Saturday - February 13, 2010

A digital diversion

Upon The Road of Anthracite




So Chris emails me a link. It’s to a neat geological web page that examines Global Warming and concludes, duh, that the temperatures have been going up and down forever. And that CO₂ levels have nothing at all to do with it, that those levels often lag 800 years behind actual climate change, and that at one point in the way way way back, the climate was considerably cooler, yet atmospheric CO₂ was 18 times higher than it is right now. Lots of graphs, and an interesting bit of actual science. Plus the author shows how the whole thing is a damnable scam, created to frighten people out of their tax dollars. With self-condemning quotes too. Nice.

So I read that stuff, and explored the rest of that page. It turns out to be a bit about West Virginia geology, and coal mining there. How it’s a good thing that puts people to work. How these days strip mining rebuilds the land when they’re finished, and how the EPA is a bit shortsighted in requiring the miners to put things back “as they were originally”. Because it’s just as easy to fill the holes and replace the overburden and build nice flat farmland that people could use, but no, the EPA demands they build steep hills. Except that “originally” if you go back far enough, West Virginia was flat. It was swampland. On the equator. When the coal beds were laid down, 300 million years ago or thereabouts.

But they kept talking about peat, and Lignite, and bituminous coal. Hey, I didn’t know bituminous came in several varieties. Ok, fine, but what about anthracite? Not a word. I guess WV doesn’t have any. It’s a Pennsylvania thing. So I looked it up. And it is.

Famous Reading Anthracite. Since 1871

Somehow I had thought it was all gone. Not true. Sure, once upon a time miners wrested 114 million tons of the stuff out of the ground per year, but their great grandsons are still pulling up 5 million tons of the stuff per year today. Born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine ...

Anthracite is hard coal, the kind that burns with very little flame and almost no smoke, but lots of heat. Kind of like nice dry birch logs in your fireplace. Is it the “Clean Coal” we’ve been looking for? I can’t say, but the good folks at Reading Anthracite seem to think so:

Mother Nature’s Clean Coal™
The inherent, natural qualities of anthracite coal from the Reading Anthracite Company address the needs for energy, carbon and media solutions.

... even if the media solutions they are talking about are for filtering applications, not the MSM. Um, uh, wait ... aren’t they the same thing?

So I’m reading all about this hard coal, realizing I’ve got a couple of chunks of it around here somewhere. And that somewhere back in my past, I’ve been in front of a coal fire. I can’t remember where, or when, but I remember it smelled nice. A much softer aroma than pine smoke. And I’m reading how the first commercially dug load of this coal went by barge down the Susquehanna River, the river that’s older than time (really, it almost is. It runs across the mountains not along them. Because the river was already there before the mountains woke up and started growing. And those mountains are the worn down stubs of what they used to be) and it’s starting to feel like Home News. Because I used to live by that river, since one end of it runs through Binghamton NY, where lives the old alma mata. Ok, Three Mile Island is on it too, but way downstream. And that this more expensive black rock was used as a premium fuel by a famous railroad of it’s day, the Lackawanna. Now it’s definitely data within my ken, as I’ve been aware of that line my entire life. In it’s latter days it was the Erie-Lackawanna, but I knew it as the Delaware Lackawanna & Western. The D.L. & W. The “delay, linger, and wait” line that ran across NY, NJ, and PA. And I’m a would-be train junkie anyway. Love them. But I never got the true addiction, never became a train-head. But Big Steam and Old Diesel float my boat, both as physical artifacts and their impact on social history. Like airplanes, only with lots and lots of added mass.

And then the Wiki post mentions Phoebe Snow, and I knew it was Kismet. The Phoebe Snow was the name of the train my mother used to ride to go to college. Back in the days when trains had names, it had the prettiest one. And that’s all I knew about it. And somewhere in this digital odyssey I saw mention of the Lackawanna Cut-off and it all hit home. That’s local history, a turn of last century engineering marvel that was so soon forgotten.

Peiper has the advantage of living in a 2300 year old town, a place that values history. I don’t. Nor do most Americans. Everything is new, everything is now. We kind of shake our heads at our children, or our grandchildren, who think that 1985 was so long ago that dinosaurs still walked the earth. We have no real sense of history here, aside from the rare battlefield park, or some well made colonial building that still stands. Everything else gets torn down, or built over. And then lost. But I had heard of the Cut-off. It’s not far from here. So I started looking. And found that the old rail line that it replaced ... is still here. I drive over the Oxford Tunnel at least once a week to get up to the bowling alley, and I never knew it was there. 103 years ago, the town where I bowl was a going concern, but the cut-off put them out of business, and they still haven’t fully recovered.

I drive under this RR bridge every week. The trolley is long gone. Today that dirt road is called Route 31. Pic is a link BTW.

