The older they were, the more likely they were to do it, too.
My childhood was spread across the 1970s and 1980s. We had tube-based televisions in our house for a good long time, and it wasn't until 1988 that we got a console TV. By then, of course, tubes were no longer in use for anything other than the display screen itself. But I still remember sitting in a quiet house, late at night, and the TV suddenly emitting that *crack*.
Televisions used to get awfully warm inside. That's why cats would sleep on them: they were warm. Especially with tube circuitry. Things would expand as they warmed up, and kind of like with earthquakes things would stick together until some threshold was reached and then there'd be an adjustment. *Crack*. But you wouldn't hear it over the noise coming from its speaker.
Much later, after the thing had been off a while and had cooled down, you'd get the same *crack* out of it as pieces contracted.
Even after they made the switch to solid-state circuitry they still got warm inside--you still had that big glass bulb--but not as much. The same thing went for computer monitors: many was the time I'd go to move one and it'd make all sorts of creaks and pops as I did.
Flat panels don't do that. The electronics are vanishingly small compared to the surface area of the LCD, and the LCD itself has that entire area to help dissipate heat. Give your blab slab a wiggle and you might get a couple of little noises from it, but nothing like what you'd get from nudging a 27" color TV, vintage 1973 or so.
* * *
Netflix has
K-On!...they also have the movie, which I didn't know existed. Their subtitles are still hit-and-miss, randomly dropping, but I watched half of it last night while waiting for Mrs. Fungus to get home. At my stopping point, it was the same old charming stuff from the TV series.
* * *
Had an epic episode of acid reflux last night. One of those occasions where dinner wasn't sitting quite right; about 2 AM I burped in my sleep, and...stuff...came up with it, which took me from peaceful slumber to
EMERGENCY! immediately.
Dinner was late, because after Mrs. Fungus got home we went out to get the rest of what we need for Thursday's festivities, and we needed to make two stops. Dinner ended up being Burger King, about 11 PM; and then we were in bed around 1 AM. That's probably what prompted that bit of reflux; I should know better, but I was tired and hungry and wasn't really thinking about it.
It's that liquid smoke stuff they use that does that to me. Burger King's food is pretty far down the scale for me because of that. Whoppers are really the only thing they make that I like. Given my druthers I would have gone to Culver's (but they were close to being closed by then) or Wendy's (none in the vicinity).
*sigh*
* * *
The third to the last sentence is the point of this post on the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945.
* * *
Not impressed with Hunter S. Thompson. I never really understood the mystique, either.
In fact, there are quite a lot of people who were idolized by Baby Boomers like that. "Oh, so-and-so is so
great!" but I never understood what was so great about him. The older I get--and as I better come to understand the attitudes of my actual age cohort--the more I come to realize that there's actually
nothing to them. At least, nothing that really makes them deserving of the adulation given to them.
Hunter S. Thompson is one of them. As far as I can tell, he was considered cool by Baby Boomers because he took a lot of drugs and acted like they did.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas made for an entertaining movie but as far as I can tell it was basically about him getting stoned fifty thousand different ways on someone else's dime.
Frank Zappa--this is going to ruffle some feathers--Frank Zappa seemed like an okay musician and the songs that I heard were quirky but harmless.
There were
two of them that could be played on the radio when I was in my teens. "Baby Snakes" and "Valley Girl" were the only two songs of his that I'd ever heard prior to the late 1980s when a friend brought over
Sheik Yerbouti.
...and
every song on that album, just about, was a raunch-fest. He was a competent musician but I just could not hear anything that demonstrated that he was as great a musician as people said he was. It just wasn't that good.
But his music was "satirical" (and these days we might refer to it as "woke") and he agreed with the millions of hippies out there, and so they idolized him. I suspect that a Frank Zappa who was just as talented as the one we got but whose songs didn't gore "establishment" oxen would have disappeared into history without a trace.
And every time I look at one of these Boomer idols, it's the same thing. It's not that he's specially talented; it's that he said things that Boomers liked--or pushed against some societal norm they wanted to see destroyed, mainly because it kept them from having a good time.
* * *
The best they could do ended up proving the opposite point. The last paragraph sums up the entire article:
So how did the video do refuting Scott Adams' cartoon? He joked that scientists warning of catastrophe invoke the authority of observational data when they are really making claims based on models. Check. He joked that they ignore on a post hoc basis the models that don't look right to them. Check. He joked that their views presuppose the validity of models that reasonable people could doubt. Check. And he joked that to question any of this will lead to derision and the accusation of being a science denier. Check. In other words, the Yale video sought to rebut Adams' cartoon and ended up being a documentary version of it.
The bulk of the article explains each of these points in detail so it's worthwhile to read it all, but that really does end up being the point.
