Depth of Field and Focus Stacking

Posted on 2024/02/03 by Gunther

Today boys and girls…Ima gonna lern ya ‘bout this thing called depth of field in photographs and why it’ important…and then we’re gonna segue into something called focus stacking which becomes necessary for close up or macro subjects. The reason for this is that Neil will be doing some macro photographs in Costa Rica in the summer so he figgered he better teach himself how to do it so that all the mistakes can be made when he’s not in the heat of battle in the tropics. 

But doncha worry…there’s an actual useful photograph later on.

OK, if you’ve ever looked at your hand in front of your face and then while still focused on your hand observed the stuff next to your hand in the field of view but across the room…and you’ve discovered that the farther away stuff is not in crisp focus…this is because of the depth of field of your eye. Now expanding this concept to photography…when you autofocus on the bird’s eye or use manual focus to do the same thing…not everything will be in focus…and for most subjects this is a good thing. A narrow depth of field results in what photographers call bokeh (pronounced bo-kay) which is what gives that pleasing buttery soft focus background behind whatever you are actually taking the photo of.

For instance take a look at this shot of a GBH in flight last week when he was up at Venice Rookery. As you can see, the bird’s eye is in perfect focus since that’s what the autofocus locked onto but the Great Egret in the lower left is slightly blurred and the trees in the background across the other side of the pond are even blurrier. This is depth of field in a nutshell.

Now depth of field (I’ll use the standard photographer abbreviation of DoF hereafter) varies based on a bunch of factors. The focal length of the lens (longer is shallower DoF than shorter), aperture in the lens used (wider open or smaller f numbers are shallower than stopped down or higher f numbers), and distance to the subject (closer is shallower) and in the above shot which was shot at 400mm focal length at F5.6 about 20 yards away the DoF is (according to the handy calculator for stuff like this on Neil’s iPhone) is about 0.83 meters or 32 inches. Since the GBH’s wingspan is about 6.5 feet…at that aperture the whole bird isn’t actually in complete focus either but the eye is which is the important part. 

For a landscape shot where you want everything in focus from right in front of you to the mountains out on the horizon…one typically stops the lens down and/or uses a wider angle to get everything in focus…or conversely you can do focus stacking which I’ll detail in a bit with 2 or maybe 3 images, one focused right in front of you, one about 1/3 the way into the scene, and one on the distant features. These three images are then blended in post processing (PP hereafter) so that the in focus parts of each image are combined into a single image. Fortunately…although one could do this tediously manually…software like Photoshop or other packages does the stacking part for you automatically.

So…from the above one would think that a shallow DoF is a good thing because it isolates your subject and minimizes the tendency of a viewer’s eye to drift away to the background or the pine cone on the ground and…the shallow DoF along with leading lines and light/dark areas sort of lead your eye through the image to tell the story the photographer intended.

But…not so fast. For distant wildlife shallow DoF is generally good and for landscapes wider DoF is better but not all wildlife is distant. When taking pictures of bugs, tree frogs, poison dart frogs, snakes and the like (which Neil will be doing in Costa Rica)…shallow DoF is not your friend.

Here’s an example…two shots taken of the coral base of a wood carving that Connie’s dad did. You’ll notice how the front of the base is in pretty decent focus in the first shot because that’s where Neil shot the image and in the second one it’s more the coral on the rear left that’s in sharp focus. He shot this with a pretty wide open aperture because in the rain forest stopping down isn’t generally possible due to lack of light. He also shot it at a focal length of about 300mm at a range of 4 or 5 feet…because that’s about as close as you want to get (even in a controlled situation with a trained critter handler on hand) to a viper or a poison dart frog…at least as close as he’s interested in getting.

So…the problem becomes how to get a wider DoF at close ranges. One is forced into a longer focal length and wider open aperture based on the limited amount of light and in actuality stopping the lens down doesn’t really gain you anything. At 3 feet for instance with a 300mm lens and f 5.6…depth of field is less than an inch and even stopping the lens way down to f22 which you never want to do anyway because of diffraction and lack of light it’s just barely more than an inch.

So…enter Focus Stacking. This technique requires a non moving critter or flower and you shoot a series of shots on your tripod…the first one you focus a little in front of the closest part of the subject you want in focus and take a shot, then focus a little farther away, another shot, and rinse and repeat until you’re past the most distant part of the subject you want in focus.

Back in the day…this was hard because the camera didn’t help at all…it was all manual focusing and taking another shot…and since critters are wont to move unexpectedly…you had to try a bunch of times to actually complete a series of shots. However…with modern cameras, particularly the mirrorless ones we have now…focus stacking is built in (at least the taking the pictures part). You focus just a bit closer than the closest part of your subject then select a number of shots you want to take. The cameras knows the lens length, aperture used, and distance it’s focused at and it takes the first shot, focuses a little farther away based on what it knows, and takes another shot…and the entire sequence proceeds at about 10 frames per second which minimizes the time for the critter to move in. In the examples below…Neil took 30 images but then reduced the series to 19 and 17 shots respectively since the remainder were past the subject.

OK…you’ve got your images, what next. Import them into Lightroom and on the first one you do all of your post processing…noise reduction, tones, colors, cropping, sharpening and so forth until that image looks the way you want (outside of the whole not everything is in focus part, ignore than for the moment). Then in Lightroom sync those changes to all the other images in the sequence so they all look the way you want. Next…you either open the images as layers in Photoshop or in whatever other software you use…and then the magic happens. Select all the layers and then select Auto Blend Layers and Photoshop picks the in focus parts of each image and combines all of them into a single layer. Save the final image and you’re done…although back in Lightroom you will probably still do a bit more touchup of the processing.

Finally…what does the output look like. Here are Neil’s two examples he shot and processed today. In each…the first shot is just one of the series so you can see how little of the subject is in focus and the second one is the focus stacked image. In the first set…the base is about a foot in diameter and the coral is 8 inches or so in diameter and the whole thing is about a foot tall. In the second series the eagle is about 5 inches tall.

OK, I promised you a real picture so here it is. Neil spotted this osprey out in the tree yesterday afternoon…he grabbed his 600mm and the 2x teleconverter for a total length of 1200mm and shot a burst. An osprey is about 24 inches long and about 17 or 18 tall in the position he’s sitting in…so this is a huge fish, probably 26-28 inches long and 4 pounds. The bird hovers over the water and dives in talons first then drags the fish to the surface and despite the bird only weighing about 3 pounds it’s able to launch from the water surface with a payload of more than it’s body weight. I’ve seen images in the past of one hauling off a fish that was up in the 6-8 pound range and it still took off successfully albeit not as graceful as with a lighter load. And it will eat that whole fish in a half hour or so.

 

Ok, on to interesting things found on the net.

I know you’ve all read about the ‘activist conservative dominated SCOTUS’ and how evil they are in the news…so I thought this illustration from a progressive dominated state Supreme Court out in Oregon was apropos as an illustration that both sides on whatever court they control tend to vote the way they think…but at least in this case the court basically disregarded what the law says because ‘we know the intent of the voters’ who passed the state constitutional amendment.

Here’s the
article…and it’s about a lawsuit filed out there in the state by the state Democratic Party. Back last year, 10 Republican lawmakers staged a walkout from the legislature to prevent a quorum which thereby prevented legislation they didn’t like from passing. The case isn’t about the legislation in question at all…and while they shouldn’t have walked out the Democrats in Texas did exactly the same thing either earlier last year or in 2022 but again…both were wrong to do so. In the interim…after that walkout in Oregon the Democrats put a state constitutional amendment to prevent any legislator who had 10 or more unexcused absences from running for reelection. Now actually…I think having some consequences for preventing the legislature from doing its job is a good thing…but ya know, the devil is in the details. In the actual text of the amendment that the voters approved…it says “lawmaker is not allowed to run “for the term following the election after the member’s current term is completed.” 

Now…work with me here. The legislators in question applied to be on the ballot this coming November for reelection and the Secretary of State disallowed them from being on the ballot because of the constitutional amendment. The problem is that the legislators are still in office and their current term does not end in November this year but in January of 2025 when the newly elected legislature is sworn in. Thus…the legal wording in the amendment says that they cannot run for reelection in 2028 since that is the term following the election after the member’s current term is completed. Since this is the clear wording in the law…those legislators sued and eventually it got to the state Supreme Court. That court decided that they didn’t need to follow the state constitution…but instead substituted their own judgement because the language is ‘ambiguous’ which it is not…and because ‘the voters understood the meaning of the ballot initiative to be for the immediate next term in office’. In other words…the court specifically ignored the clear text in the law and substituted their desire that the legislators be banned from running…talk about making it up as you go along. I guess we’ll see what happens next…there is no recourse after the state Supreme Court but I’m sure the legislators will appeal to the federal courts on denial of due process or not following the state constitution or whatnot…and we’ve seen situations before when a state Supreme Court was overruled by the federal courts based on the primacy of the federal constitution. 

As I said…consequences for legislators not doing their job is a good thing…but completely ignoring the law to substitute justice’s preferred outcome is just plain wrong…no matter which side is doing it.

And here’s one called Photoshop by Dad. Seems this mother was out of town on business travel and texted dad who was at home with the kid to see if he was doing things right…and here are the photos the dad texted back to mom.

Cyas.

Posted in Learn Something New, Photography, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment

Deliberations, Dilemmas and Decisions

Posted on 2024/01/30 by Gunther

Ya know…sometimes when you’re doing that whole triple D thing like the title says ya can just possibly overthink things a bit…and while I don’t think we’re at that point yet Neil does have one of ‘em to figger out…and at this point he’s seriously considering altering his photographic planning, a t least for birds here in FL.

Ya see…he got out last Saturday for his first outing of the season…it’s a little early for breeding and nesting activities but some of the critters have (as you will see) already gotten a head start. One of the folks he’s going to Africa in April with was on her annual visit down here to the Sunshine State to visit friends and see birds…so they got together for a morning of shooting up at Venice Rookery 50ish miles north of our home.