A little bit up the same road from the bridge in the picture, outside of the tiny town of Hampton, is another giant pile of concrete. A huge thing. A modern Ozymandius. It has to be the base of another railroad bridge from days gone by. Just the barn size concrete base remains, right up against the road, the bridge missing, the rail bed gone and built over. I always wondered about it, but I couldn’t even envision which way the tracks may have went. I think I might know now; it fell victim to engulf and devour, circa 1900.

Until the mid 1960’s train tracks criss-crossed this state. They were everywhere. The lumber yard downtown here is a rail station. The tracks are gone though. History, buried and forgotten. So many towns have “depot” or “junction” or “station” in their names, but no trains roll by anymore. Want to talk about long gone? Before the trains there were canals. All over the place around here. There’s a little town a dozen miles north east of here called Port Morris. Right next to it is a place called Landing. There is no river anywhere near them you could float anything bigger than a canoe in. But they used to be canal towns. Hey, so did Binghamton. So did lots of places in the north east.

So, canals, cut-offs, railroads that have puffed their way onto the pages of the past. Mysterious lumps of concrete and my awareness that all that is now, was once not. Sadness? No, just something to ponder on a gray cold winter afternoon.

And the Phoebe Snow? Not just the name of a train. A sexy pin-up from the days before emancipation. Before the ideas of sexy or pin-up existed. An icon from the birth of marketing so successful that it drove crowds wild. One of the original hotties. O.H. bay-bay. And a source of memorable jingles far older than the Burma-Shave limericks. Because it all comes together you see. Phoebe Snow was the It Girl of her day, but she was made up. To sell tickets on the railroad. The Lackawanna railroad. And they used her, a confident and lovely woman off on her own [!!! shudders!!!] all dressed in white ... because they powered the train with anthracite, and you could ride that train without looking like Bert the chimney sweep (chim chim cheroo) at ride’s end. And they did it with poetry. Ok, with doggerel, but that’s close enough:

And she made them millions. Her face and elegantly dressed figure were on billboards, postcards, trading cards. She sold the idea of a clean train, a luxury ride from New York City to Buffalo NY, the northern gateway city to the interior of the whole country in those days. And not just the ride. She sold the notion of lux, whether in it’s modern posh form, or in it’s more original photonic meaning

The land in the central and eastern portions of Pennsylvania is very folded. Folded like the serpentine bit in the middle of a piece of cardboard. It’s called the Endless Mountain area, and with good reason. And the eastern edge of that Endlessness starts right here in NJ, pretty much under my feet. So when they built the Cut-off, the idea was to level out and to straighten out the train tracks, which up until then had to double back and forth all over the place to get over the hills and valleys they couldn’t tunnel through. Which is why the Cut-Off was an engineering marvel on the order of building the Panama Canal. When it was all done it had several of the largest fill areas under the roadbed in the nation. A fill is what you build when you have to get your choo-choo across a declivity in the land too shallow and perhaps too long to build a bridge over. It’s a bloody great pile of rock, with trains on top. And when they hit rivers that couldn’t be filled, they built the 3 largest viaducts in history, 2 of them right here in NJ, and pioneered the used of reinforced concrete. And they did it on time, and under budget, for both the Paulinskill and the Delaware River viaducts. And they’re still standing, 103 years later. In 1907, taking a high speed train (70mph!) across those bridges, 120 feet up in the air, must have felt like that other new-fangled activity, flying. So of course they had Phoebe sell that experience too

And you could take the train from Hoboken (just across the tunnel from NYC) to Buffalo in a mere 8 hours.  And be well fed and not get dirty. They made more millions.



But they could not escape the Law of Unintended Consequences. Phoebe Snow planted the seed of the idea of the Independent Woman in people’s minds. Sure, she was classy, and proper, and not at all naughty. And perfectly safe and well cared for on her special train. But she was doing it all without a man leading her around. Amazing. Radical. And still the subject of both Advertising and Womyn’s Studies today.

As an icon, she sold a clean ride and a new cultural image for the American Girl on the go—an image that lasted nearly 70 years.

How about that?

The final version of the Phoebe Snow crosses the Delaware River Viaduct, early 1950’s
The highway will one day be Route 80

hate the name, love the site

I’ve installed two little widgety thingies on the right sidebar. They show the weather at my place and at Peiper’s. Just for fun. My brother sent me the link, and it looks like this might be one of the better weather sites online. It’s hooked into all the active local weather stations. You know, those little recording and reporting mechanisms that are all over the country, the ones Watts Up With That was tracking down? Thousands of them.

