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The Dark Side of the Moon
(Photo of the "waves" is here)
I’d been eagerly looking forward to this event since I first heard about it—Illinois was going to see its second total solar eclipse in its history as a state, and no one alive had ever seen an Illinois total eclipse. It happened in 1869 and totality passed right through Springfield, the state’s capital. Then, as now, people were very excited.
I heard more and more about it, like totality was passing through Carbondale. Carbondale is about a hundred miles from St. Louis, which is about a hundred miles from Springfield. Ozzy Osbourne was slated to hold a concert in a tiny town thirty miles from Carbondale, and play Bark at the Moon during totality.
I was stoked; it was reported that the stars come out during totality and there are other strange things, like wavy lines on the ground that scientists couldn’t explain.
At first I was planning to meet my daughter Patty, who lives in Cincinnati, in Carbondale, but Carbondale was where everyone was talking about. It was going to be a madhouse, I was sure, and decided to visit my mom in Bellville the day before, a Sunday, then go to my friend Mike’s in Columbia to cook pork on his Weber and drink beer. I planned on crashing on his couch and heading south early the next morning.
Then I found NASA’s interactive eclipse map. Mom and Mike were right on the edge of totality, and the center of totality passed right through Prairie du Rocher, about thirty miles or so south of Mike’s house. Patty watched from the Shawnee National Forest, camping there the night before.
I set out south Sunday morning, and traffic was thick. However, it always is on the weekends, which is why I usually visit during the week. As is my usual habit I set the cruise control to five miles under the limit to make for a stressless drive. But I knew traffic was going to be worse the next day.
I visited my mom in Bellville, then headed to Mike’s, where we grilled pork steaks (well, he did) and we drank beer and bullshitted. I crashed on his couch, as planned.
Patty texted me, excited that they had found eclipse glasses for ten bucks apiece. She was thrilled. I thought she had been ripped off, as Mike’s wife had five pairs she had picked up at the library for free. I just heard today when I picked up tacos at George Rank’s that they were selling them on the internet for $150!
I’d planned on not using the glasses, not trusting them; there are some really evil people in the world who don’t mind blinding people for money, or even killing them. I wound up looking through them once or twice, anyway.
Monday morning we got up and drank coffee, and headed south on Bluff Road for the middle of the umbra, the part of the shadow that is in totality.
Bluff road is a little-used two lane highway that you can often travel without seeing another vehicle. We turned on to Bluff Road, and joined a parade of cars and truck headed for the best view. Traffic moved briskly, at the various speed limits on the way. It took about forty five minutes.
On the way we saw a roadside stand selling eclipse glasses for twenty bucks apiece. Mike cursed the ripping off they were doing; they’d gotten theirs for free from the public library, donated by a veteran’s club. It was indeed a ripoff, because it would have probably cost less than a penny apiece to make them. But better than a hundred and fifty, at least.
I wished Mike had driven rather than me, because there was some enchanting scenery on the way, as well as an eagle’s nest. The magic was beginning hours before the sun and moon met.
Mike has a grandson who lives there, and we had a hard time finding the address of the house in the tiny town. His wife had told him that if he asked google for the address on Bluff Road it would lead to the wrong house, as his address was Bluff Street.
Stupid Google kept giving directions to the address on Bluff Road, and it was even more maddening because we were surrounded by bluffs and the cell signals were nonexistent to very weak. We’d brought no refreshments, so stopped at a restaurant for soft drinks and directions to bluff street.
When we got out of the car, the very humid heat was oppressive. The place was packed, inside and out. We had a hard time finding a parking spot. We were informed that the streets were the same; Bluff Road became Bluff Street for a while.
His grandson lived in a house trailer right up against the bluff. We got out and it was even hotter and more humid. We went in, and it was perhaps five or ten degrees less hot than outside; the trailer had only a single one-room air conditioner. Every time I went outside, the heat started getting to me. My hands shook and I could barely walk; I was starting to suffer from heat exhaustion. Mike and his very young great granddaughter went up the hill exploring.
“There’s a cave up here!” Mike yelled down to me, so I staggered up the hill. There was a cool breeze coming out of the cave.
It wasn’t cool enough, so I got in the car and started it and blasted the air conditioning. It really helped, and I was in the car several times before the eclipse started.
