Intelligent things that will never happen in 2017

Happy New Year everybody.  If you are looking for intelligent things to happen in 2017, save your breath.  The toast tonight will be to stupidity, may it ever reign.  :)

Intelligent Things

Canada will establish a premier nuclear research at Port Hope, giving up on loser Chalk River forever.  They will use the Korean design for the Maple reactor and actually have it work.  They will pioneer waste disposal in real rock, and give up on the Bruce Black Hole.

Somebody who knows basic physics will finally set global warming into its deserved grave, especially as world temperatures plummet.

Oklahoma will finally treat the freshwater frack waste before they get the full New Madrid series of m7's and 8's.

Trumpypants will have an epiphany on the road to Damascus.

Realtors will finally report that Toronto and Vancouver housing prices are plunging by 50%.

Linux - Jamming a full ATX power supply into a micro ATX case

These cases are supposed to take a more powerful atx power supply.  I like to rate the power supply as twice what I need.  I had to mod this case a little bit and stick out the power supply to make room for the AMD wraith cooler.  I still love it!

The only way would be a micro atx power supply (maybe), or a special water cooler.  All of which is more expensive.  This is the Cooler Master Elite Lan case.  With the power supply fully in, it would block even a regular amd cooler.

ps. the motherboard wouldn't post, no matter what I did.  I'm getting a replacement.

Jonathan Asmis and Cyrene Wu Engaged

He's the famous son who's taking Silicon Valley by storm.  :)  She's the famous project engineer who's building all those weird buildings in the same place. Don't feel bad if you never heard of them, they aren't on FB.

Google Home World's Best Party Machine

"Ok, Google, play some jazz.'  'Ok Google, don't play that crap jazz, play some hits.'  'Ok Google, make it louder.'  'Ok Google, make it quieter.'

This went on for the whole after-Christmas party.  I can't wait for New Years!  Everybody went by and changed the music.  It has a decent speaker for the living, dining room, and kitchen, and we had a mixture of old and young.  Better than a DJ!

Next, it needs to know all the rules for the board game Archipelago.

Bad Christmas Singing

We all need a little fun.

Merry Christmas Everybody

Now that trumpypants was elected, I can say that to everybody.  :)  It is meant well, and we shall put the word 'Christmas' in a non-offensive category.

That said, it's all about the toys!  I got a Google Home, which was snuck over the border by my son.  Google was expecting people to do this, because the required app is now on the Canadian Google Play store, if there is such a thing.  My son was expecting to go through a proxy.  It's lots of fun for the first 5 minutes when everybody is yelling.  I have a feeling these things will go the way of the smart watch, but who knows?

With that, we got some wifi light bulbs.  I can put them somewhere and tell Google to 'Turn off the damn lights!', like I yell at my twenty-somethings, but Google will listen.  :)

For my new computer, I'm finally abandoning the standard tower, and going for small format with 2.5 inch disks.  I've used the same two cases for a long time now, and one of them is going to the steel mill.  Progress is wonderful.

The Oklahoma earthquakes are off and on, so I think everybody will enjoy the trumpy inaug party where all the poutinologists of the free world will come together.  I hope the trains run on time.  :)

ps.  our first-ever goose for Christmas.

Linux - Waiting for Boxing Day

I have come to the conclusion that my very old Athlon 6 processor, and my even older nvidia card can't cut it in the modern world.  The new graphics desktops just freeze it randomly.  Right now I am using tightvnc to hook up to my slightly more modern a series processors.  My computer seems to survive this, and it's easier than rehooking everything.  Besides, I have a large disk on this machine, and I have to make sure it is working

I have decided I will go micro-atx and the latest amd A series.  I will reuse my ssd and move the 2 tb disk to the other machine.  That will make the new machine, my 'fun' machine, where I constantly screw it up with the latest Linux things.  The other one will be basically a disk farm.