So he was taking both his Z8 and Z9 Nikon bodies and the latter has a recent update adding bird eye autofocus that he needed to try out…and long story short…wow, it’s a serious improvement over the older version of the firmware. And since it was birds he was taking his 600mm PF lens and decided to take the 100-400mm zoom lens as the second lens instead of the fixed 400mm prime lens…his thoughts were that while everybody knows that zooms are generally lower image quality than a prime lens they offer flexibility if you need a wider angle/shorter focal length over the prime…and for most practical purposes when you’re outputting images to be primarily viewed on screen the quality is pretty comparable…but the prime is generally a faster lens than the zoom is and the autofocus is therefore a bit faster (which is important for fast moving critters). Size and weight wise the two are pretty similar but he decided that the flexibility was more important. The goal for the day besides meeting one of his travel to Africa partners was to concentrate on bird eye autofocus and practice with moving birds in flight or BIF. 

He came home from the 3 hour shoot with about 1500 frames (hey, he did use 12 frames per second instead of the 20 the bodies will do so at least there was that limitation)…and imported all of them into Lightroom for processing. Tossing out the obviously bad shots…focus didn’t lock, clipped the wing or tail of the bird, and the inevitable oopsies…that got rid of about 400 which is a pretty good ration of decent shots. Then he did a first pass and got it down to 300ish to review for the blog and then reduced that to the 20something you’ll eventually see in this post. But as he was going through the processing…he wondered whether the flexibility of the zoom actually did him any good…so he fired up the Lightroom filters and filtered by focal length…and it turned out that about 90% of the decent shots were shot either with the 600mm prime, the 600mm prime withy the 1.4 converter for a focal length of 840, or the 100-400 with the focal length in the 360-400mm range…so in this case no, the flexibility provided him no advantage. He’s going to try again the next time he goes out in a couple weeks using the 400 and 600 but will put the 100-400 in his backpack just in case and if the trend continues he might just take the primes rather than the zoom for birding trips. On the other hand…the zoom is going to be the second lens in Africa along with the 600 because the sometimes short distances to the animals there would put the 400 out of the running for the shot…and sometimes you want to get environmental shots in addition to portrait shots.

Anyways…he culled the decent shots down to the 26 you see here and processed them for me so buckle up kiddos…

One thing though…Ima not going to identify the same species of bird 27 times for ya…so I’ll just do it once and then try and remember when you see the next same species. A few notes…the Great Blue Heron is also known as a GBH and their genders are the same in appearance…as are the Ospreys, Cormorants, and pretty much everything seen here with the exception of the Anhinga and Red Winged Blackbird which are sexually dimorphic. And these are shown in approximately the correct time sequence starting about10 minutes before dawn and running until 1030 or so. As he expected…the nesting waders had not really arrived in number but on the other hand he saw a total of at least 5 or 6 Ospreys fishing for breakfast, some not so successfully at first but most of them eventually caught something. They sort of hover over the water and then dive completely in talons first to grab the fish and then take off from the water.

Osprey with breakfast…this was the first one of the day and since it was still pretty dark he could only use 1/100 of a second shutter speed which resulted in lots of motion blur in the wings. But the new Z9 firmware caught the eye pretty well and he likes both the wing blur as well as the water drops heading back towards the lake.

Male Red Winged Blackbird

Double Crested Cormorant

Male Mottled Ducks

GBH flexing wings

Failed Osprey breakfast attempt

Hovering before the plunge

Another failure

And yet another failure

Female Anhinga…the male has black neck and breast…and both have much brighter green eyes at breeding season

Success

The last seconds before the plunge…but trying to follow it down to the water is pretty much an exercise in futility

Great Egret squawking IFF as it comes in for a landing

GBH bringing in some nesting material

Great Egret in breeding plumage (the stringy long feathers on the back half of the body)

Another GBH coming in for a landing

And being warned off by the nearby Great Egret in the lower right

Great Egret with nesting material

GBH chick…one of the ugliest babies you’ll see

And zooming in a little closer his little brother or sister. It hatched much later obviously based on size and will likely be killed by the larger chick so it can hog all the food that mom and dad bring

Black Crowned Night Heron…guess how it got the name?

The Great Egret on another nesting material delivery

Cormorant again

On the home front…nothing much to really report. Connie got her injured shoulder (she tripped over Neil’s foot in the dark) X-rayed and it isn’t broken so the doc is insisting on treating her for ‘slight indications of arthritis in the joint’ despite the fact that she told her it didn’t hurt until she tripped and landed on her elbows jamming the shoulder and producing a pretty spectacular bruise on her hip. I guess eventually the’ll do an MRI or CT to figure out the real problem after more pain medication doesn’t help (like it hasn’t helped ever since Thanksgiving). 

She found a Saint Saëns Organ Symphony concert up in Jax in a few weeks so they’re going to make a trip up there for it and to visit a couple of birding spots on a quick 3 day trip. And they’re schlepping up to Orlando before that to get their TSA interview for the trusted traveler program which lets you not take your shoes off or your laptop out of the bag and usually makes your stay in the TSA line at the airport shorter.

Our Elks Lodge needs to move again…since the building is being demolished. One group of members who have a 25 year old Scotch taste and a Natty Lite budget is still looking for a place to lease but they’re burying their heads in the same we think as nothing we can afford they will find acceptable and the ones they deem viable are too expensive. So another group of members is talking to a different lodge about merging and we think that’s the only outcome that makes financial sense for either us or the other lodge…and in addition it’s actually closer to home than where we are located now…and they have a kitchen with fried chicken dinners on Monday and fish dinners on Friday. The chicken is broasted which is a fryer/pressure cooker combo and they use just seasoned flour instead of a better so you get fried chicken with a lot less coating and grease than from the Colonel…it’s the 2nd or 3rd best fried chicken we’ve ever had. But we’re deliberately staying out of the political drama…we consider ourselves social members at this point so we do events and dinners and the like but skip the meetings except for election ones although to be honest there’s usually one person running for each office anyway so it’s really not much of an election.

I guess you saw where Nick Saban retired from coaching Alabama after the playoffs and they hired the fellow from Washington to be the new coach…he seems pretty good record wise but we’ll see how things go in the fall with new coaches and schemes.

Interesting things found on the net.

If you go
here…you can read about how the UK is trying to modify their Investigative Procedures Act to basically mandate encryption of out existence…and according to the interpretation the home office has given the legislation the law will apply to all countries worldwide no matter whether they have UK customers or not. Yeah…I’m sure all of the tech companies are going to agree with that.

You’ve probably read in the news or seen on TV the terrible problem of ‘microplastics’ and how they get into everything from bottled water to seafood to just about everything else…and how bad the things are for you. Well…that might be true and then again it might not be true…but from the news reports you probably think that this is mostly a US caused problem. But…you would be wrong. As reported here 88% to 95% of the microplastics are discharged into the oceans from the 10 rivers highlighted in red…and you’ll notice that none of them are in the US. Africa, China, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East are the main offenders…so the Blame America First crowd needs to shut up. I don’t know the actual source of the image…but it was tweeted by Massimo who is a pretty credible guy at finding the actual facts and verifying what he posts.

Image

And the dumbest one of the week comes to us from the city of Atlanta as noted
here. A small construction business owner in Atlanta bought an empty lot and as required before he can start construction he got the water company to come and put in a meter. And then he got a bill for almost $9,000 for using over 305,000 gallons of water in a month…while the average household only uses about 400. When the house was finally connected to the water line almost 2 years later the bill was about $13 a month. The company owner appealed the bill and was rejected by the Atlanta water company. He appealed that…and was again rejected despite the bills continuing and are now up to almost $30,000…and even though one board member agreed with him but was (in her words) ‘forced’ to vote against fixing the bill due to administrative processes. The company owner checked with the golf course across the street to see if they had any flooding problems and the answer was No…but they would have had issues with a leak of that magnitude. So…either the water leaked due to faulty installation of the meter, or the meter is faulty, or somebody stole the water but that seems a pretty unlikely cause as a truck would only hold about 10,000 gallons maximum if you stole the water and the amount would have been 30 trucks a month for several months. The water company admitted in the middle of this that the problem was actually caused by leakage due to water company employees…and at that point the owner figured the problem was solved…but that statement was denied by somebody higher up in the legal department at the water authority. Nuts.

Here’s one we found especially amusing…it comes from fark.com which references actual media articles and applies funny stories to them. As you may (or then again, may not) know…back in 1965 there was a truck crash in Scranton PA due to a load of bananas…30,000 pounds of them…on a truck that lost it’s brakes as it came down off of the mountains into the valley where Scranton is. The 33 year old driver intentionally eventually crashed the truck so it would not hit the gas station at the edge of town He swerved around pedestrians and eventually lost his life to save others. This crash would never have been really noticed outside of Scranton except for the accidental presence of one Harry Chapin who at that time was a young, struggling musician…who happened to be in the bus station catching a bus to someplace and read about the accident in the local newspaper…so he decided to write a song about it…you can read the
wikipedia article and learn all about the song, it’s alternate endings and such…the full version of the song is 20 per 25 minutes long so it was mostly played at concerts and not on the radio. Anyways…the name of the song is Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas and Neil and Connie had heard it in college…so naturally when we passed through Scranton in the RVing days we went to the spot, took pictures, and posted about it in the blog. 

And that’s all just to explain the lead in to the interesting thing found on the net. On fark.com there was a post linking to
this article…which details an accident up in CT where 40,000 pounds of bananas were spilled all over I-95. Fark.com links typically have an amusing headline rewrite…and the one used for this article was “It’s time to update the lyrics I guess.”

And the second dumbest one of the week…it’s apparently
illegal and you can go to jail out in Las Vegas on the strip if you commit the terrible crime of of stopping on a pedestrian bridge over the street to take a photograph.

And

322911-onya_marx.jpg

And finally…a li’l bit more of math nerdery. But…ya are gonna have to pull out your calculator because not even Neil was smart enough to do this in his head.

On your calculator…enter the first three digits of your phone number…not the area code though, the 4th through 6th digits of just the phone number part.

Multiply by 80.

Add 1.

Multiply by 250.

Add the last 4 digit of your phone number.

Add the last 4 digits of your phone number again.

Subtract 250.

Divide by 2.

Recognize the answer?

Cyas.

Posted in Critters, Photography, WIldlife, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment

It’s Been An Interesting Week

Posted on 2024/01/14 by Gunther

Well…we saw Michigan win the National Championship over Washington…and they did it pretty much the old fashioned Alabama way. They ran the ball well scoring 4 rushing touchdowns and played defense and as some old guy named Bear used to say…”Defense wins championships”.

