FJ Cruiser: Shakedown Cruise #2...

Sunday (Mother's Day) turned out to be too danged hot to do any work outside – so we decided to take the FJ Cruiser out for another shakedown ride.  This time we headed out to Los Pinos, the northernmost road that's in the Corral Canyon offroading area.  This is a few miles south of I-8 and a few miles east of Pine Valley, which means it's not very far from home.  There's a road there that starts just below the Los Pinos fire lookout (the photo at right was taken from near the start of this road, with Corte Madera visible just above and left of the FJ), heads down to the saddle between Corte Madera and Los Pinos, and then west down the ravine just south of Corte Madera (the photo below left was taken just at the start of the section down the ravine, with Corte Madera visible above the FJ).

In past years this has been a moderately rugged ride with just one or two challenging parts.  We were surprised once again – the entire section that runs down the ravine is challenging, with several very challenging parts.  All this is thanks to the rains this year and the consequent erosion; in some parts the road looks like it's lost 8" to 12" of soil, with big bad rocks left exposed.  So this turned out to be the best set of challenges yet for our little FJ Cruiser.

And challenge it we did!  We managed to sit it down on one skid or another at least a half dozen times, and twice we smacked a rock or two hard enough to make scratches and dents in the 1/4" GR-50 skid plates.  The photo at right was taken on the way back out, near the place the previous photo was taken – past all the challenging bits, just easy stuff left to go.  When I crawled under the FJ afterwards to see what we hurt, I found a couple of gouges and a nice big dent on the front suspension skid, a gouge on the rear differential skid, and a nice big scrape on the forward port-side lower link skid.  Any one of those, if we didn't have the skids, might have caused some very inconvenient damage.  With the skids, just a bit of touch-up paint is needed.  Big smiles from us for the skids!

The real test, though, was the handling.  We got to exercise, for real, many of the features of our little FJ Cruiser.  We stayed in low 4 wheel drive range for much of this trail, and I found the handling both uphill and downhill to be superb – secure footing, nice high clearances, easy and solid steering, totally controlled braking.  The FJ is a very competent offroad vehicle; considerably more agile than the LandCruiser we've been driving for the past 15 years (though also considerably smaller and less comfortable!).  At one point I needed to use the rear differential locker, and it just worked, nice and smooth.  We had the A-Trac system on most of the time, and we felt the brakes kicking in fairly frequently to keep one wheel or another from spinning.  All-in-all the FJ made it very easy to drive on quite a rugged road.  I'm calibrating my driving to the new ride, and my confidence in it is rising rapidly.  It's all good!

All the photos in this post were taken with my iPhone, including the panorama below, which I took from just below the Los Pinos fire lookout.  The iPhone makes taking a panorama ridiculously easy, and its software does a bang-up job of seamlessly stitching the whole thing together.  The result beats the pants off of any panorama software I've ever used.  I've labeled some points of interest on this roughly 180° panorama; if you know San Diego County these will mostly be familiar places to you.  As always, click to enlarge.

And of course there were flowers:

The Paradox of the Proof...

A fascinating story (with no difficult math) for anyone interested in math – Shinichi Mochizuki's still-unreviewed proof of the ABC conjecture...

Caught on Camera: Good People...

What Giraffes Do When You're Not Looking...

Awesome!

Optical Illusions Collection...

A wonderful collection of optical illusions of all types, by Akiyoshi Kitaoka.

Says the Dog: “What Just Happened Here?”

Via my lovely bride...  I wish I knew the backstory on this one, but the photos' story is very clear.  First we have a disastrous looking situation from the squirrel mama's perspective: the big black dog has her baby pinned down, and it's looking like hors d'oeuvres time:

Things are not looking good for baby.  But then mama squirrel gets right in that nasty dog's face, like a fractional horsepower chainsaw mounted on motorized crampons.  That ole dog is mighty distracted – and baby squirrel makes a mad dash for safety:

Mama and baby, safe on the tree – and one very confused looking dog, the expression on her face saying “What just happened here?  Did I just get my ass kicked by a squirrel?”

Why, yes, as a matter of fact you did!

Imagine...

