Various Updates

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Of sorts. Real post tomorrow.

I realized I’m coughing less, and less stuffed up, which means I am getting better. My voice is still not back. I sound like a three pack a day smoker, but I don’t sound like a goose hissing anymore.

The truth though is that I am tired. SO TIRED. Tired like I just ran a marathon. This apparently might be due to being on antibiotics, or at least some of you said so.

I’m hoping to work tomorrow, including a chapter of Witch’s daughter for the substack. I’ll even make this one free. (Don’t hold me to it, though. Tomorrow might end up being Wednesday.)

I do need to get on my feet though, because Indy is driving Dan nuts. Not enough occupation.

This was the crime scene in the office this morning:

AND someone got super-salty when I cleaned it up. “But but but, we had play dirt and SALAD.” Yeah.

The blackout: I would assume it’s lack of energy above all. (Kind of like I feel right now.) I mean when we were there six years ago they were going house to house — they, the government — and installing some kind of switch to make the switch on the board pop at lower loads. To make this clear, BEFORE the change I couldn’t turn on a heater and a hair dryer without taking down the electricity in this four bedroom upper middle class home.

What shocked me most of all was that my parents were okay with this, because climate crisis, don’t you know? (I bite my tongue a lot.) Kindly remember my family are neither stupid nor hard left (with one exception and he doesn’t realize he is. Just trusting the best sources in “academic” circles.)

I haven’t heard from them this time, but with Trump and the demonization of Trump over there — oh, by the way, an idiot left a comment that I’m handing to one of the fans to shred. I have volunteers, but if anyone else wants it, I’ll let Holly Frost know. It’s all about how Trump is “Destroying the world”. No, I’m not approving the comment. He’s an idiot (Probably from Europe.) I’m just outing him for a fisking. They don’t play fair on their sites and I know game theory. I’m not doing it here, either. — so with this, yeah, my tongue is going to be bleeding by the end of the next phone call.

The lights are going on in Europe. Literally it seems. Meanwhile they think the shadow of fascism is over…. us? It’s inexplicable.

Sometimes I wonder if the stress is keeping my auto-immune spun up.

I’ll go watch videos of the guy walking through cemeteries. (Faces of the Forgotten.)

26 thoughts on “Various Updates”

  1. The Tom Wolfe story recounting an episode at a Princeton conference with Günther Grass

    “He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.”

    “Cat shaped crimes”! Sacrilege! Our feline overlords have no criminal behaviors, as they make the rules … Kitties in my neighborhood, but none live with me.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. Given that cats all view themselves as royalty, it is clear that they simply take advantage of sovereign immunity for their actions :)

    Unfortunately the Green Leap Forward crowd views what happened in Europe today with lights going out (apparently they were minutes away from all of continental Western Europe going down) as a feature and not a bug.

    Like

  3. I’m glad you’re on the edge of feeling better.

    And of course course POTUS is destroying the world. He’s destroying the world order that has Americans constantly BOHICA for the lazy elitist whores in the rest of the world.

    Boo hoo, *uckers.

    Like

  4. There were some wild Twitter threads on the blackout. Apparently Spain was boasting they’d hit 100% renewable a few days prior too. But the renewables dipped, and lights out. Sounds like they actually very nearly took all of Europe down with them.

    Like

    1. UK’s telegraph, or someone, said 80%, and I think about twelve days ago.

      Apparently some of the big brains say that this sort of cascading thing should take well above 80% wind and solar to occur. I don’t understand this stuff very well myself.

      But I read some dude on the internet (ten, fifteen or twenty years back) explaining that solar/wind could be a grid problem for a related reason.

      Three phase is a cool idea, but back when I was struggling with DC circuit analysis, I had a pretty hard ‘nope’ response to AC. I think AC is not as bad as I had feared.

      I can easily imagine someone being very successful politically without understanding the math and science of power grids.

      The remaining conventional supplies that the politicians tolerated on the grid might have been very few units. Then, you would only need a more extreme politician, or maintenance problems, or both, and maybe that takes down some of the other conventional capacity on the way out.

      Anyway, balancing this stuff on a grid was a very hard problem, and they worked for some years on the software to solve it. Failure analysis… I dunno. Reconstructing what happened, and figuring out if the current management software is involved, is probably going to take some time.

      Like

        1. I’ve seen young engineers almost to the point of tears when confronted with steam tables.

          They were taught the “Ideal Gas Laws”, but their instructors never bothered to tell them that “ideal” was in the Greek philosophical sense, and steam is not only isn’t ideal, it kicks the concept in the yarbles.

          Liked by 1 person

  5. Math with imaginary numbers I have done, eons again. Modeling that mixes trig functions and the square root of minus one—and the model works—nope; only made a D in that class and did not have to retake it.

    Like

    1. It’s not that bad.

      The normal FFT based approach is quite tractable compared to, say, wavelets or solitons, as far as I can tell.

      (Okay, I could be persuaded that every electrical engineer is insane, and that some can hide it fairly well. )

      Anyway, the imaginary part is just hiding phase/frequency information, that actually does exist in reality. Weird time stuff.

      I think it may all just be a convention/notation, that is somehow easy or convenient.

      Well, it is probably better than being bored enough to hit myself on the head with a hammer.