**twas a bug before Christmas.  The qt5 updates seem to have fixed it (fingers crossed).  I still want a new toy!

**Belay that order, ensign.  I can still make it freeze under heavy load.

Ontario Seismicity in Review 2016

Southern Ontario has seismicity that mirrors Oklahoma but at a natural rate.  But if they started to disturb the Precambrian water, like with nuclear waste repository at Bruce, then it would act up.  At a natural rate, we would expect an M7 every thousand years or so, but it was probably a thousand years since the last one.  As I have said, 'We don't give a sh*t about no earthquakes.'.  As such, we have a seismic capacity somewhere around Italian rubble houses.  I have written many scenarios for our next M7, and let it rest at that.

The Toronto megathrust and hanging wall zone are very clear, and are activated by water from the lakes.  The Buffalo zone practically runs into the Toronto hanging wall, and makes a nice line.  If you use a topography map, you can trace these things right down to New Madrid and Oklahoma.  They are characterized by a broken and weathered zone (hanging wall), right next to a solid wall that forms a ridge or cliff (footwall).

This year, we finally get a picture of the last megathrust to the West, the famous Grenville Front.  Now, the geologist with the Bruce black hole pooh-poohs this by saying it's off into the lake, but it is the same as the others, and has a hanging wall zone.  It's just that this one is on dry land, and has little opportunity for a natural seep.  Down in New Madrid, we have the river, and in Oklahoma, we have injection.

New Madrid is no threat for another thousand years, but OK is nearly tomorrow, and Toronto will get a good hunk of grease from OK, and will let go soon after that.  If you are a tiny bit worried about the 1 in 500 per year chance of destruction, take a pill, and move to the footwall.  :)  Otherwise, enjoy your happy life downtown.  If you live in a cheap condo, insure for the whole value, and know that you'll walk away from it.

**I just read that the condo corp is responsible for earthquake insurance.  You are responsible for contents, water damage, etc, car being flooded, etc.  I would add living expenses, and figure that that they walk away from the building.

LInux - Reinstalling for the disk drives

When I last upgraded the motherboard, it had this fancy AHCI that Linux didn't yet support, so I used the IDE emulation.  Zoom to last few days when the computer has been driving me nuts by randomly seizing up.  I  tried to reinstall and it kept seizing on the install.  That's when I knew something was wrong.  I thought it was heat so I vacuum all the dust out, and that was a good thing, but it wasn't it.  Then I switched the disk drive in the bios to ahci and that was it.  Obviously, the old has to be thrown out.  :)  Now I've got to go through all the crap about a new installation.

**oh pooh.  It's the new kde5.  The bug came back again when I upgraded to 'testing'.  I'm stuck on an old kernel and old kde for a while.  You always have to reinstall to go back.

*upgrading my kernel now.  I hate living in the 'stone age'.  I'll wait a week before upgrading to 'testing'.  It did give me all sorts of messages, and next time I'll read them.  :)

**all fixed, the order of things is important, and I don't know what I did.  :)

***not good, not good.  My old processors can't handle new graphics.  Time for new computer guts.

Magnitude 8 earthquakes, just hanging out

These earthquakes are the 'joy riders' or 'surfer dudes' of plate margins.  They can cluster and mean nothing.  However, they do set up the 9's.  Here you can see the irregular plate margin and you know that it never come up with anything more than an m8.5  An m9 is 10 times longer than those little splotches.

So, nothing super-duper is coming.  It sucks for the locals in stone houses, but they'll learn.

Another totally ignored letter to Donut Trump

Donald Trump

Excuse my typos.  Please go after the warmists with something that will throw them for a loop.  It's called the Scientific Method, and you should bring it back from the grave.

It's the process of casting a testable hypothesis, which can succeed or fail based on experiments.  Those can even be thought experiments as pushed by Einstein himself, but the experiments have to be good physics.

Here is your favourite, global warming.

Global Warming

We propose the hypothesis that the temperature of the earth is totally controlled by levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and no other means.  The physics (or mechanism) is that the atmosphere acts as a glass greenhouse, and carbon dioxide levels control the amount of infra-red radiation going back into space.