I saw something I’d not seen since I was a kid—a toad. Then another one. This hellishly hot day was really cool!
Finally, some time between twelve thirty and one it started. I finally looked through the glasses once, and afterward made a pinhole viewer out of my fist. When the sun was a crescent, I saw the “wavy lines” science couldn’t explain and I had no trouble at all explaining them. It was the multiple crescents moving around the gravel. The tree was causing multiple pinhole viewers. The way the breeze moved the leaves did look like wavy lines on the ground as the crescents moved around the gravel.
There were clouds which sometimes covered the sun, and I feared the clouds would cover it during totality, but they didn’t. I hear clouds occluded the totality in Carbondale. I hope they didn’t cover the sun in the forest where Patty was.
I’d brought my big tablet, thinking I could use its front-facing camera to watch the eclipse on it and maybe make movies, but I feared the glare on the screen might harm my eyes, so that was out. I tried to take a photo with my phone, and I got a picture, but it didn’t show the sun as a crescent. The only halfway decent photo was the tree shadows when it was still partial.
Then the sky gradually changed colors for about ten minutes, after which it took seconds for it to become dark and for all the streetlights to come on, and the screams and cheers and applause of the thousands of people in town for the sight were very loud, from half a mile away. Mike kept saying “Wow! Man, that’s the neatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life!” Nobody could help but agree.
It did get very dark, about like under a full moon. But I saw no stars, although a friend who was in a different spot in totality told me he saw two or three stars right by the corona, which I only glanced at. Around the corona it was indeed pitch black. but the horizons were like dusk. Obviously light was being reflected from places that weren’t in totality. It’s hard to explain what it looked like.
Darkness lasted maybe two minutes, give or take a few seconds. I was way too busy taking it in for photos, and it was too dark for my phone’s camera to work without a flash, anyway. I should have bought film and brought my Canon 35mm SLR I’d bought half a century ago. Yes, film is coming back. They now sell and develop it again at Walgreen’s.
When it was over I was again in distress from the heat, then we headed back to his house. Mike, who knew where we were going and I didn’t, was too busy watching the scenery to see a turn we needed to take. We got all the way to Red Bud before realizing our mistake, and highway three was in gridlock. We didn’t want to go that way, anyway, and turned back around.
The little-used Bluff road was full, but traffic was moving at a reasonable pace. I’d planned on crossing the river for cheaper gasoline, but was still heat-distressed and decided not to. We went to his house, where I drank a copious amount of water, and we ate leftover pork steaks, but eating was making me hot. They say “starve a fever, feed a chill” and the reason is that eating will warm you up, unless it’s ice cream.
I left Mike’s about two, planning to stop by Mom’s house on the way home, and changed my mind as soon as I got on I-255. Traffic was at a crawl. The normally ten or fifteen minute trip to Bellville took nearly an hour. I drove right past her exit, because I could see this was going to be a long drive and I didn’t want to get home after dark.
Not once did the speedometer measure over 30 mph on 255. Getting off 255 to I-55 is a nightmare in normal traffic because of the idiotic interchange design, so I decided to bypass it and take Collinsville Road to I-55. Traffic was heavy, but moving briskly, far faster than the interstate. I stopped for gas and a soda and got on I-55. I was really glad I’d bypassed a bit, probably saved myself half an hour or even more.
I’ve never seen traffic that heavy outside Chicago in my life, and never saw traffic that heavy that stretched that far. My phone rang three times before I reached a rest stop, just past the I-70 interchange. I had to pee, I had to get my tortuously aching back out of that car, and I wanted to see who was trying to call. I figured it was my mom, who I’d told I’d probably visit again on my way home.
Two of the calls were from her, worried about me, and I ignored the other one, because I don’t answer calls without attached names. If you’re not a spammer, scammer, or pollster you can leave a message and I’ll call you back and add your number to my address book.
I’ve never seen an interstate rest area so crowded. Cars parked where they didn’t normally, and so did I. This wasn’t a normal day. I reassured Mom, walked quite a long way to the rest room, and walked back and resumed the arduous journey.
Four and a half hours after leaving Mike’s I’d traveled fifty miles. Past Staunton I had it up to 55mph for a short time, and hit sixty past Mount Olive. Five miles from Litchfield, traffic was stopped again.
