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Most of this knowledge is from experience; forty years of trial and error. That’s about as long as anyone has been cooking with a microwave; commercial kitchens have never used them for anything but reheating.
        Some, like restaurant owners, think that microwaves are good for reheating but not for cooking, which is completely understandable. You learned to cook on a stove, have years or decades of experience cooking on the stove, but never learned to cook in a microwave, or practiced those skills. Different technologies require different methods; ask someone who learned to cook on a gas stove, then was forced to use an electric stove. A microwave is far more different from either than they are from each other.
        The art of cooking with external heat has been practiced for three hundred thousand to three million years; they’re not sure how long. Microwaves are less than a century old; at least, our manipulation of them is. We first used microwave radio frequencies for radar in World War Two for detection of enemy aircraft.
        Then in 1945 a man named Percy Spencer, who worked for Raytheon on their military radar, noticed a candy bar in his pocket melting. He used this discovery to invent the microwave oven, and the first thing cooked was popcorn. The second thing was an egg, which, as Wikipedia says, “exploded in the face of one of the experimenters.”
        There are a lot of people still alive for whom there was never such a thing as a microwave oven in their youth. Compared to the campfire, or even the stove, they’re brand new. This explains why there is so much misinformation about microwave cooking; it’s too new.
        So I’m going to start with breakfast. Eggs, because there are so many misconceptions about microwaving eggs; actually, microwaving in general. But we’ll start with eggs.
        It has been written, incorrectly, that if you cook an egg in the microwave it will explode and possibly start a fire. You can see from the early history of the microwave why this was believed.
        It is incorrect. Well, a little incorrect.
        Some think that you have to poke the yolk with a pin or it will explode. Also false. However, poking the yolk with a pin will help your egg cook evenly, as otherwise the whites will cook faster since he whites have more water, and it won’t turn out as good. I pierce it with the shell, if it doesn’t break when it’s dropped in the bowl.
        With eggs or anything else, especially meat, you will sometimes hear little explosions. They’re harmless. At the worst you may have to wipe up a little spilled food from the oven.
        My ex-wife used to boil eggs in the microwave. That is, until one day a quarter of a century ago when she and my youngest were in the back yard hanging clothes after turning the microwave on, and the oldest and I were in the living room. She was watching television and I was reading, and there was a very loud BOOM that sounded like it was a big explosion in the back yard. My daughter and I both ran to the back door looking out of its window, and they were out there hanging clothes like nothing had happened.
        Then I heard an intermittent buzzing behind me. The microwave door was open and smoking, and sparks were shooting out. I hurriedly yanked the plug.
        What had happened was that the water had boiled dry and the eggs, in their shells, exploded. That was the last time she boiled eggs in the microwave! Also the last time that particular microwave ever worked again, it was ruined.
        Left out of water and microwaved in its shell, an egg will indeed explode. If you’re going to boil eggs, do it on the stove! However, you can still cook eggs in the microwave.
        Now, when cooking anything in the microwave, the first “secret” of microwave cooking: the food’s not done when the microwave beeps. Microwaves cook from the inside out by exciting water molecules. When the oven signals it’s done, that only means that the transmitter has ceased transmitting radio signals and the turntable has stopped turning. It needs another minute for the heat to radiate. Note that this is only when cooking, not reheating.
        Illustrating this, If you get a bowl of pre-made frozen chili like the Converse Street Bar sells, the instructions will say to cook the frozen bowl for three minutes, let it set for a minute and a half, and cook it for another two minutes. This is because the grease will have floated to the top of the bowl before it was frozen, and while the liquid is boiling, the grease is still frozen, since there is no water in grease. The heat rising from the chili melts the grease as it sits. A better way is to microwave it for two minutes, remove the lid, break up the grease and submerge it in the chili, and nuke it for another half minute to a minute and a half, let it set, then remove it from the microwave and remove the lid; it will be too hot to eat, but not as bad as the package directions. It illustrates how the microwave cooks; water in the food produces the heat that cooks the rest of it.
        My old microwave, the one I bought to replace the one that exploded in the ’90s, took a lot less time to cook; it was 1000 watts, the new one is 750. Energy Star; the oven is less powerful but uses the same amount of electricity to cook!
        Your tax dollars at work. Remember, government employees are mostly no smarter or knowledgeable than you, don’t use their brains any more than they have to, like you, and get paid less than you do if you’re working the same job in the private sector.
        My mother, who considered the microwave oven to be the greatest invention of the 20th century, once wondered aloud if you could cook bacon in the microwave. “Yes, you can!” I told her. “In fact, some packages of bacon give you cooking instructions for frying, baking, and microwaving.” I’m pretty sure that my mom never read bacon packages, as she had been cooking bacon almost since God invented pigs. It’s about the only kind of meat that comes out okay, at least that I’ve seen.
        The time will vary from a minute to five, depending on your oven’s wattage and how crisp you like your bacon. As I wear false teeth, I no longer eat crisp bacon; it gets under the dentures and is painful. The look and texture of the bacon may not be what you’re used to, but the taste will be the same.
        To cook bacon in the microwave, place it on a plate and cover it with a paper towel, because it will splatter like it’s fried in a pan. Even cooked with an egg, it will splatter.
        The bacon package directions, when available, say to place the bacon on paper towels to soak the grease, but I never do. When it’s done I pour the grease in a jar for later use, like my grandparents and your great grandparents did.
        A really quick breakfast is to lay a piece of bacon in a shallow bowl, crack an egg in it, and stick it in the microwave for two and a half to three minutes. That’s with a 700 watt oven, a higher wattage will use less time; it was two minutes with the old, more powerful oven. You will have to experiment, since power isn’t standard with these devices. That’s why your prepackaged microwave items have instructions like “6 to 7½ minutes”. Don’t forget to let it set for a minute or so before removing it. It will still be too hot to eat and needs to cool a minute. Sssh, it’s a “secret”!
        It’s easier, quicker, and far cheaper than one of those Jimmy Dean breakfast bowls; two eggs and a slice of bacon are less than a dollar, but a pre-made breakfast bowl is three or four bucks and you have to pierce the plastic wrap, cook it for two minutes, stir it, and cook it for another minute. Or crack a couple eggs into a bowl, add a slice of bacon, and microwave.
        If you don’t like the idea of the egg and bacon mixed, you’ll have one more thing to clean. Throw the bacon in the bowl, cover it with a paper towel, and cook it. Then remove the bacon and put it on a plate, then crack the egg into the bowl with the bacon grease.
        The egg won’t stick badly to the bowl, but if you’re just cooking an egg or two by themselves, you should add butter, grease, or oil, as I found out when I bought my first anti-stick skillet and tried it out with an egg. It fried okay, but was the blandest egg I’ve ever eaten. The microwave is the same, you need a blandness remover. This is one reason why some think microwaved food isn’t tasty. If you’ve cooked something on the stove with something like oil to keep it from sticking, the oil is part of the taste. If you use oil in a pan, use it in the microwave, too.
          You can scramble it first, or just crack it into the bowl. You may be able to make one sunny side up, I haven’t really tried; the egg in the illustration had a solid yolk. It’s likely it will be as difficult as cooking chicken in a microwave and far more trouble than frying it. The yolk cooks only slightly slower than the white, so you would have to separate the yolk and set it aside, cook the white until it started to congeal, then add the yolk back. Way too much trouble when a sunny side up egg is so easy to cook on a stove.
        Often I just put it in the bowl and forget to pierce the yolk. Sometimes the yolk breaks and sometimes it doesn’t.
        Another secret is anything you cook in your kitchen, no matter how you cook it, will taste better than something pre-cooked and frozen, like those Jimmy Dean breakfast things or TV Dinners. A homemade chicken pot pie will taste far better than one from a food factory, if you’re any good at cooking at all. Even home-made potato chips are better than corporate potato chips.
