Squirrels spend most of their time on all fours and, when they do pop up for a look around, generally seem hunched forward, ready to drop-and-run.
Not this critter:
Definitely brandishing a big leaning ‘tude…
Category: Oddities
Who’d’a thunk it?
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Amazon Packaging: Lack Thereof, Redux
Fortunately, it’s hard to damage an aluminum-body “tactical” flashlight:
J5-V2 Flashlight – Amazon packaging A keyboard and cylindrical cell charger arrived intact, with absolutely no credit due to Amazon’s careful packaging:
Keyboard and charger – Amazon packaging Sometimes, a box does arrive with a token scrap of padding dropped inside, but, as nearly as I can tell, it’s cheaper for Amazon to replace the occasional damaged item than to waste time and material stuffing the boxes with air pillows, eco-foam peanuts, or, heaven forfend, space-filling foam.
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Supermoon!
One of the three Supermoons in late 2016 rose over the end of our driveway:
Supermoon – 2016-11-13 Moonrise always looks bigger in person, particularly through all those trees, and we always enjoy watching …
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Monthly Image: Potholes in Wappinger Creek at Red Oaks Mill
The Mighty Wappinger Creek runs low after months with very little rain and we saw more of the rocky streambed than any time in recent memory:
Wappinger Creek – streambed at Red Oaks Mill – 2016-09-23 Much of the deteriorated Red Oaks Mill Dam stands high and dry:
Wappinger Creek – Red Oaks Mill Dam – 2016-09-23 Just upstream from the bridge, you can see how water carves potholes into the rock:
Back in the day, my parents took us to see the far more impressive Susquehanna River potholes (*) near Harrisburg. They range from finger-size pits up to craters large enough to comfortably hold an adult. I’m sure one of their photo albums, now tucked in our closet, contains similar pictures of those holes.
Searching for
red oaks mill damwill turn up previous posts and pictures for comparison.(*) Exploration of the pages linked there will show how, with sufficient mental effort, one can force-fit a non-erosion-based explanation of eroded potholes to match a pre-conceived timeline and narrative. Your opinion of that narrative and the effort required to fit evidence into it may differ from mine.
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Money For Nothing: Gfk MRI TV Survey
This arrived a week ago:
GfK MRI postcard You cannot imagine my excitement when the actual survey arrived, complete with a crisp $5 bill:
GfK MRI Survey These folks are cheapskates; Nielsen paid better, although I haven’t gotten anything further from them.
It didn’t take long to fill out; my fat Sharpie slashed through the NO columns at a pretty good clip. I did attach a note saying we didn’t have a TV and regarded all TV programs as crap, just in case they didn’t get the message.
Now they know.
FWIW, I did not fill out the form that would enter us in a drawing for one of five $500 prizes, because that would let them associate my name with my response without fattening my wallet. The survey itself probably encodes my identity, even though it didn’t have any obvious bar codes or other ID; they could simply print the questions in a unique order in each survey.
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Silver-Mica Capacitor Assortment
With RF projects looming on the horizon, now seemed like a good time to restock the silver-mica capacitor supply:
Silver-mica capacitor – assortment That’s 150-ish little brown envelopes, found on eBay in the lowest-entropy state I can imagine, with about 11 pounds of caps delivered for a bit under $5/pound.
The envelopes bear date stamps from the mid- to late-60s:
Silver-mica capacitor – 188 pF 0.5 pct – envelope I think these came directly from the Electro-Motive Mfg Co production line or QC lab, because some of the envelopes have notes about “WE”, “Bell Labs”, and suchlike. They seem to be special-production items, not the usual caps from your usual distributor.
The values and tolerances are weird beyond belief:
Silver-mica capacitor – 6160 pF 0.5 pct – on envelope If you’re taking notes, 6160 pF lies halfway between the 6120 and 6190 values in the E192 series.
And, yes, that’s a cap with ½% tolerance (forgive the bright-red color imbalance):
Silver-mica capacitor – 6160 pF 0.5 pct – detail Most of the caps are 1%, which is kinda-sorta typical for silver-mica. Then you find something unbelievable:
Silver-mica capacitor – 22.8 pF 0.1 pct Stipulated, I’ve lived a sheltered existence. Have you ever seen a 0.1% tolerance cap? The assortment has more of those, scattered throughout the range.
Regrettably, the entire decade from just over 300 pF to just under 3000 pF has gone missing: somewhere out there, someone has another box from the room that housed this collection. So it goes; given the plethora of values, I can always make series-parallel combinations to get what’s needed.
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Phishing Knows No Bounds
This appeared on The Mighty Thor’s phone during a Squidwrench meeting:
BofA Phishing “To maintain a secure banking environment” seems diagnostic of a scam.
Discouragingly, some of our banks still send emails with clicky links using third-party mail servers, so
checkonlineinfo.comdoesn’t seem any more suspicious than, say, Schwab’scustomercenter.net.A pox on their collective backsides!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 