Turns out that there is one of these stations just a few hundred yards away from where I live. One problem: it’s dead. It’s been reporting ___ degrees, ___ wind speed, ___ wind direction, etc., for some time now.  So to get data for the widget I have to use the weather station just south of town. I can’t use the Cherryville station (found at Watts Up) because it doesn’t seem to exist. Or, if it does exist, it doesn’t report in real-time the way these other stations do. Every 5 minutes actually.

Going to this link gets you a nice full size terrain map around your area, and all the local readings. Clicking on any of those numbers brings up that weather station and it’s current readings. Clicking on the ID of that weather station takes you in to the web site itself, and from there you can hit links for all sorts of weather related stuff. The only thing that I can find wrong with the place is it’s name.

It’s called the Weather Underground.

Poor choice of names. Very. That’s the name of a terrorist group. And they now it. But like the “Che” crap, I think they think that makes them cool. Um, wrong.

The growing Internet weather program was given the name Weather Underground, a reference to the 1960’s radical group that also originated at the University of Michigan, which had taken its name from the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, “You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.”

So I’ll keep those 2 weather links on the side for a bit for fun, while I debate whether I should associate with these folks. Come on, if your local meat store was The Al Qaida Butcher Shop, would you give them business? Humus by Hamas? The Sinn Fein Leprechaun House, “we put the IRA in IRA-ish”? This is pretty much the same thing.

WEEKEND WOMEN

One of my favorites. 

NICOLE KIDMAN

Good actress and great dancer. Did everything Fred did and did it backwards in high heels. 

GINGER ROGERS

I haven’t a clue who this pretty is, but had to include here here cos she seems so sweet and pretty and nice. Only thing I know is her name which is:

KHERINGTON PAYNE

This is

MELANIE BROWN

and I don’t know who she is either but I thought she looked kinda sultry.

SEEYA BELOW THE FOLD GUYS.

   Friday - February 12, 2010

Zapper zaps, but is still zapped

Missile Defense Agency news release

10-NEWS-0002
February 11, 2010
Airborne Laser Testbed Successful in Lethal Intercept Experiment

The Missile Defense Agency demonstrated the potential use of directed energy to defend against ballistic missiles when the Airborne Laser Testbed (ALTB) successfully destroyed a boosting ballistic missile. The experiment, conducted at Point Mugu Naval Air Warfare Center-Weapons Division Sea Range off the central California coast, serves as a proof-of-concept demonstration for directed energy technology. The ALTB is a pathfinder for the nation’s directed energy program and its potential application for missile defense technology.

At 8:44 p.m. (PST), February 11, 2010, a short-range threat-representative ballistic missile was launched from an at-sea mobile launch platform. Within seconds, the ALTB used onboard sensors to detect the boosting missile and used a low-energy laser to track the target. The ALTB then fired a second low-energy laser to measure and compensate for atmospheric disturbance. Finally, the ALTB fired its megawatt-class High Energy Laser, heating the boosting ballistic missile to critical structural failure. The entire engagement occurred within two minutes of the target missile launch, while its rocket motors were still thrusting.

This was the first directed energy lethal intercept demonstration against a liquid-fuel boosting ballistic missile target from an airborne platform. The revolutionary use of directed energy is very attractive for missile defense, with the potential to attack multiple targets at the speed of light, at a range of hundreds of kilometers, and at a low cost per intercept attempt compared to current technologies.

Less than one hour later, a second solid fuel short-range missile was launched from a ground location on San Nicolas Island, Calif. and the ALTB successfully engaged the boosting target with its High Energy Laser, met all its test criteria, and terminated lasing prior to destroying the second target. The ALTB destroyed a solid fuel missile, identical to the second target, in flight on February 3, 2010.

Hey, isn’t this one of the “Star Wars” ideas of Reagan that every Dem in America thought was such a waste of money? Like that missile shield thingy, that turned out to work pretty well too.

This one has been under development for quite a few years, and had survived budget battle after battle.

h/t to Rich K, who pointed me to this blog, which has thermal video. And another article that shows this isn’t the first successful test either. That blog also reminds us, alas, that this is the ONE AND ONLY airborne laser system, because Obama cut the budget for it and several other functional SDI systems. Just as Iran develops ICBMs and is this close to admitting they’ve got nukes.

I have no idea what the range on this thing is. A couple miles? A couple of hundred miles? That is seriously classified. Sure would be nice to fly around in the western Pacific, or the northern Indian ocean, and be able to silently, invisibly knock down missiles as they launch.

And it’s nice that this one works, because the other anti-missile missile system is having a few teething problems right now.



It’s a damn shame this project was aborted in the 3rd trimester. And I had such a bitchin’ colloquial name for the thing too ...

History of England starts at 1700, says university

Academics have attacked a decision by a top university to scrap research into English history before 1700.


