Two Graphics for This Evening

Found at various sources around the web earlier today.

Don't be on the red stripes.  (Been there, done that; would not recommend without a robust seasonal plan.)  Elsewhere no guarantees either, but hey, you place your bets & you take your chances.

Note caption at lower right and choose wisely, friends.  "Oooh, horsies!" is not a viable transportation plan for the mid-21st Century, as much as some might wish it.

The Keys

But you're probably not going to like 'em all that much.  Behold:

From SMBC sometime last week.  Link here.  Be sure to click through for the mouse-over & big red button.

Two Good Things

With so much going on, two good things have crossed my desk in the last few days.  First up, here's Tuesday's launch of a Falcon 9 ISS resupply ship.  The entire video is 22 minutes, but the good part is all in the first 10.  Watch for the booster's beautiful landing, starting around minute 7.  Go full-screen to watch.

Additional commentary at The Silicon Graybeard's blog about the unusual partnership between SpaceX and Northrop-Grumman for this flight.

Next up, over at Lawdog's blog, Cedar recounts an encounter with a pollster pushing for solar power-friendly results.  Her response: Nuclear Power or Bust!  Smart.  Go & read.

Some of those images of the Falcon 9's landing look like something out of a sci-fi movie, but nope.  This is real life.  There are good things in 2024, as much as we may have to look around for them.

ps: Back to the Falcon 9, here are some screen grabs of the booster landing.  Just.... wow.

And that is how it is done.

Oysters in Trouble in MS, AL

Excess runoff-laden water from the Mississippi River has completely messed up the coastal waters to the east.  This is what happens when you turn a major river into a concrete lined ditch and keep pushing for 1930s farming policies upstream.  Article at NPR.

Don't let this happen to your river.

HF Trading & HF Radio

Like peanut butter & chocolate.

Directing article at The SWLing Post, and the main article at, uh, some guy in Chicago's blog.  The bottom line is that a tech guy from the Chicago financial scene was out biking and spied some long-range shortwave beam antennas pointed in the general direction of western Europe on the same tower as a local microwave link pointed at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.  Hmm.  From the blog post:

Shortwave is no panacea.  It's unreliable, expensive, and very low bandwidth.  Think dialup speeds.  But you can't beat it for latency.

You bet it can't be beat.  For a straight-line path at the speed of light, 6000 miles to Europe at 186 miles per millisecond comes out to 32 ms travel time.  Though fiber optic, this would be about 47% slower, so make that 47 ms.  Additionally, while the fiber optic may be somewhat directly routed, it can never be exactly a straight line.  Call it at best taking the square way around a block vs. the diagonal.  That's another 41%, which brings us up to 66 ms, which is more than double the shortwave transmission time.  Throw in delays caused by in-line amplifiers, routers, etc. and it's going to total to quite a bit more.  But just going with the original numbers, is 34 ms enough to matter?  Not to me, no.  But yes, to some people I can imagine this would be important.

Thales (pretty much the first scientist ever) was right: Science can be useful, and even make it fairly easy to make money.  Throw in the whole "figured this out while biking" angle and it makes quite an appealing story.

Somehow This Keeps Happening

Show me an exception and we can discuss how that exception proves the rule.

Yeah, it really is that bad.

Usually the web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is funny and brainy.  Today it's just brainy, but this time brainy as in "massive screaming migraine headache" kind of brainy.  Health insurance costs have gone batshit in pockets all over this country.  Here, just go read and weep.  And don't forget to read the mouse-over text and to hit the big red gag button at the end.

Free markets work.  Politically connected corporatism doesn't work at all.  Centrally planned systems can seem to work for a while, until they run out of other peoples' money.  This has been experimentally confirmed time and again over the past hundred years.  What is so hard to understand here?