Back to the Dinosaurs

Reference

The heat brings out great silliness.  Enjoy the warmth while you can.  The absence of the great ocean currents brings seasonal extremes.

The concept of greenhouse gases in a highly convective atmosphere has led the English Majors to 'predict' a return to the Mesozoic.  Forget the Pleistocene!  The end of mammals.  Let the reptiles grow to monster size!  I can't wait until I'm fighting giant snapping turtles at the cottage.  :)

ps.  right now the heat for Toronto is barely winning the fight.  I hope it lasts for the month.

The Autobiography of Sam Smith - 6

I, Sam Smith, and not that other guy, continue to throw these notes away and he goes dumpster diving.  This story is basically going to "Rise and Fall of Camelot", and to get to it, we have to mention scaling laws.

So, when MrBig in the superhero movies aims his BigGun at a little spider, it grows to the size of a house and threatens the heroes.  In reality, the spider collapses into a pile of goo.  That's because the volume goes up as x-cubed (along with weight), and strength only goes up as x-squared.  Very sad for movie stories, and that's why I can never watch them.  This is deftly handled by stress analysis for building nuclear plants.  What is generally not known is that lots of other physics has scaling laws, including heat conduction, and fluid dynamics.

So, here we had an unbelievable amount of intellectual talent, and free money, coping with the Grand Stupidity of commands from up high.  This was the basis of Camelots throughout history, including MASH, and, now, Silicon Valley.  They always rise and fall.  They always fall when Greed and Stupidity penetrate the inner workings.

I entered Camelot in 1979.  Our manager was the kindly Merl, who got his stripes building the Seaway, and various dam power projects.  For some reason he never liked me, but he had the intellectual weight of a tissue.  He was propped up by my section head, Chas, who was a geotechnical, intellectual super-weight.  I was glad I was up there enough to talk to him.  He was King Arthur, and I was some lowly guy that nobody remembers.  We were lucky that we could still lead the fight against the Grand Stupidity, by sheer intellectual purism.  The other disciplines were not so lucky.  They had to 'compromise' with reality, and were totally corrupt.  It's like the bigs at vw saying "Make those diesels pass or we'll kill you."  Bright people could leave, but the remaining dummies had to 'compromise'.

ps.  I really have to stop now, because the people I most want to make fun of are still kicking.

The Autobiography of Sam Smith - 5

I, Sam Smith, and only Sam Smith, although you may have your suspicions, continues this big thing.  I'm diverging with a background on the nuclear history of rantaria to give an idea of what I was thrown into.  I learned all this by talking to people.

The BFU wanted to go nuclear and yelled at the weenies to keep doubling things.  The weenies had a great time with billions of dollars being thrown at them.  After all, in their northern radioactive fortress, they only had wife-swapping and suicides to amuse them.

The first of the doubled or quadrupled plants was Pucking 1 built right beside the big city of Tiwanna.  They chose to build it on a giant swamp.  They would have a trench intake from the lake, which had huge dunes of sediment travelling underwater, just offshore.  Once again, the worst location in the world.  But the bfu was second only to god, and a little hostile nature didn't phase them.

The Pucking 1 design was four Dougie Points side by side.  All connected to one vacuum building.  We won't go into that too much.  Suffice to say it still stands. 

Then the weenies went back north to build Bad 1 right beside Dougie Point.  Rather than trench an intake in a sea of silt, they went for a tunnel in the worst rock in the world.  'Nuff said.

So, the important part here is that the BFU said "The weenies are shit, they can't build what we want.  We are going all in-house."  That sparked a huge hiring binge, and I squeaked in on the last of it.  They put up a huge building in Tiwanna, called the Crystal Palace.  It was the first and worst of 'energy efficient' buildings which just meant they cut off all the fresh air.  Some people they hired first had to quit because they could barely get out of bed, go to the office, and get another horrible disease.  When I showed up, I met a friend who was nearly dying.  I supposed she left, one way or another.

Fresh into the office for me, they were driving the piles for Pucking 2, and blasting the tunnel for Bad 2.  These plants were 50% scaled up from the weenie plants, without a speck of thought. 

The Autobiography of Sam Smith - 4

I, Sam Smith, continue to write this, of no interest to anybody.  This is the truth, as I see it, as trumpy would say.  The New Truth, and nothing but the New Truth, as determined by the PR department.