      Like

  6. I read geocide back in the day.

    Actually destroying a planet is hard to do.

    Now, what they think they are talking about is easier, but not so easy as they suppose. Ecosystems and biomes may be, essentially, an error of measurement, modeling, and statistical inference. It may be rather harder to be rid of the ‘natural’ world than they suppose.

    What Trump is doing is /not/ sending their preferred social signals, which is emotionally destroying their perceived world.

    What they fear in their heart of hearts, is that if FRance’s government, and Spain’s government, are not constantly signing documents and giving speeches about international cooperation, then one might invade the other. It is unstated, and irrational, and those are part of why it might grip them so strongly.

    They relied on US regimes that would play along, or at least would send signals weak enough that they could interpret those signals as participation no matter what.

    Which is really a function of regimes strong enough, or with enough popular confidence supporting them, that they can make delivery on interests pressing to the American public invisible to the Europeans.

    US politics is more stable than the Europeans project (1), and at the same time governments are more fragile if the public is irritated enough by unmet demands.

    (1) probably, as far as I tell

    Like

      1. So much this. I have so many pleasant memories of being stationed in Greece and Spain, and traveling in Britain, and across Europe. So many lovely places, wonderful museums and very pleasant people, on the whole.

        I’m watching some property reno series, worked up by ambitious, hard-working and hopeful young couples: one pair renowing a dilapidated cottage in the English Cotswolds, one renovating two run-down buildings in small-town France, and another rebuilding a near-ruin in Portugal. Only the French couple has a child.

        And I can’t help wondering if they will have any future at all, even out in the rural areas, if all that is around the corner in the next few decades is the real-life version of Tom Kratman’s Caliphate.

        Liked by 1 person

  9. @ Cardshark > “Given that cats all view themselves as royalty, it is clear that they simply take advantage of sovereign immunity for their actions ”

    Running through the interwebs recently, I came upon an analysis at QuoteInvestigator of a similar maxim.

    “In Ancient Times Cats Were Worshipped As Gods; They Have Not Forgotten This”

    Like

  10. Power grid operating at full capacity. Call for more power. No spare capacity because green nude eel. Grid goes critical. Some component somewhere fails and then cascading failure at the speed of light until it hits a break. Lather, rinse, repeat.

    Thank God for nuclear in France or the whole continent would have gone.

    Like

  11. Meanwhile in Britain, the government demands more solar power while planning to diminish the output of the sun over their country . . .

    These people could run out of sand in a desert.

    Like

  12. Of coarse Trump is destroying world order. Trump has declared that the United States will no longer be bullied to pay for whatever the other countries won’t pay. Be it our tax dollars, the blood of our youth, or a dumping ground for their criminals and *undesirables, etc. Trump is whacking the hands they are holding out. How dare we, the people, allow and cheer Trump for doing this! My response? The cheer is: “Go! Trump Go! Keep it up!”

    In other news, I’m glad Amazon is showing the cost of tariffs on goods listed. Shows me what to avoid. I despise ordering something, then learn it is being shipped from overseas. The new practice lets me know before I order that it is imported, be it because shipped directly, or already imported. Now I’m going to go peek on items previously bought to see how they are affected.

    (*) Don’t suppose the UK or Canada would take Markle and leave Harry? Just asking for a friend.

    (**) Heard rumors that some of the US self deportees to UK (Ireland for one) are having difficulties getting their citizenship or long term visas even meeting the expat citizenship requirements (if your ancestor immigrated from said country and you can prove it). US response? “Naw. Don’t want them back. Possession is the law.”

    Liked by 1 person

      1. Same.

        I ordered, and received, two t-shirts. Motif – Grizzly bears. One tribute to Tetons 399. Both came from China … sigh. Came fast (flown) VS boat. I get it. Both products from photographers/artists they outsource printing on material. But still wish they’d been US based.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. After the Chinese forced down one of our Navy P-3 Orion surveillance ACs a couple of years ago, I tried my best to find and purchase strictly American-made items … and I was purely horrified to find out how little there was, when it came to new.

          I’m absolutely thrilled to find nice household or garden items that are made in India, the PI, even Mexico. A couple of decades ago, the Gentleman With Whom I Kept Company patronized thrift stores, second-hand markets and yard-sales, searching for strictly American-made vintage tools. We do the same, looking for cookware. china, glass and linens.

          Like

          1. Same.

            I avoid China imports. Or try to. Why I was so disappointed with these shirts.

            Same with a couple of custom orders with (cartoon-ish) of our pets. 1) door mat with all 6. 2) long wallet with me, the current dog, and our last dog. 3) A phone carrier, current dog. 4) Hat for hubby with husky, and 3 cats (could be “current” cats or cats that have passed, no names). Should have known better. Printed and shipped from China.

            Both examples, pretty sure are US based companies. But production in China.

            Lastly my OTC CGM. Either shipped from Dubai, UE, or Romania. Latter was ordered through a company that has a US address. For this reason, and others (not cheap), not ordering again. The other sources are New Zealand and China. I suspect it made in China. OTOH even though shipped from within the US, not 100% the other OTC CGM isn’t also made in China. Or for that matter any of the prescription versions.

            Liked by 1 person

Comments are closed.