One More Worry: Palm Bronzing Disease

Video from last winter at a Tampa area TV station.

Article in The Times.

The only good news is that the leaf hoppers that spread this stuff tend to get vacuumed up as tasty snacks in truly wild areas, so this is more of a city & suburban problem.  Guess I'll have to arrange to get my four trees tested this week.

It's Just a Wheel

Last week I mentioned having a spoke pull through a cracked rim on the gravel bike, spending a couple of hours finding a replacement wheel for this 12yo bike, and ordering and hoping it would all work out.  (BTW, it's a Sta-Tru from Modern Bike.)  Long story short, the installation took two hours from brewing a pot of coffee pre-work through to adjusting the brakes, then degreasing the kitchen sink in the post-work clean-up.  It all went without a hitch.  As usual, there was the 15 minute hunt for the freehub tool in the bottom of the toolbox, and parts were far dirtier than expected so I spent some time scrubbing the cassette.  Nice putting things back together without the sickening scrape of grit on machined aluminum though.  It's the little things that take the most time, but that matter in the final result.

Damn though, four hours total to replace a busted wheel.  That seems a tad excessive.  OTOH, if I can get another eleven years out of this bike (and I expect that I might), it'll all be worth it.

Sta-Tru.  Let's hope so!

And with that, over the past seven months every drivetrain part (with the sole exception of the cranks, which never seem to wear out) has been replaced: pedals, chainrings, chain, rear derailleur, cassette, and now back wheel.  Modularity and repairability at its finest.

More in the "Black Tide Rising" Zombie Series

On the eve of the whole 2020 – ah – issues, I read and blogged about the first four, core books in John Ringo's Black Tide Rising series of zombie novels.  Fun stuff, and if the CDC fumbled the outbreak of the responsible virus in fiction, in reality their handling a much less deadly virus turned out to be much less entertaining.  But that's another story for another web site, not now and not here.

Onward with Ringo's series, after reading some reviews I opted to skip the Mike Massa sequels Valley of Shadows and River of Night, and went straight on to the short story compilations Voices of the Fall and We Shall Rise.  Those last two I can recommend.  The great thing about a short story collection is that you can skip a few if they're not to your taste.

Back to the present, I just finished the two latest follow-ons, At The End of the World and At the End of the Journey, both by Charles Gannon, and those were fun.  They follow the adventures of an Outward Bound-type sailing ship summer program for wayward teenagers... who as you might expect get swept up in dealing with the zombie virus outbreak.  In the first, it's just a struggle to get through the first couple of months and get everyone trained up, culminating in a call to adventure, in the Joseph Campbell sense.  No spoilers here, but trust me, it's a quest of big enough proportions for another book.  If you've gotten this far, either in the series or this blog post, you'll probably enjoy these too.

It was all a lot of fun, and now it's summer again and I'm back starting a re-read of the original four books.  It's like eating potato chips.  Now that we've been through a couple of years of what seems like an engineered virus, does the "scifi" label really apply to this series anymore?

Ugh, the formatting under blogger is horrible now, what a mess; it's a real distraction from writing a post.  Anyway, here's a link to the entire book listing in the series at wikipedia.

Thinking about Soldering?

Then here's an article at The  SWLing Post about a new how-to pdf comic book on the topic.  Just right for a rainy weekend's fun.  Obligatory link to the pdf itself, along with commentary, at link.

Busted.

After eleven years of adventures, a spoke split out of the back rim on the gravel bike.  The hub and spokes... not really worth saving and re-lacing.  This is a no-win situation, whole wheel's gotta swap.  The hardest part was finding a straight-up replacement for a 2010 year model bike; since then, everything's gone to disk brakes, 135mm hub spacings, 12 speed cassettes, etc.  Took two hours(!) of internet shopping to find something close.

Red line's the mechanic's reference mark.  This is a very dead rim.

Eh, just the cost of doing business.  At least I wasn't left stranded somewhere inconvenient.