With my shiny Masters I entered the workforce.  With my friends, I was hired next door by the BFU, or Big Frackin' Utility.  Nobody who is outside the Kingdom of Rantaria can understand how big bfu was, rest in peace.  It controlled every aspect of the lives of the 10 million peasants, decided everything, and told the king what to do.

The bfu was a monopoly, and money showered like rain.  In the bowels of their back rooms, they decided the future of Rantaria.  They read the tea leaves and decided that electricity growth would be 7% per year, forever.  All the dams had been maxed out, and they had to go nuclear.  They chose sites where they had some land and started building.

The first was Dougie Point, on a speck of land with absolutely the worst rock in the world.  They didn't worry about the foundation because they were the bfu, by God, second only to her.  This was cheap land by the water, and that was that.  They also built a giant heavy water plant.  Now, the past is murky because in those days everything was built by The Weenies, a secret government organization that processed uranium for the first atomic bomb, and spilled radiation all over the land.  So, I don't really know why they went to that land.

Dougie Point, or dp was the first civilian nuclear plant built by the weenies.  Throughout their existence, they made the three stooges look competent.  This nuclear plant could light a house on a good day.  It was a general disaster, but set the main design components for all future nuclear plants in the Empire of Canoodle, so naturally,  rantaria had to go with it.  Okay, the bfu said, let's build something that can light 2 houses!

Thus began the procession of scaling up the nuclear plant, when they had no idea of the physics for the scaling laws.  'Just make it bigger!' they would shout, and thus it was.

As a sidenote, the bfu totally rejected the idea of buying power from the neighbouring kingdom of Quincy.  They hated those guys with a passion.  Quincy had very far dams, and power lines they stretched to the limit.  The power was so unreliable that you could hardly turn on the lights long enough to light a candle.  The bfu learned that nuclear plants had to be close to the demand.

Also at that time Quincy had decided only to speak freshy.  All non-freshies were booted out of the country.  This started first in engineering when their utility BFF, or Big Frackin' Freshies decided they would only hire freshies for building power stations, building bridges.  Not anything wrong with freshies, but they were now fishing from a smaller cess pool, and things went totally corrupt very fast.  Look at how long their stuff has lasted.  No engineer in rantaria could talk to them.  Their graduate engineers came from universities that had recently been churning out philosophers. priests and lawyers.

The Autobiography of Sam Smith - 3

I. Sam Smith, continue to throw these notes over the wall, even though I don't get anything out of it.  Makes it more honest.

For third year engineering science, I had to make a choice of options.  Once again, my life was ruled by what I didn't want to do.  I settled for the geophysics option which was mainly to feed the oil industry.  I did well and got a summer job.  At that time, a rich oil guy came down and recruited me for Calgary.  Everything was first class, and I would stay a few weeks in the top hotel until I found a better place.

On my first day in Calgary, the entire oil industry went bust.  That was 1976.  The old guy who recruited me had a heart attack and died.  The company was scrambling like headless chickens and didn't know what to do with me.  We were hearing stories of security guards going into entire floors of oil companies and wiping them out. 

I stayed in the hotel and saw a famous movie star in the elevator, but I had to get out.  I chose a residence in the university.  I was paired with this guy called Harvey, who jammed all my stuff into a corner and hogged all the space.  Every night there was a different women and he said he was going into the movies, while he plied them with booze and drugs.  I was fascinated, but soon got an individual room.

Calgary was the most boring city in the universe.  The only thing to do was to go to these huge drinking houses and guzzle 25 cent beer.  We stayed with our backs to the wall, and near the exit.  Each night we watched the fights, with the bouncers taking them to a back room.  It was great, but I soon went back to Toronto to get my sister's VW bug, and then I went camping every weekend in the mountains.  The only good thing about Calgary.

They put me on seismic reflection and I learned a lot, which I was to use later in life.  A very interesting time.

Coming back to university, I decided that there was no future in oil, and went for my Masters in Rock Mechanics, or tunnels.  That was fun and I wrote the shittiest master's thesis ever that nobody understood, and so, graduated.

