This aircraft first flew in 1962– but as one of its creators, Ben Rich, noted– it’d still be a technological achievement if it rolled off the line today.

Now, go watch the majesty that is the Blackbird.

Makes me smile, because one of my good friends in high school is deaf and has implants.  When her daughter was born, she didn’t react to sound and they had to do testing to see (in her words) “if she’s deaf like mommy or just stubborn like daddy.”  Turns out, she was just ignoring everyone.

(H/T Uncle)

Now, the action video!

And in case you’re wondering what the sound clip is when the control laptop fires up, here it is.

“I see you!”  Heh.

(H/T ENDO)

Jules: They speak English in What?
Brett: What?
Jules: English, motherf*cker, do you speak it?
– Pulp Fiction (1994)

Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat
(Who does not understand should either learn, or be silent.)

In the followup to this post, Stephen has this one up, discussing the poll numbers I used and some of the logic on the pro-gun side.  But the quote I want to hit on is this one: “Do a google on about any gun control issue (at least the ones I’ve tried) and the majority of the first page hits will be for pro-gun sites/topics.”

I’ve had the basics for this post (the title, and the two opening quotes) around for a while, looking for a time to use them.  Basically, I’ve been trying to find a way to express my disbelief in the fact that most of the leftists on the Internet seem to be unable to use Google.  I mean, while the logic behind Google (Boolean logic, search theory, satisficing, and a bunch more) can be deep, the box itself is… well, it’s pretty foolproof.

Now, I now that my background makes me a search geek.  I grew up consuming information (I was on a first name basis with most of the librarians in the area.*), and I got very, very familiar with this interface.  That is the user interface for a Follet Circulation Plus/Catalog Plus search engine.

Except when I learned it, it was the Winnebago CAT system.  And it was DOS based.  And you had a 25 character limit per box.  And you had to know the keyboard shortcuts.  But, barring those differences, it’s the same system.  I learned to use that system because the card catalog (yes, even in the late 1990s, my library used a card catalog) was dominated by the older patrons.  So I, being all little and geeky, had to learn to use The Library Search Engine From Hades.  Which of course had no true help system and none of the librarians knew how to use it.

This long (dreary) aside brings me (meandering) back to my main point– searching isn’t that hard.  Sure, knowing the theory behind it helps out, but the basics are easy to grab hold of.  For instance, let’s find some statistics of causes of death, both worldwide and in the United States.  (Instead of trying natural language, I always use a Boolean search with key words in quotation marks.  Winnebago is a jealous mistress.)

“statistics” “causes of death” “worldwide”

There are 103,000 results.  The first is this Wikipedia article, and next is this article by the “UC Atlas of World Inequality.”  After this, the results tend to be more towards babies, cars, and suicide.  (Of course, we could add [ -"babies" -"cars" -"suicide" ] to our search string, but we’ve “satisficed” our needs here.)

“statistics” “causes of death” “United States”

654,000 results (why does the Internet hate the rest of the world?), with the second being this CDC page, and at 9th, this NIH page.

Taking the data from these two searches, you find that– 1) [Wikipedia article] almost 30% of worldwide deaths are from cardiac disease, while less than 3% are from “Intentional injuries,” 2) [NIH article] the “fast living” combo (tobacco, alcohol, food, sex, cars and drugs) killed about 900,000 people in the U. S. in 1990 versus 25,000 gun deaths, and 3) [CDC page and PDF page 89] in 2006, over 34,000 people died from Septicemia (sepsis), while less than 31,000 died from all firearm-related causes (including suicides, accidental deaths, and police shootings).

Reflecting on this, you can make the assumptions that– 1) if things were balanced, for each anti-gun organization, there should be 10 anti-heart attack organizations, 2) “sex, drugs and rock n’ roll” are 36 times more likely to kill you than guns, and 3) the blood in the streets will be filled with bacteria.

Of course, it’s not just guns where the power of Google could be brought to bear.  Some of my pet peeves:

“There’s no historical evidence for Jesus.”
[ "historical evidence" "Jesus" ]

Wikipedia disagrees with you.  Of course, with the above search, you also get some odd results, but even those odd results can lead to other questions, which lead to others, which lead to others…

(Problem: all ancient texts and sources might have been edited at some time between their writing and the present.  Hypothesis: texts with the longest record of unedited existence and an earliest manuscript closest to the event in question are the most likely to be unedited.  Application: manuscripts of the Gospels and Pauline letters are known to date from the mid to late first century, which makes their being edited highly unlikely.)