Imagine that you're a chemist, and you've followed a standard procedure to produce a chemical that's new to you.  The procedures that you read didn't mention that the chemical you're making has an odor, but it does – an unimaginably foul, evil odor.  So bad, in fact, that it ended up getting you fired.  Now imagine that you had to describe that odor.  Here's a valiant attempt:

But the smell - right at the moment when we quenched (in a hood of course) we were pushed back by the solidity of the reek. I got to know many evil chemical smells over the years but nothing comes anywhere close. With the other stinkers, at least one can imagine what sort of unwashed, putrid, fishy, skunky, human-waste object those smells are related to. But I never encountered anything as nauseating or alien like PhePHMe: The memory is stil with me - the most sickly and sweetish smell of rancid gasoline combined with rotten water melons, with undertones of stale sweat, pig carcass, a hint of garlic, moldy oranges, russian-made aftershave and a cheap household air freshener…  its a whole package, and rather sweet one – like isonitriles or cyclopentadiene but magnified thousand times. A whiff of that thing and you feel that your nose just suffered a stroke and will hopefully die and peal off so that you never smell that thing again.

Not bad.  Not bad at all :)  Do read the whole story – it's marvelous, and you don't have to be a chemist to appreciate it!

Murder Charges For Ariel Castro...

Prosecutors in Ohio announced that they'll be seeking aggravated murder charges against Ariel Castro, for the miscarriages his abuse of his captive women caused.  I'm surprised that keeping three women captive for ten years doesn't carry the same sort of penalties as murder (life in prison without parole or execution), but apparently it does not.  If charging him with murder is required to make sure that miserable scum is never a free man again, then I'm all for it.

But it does raise some questions.

How, exactly, is it possible to simultaneously have legal abortion and charge someone for murdering a fetus?  If you can charge someone with murder for killing a fetus, then you are saying that killing a fetus is (under the law) the same as killing a human.  If that's the case, then how can abortion be anything other than murder?  It can't be the mother's permission – there's no other circumstance I can think of where permission excuses murder.

I'm no lawyer, but this isn't making sense to me.  I don't see how our legal system can simultaneously hold that abortion is legal and that Ariel Castro is a murderer...

Better Names for Things...

Happy Mother's Day, Moms!

Here's a little something to put a smile on your face:

Ah, California...

Not long ago, California Senator Dianne Feinstein said (in the context of pushing her gun control bill, which failed) “All vets are mentally ill and government should prevent them from owning firearms”.  She didn't actually say those words, but that is how many understood her meaning.

Columnist Burt Prelutsky had this thought:

Frankly, I don't know what it is about California, but we seem to have a strange urge to elect really obnoxious women to high office. I'm not bragging, you understand, but no other state, including Maine, even comes close. When it comes to sending left-wing dingbats to Washington, we're Number One. There's no getting around the fact that the last time anyone saw the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Maxine Waters, and Nancy Pelosi, they were stirring a cauldron when the curtain went up on 'Macbeth'. The four of them are like jackasses who happen to possess the gift of blab. You don't know if you should condemn them for their stupidity or simply marvel at their ability to form words.

No other state even comes close.  Ouch.  What a sad statement that is...

Meanwhile, Down Under...

This beast, dubbed “SkyWhale”, is about to take flight.  Tim Blair says: “The perfect symbol of our capital city – a bloated, gaseous, multi-breasted monster feeding those who dwell in its poisonous shadow while leeching off the rest of us”.

Study it a bit, and try to imagine what the artist is trying to convey.

I have no idea.  None at all.  But I'm now newly worried about my friends who hail from the land down under...

Quote of the Day...

Said by my mom, upon reading that 78,000 people have volunteered for a one-way mission to Mars:

It's my fervent hope that all 78,000 that want to settle on Mars are politicians!

Oh, yes.  Let's certainly hope so.  And let's also hope that there isn't some galactic environmental protection agency that will punish us for polluting the now-pristine Mars...

FJ Cruiser: Shakedown Cruise...

Yesterday morning I finished putting on the last of the skid plates (the four lower link skids).  The FJ's “armor” is complete!  And that meant it was time for a shakedown cruise to test all this stuff and work out any rattles, loose bolts, etc.

I decided to start out with a route we know well: entering near Banner, we made a loop of the Rodriguez Canyon road and Oriflamme Canyon road.  In past years, the Rodriguez Canyon road was by far the more rugged – but this year, extensive erosion on the lower reaches of Oriflamme Canyon road gives that route the edge.  No matter, the FJ took it all in stride with ease and equanimity.  We scraped a skid just twice, showing off the FJ's high clearance.  We had a chance to exercise crawl mode, the A-Trac positive traction system, the rear differential lock, and of course basic four wheel drive; all performed flawlessly. 