Then the middle of last week Nick Saban announced his retirement as head coach at Alabama…he’s 72 and said that neither he or Miss Terry (his wife) are ill but that health and age were catching up to him and he (a) couldn’t coach like he really wanted to and (b) more importantly, kids and their families who he was recruiting wanted to know if he would be around 3 or 4 or 5 years and he didn’t feel like he could honestly say yes to that question any more. It was quite a shock to everybody…and I’m sure he and Miss Terry discussed it extensively…and I’m also sure that she told him to do what he wanted to do. Whether she gave him her honest opinion or not I have no idea…but after 52 years I’m pretty certain she told him both her honest opinion and also that he should do what felt right to him. He hung up the phone with her 5 minutes before a scheduled team meeting and according to him at the press conference later had not made up his mind when he hung up the phone.

So…we need a new coach. The best guy possible would have been…in the view of many…Kirby Smart who was his defensive coordinator for many years. But Kirby graduated from Georgia and moved there establishing himself and his own legacy…and he still uses “the process” that Nick uses although I’m sure it’s named something different…but the do your job, move on to the next play, don’t make stupid mistakes, run the ball, play defense, don’t make mistakes, and make the other team pay for their mistakes has been adopted by a lot of current coaches. I’m pretty sure that Kirby got asked and politely declined. Next choice would be…in my opinion…Lane Kiffin who was Nick’s offensive coordinator but Lane is really too much of a free spirit say what I think guy to really be successful in Tuscaloosa and he also said that following a legend was a really dumb idea in his opinion.

So…after a couple of days the new coat is Kalen DeBoer who was the coach at Washington. He took a 4-8 team when he arrived and was 25-3 in 2 years there…so he clearly knows how to coach. At his first job in the NAIA where talent is all pretty much equal and coaching and scheme are the ways to win…he went 60something and 3 with 3 national championships. Rumor has it as of today that his offensive coordinator and some of the other staff will follow him to Alabama. Alabama’s defensive coordinator retired after the season and the offensive coordinator is young and has no head coaching experience so although he would be an in house hire it’s risky.

Will this coach pan out? Dunno…it was hard replacing the Bear when he retired and the first 2 guys that replaced him, Ray Perkins and Bill Curry didn’t do well. Gene Stalling came in and both looked like and talked like the Bear and did well…but then he retired. The next 4 guys didn’t do very well and then Saban arrived in 2007 and you know the rest…6 national championships, 7 SEC championships, 9 SEC West titles, and a 189-27 record. Lost 6 games the first year and then never more than 3 and that only once. I think it will be a long time before we see another college coach do that in 17 years and it’s really hard to disagree that he’s the GOAT (greatest of all time) in the college coaching ranks. 

I do know that the guy that replaces the guy is frequently not successful and that the guy that replaces the guy that replaced the guy is generally more successful…but the new coach has demonstrated ability and we’ll have to wait and see.

My personal guess is that more than age and health…the name, image, and likeness rules that the NCAA now runs under that allows players to essentially go to another school anytime and the associated need to pay players was a far larger factor…some of the sports gurus agree with that and some don’t…and Saban is unlikely to ever say so himself. 

So…it’s the end of an era…and the beginning of a new one. We’ll miss seeing him on the sideline but time goes on and if he wants to stop and enjoy retirement like we are…that’s just fine and dandy.

Nothing much new here…it’s been cold and rainy…in fact this winter has been far and away the coolest and wettest of any we’ve seen since our first one in 2012., Dunno why but we’ve already worn jeans more days than any 2 other year put together…but we’ll buck up…at least it isn’t like Buffalo or Kansas City where they are playing NFL games in temps of minus something.

One small political observation. I know I’ve already told you want we think about the former President and that neither he, the current President, or the current Vice President should be elected in November…so I won’t repeat that here. I also think the SCOTUS will not kick him off the ballot like CO and ME are wanting to do…but again that isn’t relevant to this part. 

What I have been seeing is a whole lot of doom and gloom predictions that it will be the end of democracy and that he’ll suspend the constitution, kill his political enemies, and a whole lot of other things that lefties and people who hate the man are want to blather on about. My observation is that …yes, he might try and do all of those things…but then again he might not…and violating the constitution (in my opinion) to kick him off the ballot because the left has universally declared him to be an insurrectionist without a conviction or anything other than their opinion is just as much a violation of the constitution as they claim he will be. Let the man run…and either defeat him at the polls…or wait until he issues some Executive Orders that are clearly unconstitutional (and which will be immediately invalidated by the courts) and then impeach him. If he really tried to overturn the constitution…he would be impeached and convicted by large majorities of both parties. But doom casting and demanding that his right to run be eliminated just because you don’t like him and have an opinion that he’s ineligible is just plain wrong.

Interesting things found on the net.

This is a mourning dress worn back in the late 1800s by Queen Victoria of England. I didn’t realize until I saw the accompanying tweet with this image that she was only 4 feet 8 inches tall…

Image

According to
this post at snopes.com…one of the preeminent fact checkers on the internet…back in 2007 then Senator Joe Biden said

 “no great nation” can have uncontrolled borders” and proposed increased security along the U.S.-Mexico border, including a partial border fence and more Border Patrol agents.

Kinda seems like he’s changed his mind now that he’’s President and his administration basically wants an open border and just releases illegal immigrants into the US with an appointment to schedule a court date sometime in the indeterminate future (not that most of them will show up anyway, they’ll just fade into society, take low paid cash jobs, and continue to be criminals. And criminals is exactly what they are…the left likes to call them undocumented but that’s just bull crap…they’re criminals…period.

And the top 10 Senior Pickup Lines.

 

Cyas.

Posted in Homebody, Reality Based Blogging, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment

Solar Power For Home Use…Does It Really Work?

Posted on 2024/01/13 by Gunther

I keep seeing posts on the NextDoor site about how one should go solar and “eliminate your electric bill” and while I realize that claim is complete BS based on our history with having panels on our RV…but I wanted to get a post up on the web so that I can refer anyone that asks to actual numbers. I based this post on some calculations Neil did…and in the interests of giving solar the greatest amount of benefit of the doubt he really was fairly generous his assumptions.

And granted…he’s a mechanical and not electrical engineer…but they learn electrical stuff as well…and in addition, all of this pretty simple math anyway, While we don’t and won’t have solar at home…we did have it in the RV days and you can make it work but it’s clearly not the same as being able to flip the switch to on for whatever you want whenever you want it.

So…let’s dive in.

For purposes of this…I’m using 200 watt rated solar panels which cost about 220 each from Amazon and they’re 56×26 inches in size or about 10 square feet each. Our neighbor has this type of panel on their roof and there are 14 of them if he counted correctly…but I went ahead and assumed an installation size of 30 panels or 300 square feet.

So…a 200 watt panel doesn’t actually produce 200 watts except under specific conditions…the biggest two are at a temperature of about 75 degrees and perpendicular to the sun rays…and since panels on your roof don’t move and are rarely at 75 even in winter in FL…at best you get about 60% of rated output or 120 watts. And in Florida you only get about 6 hours per day of maximum 120 watt output and perhaps another 5 at half output so each panel ends up providing about 1000 watt hour or 1 KWH per day…so with 30 panels you produce 30KWH/day.

Our house only uses A/C bout 5 months per year and the other 7 we are mostly open window people…and in 2023 we used about 13,000 KWH or 36 KWH per day at an average monthly cost of $160. So…even with the generous 30 panels you aren’t producing enough to cover the 36KWH per day needed and realistically most houses run the A/C unit a lot more down here than we do.

Can you run an A/C unit on solar with no grid? Well…your panels produce about 3,600 watts peak in the summer time…and by the time you factor in losses in the wiring from the panels to the inverter and the efficiency of the inverter you get about 3,200 watts AC or about 26 amps. Your typical 5 ton A/C unit takes 9KW to start (75 amps) and 6KW running (50 amps)…so no, you can’t run A/C on 30 solar panels even ignoring the other loads in your house (water heater, stove, lights, computers, etc). And realistically most houses down here have more than a 5 ton A/C unit   

Those 30 panels cost about 6,600 plus the inverter, wiring, and installation. I don’t have any quotes for installation but based on our cost of about $5,500 back in 2013 to put 8 panels on our RV (which is essentially the same as putting them on the roof and we already had the inverter and wiring from the roof and the inverter from the RV build), it would cost about 5 times as much and that’s around $33,000 in 2013 dollars and I’m sure it costs more now. A quick loan amortization calculation for 20 years on 33,000 loan at 6.25% which is what it is in January 2024 puts the payment at about $241 a month which you’ll note is more than the $162 our household electrical bill is. And that doesn’t include the fact that your 30 panels barely cover the total annual usage, the lower rate the power company pays you for power fed back to the grid vs the power flowing to your house…and the fact that you’re still going to be pulling power from the grid all day long in the summer to run the A/C anyway.

He even went so far as to give you another 25% of actual power output over his already pretty reasonable assumptions above and it’s still cheaper net to pay the electrical bill…and you’re not really off grid anyway.

In fairness though…if you don’t need A/C at all…and if you’re careful about managing power and all that……and if you have mostly 12 volt lighting for efficiency…and if you have a bunch of expensive, heavy batteries…you can produce enough to live off grid…it is doable but it isn’t easy and there are certainly drawbacks to trying to do so, especially with a house that was not built with an electrical system designed to subsist on solar alone.

So…that’s it. As we used to say in the RV days…solar is a lifestyle thing, not a fiscally responsible thing. In an RV it allows you to park off grid in the plains or desert and mostly subsist on solar with some generator usage…but again an RV is designed to run with a generator and unless you have a whole house generator and a bunch of expensive switchgear that most houses don’t have then adding in generator power at home isn’t all that simple either. 

Cyas.

Posted in Nerdery, Reality Based Blogging, Technology, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment

Could It Actually Be Possible…

Posted on 2024/01/08 by Gunther

That we’ve reached “peak stupidity”. I know the question is sort of rhetorical…that means it’s meant to make a point rather than solicit an answer for those of you wondering…but work with me here. 

