xxmikexx

How can I identify the thread you started? (It might have been deleted?) Apparently the policy at The Yard has changed. (As I said, I hadn't been there since March.) I've never seen a moderator at work in that forum before, and now there is a detailed set of rules posted, which is also new. (Unless I misread a timestamp, the rules may have been posted subsequent to my defending myself against rgarber's attack.) As you saw, rgarber attacked me the moment I arrived. He was not chastised, but I was, for making a comparatively mild reply, after which this guy was allowed to attack me again. So I opened up another thread explaining that the things he was saying about me were simply wrong. Result? Another nastygram post from the moderator, whose position is that I should "be the bigger man" and sit there and take my lumps. Well, we'll give it a try, but "Irish Terence" McCarthy's son Mikey has a rule in life which is, Be nice, but when pushed by a bully, push back. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The Yard used to be an interesting place to hang out. Now it may be just another pablum forum, we shall see. I opened a thread about energy independence. I won't post there again unless and until somebody replies in that thread. Of course we could always go over to Ann Coulter's website. :D I've only made a post or two there, and that was last winter, but it seemed at the time like a pretty liberal place provided decorum is maintained, which is not a problem for me unless pushed the way rgarber pushed me. That site also hosts a broad spectrum of political positions, or so it did when I signed up last winter. Also, I was given an especially warm welcome for being a newcomer. As the Joe Dolce song of twenty years ago went, "It-za ni-za place." Interested?

Most people who are experts became experts independent of the formal educational processes. Here are the backgrounds of some of the pioneer computer programmers I knew way back when, many of whom never finished high school, but all of whom showed the world how creative and competent people are when you give them the opportunity to be all that they can be ... gold prospector infantry sergeant astrophysicist fighter pilot railroad office clerk tail gunner chemist . . . I could go on but you get the idea. The pioneers of any new field come from all walks of life, and from all educational levels. In a "missionary" situation, people care only about what you can do, not how you came to be able to do it, and not whether you have a "license" to do it, so to speak. The pioneers figure stuff out on the job. Then the educators come in and codify everything, and make the rest of the world believe that the resulting degrees are somehow important. I'm the chemist, by the way, and my master's degree in that field meant zero. Because of my own experiences, and because I saw who the pioneers were and what they accomplished, I don't give a rodent's rear how somebody became an expert. I care a lot about what people know and therefore what they can teach me. I care zero about how they came by their knowledge, other than for my own curiosity. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Like job descriptions, degrees are pretty much about what you're not allowed to do. Once you realize that these chains are an illusion, they can never make you a prisoner again ... ... And the feeling of true freedom -- intellectual freedom as well as economic and political freedom -- has no substitute. No wonder companies are reluctant to hire entrepreneurs. In the immortal words of Peter Townshend of The Who, "We can't be fooled again."

Okay. I couldn't figure out what your username is, and "skylab" doesn't show up in the member list. (Separate registration for the forums there too.) Anyway, see the "I'm Ba-a-a-a-ck" thread and we'll go from there. By the way, my Train-Sim identity is zzmikezz.

I haven't been there since March but I'll go there now ...

Do you know the limits of your knowledge? I do. Or rather, I think I do, and I try to behave in ways consistent with that. When I’m wrong I say so. When I don’t know something, I say so. When I know that a given person knows more about a given subject than I do, I request that person's services as a forum consultant. This approach to life and to technical matters doesn’t make me weak, it makes me strong. It makes me as strong as the combination of all the experts that I know who are willing to work with me.

Now ... I really don't want to get into politics here -- The Yard would be a much better place ... But as I like to say, Here in Colorado we have everything except an ocean, and if Al Gore is right, in 50 years we'll have one here too. (In the Mile High City. :D)

If you want to talk politics and/or religion and/or any other taboo subject, the place to do it is in the little-known forum at TrainSim.com named "The Yard", at the very bottom of the forum list. I'd be happy to meet you there to discuss anything you'd like that would not be appropriate fare for FlightSim.com. It's a very interesting bunch of people there ranging from loony left to loony right and all stops in between, including a military items collector who calls his home "Firebase Andy", and a hilarious Canadian who continually takes well-aimed potshots at we USA people. :) You and I could safely start some trouble over there :D -- I guarantee you that the usual suspects would chime in but that no harm would be done and, in the end, no grudges held. Ordinarily I would not publcize The Yard but there's nobody here in my blog but us chickens -- and the few who are reading us might also want to join in. Wanna go for it? (You would need a thick skin because essentially anything goes over there.) How about the rest of you? Trust me, the Conversation Police have no jurisdiction there, and the Great Site Owner In The Sky, webmaster Nels Anderson, turns a blind eye to the happenings in The Yard.

