lot further ahead than we are now.  And guaranteed people will no longer be optimizing for mass.

Casey Handmer covers this well in the post I linked to:

Consider the two critical metrics: Dollars per tonne ($/T) and tonnes per year (T/year). Any effective space transport cargo logistics system must aggressively optimize both these metrics simultaneously. Starship is intended to reach numbers as low as $1m/T and 1000 T/year for cargo soft landed on the Moon. Apollo achieved about $2b/T and 2 T/year for cargo soft landed on the Moon. Constellation 2.0 as described above [NASA's SLS-to-the-moon program - Borepatch] would be more like $4b/T and 2 T/year.

Not only is this architecture obviously worse than Starship, it’s also significantly worse than Apollo or any existing lunar delivery system. For example, the Blue Moon lander could be flown on Falcon Heavy, delivering perhaps 10 T to the surface for <$200m. Indeed, the Constellation architecture is worse than the current state-of-the-art by roughly the same factor that Starship promises to be better. That is, it takes the key metrics of $/T and T/year and runs as far as possible in the wrong direction. It is also a programmatic dead end, since none of the individual components can be upgraded in a meaningful way without restarting development of the entire system from scratch. It’s an expensive, interlocking failure.

I'd say that Starship is an enormous efficiency improvement. 

Starship - Past and Future

The Silicon Graybeard (among others) links to a really interesting video from SpaceX about Starship:

Something that needs to be shared is a video from SpaceX, called Starship - Test Like You Fly and while it's nearly a half hour long, it's absolutely worth watching. 

That's near-term Starship past and (implied) future.  But watching it made me think about a 2021 post from Casey Handmer - Starship Is Still Not Understood.  In it, he remarks on just how far Starship had come in the previous couple of years:

While I am 100% certain that the Starship design will continue to evolve in noticeable ways, the progress in two years cannot be understated. Two years ago Starship was a design concept and a mock up. Today it’s a 95% complete prototype that will soon fly to space and may even make it back in one piece.

The odds of Starship actually working in the near future are much higher today than they were two years ago. Across the industry, decisions are being made on a time horizon in which Starship operation is relevant, and yet it is not being correctly accounted for.

He then goes on to lay it all out: 

Starship matters. It’s not just a really big rocket, like any other rocket on steroids. It’s a continuing and dedicated attempt to achieve the “Holy Grail” of rocketry, a fully and rapidly reusable orbital class rocket that can be mass manufactured. It is intended to enable a conveyor belt logistical capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) comparable to the Berlin Airlift. That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts launch below the API.

Starship is designed to be able to launch bulk cargo into LEO in >100 T chunks for <$10m per launch, and up to thousands of launches per year. By refilling in LEO, a fully loaded deep space Starship can transport >100 T of bulk cargo anywhere in the solar system, including the surface of the Moon or Mars, for <$100m per Starship. Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows, in addition to serving other incidental destinations, such as maintaining the Starlink constellation or building a big base at the Lunar south pole.

The fact that Starship flown expendably would be perhaps 10 times cheaper, in terms of dollars per tonne, than even Falcon is not relevant.

Jerry Pournelle used to say that the only space metric that counted was cost per ton delivered to orbit.  I don't see this as a Berlin Airlift; it's a Liberty Ship.  Mass Produced in huge numbers and able to shuttle large amounts of generic cargo to and from space.  Handmer emphasizes this point:

Historically, mission/system design has been grievously afflicted by absurdly harsh mass constraints, since launch costs to LEO are as high as $10,000/kg and single launches cost hundreds of millions. This in turn affects schedule, cost structure, volume, material choices, labor, power, thermal, guidance/navigation/control, and every other aspect of the mission. Entire design languages and heuristics are reinforced, at the generational level, in service of avoiding negative consequences of excess mass. As a result, spacecraft built before Starship are a bit like steel weapons made before the industrial revolution. Enormously expensive as a result of embodying a lot of meticulous labor, but ultimately severely limited compared to post-industrial possibilities.

Starship obliterates the mass constraint and every last vestige of cultural baggage that constraint has gouged into the minds of spacecraft designers. There are still constraints, as always, but their design consequences are, at present, completely unexplored. We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production. Or, more generally, maximizing some robust utility function assuming saturation of Starship launch capacity. A dollar spent on mass optimization no longer buys a dollar saved on launch cost. It buys nothing.

The implications are huge, and probably require a change in the institutions themselves (e.g. JPL and NASA):

NASA centers and their contractors build exquisitely complex and expensive robots to launch on conventional rockets and explore the universe. To take JPL as an example, divide the total budget by the mass of spacecraft shipped to the cape and it works out to about $1,000,000/kg. I’m not certain how much mass NASA launches to space per year but, even including ISS, it cannot be much more than about 50 T. This works out to between $100,000/kg for LEO bulk cargo and >$1,000,000/kg for deep space exploration.

Enter Starship. Annual capacity to LEO climbs from its current average of 500 T for the whole of our civilization to perhaps 500 T per week. Eventually, it could exceed 1,000,000 T/year. At the same time, launch costs drop as low as $50/kg, roughly 100x lower than the present. For the same budget in launch, supply will have increased by roughly 100x. How can the space industry saturate this increased launch supply?