I know it’s only the 8th of January…and people being who they are and this being an election year…there’s bound to be a whole lot more stupidity but Ima just gonna say the the remaining 357 days of the year have an awfully high bar to meet to outdo this one.

And I know that abortion and the right to it or not and all that constitutional rights or not jazz is involved…but trust me…no matter what your position on this issue might be the abortion issue is actually irrelevant to the stupidity involved.


Here…is the Newsweek article that prompted this post. You can go read it but I’ll do my best to accurately report what it says.

There’s this person…obviously an abortion supporter (but again the issue involved is irrelevant to his idiocy)…named Mac Truing who resides in and is a citizen of the state of NJ (this will be important later). The case involved is Max the  vs. Abbott, a case filed by Mr. Truong sometime after the Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization case which was decided back in 2022 by the SCOTUS. As an aside…this case *did not* outlaw abortion in the USA…it merely overturned the previous decision in Roe vs. Wade from the 70s that determined that abortion was a constitutional right…and thus according to the constitution returned the issue to the individual states to decide (but still irrelevant).

As a result of Dobbs…Texas passed the Texas Heartbeat Act which essentially outlawed abortion after a fetal heartbeat was detected. So…Mr. Truong decided to sue over the issue…and filed a suit with a whole list of defendants…the six justices who voted for Dobbs, Texas governor Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Patrick, Texas Speaker of the House Phelan, and former President Trump. His suit alleges that the defendants “were involved in either passing, enacting or upholding the THA because he believes the Dobbs decision was incorrectly decided and thus, Roe v. Wade is still law.” 

Now remember…Mr. Truong is a citizen of and resident of NJ…which for anybody not paying attention is specifically not the same state as TX, and he filed his suit in Texas. Given the facts as noted…the trial court dismissed his suit because Mr. Truong…not being a resident of Texas…has no standing to sue in the state of Texas. He appealed to the 5th Circuit…and the appeal was heard by a 3 judge panel of that court (two of which were appointed by Democratic Presidents)…and lo and behold the vote was 3-0 that he had no standing and the case was rightfully, properly, and legally dismissed.

Mr. Truong…and his lawyer (who by the way should be hauled up by whatever bar association approved his membership and after appropriate due process be disbarred because no lawyer this stupid should be allowed to practice law)…decided to appeal to the SCOTUS.

So…let’s review the bidding here.

  • Mr. Truong who is apparently not himself a lawyer decided that the SCOTUS decided Dobbs wrongly…and thus Roe vs. Wade was still the law of the land. The first issue here is that SCOTUS…by definition…simply cannot decide an issue wrongly. They are the ultimate arbiter of law in the country…and while occasionally they overturn precedent whatever they say the law is…is…well…the law, ya know.
  • Mr. Truong included in his list of defendants the six justices who affirmed Dobbs…and with all the hullaballoo about the court needing an ethics policy…they instituted one a month or three back…and the other federal justices ethics code says that if a judge is a party to a suit they must recuse themselves. So…under their policy…the six justices who were the defendants in the suit recused themselves from consideration of the case.

Now…under their rules…the SCOTUS must have a quorum of at least six justices to even consider taking a case. With the six recusals…this left only 3 remaining. And since 3 is obviously less than 6…the court was unable to decide to take the case for review…and thus the judgement of the 5th circuit (which dismissed the suit unanimously) prevailed and is now law. This means that the suit is dead…like in as a door nail.

I simply cannot understand how Mr. Truong and his lawyer, who must have gotten his law degree from a Cracker Jack box or something…failed to think their cunning plan through.

It is also noted in the article that Mr. Truong (and presumably the same really outstanding lawyer) have additional pending cases involving the same issue. The only one mentioned is the suit filed in the Peoples Republic of California with defendants including “Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, President Joe Biden, California Governor Gavin Newsom, actors George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Tesla Founder Elon Musk, singer Britney Spears and media expert Norah O’Donnell.”

Now since the PRC has pretty much an unlimited right to abortion after Dobbs…I again have no clue why Mr. Truong has a suit against the state of CA as well…but then he clearly is a legal genius so I dunno.

Ya know…you really have to wonder about a lawyer who agrees to take a case where his client alleges that the SCOTUS decided a case wrongly. Sure…this is a contentious issue and the opinions on it, abortion, and all related stuff are all over the spectrum…but really…any moron that actually reads the constitution should understand that the SCOTUS is the ultimate arbiter and thus…cannot decide something wrongly. They can make decisions you personally don’t agree with…but under the law they are not wrong.

In other news…I guess you saw the articles about the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 that had the plug blow out. Now the fuselage is manufactured by a sub contractor who cuts an opening for an extra entry door then installs a plug in it so there’s not a door there. The door may become necessary given certain seating configurations in the aircraft but is normally sealed. The sub then sends the fuselage to the main Boeing plant which removes the partially installed plug and uses the opening to get inside to install seats, overhead bins, and all the other inside the airplane pieces…then Boeing reinstalls the plug completely. The plug is simply a mechanical piece that bolts over the hole…nothing more, nothing less.

So…apparently Boeing reinstalled the plug incorrectly and it blew out at 16,000 feet after the aircraft took off from Portland. It landed safely and there were no serious injuries…so that’s good.

But now…the recriminations start. And I’m not talking about between Boeing and the fuselage making subcontractor…I’m talking about the hyperbole in the news.

For instance…I read 3 articles today that discussed that the aircraft in question had …three separate instances of aircraft pressurization system warning lights since October when it was delivered to the airline…and that it was restricted from flying over water for long distances. All 3 articles pointed out that this was an obvious flaw in procedures and that the plane should have been already taken out of service.

But…the rest of the story as Paul Harvey used to say…

Remember…the aircraft pressurization system knows nothing…zip, zero, nada…about the existence of or status of the plug…any more than it knows about the windows. The three previous pressurization system warning lights were all worked on by maintenance and were determined to be bad sensors, alignment problems in the system, or other factors completely unrelated to the bolts holding the plug in place. Nonetheless…this is clearly a problem of great intensity and shows that Boeing is incompetent or worse.

And that whole flying over water thing…not required by the FAA but Alaska Airlines has an internal policy that after 3 warnings on the same subsystem on the plane regardless of the fact that they were fixed…in the interests of safety just in case the airline doesn’t fly the plane long distances over water until verified that the issues are not recurring…so that its never too far from an airport.

As you can see…much ado about nothing. As investigations continue…loose bolts have been found on some number of other plugs on different aircraft so obviously Boeing has an installation procedure issue they need to resolve.

And in the line of “no good deed goes unpunished”…there’s

this about the police in Toronto. Now again…this tangentially involves protests about the ongoing situation in Gaza between Israel and Hamas…but once again that issue is irrelevant to the stupidity.  This past Saturday there was a protest in Toronto in support of the Palestinians…which is perfectly legal under Canuckistan law…and the protesters were up on an overpass over a highway. Police were on hand to control traffic, monitor the situation, and general police things…and were not allowing (apparently again according to their laws) anyone else to go up on the overpass. At some point…some other unnamed people showed up to support the protestors…and brought them a take out box of coffee and presumably pastries from presumably Tim Hortons (that’s the Starbucks of Canuckistan and there’s one on every corner…their coffee is decent but the pastries are really outstanding). Anyways…since nobody was being allowed on the bridge…and since Canadians are almost universally polite…the on scent police took the coffee and carried it up to deliver it to the protestors. Seems like a neighborly thing to do and not out of line at all…Canadian politeness being what it is. 

Unfortunately…some of the media took outraged offense at this…and the chief of police ended up apologizing for his officers ‘supporting’ the protestors…seems like an overdose of both idiocy on the media’s part and an unneeded bow to political correctness on the chief’s part…but what do I know.

And I guess you heard about the SecDef…and his episode of “what was he thinking”. Apparently back on Dec 22 he had some sort of elective surgery which he as of today is still providing no details for as it is his private medical information. Nobody has…or should have…any issue with that at all…and his deputy was still available to handle anything needing SecDef vote on. But then on New Year’s Eve he woke up with intense pain from the unknown medical procedure, went to the emergency room, and was admitted to intensive care to take care of it. But…nobody from his staff ever told the President his SecDef was in the hospital…which is pretty bad form. If you’re a cabinet level official…one would think you’re smart enough to have somebody tell your boss when you go into the hospital. Naturally the other political side is all up in arms because “you never know what might have happened…national security was at stake here”…and the administration is saying “no big deal, he should have notified us but his deputy was handling things”. In this particular case…just like in the brouhaha last month about military promotions being held up by a Senator…no, national security was not at stake. In this case…the deputy would have handled things and unless SecDef was being given serious pain killers he could have been consulted if necessary…just as in the promotion hassle last month the deputy who was getting promoted was the acting whatever until the promotion was approved…but he/she was still acting and doing the job and I’m pretty sure that whether you have 2 or 3 stars on your shoulders (or 3 or 4 depending on the job) has little to do with you actually doing the job.

And finally…in the dumb thing category…there’s a lawsuit filed over in Norway by mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik who you might remember massacred 77 people back in 2011 and is serving a long sentence after being convicted. Now remember…Norway believes in rehabilitation in prison and not punishment…so he resides in a multi level section in prison that is just for him…it includes a training room, a kitchen, a TV room and a bathroom, pictures from a visit last month by news agency NTB showed…and he e is allowed to keep three budgerigars as pets and let them fly freely in the area. 

But…he is essentially in isolated confinement and not mixed in with other prisoners. And he’s suing the government for violating his human rights…despite that he has contact with guards, a priest, health professionals, and an outside volunteer…because he’s “isolated”. Bah…he should have been executed for his crimes post haste after conviction and appeals.

Interesting things found on the net…but only one today. 

Neil has found out his ultimate present just in case anybody out there wants to buy it for him.
This is it…a chocolate 3d printer…it prints 3D objects made from chocolate. Clearly the thing every chocaholic needs.

Cyas.

Posted in Reality Based Blogging, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment

And Happy New Year

Posted on 2024/01/01 by Gunther

To all of our followers, family, friends, and whoever else is reading these missives. I know it’s really strange to see me posting two days in a row…but I got some New Years related interesting stuff for ya…so here goes.