        As most everyone has discovered by now, a microwave will make stale bread soft. You can’t bake in a microwave; the “oven” moniker is very misleading. You can heat a pot pie in the microwave, but you can’t bake one. You can make a Shepherd’s Pie in the microwave, since it has no crust. I just buy them from D’Arcy’s Pint; I don’t really like to cook.
        I like to make omelettes, and they’re especially good in the microwave. I make a Denver omelette; a Denver omelette has egg, meat (usually ham), cheese, green pepper, onion, and tomato. That’s a Western Omelette with added tomato. Sometimes I add hash browns and corned beef and call it a Western Irish Omelette. I usually lay the cheese on top. A pat of butter in the bowl makes it better.
        If you’re making a Denver omelette in the microwave, it will need to cook longer to evaporate the water in the tomato. Also, as might be expected, two eggs take longer than one egg.
        To make a Dr. Seuss omelette, add a drop of blue food coloring to the scrambled egg and microwave it with ham.
        I had an astronaut omelette this morning, a cheese steak omelette with a little steak I had left over from yesterday. I seldom made omelettes before I found out how good eggs were from the microwave, if cooked properly, because it’s a lot more work on the stove.
        I bought a food processor to chop all the stuff up, and discovered that shredded potatoes turn black overnight in the refrigerator, obviously oxidizing. I doubt they’re bad for you, but I’m not eating black hash browns! So I’ll give the food processor to a daughter. I’ve since bought a small handle-operated cheese grater to shred the vegetables for my omelettes, and started buying the smallest potatoes I could find. I also found that shredded potatoes keep well in the freezer, but start darkening as soon as they start thawing.
        I’ve bought pre-shredded frozen hash browns, and they kept in the refrigerator for weeks, so they must have added BHT (Beta Hydra Tolulene) to keep it from oxidizing. As the Food and Drug Administration has limits on how much BHT you can add to your pre-processed food, it’s probably not very good for you. Actually, any pre-processed food isn’t much good for you.
        My sister and her husband won’t use their microwave for anything but heating a cold cup of coffee because “I heard that the microwaves change the chemistry of the food.” It’s true, but the change in chemistry is from the heat, not from the microwaves themselves. The chemistry of the food changes exactly the same in a convection oven, microwave, or a pan on the stove. The differences are in moisture, especially the microwave because of how a microwave produces heat.
        Now, when people hear the word “radiation” they think of radioactivity and call microwaving “nuking”. But your gasoline vehicle has a radiator, and houses with steam heat used to have radiators; heat was radiated from them. In a microwave, the radiation is simple radio waves, like the radio in your car. The only difference is the frequency; the same difference as the difference between two radio stations, and enclosing those radio waves in a steel box.
        About “frequency,” AC stands for alternating current; DC is direct current that travels in one direction, while AC switches directions, the frequency being the speed at which it changes. American wall current is 60 Hz (Hertz, named after Heinrich Hertz, who proved that Maxwell’s “electromagnetic waves” were real), meaning it changes direction, or “polarity”, sixty times a second. European electricity is 50 Hz. FM radio is in the middle of the television frequencies, 88 mHz (mega Hertz, or eighty eight million cycles per second) to 108 mHz. Microwave ovens are 2.45 gHz; gHz is giga Hertz, billions of cycles per second; 2.45 gHz is 2,450,000,000 Hz, or two billion four hundred fifty million cycles per second.
        It’s roughly the same frequency as the telephone in your pocket, which is why people have ignorant, superstitious fears that cell phones cause brain cancer. If these fears had actually been warranted, brain and groin cancer rates would have spiked in the quarter century since cell phones became common. They haven’t.
        But “radiation causes cancer!” Again, the word “radiation” can mean different things depending on what is radiating and how it radiates. A radio, like your phone or a TV broadcasting station, radiates electromagnetic energy; it’s exactly like waving a magnet around. In fact, if you take a bar magnet, drill a hole in the middle and stick a stick loosely in the hole, if you turn on an induction cooker and hold it just above the burner, the magnet will spin at 60 RPM, as wall current is 60 Hz. You will have built an electric motor.
        Light is electromagnetic radiation, just like the low frequency magnetic radiation an induction cooker uses, or the colors you can see, or the signals beaming to your TV set and car radio and telephone, or your microwave oven. All are light. We just can’t see those colors with our eyes.
        Radioactivity is also light, but unlike the colors you can see, or the colors a microwave oven or telephone transmits, the photons that make up gamma rays and X-rays contain enormous amounts of energy. Comparing microwave frequencies to gamma ray frequencies is like comparing a candle flame to the sun, each at a distance of a thousand miles. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point.
        Your phone uses microwaves, those extremely high frequencies, because with digital signals, the higher the frequency the greater the bandwidth; meaning the more phones the towers can connect to. Your microwave oven uses those higher frequencies because it’s the frequency that excites water molecules. The reason you shouldn’t put metal in a microwave is because metal is opaque to microwave frequencies of light, so it will reflect back to the transmitter and ruin it, like a high powered laser pointed straight at a mirror.
        A gas stove produces its heat by burning natural gas, and a traditional electric oven produces heat by passing electricity through an electrically resistive coil.
        There is a new type of electric stove, the induction cooker. It heats a steel pan with a low frequency electromagnetic wave. Rather than microwave, it’s a long wave about the frequency of the AC from your wall These won’t work with anything but a steel or iron pot or pan; like a microwave heats the food directly and needs water to work, the induction cooker heats the pan or pot directly and needs a ferromagnetic material like iron or steel to work. Like microwave frequencies react with water (hydrogen is actually a metal, making water like burned metal. Rust is burned iron), those extremely long wave frequencies react with iron. However, laying a steel plate on top of the cooker makes it as if it’s a normal electric burner.
        In either case, the heat is introduced from outside the food, like a campfire and unlike a microwave. The microwave energy is a radio frequency that excites water molecules; the water inside your food heats up, so it’s cooked from the inside out rather than the outside in, but the chemical changes are identical. The difference is how and where the food’s water escapes as vapor, which is why a convection oven can bake a pizza and a microwave can’t (although there are some special pizza boxes that “kinda” do, heating a pre-cooked frozen pizza without making the crust soggy).
        Because of this, it’s extremely difficult, almost impossible, to cook edible chicken in the microwave, or to even heat it up in the microwave because of how fat is situated in the meat of a bird, unlike mammal meat. I’ve managed to cook edible chicken breasts in the microwave, but it’s so hard to do you’re better off cooking them in the convection oven, or deep frying them. If I want chicken I’ll just buy it already fried; frying chicken is hard work and a mess and I’m too old for that shit! I’m not one who loves to cook, I cook for the same reason I worked: to eat.
        Mammal meat doesn’t cook well in a microwave, either; the taste is almost the same, but it comes out very unappetizingly ugly. Here’s a photo. I tested part of a raw T-bone, putting it in the microwave for two minutes. It came out like the photo here, but the taste was almost identical to the piece cooked in a frying pan, except for being more juicy and tender than the part I cooked on the stove. Yes, that’s science. One steak, part cooked on the stove and part in a microwave. Better science would do that hundreds of times and document all of the results.
        Afterwards, I experimented with barbecuing a pork steak, again, with most of it cooked in a pan. I thought perhaps the sauce would disguise the looks.
        I was wrong. It still looked disgusting when it was done. That’s what science is for; testing preconceptions. Some things that seem to be a certain way really aren’t.
        Of course, what was cooked in a pan was nowhere as good as one cooked on a grill. I put a small piece on a plate and microwaved it for three minutes, fearing undercooked pork.
        It was way overcooked; chewy, but didn’t taste any different than the barbecue in the pan. Had I overcooked it that badly in a pan it would have been like burned shoe leather.