Method of Testing

The hypothesis can be tested by several means.  The first is tracking the future temperature and co2 levels.  As a blanket, a linear increase in co2 can only lead to temperature rising by the square.  Since increasing temperature releases more co2 from the oceans, this will lead to a square co2 and cubic temperature.  There is no back-off from this runaway reaction.  Look in the past when co2 has risen.  Did all life die?

The physics or physical mechanism can also be tested.  In clear air, shoot a laser to a satellite and back.  Can you see the absorption?  Is it increasing in time?  Measure the die-off of the daily sun temperature in clear air.  Is it slowing as co2 increases?  Study clear air convection since the hypothesis states that such heat transfer is less than 10% that of radiation.

These are absolute, any variance from the results expected of the hypothesis invalidates it.  Under no circumstances should there be continuous modifications, due to new information.

**I just found out that this is posted to FB, so I have to give the answers.

-temperature is flatlining, probably soon to go down, no cubic
-all life didn't die, witness me writing this blog
-absolutely no measurement confirms the infra-red effect
-convection is 99.9.....% of atmospheric heat transfer

Why I love Donald Trump

Reference

Every election, the US re-enacts the Civil War.  This time, the right wing won, and it is better than just leaving them in the sidelines.  Now they can totally screw up, and leave everybody alone for the next cycle.

What this article doesn't realize is that conspiracy theories and fake news, are the only tools of the powerless to get into power.  All these people are power-mad, left and right.  Now that they are in power, anything they say will lead to mass shootings, or trillion dollar losses on the stock market.  They'll see power slipping away and will correct themselves.

With the Bush-league, the greatest nutty conspiracy theory was 'Weapons of Mass Destruction'.  Even I and the Economist believed that one.  And the lefties have 'Global Warming' which is just the same.  All of them lead to power and riches.

This is the normal cycle of the world.  Everybody should stop worrying for a week and have a nice Solstice Holiday.  (I think the Peaceful Muslims made the biggest mistake of their lives going after Christmas, and it led to Trump.  I hope they realize that and issue a new statement)

Russia attacks the Fish

Lots of referral spam has hit my blog, all from Russia.  I am now on their hit list.  :)  I knew I shouldn't have used his real name.  Now I will call it Poutinology, with a phoney meaning of 'studying fries with gravy and curds'.  They won't pick that up on their search engines!  Really, they have taken over the world anyway, why would they be so petty?  :)

Amazing double El Nino ends droughts in California and Toronto

Wow, I've only been able to monitor wet air and currents for a while now, but we are into an amazing time.

Clouds       Currents

The Gulf Stream is pumping warm air into the Arctic, which whips around Greenland, and comes back at us.  In the Pacific, the north Pacific current is dead, and the El2 is backwashing right to Central America.  Normally, we get high plumes which hit the Yukon and come down at us in the form of an Alberta Clipper.  Not this year.

These low, straight west, plumes are soaking California, warming up the mudslides, and then hitting us with huge snow storms.  We are lucky that we are not getting a simultaneous Gulf of Mexico plume.  :)

Remember that with physics, and not philosophy, water has a specific heat orders above that of air, and the ocean currents control our weather, not carbon.

**really, trumpypants should give me money.  :)

Linux - Setting up a dynamic dns

Say you're a new Secretary of State and you want to set up your own personal email server in your house, like every other predecessor.  You want to be secure from your Putinist friends, but you are a cheap bastard.  Then you need dynamic dns.  This gets around the fact that your local phone company will force you to pay through the nose for a fixed IP address.  That's when you get an IP address for your very own so you can set up your own domain, like altrightsec.com.  You need that for a mail server.  Because, honestly, who trusts the government with their black helicopters?

Just get the cheapo service where they randomly switch the ip address on you.  Then a fancy openwrt router approved by moscowsnowy himself, where you can run a client.  That checks every 5 seconds what ip address you currently have and sends it to dynamic ip host.