As I sit here typing this…our osprey is out back in the tree…I didn’t get Neil to take a picture of it because it’s just about the same picture as the ones I posted yesterday…so go back and look at those and imagine it was a mere 24 hours later.

We welcomed the new year…well, actually the New Year’s Eve…with the arrival of eaglet E-23 at our local eagles nest…the offspring of M15 and F23 the parents (they don’t have names like the former occupants of their nest Ozzie and Harriet. You an review the progress
here…anyways E23 hatched at about 0700 on New Year’s Eve…the estimated time of hatching of the other egg was (as of a few days ago) about a day and a half later…as of this morning there’s no discussion of the second egg on the website but I imagine that’s just an oversight by the site maintainers. As the first hatched…E23 has a serious leg up on surviving eaglet-hood as the larger first hatchling usually muscles the later hatching siblings out of food and they end up starving a lot of the time. About 80% of first hatching eaglets survive but less than half of the later hatching ones do…at least based on our experience with this particular nest over the past 11 years or so. 

It got down to about the mid 50s last night…pretty cool for down here in sunny FL…and it’s only going up to 70 today so we’ll stay in, dress warm, and that’ all on our schedule.

OK, on to Interesting things found on the net…mostly New Year’s related.

Japan welcomed in the New Year with over a dozen earthquakes offshore of the western side of Honshu (the main island) in Ishikawa prefecture (that’s like a state for the US or province for Canuckistan). You can go
here to see the signs swinging in the Kanazawa train station about 90 miles WNW of Tokyo…or
here to see some of the collapsed buildings. Maximum intensity was about 7.6 and amazingly enough no one seems to have been killed as of the time I’m writing this. Their building codes are pretty rigorous on earthquake safety measures and the population is well trained in what to do when one happens.

This is a tree known as the Ankerwycke Yew…it’s located in Berkshire UK and is somewhere between 1,400 and 2,500 years old…it’s famous because the Magna Carta was signed there. For those of you non history buffs is sort of like the Declaration of Independence and Constitution in the US…it’s the document that an unpopular King John was forced to sign to appease a bunch of rebel barons and granted rights to people, churches, and more…it was signed in 1215 CE and is pretty much the basis for English law and thus law for most of the colonized world later on. 

image

While they were living in the RV…Connie and Neil noticed that in a lot of places you go from essentially the wilderness to civilization in just half mile or less as you drive the highways and byways of small roads where is mostly where they roamed. However…they don’t recall ever seeing a transition as abrupt as this one which is located in Arvinheer, Mongolia…Wow.

image

As you know…there’s this line in the Pacific Ocean named the International Date Line…and it jogs to and fro so as to keep countries in the same time zone…at least most of the time…but unfortunately it was drawn sort of strangely in the Samoan Islands area. Samoa and Tonga which are both part of the country of Kiribati…are the first place that celebrates the new year when it happens as they’re just about 20 miles west of the line…and while not specifically the last ones to see the new year American Samoa, Baker Island, and Howland Island about 100 miles east of Tonga are among the last to see it. And interestingly enough…Howland Island is the place that Amelia Earhart and her navigator were aiming for when they got lost and ran out of fuel never to be sen again. 

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And of interest only to the math nerds amongst ye…here’s a mathematical countdown to 2024.

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Speaking of 2024…it’s what is known as an apocalyptic year because it is an apocalyptic number…and most of you are now wondering just what in de heck is an apocalyptic year? Well…if you take any number and calculate the value of 2 to that power…then examine the result and see if it contains the sequence 666…then you’ve got yourself your basic apocalyptic number…and 2 to the 2024th power contains this sequence. Now just what the significance of that is…or whether it is must math nerdery…well, I dunno.

That’s ‘bout all I got fer ya today…so get yerself to celebrating in whatever manner you prefer.

Cyas.

 

Posted in Homebody, Learn Something New, Nerdery | Leave a comment

And That’s The Way It Is for 2023…

Posted on 2023/12/31 by Gunther

To paraphrase the late, great Walter Cronkite…the title that is.

Anyways…it’s the end of the year and I want to be the first to wish you a great year in 2024 no matter what your situation is…because that’s just the right and sociable thing to do. Our dinner will be a ham from the Honey Baked Ham store along with some roasted tater wedges and pearl onions, green beens, and roasted carrots…along with whatever bottle of wine our sommelier pulls out of the rack. We’ll do that mid afternoon and then settle in at 1700 to watch Alabama take on Michigan in the first football semifinal…Texas and Washington are in the other but Ima pretty sure we won’t be awake until the end of that one. 

I wanted to give you a recap of the entire year…and don’t worry…Neil actually processed me a few images from the pond out back the last couple of days…so there will be pictures…eventually.

January the highlight was a trip up to the northern sections of FL for some bird photography.

February was devoted mostly to the preps for and recovery from Connie’s colon surgery to alleviate her ongoing for a couple of decades diverticulitis problem. The good news is that after the surgery she was pretty much back to her normal self. The bad news is that whatever the after effects you’ve ever had from a colonoscopy prep…I can tell you for certain that the prep for colon surgery is far, far worse. Some of ya might be a wee bit sqeamish so I’ll spare you the details…but trust me…it’s a poopy deal all the way ‘round.

March we mostly took it easy as she was still recovering from the surgery aftermath…but her group for the UK tour started practicing in earnest for the pieces she would sing with them. The group was mostly composed of people from the choir at the church where the former director of the Fort Myers Mastersingers is the music director…but was augmented wit about 20% of the total from Mastersingers personnel. Our plans were to do the choir trip…about 8 or 9 days…and then spend another couple of weeks touring around the UK. We vacillated between some combination of Scotland, Wales, and northern England but in the end decided that rather than a “if it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium” sort of rapid tour to stick with just the north of England. This was key for Connie…as she loves the BBC show All Creatures Great and Small…and it’s filmed in and around the Yorkshire Dales district in England…so Neil got sort of outvoted. He really didn’t mind much as either Scotland or Wales would have been too much traveling and not enough Fun Stuff©…and they were renting a car and driving the last couple of weeks which was good because he needed to refresh his ability to drive on the wrong side of the road from the wrong side of the car.

April and May were mostly repeats of March…rehearsals for the singing tour, going to the Elks Lodge, and just home life.

Early June was final preps for the trip to the UK and we left on the 21st for what turned out to be a 3.5 week trip returning on July 15. I’ve detailed the places we saw, concerts they did and all that in earlier posts but suffice it to say that the concerts were wonderful, the food pretty good, and the roads narrow and with way too high of a speed limit considering the roads. On the bright side…getting used to…again…the wrong side of the road and wrong side of the car occurred pretty quickly and served as excellent training for our later trip to St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands.

On the bad side…both of them came home from the UK having suffered most of the post singing portion of the trip with what turned out to be bronchitis. They survived on Advil and cold pills and on arrival home went the first weekday to urgent care and got some antibiotics and cough medicine that actually worked…but it took another 3-4 weeks before they really felt normal again.

Also along this time…we signed up for a total of 3 photo workshop/tours for 2024…well, 2 for just Neil and the third Connie is going on as a spouse but isn’t doing the in the jungle taking pictures thing. In the spring he’ll do 10 days in the Serengeti in Tanzania and then in the summer they’ll do a week in Costa Rica (she’s going to go deep sea fishing one day and lay by the pool a lot) and then a week in Glacier National Park or just him…she wasn’t really interested in either the first or third trip. 

August and most of September were back to normal life for all of us…but late in September we headed off for the Florida Ladies of Elks convention in Daytona and then headed north for 2 things…first was to visit the kids and grandson in Richmond and second to pick up the parts of our US Route 50 tour from 2019 on the eastern shore of MD…that part got cancelled as you may recall because of Neil’s kidney stone in Cody WY…and if you ever have to pick a place to be stuck for 2 months…Cody WY is a pretty nice place to actually be stuck. The tail end of that trip we visited an old favorite place to eat…High Cotton in Charleston SC…but it’s gone downhill considerably since we were last there and neither the cocktails or the food were as good as we hoped. Decent but not the former spectacular.

We decided (well, the humans did anyway…nobody asked me) that they actually needed a real vacation where the highlight of the day was dinner…and one of our…again…favorite places was St. Croix in the US Virgin islands…so they scheduled a short week there in late October. While they accomplished their goal of not doing much…again the island infrastructure and ambiance has gone down considerably since our last visit. Not really surprising since they had major hurricane hits in both 2021 and 2022…and the Carrington Inn where they loved to stay is no longer in business…Claudia and her husband retired and closed the place. They ended up at a different B&B that while not bad lacked the spectacular views, friendliness, and ambiance that Claudia provided. They did eat at several really good places…but 2 of their favorites there have closed in the interim since their last visit. Between the falling apart infrastructure, road construction to recover from the hurricane damage and long term dilapidation of the structures…it wasn’t what they remembered and they’ll have to consider whether another visit is warranted or if another Caribbean island is a better choice. Overall…the islands in the Caribbean are pretty much like going to Hawaii…but without the 8 hour flight to get there. But there are a whole passle of other islands they could visit instead…they’re not really interested in the casinos and shows on the more popular islands…their idea is small enough so that 5 cars is rush hour and large enough to have great places to eat. On the bright side…they did go to the sam restaurant over on the west side where they had their 20th anniversary dinner and sat at the same table from 27ish years ago…so a good time was had there. But overall…the island has a lot of run down appearance…which given the storms they’ve had and the general governmental inefficiency, graft, and corruption/bribes that goes on in most islands it wasn’t as nice as they hoped.

November and December were pretty much consumed with Mastersingers and the choir at church…between rehearsals, paid gigs, concerts, and lots of new music Connie was pretty busy and Neil just hung on for the ride.

We had a nice Christmas celebration…Neil got a bunch of things he needed for his photo tours to Africa, Costa Rica, and Montana and he grilled some marinated lamb chops for dinner…and we’re having a Honey Baked Ham for New Years (Connie’s favorite meat of all time). For Neil…the best thing about ham is the bone left over at the end…he makes stock out of it and ham stock makes the best gumbo ever.

Let’s see…what else I got.