By Graeme Paton, Education Editor

It was claimed that the move by Sussex University risked jeopardising the nation’s understanding of the subject and “entrenching the ignorance of the present”.
Under plans, research and in-depth teaching into periods such as the Tudors, the Middle-Ages, Norman Britain, the Viking invasion and the Anglo-Saxons will be scrapped, along with the Civil Wars.

The university will also end research into the history of continental Europe pre-1900, affecting the study of the Napoleonic wars and the Roman Empire.
The university said it was “reshaping” its curriculum and research following a £3m cut in Government funding.

Last week, universities across the country were told their budgets were to be slashed by £449 million next year, including a £215m reduction in teaching funding, with threats of further cuts in the future.

Well now I can understand that.  Budget cuts have to be made.  Especially when you have to find the money to fund the 2012 Olympics, the immigrants on state aid, the illegal immigrants on state aid, the asylum seekers who find their way to the UK and get to stay, terrorists and former (they claim) terrorists and various groups who have a human right to the money which I think might be everyone who wants a free lunch. Well heck.  You can see they have to make cuts in their budget to accommodate ,,, stuff.  Oh right.  Lets not forget all the MPs and their expenses. 

Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, has claimed that institutions can use the opportunity to focus resources on their strongest areas.
But in a letter to The Daily Telegraph, 17 leading historians said the move was short-sighted and risked undermining the public’s understanding of the past.
“To cut everything but the most modern puts in peril the public function of history, entrenching the arrogance of the present and making a mockery of the claim by the minister behind these cuts that ‘we also wish to keep this country civilised’,” said the letter.

The academics, who all trained at Sussex, said that the decision to sever ties with European history before 1900 was a particularly retrograde step.
“For a university which has long prided itself on its European links to abandon the serious study of such pivotal areas of modern history as the French Revolution will mean depriving Sussex graduates of the mental furniture of educated Europeans,” said the letter. “The university risks damaging its reputation as a centre of knowledge for European culture and history more widely.”

The letter to the Telegraph was signed by historians from universities including Nottingham, Southampton, Trinity College Dublin, Michigan, Sydney University and the University of London Institute in Paris.

Sussex is among dozens of universities being forced to make savings following savage budget cuts announced by the Government.
The University and College Union estimated that more than 15,000 jobs – the majority academic posts – could disappear in the next few years.
Positions are being cut at King’s College London, Westminster, Leeds, Sheffield Hallam and Hull, while entire campuses belonging to the universities of Cumbria and Wolverhampton are being shut.

Several loss making courses are also being scrapped across the country. The University of the West of England has already scrapped French, German and Spanish, and Surrey has dropped its BA in humanities.
The letter called on the university to stop proposals to withdraw from “research, and research-led teaching, in English social history before 1700 and the history of continental Europe before 1900”.

Prof Paul Layzell, deputy vice-chancellor, said: “The proposal put forward by the University of Sussex to withdraw from certain areas of research and specialist teaching in history reflects three factors: first, a strategic determination to focus our research in areas of sustainability and strength; second, to align undergraduate provision with areas of demonstrable demand; and, thirdly, a need to reflect the Government’s financial policy for higher education.
“The history degree at Sussex, as befits a programme offered by one of the top 20 departments in the country, will continue to be broad based and intellectually challenging.”
He insisted there were no plans for teaching to be “entrusted with non-specialists”.

SOURCE

BREAKING BACK INTO A POW CAMP AFTER BREAKING OUT FOR AMOUR.  200 TIMES.

I guess alls fair in love and war. Sort of. Quite a story and the first time I have come across something like this since I’ve been bringing obits here.

Horace Greasley RIP

Horace Greasley, who died on February 4 aged 91, claimed a record unique among Second World War PoWs – that of escaping from his camp more than 200 times only to creep back into captivity each time.

The reason for the frequency with which Greasley put his life in danger, he admitted with engaging good humour and frankness, was simple: he had embarked on a romance with a local German girl. Rosa Rauchbach was, if anything, running even greater risks than Greasley.

A translator at the camp where he was imprisoned, she had concealed her Jewish roots from the Nazis. Discovery of their affair would almost certainly have meant doom for them both.

Greasley recounted the almost incredible details of his wartime romance in the book Do The Birds Still Sing In Hell? (2008), which he had been “thinking about and threatening to write” for almost 70 years. But while the book is described as an “autobiographical novel”, the story was largely confirmed at his debriefing by MI9 intelligence officers shortly after the war.

Horace Joseph Greasley, nicknamed Jim, was one of twin boys born on Christmas Day 1918 at Ibstock, Leicestershire. He was 20 and working as a young hairdresser when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and the Military Training Act made all men between the ages of 18 and 40 legally liable for call-up. Horace and his twin brother Harold were conscripted in the first draft.