I'm going with duckdns because they are supported by openwrt and linux.  Also, they have a g+ community and everything.  I finally convinced some relatives to ditch ms, and I'll be supporting them remotely.  All the servers will be Linux.  I haven't decided on the tv box.  Those cheapie Android boxes can never be updated.  Maybe a chromebox supporting android.  Who knows?  Chromecast?

Oklahoma earthquakes go into freeze-up

I had thought there would be one more kick at the can, because of trumpies, but there isn't.  Freeze-up means that there are no more trucks of freshwater frack waste heading to OK.  It usually stays quiet until April or May.  They'll claim great victory, and people will plan a huge increase in fracking for the Spring.

End of social-media war with Amazon

I call an end to my tempest in a teacup.  Ammie has proven itself to be a true Putinista, immune to any outside influence.  I have a friend who programs for them in Seattle, probably bots, so I love them all.

Merry Christmas to all, and as long as I get cheap stuff delivered immediately, I'll love you forever.  :)  I'm glad you have finally figured out the way to do business in Canada.

I'm probably losing my touch.  I've only had a few great wars, but most of them have fizzled out.  But Hope Springs Eternal.  :)  I refuse to use fake news on FB.  Now that's a weapon that actually gets people killed.

**Now, back to my Christmas Sabbatical.  :)

Putinistas in Ontario

In Political Science, the political spectrum is represented by a big circle.

I'm not allowed to say the old word that used be on the bottom so we replace it with the New Nastis.  At the bottom everything is the same because it is only sustained by Totalitarianism, which is a long word, and best replaced by Putinism.

It's funny thing that all organizations are sliding down the circle.  I  blame it on social media, nobody can withstand the stupidity of FB, and so they slide.  The first thing they all do is put in an opaque PR department.  Everybody does this now.  My old company had a massive slide almost all the way down.  I used to call it Stalinism, but now we know what it is.

People just let it go by believing in fake news, and not caring if all they see is a bland face of PR.  We know who pioneered propaganda techniques and the Big Lie.

But there are long-term consequences.  For government, it is a shattered economy as everybody flees high taxes and power rates.  For a company, it is credibility when something goes wrong.  Also, things will go wrong more often as they boot out the intellectuals and replace everybody with bots, human or otherwise.

Everything shatters at the bottom, so the circle is self-correcting.  Might not be in my lifetime.  :)

ps.  Putin is now going for genocide.  Trumpypants can only be a wannabe next to him.  The original had several wannabes.

The Kirkian Hacking of Amazon

First Hypothesis - Holding.   That Ammie does not employ anybody anymore after the big accusations of Putinism for management (The New Nasti-ism).  Especially in Canada, where they would have to be nice, and pay severance and maternity leave, stuff like that.

New Hypothesis.  I'm getting increasingly frantic bot-mail that I'm getting a refund for the item that I did not receive.  I have a horrible vision that I will see 10 refunds and it will be impossible to return it.  This has led me to think of the Original Star Trek, where Captain Kirk always took over computers by talking non-sequiturs, that made the computer smoke and blabber "Does not compute!".

So, the hypothesis is that you can hack into Amazon just by sending messages to their bots.  Instead of smoke, you will get a message "Full Root Access Granted".  Naturally, I'm not going to do this, because it's too much work, but eager beavers could give it a try.  :)

Linux - Kernel 4.9 working well

It's fun to be able to compile new kernels again.  This is the 'big' 4.9 release.  You can keep the compile much shorter with the 'localmodconfig' trick.  The great thing about these latest Linux releases is that my computer keeps getting faster.  The 'time to use' for rebooting is incredibly fast.  And everything is working.

Putinism Takes Over the US

Putin has defined the New Nasti-ism.  Modern Nastis are following the book written by the original bunch.  Be friendly to big corporations, grant monopolies, and let them run roughshod over everybody.  Anybody who gets in the way can be eliminated.

This will be great political science which will be studied for years.  Right now, Heil Hrump is assembling a team that will outdo the originals.  However, he will never achieve writing History, because of all that constitutional stuff.