        However, with the exception of chicken or fish you can reheat it, again being sure to reheat it, not recook it. The biggest reason mammal meat doesn’t cook well in a microwave is because you can’t brown it in a microwave.
        However, if the meat is in a dish, like ham and beans, or beef stew, or chili con carne (that’s Spanish for “chili with meat”), maybe a casserole (I never tried making a casserole in the microwave because I don’t much care for casseroles), it cooks fine in the microwave.
        If you’ve fried a steak or a hamburger or a pork chop or such on the stove or grill, and find when you cut it or bite it that it isn’t done, a minute or two in the microwave will finish its cooking without altering its taste or appearance unless you cook it too long.
        That is, unless it’s a fats food burger, those are really nasty reheated. They slap the condiments and tomatoes and other garbage on them to cover the taste of the very low-quality meat. Just give it to your dog, if he will eat it.
        But good quality hamburger you cooked on the stove heats well in a microwave, unlike a fats food burger. No, that wasn’t a typo, “fast food” is; it’s no faster than a sit-down restaurant with wait staff, but it will make you fat.
        One thing I discovered about forty years ago was that if you barbecue pork on a charcoal grill, refrigerate the leftover meat overnight, then re-heat it in the microwave the next day, it tastes twice as good as when it was first cooked! It probably has to do with the water heating the fat, but that’s just a guess.
        Anything that you normally boil will be identical in the microwave. I’ve found that it doesn’t have to boil to cook in water, making your food healthier, since less water will evaporate.
        You should always use filtered water when cooking, either in a pot on the stove or in a microwave, because evaporation will concentrate all of the inorganic poisons, like lead and arsenic. If you drink filtered or bottled water, you should cook with it, too, or you’re wasting your money. If there are 135 parts per million of nastiness coming out of your tap, like the last time I tested Springfield water (my filter pitcher came with a tester), boiled halfway down doubles that to 270 PPM.
        I have yet to find any vegetable that doesn’t come out of the microwave tasting delicious, as long as it’s cooked well, which in most cases is just heating long enough. But some require extra for the best taste. I mentioned bacon grease earlier; when I was growing up, whenever my mom made green beans she cooked them in a pot (there were no home microwave ovens back then) with water and bacon. I understand that’s how most Americans except Jews and Muslims cook green beans.
        In a microwave, I’ve used the bacon itself, but the way I cook dinner makes it better to just put the frozen beans and filtered water in a tall ten ounce cup, and add a little bacon grease.
        The tall cups allow me to heat three vegetables at the same time. Maybe I should have subtitled this “Cooking for One or two”. Before, I used bowls, and was thinking about buying two more microwaves, but don’t have the room in my little kitchen. If you’re cooking for one with the microwave, you’ll need to pre-cook most vegetables until they’re the desired softness. In the microwave, of course.
        The tall cups also, unfortunately, boil water a lot faster than in a bowl, and as soon as it boils, it boils over. The obvious answer is to not leave it in long enough for it to boil. Test it first with just tap water so you will know the maximum time it takes your microwave to boil water in a tall cup. With the cups I have and the microwave I use and the liquid at room temperature, a minute and a half is the maximum without making a mess. Veggies straight from the freezer can take two minutes; you can test this with cold water and an ice cube. When it beeps, start it again until it’s done.
        Now, another misconception about microwave cooking is that you should only reheat food in a microwave once or it will somehow become poisonous, the old “microwaves change the chemistry” nonsense. If you overcook anything, whether in a microwave, on the stove, or in an oven, it will taste nasty. It won’t be poison, but I can see how you might think that, although if you use tap water there’s a tiny grain of truth in it. Again, water that some of has evaporated is in fact more poisonous than before heating. Whether cooking on a stove or in a microwave, you should use the purest water you can.
        The biggest microwave cooking “secret” is getting the food just hot enough. A lot of people have a really bad habit of overcooking in the microwave, probably because it’s so much faster than other cooking methods. I once saw someone put a TV dinner in a microwave for ten minutes, then complained about how badly it tasted. I looked at the box—the instructions were cook it for two minutes, turn the meat over and stir the potatoes, then cook it for another minute to a minute and a half. No wonder it sucked! But back before microwaves they came in an aluminum tin and took half an hour to forty five minutes to cook in a convection oven.
        Remember that if it’s not done enough you can put it right back in the microwave, but uncooking a thing is physically impossible.
        It’s been said that “everything’s better with butter.” That’s simply not true. I tried cooking buttered broccoli and cauliflower and it was awful! You would think that butter beans would be better with butter. Ironically, buttered butter beans are disgusting.
        Broccoli and cauliflower are best just cooked in water until they’re soft, or eaten raw, the most nutritious way to eat them, although cooking will kill bacteria. Of course, there are probably some very delicious recipes with those vegetables. Butter beans and Lima beans are also best just cooked in water. Peas are very good with minced onion.
        Corn, carrots, potatoes, are all better with butter, and the more butter the better. If you buy or grow fresh carrots you’ll be amazed at how much stronger the taste is than canned or frozen. I’ve started to buy fresh vegetables when they’re available, and freezing them myself. They’re cheaper, more nutritious, and taste better; they must boil the hell out of carrots, peas, and green beans before they freeze them to get rid of the taste and nutrition. I’ve never liked canned peas, but love them fresh or frozen.
        A good rule of thumb is whatever you put with any given vegetable when cooked on the stove will work with a microwave, like butter with corn, or bacon with green beans. Often it will taste better than on a stove top. Again, that includes anything you put in the pan to resist sticking.
        The most rational way to cook is to use the method that produces the best results; taste and nutrition, ease of preparation, and costs the least. Of course, with any kind of food, there will be trade-offs between those three variables.
        Cooking with microwaves has many advantages, for things like eggs, vegetables, and soups. Actually, anything except meat, and as long as it is in a recipe, like chili or beef stew, you can cook meat in it, as mentioned before.
        Microwaved vegetables are more nutritious than vegetables cooked on a stove, because on a stove, most of the vitamins and minerals are poured down the drain. As it takes longer to cook on the stove, there will be more poison from the evaporation on a stove, compared to the microwave. On cold winter days when the air is dry I put a big pot of tap water on the stove to boil. It keeps my lips and sinuses from cracking, and the flu virus can’t live in higher than forty percent humidity. You should see what’s left in the pan when the water’s boiled out!
        A gas stove may be cheaper to cook on than a microwave; that would have to do with what you’re paying for each form of energy. But in the summer, that gas stove will run your electric bill up from making your air conditioner work harder; that’s the appliance that uses the most electricity in your house. At least in the summer and possibly all year, the microwave costs less to run.
        An electric stove will cost a whole lot more to cook on than a microwave, whether a traditional resistance stove or a new induction cooker. Each separate burner in a resistance stove uses up to 2400 watts, an induction burner uses up to 1800 watts. Your microwave maxes out at 750 to 1000 watts, and it runs for less than a fourth of the time it takes to cook on the stove.
        The microwave is a lot less work than the stove, especially cleaning up the mess. In the microwave, there are no pots, pans, or skillets, you serve the food from the container it was cooked in. Except the vegetables; you will need a slotted spoon to dish them out. There are no tongs or spatulas to wash because when food is cooked from the inside rather than the bottom, you don’t need to turn it.
        Now, where do all the myths come from? Mostly, as I said, misunderstanding something that’s been heard. But also from those dishonest rich people who stand to make more or lose less money because of the myths: gas and electric companies. If you cook your vegetables on a gas stove, the gas company gets paid, but not if you cook it in a microwave. If you have an electric stove, the power company prefers you use the stove because it takes a lot more electricity than a microwave, so they make more money from you.
        It’s better to throw away the myths and keep your money.