...

This is where the risk to the space industry originates. Prior to Starship, heavy machinery for building a Moon base could only come from NASA, because only NASA has the expertise to build a rocket propelled titanium Moon tractor for a billion dollars per unit. After Starship, Caterpillar or Deere or Kamaz can space qualify their existing commodity products with very minimal changes and operate them in space. In all seriousness, some huge Caterpillar mining truck is already extremely rugged and mechanically reliable. McMaster-Carr already stocks thousands of parts that will work in mines, on oil rigs, and any number of other horrendously corrosive, warranty voiding environments compared to which the vacuum of space is delightfully benign. A space-adapted tractor needs better paint, a vacuum compatible hydraulic power source, vacuum-rated bearings, lubricants, wire insulation, and a redundant remote control sensor kit.

I suspect that Jared Isaacson understands this.  The Space industry five years from now will be very, very different that any projections we can make today.  Starship's future - while brightly described in SpaceX's outstanding video - is much more interesting than almost anyone suspects.

Earth Day

I would have something to say about this nonsense but The Silicon Graybeard has it pretty much covered.

Miguel, too. 

Artificial Intelligence confirms Borepatch

Sixteen (!) years ago I posted about how the climate databases did not show any warming since 1850:

So what does the raw data look like for all 4495 stations?

Other than a short term blip in the 1990s, we see no warming at all since 1850. None.

Let me say this simply: The raw (unadjusted) weather data from the largest historical data set shows no warming for the last 150 years.

Now Grok 4.1 has answered a query about the same subject:

When correlated systematic errors and the realistic treatment of infilling problems are properly accounted for, the global mean temperature curve before 1950–1970 (and partly even today) cannot physically be determined with an accuracy better than ±0.5–1 °C. Consequently, a claimed trend of +1.3 °C since 1850 is **not significantly distinguishable** from a zero trend. This is not “skeptical exaggeration”; it is simply what error theory and metrology **mandate**

So you can't show any warming that is statically valid.  Always trust content from Borepatch! 

I'll just wait quietly over here for my long-delayed Nobel Prize ...

Friday Night Rumba*

45 minutes of sultry music.  You're welcome.

*See what I did there?

The Aral Sea is coming back to life

This is unexpected good news.  You have to click through to watch because embedding is disabled.  

Update on the Bluehammer exploit

Steven emails in to ask if this is real.

1. Yes, this is a real vulnerability. 

2. It impacts all Windows 10 and 11 systems.

3. There is still no patch from Microsoft (i.e. a true Day Zero exploit)

4. A successful exploit results in exceptionally bad things happening (access to the SAM database, get password hashes, and Administrator privileges). 

5. The exploit code has been posted to Github.  This is Biblically bad - fire and brimstone, etc.

The only good news (and it is legitimately good news) is that this does not look like it can be exploited remotely.  Corporate IT departments will be pulling their hair out about their users gaining Admin access to their corporate laptop, but users at home shouldn't panic (you are already admin).

Microsoft has not covered themselves in glory here - heck Forbes has an article on this.  That's not good PR. In my experience, Microsoft was pretty good at disclosure, but that was a long time ago.

Also, the researcher did not cover himself with glory either.  There are something like a billion vulnerable systems out there and he uploaded the warez to Github?  Not cool. 

And all of a sudden, I was ten years old

I am surprised at my reaction to the Artemis II mission.  I mean, it's a huge bucket of money to throw at well connected aerospace contractors - and one that imperils the astronauts because it's so expensive that they couldn't really test the heat shield.

And yet suddenly it's 1968 and the teachers are rolling televisions into the classroom so we can watch the spaceships return to Earth.

Sure, it's crazy expensive, but we just sent men people around the damn Moon.

And we did it without that ridiculous Metric System ... 

For a moment, America is the Old America that can do things.

Doris Day - Fly me to the moon

Yeah Artemis is crazy expensive, but it's still a big deal. 

And we love us some Doris Day ...

Miklós Rózsa - Overture to Ben Hur

When it was released in 1959, Beh Hur became the second highest grossing film in history (behind Gone With The Wind) - saving MGM from bankruptcy.  It won an astonishing 11 Academy Awards, including best musical scoring by composer Miklós Rózsa. 

It's good music for Easter.  I hope that you (like we) are enjoying it with family. 

Where's Borepatch?

The Queen Of The World's son is visiting for Easter, along with his best buddy Mario from Basic Training.  The weather was perfect, and so we met up with one of his High School buddies who happened to be here:

Anna Maria Island, off Sarasota Bay.  The High School buddy brought a drone and took this photo.  Yeah, I'm down there somewhere.

Man, I love Florida. 

I Didn't See This Until Today

 Obviously, I'm a couple of days late. 

The photo of the year for America's 250th birthday

Photo via The Silicon Graybeard.

Sure, NASA spends taxpayer money like a drunken sailor.  Sure, Congress is using this program to throw taxpayer money at favored corporations.

But today, no other country can do what we are doing, just like what Old America did half a century ago.  And no other country has a SpaceX waiting in the wings to drop mission cost by a factor of 40. 