The Perils of Buying with Amazon

So, I love shopping with Ammie.  I'm a big reviewer and I get stuff.  But there is one horrible trap you can sucked into without having a clue why.

When you order from a third party, you have no idea if they are in Canada, the US, or China.  Ammie now washes its hands of any such dealings.
****
Hello,

We are sorry to hear that you did not receive your merchandise for Order 702-4557307-5919427. Please understand that Amazon.ca has no way to fulfill an order which you placed with a third party merchant on our site. We can, however, guarantee you a refund through an A-to-z Claim.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience you may have experienced as a result of this issue.  The vast majority of orders from sellers are trouble-free, but for the occasional one that doesn't work out, we are happy to employ the A-to-z Guarantee and as a result a full refund is been issued. We hope that this solution works for you.

If you have legal questions or concerns, please contact our Legal team at this address:

Amazon.com
Legal Dept.
P.O. Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108-1226
Fax: 206-266-7010

We regret that we cannot correspond with you further about this issue.

Sincerely,

---
Chetan
Account Specialist
A-to-z Guarantee Program

***********

I ordered something, had no clue where it was from and Border Services seized it.  They sent me a nasty note, stating that I was the importer of record, and I was responsible for its disposal.  I desperately tried to contact them, and then contacted everybody at Amazon, stating that since I never received it, it isn't my concern.  No such luck.  They have abandoned me, as you see by the letter.  I will now wait for the next letter from Border Services, and then sue.  They use American lawyers and have no clue about obligations in Canada.  I can get the costs up into the thousands, and any arbitrator will award costs because Amazon is so opaque about this.

I don't know what you will want to do.  For now, I am checking whether a company is US, and I might not order from them.  But it is very difficult to do.

**This will become a fine study of companies who follow putinomics, like Google and Ammie.  If you are nasty to your employees, and kill off all the bright ones, then there is nobody to deal reasonably with these small issues.  Ammie has nobody in Canada with both intelligence and power, they do all their thinking with bots, so they don't have to deal with Canadian labour laws, like maternity leave.  :)  I may escalate this through my MP and federal consumer protection.  It will become a great nationalistic cry "Don't treat us like Americans!"  :)

***This is the start of social-media war.  I've had lots of these and it is always to mutual destruction, and great entertainment.  You can help me by trying to get through their bots.  Any success will be reported here.

pps.  The hypothesis is that there are no Canadians working there that can rub two brains together.  The experiment, to be conducted by you, is to go to Customer Service, pick other, other, other, and ask the question "Are your facilities friendly to baby seals?"  The Canadian answer would be "No baby seals have ever been injured in our facilities.".  The bots will blow up.  :)

ppps And the American Putinists will answer "Who gives a f*ck about baby seals?"  That answer is worth extra points.

Oh Happy Day, as they say in Rome.  We have the coffee roaster back.

And it's at the price I bought it!  Some may have remembered my article on Home Roasted Coffee.  This is the roaster, but I couldn't recommend the third party sellers at a lot more.

Get this for Christmas, if it is in stock by then.  Do make dark roast!  That bakes out all the caffeine and other goodness, and if you stick with light-medium roast, you will live forever!  :)  (fake news).  Read my review and get the Amazon warranty.

This is the best because that thing solid for me, but has a poor warranty.  I think you get problems with dark coffee.  :)

Use the links to the side, to give me money.

**even though it says they are getting it in, buy it now so they get it faster.

Christmas Sabbatical

I find I'm getting to hyped up about general stupidity.  This is dangerous to anybody, but it causes me to post nasty things to no audience whatsoever.  I'll stop a bit and get the readership to zero again (from 1).  This is also the time it bothers me that I vent into the air, and nobody reads.

All my happy friends and relations don't get anything I write.  I do that on purpose, but I do hope that one day people will read, since I'm always right.  :)  For now, stupidity reigns supreme, as it always does.  I just have to get back into the mood where I can laugh at that.