I had an idea for a story I don't think anyone has written, although I'm probably wrong, as it seems obvious. I had Mars, ho!, and a voyage to Earth, and I thought, "it's time we left this solar system." I mean, I'd spent a lot of time on Mars and several of the larger asteroids, what's next?

Research for Grommler informed me that you could get to Sirius and back in a little over ten years, although a hundred years would pass on Mars during that time, so I thought "Why not Alpha Proxima?" Note: although college research prohibits using encyclopedias as sources, researching a fiction story needs no citations.

I found that the calculations I got from Wikipedia for a trip to Sirius at 1g thrust were wrong (so sue me) but at that amount of thrust you could get to Alpha Proxima in a year, so I'll make it two. Of course, it will seem a lot longer to us here, but I haven't figured out how much yet. Math guys?

Proxima B is in that star's habitable zone, but Jesus, what a shitty name for a planet! It will probably be hundreds of years before we get to the point where we can produce that much thrust for that long a time, and by then we will have had an awful lot of probes to our actually existing but poorly named planet.

Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf that rotates around A and B, which should make some really cool visuals for a movie set on that planet, and also a hint at what its name will be in a few hundred years. It Certainly won't be "B". Bee, maybe? Could life begin on a planet like that? I have my doubts, but could be wrong.

Also, the star's sisters have more "normal" star names, Rigil Kentaurus (Alpha Centauri A), and Toliman (B).