Neil finished the year with 131 (11.5 mile average) rides totaling 1,509 miles biking with an average speed of 14.9 mph. His goal every year is at least 1,500 miles and he barely made it this year…but what with missing most of 7 weeks with the UK and bronchitis and more weeks for other reasons…he was happy to make his goal. About 150 miles less than the past couple of years…but then time off will do that as he’s usually up in the mid 140s for total rides. He did get a new bike after 12 or 13 years…nice carbon fiber frame, disk brakes and electronic shifting…and the good news is that the new bike is much more fitted to his level of fitness so his average speed for October and December with the new ride went up almost 1 mph…a not insignificant improvement.

Connie continued to sing both in the Fort Myers Symphonic Mastersingers and at St. Therese in both the choir and as the psalmist (used to be the cantor but with the new choir director and his focus on the Joe Show instead of the choir as a whole he took over most of the duties that the cantor would normally perform). She had concerts in the spring both with the chorus alone and also in conjunction with the Gulf Coast Symphony and the First Presbyterian Church of Bonita springs which provided the majority of the singers for the UK trip. They did a concert in Bath Abbey with John Rutter directing some of the choral pieces he composed (he’s like the Arthur Fiedler of the choral world if you don’t recognize the name) and a second concert St. Paul’s Cathedral in the Knightsbridge of London (not to be confused with the other much larger St. Paul’s Cathedral also in London).

Around the house…the only thing we really did was replace the stove. Up until we moved in here…we had always had a gas stove for him to cook on…and he really prefers the responsiveness and maximum heat output of a gas range over an electric one. However, gas is almost non existent in SW FL and the HoA rules don’t allow us to put in a tank. But the solution is what is known as an induction range. This is electric but other than having a heating element it’s got a magnetic coil under the top and one must use cookware that’s magnetic. The coil induces heat only in the pan itself…which has a couple of advantages. First…it has the responsiveness of a gas range, second…only the put gets hot, and third the lower temperature of the cookware itself results in far less sticking or burning. The bad news…as I said above…is that your cookware has to be magnetic and our long favored Calphalon cookware is alas made of aluminum…which is non magnetic. So…in addition to the new range we had to buy all new pots and skillets…but we did get some nice coated non stick stainless steel cookware that is a joy too cook on…so the chief cook and bottle washer is quite a happy man.

And…that about covers our year’s activities…if you’re inclined you can take a look at the posts from the relevant months noted above to see more details, photos, and discussions of Fun Stuff©.

OK…a couple off. images for ya.

First up…a couple of older images from our RV trip to Alaska back in 2015…he reprocessed these from the original RAW image files since the software today is much better. These are three different bears…the first is a grizzly and the last two are brown bears (although technically grizzly and brown are the same species…and while browns are almost always brown or blonde grizzlies run the gamut from black to brown to blond.

This was taken out of the truck window in (I think) the Yukon province in Canuckistan.

These two are from his trip on the bush plane down to Katmai National Park…they landed on the gravel beach and you have to leave before the tide comes in because at high tide the runway ceases to exist. The first was 40 or so yards out…the second one actually walked by them between the little grass hummock they were standing on and the edge of the creek…and they measured the distance to the creek at about 9 feet after it walked past. The shot isn’t quite a wide angle focal length but it was getting darned close to it. Fortunately for them…the bear was fishing and didn’t give a hoot about the 6 people including the pilot sending on the foot high grass hummock.

And a couple from out back at the pond…

This Osprey has been sitting up in the tree the other side of the pond a lot lately…usually either waiting on dinner to swim by in the pond or eating the catch after swooping down to grab it.

A wood stork…he sees them routinely in other ponds around the neighborhood including some that are on the main road and have more traffic…but we do occasionally see one on our pond. It’s actually a bit taller when it extends it’s neck than the Great Blue Herons we see routinely…and the Wood Stork is like the Turkey and Black Vultures…a face only a mother could love.

Great Blue Heron.

Interesting things found on the net.

What is interesting about this photo?

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As you can see…lion, crocodile, elephant, tiger, rhinoceros, and bear. The interesting thing is that India is the only country in the world you can find all of those living in the wild. The country has widely varying climate zones which allows all 6 species to live there.

I think I used this one before but was too lazy to go and verify…so ya get to see it again…maybe. Anyways…the RMS Titanic was the largest ship afloat when it set out on it’s maiden voyage and the picture shows the front view of it in front of a modern cruise ship., Shows you how truly monstrous today’s are…Connie claims it’s like a hotel that moves around but Neil says they won’t let him drive or go visit the engine room and they don’t have guns to shoot…so after a career going to sea he’s not interested in going on one. Modern cruise ships like the Wonder of the Seas check in at almost 1,200 feet long and 236,000 tons displacement…over 100 feet longer and 2.5 times the displacement of the largest aircraft carrier.

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And finally…a bit about uncontrolled growth…the bacteria E. coli divides and doubles the number of bacteria every 20 minutes. While it could never happen in actuality…if it were given sufficient resources to do so in 36 hours there would be enough bacteria to cover the earth a foot deep. Good thing there aren’t limitless resources, eh?

Cyas.

Posted in Blast From The Past, Homebody, Learn Something New, Photography, Travel, WIldlife | Leave a comment

Stupidity Rant

Posted on 2023/12/27 by Gunther

Yeah…that’s about the right title…other choices were “Why Don’t People Read” and “People Only Read The Parts They Like”…but Ima just going to put it down to basic human stupidity (I woulda used a more colorful noun but Ima trying to keep this kid and work safe).

Don’t worry though…there are some images at the end…

You probably have seen the recent brouhaha about our former President and various and assorted courtroom antics…but as noted below the stupidity is most certainly not limited to people that like the man…nah, the other side of the argument has it’s fair share of stupidity as well.

We keep reading about his 91 felony counts total in indictments but none of those trials have happened yet. We also keep reading about how he clearly and obviously participated in an insurrection from the left up to and including our current President…who stated unequivocally that he participated in one. And we keep reading from the other side that he was legitimately protesting the unfair election and all that…but that’s not really the point I’m making here.

Let me remind you again…that we are not supporters of former…in fact he should never elected to anything ever again and likely has committed crimes…although he hasn’t been convicted of anything. And likewise…we are not fans of either current or his Veep either…none of the 3 of those people needs to be our next President for various reasons. But…unlike most far left and far right people…we are capable of actually analyzing both sides of a situation and aren’t blinded by either MAGA devotion or Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Of most pressing concerns are two cases involving the SCOTUS…both of which need to be adjudicated in the near future. The first of these was from the special prosecutor Jack Smith who…after the trial judge paused his trial pending the outcome of former’s appeal that he was constitutionally protected from being charged for anything he did during his term office…appealed directly to SCOTUS so as not to impact the scheduled trial in March. Obviously former wanted to have the case heard by the appeals court first with initial arguments due in court Jan 9…but former’s entire game plan appears to be to delay the trial until it is election time and if he wins order the DoJ to drop the case after he is inaugurated. Mr. Smith’s attempt to short circuit this delay…which seems somewhat valid to us here…was turned down by the court and I’m guessing that mostly they want to not have to decide the issue. Internally…I’m sure they have their opinions about his absolute immunity claims…but if the court of appeals decision matches with what they think…then they can just decline to hear any further appeal and that’s a smaller political hit to their reputation. Our personal opinion is that absolute presidential immunity is an oxymoron and is most certainly not what the Constitution says…and if forced to vote on that issue he will lose and I would not be surprised to see a 9-0 vote on it. If a President has absolute immunity…he could just declare martial law, suspend elections, and essentially become king…and that just is as wrong as it could be.

The second and more pressing issue is the recent decision by the CO Supreme Court that he participated in an insurrection and thus is constitutionally prohibited from office and thus is banned from the primary ballot in CO…that decision was stayed by that court until Jan 5 to allow SCOTUS appeal since Jan 5 is supposedly the drop dead date for printing the primary ballots. Former’s obviously upcoming appeal to the SCOTUS really doesn’t have anything to do with CO…the party could just have a caucus and choose him as it’s state delegate nominee anyway but he doesn’t want the legal precedent that he can be banned since other (particularly blue) states will do the same thing. 

So…the original case was held as a judge only 5 day maximum trial by an election law judge in the state (that’s what the CO election laws require) and after this trial…the judge (and I’m not sure exactly that an election law judge is the right person to make this determination) declared in his Findings of Fact that it was an insurrection on Jan 6, that former participated, but that he should not be banned from the primary ballot because it wasn’t the actual election. He appealed to the state Supreme Court (composed of 7 Democrat appointed and therefore likely Democrats themselves judges)…who found 4-3 that the Findings of Fact were correct but reversed the no primary ban under section 3 of the 14th amendment. So you don’t have to go look it up…here is the entire text of the 14th amendment as copied from https/constitutioncenter.org.

 Section 1

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

 

Section 2

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

 

Section 3

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

 

Section 4

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

 

Section 5

The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

There are several arguments to be made here…and to be fair I’ll try and summarize the positions of both sides.

First…whether or not Jan 6 was an actual insurrection…that is an armed attempt to overthrow the government according to the applicable federal statute…or whether it was just a peaceful protest that involved some lawbreakers. Frankly…it seems like a bit of a stretch to me to call what was essentially a riot an insurrection even though some participants were armed…but then the left has declared their opinion that it was and the right that it wasn’t. Strangely enough…and I have the same issue here…both sides have the completely 180 degrees opposite opinion about whether the disturbances in Portland were an insurrection or not…and to be factual those disturbances actually occupied and destroyed a federal building and declared that some number of square blocks had seceded from the state and the union. Now…until a court hearing testimony actually makes a decision and it is affirmed on appeal either way…whether either was a riot of an insurrection is what lawyers would call “facts not in evidence”…but to the guy in the middle either both were insurrections or both were riots…neither side gets to have it both ways.

Second…is the President actually covered under section 3. Again…in the absence of a legal decision…nobody really knows. I can say that the list of people banned under section 3 in an early draft included the President (according to a couple of articles I saw but didn’t further research in detail) but it was removed for reasons known only to history. On one hand…it seems that the President should have been included…but then there is a specific list of who is included and it doesn’t include the word President. Further…whether the President is an “officer of the United States” and I have to admit the wording isn’t specific. Again…no court has ever officially answered this legal question.