“Unemployment fell in all but one year of FDR’s pre-war Presidency!”
[ "Unemployment" "FDR" ]

Per the Wikipedia article, you find that that’s technically true.  You also find that that “one year” was 4-5% jump, the year after the second “New Deal” started– which included Social Security.  A look at some of the issues is in this Cato article.  Pretty much, this one gets tossed back and forth.  Democrats throw it around as “look, government WORKS!” and Republicans throw it back as “yes, when a world war is driving the economy!”

Well, that’s it for now.  Now, if you excuse me, somewhere there is a patron is in distress.

Dixie rips open his shirt, revealing a turtleneck sweater and tights underneath– the sweater is emblazoned with a red D on a yellow background.  He pulls his glasses off and lets them hang on their chain, the points both fists skyward and flies away.

Toyota is building a motorized chair.  With a built-in social networking computer, to find other chair owners who want to hangout with you… in their chairs.  Or something.

Observations:

Windows 7 is awesome.  Installed in less than 30 minutes, very user friendly, and secure.  But it does cost an arm and a leg.  Also, 64 bit OSes (in spite of all their flaws) are here to stay.

Onboard sound has become viable.  The sound on my Gigabyte motherboard is better than the Audigy 2 that I just yanked.  7.1 vs. 5.1, better clarity, and it’s pushing a stronger signal.

Creative can go take a run at a galloping goose.  In the past 4 1/2 years, I’ve worked on my PC over a dozen times, and every single time, the Audigy has worked its way loose, and refused to seat without hard pressure.  Which I why I now am using the onboard sound.

While the Radeon HD 5770 is shorter than the old 7800 GTX, it’s wider.  Wide enough that it’s in the second PCI-E x16 slot… the memory slots are in the way of the first PCI-E slot.  Awesome performance, but the fans at speed are… well, it reminds me of a jet engine.

In desperation, I hit wikipedia, looking for calendaring software that could handle my needs.  None of the newer packages suited my needs.  Then I saw a simple, unassuming package named Chandler on the list.  Looking into the program, I found out it’s a derivative of the old Lotus Agenda scheduler.  Seeing as the integrated engineering program I used in my old job used a form of Agenda for its scheduler, I knew I had a match.

The program is a small download, easy to use, has a great array of tools, and it is flexible.  Need to make yourself a note?  Just type one into the menu bar, it’ll be on the top of your to-do list.  Need to share a list of tasks with your team?  Simply make a calendar of all the tasks, assign it to its own group, export that group to the Chandler Hub, then email your team a link to subscribe to that group… all within Chandler itself.

Worried about losing your calendar?  Try this program.  I set up my hub account, and now, every few minutes (and at every shutdown), the program backs up everything except my trash.  Need to keep track of work, school, personal, and family calendars?  No sweat, you can share any, all, or no calendars with anybody.

The only downside is that the program takes forever to start, due to the fact that it syncs all calendars at startup, and the backup at shutdown can be a long wait… but that may be because I have 2500 notes and counting.  Also, this is an open source program, and the main programmer has left the project.  So, no support, few updates, and little documentation.  But it’s free, and useful.

Watch the Youtube video linked above, and the 4 part series that details use and features.  It takes about 2 minutes for the narrator to set up and distribute plans for a cookout, from “hey, honey, you wanna grill this weekend” to “hey, here’s how you get to my place.”  All in one program.

(FTC note: I was not paid to do this testimonial.  I just really like the program.  Plus, it’s a FOSS project, I doubt they pay their programmers.)

So, in essence, every scheduled post has a timer that looks at the UNIX time, counts down to zero, and then publishes the post.  Unless you just piddled with the timekeeping code, in which case, each timer never reaches zero.  This means that the timer goes away (having passed the time it was set to execute), leaving a post with a publish date set to FUTURE.

The plugin I added takes care of this two ways.  It fixes the code, so that the timer actually executes, and it has a SQL query that looks for posts with a status of “scheduled/missed schedule” and a post time that has passed, and then posts them.  Belt and suspenders.

I ask, because I kinda want to start reviewing things and doing some of the how-to articles I have thought about.

Any ideas?