* * *
What kind of stress test? Boeing was stress-testing a 777 fuselage and it went "bang". It sounds like they were doing a cabin pressurization test, bringing it up to 1.5x the normal load, and it failed at 99% of that value. I can't tell from the article at ZeroHedge, and the Seattle
Times refuses to allow me to run a secure system while viewing their article. (They want me to turn off my ad blocker, which I won't do for reasons explained previously.)
In any event the failure was close enough to the threshold that the FAA will let Boeing self-certify their fix for it. At this point I don't think the FAA should let them get away with
anything of the sort, but I don't run it, so WTF.
* * *
A Hard Rock Cafe, under construction or renovation or something, collapsed in New Orleans some time ago but I didn't care enough about it to discuss it.
The construction company employed illegal aliens. This guy was ordered deported in 2016--three years ago--and was not legally able to work in the US.... "But Hard Rock's construction company hired him anyway and nobody has been indicted for doing so."
As Karl Denninger notes, American companies will continue to hire illegal aliens as long as they are allowed to get away with doing so. If you want to stem the tide of illegal aliens, drying up the job market for illegal labor would be a good place to start.
I'd say, if your company is caught employing illegal aliens, you're subject to a fine of $1,000,000 per head.
That would go a long way towards ending this shit. But of course there are already laws on the books, and penalties for hiring illegals. So really the only thing we need to do is to
start enforcing those laws and penalizing the companies that break them.
* * *
It's high winds in the Fungal Vale. Snows, rains, winds, storms, dogs and cats living together--mass hysteria!
Bad weather in November. Who coulda seen
that one coming.
* * *
Pixy Misa has something about HP SSDs:
Speaking of HP: Some HP SSDs will fail after 32,768 hours online. (Bleeping Computer)
And they didn't find out until it started happening to people. (Reddit)
Links redacted; if you want to read them go there and make clicky.
In summary, though, these are serial-attached SCSI drives, which are typically used in file server drive arrays. Network hardware, in other words. Expensive.
...and failing at exactly 32,768 hours of service--about 3.75 years--means someone screwed up when writing the firmware. Of course--these articles discuss the firmware update released by HP--but long before I read
anything other than what Pixy wrote, I knew it was a software problem. Why?
32,768 is 2 to the 15th power.
Exactly. And so what happened is, some register or counter or something hit 32,767, and when it tried to go to 32,76
8, BLAMMO.
If you look at it in binary it becomes more obvious what happened:
32,767 is 0111 1111 1111 1111. (Hex: 7F FF)
32,768 is 1000 0000 0000 0000. (Hex: 80 00)
The drive bricks when bit number 15--the most significant digit--goes from a 0 to a 1. I've got a fiver that says that someone used a signed variable when he should have used an unsigned one. Because when you're talking about signed binary numbers?
0111 1111 1111 1111= 32,767
1000 0000 0000 0000=-32,768
...and the software reads out those bits and says "Negative hours! Nope!" and crashes.
I've run afoul of that myself; signed binary numbers are a
pain--but I'm not, and never was, a professional programmer in
any capacity, let alone writing firmware for mission-critical hardware.
* * *
This article about exorcism films leads me to an interesting point: when you're talking about excorcism, you necessarily have to stipulate the existence of a beneficial, loving God, and in fact you also have to stipulate the divinity of Christ.
Exorcism does not make sense in a godless universe. Demons are fallen angels, and angels were created by God. Even if you ignore that, some guy standing in front of a human being who has been possessed by a supernatural creature yelling "The power of Christ compels you!" is just doing a standup routine for the entity...
if there is no God.
(And, in fact,
any movie or story about angels and/or demons must also make that stipulation. Neither exist in a godless universe.)
What about the notion that the faith of the exorcist alone is sufficient to expel the entity? If that were true, then there would be a significant number of stories about healers who use the power of their faith to heal people, decisively and completely, that would have about the same amount of credence as these "based on a true story" exorcism stories, but there are none in my experience. Further, "faith healer" generally has a mildly negative connotation that "exorcist" does not. I do think the existence of maleficient entities implies the existence of beneficient ones (as well as neutral ones) and those beneficient entities would probably take a hand in helping exorcists do their thing.
* * *
Contract workers can't unionize.
* * *
Another opinion to the effect that the impeachment scam is a bad idea. I've known from the very beginning that attempting to impeach Trump was a losing proposition for Democrats.
Earth to Democrats: You lost the election.
Get over it. Or you'll lose the next one, too.
* * *
...woke up this morning at 7:50, which is about an hour later than normal. I'm going to go to the store for some Pepsi and bread, and otherwise? Staying home. Making food, and cleaning, and maybe having some fun too.
Whee!