I don't want to get into the issue of climate change. Suffice it to say that I believe the sun to be a variable star on several different time scales, and that average global temperature can therefore be expected to fluctuate on several different time scales. Colorado is on roughly a 44-year climate cycle though this too is subject to a lot of variation. We have been locked into a severe drought for many years now, and while I thought for a short time that we were emerging from the drought, now I have to say that I'm not so sure anymore. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx When we moved to Colorado in 1978, that year's winter was among the coldest and snowiest on record. For example, in early 79 it reached -37 F on the deck of our then house in Colorado Springs. (That same night Leadville recorded -60 F.) There was so much snow that piles of it persisted in the supermarket parking lots into late July. (!) Denver's weather is milder than that of the Springs. Nevertheless, because we've been living around Denver since 1990 or so, I can tell you that the past few winters have been mild even by Denver standards. In particular, last winter was the first one in which I never had to use a snow shovel. The mountains got plenty of snow but down here in Flatland we did not, and there were very few days of significant cold. So I'm going to count that winter as the mildest one I've ever seen out here. Yet the mildest winter hung on the longest of any that I can recall. In fact, this past spring was the coldest ever as far as I know. Of course it's summer now. Denver set a record last week for the longest string of consecutive days when the temperature went above 90 F, something like eighteen of them. Yet it's only broken 100F on two days that I can recall, where normally by this time we'd have had a dozen of them. So I'm going to count this as the coolest summer I can recall, the recent record notwithstanding. Not only that ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I think that when last week's string of 90+ F days ended, summer ended. I very much doubt that we're going to see 100 F again this year even though August is usually our hottest month. In fact, it's become cloudy. Combine that with the fact that the Canada geese seem to be starting their southward migration and I am led to predict an early winter, but a mild one again. We shall see what we shall see. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Oh yes, another sign of regional temperatures this year ... We have not stopped seeing contrails from the jets flying high over BJC, the Jefferson County VOR. Normally contrails are gone by late May and are not seen again till late August. This year I've seen them every day, another first for the area.

Newcomers and others, I've been hanging out at FlightSim.com since, I think, 1997, shortly after the site opened. However, for the better part of a year (maybe a couple of years) I was a "lurker", unwilling to make any posts or ask any questions for fear of being attacked the way I saw other people being attacked. That should never happen to you in this forum, and if it does happen I will see to it that the offender receives a private nastygram from me or, if necessary, from site management. This forum exists precisely because a) I remember my own fears as a newcomer, and because b) I want other newcomers to have a better early experience than I did. None of us was born knowing this stuff, and 99% of what we veterans know about FS we learned from other people, either directly or as a result of things they wrote earlier, just as you will learn from other people. So the arrogant people really have nothing to be arrogant about, do they? :) So ask any questions you like because it is truly the case that there are no dumb questions, only dumb answers. The moderators of this forum were proposed by me and approved by webmaster Nels Anderson exactly because they combine depth of knowledge on many FS-related subjects with a concern for the well-being of newcomers. This is a wonderful hobby and we don't want people walking away from it because they were afraid to ask questions. Don't worry that you don't yet know how to research a subject. That skill will come as you gain knowledge. In the meantime, you have questions and the mods and other members have answers. Don't be shy, There may be more to life than FS, But there isn't a lot more :),