Considering the epic amount of fraud from California's (and other states) Medicare programs (not to mention Learing Centers), all I can say is that this is waste I can get behind.

OPSEC

The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, the only nuclear powered carrier outside the U.S. Navy, is en route to the Mid-East as part of the French response to recent events in the region. As it is sailing into harm's way, security would understandably be high. The exact location of the ship would be classified.

Strava is a fitness app athletes use to record their activities running or cycling. It's very popular and can be used to allow athletes on training equipment paired with the app to compete with one another or share their individual results with friends or interested fans. Results can be published in near realtime.

The French officer that was getting in a 7 kilometer run on the deck of the ship is  was a Strava user. The GPS coordinates of his run pinpointed the location of the flagship in real time. The location was confirmed with publicly available satellite photos.

A French armed forces spokesman said the reported incident did "not comply with the current instructions" and appropriate measures would be taken.

 

 

 

Hector Berlioz - "Resurrexit" from Messe Solennelle

Holy Week calls for the Big Guns of classical music.  Hector Berlioz was one of these, and his Messe Solennelle is one of the great works of religious music.  Astonishingly, Berlioz was only twenty years old when he wrote this, and then destroyed the music for Messe Solennelle (except for the Resurrexit portion).

A copy of the entire work was discovered in 1991. 

LOL

I never looked at it that way. 

Apple's iPhones and iPads are now certified for NATO classified data

Wow.  And just plain-jane iOS, too.  Out of the box. 

As someone who ran across (into?) "Secure Operating Systems" more than once, this is a big deal. 

Chuck Norris - The Eyes of the Ranger Are Upon You

Rest in peach, sir. 

The Eyes of the Ranger Are Upon You (Songwriter: Tirk Wilder)

In the Eyes of a Ranger, the unsuspecting Stranger, 
had better know the truth of wrong from night
Cause the rule of law and order starts at the Texas border, 
with the lone Star of the Ranger shining bright. 

For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you;
Any wrong you do, he's gonna see.
When you're in Texas look behind you; 
for that's where the Ranger's gonna be.

In the Heart of a Ranger he'll never know the danger; 
from desperate men with nothing left to lose, 
the Ranger keeps on coming; so there ain't no sense in running, 
cause he's bound and sure to make you pay your dues.

For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you;
Any wrong you do, he's gonna see.
When you're in Texas look behind you; 
for that's where the Ranger's gonna be.

When a Ranger's on your Trail, he won't know how to fail, 
and you can't buy him off at any price; 
so if you decide to ramble, and with your life you'd gamble, 
know where you are before you roll the dice.

For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you;
Any wrong you do, he's gonna see.
When you're in Texas look behind you; for
that's where the Ranger's gonna be.

If you see him coming' round the outskirts of town, 
never take that Ranger for a ride.
For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you;
Any wrong you do, he's gonna see.
When you're in Texas look behind you; for
that's where the Ranger's gonna be. 

Yes, that's sung by Chuck himself.

But this is the song that I associate the most with him.  R.I.P. 

GPS jamming in the straight of Hormuz

This is not surprising, but it is pretty interesting, especially the guy in Dubai where Google Maps puts him in the middle of the straight. The discussion about why the Iranians probably have not mined the straight is also pretty interesting.

Update on the Herculaneum scrolls

As background, I've posted several times on the Herculaneum scrolls, here here and here.  That last link in particular is a fairly pain-free Youtube video about what the Big Deal is.

And a Big Deal it certainly is.  In short: when Mt. Vesuvius buried the Roman town of Pompeii in 79 AD, it also buried it's more prosperous neighbor Herculaneum.  One of the (very) rich Romans who lived in Herculaneum was likely the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, and had one of the biggest libraries in the Empire.  The extreme heat of the lava flow carbonized the scrolls (books).  Researchers have been using CAT scans to image the carbonized rolls and have been applying AI to "unroll" the scrolls virtually and distinguish between carbon-based ink and just plain old scroll carbon.  They are starting to read scrolls that have been lost for 2000 years.

 Like I said, this is a Big Damn Deal.

If this interests you, there is a must read essay on what's been happening over the previous 18 months, the progress that's being made, and the challenges that are still present.  This part is really, really interesting:

So the central question has shifted from whether text could be recovered at all to whether it could be done routinely. At the current pace, processing the full Herculaneum library would take several years. The Vesuvius Challenge Master Plan, published in July 2025, outlines a series of steps intended to compress that timeline. These include improved surface extraction, deeper automation, and tools designed to reduce manual intervention at every stage.

According to Schilling, the problem is not that current methods fail outright, but that they require too much human steering.

“It’s not as fast or effective or cheap as it should be,” he told me. “Right now, we have solutions that work but that require human input.” What researchers want instead is a “global optimal solution” — a system that can isolate papyrus surfaces, unwrap them, and detect ink reliably across many scrolls without constant correction.

We're not there yet, but people are starting to figure out how to get there.  And it looks like there are a bunch of scrolls that were entirely lost over time that we will be able to read:

These scrolls are believed to contain Greek prose that largely vanished elsewhere, including philosophical works from the Epicurean tradition that were rarely recopied because they conflicted with Christian doctrine.

