Posts from — July 2015

Things are a bit warm around the Persian Gulf: Iranian city feels like 73 C as heat wave smothers Middle East. That temperature is a heat index and it converts to 163.4°F. The Iraqi government just declared a holiday because the actual air temperature high is forecast to be 120°F+ with the lows only going down to 90 for a week.

The reason there was no cat blogging today is that we have been having thunderstorms pop up that do provide some relief from the 100 to 110F heat indexes that we have been experiencing.

So why aren’t businesses moving to the South? Gee, maybe this has something to do with it: ‘Brain-eating amoeba’ found in water supply near New Orleans:

US health officials have confirmed the presence of a ‘brain-eating’ amoeba in the water supply of several communities near New Orleans.

Ascension Parish and St Bernard Parish have each discovered Naegleria fowleri, an amoeba that enters through the nose and attacks the brain.

Officials have begun a 60 day “chlorine burn” to kill off the deadly pathogen.

This is the way it works – when you cut taxes, you reduce the ability of the government to provide services like clean water. If you don’t have the money to buy the chlorine necessary to disinfect the water supply, you will get disease.

Apparently the GOP is gonna need a bigger clown car as former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore launched his bid for the White House today. He was governor from 1998 to 2002 and ran for the nomination in 2007 until he ran out of money. Gilmore is the 17th GOP candidate to join the race.

Meanwhile in Canada the campaign may start on Sunday: “Prime Minister Stephen Harper will call an election as early as this Sunday, kicking off what would be the longest federal election campaign in modern history, CBC News has confirmed.” The election is scheduled for October 19, 2015.

Normally the campaigns have been six weeks. They have to be at least 37 days, and there were spending limits of $25 million for a party, and $100,000 for a candidate. The Tories have changed the spending limits using the old limits to cover 37 days, but adding $675,000 a day for a party, and $2,700 a day for a candidate for campaigns longer than 37 days. They believe that a long campaign is to their advantage because of their funding-raising ability.

The political stuff is getting silly, so I’ll shift to technology.

The BBC had a preliminary article on an Intel/Micron joint venture: 3D Xpoint memory: Faster-than-flash storage unveiled.

The features are interesting: it is static and bit addressable, as well as being faster than flash RAM. It isn’t as fast as dynamic RAM, but it is suited to be used for buffering.

The CBC covers the release of Windows 10 tomorrow. M$ is offering it for free to current Windows 7 & 8 users to get a large number of users quickly. Before the independents start writing code specifically for Win 10, they want to see a market.

With this latest uproar about the Iran treaty and Huckabee’s hyperbole, I would put forward something you might learn if you have ever actually known any Muslims from the Middle East.

In general Muslims aren’t denying the Holocaust, they just don’t see the relevance for them. As far as most Muslims are concerned what happened to Jews in World War II was a Jewish-Christian situation and they had nothing to do with it. Which is also at the root of the resentment about the creation of Israel. For Muslims there is no justice in taking their land and giving it to Jews because of what Christians did to the Jews in Europe. Is it surprising that Muslims from the Middle East believe that if the Jews are entitled to their own country, then it should be in Europe, not Palestine.

Sèvres – Grand Paris Seine Ouest – Paris Champs-Élysées

Distance: 109.5 kilometers.

The final stage, which, by gentlemen’s agreement features no attacks, but a group sprint on the nineth and final circuit on the Champs Élysées. It becomes a parade of the survivors of the race that preceded it.

Christopher Froome ( GB – SKY – 031 ) [Yellow] 84h 46′ 14″
Peter Sagan ( Svk – TCS – 047 ) [Green] 432 points
Christopher Froome ( GB – SKY – 031 ) [Polka Dot] 119 points
Nairo Alexander Quintana Rojas ( Col – MOV – 051 ) 2 [White]

Team: Movistar Team ( MOV – 051-059 ) [Yellow numbers]
Stage winner: André Greipel ( Ger – LTS – 075 )
Super Combative: Romain Bardet ( Fra – ALM – 012 ) [Red numbers]
Φ Sébastien Chavanel ( Fra – FDJ – 023 ) + 4h 56′ 59″ [La Lanterne Rouge]

In a repeat of 2013 Chris Froome and Nairo Quintana finished 1-2. Chris was born and raised in the Nairobi highlands, and Nairo in the highlands of Colombia. Growing up at altitude means you have larger lungs and more efficient oxygen use than ‘flatlanders’ which is why they were also 1&2 for the Polka Dot [King of the Mountains] Jersey. No one born and raised on the Florida Panhandle will ever win the Tour.