In the Alien Civilizations thread I suggested that we would be able to talk meaningfully with aliens only about mathematics and science. (I should also have said engineering.) This is because physics, and engineering (which is applied physics) are both rooted in mathematics. So the question on the floor is whether the mathematics of an alien civilization would be different from ours. My answer is, Yes but ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Since I expect most alien civilizations to be more advanced than we are, I would expect their mathematics also to be more advanced. However, advances in mathematics don't invalidate previous advances, they add to them. So aliens' ideas about number theory are likely to be more advanced than our own, and they may very well be able to explain why prime numbers tend to cluster in integer number space, for example. But all numbers that are prime for them will be prime for us, and vice-versa. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Some people, including some mathematicians, believe that mathematics is a creation of the human mind and is not a set of objective truths waiting to be discovered. The development of Riemannian (non-Euclidean) geometry is often cited as an example by non-mathematicians. But Reimannian geometry falls naturally out of the axioms if you remove the Euclidean geometry assumption that parallel lines can never meet. Now some people will say "They can't both be true. The world is either one way, or it is the other." Well, the world "is" in fact Riemannian as best we know today, but Euclidean geometry is equally true even though it no longer applies to the real world. You see, the truth content of mathematics is simply logical consistency. There can never be a world in which the integer one, when added to itself, produces some integer other than two. So what is invented is the correspondence between mathematics and the real world, and not the mathematics itself, which is objectively true and lies before us, a vast and in fact infiinite ocean of mathematical truth that we do not and never will fully explore. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx What do I mean by the correspondence between mathematics and the real world? Take Newtons laws. Two hundred years ago they appeared to be self-evidently "true", with no possibility of their being "wrong". Yet along came Riemannian geometry, which served as the basis for General Relativity. But Newton's laws aren't "wrong" today, they are simply a special case of General Relativity -- the case where spacetime is flat. Every major advance in physics contains the earlier physics as a special case. But the earlier mathematics were never "wrong", they are simply seen as inapplicable in the general case. The mathematics are always "right" because they are always internally consistent. Goedel showed that there is no way to prove that in the general case a system of mathematics (a set of axioms and the consequences that flow from them) results in mathematical consistency, but to me this is like saying that there is no way to prove that pi will never terminate with a repeating sequence -- so what? xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx An issue that is more interesting to me is whether so-called proof by computer is valid. For example, there are theorems in mathematics for which no proof exists, but for which there has been exhaustive exploration of the solution space without counterexamples ever being found. This is a revolution in epistemology -- the science of how we know what we know -- because it makes statements similar to those of thermodynamics. For example ... It can easily shown mathematically that it's possible that one hour from now all of the air in the world will suddenly escape to outer space, asphyxiating us all. But so what? Our behavior does not change just because this event is theoretically possible. Similarly, if a theorem has been shown not to be violated in one billion samples of its solution space, then for all practical purposes we ought to behave as if the theorem is true even though we do not know this. This is definitely an area in which aliens might have a great deal to teach us. Their sciences may be based in part on theorems, and therefore on physics, which are unknown to us today and which may never be shown to be "true" or "untrue". My own guess is that the disconnect between quantum mechanics and general relativity is going to be resolved in exactly this way -- new mathematics which will not be proved in the traditional way but which will be so overwhelmingly likely to be true that we should behave as if it is true.

loki, No, I haven't gotten mine yet. I think I'll ask my wife to order the one on the right. (Now I know where Big Daddy Roth got his inspiration.) Anyway, the one I want says on the back "My mommy and my mommy and my mommy and my daddy and my daddy went to earth and all I got was this lousy T-shirt." :D (Gee ... You probably don't know who Ed Roth was, do you?)

The straight man sets up loki with a lobbed pitch so he can hit it out of the park ... loki, I don't think so. Consider ... Everybody in Primitive Amazonia has T-shirts now, obtained from the civilized world. So where are our alien T-shirts?

skylab, It seems to me ... Violence is in our genetic makeup and has probably been there for tens of thousands of years. You're worried about mankind self-destructing yet in terms of head count we have survived and prospered in spite of wars and crime. So violence has some kind of survival value or we wouldn't have 6.5 billion people on the planet. Perhaps it goes back to a species war with the Neanderthals. Perhaps it is simply survival of the strongest in terms of competition for land and hunting resources. Perhaps it's something else. I'm not condoning violence -- it's probably genetically obsolete now, like body hair. But it must have played some part in our development as a species or it wouldn't be so deeply rooted in our genetic makeup. ... Or so it seems to me.

