$260, because we have a friend who works at a tire shop, and now her car has four brand-new tires on it, and I can now worry a hell of a lot less about her commute. The car now drives down the road like it did six months ago--straight and smooth with no extraneous vibration. The new tires are a shade noisier than the old ones were, but not obnoxiously so, and they grip like nobody's business. The car corners like it's on rails.
What an amazing concept: traction.
Also, Mrs. Fungus can walk now without yelping in pain every other step. She's still not 100% but at least she's mobile, and able to drive.
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Stay the hell out of Maryland. It's a police state. Okay, any state which allows its police to stop people from other states solely because they have CCW permits in their home states is run by fuckin' nazis.
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Global cooling!
Are we in for a frigid 21st century? The article has a quote in it:
The development of telescopes as astronomical instruments after 1609 enabled observers to track the number of sunspots with unprecedented accuracy. They noted a ‘maximum’ between 1612 and 1614, followed by a ‘minimum’ with virtually no spots in 1617 and 1618, and markedly weaker maxima in 1625-26 and 1637-9.That description fits rather neatly with how the Sun has behaved for the past couple of decades; we just passed through a minimum with virtually no sunspots in 2008-2009, and now we're seeing a remarkably weak maximum.
Meanwhile Michael Mann wants to see science politicized because if he actually does any real science (as opposed to the Lamarckian/Lysenkoist nature of global warming research) he's going to be out of a job. The more political science becomes, the less focused it will be on accuracy and repeatability of results.
And quite honestly, it's already the case that a lot of scientific research is just crap. There's a big storm brewing in the scientific world about studies which cannot be replicated. Perhaps that is what's caused the apparent sudden stop in technological advancement.
...except for electronics. That stuff has to work--else people will not buy the products!--and it's shaped by the laws of physics. You can get away with "proving" that a certain drug may be efficacious in the treatment of high cholesterol, but you can't fiddleate and adjuster data to make a multicore CPU function correctly; the chip either works or it does not, and it'll be obvious pretty quickly which is the case.
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Well, I managed to get the chore done today that needed doing. I think I'll go take a nap.