Very, very cool

 

An Open Source Intelligence assessment of the Iran war

Via a link from HMS Defiant (who is on quite a roll lately), this is a very interesting analysis of the war from Open Source Intelligence sources (i.e. non-classified published sources).  Very, very interesting indeed.

Turlough O'Carolan - various Irish tunes

Top o' the morning to you, and happy St. Patrick's Day (almost).  This is my traditional Paddy's Day post, mostly because I love the music here.

What is the "Classical Music" of Ireland? It's not (Italian) Opera, or (German) symphonies, or even an (English) homage to Ralph Vaughan Williams (who studied under an Irish music professor) "countryside music" in the concert hall. Instead, we find something ancient. 

We find something that easily might not have been.  Turlough O'Carolan (1670 – 25 March 1738) was the son of a blacksmith.  His father took a job for the MacDermot Roe family; Mrs. MacDermot Roe gave the young lad some basic schooling and saw in him a talent for poetry; when a few years later the 18 year old Turlough went blind after a bout of smallpox, she had him apprenticed to a harpist.  He soon was travelling the land, composing and singing.

This tradition was already ancient by the early 1700s.  it was undeniably Celtic, dating back through the Middle Ages, through the Dark Ages, through Roman times to a barbarous Gaul.  There bards travelled the lands playing for their supper on the harp.

This was O'Carolan's stock in trade.  He rapidly became the most famous singer in the Emerald Isle.  It is said that weddings and funerals were delayed until he was in the vicinity.  One of his most famous compositions - if you have spent any time at all listening to Irish music, you know this tune - was considered too "new fangled" by the other harpists of his day.  Fortunately, he didn't listen to their criticisms.

 

He married very late, at 50, and had many children.  But his first love was Brigid, daughter of the Schoolmaster at a school for the blind.  He always seemed to have carried a torch for her.

 

So why is this post in the normal slot reserved for Classical Music?  Listen to this composition of his, and you see the bridge from the archaic Celts to Baroque harpsichord.

 

And keep in mind how this brilliance might never have blazed, had Mrs. MacDermot Roe not seen the talent in a blind Irish boy and set him upon a path trod by many equally unexpected geniuses, all the way back to St. Patrick.  It is truly said that we never know what our own path will be until we set our foot down on it.

But his was an ancient path and he inherited much from those who trod it before him.  His "Farewell to Music" is said to be more in the traditional mold, and might have been appreciated at a feast held by Vercingetorix before the battle of Alesia.

This music is a bridge between modern and the ancient that disappears into the mists of legend.  Perhaps more importantly, it is a music that is still alive today, after a run of perhaps two and a half millennia.  

And it is a music where you still hear the yearning of a young blind man for his muse, Brigid.  That is a vitality that should not be exiled to a single day of celebration, even if it is for as illustrious a Saint as Patrick.  On this Feast Day of St. Patrick (almost), remember just how deep the roots of our civilization run.

(Originally posted March 16, 2014)

Paddy Treacy - Charlie's Bar

Country music is alive and well in the Emerald Isle.  Glór Tíre is a long running and highly rated country music talent competition on Ireland's TG4 channel.  The last season's winner was Paddy Treacy with this song.  It's Irish (for sure) but it is indisputably country.  I love this video - it looks like he and his mates had a blast filming it. 

Nightnoise - Night In That Land

Nightnoise is one of the most famous Irish jazz ensembles, combining jazz with traditional Irish themes.  As we come hard into St. Paddy's Day, this seems a fun kickoff that a bunch of you should like. 

Write Europe off

As HMS Defiant points out, there's no There there:

The knowing world watches and mocks as the mighty Royal Navy and Great Britain struggle to get ONE SINGLE SHIP underway 12 days after the war started and still the damned thing is unable to leave port ...

You can say exactly the same about all of the Britain's pantywaist partners in NATO. Not one single one of them has ponied up a ship or fighter squadron or bomb wing to send off to do something about the sudden and complete dramatic disruption to their oil and gas supplies. NOT ONE OF THE BASTARDS HAS STIRRED.

I have watched as people are concerned that poor Britain is struggling to get a ship underway but that really isn't the real problem. You see, any relevant and serious government would have seen the damage to their economic fortunes by the oil and gas embargo and sortied the entire fleet and sent every other fighter and bomber to the Middle East to squash the Iranians and as we have all noticed, not one of them lifted a finger.

Yup.  If they don't care about oil from the Gulf being cut off, let them buy Permian Basin fracked oil.  Otherwise, His Majesty's Government would tell Lloyd's to keep insuring tankers.  But they don't.

The USA has let them act like children for so long that they no longer know how to act like adults.  c.f. German Chancellor Mertz' comments yesterday that shutting down German nuclear power was a huge mistake, but it's too late to change the decision. Maybe you should try adulting sometime, Chancellor.

And the last word goes to HMS Defiant:

I think the first wave of European refugees is looking around now and beginning their research; where do they want to settle when they pick themselves up and their families and maybe even their businesses and move lock, stock, and barrel to the United States or Western hemisphere as they start fleeing the dire fate their elites have arranged for them all.

This wave of destruction is now unstoppable.

Sure looks that way to me.

