Curiosity at the foot of Mt. Sharp...

Curiosity at the foot of Mt. Sharp...  And heading up the slope, climbing a mountain on Mars!

Meanwhile, back on the ISS they're conducting observations on slime mold growth in microgravity.  How thrilling!  Not...

Breaking science news: men and women are different!

Breaking science news: men and women are different!  Probably the scientists involved in this study will be denounced by the feminazis, and websites carrying the news will be boycotted.  For now, though, you can read all about it: science shows that men and women actually have intrinsically different abilities.  Imagine that!  Men really are better at parallel parking, and women really are better at anything requiring fine motor skills (like sewing, knitting, or circuit board assembly).

You mean their really might be a biological reason why men are better at some things, and women better at others?  Really?  Whatever will these scientists discover next?!?

Comet 67P from just 30 km (18 miles)...

Comet 67P from just 30 km (18 miles)...  Via APOD, of course.  Yesterday the ESA chose primary and secondary landing sites for the Philae lander.  They're carefully setting expectations, as there is a good chance the landing attempt will fail.  The selection team emphasized safety over scientific interest (though every potential site is quite interesting!), and the primary site ended up being on the relatively smooth end of the comet's smaller lobe.  The landing attempt is scheduled for November 11th, by which time the Rosetta “mother ship” will be orbiting at an altitude of just 10 km (6 miles)...

As if we would expect honesty and transparency from this administration!

As if we would expect honesty and transparency from this administration!  More revelations about the seamy, casually corrupt Obama administration...

Estonia leads the way!

Estonia leads the way!  In tax competitiveness.  The U.S.?  We're at number 32, behind Slovakia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Slovenia.

Number 32.

This is why corporations are decamping to other countries.  It's not their lack of patriotism, nor their stupidity – it's that the U.S. is far from being the most attractive place for them to be located.  It's that simple.  To pick on an example from recent news, Burger King is relocating its headquarters to Canada mainly because it's going to save them a boatload of taxes.  That's not much different that what we just did: we moved from California to Utah, and a big part of that motivation was to escape the (absolutely absurdly high) tax rates in California...

San Diego leads the way!

San Diego leads the way!  In public school districts acquiring MRAPs.  I know this sounds like something from The Onion, but it's apparently for real – it's being reported by NPR...

The CQ is very high on this one...

The CQ is very high on this one...  That's Cuteness Quotient...

DUBAR – Duct Up Beyond All Repair!

DUBAR – Duct Up Beyond All Repair!  The farmer-style repair job on my truck's rear windows.  Aleck, I know you'll be laughing when you see this :)

I just knocked off for the day.  I walked into the house, stripped all my dusty, sweaty clothes off, and took a nice, long shower.  That felt so good that I'm sure it's illegal in California!  I didn't get quite as much done as I'd hoped, but I think that's mainly because the brush pile was even bigger than I'd thought it was.  I did a lot of pruning around the place this year.  It looks to me like I've got another full day's work to get it done.  With any luck, the paving folks won't show up tomorrow, and I'll have the day to get it done...

I'm one tired puppy.  I think I'll sleep very well tonight...

I swear that brush pile is growing!

I swear that brush pile is growing!  My job today is very straightforward: chip and shred the contents of my (gigantic) brush pile until there's nothing left to chip.  I've got all sorts of brush in there – rose clippings, willow clippings, a few small pines I culled, and lots of pine and spruce trimmings including some large, long branches.  I put in two and a half hours this morning, and now I'm taking a lemonade (ah!) break.  At right you can see my setup, with the wood chipper's exhaust chute aimed into my pickup bed.  This works great!

Except for one little thing, that is.  When picking up handfuls of twigs and leaves to shred, I must have gotten a few small rocks as well – and these exited the chute at high speed, breaking both of the windows in the back of my truck :( 

When I go back out, a roll of duct tape is going with me to make temporary repairs.  Those danged windows are expensive, too – you have to replace the whole rear unit, not just the pieces of glass.  Furthermore, my windshield has a foot long crack in it, too, that keeps growing every day.  Sounds like I'll soon be making a glass shop very happy...

Virginia sea level to rise by seven feet?

Virginia sea level to rise by seven feet?  Willis Eschenbach, writing over at Watts Up With That?, utterly demolishes the recent claims - which, of course, the lamestream media has been credulously reporting...

Feminism's odd choice of heroine...

Feminism's odd choice of heroine...  I'm referring to Margaret Sanger, who has achieved (posthumously) near-goddess status with Planned Parenthood in particular, “pro-choicers”, and feminists in general.  After reading a biography of her some years ago, I found that to be a surprising choice.  I ran across this blog post in my morning reading, and it does a yeoman's job of extracting some damning Margaret Sanger quotes, all carefully documented.  As the author points out, the care is needed, because the Intertubes are full of utter crap on both sides of this issue.

If you're unfamiliar with Margaret Sanger, this is well worth a few minutes of your time to get edumacated just a little.  I'm not a member of Planned Parenthood, I'm not a pro-choicer, and I'm certainly not a feminist – but if I were any of those things, I damned sure wouldn't be looking at Margaret Sanger in admiration...

“Is there anything the government doesn’t ruin?”

“Is there anything the government doesn’t ruin?”  Nothing comes to mind, actually.  This time, it's cheese...

“We must fight...”

“We must fight...”  Found this video of one of Reagan's better speeches. 