A client whose hair he was cutting offered, when Horace mentioned that he was going into the Army, to get him a job as a fireman, a reserved occupation which would actually pay better than joining the services. Horace Greasley turned the offer down.

But his war proved a short one. After seven weeks’ training with the 2nd/5th Battalion Leicestershire Regiment, he landed in France at the end of the “Phoney War” as one of the British Expeditionary Force; on May 25 1940, during the retreat to Dunkirk, he was taken prisoner at Carvin, south of Lille.

There followed a 10-week forced march across France and Belgium to Holland and a three-day train journey to prison camps in Polish Silesia, then annexed as part of Germany. Many died on the way, and Greasley reckoned himself lucky to have survived.

In the second PoW camp to which he was assigned, near Lamsdorf, he encountered the 17-year-old daughter of the director of the marble quarry to which the camp was attached.

She was working as an interpreter for the Germans, and, emaciated as he was, there was, Greasley said, an undeniable and instant mutual attraction.

The only way to carry on the love affair was to break out of his camp. From Silesia, bordered by Germany and German-occupied countries, there was little hope of escaping back to Britain. The nearest neutral country was Sweden, 420 miles to the north. Perhaps for this reason the guards were lax, and the Germans seemed to consider that those trying to escape were effectively attempting suicide.

Greasley reckoned that short absences could be disguised or go unnoticed. Messages between him and Rosa were exchanged via members of outside work parties, who then handed hers on to Greasley, the camp barber, when they came to have their hair cut. When, with the help of friends, he did make it under the wire for an assignation nearby, he would break back into the camp again under cover of darkness to await his next opportunity.

SOURCE FOR OBIT

see link above for the rest of this. Quite interesting and sad too. don’t understand why he didn’t ty and get her out at the end in 45 or 46. maybe I’ll have to buy the book.

Greasley in photo with Himmler

Germany gets to call the shots in Greece ….. which is what LyndonB said days ago …

I’m not sure about German and the word ‘shots’ in the same line tho.

This was the official Telegraph line this morning on their editorial page.
Interesting stuff.

it has never been more comforting to be outside this particular club.

Germany gets to call the shots in Greece
It has never been more comforting to be outside the euro.

By Telegraph View

Those who imagined that Greece would be allowed to go to the wall, or that the Washington-based International Monetary Fund would be called in to finance its rescue, ignored the self-regard of the European elites, and their global ambitions for their currency. Although the details of the rescue plan agreed yesterday are still nebulous, what is clear is that Greece will be supported by its partners in the eurozone - but only in return for the imposition of a real austerity package, rather than the milk-and-water measures proposed by the Papandreou government.

This act of economic imperialism - how else to describe the supervision of a country’s economy by an outside authority? - will have sweeping ramifications. It is, of course, in flagrant breach of the Maastricht Treaty. But ever since the single currency was created, its rules have been more honoured in the breach than the observance (especially in the fudging of the entrance criteria, which laid the foundations for this crisis). Yet far from weakening the eurozone, these events will give added momentum to the federalist cause. The very act of coming together to save one of the weaker brethren transforms the dynamics of monetary union as, to oversee the rescue, a central treasury function will have to emerge.

How will the Greeks react to an austerity package imposed from Berlin?

READ THE REST HERE

This act of economic imperialism - how else to describe the supervision of a country’s economy by an outside authority? - will have sweeping ramifications.

In fact, I believe this is exactly what happened to Germany in the 1920s. If not this then something very,very close to it.

JUST ONE MORE GOOD REASON TO BAN THE BURKA …. ROTFLMAO

READ ALLLLL ABOUT IT!

Arab ambassador discovers bride is bearded and cross-eyed behind veil

An Arab ambassador has called off his wedding after discovering his wife-to-be who wears a face-covering veil is bearded and cross-eyed.

The envoy had only met the woman a few times, during which she had hidden her face behind a niqab, the Gulf News reported.

After the marriage contract was signed, the ambassador attempted to kiss his bride-to-be. It was only then that he discovered her facial hair and eyes.

The ambassador told an Islamic Sharia court in the United Arab Emirates he was tricked into the marriage as the woman’s mother had shown his own mother pictures of her sister instead of his bride-to-be.

He sued for the contract to be annulled and also demanded the woman pay him 500,000 dirhams (£85,000) for clothes, jewelry and other gifts he had bought for her.

The court annulled the contract but rejected the ambassador’s demand for compensation.

The report did not identify the ambassador.

SOURCE

I guess we can score one for the good guys except the gremlin is still breathing. Damn!

Another one of those articles that caught my eye and so I’m posting it before the things I had planned.

Here come de judge who in this case tells the AG, you got it wrong lady.
She, Baroness Scotland (Scotland is her real name, it’s not the country) wanted to prosecute persecute the homeowner and hand down a stiffer jail term.
Here’s a little background on her just so you’ll know who the heck is being referred to here.
Anyway, score one for the good guy although I’m sorry they managed to save the gremlin’s life as it’s useless and worthless anyway.