Secure Your Home Network: Simplified Mint Linux Installation

It used to be a real pain to install Linux.  My first Linux distro was Slackware on a v0.99 kernel that came on 35 floppy disks (ask your parents, kids) way back in the early 1990s.  Things have come a long, long way since that.  You don't even need to muck around with dd and create a boot USB anymore.  Super easy. 

Somehow I missed this

Sometime in the last two or three weeks the odometer here ticked over 20 Million page views.  Seems kind of weird that I wasn't tracking that, but whatever.  In three months we will celebrate the 18th blogiversary here.

Silicon Graybeard has an interesting theory about all the traffic lately. 

The shameful decline of the Royal Navy

His Majesty's fleet seems to be entirely unable to protect His Majesty's subjects abroad.  There seems to be only a single ship (MHS Dragon) that can be sent to Cyprus for anti-missile defense, and it has taken more than a week to prepare to sail.  And they still haven't left port.

The Royal Navy is no allied force worth considering.  Perhaps HMS Defiant can comment on his place. 

As they point out, the Royal Navy was ready to sail in three days when the Iron Lady Maggie Thatcher told them to stand ready in the Falkland crisis. And then they had something like 100 ships.  Now they can't get a single one.

As Donald Trump would say, sad!

Although I like what he says about the "1000 ship Navy" at about 11:40 into the video.  'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

But after all, what today is the "special relationship" or even the transatlantic alliance?  But it's really weird that we're getting more support from Germany than from Great Britain these days.

Whatever you do, don't mention the war. Gosh, the darn Krauts have no sense of humor ... 

The Royal Navy is the fleet of Great Britain.  You know Great Britain, right?  It used to be where Britain is now.  Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

Jeremy Clarkson on the USS Eisenhower

This is Jeremy Clarkson from 1998, four years before he rebooted the Top Gear show.  They still had F-14s on the carrier.  This is a very cool look back to Old America when it still was America. 

The Blues Brothers - Soul Man

The 1980 film assembled an all-star cast of musicians.  This was perhaps the weakest song in the movie. 

How far back in time can you understand English?

The English language has evolved for basically as long as there has been English.  A great book on this subject is Robin MacNeil (and company) in The Story Of English (highly recommended if you are a history nerd like me). 

Well, via a link from someone I've forgotten (sorry! Midwest Chick? A Large Regular?) there is a fabulous demonstration of this where the writer starts in the present and where each paragraph goes backwards in time 100 years.  I started getting lost around 1200 AD, and I've messed around casually with Old English before.  I would catch the odd word before 1200 but the overall gist was a mystery.

And I love the URL for his site.  LOL.

But at the end of his post he links for a Youtube video of a guy who speaks the different versions of English, starting in 400 AD and going forward 100 years at a time.  I found this a lot harder than reading, only starting to pick up some comprehension around 1500 AD.  But when he turns on transcriptions it's amazing how far back I recognize a lot of words.

Wild.  I've embedded it here.  Highly, highly recommended. And I guess I'm not the only one who's interested - 1.2 Million views in two months?  Yowser.

New Zealand Navy grounding update

I posted about this 15 months ago. Midwest Chick has an update:

The New Zealand navy was so proud and happy to have a lesbian from Britain come on board that they gave her a $100M survey and dive vessel, which she crashed and sank.

The lesbian “diversity hire” captain of a Royal New Zealand Navy ship that ran aground and sank off Samoa has been charged with negligence along with two other officers over the loss of the vessel.

The $100 million HMNZS Manawanui, which was under the command of UK-born homosexual Yvonne Gray, crashed on the south side of Upolu on October 5, 2024, due to human error including failure to turn off autopilot, an inquiry found last year.

This is the official inquiry report which is leading to Commander Gray's Courts Martial.  Obviously the entirety of His Majesty's New Zealand Navy is a bunch of dirty misogynists ...

Midwest Chick adds this tidbit that I had missed:

This isn’t the first time that a NZ naval diversity hire damaged a ship. It happened in 2024 with a different female captain.

And that’s what happens when you choose diversity over competence. Wonder if the New Zealanders will actually learn from this??

Now maybe our own Navy could do something about our (multiple) female commanders who run into ships on the high seas. 

 

Bravo Zulu, Coasties

A cruise ship got stuck in the ice off Antarctica, and the Coast Guard (by chance) had an icebreaker nearby.  Well done. 

Country Comfort - Waimanalo Blues

I stumbled across this and like it.  Not sure if it's Country or not, but if it's finger-pickin' then you're at least Country adjacent. 

Tatiana Eva-Marie & Avalon Jazz Band - La Mer

11 Million views can't be wrong. 

Borepatch, you magnificent Bastard! I read your blog!

So Donald Trump seems to be following the ravings here.  Consider this post from December: 

In general, mid-term elections favor the party out of power.  This is true so often that it is almost considered a law of nature, particularly during a President's second term.  What you don't ever see is anyone ask why do voters reject the party in power in the mid-terms? There's quite a simple answer.

Fatigue.

The voters have had some time to get used to the Administration and starts to tire of the typical amount of scandal, incompetence, and general dum-assery that any administration accumulates.