Past Litchfield traffic thinned somewhat, and you could usually do forty, but it was almost in Springfield before anyone could do the speed limit. There was simply far, far more traffic than that highway was designed to handle.
Which makes me wonder how bad it will be if a nuclear missile is headed to a major city whose occupants have only half an hour to escape.
The trip was finally over about eight, just as it was getting dark. It had been a seven hour journey with an average speed of 14.3 mph. But it was well worth it! I’m really looking forward to the one in 2024.
A Short Eclipse Note
Interesting fact that nobody bothers to mention about solar eclipses. It feels about twenty degrees cooler during totality than it does half an hour before or after. This is a good thing during a Tennessee summer.
Also saw eclipse
Anyway, the park consists of two areas, the Teton range of mountains which goes something like 20-40 miles (30-65km) and has a impressive vertical rise (up to 6000 feet or around 1800 meters) over the second part of the park, a very level valley which runs along the entire east side of the range. There are several lakes in the valley area including the fairly large Jackson Lake of which Colter Bay is a part.
We had scouted the Grand Tetons the day before. The authorities had done a relatively good job of managing the situation. There were five areas where visitors were encouraged to go (which in theory would handle a good portion of the visitors the park was expecting to receive) and everything in the park was scheduled to open at 6am this morning (Mountain Daylight Time). It still sounded like way too many people for too small a space, but I'm not seeing what the park could do better. I guess I'll hear how things went later in news or the local Yellowstone rumor mill.
I and some friends managed to find a vantage point near the marina located there to view both the Tetons with the bay in the foreground and the sky where the Sun would be situated during the eclipse. I'd say about 200-300 other people also found this spot, so it was a bit crowded.
We got lucky, the clouds completely vacated the area around 10am and there were no clouds to interfere with our viewing from start to finish of the full eclipse period (about 3 hours in length).
One interesting aspect was the changing of the sky behind the Tetons. My digital camera didn't do it justice since it automatically adjusted for light levels, but you could see the shadow approaching from the west behind the range and later the lifting of the shadow, providing a sort of weird false dawn near the end of the eclipse.
Prior to this expedition, I had prepared some observation tools. I didn't finish the ambitious scheme I vaguely outlined in this post (ran out of time and energy), but I did come up with a nice, simple projection method (small telescope projecting normal image into a box) by which I could count six sunspots on the Sun and partially melt the plastic frames on two very cheap eyepieces of a very cheap telescope that I acquired for this purpose (when the telescope was off-center, the sunlight going through the scope was brushing the edges of the eyepiece holders). Worth the price, but not a problem that I was aware of from reading up on this sort of telescope design. I didn't bother with it at later stages of the eclipse since I had also brought solar glasses and one could observe the total eclipse itself with the naked eye.
The final interesting aspect of this was the traffic. I have never witnessed heavy traffic so purposeful as today. We must have traveled 50 miles in heavy traffic (on single lane roads) that was at or above the speed limit aside from occasional burps. That is unheard of either in Yellowstone or Grand Tetons National Parks (we started our trip in the former around 4am). Usually some animal ambles onto the road or an RV putters along at 25 MPH, putting a halt to that. Not this time.
Yggdrasil
Race Bias #1 - "Blissful Ignorance"
I began the "Race Bias" series in 1995 in response to a post on the alt.politics.nationalism.white newsgroup to the effect that there was no discrimination in employment, university admissions, or otherwise, against European-Americans.
I was stunned that the regular posters to the group had no instant supply of material to post in reply.
Most regular posters and "lurkers" on the newsgroup, have some first-hand experience with anti-White race preferences. But very few of them are aware of just how pervasive these anti-White preferences have become. Unfortunately, the primary weakness of our defensive political movement is that a commanding plurality of _Whites_ are utterly unaware of it. They have no clue that the nice sounding phrase "Affirmative Action" means the systematic disfavor of Whites and race based preferences for non- whites.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine how a White can grow up in this society and not be aware of the legal and social impediments imposed on him, but a recent survey from the Washington Post found that 41% of Whites think "affirmative action" included benefits for white men. (Affirmative Action for White Guys? Washington Post, Oct. 22, 1995, p. C5.)
