Posts from — February 2010

These are the elevations of the checkpoints and mountains on the trail, as well as the distances between the checkpoints:

Fairbanks 440 feet [134 meters] Start
Two Rivers 750 feet [229 meters] 45 miles [72 km]
Rosebud Summit 3640 feet [1109 meters]
Mile 101 2250 feet [686 meters] 82 miles [132]
Eagle Summit 3685 feet [1123 meters]
Central 435 feet [133 meters] 33 miles [53 km]
Circle City 597 feet [182 meters] 74 miles [119 km]
Eagle 880 feet [268 meters] 159 miles [256 km]
American Summit 3920 feet [1195 meters]
Dawson City 1050 feet [320 meters] 147 miles [237 km]
King Solomon’s Dome 4002 feet [1220 meters]
Pelly Crossing 1558 feet [475 meters] 202 miles [325 km]
Carmacks 1722 feet [525 meters] 73 miles [117 km]
Braeburn 2326 feet [709 meters] 77 miles [124 km]
Whitehorse 2089 feet [637 meters] 100 miles [161 km] Finish

Total actual distance: 992 miles [1596 kilometers]

[Read more →]

When I saw this at Pensacola Beach Blog it occurred to me that it was a perfect illustration of why you don’t bother with the policies of Reagan and the Bushes to deal with the national debt – they failed miserably. If you want to reduce the debt, the look to the policies of Harry Truman and JFK.

Tax cuts are part of the “Borrow and Spend” Republican policies that got us into this mess, not the path out. Deregulation was the reason Wall Street was able to almost destroy the world economy, not the path out.

It was about the money. The Miami Herald reports that Charlie got his money, and the medevacs started almost immediately. Somehow all of the space and coordination problems vanished when the “extortion payment” was guaranteed.

From the beginning of the crisis military aircraft have been transporting people to a Central Florida airport for processing: Flights from Haiti continue to arrive in Sanford airport

So far, the airport has received 8,596 passengers on 110 flights, Crews said. Of those, 6,544 were American citizens and 2,052 were foreign nationals. Emergency workers have transported 67 passengers to area hospitals because of injuries or illnesses.

The officials at the airport, near Orlando have been talking about asking for National Guard or Federal help with the processing because of the number of flights.

Of course, most people don’t know that the charter flights organized by the NGOs and relief groups cannot, for the most part, carry passengers, so this is another task the military takes on. They fly relief supplies in and then convert the cargo bay for passenger use, including medical evacuations.

Badtux gets his tail feathers in a knot over ignorant proposals to create jobs. The people making them keep showing up on the op-ed pages and the talk shows, but none of them has ever been in business. They honestly don’t understand how a business works.

If you want more jobs, you have to create demand. The easiest way of doing that is with a sizable stimulus package that begins to repair the neglected US infrastructure.

If you are in business, you hire the number of people necessary to meet the demand you have. You don’t hire more people unless you have a good reason to believe they are necessary to meet increased demand.

You don’t hire people based on taxes or wages, you hire based on demand. If you aren’t selling anything, it doesn’t make a bit of difference how many tax breaks you will get, or how cheap labor is, you are losing money.

If people don’t get back to work, the deficit will get worse as tax revenues continue to fall. If people go back to work the deficit will decline as revenues increase. You have to spend money to make money. Currently the only entity capable of spending the kind of money necessary to kick start the economy is the Federal government. A spending freeze will make matters worse and shut the economy down. We know this, because we have been through it before.

It’s Groundhog Day and some of the militant marmots object to being disturbed.

One thousand miles from Fairbanks, Alaska to Whitehorse, Yukon on the Goldrush/mail route – the Yukon Quest.

Here’s the official site, and the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner site.

Only a quarter of century old, the start alternates between Whitehorse [odd years] and Fairbanks. Lance Mackey who has won the Quest four times and doubled by winning the Iditarod the two of those times, is running this year after staying away last year.

This year’s race starts on Saturday, February 6^th, at 11:00 am. The start was moved up a week to give mushers more time between the Quest and the Iditarod.

February 1, 2003

Commander:
Rick Douglas Husband, Colonel, USAF

Pilot:
William C. McCool, Commander, USN

Payload Commander:
Michael P. Anderson, Lieutenant Colonel, USAF

Mission Specialist:
Kalpana Chawla, PhD
David M. Brown, MD, Captain, USN
Laurel Blair Salton Clark, MD, Captain, USN

Payload Specialist:
Ilan Ramon, Colonel, Israel Air Force

I needed to send a fax this morning, something I rarely do anymore because of e-mail. It was a Word document, so I just brought it up and selected the fax from the printer menu.

Everything seemed to be going normally when a big security window popped up informing me that the Microsoft Firewall had blocked the Microsoft Fax Program. I was conflicted because the security window wanted to know if the software came from a trusted source.

The philosophical question is: Can you go to hell for lying to your software?