Attorney General Baroness Scotland has seen her career in law and politics thrown into the spotlight by her admission that she mistakenly employed an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper.

She has been fined £5,000 for breaking laws brought in when she was a Home Office minister.
The tenth of 12 children, she was born Patricia Scotland on the Caribbean island of Dominica in 1955. Her family moved to England, when she was three years old.

Maybe just maybe and time alone will tell, the tide may be turning in favor of the law abiding homeowner.  Of course, when you still have AGs like this fat assed Baroness Scotland that’s still gonna be an uphill climb.  Scandal around her (illegal immigrant she hired) has died down.  She was fined but is still in office.
You or I would be in jail most likely but apparently there are same laws but different punishments depending on who you are. 
Here’s part of the article. The rest at the link below as always.  (well, almost always)

Oh btw ... the judges name?  It’s really Judge. Kid you not.  Judge, Igor Judge.

Decent middle-aged man’ spared jail after stabbing teenager who attacked him in his own home

By Daily Mail Reporter

A ‘mild-natured’ middle-aged man who stabbed a teenager in the throat after being attacked by the axe-wielding youth in his own home, has been spared jail by the nation’s most senior judge.

Kenneth Blight, 51, who left 19-year-old Andrew Nelson with life-threatening injuries after the drink and drug-fuelled teenager attacked him with the axe, was described today by Lord Judge, the Lord Chief Justice, as ‘a decent middle-aged man in his own home, goaded beyond endurance’. 

Blight was handed a two-year suspended sentence by a judge at Teesside Crown Court on October 19 last year after pleading guilty to wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.

Attorney General, Baroness Scotland QC, asked London’s Appeal Court to put him behind bars, because she felt the sentence was ‘unduly lenient’.

But her application has now been refused by Lord Judge who called the decision to let Blight walk free ‘humane and justifiably merciful’.

Blight of Thornaby, Teesside, had rowed with Mr Nelson - the son of his partner - over his attempt to use the family home as a hideaway from local drug dealers, who were hunting him for a debt, said the judge, sitting with Mr Justice Irwin and Mr Justice Penry Davey. 

He confronted the teenager after the youth had been drinking and smoking cannabis at Blight’s home on May 30 last year, telling him that he wanted him out if he wasn’t going to pay off the debt, as he didn’t want drug dealers paying threatening visits to his door.

Mr Nelson’s reaction was to snatch up an axe that Blight had loaned him for a camping trip and to strike him twice on the leg with the blunt side, causing the older man ‘massive bruising’. 

SOURCE

   Thursday - February 11, 2010

Oh just shut up already

Atlanta’s Transit System Changes ‘Yellow Line’ to ‘Gold’ After Asian Outrage





Outrage? WTF, are these folks taking lessons from the muzzies now?

Atlanta’s transit system will rename a train route into the heart of the city’s Asian community in response to complaints that calling it the “yellow line” showed a lack of racial sensitivity.

The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority issued a statement Thursday afternoon announcing it would change the name of the line to the “gold line.”

“The expressed concerns regarding the use of the phrase ‘yellow line’ will be addressed in the most expeditious and cost-effective manner possible,” MARTA officials said in the statement.

The move to change the name to “gold” coincides with the demands of some advocates in the Asian community.

“Our thought is, why don’t you change it to gold? It’s really more of a ‘why not?’ question. Why not change it?” said Helen Kim, director of advocacy and education at the nonprofit Pan Asian Center for Community Services.

Naming it the “yellow line” was part of MARTA’s color-coding the entire transit systems by using primary colors.

“There was absolutely no intent to confer any negative connotation through the use of any of the colors chosen,” the statement released Thursday said.

MARTA also has a red line, a green line and a blue line. Several other cities — including San Francisco, Tokyo and Washington — utilize yellow within their color-coded systems.

...

“It’s not a term, it’s a color,” said Darcy Olsen, president and CEO of the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank based in Phoenix, “Should we outlaw yellow jackets, yellow traffic lights? How about the white nights of summer solstice? This is manufactured offense when clearly no offense is intended.”

Hey I know, let’s just deport all the Asians in Atlanta, and then there won’t be any left to get all offended. I wonder if any of them are actually legal immigrants to begin with. [/snark] Geez Luise, some people are some uppity little bitches aren’t they? Next thing we’ll have Jesse and Al picketing because there isn’t a brown line. And if MARTA puts one in, they’ll be sued for racism if that route goes past a single black neighborhood. Get a fuckin life already you losers.

People, fer gosh sake quit leaving kids and keys in the car even for a second. U got lucky here.