On one level, the speech's message was completely appropriate for the moment. 

On a completely different level, the speech made me yearn for a leader of Reagan's abilities.  The contrast between his leadership – from the front! – and Obama's couldn't be more stark...

“The west had better find its will...”

“The west had better find its will...”  What she said.  My dad used to say that the only solution to the Middle East's problem is to collect the world's nuclear weapons and use them to turn the Middle East into a few inches of glass.  The more I learn about it, the more I think he may have been right...

Everything is bigger in Texas!

Everything is bigger in Texas!

It's amazing that the Internet ever works!

It's amazing that the Internet ever works!  Practically every network engineer who has worked with BGP (the routing protocol used by the Internet “backbone” has the same reaction I did when it first dawned on me just how vulnerable it was.  BGP is utterly dependent on being correctly configured – by humans! – by every participating router.  This is a recipe for problems, and so it has proved.  I've been involved in BGP administration at three different jobs, and each time some of our worst outages were traced back to BGP configuration errors – usually by our ISP, sometimes by us.

This is a situation that is ripe for improvement.  Several teams are working on such improvements, and quite a few have tried in the past.  Switching to some other routing method will be tough, though – BGP is as embedded in the Internet as driving on the right is on American roads.  But that vulnerability to human error is less acceptable every day...

Puppies swimming underwater...

Puppies swimming underwater...  This is industrial-strength cuteness.  More puppies here.

Oh, I wants one.  Or five!

Bathroom fixtures...

Bathroom fixtures...  Most of this past week I've been working on installing various fixtures in our new bathroom – things like towel rods, shelves, soap dishes, etc.  The bathroom is completely tiled, so this means drilling holes in the tiles for the mounting screws.  Lots of holes.

I've drilled holes in tiles before, using special carbide drill bits.  I bought some of those bits for this job – they worked before, so why wouldn't they work now?  But they didn't.  In fact, they were a rather complete failure.  Fifteen minutes of attempting got me a just barely noticeable nick on one tile.  This led to some research on the web, a phone call to the guy who did the tile work, a bit of education, and finally to a solution.

It turns out that the tile Debbie picked was a particularly high quality Italian-made porcelain tile.  The tile guy told me that these tiles are fired for so long, at such a high temperature, that they're fused nearly all the way through.  He wore out several saw blades doing our bathroom!  Ceramic tiles that we've had in our past bathrooms have only a thin layer of fused material, and even that layer wasn't as hard was these porcelain tiles.  Bottom line: our tiles are too hard for a carbide bit to work.  To drill a hole in these tiles, you have to use a freaking diamond drill bit.

For the most part, I'm drilling 1/4" holes, with a few 5/16" holes as well.  The diamond drill bits, even at such small diameters, are actually tiny little hole saws.  When you look at the working end of the bit, you see a circle with a hole in the middle, just like you would on a larger hole saw.  The diamond chips are embedded in that circle.  Getting that bit started on a new hole is tricky, but not bad once you get the hang of it.  The essential “trick” is to start the hole by holding the drill at 45° to the surface, making a little nick where one edge of the hole should be.  Once you get that little nick, then you (slowly!) rotate the drill until it's perpendicular to the surface.  After about five or six holes, that part started to get easy.

But this is not like drilling a hole in wood, or even metal.  Each of these holes is taking me from 10 to 15 minutes of drilling, with steady hard pressure on the drill with one hand, while I squirt cooling and lubricating water onto the bit with the other hand, often while in an awkward stance.  This is darned hard work compared with any other drilling I've ever done!

Most of our bathroom fixtures are in now.  I've drilled 38 holes at this point, and I have just 24 to go.  I will be one very happy camper when that last hole is done :)

The first fall color...

The first fall color...  Not down in the valley yet – but on the mountains around us it's starting to spread across the slopes.  The photo at right (click to embiggen) is of the unnamed mountain to our east, in the Wasatch range.  The patches of red there are at about 6,000' altitude; the scrub oaks are turning.  In other places we see patches of yellow, from the quaking aspen turning.  The locals tell me that Sardine Canyon (which State Route 91 takes through the Wellsville mountains) is spectacular just about every year.  Gotta go see that!

Tractor arrived!

Tractor arrived!  Late yesterday afternoon, Lawrence W. of the local Kubota dealership drove up with my new tractor and some of it's attachments.  I've got a couple more attachments on the way (a snow blade and a cart), but he delivered the tractor (a Kubota B26 with loader and backhoe), a Wallenstein chipper/shredder, and a set of pallet forks.

The B26 is an updated and more powerful version of my old B24, so much about this tractor is very familiar to me.  Kubota has made a lot of improvements in the 15 years since I bought my B24, though.  The controls are much improved, and much easier to use.  The key controls are all easily reached with the seat swiveled around backwards for backhoe work; I especially appreciate that.  The hydraulics are now very easy to make slow motions with – that took special skill with my old B24; now it's easy as pie. 

I put the new tractor and chipper/shredder to work today.  I started chipping up the huge pile of brush that I've been accumulating since last April.  I made it through about a third of the pile today (with only a half day's work).  I think I'll be able to knock out the rest tomorrow.  The Wallenstein chipper shredder is a very nice piece of machinery.  I bought it after reading dozens of reviews online, and I bought it from a place in Pennsylvania – no local dealers had it.  I have to say that it was quite a relief to see that the machine was every bit as good as those reviews said it was :)