That's not at all what we see today.  The main focus of the Trump 47 administration has been border security, deporting criminal illegal aliens, economic growth, and lower inflation.  There are remarkable results for all of these, despite the legacy media's frantic efforts to hide them.

Each of these are 80% issues - i.e. the issues all get 80% support in polls.

I would go so far as to say that the voter fatigue is on the other foot.  It's the Democrats who spent the last four years stumbling through a morass of dumb-assery.  And who are all on the 20% end of the issues that voters care about.

And here comes DJT with the State of the Union Address.  Here's the TL;DR version:

Boy, those Democrats are crazy, aren't they? 

You're welcome.

Johnny Horton - Battle Of New Orleans

We are fresh off of President's Day, and this is one of the few country songs that name-checks a President. 

Don't buy TP-Link home firewalls

This is pretty skeevy:

TP-Link is facing legal action from the state of Texas for allegedly misleading consumers with "Made in Vietnam" claims despite China-dominated manufacturing and supply chains, and for marketing its devices as secure despite reported firmware vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored actors.

The Lone Star State's Attorney General, Ken Paxton, is filing the lawsuit against California-based TP-Link Systems Inc., which was originally founded in China, accusing it of deceptively marketing its networking devices and alleging that its security practices and China-based affiliations allowed Chinese state-sponsored actors to access devices in the homes of American consumers.

Anyone who has ever ordered something from Amazon that looked like a good deal, only to discover that the photos weren't exactly depicting what you got - you know that the People's Republic of Chine (a.k.s. PRD, a.k.a. Red China a.k.a. West Taiwan) has a very different (dare we say "predatory") concept of truth in advertising than we do on these shores.

Me, I wouldn't buy one of these things on a dare.  FYI, they are something like 60% of the market because they're cheap. 

 

Photo Editing - A Tale in Three Pictures

 In the great digitization of all my family photos I came across this image.

 The story is that the boy in the picture was mad one day and he tore, crumpled, and poked holes in the picture. It was saved anyway because there not many pictures and you could still see the image.

I worked on it in GIMP, because Photoshop costs too much for how often I would use it, and managed, despite my woeful lack of skills, to get it looking like this.

  

 

This is how I put it in the archive I created, alongside the original. 

 

Recently, I read an article on using AI to repair damaged photos and thought of this image, so I gave it a try. The image I uploaded was this second image, the one I had labored over for a couple of hours. What I got back in about 90 seconds was this.

 

 

 

 

There's valid concerns about where all of this is going, and so much of the AI generated stuff on FB and YouTube is terrible, but this is amazing. I have a handful of pictures I scanned and saved because they seemed important to the family story in some way but are damaged, faded, or in need of color balancing. I'm hoping for more results like this.
 

 

Hallucinations come to Mass.gov

Okay, okay - Mass.gov has been hallucinating for years and years.  But now they're automating things:

Today, Governor Maura Healey announced the launch of the ChatGPT-powered Artificial Intelligence (AI) Assistant for the state’s workforce, with the goal of making government work better and faster for people.  

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL." 

Louis Jordan - You Can't Get That No More

Is this plausibly the first rap song?  Probably not because it's actually a fun listen. 

Spotted by The Queen Of The World.

Secure Your Home Network: Why Mint Linux?

I've recommended Mint Linux before, but this is a great overview of why users new to Linux should consider Mint.

Tomorrow we'll talk about how a seasoned IT guy has moved from Windows to Linux.  Spoiler alert: it's less technical work to make Linux work right than it is to make Windows work. 

President's Day - Best and Worst Presidents

I've posted this each President's Day for quite some time but have found no reason to adjust the rankings.

It's not a real President's birthday (Lincoln's was the 12th, Washington's is the 22nd), but everyone wants a day off, so sorry Abe and George, but we're taking it today.  But in the spirit intended for the holiday, let me offer up Borepatch's bestest and worstest lists for Presidents.

Top Five:

#5: Calvin Coolidge

Nothing To Report is a fine epitaph for a President, in this day of unbridled expansion of Leviathan.

#4. Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson is perhaps the last (and first) President who exercised extra-Constitutional power in a manner that was unambiguously beneficial for the Republic (the Louisiana Purchase).  He repealed Adam's noxious Alien and Sedition Acts and pardoned those convicted under them.

#3. Grover Cleveland. 

He didn't like the pomp and circumstance of the office, and he hated the payoffs so common then and now.  He was so famously incorruptable that he continually vetoed pork spending (including for veterans of the War Between the States), so much so that he was defeated for re-election, but unusually won a second term later.  This quote is priceless (would that Latter Day Presidents rise so high), on vetoing a farm relief bill: "Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character."  I highly recommend his biography Man Of Iron.

#2. Ronald Reagan

He at least tried to slow down the growth of Leviathan, the first President to do so in over half a century (see entry #5, above).  He would have reduced it further, except that his opposition to the Soviet fascist state and determination to end it cost boatloads of cash.  It also caused outrage among the home grown fascists in the Media and Universities, but was wildly popular among the general population which was (and hopefully still remains) sane.

#1. George Washington

Could have been King.  Wasn't.  Q.E.D. 

Bottom Five:

#5. John Adams.