Linux - needs to be reinstalled

Blah.  My troubles with the ryzen5 continue.  After freezing once a day for weeks, it finally totally froze.  I have to reinstall.

ps.  It's super-horrible reinstalling because the Debian Installer doesn't work right now.  It won't install grub.  Then I ran into the fact that moving to 'unstable' brings up the worst kernel for amdgpu and won't boot.  Then 'stable' doesn't have 'kernel-package'.  I'm trying the 'buster' install and going right to the latest kernel.  Blah.

ps.  So, the sequence is -- install debian with the buster alpha.  Load kernel-package and other junk.  Get the latest 4.17.9 and compile it.  Don't forget to install libssl-dev, or you're hosed, and never know why.

Then the stupid thing works, for a while perhaps.  I should take more backups, but this is my experimental machine.  I run really weird stuff on it.

pps.  still freezing

14.17.9 is worse than ever, trying another one.

14.18 rc6 is working, and I can't crash it.  However, all of these things have gone bad in a couple days.  Must be memory leaks.

now it is freezing

The Autobiography of Sam Smith - 2

I, Sam Smith, continue to write this stuff.  It's funny how you remember more things as you lay it on the ethersphere.  I did have girlfriends.  In high school, I took the biology lab assistant (I was physics) to the prom.  When we were alone, we just stood rigidly beside each other and didn't know what to do.  Totally, dual nerdism.

In first year university, I sang at my church choir and went out with Plain Jane Pain.  It was so boring, I usually fell asleep talking.  I remember once trying to have sex with her.  My anatomy slammed into a brick wall.  I remember WTF! and OW!.

After that, I was determined to be the 40 year virgin and stayed away from females.  Lucky for me, there were no females in my university course.  There were some who might have been, but I didn't look closely.  Equal rights for all!

ps.  Sam says he won't write any more.  His inspiration is gone.

The Autobiography of Sam Smith - 1

I, Sam Smith, entered university without a clue on what I wanted to do with my life.  I was a technical purist from a family of purists, and I went into the U of Tiwanna, Engineering Science program.  I had won the gold medal of top marks from my high school, mainly by shafting my competition.  I took German and they were forced to take English from a crazy guy who randomly chose his marks.  Ha, Ha!

As such, I could have chosen any university course, but this one seem to be the best thing to postpone difficult choices.  I also got a full bursary from some steel company, but I chose to stay home and commute.  My banana-republic province was rich with some 10 million people, so I stacked up on student loans which I never spent.  I only had my poor widow mother, so it was a bonanza.  Lest anybody think this was worse than being a Russian laundromat, this money had to be paid back, but there were grants on top of that, and I went with the flow.

I was a brilliant but generally useless student.  Since I commuted, I was never part of anything, and girls made me puke with anxiety, so I didn't have a life.  The first two years went like a blur.

-end of chapter 1  (I really hope they start getting longer)

The Autobiography of Sam Smith - Preface

Now that corruption is an everyday thing, my buddy Sam has decided to write his autobiography.  He's left me copies, and will fill things in as more of his colleagues die. 


Start

I, Sam Smith, write this fictional autobiography, which is totally true, maybe, and doesn't resemble anybody living or undead.  Anything that anybody objects to will have an instant 'walk back', until they die.

I shall start with the very beginning, which is usually boring, and I've just decided that I won't start with that.  I shall start with sometime in University.

It may be that some people have a past exactly like me, but that is coincidence, and I plead 'Stupidity Defence', right from the start.

I shall write in instalments, and if anybody wants any more, they have to contribute to my Kickmefunder campaign.  I will tell the whole ugly truth.  Names may be changed to protect my ass.

-- to be continued.

Great Climate Scares of the Past

I've done a series of great earthquakes, and now I'll do great climate scares of the past.  This is the 'Great Drought' of about 2000 BC.

Reference

I'm doing this because I just read that they are calling this era of the Holocene, the Meghan Markle era, or some such thing.

If you read the reference, you will find that there was a tremendous drought in the Northern Hemisphere about 4000 years ago.  Not a speck of water anywhere.  All the ice sheets ignored it and even advanced a bit.

If you believe in those other guys, then you will 'know', absolutely know, that it was caused by the damned Egyptians raising cattle, and all the carbon dioxide and methane.  The Southern Hemisphere was unaffected, but they didn't have much in the way of civilization, or caves, or whatever.