Today I get to crawl under the FJ and see what needs tightening, and maybe do a little touch-up painting.  Oh, what fun :)

Along the way we saw a few wildflowers, actually unexpected at this late date.  Some of these were quite beautiful.  The tiny little blue ones were my favorite; they covered the ground in a few places like a blue gas hugging the ground.  As always, click to enlarge.  BTW, these were taken with my iPhone – that's an amazingly nice camera for its size...

Dancing Granny...

Via Rachel Lucas, this is a slightly different version of a video I've posted before.  But what the hell, it's still wonderful :)

Consumer Reports Really, Really Likes the Tesla Model S...

They note with some regret the 200 mile limitation, but otherwise they make the Tesla Model S sound like basically the perfect car:

Math-for-Programming Primers...

Here's a nice collection of very terse math primers on a bunch of different math topics that are frequently used in programming...

Benghazi...

Several readers have emailed to ask me why I'm not commenting on this story.  Mainly it's because there's nothing for me to add.  The entire disgusting, sickening story is now emerging.  I still have no intuition whether the main culprits (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in my view) will be held to account.  I certainly hope so, but I can't say I'm optimistic about that.  But even that emotion is completely dwarfed by something else I'm feeling: an overwhelming sense of despair and resignation about politics sublimating everything good about my country.  It's getting to the point where it's difficult to imagine anything short of a revolution effecting a cure.  Another Thatcher or Reagan, perhaps...though I don't see anyone like that emerging.

Peggy Noonan has a good piece in today's Wall Street Journal discussing Benghazi.  Here's her summary of the affair:

The Obama White House sees every event as a political event. Really, every event, even an attack on a consulate and the killing of an ambassador.

Because of that, it could not tolerate the idea that the armed assault on the Benghazi consulate was a premeditated act of Islamist terrorism. That would carry a whole world of unhappy political implications, and demand certain actions. And the American presidential election was only eight weeks away. They wanted this problem to go away, or at least to bleed the meaning from it.

Because the White House could not tolerate the idea of Benghazi as a planned and deliberate terrorist assault, it had to be made into something else. So they said it was a spontaneous street demonstration over an anti-Muhammad YouTube video made by a nutty California con man. After all, that had happened earlier in the day, in Cairo. It sounded plausible. And maybe they believed it at first. Maybe they wanted to believe it. But the message was out: Provocative video plus primitive street Arabs equals sparky explosion. Not our fault. Blame the producer! Who was promptly jailed.

If what happened in Benghazi was not a planned and prolonged terrorist assault, if it was merely a street demonstration gone bad, the administration could not take military action to protect Americans there. You take military action in response to a planned and coordinated attack by armed combatants. You don't if it's an essentially meaningless street demonstration that came and went.

The rest of her piece is interesting as well.

The current Crowder (with a guest appearance by Andrew Klavan) is also an effective summary.


You know this all means we need:

   Rope (lots of it).
   Trees (an entire forest full of them).
   Bureaucrats and their leaders (an administration full of them).
   Some assembly required.

Oh, That's Gonna Leave a Mark!

Let's say that you're a big government organization.  Let's say that you have an application where your computers really, really need to be reliable.  Like, say, NASA's computers on the International Space Station.  What's the absolute last operating system you would choose for those computers?

Everyone I know in IT or programming would instantly say “Windows!”.  Naturally, NASA chose Windows.  Windows XP, to be precise.

But...even NASA eventually got tired of crashing, virus-vulnerable computers.  They just switched to Linux (Debian 6). 

Somewhere a Microsoft salesperson is being boiled in oil while Bill Gates stirs and Steve Ballmer piles on the coal...

The True Culprit...

Megan McArdle does what she does best: a merciless beating applied to a government agency.  A sample:

Central States is in particularly bad shape, but it's far from alone.  A whole lot of the big union pension plans are in trouble.  This is usually cited as an example of The Trouble With Unions, or alternatively, The Scandalous Underregulation of the Private Sector.  As I dug into the details though, I found out something that surprised me: this wasn't just a story about union mismanagement.  And it wasn't a story about deregulation, either.  Oh, to be sure, the funds could have managed things better (more about that in a little while).  But the reason that they're in such deep trouble now is neither bad management, nor inadequate regulation.  In fact, the opposite is true: managers wanted to do a better job, and the government actively stopped them.  Meet the true culprit behind the crisis in union pension plans: the friendly folks at the IRS.  

You really should read the whole thing...