There's no way to read the Alien and Sedition Acts as anything other than a blatant violation of the First Amendment.  It's a sad statement that the first violation of a Presidential Oath of Office was with President #2. 

#4. Woodrow Wilson.

Not only did he revive the spirit of Adams' Sedition Acts, he caused a Presidential opponent to be imprisoned under the terms of his grotesque Sedition Act of 1918.  He was Progressivism incarnate: he lied us into war, he jailed the anti-war opposition, he instituted a draft, re-instituted segregation in the Civil Service, and he was entirely soft-headed when it came to foreign policy.  The fact that Progressives love him (and hate George W. Bush) says all you need to know about them.

#3 Lyndon Johnson.

An able legislator who was able to get bills passed without having any real idea what they would do once enacted, he is responsible for more Americans living in poverty and despair than any occupant of the White House, and that says a lot.

#2. Franklin Roosevelt.

America's Mussolini - ruling extra-Constitutionally fixing wages and prices, packing the Supreme Court, and transforming the country into a bunch of takers who would sell their votes for a trifle.  He also rounded up a bunch of Americans and sent them to Concentration Camps.  But they were nice Concentration Camps - well, we're told that by his admirers.  At least Mussolini met an honorable end.


#1. Abraham Lincoln.

There's no doubt that the Constitution never would have been ratified if the States hadn't thought they could leave if they needed to.  Lincoln saw to it that 5% of the military-age male population was killed or wounded preventing that in an extra-Constitutional debacle unequaled in the Republic's history.  Along the way, he suspended Habeas Corpus, instituted the first ever draft on these shores, and jailed political opponents as he saw fit.  Needless to say, Progressives adore him.

So happy President's Day.  Thankfully, the recent occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue haven't gotten this bad.  Yet. 

A Libertarian Valentine's Day

LOL.

LOLOLOLOL. 

Joe Bonamassa & Beth Hart - I'll Take Care of You

It's been a while since I posted Blues on Thursday.  Mea maxima culpa.

So here's what may be the Platonic Ideal of a Blues Ballad.  If you don't like the Blues but you do like Pink Floyd* then you'll like this.

 

* A band with deep roots in the Blues. 

Secure Your Home Network: Moving to Linux - kicking the tires

OldNFO has an important post about how Microsoft is moving very aggressively to a 100% online subscription licensing model.  This is important enough that I won't excerpt any of this; instead, you should go read the whole thing.  It's not too  long, but if you care about the security of your home network (especially the whole who has access to my data and can I even know thing), go read.  I'll wait.

What this means is that you don't own any Microsoft software.  Sure, you may think that because you paid them money (most often when you bought your computer - some of that purchase price went to Microsoft in the form of a license fee for Windows).  But you actually don't own "your" copy of software.  At all.

Rather, you have the right to run the software on your computer.  That may not seem like a big difference, but it is.  The license agreement (you know, the one you didn't read before you clicked "I Agree") allows Microsoft to change the terms of the agreement at any time, at their pleasure.

Microsoft has just done this in a big, big way.  Key new stuff in Windows 11 is:

• AI integrated with your operating system
• Online presence is critical for lots of Windows now (e.g. AI)
• Windows will nag you until you put all your data online (OneDrive) whether you want to or not. 

The proper technical term for that first bullet point is that your Windows operating system is essentially now an "AI Agent" which if you are a regular reader you know is very, very bad security juju.

Combine this enormous security hole with the requirement to essentially be online 100% of the time (bad security) and the liklihood that OneDrive will slurp all your data to some Internet black hole in a Microsoft data center, Windows is simply unsecurable.

Yes, I know that is inflammatory, but there is simply no way that you can get assurance that your security is sane.  I say that as someone who has spent decades inn Internet Security (and particularly in security assurance).  Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don't think that I could get decent assurance that things aren't going "bump in the Net".  For most of the readers here, it's not even worth trying.

So what do you do, assuming that you are not a tech nerd like me?

Interestingly, Microsoft has just flipped the technical script on this.  It used to be that it was easier to stay on Windows than to move to alternatives like Linux.  Now that's out the window, at least if you want to protect your data from that OneDrive vacuum cleaner and whatever the AI agent will do to you. 

But this is admittedly a big step for a lot of people.  So as it turns out, you can "kick the tires" on all the different flavors of Linux without installing it.  All you need is a web browser. 

This is really slick.  The Linux equivalent of the Windows Start Menu lets you try all the apps (I use the Office apps which are every bit equivalent to Word and Excel, etc, and will save files in Microsoft format like .DOCX).

Take a few weeks poking around, you will likely see that it's not a big learning curve.  

An interesting perspective on AI

Long time Internet Security guy Fred Cohen has some interesting thoughts on how AI can be less obnoxious [PDF]:

The nature of the problem (I think) is that the attempts at safety reflect the behavior of the people who programmed and trained the AI engines, and they are apparently snarky, obnoxious twits that think its better to argue about meta issues than to serve their customers, like me, with the real capabilities they have developed. 

Their version of safety is the opposite of mine. If you want children to be safe from AI, don’t let them use it. 

If you want adults to be safe from AI, don’t make it available. 