If you read the Ancient Greek newspapers of the time, this would have been a big thing.  Whole civilizations moved to the water.  Huge groundwater cisterns were constructed.  The desert tribes of the US south-west were wiped out.

******
Alternate Reality

My thoughts are, that this was one of the many attempted ice advance times, but it failed.  The major reason it failed was because the highlands were still too low, but it was a good college try.  Our wonderful ocean currents that keep the N Hemisphere alive all failed.  Cold and dry.  Sort of like now.  I have postulated that a mini ice age is caused by both the Atlantic and Pacific currents dying, but there must be 'wet and dry' versions of this.  There must be some cycle more severe than just a mini ice age.  I can't think of it now, but we must consider it.  Perhaps, if I had access to some super-duper computer, then we could play, but those things are used for bitcoin now.  :)

Okay, thought about it.  This was the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean currents failing.  Neat.

ps.  Reference2

Nebraska tries a new injection site

I keep wondering why Oklahoma isn't having any more earthquakes.  There was an injection site in Nebraska that was taking natgas frack waste, and it was closed after too many earthquakes.  Now they have moved to an injection site just up in South Dakota on a reservation.

This is an m4 earthquake, well felt.  Taking a Google zoom, we find a classic injection site layout.

They'll soon stop when old ladies start hitting them with their canes.  The knick-knacks are smashed!

ps.  It's funny because this actually is a conspiracy in the trumpy states.  Texas knew what caused the earthquakes and tried moving it around the state.  They must have finally told Oklahoma which seems to have banned it.  Now it's up in Nebraska.  Where next?


pps.  It won't last because the place is jammed with casinos.  Imagine the poker chip towers coming down.  :)

more:  so here we have a fleet of trucks, carrying 'liquid earthquakes' roaming around the country, convincing the local injectors to 'try their stuff'.  "You can make a million dollars before the first earthquake, and then run." 

Cottage Report

Went up one night with the dog.  Mainly to do some work, and get a lot of white oak rings for the wedding.  We are going to do table numbers with them.

Nice and hot, with very cool nights.  When I came, they had experienced some thunder storms that were super-strong.  Knocked out the power.  No winds but very intense lightning.

ps.  here are oak rings ready for processing.

Resuming cooler weather

Strong polar air is coming down on us.  The Atlantic belt is just going straight through.  Good working weather for the cottage.

Weekend in Muskoka

We have relatives up there, and did the whole shebang.  The one rainy day, we went on the boat tour.  This is the sister ship to the steamer.  Nice tour, but all you see are the ridiculously over-built permanent homes there.  No more quaint cottages.  They are fighting people wanting to build huge condo towers, and the cell towers are disguised as trees.

The deer flies were absolutely horrible. 

Uptick in Global Temperatures

Yeah for a warm summer!  Boo to me for warmer temps when I thought things were going straight down.

The June global temps went back a month.

But the general pattern is neat.  This is all 'continental heat', which is just the land warming up, with no ocean involvement.

The end of the Gulf Stream means that the UK is not getting any moist air, which makes for a clammy trumpy handshake.  We were lucky in Toronto because we are getting a huge amount of Atlantic air.  But this can never last.  I suspect that things will be chilly by the second half of August.

Linux 4.18 rc4 finally works with Ryzen5

After many false hopes, this one seems to be stable, and the screen off power management is working.  The developers must have a lot of these chips.  The kernel mode setting (kms) still isn't working on 'recovery mode', but that will come.

So, you can buy this chip and as happy as you can with a computer.  :)

AMD did everything right with this, and it still took 6 months.  I think all the effort is on win gamers for a new chip, but most of these guys go for separate boards.

ps. blah.  Took two days to freeze, a new record.  :(

pps.  now it's freezing like before.

rc5 seems to be worse

Let's do the whole drugs thing

Reference

Now that we have big druggies at the top, we should go with this.  Talk about boosting the economy!  The money has to go into guilt-free treatment, like those places that allow you to drink all you want, until you get sick of it.

This is a better dig at nazitrump than stupid tariffs. 

Last boys should be out before the typhoon hits

It's really barrelling in there.  I'm glad everything looks good. 

Thailand may be hit by Typhoon Maria

Good thing they are moving out now.  Big stuff is moving in.