A Harte-Hanks Texas Poll conducted for media outlets by UT's Office of Survey Research and reported in the June 29, 1996 Austin American-Statesman (p A1) is consistent with the Washington Post results:
"A vastly lopsided percentage of Texans, eight of 10, oppose giving any consideration to race when admitting students to college. But when asked about affirmative action in general, respondents were more positive than not."
However, when asked "whether affirmative action for minorities and women "has had a positive effect on Texas," the response indicated that most had no clue what the words "affirmative action" really mean:
"Forty-seven percent of the 1,000 respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that affirmative action for minorities has had a positive effect, while 33 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed."
"When asked about affirmative action for women, 59 percent agreed it has had a positive effect on Texas and 23 percent disagreed. The higher percentage favoring affirmative action for women is not surprising, experts said, because women make up half of the population."
Of course, the issue is not whether "affirmative action has had a positive effect on _Texas_" - a proposition that asks the interviewees to speculate on the impact of race preferences on an inanimate parcel of real estate, but whether affirmative action hurts or harms the interviewee.
But the survey itself highlights one of the means by which large institutions hide the truth from Whites. By selecting the term "affirmative action," conjuring images of a little extra recruiting effort to overcome any "information deficit" that non- whites might have in the marketplace, most Whites are kept in the dark.
Only the minority of Whites who read newspapers will know the truth. Those who get their information from TV will be blissfully ignorant.
The problem is that nearly half of this nation's Whites lack the basic vocabulary and the rudimentary facts needed to defend themselves in the political process.
With this in mind, I produced the "Race Bias" series.
I am a firm believer that the people of the Euro-American nation need facts more than they need ideologies. With that in mind, the series has been reorganized and lengthened from the original 30 to a revised 42 posts.
Copy them and circulate them to others!
Yggdrasil-
(As a P.S., I am indebted to "American Renaissance" magazine for reporting the Washington Post survey [Volume 7, Number 4, April, 1996] Subscriptions to American Renaissance are $20.00 per year. Make checks payable to: American Renaissance, P. O. Box 1674 Louisville, KY 40201.)
http://www.whitenationalism.com/rb/rb-01.htm
Moderator Hall of Fame
So, I know you all have read the moderator guidelines and remember the very important "Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting." bit, yes? Well, I went looking for who the worst offenders were against that out of curiousity. I'm not sure it's really proper to shame them here though. You lot can leave your opinions on that here and us staff types will discuss it later.
What I absolutely can and will post are the badasses who have most excellent ratios of upmods to downmods. Without further ado, here's everyone with over a thousand upmods to their credit and a downmod percentage of less than 10%.
+--------------+-----------------+
| percent_down | nickname |
+--------------+-----------------+
| 0.0865 | VLM |
| 0.1188 | anubi |
| 0.1209 | AnonTechie |
| 0.2067 | tonyPick |
| 0.4737 | redneckmother |
| 0.5438 | Reziac |
| 0.6222 | CoolHand |
| 0.6494 | Bobs |
| 0.7171 | WillAdams |
| 0.8937 | McGruber |
| 1.1099 | GlennC |
| 1.1341 | fritsd |
| 1.2910 | maxwell demon |
| 1.3060 | pinchy |
| 1.3723 | HiThere |
| 1.4609 | monster |
| 1.8067 | DannyB |
| 1.8447 | J053 |
| 1.8601 | quacking duck |
| 2.2772 | deimtee |
| 2.4750 | mhajicek |
| 2.5053 | Unixnut |
| 2.6012 | dak664 |
| 2.6693 | zocalo |
| 2.8353 | Yog-Yogguth |
| 2.8932 | rts008 |
| 3.1125 | khchung |
| 3.2325 | The Archon V2.0 |
| 3.5069 | GungnirSniper |
| 3.5307 | canopic jug |
| 3.7419 | Freeman |
| 3.7582 | jelizondo |
| 4.3070 | turgid |
| 4.3096 | hubie |
| 4.5095 | bradley13 |
| 4.8469 | Scruffy Beard 2 |
| 4.9924 | Nerdfest |
| 5.1967 | Kymation |
| 6.1929 | Bloopie |
| 6.2708 | linkdude64 |
| 7.2055 | SpockLogic |
| 7.2575 | acid andy |
| 7.3139 | NotSanguine |
| 7.4517 | Ethanol-fueled |
| 8.5932 | KiloByte |
| 9.5238 | Hawkwind |
| 9.6141 | bart9h |
+--------------+-----------------+
Congrats to VLM. He is currently Da Man.