Anybody have a good name for this planet? And its poorly named star? Or should I just name it the same as Isaac Asimov did in Foundation and Earth? I've forgotten what it was, I'll have to read the book again.

I named the CEO of the Green-Osbourne Transportation Company after the guy who thought of whores in space as we were discussing Nobots in Felber's beer garden and a coven of crack whores walked down the street, and gave him an acknowledgement. If I use your planet name and you wish, I'll do the same for you.

We used to not have any worker safety laws. Nobody forced us to put doors on the elevators. If somebody died, so fucking what? We could foul the water so badly rivers caught fire, nobody cared what poisonous garbage we poured in it. We could spew so much poison in the air that you had to roll the windows up driving past our Monsanto plant because of the pain it caused your lungs. We could get the government to wage pointless wars so that gold would pour into our coffers, even having the government draft men to die for our filthy money.
        Then those pesky kids came along.
        They picketed, demonstrated, voted and wrote letters on paper to their elected representatives. They got the war stopped, damn them, and the draft. They got OSHA so now we have to put doors on our Purina elevators and guard rails. Guard rails, for Christ’s sake! The nerve!
        What’s worse, they got the EPA started. Damn them!
        But we’ll show ‘em. Now, we’re paying all the federal tax, and they’ve made us actually pay our full-time workers a living minimum wage. But we’ll fix their wagons. All it will take is for us to keep raising the price of the worthless junk the fools buy from us until the minimum wage won’t buy shit, and bracket creep will raise taxes so high everybody will be paying them. Then we’ll shower the dishonest fools in congress with cash and convince them to lower OUR taxes to the point only the poor will pay them.
        The best part? We’ll fuck up the education system to the point that their grandchildren in the twenty first century will be too stupid and apathetic and feel too powerless to do a damned thing about it. They’ll be so damned dumb they’ll vote against their own interests. We’ll be BILLIONAIRES!!

President Biden’s lawyers found a few classified documents last November in an office he used after he was Vice President, and he immediately informed the Archives and other authorities. Then they started searching in earnest, and found more in a box in his garage and an adjoining room, mixed with private documents.
        The “liberal” media found out about it this month and went absolutely insane, screaming “Where’s the transparency you promised us?”
        Joe Biden’s job isn’t to inform the American people of his every little fuckup, that’s the media’s job itself. He could have done what Trump would have done and shredded the documents, and nobody would have been the wiser. But being an honest man, unlike his predecessor, he went about it by the book. He didn’t hide anything.
        Someone should inform those who are charged with informing us that a window is still transparent even when nobody is looking at it.
        What the “liberal” media won’t tell you is that “liberal media” is a lie in America, told by America’s people’s true enemies, its ultra-rich, like the Sacklers, Waltons, and Kochs. The media are owned by selfish, greedy billionaires who don’t even pretend to care if you live or die. Black lives matter? To them, only rich lives matter, and no poor life, White, Black, or Asian, matters.
        There are two media, the entertainment media and the news media. The greedy, selfish, amoral 1% own almost all of both types of media, and have been trying for the last half century to combine the two; witness the network morning news shows leading off about a football game when there were dozens killed in an airplane crash and dozens more in Ukraine were murdered by the terrorist state Russia’s president with a huge missile.
        To the amoral, soulless 1% who own the networks, the football game is more important than people’s lives. After all, they own football teams, they need the media a lot more than a murderous foreign terrorist who, by the way, controls atom bombs. But tell the news of the game first, despite the fact that anybody who gave a damn already watched the game! After all, it’s the rich people who own that game, they don’t give a damn about democracy, and in fact are jealous of Russia’s authoritarian government and its easy loot for their evil oligarch class.
        The entertainment media have been liberal for decades; bread and circuses don’t matter to the owners, although entertainment media started becoming more “conservative” (meaning authoritarian) with Dirty Harry. It’s their wealth. But all of the network news shows are conservative, with some, like Fox and Sinclair, going all the way to the Fascist right.
        Their wholly owned media will say “I don’t want to hear about class warfare” while waging it against Americans. If the media were liberal, let alone transparent, they would inform you young ignorant fools that in 1965 when I was thirteen the federal minimum wage was a living wage, and America had no working poor. They wouldn’t hide the fact that when my dad was eight in 1940, the lowest taxable income rate was four times the median income. These are all facts that you can easily look up.
        There are still a few liberal newspapers; the Illinois Times is pretty liberal. Mother Jones is as liberal as Fox is conservative. But liberal papers are few and far between, and there are no liberal TV news outlets.
        Thanks to the media, the meaning of a lot of words has become rather fuzzy. To a working class conservative, he wants to conserve social norms, like marriage and heterosexuality. That’s nothing at all like a rich conservative, who may be Jeffery Epstein or some other child molester. All they want to conserve is what is theirs: their wealth, power, and privilege. Liberals didn’t kill Aunt Jeremiah, the rich conservatives who own the food company who owned her did. It’s not about Uncle Ben, it’s about the Benjamins.
        It seems to me that the only people who aren’t being transparent are the media itself. But don’t expect them to be transparent about the fact that they are owned by rich conservatives who were born rich and want to continue becoming richer and richer until everything collapses like it did in 1929. There are no patriotic billionaires and never have been.

This is intended for a far more general audience, but I thought I'd see what you folks thought about it before I loose it on normal people.