This is the chart of moist air.  It only rains when it hits cold air.

Toronto real estate does the dead cat bounce

* no cats were killed in the making of this blog.

Latest housing chart.  The media has this as 'hot'.  They always say that.  Anyway, listings have soared, and sales and prices aren't doing much.  'They say a dead cat can bounce if it drops from high enough.'

My old guy dropped the price 20-30% to sell.  Some new houses have gone on the market in the area at prices higher than peak.  Good luck to them.

Top YouTube Ad Goes to Major Scam

Here's the search for 'youtube'

I clicked the top ad on my Linux laptop

This is the whole major scam.  No feedback to Google.  If I had a win laptop it would frighten me and I would send bitcoins to fix it.  Bad Google

Arctic Ice Volume Doing Well

This is summer, so the Arctic ice volume is following the usual seasonal trend.  It crossed lanes last month and is staying in the pack.  It will cross lanes again in the fall, as the ice builds up. 




By October it should leave the pack behind and head into the open territory to the 1970 curve.


You won't hear any more sob stories about the killer polar bears dying.

Cottage Report - No Blueberries

The mild storms passed on Friday, and now it's cool.  We went up to look at the blueberries.  There are very few, blue and white.  Looks like the whole crop got wiped out.

We are sheltered from the north wind, so it's nice.  Way out on the lake, you can see a good chop.

Out in the distance, it's rough.  Bad for canoes.  We are going back to the 'bad lake' of 30 years ago.

Nebraska earthquakes shut down, move back to Oklahoma

I am assuming the guy in Neb collapsed when old ladies started hitting him with their canes.  Don't break the Royal Dalton!

Earthquake activity in OK seems to be resuming its normal pattern.  Nebraska is quiet.

Tariffs Cost Ten Times the Initial Duty

We can't win a trade war against trumpler.  For every tariff we throw up, it costs us 10 times the initial amount.  Their economy is ten times ours, and it will take ten times as long for things in the US to fall apart.

Canada should declare a major retooling effort.  All imports should have no tariffs or restrictions.  The money we save should go into surviving the new world.  Fix up the dairy farmers and the steel guys.

All our exports to the US should stop while we retool, especially oil and natural gas, and other resources.  Doug should support this.  :)

If we don't do this, we are in the big poop.

ps.  for example, take the whinging dairy industry, especially those french guys.  It is better to open the borders and go into those fully automatic milking robots.  They're all made in Germany, the auto parts guys could make their own.  Also lots of employment for installing, repairing, optimizing, etc.

Instead of 'anti-dumping' we could assume that the world is one market, and just monitor for predatory pricing, monopolies, etc.

pps.  this is the next big idea, after legalizing my Sea Oil.  I accidentally took a huge dose at the cottage, with a new batch that was 4 times stronger.  Man, that fixes you up good.  :)

Gulf Stream Breaks Up

I've pointed out before to the English Majors that the Gulf Stream is dying.  On the sea temp map, it was always a distinctive warm streamer heading to the UK.  Last year, hurricanes followed the path.  Now it has detached to a nub and may die altogether.  For the UK, this winter's 'Beast from the East' will be a fond memory.  :)

The Typhoons Start Moving in on Thailand

You can see our short heatwave allowed by weak Pacific air.  The big news is around Thailand where the moist air is starting to move in, and you can see typhoons (hurricanes) starting up.

Most likely the cave rescuers don't have months.

University of Leeds goes to the mattresses

Reference

Let's forget all the other stuff going on.  We can forget that bacteria took out all the  methane.  We can forget plate tectonics.  Yes children, animals eating plants and breathing started the first warm cycle.  This carbon dioxide thing happened every 300 million years, exactly coinciding with tectonic cycles.  Amazing.  The current ice age is caused by animals not breathing.


ps.  I shall call this Leeds Physics, the art of ignoring the elephant in the room. 

Cottage Report - Canada Day

So hot, and we live in a tin can.  The water is still ice cold, so we can sit out on the dock, under the canopy.  I drank lots of water, and went to sleep.  I felt like a lawn sprinkler, pouring out sweat.  Can't do any work.  It's good to have a July heat wave,  they are fragile and we didn't have one last year.

Time to go fishing this morning before the heat blast.