That has to be very scary to see your car driven off and your baby is still inside. Fortunately a happy ending as babe is safe but read on.

Police handed me a £150 bill to get Vauxhall back after carjacker drove off with my daughter

By Chris Brooke
09th February 2010

A mother had to pay £150 to recover her car from a police compound.

But Sarah McDonald- Lee hadn’t been parked illegally and there was nothing wrong with her car.

Her ‘crime’ was to see her little daughter being driven away at high speed during a carjacking.

Fortunately three-year-old Sophie and the car were traced within 20 minutes - and Mrs McDonald-Lee has nothing but praise for how officers handled the terrifying incident.

But her relief and joy has turned to anger. After the Vauxhall Zafira was towed away for forensic examination a terse letter arrived from the recovery firm hired by Nottinghamshire Police.

It said Mrs McDonald-Lee had to pay £150 to get her car back because it had been ‘abandoned’. It also warned she could be charged £20-a-day storage.

SEE HOW IT ENDS HERE

THEN THERE IS THIS LETTER TO THE EDITOR AFTER THAT STORY APPEARED. Heaven forbid the Mail should have a letters page on line. If they do I can’t find it and so no link for source to the letter below.  I haven’t copied the entire letter. Just too much for me tonight. But you get the picture.

10 Feb.
DAYLIGHT ROBBERY
Why is it police policy to charge car owners exorbitant fees to recover their stolen vehicles? (Mail)

When my son had his car stolen, the police found it an hour later. It had been stolen by a teenager and smashed beyond repair.
The police towed the car away for forensic purposes and then contacted my son and told him he had to pay for it to be taken away or pay a daily charge for storage.
The police wanted to carry out tests and took it to their garage, but it’s the owner who has to pay.

Mary Gleeson
London W13

It’s in the code

Is Toyota Gas Pedal Problem Computer Based?




According to this article in The Wall Street Journal, the “sticking gas pedal” problem with Toyotas is not due to improperly placed floor mats. It’s a computer problem. And it’s been going on for years. And Toyota has known all about it. For years. So has the NHTSA. For more than half a decade.

On Jan. 19, in a closed-door meeting in Washington, D.C., two top executives from Toyota Motor Corp. gave American regulators surprising news.

Evidence had been mounting for years that Toyota cars could speed up suddenly, a factor suspected in crashes causing more than a dozen deaths. Toyota had blamed the problem on floor mats pinning the gas pedal. Now, the two Toyota men revealed they knew of a problem in its gas pedals.

Toyota’s woes have roots in 2002’s redesigned Camry sedan, which featured a new type of gas pedal. Instead of physically connecting to the engine with a mechanical cable, the new pedal used electronic sensors to send signals to a computer controlling the engine. The same technology migrated to cars including Toyota’s luxury Lexus ES sedan. The main advantage is fuel efficiency.

But by early 2004, NHTSA was getting complaints that the Camry and ES sometimes sped up without the driver hitting the gas.

But by early 2004, NHTSA was getting complaints that the Camry and ES sometimes sped up without the driver hitting the gas. It launched its first acceleration probe, focusing on 37 complaints, 30 of which involved accidents
...
NHTSA had decided to limit the probe to incidents involving brief bursts of acceleration, and would exclude so-called “long duration” incidents in which cars allegedly continued racing down the road after a driver hit the brakes.
...
Of the 37 incidents, 27 were categorized as long-duration and not investigated. On July 22, 2004, the probe was closed because NHTSA had found no pattern of safety problems.

By August 2007, NHTSA wanted Toyota to issue a Lexus and Camry recall to remove the floor mats Toyota blamed for the acceleration problems. “Toyota assured us that this would solve the problem,” said Nicole Nason, then NHTSA’s administrator.

In their probe, NHTSA investigators asked Toyota, “Are you sure it’s not the gas pedal?” Ms. Nason said. “They assured us it’s just the floor mat.”

Toyota says that, at that time, it had no indication of problems with the pedal design.

Vehicle engines are all controlled by computers these days. Toyota’s gas pedal doesn’t have an actual throttle wire. It’s a “fly by wire” system and similar systems are used by many other companies. The technology is a spin-off from the aerospace industry, where control systems need to work in as little “real time” as possible. A predictive algorithm that gathers sensor data and user input can react faster than a physical connection, and make the engine changes smoother with less wasted fuel.