        Unless you’re a mathematician or a computer programmer, the chances are that you’ve never heard the term “number system” before. It simply never comes up in the normal bits of life.
        When I was born, only mathematicians knew about number systems, and they were the only ones who could program a computer. Then, despite everyone saying it couldn’t be done, Grace Hopper invented high level programming; computer languages like Assembly, FORTRAN, and COBOL. No longer did you have to be a mathematician to program computers. Her accomplishments should be taught in primary school!
        Normally, we think of a number system as simply counting. There’s no system, you start with one, and if you’re recording your counts, when you reach nine, the next number is ten, a one and a zero. But that is a number system. It’s base ten, or “decimal”. It’s base ten because it’s based on ten digits, zero through nine.
        But that’s not how counting has always worked. Have you ever wondered why clocks go from one to twelve and there are twenty four hours in a day? It’s because at some time in the past, they had a base 12 or 13 number system (the zero is a relatively modern concept), perhaps why 13 is now considered unlucky. 12+1=“Time’s up.”
        The very first number system wasn’t written down, because nobody had yet invented writing, but was very obviously base six; zero, which was meaningless then, through five. The digits were the fingers on their hands, the very first calculating devices. One finger on one hand was equal to five on the other hand. “One sheep,” one finger, “two sheep,” two fingers... “five sheep,” open hand. “Six sheep,” one finger on the other hand, first hand closed. You could say a closed fist is zero. “fifteen sheep,” three fingers on one hand and two on the other. Easy to keep track of how many sheep you’ve counted, as long as you don’t have to pick anything up or scratch your ass.
        This base six number system became Roman numerals, with IV meaning “one fewer than all fingers” and V signifying an outstretched hand. As their society became more complex, so their method of writing down numbers became more complicated.
        The decimal system was invented between the first century and the fourth by the Hindus, and the Arabians learned it from them in the ninth century. We use the Arabian marks for the numbers, as does almost everyone else these days, with variations.
        After fingers, the first computer was a pile of rocks, and nobody knows when the first pile of rocks was used as a primitive abacus. The rocks later advanced to become beads on the abacus. The math could be done in any number system with an abacus as long as you have enough beads on a string to cover all the digits in your number system, or a pile of rocks.
        A modern digital Turing computer uses the binary number system, with two digits: zero and one, on or off. Five in binary is 101, and yes, you can count on your fingers in binary. The prehistoric base six lets you count higher on your fingers than base ten, which ends at ten, and binary lets you count even higher on your fingers. Yes, in school you can cheat in math class by using your fingers as abacuses if they won’t let you use a calculator.
        You can do things in binary math you simply can’t do in decimal, like ANDing or ORing. The Who most likely didn’t know, when they sang “Bargain”, that the lyrics “one and one ain’t two, one and one is one” that they were talking not about romantic love, but boolean algebra. In it, 101 (binary five) AND 011 (binary three) are 001; or:

        101
AND 011
        ----
        001

        That’s 5 (101 binary) AND 3 (011 binary) equals 1. So if someone says “five and three is one,” they’re correct. With an AND, both numbers must be one for that digit to be one. An OR is the opposite; the answer is one if either is one. 5 OR 3 = 7.
        That’s really handy in programming. Not so much in day to day life.
        The prehistoric base six number system became base 12, an easy conversion from base six, for timekeeping. Because, of course, there are twelve full moons in a year (thirteen in a year unlucky enough to have a blue moon).
        Programmers also use octal, or base eight, and hexadecimal, or base sixteen, because they are the easiest number systems to convert to binary.
        A digital computer is basically a complex abacus with one bead each on thousands or trillions of strings. Some people say a big enough computer could become sentient. I’m still asking, how many beads do I need to add to my abacus before it becomes self-aware?

Donald Trump had an excellent catchphrase: Make America Great Again. Too bad he had no intention of doing so. The motto was as empty as coal is black. His entire administration was one of enriching himself and his friends; witness the 2017 tax cut that slashed his taxes but did nothing to yours. He was about White supremacy and hatred of foreigners. He was the world’s greatest fraudster, greater than Ponzi or Maddoff (both of whom went to prison; Trump is still free).
        But what makes it such a great slogan is that it’s exactly what America needs. Not trickle down tax cuts that never trickle down, because wealth flows upwards, but restoring America’s greatness to the fifties and sixties.
        Back then, we were number one in everything. Europe, Asia, and a big chunk of Africa had been destroyed in the war while we came out relatively unscathed. We had the best infrastructure except the German Autobahn, which President Eisenhower set out to remedy with the Interstate Highway System, and the Russian space technology, which Eisenhower tackled by starting NASA.
        There was poverty, but far less than today. There was no such thing as the “working poor,” in 1965 the federal minimum wage was $1.50 and a McDonald’s hamburger was 15¢. Now that same sandwich is $2.49. To match 1965’s greatness, we need to raise the minimum wage to $24.90. And to keep the rich from continuing to steal our labor, tie the minimum wage to inflation like Social Security is; the rich benefit from inflation. Where do you think billionaires came from? None existed when America was great.
        The rich, who own the media, stole America’s greatness and sold it to foreigners. Its media claim that raising the minimum wage raises inflation, when no minimum wage increase in history has ever led to prices rising; you can look the data up, they’re all on the internet.
        The rich have another evil tool to use against America (meaning the 95% of Americans who aren’t filthy rich legal thieves), racism. Our only dark spot in those great times was Apartheid, that we called “Jim Crow Segregation”. It, and the continued racism of today are Elon’s and Donald’s and Jeff’s and the Sacklers’ and the Waltons’ way of keeping us at each others’ throats so we won’t notice who’s really holding us down.
        How about tax greatness? Before World War Two, only the rich paid federal income tax; in 1940 the lowest taxable income was over four times the median income. In 1955 the top tax rate was 95%, why aren’t Musk and Bezos paying that? Instead, they pay no tax at all! Yet, nobody is willing to change it.
        Perhaps that’s because we have ceased to be a truly democratic nation and have become a plutocracy, where the campaign contributions determine who wins an election. The Republicans worked to overthrow Roe for half a century, where is the party that will work to overturn Citizens United? A name, by the way, that was as much a lie as “right to work” laws, which gave no one any rights, except giving the rich the right to destroy labor unions.
        How about health care? We used to have the best health care in the world, but since the rich, who are so averse to the taxes that pay for civilization, haven’t allowed America to have universal payer like the rest of the industrialized world, we have dropped from the best to among the worst. There are third world nations that get better health care than us!
        Make America great again? Don’t be foolish enough to ask a billionaire to do it, because they have no clue what it’s like to be a real American, one who actually needs to work.

It’s that time of year again. The time of year when everyone and their dog waxes nostalgic about all the shit nobody cares about from the year past, and stupidly predicts the next year in the grim knowledge that when the next New Year comes along, nobody will remember that the dumbass predicted a bunch of foolish shit that turned out to be complete and utter balderdash.
        I might as well go ahead and do it anyway. Just like I did last year (yes, a lot of this was pasted from last year’s final chapter).
        Some of these links go to /. (these would be old stuff), S/N, mcgrewbooks.com, or mcgrew.info. As usual, first: the yearly index:

Journals:

Random Scribblings

the Paxil Diaries

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

Articles:

The Bicycle
 

No, We're Not Entering a Recession!
 