The Tour is over and, quel dommage!, I haven’t been able to follow it I wanted to and usually do. If you don’t do all of the ground work and build the data bases and spreadsheets before the race starts, it is hard to keep up.

Comfort Control

Ahhhh!

[Editor: CC is again at my front door because it is dry. Lots of rain lately.]

Friday Ark

Badtux checked and reports that the hack doesn’t affect Wranglers, only Grand Cherokees. The Wranglers have a firewall built in, but the Grand Cherokees don’t.

Trump went to annoy people in Laredo, Texas, saying he was invited. He didn’t seem to notice that Laredo has a low crime rate for cities its size, and local officials have been really annoyed by politicians who keep telling the world that the US-Mexico border is overrun with violent crime on the US side.

A border fence or wall isn’t going to work. The people who want to cross will either dig a tunnel or use ladders. Building a wall is pork-barrel – a political pay-off to a campaign contributor. It’s a waste of taxes.

Another mass shooting. This time at a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. So far only three have died, one of them the shooter, and seven nine people were wounded. The shooter was a 58 59-year-old white male whose identity is known but being withheld by authorities. Since there is no speculation about motive, he must be a Christian. [I should know better than to trust CNN ‘reporting’]

Since he’s running for the GOP Presidential nomination, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal rushed to the scene for free media exposure.

Not only have cars become so computerized that you can’t fix them with a few tools in the middle of nowhere, but outsiders can take control of them. In the UK the hack was with a digital audio broadcasting (DAB) radio signal, and in the US it was a cellular signal.

Modern cars are monitored and controlled by on-board networks of computers. The navigation/audio systems have receivers for both kinds of signals. Obviously they need to be hardened.

That would be Donald Trump. Trump is actually making Linsey Graham look good. Graham would seem to have some advisors who actually understand that the best way to deal with Trump is to make fun of him, to emphasize that he’s a joke.

Watching Trump supporters try to justify their support is really sad, similar to watching a cat trying to cover a mess on a tile floor.

I have major disagreements with John McCain and I’m not shy about stating them, but he is permanently disabled as a result of being tortured while a POW. For a guy who used every deferment his family could afford to avoid military service to question the service of a disabled veteran demonstrates a total lack of class.

Trump’s only ‘job interview’ was with his own father, so he has no idea what is actually required for a job in the private sector.

With all of the other problems California has had two recent incidents that got to me as a former driver in SoCal.

First was the wildfire that swept over I-15, the road that everyone in SoCal uses to get to and from Las Vegas. In my case it was to attend Comdex and other industry shows. Given the drought a wildfire was to be expected, but having the cars and trucks halted on the roadway and then burned was not.

Nor was what happened this weekend – a washout of I-10 at Desert Center. I-10 is the main route from LA to the East, especially Phoenix, Arizona, and a primary truck route. Having a flash flood take out a bridge on the eastbound lane, and undercut the base of the westbound lane was definitely not something anyone expected. Caltrans is hoping to reopen I-10 to two-way traffic on Friday.

It was apparently OK for Trump to malign immigrants, but the other Republican candidates have finally gotten upset with him for bad-mouthing John McCain. Even more hilarious is the reaction of Republican voters responding to polls saying they like Trump because he’s the only candidate with guts enough to speak ‘truth to power’. These people are apparently blissfully unaware that when you are a billionaire like Trump, you are the power.

Stephen Hawking backs venture to listen for aliens: “The £64m ($100m) initiative was launched by the Breakthrough Initiatives group at the Royal Society in London.” They are going to be using radio telescopes in the US and Australia to search the near-Earth sky.

The US can’t come up the funds to build and launch weather satellites, but other countries are still doing basic research.

The good news is the New Horizon mission to the outer edge of the solar system.

Proving that some people have less than no class, we have people waving Confederate flags greeting President Barack Obama as he arrived at his hotel in Oklahoma. You would think that they would stay invisible after the bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City and the murders in South Carolina, but you can’t stop bigots from displaying their ignorance.

Just as soon as they identified the shooter in Tennessee as Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez, you knew this was going to be classed as ‘terrorism’. Heaven forfend that anyone notices that in this individual’s high school yearbook he notes the discrimination he is facing because of his name, and thinks this might be considered a reason for him not to feel thrilled about the US.