Well, Shit
So, yesterday I moved my car into The Roomie's parking space, moved my boat out of the yard and into mine, and mowed the yard. All was good and celebratory beer was drank.
Enter today. I go outside for a smoke and while enjoying it I think to myself, "Self, TR's going to be back from his customer service road trip today. You should jockey things back around before he gets home." This sounded like a fine and courteous idea, so I got up and proceeded towards said goal.
Unfortunately when I went to lift up the tongue of my boat trailer (Well balanced. Boat and trailer together weigh maybe 500lbs. Load on my arms maybe 50lbs.) that I'd moved easily the day before and wag it back over into the grass beside TR's boat. For some unknown reason, my back takes that specific moment to remind me that I started having birthdays beyond my 40th within the past few years; or, to put it more succinctly, it just shit right out on me.
Damned traitorous body parts. If it weren't for all the skills and wisdom you tend to pick up along the way, I'd say getting older sucked.
This has put me entirely not in the mood to bandy words with my peers and adversaries. My apologies to those who will likely never know how utterly wrong some comment of theirs is. To those in need of mocking, leave a note here and I'll get to you as soon as the pain's lessened enough to think through. See you lot in a week or so, I expect.
Free Speech in the UK (Part II)
A few weeks ago I received a mysterious letter in the snail mail purporting to be from a certain PC Plod of Her Majesty's Constabulary informing me in somewhat stilted and ungrammatical English (Mrs Turgid teaches English at a secondary school and was highly amused) that he would like to speak to me regarding a inappropriate comment made on a UK web forum from an IP address apparently registered in my name. The method of communication requested was quite strange. PC Plod wanted to know my phone number so that he could speak to me in person. PC Plod managed to find my snail mail address, so this was a bit fishy, to say the least.
Smelling a rat, I decided to proceed with caution and to entertain the possibility that this may have been some kind of hoax.
Being a bit of a commie I'm a member of a trade union and have access to free lawyers, so I contacted them. I was granted a telephone conversation with a lawyer who was both very helpful and knowledgeable. I am not a lawyer, and what follows in not legal advice. I am paraphrasing from a conversation that happened many weeks ago.
The lawyer agreed that the wording of the letter was very strange. I made the point that I was quite distressed by it since I am not in the habit of intentionally stirring up trouble, certainly not of a violent kind and certainly nothing that would attract the attention of the police. She conjectured that if it wasn't a hoax, perhaps the police had imagined that someone using my network may have said something contravening the Malicious Communications Act. We both discussed that fact that a lot of subjectivity is involved when trying to argue that something is in breach of the Act and that this has implications for Free Speech. To put it a bit more bluntly, just because PC Plod takes issue with something that doesn't mean that a Court of Law would. It would be expensive and time-consuming for them to prove so. And we are still innocent until proven guilty in England and Wales.
She discussed the circumstances under which a police officer may speak to a member of the public. If a police officer has reason to speak to you regarding a suspected crime or such, you should be interviewed under caution and have the right to legal representation. What you discuss will be written down and signed. If the police officer wishes to speak to you in connection with a civil matter, they have no business doing so. They should not be investigating. Lawyers deal directly with that sort of thing. Finally, apparently, a police officer may wish to speak to you unofficially to offer "a few friendly words of advice." Communicating with the police by phone is a bad idea since you have no idea who you are really speaking to at the other end. You also have no idea whether the call is being recorded, whether there are other people listening in, or whether it is being transcribed.
So a letter was written back to this mysterious PC Plod expressing surprise, concern and asking for more information.