That’s when the sensors are working properly and sending in correct information. And when the algorithm is written correctly (especially the parts that deal with sensor output outside the normal bounds (either from a dead sensor or from one sending in an unnaturally high signal) ... and then thoroughly tested. Exhaustively tested. I used to do software testing. Boundary testing was one of the most basic parts of it, right down at the same level as Garbage testing. And we found bugs in commercial software like crazy, although many of those were set aside. “We don’t care that the program crashes when the database query fails because the field is empty. This software is run on an existing database, so the fields are never empty!” We got that a lot. And it did make a bit of sense in a way. It was what we called “a chicken-egg thing”. But this kind of attitude is inexcusable when you are dealing with electro-mechanical systems, because parts can ALWAYS fail. Wires can short, interfaces can get dirty, etc. You HAVE to test the boundaries and ensure that the system has a “worst case” safe path to follow. Granted that the permutations are very large in number. eg: take an engine that has 20 sensors feeding it’s computer. Each sensor can go dead, or provide a reading in it’s proper range, or go hot and provide an excessive signal. Dead and excessive are the boundary test cases. Two conditions. And 20 sensors. Since each sensor impacts how the whole engine runs, there are 2²⁰ unique permutations. Just for the “bad sensor” scenarios. That’s more than a million: 1,048,576 to be exact. (an actual “meg") If you physically tested each one on a running engine, and gave each test just 5 seconds to see how the engine reacted, it would take almost 61 days to run that test working 24-7.  It’s far more likely that the Toyota gas pedal issue is not boundary condition related, which means there are nearly an infinite number of sensor permutations, because sensors are analog devices even if they are only sampled digitally. So no doubt this testing was done on a computer model. But models are just that: models. Not the real thing. And “mission critical systems” like cars, heart monitors, air-to-air missiles, etc., need to be tested on the real thing as much as possible.

Toyota has a fix and they’re making big efforts to put it in place. But such systems are in lots of other cars too. Should you find yourself in an “unforeseen sudden acceleration” situation, remember what you learned in Driver’s Ed and just put the damn transmission in neutral. Then step on the brakes. And if the brakes fail, use the hand brake. And aim for something soft.

Notice that I’m not railing on Toyota for being a heartless evil giant corporation. That’s just the way it is. Same goes for Boeing, Chevrolet, Dell, Remington. People have problems with their machines, the corporations investigate when they see enough complaints of a similar nature. Then they get around to making a fix and issuing a recall when government and media pressure force them to. So let the buyer beware, and don’t forget how to handle emergency situations. Because it’s your life.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE MAD TO WORK HERE ….  SHORT BUT TELLING COMMENT ON OUR WORLD

This is just a very short item at the bottom of his article.  You might call it an aside and a telling one at that.

Snapshot reveals the increasingly tangled web

Martin Waller: City Diary

I tiptoe uneasily into this one, well aware that it will generate plenty of hate mail.

The US Department of Justice is advertising for as many as ten “experienced attorneys” for its Civil Rights Division, which enforces laws preventing discrimination. The Civil Rights Division encourages “qualified applicants with targeted disabilities” to apply.

Targeted disabilities include deafness, blindness, missing limbs, etc, and “mental retardation, mental illness . . .” Yes, I know, in a civilised society everyone should have a chance. But actively seeking a lawyer who suffers from mental retardation? It gives a whole new meaning to the cliche “you don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps”. Hate mail to the usual address, please.

SOURCE

   Wednesday - February 10, 2010

A joke from Carol

Subject: FW: What marriage is all about

Touching…

An old couple were at a restaurant. He ordered one hamburger, one order of French fries and one drink. The old man unwrapped the plain hamburger and carefully cut it in half. He
placed one half in front of his wife. He then carefully counted out the French fries; dividing them into two piles and neatly placed one pile in front of his wife.  He took a sip of the
drink, his wife took a sip and then set the cup down between them. As he began to eat his few bites of hamburger, the people around them kept looking over and whispering.

You could tell they were thinking, ‘That poor old couple - all they can afford is one meal for the two of them.’

As the man began to eat his fries a young man came to the table. He politely offered to buy another meal for the old couple.  The old man said they were just fine; they were used to sharing everything.  The surrounding people noticed the little old lady hadn’t eaten a bite. She sat there watching her husband eat and occasionally taking turns sipping the drink.

Again the young man came over and begged them to let him buy another meal for them. This time the old woman said ‘No, thank you, we are used to sharing everything.’

As the old man finished and was wiping his face neatly with the napkin, the young man again came over to the little old lady who had yet to eat a single bite of food and asked
‘What is it you’re waiting for?’

She answered . . . .


(This is great)





‘THE TEETH.’

completely off topic ... reader IBM makes the keenest observation in BMEWS history. See Peiper’s Eye Candy, A Girl In A Bikini post from the other day. I bet half you animals didn’t even notice there was a gun in the picture. The other half saw the gun, but didn’t notice there was a girl.

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Oh, and here's some kind of visitor flag counter thingy. Hey, all the cool blogs have one, so I should too. The Visitors Online thingy up at the top doesn't count anything, but it looks neat. It had better, since I paid actual money for it.

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