Good-bye, and thanks for no fish.  :)

** I'm coming back a little bit on mild topics.

Google is So Tight it Squeaks

Another grabber headline to get them to react.  They have never done 'social' very well because they are all anti-social and very nasty nerds.  They cut me off adsense forever with no pardon ever.  Such trumpies!  So, as an organization, Mr. G is a Scrooge for Christmas.

Amazon pays me generously for helping them out.  I help out Mr. G all the time, but do I get anything?  Their Map G-Guides points are pitiful joke.  Kill yourself for a buck!  No way!

And now Mr. G is in big trouble with the whole world because he is evil and taking over everything.  Yet, there is hope for Scrooge at Christmas.

Mr.  G, you will be visited by three ghosts.

Christmas past - you were a happy little organization, out to change the world, and to not be evil.  What happened to that?  You should cry.

Christmas present - You are a cheap bastard.  Little Timmy is about to die.  Geofish has a scrawny turkey because you are so cheap.  Crowds are outside the gates, demanding your head.

Christmas future - you visit the grave of little Timmy.  And then your own grave. Nobody misses you, and they fight over your scraps.  The gravestone reads:  Here lies somebody, we can't remember, who couldn't do anything social because they were so cheap.

But you can wake up in the morning!  Cast off your cheapness, and follow all my suggestions.  It's a new dawn (oxymoron, Disney).  :)

**whoops, I may have falsely accused Disney of committing an oxymoron without a license, but they are really nasty (you know what you did!)

**Mr. G has a nasty PR department that only whitewashes things after they are in the news by the last remaining newspapers, which Mr. G killed.  :)

Engineering - Tinkering with Exponentials

It is human nature to think of everything in linear terms -- going another 10% requires 10% more effort.  Budgets are always like this, anybody who doesn't do math or physics wallows in it.  Oklahoma will soon learn the power of exponentials, and so will these guys by the river.

Today, they are tinkering with lowering a mini-excavator into the quicksand pit.  They think they can work their way around the sewer.  But the hydraulic head increases linearly, and the permeability with quicksand drops exponentially.  This gives a big exponential for total water flowing in.  In other words, they try to go an extra foot, the water comes in like a torrent.

I would like to say that this is only confined to 'handyman specials' but it isn't.  Many engineers are caught up in this.  Look at seismic 'upgrading'.  It only goes up one intensity level (double PGV), but the uncertainties are 3 intensity levels.  Upgrading is useless, but it looks good.  Put everything on screw piles!  :)  These are lessons only learned by body count.  :(

**The exponent aspect of water flow was my big objection with the Bruce Black Hole, now thankfully in Liberal Limbo.

Canada does well on Science

Reference

Yeah Canada!  We rule Palo Alto for creating wealth for trumpies.  We're stinky on business, so all the bright ones have to go to California.  But why is that?  We have to get into the physics, or fundamental forces at play.

Nearly all science and engineering talent has come from the second generation (children of immigrants).  Lots of exceptions, but I cry 'Trumpies!'.  Horrible weather must have something to do with it, as well, since Finland is high, and nobody wants to go there.

Third generation (and beyond) all want to become corporate lawyers, or go into the horrible Canadian banking industry.  There, they choke the life out of the country.

Australia has almost no immigration, and good weather.  Pity.  The US will go all trumpy and start to fail, and Canada will own California.  :)

Google becomes a hate propaganda publisher

Reference

We should charge Google with hate-pushing, but they can do what they want in the US.  Actually, I've just said all this just to get their attention.  They react quickly to news articles, so they should set up a bunch of Google Stars, just like their Maps Guides.  I'm willing to do it as long as Sergey takes up my suggestion of Google Scientists.  He's putting millions into big parties for 80 year olds, how about something that will work?

It's kind of neat how everybody fools Googs.  All the people selling phoney stuff put up a huge number of phoney sites such as "This stuff sucks', and if you do a search, all you get on the first page are the pages with the misleading headlines.  And every web site now has ads for 'click bait'.  And my wife asks me for the umpteenth time when I'm falling asleep  -- "Can you have a virus on Android?" because she's looking at FB, and it always flashes 'You have a virus!"