Eventually came the reply. PC Plod glibly and arrogantly stated that a message posted from somewhere behind my router broke Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act but that he had no idea who posted it. Upon looking at the pseudonym under which the message was posted, I suspected satire. The name suggested a certain amount of reactionary bad temper and perhaps a degree of non-conformity perhaps relating to ethnicity, the sort of thing that your typical alt-wrong snowflake would have difficulty with. Looking at the actual message and the discussion under which it was posted, it was patently obvious that it was satire, highly condensed, but in the spirit of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. The problem is, apart from the fact that PC Plod is poorly educated, not particularly familiar with the political culture of his own country, has no concept of context, but this particular forum has a major design flaw in that moderators may remove comments, thereby removing any context in which other comments may have been made.
PC Plod did indeed offer some friendly advice on Internet security and signed of with a thinly-veiled threat.
Let me just finish by pointing out that this "grossly offensive" comment was pretty tame compared with the stuff EthanolFueled and TheMightyBuzzard and even Runaway1956 post sometimes around here.
Grid Computing and Cracking Encryption
Here's one. Suppose you were a Three Letter Agency and you needed to break some strong encryption. Now say that the cost of the hardware to do that was prohibitive (it's not likely to be invented for several decades, for example) but you remembered that millions of people were running "grid computing" (remember that term) applications on their home computers with juicy GPUs (e.g. Folding@Home). Do you reckon you could get some secret code deployed by those projects to help you break that encryption in parallel right under the noses of J. Random Citizen?
Novella review: There Was a Crooked Man...
There Was a Ceooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House
David Erik Nelson
July-August Fantasy & Science Fiction
I finally caught up on my reading, and the latest F&SF magazine has the best novella I've read in a long time. It will be on sale until September 4.
When I first started reading it, the thought occurred to me that the author was trying to cash in on last year's bogus controversy about black writers not being published (how would an editor know?), and perhaps he was, but it's a great story none the less. It starts out in Detroit with a black locksmith with four years of architectural training under his belt, and a large white man who is slightly retarded. They work for a real estate agent, who has just bought the house. Their jobs are to check it out.
Before they get close, they're hassled by the cops, with the locksmith in handcuffs until he shows his certification as a locksmith and his license for "burglar tools". The cops leave, the locksmith picks the lock, and his training tells him the door is installed backwards.
He steps inside and falls out the back door. I thought then that it was a remake of an old Heinlein story, especially after several such attempts, but it wasn't anything like that at all. They call the boss, who comes out and sees the oddities himself, and curses. He gives the locksmith a silver key.
Later, having met a foreign toourist who complained that there's nothing interesting to photograph, offers to show her the house. He uses the key--and the door opens from the other side. They go in, and it really starts getting wierd. Books by authors who didn't write them, like a memoir of William Shatner written in Esperanto, and the fact that outside the windows isn't Detroit. And a sneaker with a foot still in it.
Not to give too much awy, it involves superior creatures from... another dimention? I was two thirds of the way through it before I could see it was science fiction.
I plan on nominating it for a Hugo next year. It's well worth the cost of the magazine.
HiDPI Display Woes
Now, I'm beginning to burn in my new laptop, and am starting to set up the software on it. This process is proving not quite as trivial as I hoped it would be, the main problem being the Galago's HiDPI display. It seems that a lot of applications make assumptions about screen sizes that break stuff. The next major application that suffers from problems due to the high screen resolution is Emacs. I enabled desktop scaling in System Settings > General, and that manages to fix almost all the important apps, but it does something unexpected with Emacs. With desktop scaling on, Emacs expands to fill nearly the entire screen, saying that its window geometry is only 80x20. Attempts to set Emacs' window geometry manually to something reasonable via the -geometry command line switch, or in .emacs set-frame-size or in default-frame-alist doesn't help. Either results in a smaller Emacs window briefly appearing before the window again explodes to an irritatingly large size. This had me stumped for a while, until I realised that it had something to do with desktop scaling. Turning off desktop scaling results in a reasonably-sized window. Eventually, some judicious searches turned up this link, and I found a useful workaround by adding env GDK_SCALE= to the launcher command. Most standard apps are okay, but some others need special settings to be usable on HiDPI displays.
Pale Moon also seems to be only partially scaled. Many display elements such as scroll bars, checkboxes, etc are very small, but I can live with that for now. Gimp and Inkscape both still have very small buttons that didn't properly scale. As I install more and more apps it seems far too many of them seem to make the assumption that the display isn't going to be much more than about 1280×720. This should change with time but right now is a bit of a pain.