The Blair Witch Franchise is AWSOME – in Another Universe

The  creators of TBWP had a whole series of innovative movies in the same universe ready to pitch – and the film execs in effect said "Hey, that's something out of the ordinary you've made, and it made us a lot of money.  Now pitch all that innovation and grind out some mediocre re-hash sequels."  Details at Collider.

It's still not too late to back up and take the correct path.

Been There, Done That, Published the Paper

I take exception to the ordering in #4.  Summoning the Health and Safety Officer is by far the worst of the four options.  You'll be filling out paperwork until the universe goes into heat death.

Bonus link, for a limited time only: The Far Side's curious lab cats.

Movie Review: The Batman

The three hour runtime chewed through all my time surplus, so all you get is this TLDR list:

• Ninety minutes of story was stretched over twice that.
• There are no good guys here; people range from a shady inheritance to psycho-bad.
• Most of the actors were spot-on for their respective parts.
• Gotham seemingly has no real economy.  Can a city exist on drug money alone?  Nah.
• Some of the "world's greatest detective" part is OK.
• The "60's badass muscle car" Batmobile was pretty cool.  Less tech, more wreck.
• Just from the look of it, this movie just smelled bad.  Batcave is a junked-up monster car garage?  Sure, it's gonna stink like a truckstop in August.  Catwoman's apartment is packed with strays?  Yeah, we know what that's gonna smell like too.
• There's a flooded city theme toward the end, so add New Orleans to the Chicago/New York mix.
• Gritty.
• Too damn long for too little chewy nougat center.
• Two Stars out of Five.

One more on Webb...

So... what's the Webb Space Telescope supposed to find, and how does it do it?  Here's a 13 minute video that covers all the basics, without assuming that you have a solid foundation in relativistic effects:

Just click over to youtube and embiggen to full screen.

I hate to keep re-posting other people's stuff about Webb and the Event Horizon radio telescope array, but damn, there's some good stuff out there that deserves highlighting.  As I put it back in 2016, "Between the Webb and LIGO, the 2020's are going to be boom times in astronomy."  Well, that golden age has arrived.

Perspective

We've all seen the Event Horizon radio telescope pic of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy splashed across the news this week, but only NASA APOD puts it in the context of the heart of the galaxy:

Even though we live in amazing times and are able to see sights like this, try to keep a sense of perspective.

OK, Webb is Up & Working

Still a few commissioning details ahead, but here's an image comparison with the Spitzer IR space telescope:

Just by uninformed inspection, the Webb image on the right is spectacular.

More details over at space.com   So many moving parts, so many ways to go wrong, and in the end... the damn thing works.  Just amazing.  Not half as amazing as what we're all going to get to see in the coming years, however!

Tour of Homes last Saturday

Article at The Times.  I will say, it was most impressive this year, and leave the rest to the article.

If the pattern holds into next year, The Tour will return on the first Saturday in May next year – the 6th.

ps: Here's The Tour's website.

FTL?

Faster than light?  No, not really.  Wait, let me rephrase that: No, Of Course Not.

On to the article, Much Faster Than Light, which is about hollow core fiber optics.  You see, the speed of light in glass is about 2/3 that in vacuum or (near enough) air.  The resultant ever-so-slight time delay in passing data is significant in high-frequency trading between cities... so hollow core optical fiber is a thing now.  The light moves through air inside of the glass fiber instead of in the glass, which brings the speed back up to 99%+ of c, and there we go.

Something similar, using HF radio comms, was posted here four years ago.  Each approach has its plusses and minuses.  Fiber will be more reliable and have a higher data bandwidth; HF waves will follow a straighter path, you don't have to worry about right-of-ways, and there's no physical infrastructure beyond the two end-point stations.

On one hand, this is technologically cool.  On the other hand, HFT and related shenanigans seem about as big-picture economically productive as counting cards.  I get the feeling that historians and forensic economists will have a field day with all this in a few decades.

So, FTL?  No, just faster than light moving through a slow medium.