If you want a ship to be safe, don’t put it out to sea… but that’s not what ships are for. We trade the utility for the safety, and while making ships that leak like a sieve is a bad idea in my view, making ships that don’t sail is a fruitless effort.

... 

Solution 

The solution is to put someone in charge of these mechanisms in these companies who is not a snarky, obnoxious twit… and I hope this doesn’t exclude me from the candidate pool. 

There are also some rather direct solutions to the problem of providing information to people where the information is not something that should be provided to anybody as a matter of policy. The most obvious solution is not to incorporate any of that sort of policy-violating information in the learning process. 

Of course the snarkiness is the same problem. If you don’t teach the LLM to be snarky by feeding it snarky crap, it will probably not behave that way. It’s no different than a child brought up by respectful parents vs. disrespectful parents. They learn from their teachers. 

Conclusions 

If you don’t want trouble, stop asking for it. If you teach a dog to bite, you are unlikely to be successful at later telling it not to. If you train an LLM with views of pedophiles, fraudsters, and murderers, you are unlikely to get it to not carry that behavior through later on. 

I think that Fred's entirely correct here (note that we ignore the very serious problem of AI Hallucinations here). AI training is generally crap layered on top of the hallucination engine*.

But I wonder if this is an opportunity for AI companies?  If you did a better job training the AI to be well-behaved (like you'd do with your kids or your dogs) would you have a different - and more attractive AI offer?  How about politeand wellbehavedAI.com?  That's a branding that would stand out from all the others.  You could market it to parents worried about their kids, or to old fuddy-duddies like me who hate everything about AI?

I smell a billion dollars of venture capital here ... 

* It seems very likely that the AI algorithms cannot be prevented from hallucinating. 

Word

Quote of the Day goes to B, who hits center mass:

50 years from now, no one is gonna bother to restore an electric Mustang to collect or drive.

Just sayin’.

Yup. 

Ronnie Dunn - Cost Of Livin'

Farewell to the Washington Post.  Journalists never cared when mills across the land shut down and people and towns were wiped out; now it's wailing like the End Of The World by journalists, for journalists.

I'm having trouble summoning up sympathy.  Welcome to the club, pal.

Elon's city on Mars

This is a fascinating breakdown of the (quite serious) engineering problems facing SpaceX as they attempt to build a Mars city. 

Deap sea video of German Battleship Bismark

Last year a company called Magellan sent a deep sea rover 15,000 feet down to the site of the final resting place of the battleship Bismark, sunk 86 years ago.  The video is simply spectacular.  Here is a shortish excerpt with commentary. 

And since we're talking about the Bismark, this song is obligatory.

The EPA makes everything worse, vol CXVI

In this case, marine diesel engines which used to be famously long lived.  The Detroit Diesel engines of old were famous for running 20,000 or 30,000 hours before a four day rebuild at the dock set them up for another 20,000 or 30,000 hours.  You couldn't kill these engines.  Rather, you would leave them to your kids in your will.

That's over now, and it's because of the EPA.  Over a span of 15 or 20 years, they ratcheted up the emission requirements for these engines to the point that Detroit Diesel would be fined millions and millions of dollars for selling their old (famously reliable) design.

And so now you have to rebuild after 10,000 hours, and you have to replace three times as many parts.  Plan on a month, rather than four days.

This is a very interesting video on the subject.  While I'm not an expert on diesel engines, it certainly seems solid from an engineering perspective. 

Here are the main points.

1. Pressures have gone from 10,000 psi to 30,000 PSI for a bunch of EPA-imposed constraints.  This shortens the lifespan of parts used in the engines.

2. The higher pressure means that engines are much more vulnerable to bad diesel fuel: water particles or tiny flakes of rust now essentially sandblast the pistons, valves, and cylinders.  This didn't used to take place at the old lower pressure.  This sandblasting effect shortens part life even more, which makes engine rebuild and cost even higher.

3. Because parts will fail much more often now, manufacturers put all sorts of sensors in place.  The sensors themselves can fail - the high seas is a notoriously unforgiving environment and salt water will get into the engine room.  This causes corrosion, which triggers sensor faults.  The engine's computer (itself a new thing, with software of questionable quality) will detect the fault and sometimes put the engine into "Limp Home Mode" - not allowing it to go above, say, 1000 RPM.  A ship in a storm may find its engine dangerously under powered, putting at risk the lives on board and the safety of the ship itself.  If a ship sinks in a storm under these circumstances, the fuel oil in the tanks will pollute the environment.

4. Not pointed out in the video, ocean-going vessels do not have to worry about emissions.  From a pure regulatory perspective, that is.  However, finding a new engine with all the design "upgrades" discussed here is the challenge.  I don't know what EU regulations are, so maybe a MAN engine doesn't have to deal with this.  But I'm nasty and suspicious and think that EU regulations could be even worse than EPA's.

Thanks a whole lot of nothing, EPA.  You're supposed to protect the environment. Oh, and not get Americans killed.

The only thing I think is unfair about the video is the title.  Engine manufactures design their engines to fail after 10 years because the EPA forces them to. 

You could roll back all the environmental regulations since 1990 and shutter the EPA and this Republic would be a whole lot better off.