Progress in Paradise... The brush pile is gone! The whole darned thing is burned up, and only a small pile of char is left.
The stacking that I did yesterday worked a treat – picking it up with the tractor's fork was easy. I dumped two fork loads onto the ashes of my last burn, and then lit it. Well, more exactly, I tried to light it. I used the cardboard from five boxes as “kindling”, but never got a sustainable fire going. I called Debbie and had her bring me some more cardboard, and after using a total of nine boxes worth of cardboard, I finally got the darned thing going. The problem was that this bunch of brush was all green wood (as opposed to the dead willow wood I'd burned previously). With all that water in the wood, I had to heat it for quite a while to boil it all off. Once I got a sustainable blaze going, though, it burned hot and fast.
Over the next few hours, I dumped load after load of brush onto the same spot, where the fire was burning. The pile of glowing embers got taller and taller, and ever hotter. At the peak, I couldn't stand within about 10 feet of the fire – it was just too hot. After a total of 22 fork loads, I had it all on the pile. Then I just had to wait for a couple hours while all those glowing embers burned off. I kept stirring the pile with my tractor's fork (that's a very handy tool, that pallet fork!) to keep oxygen flowing to it. Finally when it was down far enough I wet it all down until it stopped steaming. Done with the brush!
As I worked today, locals who knew me honked and waved as they drove by. My burn pile was just 30 feet or so off the road, so I was in view almost all day. Two people stopped to see if I needed help (I didn't), and one of those sent their kid back with a mason jar full of ice water for me. That sure tasted good! A neighbor pulled over in her car and shouted to me that I was doing a good job. I think she's really happy to see all the dead wood taken down and burned off.
Now the only remaining work after the Mormon horde's service project is a bunch of logs I set aside as firewood. I need to saw them up into lengths of 18" at most (that's what my stove will accept), and then haul them back to a wood pile that I've got going. I have a wood splitter on the way, and once it arrives I'll split those logs up and pile the wood up in the shed's second floor, in the storage section. There it should dry out over the summer very nicely, and give me a great supply of firewood for heating my office next winter.
Debbie and I had ourselves a homey dinner at Angie's. We both had the special: a half dozen fried shrimp, potatoes, homemade dinner rolls, and iced tea. We were way too full for dessert :)
Monday, May 25, 2015
To the great surprise of...
To the great surprise of ... exactly nobody other than the most credulous and uninformed progressives (i.e., 90% of them), ObamaCare's promised premium reductions are turning into giant premium increases! Debbie and I are still stunned by our over-$1,200 a month premium (and that's for a plan with sky-high deductibles!), and we're reliably informed that we should expect a 25%+ increase for the coming year.
We feel very fortunate to be in a position to actually pay such a premium. Several of our neighbors, including some with large families of young children, cannot afford any health insurance – even with ObamaCare's subsidies. They go without any coverage at all, and rely on a well-established network here of cash healthcare providers and the safety net of the LDS church if someone had a catastrophic illness or injury. If we didn't have the ObamaCare fine (for not buying insurance) hanging over us, we might do the same. The LDS church provides that safety net for everyone, not just their members. I like their system far better than I like ObamaCare (or, for that matter, any other form of federal welfare/involuntary wealth transfer)...
We feel very fortunate to be in a position to actually pay such a premium. Several of our neighbors, including some with large families of young children, cannot afford any health insurance – even with ObamaCare's subsidies. They go without any coverage at all, and rely on a well-established network here of cash healthcare providers and the safety net of the LDS church if someone had a catastrophic illness or injury. If we didn't have the ObamaCare fine (for not buying insurance) hanging over us, we might do the same. The LDS church provides that safety net for everyone, not just their members. I like their system far better than I like ObamaCare (or, for that matter, any other form of federal welfare/involuntary wealth transfer)...
Mark Steyn...
Mark Steyn ... on the fifth anniversary of “Everybody draw Mohammed” day. The lead:
The reflex to shut down free speech (and yes, cartoons are a form of speech) is one of the things that most disturbs me about progressivism. They, of course, rarely acknowledge that they want to shut down free speech – they weave calming words around the notion, casting it as a right to be unoffended, rather than as a curb on free speech. That's just a marketing ploy, though. The reality is that they want you to stop saying whatever it is that they don't want to hear.
To which I say, “Fuck off, progressives!”
Five years ago, a cartoonist with The Seattle Weekly, shocked by the way Comedy Central had censored "South Park" after the usual threats from violent Muslims, proclaimed May 20th as "Everybody Draw Mohammed" Day. What was novel about this particular promotion was that the cartoonist, Molly Norris, was not a "right-wing" "Islamophobe" but a liberal progressive, and therefore a rare if not all but unique example of a feminist leftie recognizing that the Islamic enforcers were a threat to her way of life. This was a very welcome development.Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.
Unfortunately, Miss Norris was not so much recognizing reality as blissfully unaware of it. When the backlash against her idea began, she disassociated herself from it and signed off with - Lord help us - a peace symbol.
The reflex to shut down free speech (and yes, cartoons are a form of speech) is one of the things that most disturbs me about progressivism. They, of course, rarely acknowledge that they want to shut down free speech – they weave calming words around the notion, casting it as a right to be unoffended, rather than as a curb on free speech. That's just a marketing ploy, though. The reality is that they want you to stop saying whatever it is that they don't want to hear.
To which I say, “Fuck off, progressives!”
Memorial Day...
Memorial Day... Many others have written of this day's meaning far better than I ever could. I'll be burning brush today, and while I'm doing that I'll be thinking of the ones we honor today...
Geek: what takes 80 seconds to do a double SHA-256 hash?
Geek: what takes 80 seconds to do a double SHA-256 hash? An IBM 1401 mainframe computer, that's what. The bad performance isn't just because of slow clock speed – it's also down to the fact that the 1401 doesn't have a conventional binary ALU; instead it uses BCD math. The logical operations in the SHA-256 algorithm are relatively easy with a binary ALU; they are horribly difficult using BCD.
Even on the old computers I first learned to program on, I never had that particular problem – they all had binary ALUs, though they didn't use two's-complement math (they used one's-complement math because back then it was slightly faster). I did, however, once have almost the inverse of this challenge: I implemented a BCD-based floating point package (complete with logarithms and trig functions) that ran on an Intel 8080 microprocessor. This was made slightly more bearable by the built-in support for adding two BCD digits packed into a byte – but still, multiplication and division were quite painful. And painfully slow...
Even on the old computers I first learned to program on, I never had that particular problem – they all had binary ALUs, though they didn't use two's-complement math (they used one's-complement math because back then it was slightly faster). I did, however, once have almost the inverse of this challenge: I implemented a BCD-based floating point package (complete with logarithms and trig functions) that ran on an Intel 8080 microprocessor. This was made slightly more bearable by the built-in support for adding two BCD digits packed into a byte – but still, multiplication and division were quite painful. And painfully slow...
Fourteen untranslatable words, illustrated...
Like riding a bike...
Watching this reminded me of an experiment I read of many years ago, wherein a man wore a pair of glasses that turned the world upside down. After a few days wearing these glasses, he saw the world right-side up again! Through the magic of Google, I found that experiment: it was done by Professor George Stratton in the 1890s. The underlying observations closely match those of this video...
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