This is just the Internet.  All the stupid people have gone on now, and the media is whining about how they are misled, and it's goog's job to de-stupidfy them.  Can't happen.  The previous (and now dead) newspapers did a sterling job in presenting the 'truth' like gorming.  Ha!

Oklahoma is setting up for the tank-buster earthquake

Now, I could state all the usual qualifications, but I follow trumpypants.  There have been a lot of shallow thrusts under Cushing, as well as distant 'strain gauge' earthquakes.  This sets us up for an m6 shallow thrust under the tanks.  Whoooeee.  The busgus has stated that the number of earthquakes will soon approach zero while the size of each one goes to infinity, so it's nothing to worry about.

I'm saying the same thing -- nothing for me to worry about, I've budgeted for $10 a litre gas, mainly by not using the car.  :)

Dance recital time

Time for the annual dance recital at Dance to the Rhythm.  This is very happy family of all types, and some very good dancers.  My daughter instructs there.

Continuing a world without physics

Reference

This goes on an on about 30 trillion tons of human structures.  Wow, that must be a big number!  Why not compare it to the mass of water in air - 13 Giga-tons.  Compare it to a shaving of rock off all the land mass.  Compare it to what the glaciers moved.  Compare it to the weight of vegetation.

This is pure philosophy-science.  The article basically say we are destroying the earth.  Blah.  So that cockroaches can run over everything?

One nice thing about concrete cities, they have less radioactivity than freshly ploughed earth.  :)

I'm with trumpy-pants on all this.  :)

Linux - yeah, you can compile your kernel again!

In what has to be the stupidest Linux trick yet, they all went for kernel hardening, and forgot to fix the gcc compiler to work.  We had months without being able to compile a new kernel.  I like to do it just for fun, nobody really has to do it.  Nevertheless, I looked everywhere for a solution.  Now gcc6 is finally fixed.

Geotechnical Engineering - Quicksand

I've seen a lot of excavations in Toronto have that most dreaded of problems - quicksand.  This is when the hydraulic gradients are so large as to lift sand particles, making a thick soup.

This excavation has been stalled at this exact point for weeks.  And they have a pump going all weekend.  All they do is walk around with worried looks.  I haven't asked anyone because they'd be looking for an extra few million dollars for freezing.

The excavation is for jacking in a sewer liner.  It is deep and has to be very stable because men will constantly be working in it.  They could have paid an extra 10 bucks when they were doing the soil drilling, for a pumping test, but I guess they didn't.  An old-school geotechnical engineer would have seen it right way, but nobody employs them any more.

It's just the delay that is costly.  The contractor will sue for extras, so he's okay.  This is just consistent with all the other jobs on the river.  :)

Natural gas prices zoom

This has been my one reliable indicator of Oklahoma earthquake activity.  It's always right, except now at the end of the year, there is the issue of gas-frack freeze-up.  In any normal year, I'd say we'd have to wait until May to restart the season, but it is so warm that they may still be fresh-water fracking for a while yet.

Meanwhile, OK is perking up again for another big one.  These natgas prices will help things along.

El Nino going into second peak - global warming party

This is the El Nino that won't die.  Normally, we'd be plunged into extreme cold right now, what I call the 'hangover' effect.  Not happening!

I always avidly wait for this monthly graph.  The famous 1997 El Nino, until now called the greatest ever, came and went in a single sharp pulse.  That's what they're supposed to do with our sample size of 1.  California desperately needs these every 7 years.  Everything is screwed up now.

You can see it on the ocean current map.  Pacific island backwash is still happening, the northern currents are dead.  All the Arctic cold air is descending on Russia.  I don't know when we'll get our Canada back!  Of course, all the gormers have forgotten 'Big El' and just pack this into their beliefs.

Meanwhile the Arctic is refusing to freeze up, and the warmies are having a field day.

You can see that 2016 is not following the usual curve.  Trimpy-pants is going to get an earful this year.  He should invest in basic ocean and atmospheric physics to shut them up.  :)