An InSight-ful Article

In case you blinked, the BBC has a well-written article to quickly get you up to speed on NASA's InSight Mars lander.

InSight is primarily a geology mission: seismometers, subsurface heat flow probe,  wobble-o-meter, weather station.  But don't worry, astrobiology fans.  The next round of landers in 2020 will look for those signatures.

Saturday in New Orleans

Bayou Bicycles – the CX bike needs a lot of work

[coffee interlude]

The Orleans Collection at NOMA – cultural tune-up

Blue Oak BBQ – no explanation needed.

[coffee interlude]

Drive home.

Consider This

From the Port St. Joe Star (the local weekly, if you're not familiar):
Hurricane Michael: Bikes program seeks boost

That first Christmas – in fact the entire winter – after a major disaster is always the worst.  This looks like a good way to brighten things up just a little bit.

ps: Send to Saturday, and by Wednesday there was a letter with (in order of importance) a thank-you note and a tax deduction letter in my P.O. box.  Good folks.

pps: Article on the results in the St. Joe Star. 

Perspective

From yesterday's xkcd:

First Mustang Coupe Headed to Auction

It'll likely go for something in the half-million range.  Article at Fox.  VIN = (buncha zeros)2

Not really my way to fly, but it does have its own cool factor.

Sticky Wicket: A New Podcast

Here's a new podcast four-part mini series, centering on several Louisiana politicians and the news media of their time, improbably named Sticky Wicket:

download page |  all about 

To date only the first episode, centering on Huey P. Long has been published, and so far it's really good.  Recommended listening for people of all political stripe.

Hat tip to The Darling Daughter for pointing this one out.

The Hobbit, re-read

Following up on last month's post about The Hobbit movie disaster, I took a little time this past week to re-read The Hobbit.  As always, it's a delight to go back through that book and enjoy it all over again.  If you've never read it, or especially if you've had the misfortune to have only seen the movies, you owe it to yourself to dig into this book.

Then, as with potato chips, one thing leads to another and now I've launched into a re-read of Lord of the Rings.  This one will take a bit longer.  Reading the intro chapters, it was interesting to see how Tolkien's retconning of certain small aspects of The Hobbit between editions were, by him, attributed to Bilbo's coming under The Ring's influence.  The most significant of these revolve around upgrading a simple turn-you-invisible prop in The Hobbit into The One Ring in LotR, and are discussed in some depth in The Road to Middle Earth.  Anyway, it was a nice twist by Tolkien to attribute the retconning of various editions of The Hobbit into being a malevolent effect upon Bilbo of The One Ring's reality distortion field.

It's a nice day here, so that's all for now.  Time to go out and have adventures of my own.

Film Review: Prospect

Did you like Firefly?  OK then, put this one on your schedule.  Three and 1/2 Stars out of Four.

Oh, you want more?  Here are three more items:

1. The film's official web site.  It includes a functional "find where it's playing near me" feature and an honest, representative trailer that you should go watch right now.
2. More review?  OK here: it's gritty, real gritty.  Makes Firefly seem clean and polished by comparison.
3. Here's a review by a reviewer who gets this kind of film.  She has lots more to say.  BTW, if you know the old short story The Cold Equations, don't take her comment there too literally.  There's an element of things sort of playing out that way, but not exactly.  Her comment comes off as a spoiler if you know your classic sci-fi, but it truly isn't.

Back to your regularly scheduled evening surfing.

Deer Season Cometh

And you know what that does for mountain biking.  For quick reference, here are the key dates:

Gun & Dog: Nov 17 – Dec 1

Gun, no dog: Dec 16 – 23

Gun & Dog: Dec 24 – Jan 16

There are other phases to the season (youth, primitive, etc.), but the Gun & Dog phases are the ones to consider.  Here's the full link at MDWFP if you have questions or need more information.  And really, you should confirm these dates for yourself anyway before you go off to the woods.

Noteworthy

Every Veteran's Day it is worth pausing to reflect, but this year's 100th anniversary of the end of World War I makes today particularly noteworthy.  Not a lot I can add here, but we shouldn't let the day pass without mention.

Coffeeneuring Stop #7: Bethel Bike Trails

The post about Stop #6 promised something creative this time out, and creative is what we got.  With all the small-town shops checked off, it was time to step out into the Coffee Shops Without Walls category.  On to the particulars:
1. where: Bethel Bike Trails, Desoto National Forest, just north of Biloxi MS
2. date: 11/10/2018
3. what: double helping of black Taster's Choice instant ("just payin' for my sins here on Earth")
4. ride details: a short excursion for coffee and lunch, tacked onto the end of a 24 mile MTB ride
5. mileage: 3.1 miles round-trip

After the Thursday and Friday rains, the first serious cold front of the year moved through leaving beautiful cool weather and wet but not quite soaked woods.  It was a great day to be out there in the flat pineys of Desoto NF.  After getting the main ride done, swapped Camelbak for the day pack, pre-loaded with coffee gear, lunch, backpacking stove, and – throwing in a twist – a shortwave radio.  Here, have some pics, we'll come back to the rest in a minute:

Hm, for some reason those pics didn't stack around too easily this time.  Ah well, you can see the main points anyway: a smokey day camp, trying to get wet twigs to burn; the little folding Ti stove and pot, slowly trying to boil water to re-hydrate lunch & coffee; lunch & coffee & shortwave radio (listening to WWL-AM New Orleans at the moment); stove ready to be folded up for storage.

I'd been wanting to try out some of this gear under real-world conditions for a while, and here was the chance.  As a twig-burner, the Vargo stove did fine but it would've been much better if I could've found some dry wood.  As it was, pine park and cones were about the best things available.  The Osprey Talon 22 day pack, stuffed with nearly 15 pounds of gear and water, did great on the trail.  I wasn't trying to go light this time out, rather I was trying to push the gear a little bit to see how it performed under load.  As for the SW radio, it did well too, pulling in all kinds of stuff including a numbers station, some Spanish rap music, something in French, WTWW playing oldies, and a ham radio talk show.  Also dialed over to one of the ham 20 meter band digital text watering holes and listened in on a Canadian talking with a guy in the U.S., using the iPhone as the decoding computer.  So that was pretty cool.

All in all, it was a good day on the trail, and a good day to have coffee and try out some gear in the field.  But in the end, I was tired after 27 miles of wet woodlands and hustled it home before mid-afternoon.  And that's a good, slightly offbeat way to wrap up this year's Coffeeneuring Challenge.  But there's no stopping this train now, I'm headed downtown on the CX bike in a bit for the after lunch cup.

The Ugly Truth on Information-Thin Books

As seen over at SMBC :

Be sure to follow the SMBC link to get the mouse-over text and the red button gag.

BTW, if you want to catch up on Foucault even faster than the Cliff notes version, you can just download a couple of hours' worth of podcast over at Philosophize This.

Oh Good

Coffee May Protect Against Alzheimer's and Parkinson's
Man, I'd be the perfect image of health if only I didn't twitch so much.

You can read some of my other opinions on the (dark) matter right here.

Well that's pretty cool.

How a Florida Jeep Club Used Wranglers to Flip a Family's House Over After Hurricane Michael
Story at Jalopnik.

Heartwarming, dramatic, and a little bit dicey all at the same time.

Whoo, you see the time?  More later.