C'mon, skylab, I'm trying to have a serious conversation with myself :D. As always you're welcome to join in, as is anybody else, but let's try to be dignified :) when we post. Now ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I read a book last summer that plausibly estimated the number of advanced civizations in the universe to be about one per galaxy. (I agree with the author's analytical approach though of course the numerical result could be off by a factor of a million or more either way.) Since there are estimated to be 100 billion galaxies in the known universe, one per galaxy would be a huge number of civilizations, most of which must be more advanced than our own given that our own is so recent. What would we talk with such a civilization about? I think we could relate only in the areas of mathematics and science. We could learn about their ways but we would never understand them, in my opinion.

Speaking of bass, here's Larry Grant of Sly And The Family Stone ... Someone in this video said that Larry Grant is the inventor of slap bass. Not true. Slap bass goes all the way back to upright string bass and big bands. However, Grant is the inventor of electric slap bass, which is a whole different thing.

I'm a huge James Brown fan, have been so since the early 60s when he was recording as "Nat Kendrick and the Swans". I own most of his stuff. However, while listening to the regional jazz station today, KUVO out of Laramie, I heard a JB number that I'd never heard before. He sang "Every Day I Have The Blues" with an honest to goodness full big band behind him. The band arrangement sounded to me as if it must have been written by the guy who wrote all the Frank Sinatra band arrangements. (I'll have to look into that.) Now if I can just remember, I also learned today that there's a KUVO funk show tonight from 11 PM to 1 AM. The time is not a problem -- I'm a night owl. So I think what I'll do is set my desk alarm. Almost certainly I'll be working at that hour, now I won't forget about the show. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx You see, I'm also a huge funk fan. Here's the kind of thing I'm into, this one an obscure piece by the Ohio Players, "Funky Worm", this particular rendition done live at a small dancehall somewhere ... And here's the original recording Each rendition has its own merits. I have no preference because I love funky keyboard work and this guy is a master. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Since I can't seem to come up with any other renditions of Funky Worm you will have to settle for this interesting live jazz/funk arrangement of "Skin Tight" ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfjtoNzh7p8&feature=related In this video we come in with the long intro already well underway. Now listen to the bass. Except for the short choruses he plays the same line all the way through, for more than six minutes. This is a complex bass run and I will tell you as a bass player myself that it's really hard to keep from getting hypnotized and messing up the intricate line in a long piece like this.

It occurred to me the other day that if intelligent life exists elsewhere, and if that life is civilized, then we are going to have a great deal in common regardless of what they look like or how advanced they are. For example, I'm quite sure that they have steel. They may have miraculous materials that we would have trouble understanding at first, but they will have steel too just as we still have fire.

No, I've not heard of Silver Lake. As for Yosemite, we were there in 1976 and it was clean and stunningly beautiful, with unobtrusive and immacualte campgrounds maintained by the National Park Service. I'm sorry to hear that it has been degraded by the modern world. Except for Old Faithful it actually exceeded all of our expectations. I've heard of Hetch Hetchy but know nothing about it other than what you just told me. On my one three-day outing I caught, cooked and ate a bunch of trout fingerlings. They were delicious -- and I don't even like fish. :D (No, I shouldn't have done it but yes, I was that kind of kid.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Camping is great. As a kid I did plenty of wilderness camping but in three years of driving vacations I decided that we would use KOAs. By a week into our first vacation we were able to set up camp in 15 minutes, and we could break camp the next morning in half an hour. So we got the best of both worlds -- sleeping on the floors of fragrant pine forests, for example, while still being able to take showers, which was important to the women folk. I'm a night owl and spent many wonderful early mornings just feeding brush into a low fire, watching the embers and marveling that we exist.