Free Books!
 

A little advice for a Terrorist War Criminal
 

1984 China
 

The Robots
 

Changes
 

Marijuana Myths
 

A Gift from God?
 

The Man With No Belly Button
 

Only Yesterday (The Invisible Hyphen)
 

Useful dead tech part three
 

Weird TV
 

The Brits have it wrong
 

Review:

The 1619 project
 

Song

A.G.E
 

Waking Up Is Hard to Do
 

Fixin' to Die Rag (Russian Version)
 

Last years’ stupid predictions (and more):

        I completed my seventh decade of life, turning 70 last April.
        I pedicted that I would have another volume of Random Scribblings, because all it lacked was a table of contents and cover art. I still haven't made the art; when I go to Track Shack on 3rd and Laurel, there are never any trains until I leave. Oh, the HTML for that book is less than half done.
        I did get Only Yesterday done, but I didn't write that, although it was as much work.
        But I’ll also hang on to most of last year’s predictions.
        But here's a new one: I predict that there will thankfully be no elections in 2023, at least here.
        Someone will die. Maybe you, maybe me. Not necessarily anybody I know... we can only hope.
        SETI will find no sign of intelligent life. Not even on Earth.
        The Pirate Party won’t make inroads in the US. I hope I’m wrong about that one.
        US politicians will continue to be wholly owned by the corporations.
        I’ll still be a nerd.
        Technophobic fashionista jocks will troll slashdot (but not S/N). I have no idea if that one or the following held up, anybody been there lately?
        Microsoft will continue sucking.
        The pandemic will continue plagueing us.
        Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?

Forty years ago last summer I learned how to program computers. I was thirty then, and bought a cheap computer, a TS-1000. It was monochrome, text only with a dozen blocks that do very primitive graphics, 1 mHz clock speed, with 2 kilobytes of memory. A very small, primitive computer.
        I bought it because I hated my job pumping gas at Disney World, despite its numerous perks, and had read that a teenager had become a millionaire writing computer programs. A teenager? I could do that! Hell, I was hacking electronics as a teenager, making a guitar fuzzbox, like was sold for $300 in music stores, out of a broken $10 transistor radio!
        The computer came with a tutorial on how to program it in Sinclair BASIC. It took a few weeks of spare time to learn well enough that I could write an analog clock display, albeit not a very accurate clock, and simple 2-D video games, building up in complexity.
        The most ambitious game I wrote at that time was a two player battle tanks game, similar to what Windows would have decades later. The only trouble was, the slow clock speed of the machine, with the added overhead of its BASIC interpreter made it unplayably slow.
        So I learned Z-80 assembly, re-wrote it based on the BASIC version I had written; BASIC is incredibly similar to assembly, and I had to assemble it by hand because that computer had no assembler I knew of. Then I had to add timing loops to slow it down.
        A couple of years later, I discovered that the teenager was Bill Gates, his parents were rich lawyers who worked for IBM, and he became a millionaire making an operating system he had bought to work on an IBM-PC, then licensed that OS to IBM. And I bought another computer with my meager Disney wages, a Radio Shack TRS-80 MC-10. This was color, but text-only as well.
        I bought its repair manual because I’ve always wanted to know as much as I could about stuff I owned, and discovered that although it was text-only, its video chip was capable of graphics. It was fun finding its address and what value to POKE there to make it do things; trial and error, short routines, etc. I had hacked its hardware with software.
        I wrote a graphics program for it called HRG, bought a classified ad in Byte Magazine, and sold enough copies for $20 each to pay for the ad, but not for the blank cassettes or postage.
        Learning was always easy as a young man, as long as I worked my ass off on it.
        But half a decade later during a bad recession I got a job with the state of Illinois on the basis of my knowing about computers; they were still new in offices, and most people had never seen one. Of course, the state had mainframes for decades, but “microcomputers” were still new.
        I started out entering data, and wound up writing the databases in dBase, later taking a college course in NOMAD. I still have the textbook in my basement, I think. The two languages are similar enough that I suspect that dBase was originally written as NOMAD on a PC.
        Four decades after haunting the library and devouring dozens of books learning assembly, and almost a decade after retiring, I find the books I’ve written are listed on Goodreads and sign up for an author account.
        It requires RSS for a linked blog. I’ve never used RSS on either end, and as of when I created the Goodreads account yesterday knew nothing of it whatever, except that a thing called “RSS” existed. I searched for information all afternoon yesterday and wound up where I should have started, W3C Schools.
        I’m seventy now, but I’ll bet I have that RSS feed up and running faster than I had that machine code tanks program running when I was young!
        Update: Two hours. Who says you can’t teach am old dog new tricks? Of course, XML ain’t hand assembled machine code...

Was there another S/N crash, or did I screw up? Probably the latter; I posted this a week ago and it disappeared. [Edit]: The former, all the comments I made yesterday are also gone, and few stories have any comments at all! Now to what was lost:
        I have the Linux computer pretty useful, thanks to your comments, although I’m still sharing files with Sneakernet.
        But I think my biggest Linux problem, as a few of you mentioned, is kubuntu. So now I’m looking for a better distro, I think I’ll try Mint. What I’d probably like best is one with the biggest repository.
        Kate works okay as a text editor, but it’s too busy, has too many functions I have no use for, and worse, it’s completely nonstandard, with the stupid Chrome nonsense. Doubly stupid in an interface as busy as Kate has. Any suggestions for a Linux text editor that’s as minimalist as Windows Notepad?
        I’m still going through your answers. Thanks again!

Here is the deleted journal, which can also be found in my real web page.