Third…is the 14th amendment “self executing” or does it require a conviction. The Democrats claim that since it doesn’t say conviction that if you engaged in an insurrection in their opinion that’s all that is required. However…as we all know everybody has an opinion just like everybody has a navel…and your opinion and $4 will get you a latte at Starbucks until your opinion is actually ratified as a legal certitude by appropriate court action. The Democrats claim that the trial judge in CO issued a finding of fact…and that thus he has been immutably and permanently branded as participating in an insurrection. The Republicans on the other hand…state that he has been neither charged or convicted of the crime of insurrection…and that therefore even if President is an Officer of the United States…he has not participated. And in fact…they point that section 1 of the same amendment requires due process and that due process means a conviction by an unbiased jury of his peers…which hasn’t happened.

Thus…SCOTUS needs to answer these questions.

First question…was there an insurrection as defined by the federal statute. The wording is sorta vague and the definition of “armed” and “overthrow the government” is also sort of nebulous and not being a lawyer I did no legal research…but the judicial system can and will do that and then we’ll know (and only then).

Second…if there was an insurrection…did he participate. My personal opinion is that there was enough evidence for Mr. Smith to have indicted him for insurrection if he chose to…but he did not choose to do so. And being a politician himself…the likelihood that he made that decision with out consulting with (in my opinion) both the Attorney General and the President is pretty darned small despite his status as an “independent” prosecutor…he still works for the Justice Department and it’s never good to piss off your boss. So one thing to ask here is…why didn’t he indict for insurrection as we all know a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich as the saying goes. My guess is that several possibilities exist…he couldn’t find evidence to get a conviction under the specific terms of the insurrection statute…he had some evidence but decided that the likelihood of conviction was low enough that he didn’t want to take the risk of losing the case…or he (and potentially his boss and his boss’s boss) didn’t want the political hit of seeming to be a banana republic by disqualifying his political opponent from the election…or the most likely outcome some combination of all of the above. In any event…no insurrection indictment, trial, or conviction exists…and since the accused is innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt by an unbiased jury of his peers…former is at this point still innocent of the crime of insurrection and thus the 14th amendment doesn’t apply.

Now…if he was convicted…and if President was determined to be an “officer of the United States”…then yes, he should be excluded from the ballot since he can’t hold office. Until then however…to me section 1 of the amendment clearly makes section 3 not self executing because of that whole due process thing.

As an aside…even if convicted…could the man really get a fair trial by an unbiased jury of his peers? Personally…I think the odds of that are vanishingly small…because everybody has pretty much made up their mind already…and the anti former people will vote guilty regardless of the evidence while the pro former people will vote to acquit because of the “stolen election”. While neither Connie or Neil likes the man or will vote for him…they’re both in their view fair minded enough that they would be able to listen to the evidence and determine whether the prosecution proved their case beyond a reasonable doubt…but they also realize they’re in a very, very small minority there. And since neither the prosecution or defense would be able to select a jury entirely to their liking…any trial is likely to end up in a hung jury anyway…and that’s always going to be the case.

I’m pretty sure that SCOTUS will overrule the CO court on the insurrection issue…at least for now…and again it won’t surprise me if it is a 9-0 vote…because innocent until proven guilty…due process…and all that entails.

Gee…wasn’t that fun?

OK, on to some images. None of these are new but on one of his photo forums they asked each member to submit their 8 best wildlife photos of 2023…and since he did that he figured it would do to post them here as well. He went through his 300odd blog published images of the year and got it down to 39 pretty easily. Getting to 20 was harder and down to 12 even harder still…and then the final 4 cuts were pretty hard as all of the images were worthy and he didn’t want to over represent any particular species. They’re all birds…but that’s just because we didn’t go anyplace other than FL for wildlife this year. So…here are what he says are his 8 best of the year…they’re in chronological order of taking and all were from Jan to May because after that the heat and low water make the bird population mighty sparse.

Female Belted Kingfisher…the orange-brown belt is only on the female

Snowy Egret fishing

Red Shouldered Hawk…showing you why it got the name it did

Female Anhinga (rusty brown neck) with some nesting material

Osprey with breakfast

Reddish Egret…one of the last 4 cuts was of the same individual with wings spread out in front umbrella like in their classic hunting pose…but he decided the successful stab was slightly better

Male Red Bellied Woodpecker…the red on the female doesn’t extend to the top of the head…one might wonder why this isn’t called the red headed woodpecker…but that species looks like the whole head was dipped into the paint bucket

Male Red Winged Blackbird…the female is brown and does not have the red or yellow epaulets

Math skills needed for various life stages…and it’s perfectly on point.

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And since Neil’s going to Africa…he thought this illustration of just how darn big the place is was pretty cool…it plops some other countries (at the same scale) on top of the continent. Tanzania (specifically the Serengeti region) where he is going in the spring is just above the D in India

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Cyas.

Posted in Photography, Reality Based Blogging, WIldlife, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment

Happy Holidays To All

Posted on 2023/12/25 by Gunther

Yep…the greatest of salutations to you and yours no matter which holiday you celebrate or what name you give it. Round here it’s Christmas and we say Merry…but your mileage, religious convictions, social presence, influencer friends or whatever might lead you in some different direction…but ya’ll be ya’ll as we southerners say.

Or…as I found on the interwebs for ya…a politically correct holiday greeting.

Best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most joyous traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, but with respect for the religious persuasion of others who choose to practice their own religion as well as those who choose not to practice a religion at all;

Additionally, a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the generally accepted calendar year 2000, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions have helped make our society great, without regard to the race, creed, color, religious, or sexual preferences of the wishes.

(Disclaimer: This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others and no responsibility for any unintended emotional stress these greetings may bring to those not caught up in the holiday spirit.)

 

Anyways…we got some good stuff here this morning. Neil got some various and assorted camera and computer stuff he needs for the upcoming photo trips to Africa, Costa Rica with Connie and Glacier National Park (the first in April and the latter 2 in July). She got some clothes she picked out…and a couple of other things she decided she wanted to do. And tomorrow it’s Old People Tuesday at Bealls…that’s a store down here in FL…and that means we get a discount and she’s also got a birthday certificate that  runs out the end of the year so off we go to battle the hordes tomorrow.

Oh yeah…Neil got a red Hawaiian shirt too…’cuz if you go to the Elks Lodge on Friday (which they do albeit not every week)…you’re supposed to wear red and he didn’t have anything red so just pointed to the red flower on his shirt or whatever as meeting the standards. Connie got a couple of red dresses and a red top…but one thing she needs tomorrow from Bealls is some green stuff. As choir member and psalmist she’s supposed to wear the correct color to match the color vestments the priest is wearing and the changes Sunday to Sunday with green being the most popular color for what is called “Ordinary Time”…which is essentially everything except for Advent and Lent. She’s practically green-less so wants to have more options there…and heck, Old People Tuesday and birthday discount so…SCORE!!

I got some commentary on all the current political, social, and world order la-di-da going on right now…but it’s Christmas so I’ll save that for next time.

It’s raining today…not hard but we’re supposed to get a thunderstorm around 1300 but be better by dinner time…which is excellent because he’s got these lamb chops that been marinating and percolating in the fridge since yesterday in some good stuff and they are much better on the grill. He’s got a fancy tater dish and pearl onions with cheese cream sauce for sides and a bottle of Chalk Hill Pinot Noir to go along with it…and we’ll have a snack of Prosciutto and Gruyere cheese in the afternoon sometime. Don’t know about dessert…we’ve got Pecan Pie Brownies in the freezer and if they’re still hungry than thawing a couple of those out happens lickety split and toss on some whipped cream in the can and as Justin Wilson used to say…”It be wondermous!!” (Ya gotta say that with a Cajun accent though). And if you don’t know who Justin is…well, he was actually a safety engineer down in Louisiana that was a pretty darned good chef so got himself on TV for awhile back in the 1970s or 80s…you can go
here to get a small taste of his accent and viewpoints.

 

Edited…ok, now that we’ve had our dinner I wanted to give you a report. We had some Apple wine that we won in a gift basket thing at the Elks fr happy hour…then had the Chalk Hill Pinot Noir but we opened that while we were cooking and it was gone by dinner so we opened a bottle of Lions Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon with dinner but were good and only had a glass each of that. I an report that marinating lamb chops in fresh rosemary, wine vinegar, garlic, balsamic vinegar and olive oil for 26 hours and then grilling them to 125 degrees results in excellent lamb…which was then complimented by a glaze Neil made of orange marmalade, blueberry jam, a bit of the apple wine and a couple drops of hot sauce (Bill’s favorite Habanero sauce from up in Plant City) is mighty good. He sliced on the mandolin a couple of Russet taters and them mixed them with EVOO, smoked paprika, salt, and olive oil and then put them in couple of dishes for baking…they turn out sorta baked and sort fried. For veggies…he boiled about 8 ounces of frozen pearl onions. Then he chopped up a shallot and sautéed that in some duck fat and butter (hey, I said it would be good, not low calorie) then put in the chicken stock the did the onions in and some cream, Italian spices and butter and the ultimate secret for cream sauce…a bit of freshly ground nutmeg (not enough to taste but enough to alter the flavor and make it good but not nutmeg tasting. He poured that in a couple of dishes and topped with panko bread crumbs, more Italian spices, and some Grana Padona cheese (it’s like Parmesan sort of ) and tossed into the broiler for 5 minutes to melt and burn/carmelize slightly the cheese. And…it was really, really good. We’ll have a couple of pecan pie brownies later and a bit of eggnog the just might have a little hooch in it:-) They ate all the taters and onions but have 2 lamb chops to make something scrumptious out of later in the week.

Anyway…lessee what I got from prowling ‘round the internet for ya.

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That’s about all I got fer today…so get yourselves to your holiday plans…we’re staying home today since we’re the least popular grandparents I reckon…but as Walter Cronkite used to say “and that’s the way it is for today, December 25th, 2023.” We miss old Walter…one of the last of the true journalists on the news who wanted to tell you the news, not be the news and did little to no soap boxing or slanting of the facts in his broadcasts. Once he was retired…he started stating more political things and was what would back then have been called practically a communist socialist politically but today it would just be progressive as times and attitudes have changed. Despite his personal feelings though (and they were very likely the same when he was the face of the CBS Evening News) it never came through in his broadcasts and for that we as people were better off back then.

Cyas.