Twenty years ago I pioneered the business of MIDI cover sequences for computer bands. As a music producer (albeit a strange kind of producer), I hereby declare this, my favorite music video, to be excellent sequenced hip hop ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I've written about music before and no doubt I will do so many times now that we have blogs. This post you are reading now was motivated by an email I sent to a friend an hour ago, telling him about all the interesting versions of Get Down Tonight that are up on YouTube .... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Hi Matt <Matt Lee, a friend who is an Internet DJ>, A riff about Get Down Tonight ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Original recording synced to a concert video. You can see that they're all having a lot of fun with it. This will have been the long version (7.5 minutes), which they here cut off in the middle of the lengthy horns bridge that everybody edits out ... http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qEyWm3UNK1Y&feature=related xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Apparently in concert ... http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=YE26BGdzRfw&feature=related To play the strum guitar part non-stop is a killer on the left wrist. (I should know, I play rhythm guitar.) In the original recording they probably punched it in in sections but obviously you can't do that live. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Here's a very nice dance remix. The horn samples start earlier, the vocal begins at 1:07. This cover at least has the decency to run for 5 minutes. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qddHjPjkj6w&feature=related xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Here's another concert video, this time with live music, the FULL horns bridge at 1:51 followd by a funk guitar breakdown, followed by the horns part of the outro. (I love horns.) But then they go back into the guitar breakdown again, this time really long, during which the video cuts off. It wouldn't surprise me if this performance had actually run 15 minutes. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OGRwZ8OeycM&feature=related xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Here's a strange, creative but vaguely disturbing animated video, synced to the music, starting at 0:32 ... http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ucUTicF8zSk&feature=related xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx If you're going to do a cover you should either a) cover the original note for note, or b) bring your own radical interpretation to the party, as Shriekback has done here. Be sure not to miss the hip hop breakdown beginning at 2:00 ... http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nZo2fMmXzOo&feature=related xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I had never heard of Shriekback before tonight. I found that they did some interesting stuff, like this piece ... http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=svnnUTpCLFc&feature=related xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx YouTube is a wonderful thing.

tigisfat, I think that those of us who grew up in tough areas of cities appreciate rural America more than most. A line from Stevie Wonder’s “Livin’ For The City” comes to mind ... A child is born, in Hard Times, Mississippi. Your escape from the grimness of Castro Valley was your aunt’s ranch. Mine was to my grandparents' bungalo in the new Sherman Oaks development in the San Fernando Valley, the Valley at that time being almost completely empty, in huge contrast to the densely crowded Sicilian neighborhood at the north end of NYC’s Little Italy that I grew up in, and in equal contrast to the Valley of today. I was exposed to horses later during 3.5 years at a boarding school consisting mostly of kids from dysfunctional families like mine. To my surprise I found horses to be intelligent, friendly, and excellent pets even though they were comparatively large. My only problem with horses was the amount of time and effort required to keep them healthy. (And the expense of course though somebody else was paying.) So where did you go camping by horseback in the Sierras? My one such experience was a three day summertime trail ride in Vermont. I loved it.

Folks, The contents of this thread have been posted to the PC Software Tech forum. Please view the thread here in my blog as closed, and make any further posts over in the forum.

Folks, The contents of this thread have been posted to the PC Software Tech forum. Please view the thread here in my blog as closed, and make any further posts over in the forum.

Folks, This just in ... It does appear that GoDaddy is throttling upload speed. However, they seem to be doing it only for files larger than 100MB, which most of my zipped sub-archives are. I've got an 85MB upload running right now and it will have completed in less than 20 minutes. This is a transfer speed of roughly 250MB per hour, two-and-a-half times what I've been getting for large files. I'll next see what happens if I hand the server a set of files, each less than 100MB in size ... ... And the answer seems to be, If the total transfer is larger than 100MB, they throttle it.

loki, It's DSL; I don't remember the specifications. MemoPal seems promising, I'll look into it, thanks for the link. I have a complex system of incremental backups and I don't expect or want any assistance there. However, I do total backups roughly monthly and I park them on removable drives in duplicate. Once parked those things don't change so they are candidates for uploading. However, the totals contain a huge number of files, which brought Carbonite to its knees even with data that wasn't changing. But the MemoPal offer a free trial and I'll take them up on that in the near future. We shall see what we shall see.

loki, On this matter I'm not very price sensitive, but the features and functionality would matter a lot. However, I've never heard of Mozy. How can we be confident that they're going to be successful and not simply take the servers down someday? If they did it wouldn't be a big deal for me personally because, as discussed elsewhere, I have everything replicated in duplicate locally and would simply upload to a different service, but it's another piece of information that others ought to receive. Do you know whether it has been suggested to Mozy that there be the ability to declare something to be an off-site archive, not to be a mirror but rather a safe deposit box? xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx An aside ... I've been uploading to GoDaddy in chunks that require 2-4 hours at a time, in priority order. I'm not sure why the transfer rate is only 100 or so MB/hour -- as a premium member of FlightSim.com I'm experiencing a download speed of something like 300 MB/hour. Perhaps if I were to upgrade my GoDaddy hosting account(s) I would get faster speed. I'll speak with them when I get a round tuit.