The Man With No Belly Button
A True War Story

        You may think that the movie “Forest Gump” was unbelievable because you can’t believe anyone that dim could ever be accepted by the military, but I wasn’t in the Air Force long before I found that if you have a mental disability, you’re fine. Maybe intelligence is a detriment, although there are some stupid stunts that they won’t stand for.
        One was possessing marijuana, a felony in 1972, outlawed on the basis of lies.
        It was my day for clean-up duty in the barracks, as well as the duty sergeant’s. I can’t remember the fellow’s name, but Private Gump was a lot smarter than him. As we were cleaning the day room, where there were couches and a TV, the sergeant found a doobie. A big fat one, a real hog’s leg. He asked me if I knew what it was.
        I took it and looked at it. “It’s a hand-rolled cigarette.”
        “Could that be... marijuana?”
        “One way to find out,” I said, and broke it in half. “I never saw green tobacco before,” I said, handing it back to him.
        “What should I do with it?”
        I shrugged. “Throw it in the dumpster.”
        “You don’t think I should turn it in to the SPs?” The SPs were the Security Police, what other branches call the MPs.
        “Hell, no! If you do, you’re going to be there all damned day filling out paperwork.”
        He did. I saw him in the hall the day after next.
        “You were right, I should have thrown it in the dumpster. I spent all damned day yesterday at the SP’s filling out paperwork!”
        Two friends I was stationed with there were Stan Rogers and Chuck Woods. Chuck hated the tongue twister “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood?”
        Late one afternoon as I was reading, Stan dropped by my room to show off a gun he had gotten, from God only knows where. It was a snub nosed .38 pistol.
        My dad was a hunter, so I was brought up around dogs and guns. I was taught dog safety and gun safety at an early age. It was obvious that Stan had never seen a gun of any kind except on TV and movies, and the two days during basic training.
        I ran him off, despite his protestations that it wasn’t loaded. I was sure someone was going to get killed and I didn’t want to be around when it happened, especially if it happened to me.
        Later in the evening a fellow whose name I don’t remember, the company clerk, a practical joker and doobie toker who hung with and smoked with the guys I hung around with, knocked on my door. I put down my book again and answered it.
        “Stan shot Chuck!” He seemed really excited. Nice acting, I thought.
        I frowned. “Peddle your sick joke somewhere else.”
        “No! Really!”
        I slammed the door and picked my book back up, a truly evil book I had checked out from the base library. It was Aleister Crowley’s “autohagiography”, the book that Ozzy Osbourne obviously named his album “Diary of a Madman” for, and sang about in the song “Mister Crowley”. It’s a book of black magic with instructions on how to perform it, drug abuse, murder (he claimed the King of England was Jack the Ripper), rape, sodomy, bestiality, suicide, ocean voyages, and mountain climbing. Four thousand evil pages. I read the whole damned thing, Delaware was the most boring place I’ve ever been in my life.
        But real life was just as ghastly that night. The fellow wasn’t joking, Stan really did shoot Chuck! But it wasn’t on purpose.
        I don’t know why I didn’t hear the gunshot or hear the sirens. I never thought about that until now that I’m writing it down. Maybe I had dozed off? A C-5 took off at the same time? Those things are really loud, although an SR-71 is a hell of a lot louder. Or maybe I was so absorbed in the batshit crazy book that I was just oblivious.
        At any rate, Stan had visited Chuck after I had run him off. They took turns playing with the gun that Stan had insisted was unloaded.
        I learned gun safety at a young age, as I said, and rule one is to never treat a gun as if it’s unloaded, even if you just unloaded it yourself. My dad always said that more people are killed by unloaded guns than loaded ones; I don’t know how accurate that was. But Stan and Chuck sadly didn’t know the rules.
        Chuck later told me what happened.
        He was leaning against a wall. Stan, a tall thin fellow, was twirling it like the “cowboys” (the word “cowboy” was an insult in the 1800s, referring to a drover, who held America’s worst job) do on TV and in the movies.
        His unloaded gun went off. The slug hit Chuck square in the belly button and exited from his left buttock. He told me as he recounted the tale, “When I die, I want it to be from getting shot. The only way I knew I was shot was my leg started twitching.”
        He slumped down the wall.
        “Oh, shit!” Roger exclaimed. “Shit! Shit! Oh, fuck! Are you okay?”
        “No, God damn it! You fucking SHOT me!”
        I imagine a lot of blood was pooling, but he didn’t mention the blood, but said he wasn’t freaking out. I imagine it was like the car wreck I had in 1976; I was calm, but the ambulance guys were freaking out.
        Stan was frantic. “Oh shit! Oh Shit! What should I do? What should I...”
        “Get the God damned duty sergeant you fucking moron!” Chuck yelled. Stan ran down for help, and came back with the sergeant, of whom, as I said, Terry Pratchett might have said wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and might even be a spoon.
        “Holy fuck! What do I do?”
        “Get an ambulance! Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you?!”
        Yes, unlike TV and the movies, in real life military men freak out and panic sometimes, just like civilians. The ambulance came and took him to the hospital and the doctors started surgery.
        The hospital lost power halfway through the operation, and they had to get a generator from the flight line.
        Before they started sewing him up, the generator went out. In my 3½ years on the flight line towing AGE (Aerospace Ground Equipment), that was the only time I ever heard of those things failing; the military keeps a sharp eye on their equipment. Most of the vehicles I drove were older than I was.
        Someone on the internet said that my science fiction story “But Sir, I’m Just a Robot” was unbelievable because of the string of bad luck that befell the robot’s owner, but Chuck’s story is actually true; all of this happened to the best of my memory. Mark Twain said ”truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be believable” (Terry Pratchett disagreed).
        I never saw poor Stan again. He was immediately incarcerated, and stayed in jail until he was court-martialled on the charge of bringing a prohibited weapon on base; the only firearms are supposed to be owned by the government, and Chuck’s injury illustrates why.
        Stanley was found guilty, and spent the next six months in Leavenworth, before receiving a dishonorable discharge. Nixon was in office, and the nation would be in a recession until Clinton’s administration, so life must have been really rough for Stan after the Air Force.
        Chuck was in the hospital for a long time, but bore no ill will towards Stan. It was an accident, and it could have been just as easily Chuck shooting Stan. But he was pissed off at the hospital; they had incinerated his shirt and jeans because of the blood. He wanted them for souvenirs, I guess the big scar wasn’t enough.
        He did recover from his injuries, but lost his belly button.
        If you’re thinking about buying a firearm, please take a safety course. More gunshot wounds are accidental than murderous.