Posted in Homebody | 2 Comments

And Now The Shoe Is On The Other Foort

Posted on 2023/12/15 by Gunther

Yeah…that would be the impeachment shoe.

Now…before I talk about that…let me state for the record that at least at our house we are completely not fans of the former President, think he’s a complete idiot, doesn’t deserve to be reelected, and will probably go to jail over at least one of his current indictments. That said…until he is *convicted* of insurrection by a court of law…the justice system in the US says that he is innocent until proven guilty, so he’s not at this point guilty of having participated in an insurrection and all the hubba-hubba about the 14th amendment being “self executing” is just that, a whole lot of nothing-burger.

We are also seriously not fans of the current President or his Veep and neither of them deserves to be reelected either…and when you get down to it a lot of the reasons that former doesn’t deserve to be reelected also apply to the current…but that’s not really the point of this discussion. 

Frankly…some of the policies of both former and current are just fine, and there are just as many policies of both that are just…not fine…but again that’s not the point so I will move on.

I keep seeing a lot of the liberal media talking about how there is no proof of anything involving current at the behest of his son and money…but then back when former was getting investigated and impeached…there was pretty much their side saying that there was no proof. And while we know now that there was actually no proof of wrongdoing by former…we don’t know that about current yet. However…there’s a lot of smoke but no visible flames yet…and it deserves being investigated to see if there is any actual evidence. Without being able to see *everything* the congress has gathered, it’s impossible to say where there is actual evidence or just muckraking…but really, it was the same last time…I distinctly remember how Schiff and his ilk kept saying “we have undeniable written proof and I’ll show it to you later”…but later never came.

Both sides in every recent impeachment (except for Clinton’s, which was a slightly different case) have a lot of innuendo about collusion, corruption, payoffs, the big guy, and don and on…and both sides have protested vehemently that there is no proof…and no evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors” as is required for impeachment. 

But ya know…here’s the deal. Impeachment is absolutely not a legal thing…because according to the constitution it isn’t a legal thing, it’s a throwing people out of office thing. And that my friends…makes it a political thing with political pros and cons and attempts to influence the voters in election season.  Now personally…every impeachment (including Clinton’s)…was doomed from the start as the House in all cases was held by the opposite party and the House is historically far less carefully considered evaluation and much more stick it to the other side than the Senate. I can’t recall if the Senate was controlled by the Democrats for Clinton…but there was clearly not a 2/3 majority who would vote to convict (and convict here is specifically not in the legal justice system definition) and for the former and perhaps current impeachment proceedings the Senate is majority of the President’s party so it’s not going anywhere anyway regardless of the 2/3 majority requirement. So…in my opinion…any impeachment of current is just as doomed as impeachment of former…and the House leadership knows this to their core…and are doing it anyway (or attempting to for current as I type this) and this makes it entirely a political tactic. And going forward…I predict that every President who has a majority House of the opposite party will get investigated and perhaps impeached…and none of them will actually go anyplace because of the 2/3 majority if not the Senate being the President’s party.

Now…I have no idea whether current actually performed any corrupt actions as either the Veep or the former Veep or the current officeholder…but it is clearly obvious to just about anyone with an IQ above room temperature that the rich and powerful get away with a lot of close to the line things and perhaps some over the line things because they’re the rich and powerful. It shouldn’t be that way…but I recognize reality when I see it and also recognize that reality isn’t going to change just because I think it’s screwed up. So…absent seeing all the evidence presented in an unbiased manner and having it analyzed, challenged, and cross examined in a non political manner (which is pretty darned unlikely overall) it’s impossible to say for certain…beyond reasonable doubt…that either former or current actually committed either a high crime or misdemeanor which warrants impeachment and removal from office or whether they committed an actual crime for which they could be indicted and convicted and sent to prison. It’s also not clear whether (as former says and the SCOTUS is considering) whether any President is shielded from prosecution for his actions while carrying out his duties…and I can see an argument to be made for the answer to that question to be either Yes or No…so I’m glad that somebody else has to decide that rather than politicians or media personalities.

I just wish all this BS would go away and the two parties actually do their job and run the country, compromise on difficult issues, and generally not be infantile jerks…but who am I kidding, that ain’t gonna happen.

On the other hand…I see from this
article…that once again our thoughts that no longer teaching civics in high school has led to the dumbing down of the American people and clearly they’ll let you write articles that (a) are completely wrong and nobody actually fact checks them and (b) prove my point about dumbing down. To wit…this article by Dawn Alcott makes the following assertions…that Nancy Pelosi “stepped down from her role as Speaker of the House at the end of 2022”…and “leaving the House without a speaker at the start of the new year”. So…looking at actual facts…it’s clear that Dawn just doesn’t know what the hell she is talking about. 

A Congress is elected for a two year interval…the current one is the 1128th and runs from Jan 3, 2023 to Jan 3, 2025…and the previous one was the 117th running from 2021 to 2023. The new House is sworn in on Jan 3 and the old one is dissolved…and the first order of business of the House is to elect a Speaker…this is historically been the leader of whichever party would have the majority in the new House. In the 117th this was Ms. Pelosi…but she did not step down as Dawn claims…her term office ended and thus she was (as of Jan 3, 2023) no longer Speaker in the same manner that a President doesn’t step down…his term office ends on Jan 20 regardless of whether a successor is sworn in on that date. And the House…well, it wasn’t leaderless either as the first job it has is to elect a speaker and the rules provide for who actually manages the voting for the new speaker…and whoever that is has zero authority to do *anything* except manage the election of the Speaker and deliver the gavel to whoever that is. 

We learned all of this back in high school…because ya know, back in the day Civics was a required course so students would…actually be taught how the government works…but with the lack of that any longer we get people like Dawn who just blather on demonstrating their complete lack of knowledge.

Let’s see…what else I got.

I see that COP 28…ya know the climate change hand wringers…anyway they met in Dubai this week to discuss how to get rid of climate change (an actually impossible task) by eliminating carbon. I’ve never understood how all these rich tree hugger influencers can justify living in their big mansions and flying in their private airplanes to places around the world to debate climate change despite the way above average carbon production they’re personally responsible for…but ya know, that crowd believes in “rules for thee but not for me” I guess. Anyway…they’ve decided to “eliminate the carbon fuel industry by 2050 by legislating scientific progress and…although some of them labeled this point as heresy…actually increasing the amount of nuclear power energy production. They make no mention of exactly where the scientific progress in fusion power, better efficient solar panels, energy storage solutions for the power for when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing…but hey, they just say it will be so.

Now…I’m not saying that climate change is non existent or that it’s a good thing. What I am saying is that climate has always been changing over the 6 billion-ish years of the planet’s existence and it will continue to change. There has been an increase in global temperatures since the dawn of the industrial age…but that’s only been 200 or so years out of the 6 billion and we’ve only been able to measure temperature for about those same 200 years. While ice cores and their scientific analysis does present some idea of what the temperatures were like 3 million years ago…and despite the claims of the climate warriors to the contrary…it’s still a best guess at this point and while people and their cars, power plants, and all certainly have some effect on the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere…it’s not really possible (outside of idiots on both sides of the debate who ignore all evidence that doesn’t support their predetermined conclusion) whether people are a significant contributor, the major one, a minor one, or not at all in the overall scheme of things. And an even more important fact is that short of getting rid of about 2/3 of the 8 billion-ish people on the planet and their associated need for light, water, heat, and food…this isn’t a problem that is solvable. Realistically…the only long term solution that doesn’t violate the laws of physics is the development of fusion power. Fusion will provide essentially limitless power and there’s an essentially limitless amount of fusion fuel in the water in the ocean…but we’ve been 10 years from reliable commercially available fusion power for at least the last 30 or 40 years. Fusion is hard because of the conditions required to make it work. Fusion is expensive because of those conditions…and while we understand how to make fusion work in a thermonuclear fusion missile warhead…making it work in a controlled manner that can generate electricity for us is still a ways away. We’ll probably eventually get there…but all the climate warriors in the world can’t legislate scientific progress any faster than it’s going to happen. And in the meantime…COP kept talking about how the Chinese are on track to place in service more solar power in the next 10 years than the rest of the world combined (or some similar claim)…the same COP ignores the fact that China is continuing to build coal powered power plants at far greater rates than they’re building solar panels and they’re completely ignoring the carbon problem from those plants (both COP and China are doing this)…while demanding that the US and the rest of Western civilization essentially bankrupt their economies and industries to meet unachievable goals.

It’s a hard problem…and I wish there was an answer…but neither the “it’s not happening” people on one side or the “renewable can save us” people on the other side have a clue about what the answer is either. 

69…yeah, the number 69 so I guess this fits into math nerdery.

69 is the only number which when squared (4,761) and cubed (328,509) uses every digit from 0 through 9 exactly once.

And another bit of math nerdery…the number 115,132,219,018,763,992,565,095,597,973,971,522,401 is apparently unique. It is a 39 digit number that equals the sum of each of its digits raised to the 39th power.

Ok, enough of the math stuff…I’ve shown a similar image as these two regarding the amount of water on earth but keep seeing different ways of showing just how small the amount of water on the planet is. This first one…and the image credit is in the image…shows the total amount of water on earth (the largest sphere), the amount of liquid fresh water (the middle one) and the amount of liquid fresh water contained in lakes and rivers (the really tiny sphere about where Atlanta would be on the map…and all of this despite water covering 71% of the planet’s surface area.

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This second one is a pie chart version of essentially the same data…I have no idea who did it though but found it on the application formerly known as Twitter.

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Just goes to show how little fresh water there is.

 

This is the OmniVision OV6948…it’s the worlds smallest digital image sensor (like the ones in your digital camera)…it measures 0.575 x 0.575 x 0.232mm and is a 40 megapixel sensor (more pixels than in a lot of current top of the line digital cameras). I’m not sure what it’s used for…but it’s really tiny sitting there on a fingertip.

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Just a couple of photos for you today…and both of them are old. One Neil’s photography forum somebody posted a thread saying to post your oldest digital landscape image…Neil submitted these two which both date from 2002. The first is from the area outside of Sedona AZ and the second is the Fantasy Island waterfall in Kauai…both were taken on their 25th anniversary trip to Hawaii via Arizona for a work meeting Connie needed to be at.

Cyas.

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