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People are too soft today
When I was young, it was uphill both ways, and in plain ASCII, no GUI.
You had to memorize a stack of manuals -- that couldn't be removed from the computer room because they were bolted (literally) to the table. Young people learned to type properly, otherwise you would have to DUP the card you were punching up to the column where you made the mistake. There was no backspace -- the hole is punched into the card and can't be un-punched. And stand up straight. Pay attention. Don't drop your deck of cards on the floor -- that's a real mess to sort out.
Those Turkish F-35s
I just spent over an hour reading stories searched with 'Turkey F-35' and every single one of them has left me with the impression that the US still has an option to lock Turkey out of the program before anything is delivered to them.
This is just not true. Not only is Turkey one of the production partners, they have taken delivery of 2. It took some delving in local resources to find this, google seems to have delisted it, but here you go: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/03/709222963/u-s-turkey-standoff-over-f-35-escalates-as-each-side-waits-for-the-other-to-blin
"Last year, two F-35s were symbolically delivered to Turkey by Lockheed Martin in a ceremony at its Fort Worth, Texas, F-35 assembly plant.
"At Lockheed Martin," Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson declared at the event, "our hope is that the F-35 will continue to strengthen the mission and the values of NATO, our relationship with Turkey and the cause of peace in the region and around the world."
But those two warplanes are still in the U.S., at Luke Air Force Base on the outskirts of Phoenix. Turkish pilots have been training there to fly the F-35s, which are slated to be taken to Turkey in November."
Those are the Turkish pilots your recent news hits will be referring to, who have been grounded, no longer allowed to fly the planes their air force owns, and about to be stuck on an airliner back home.
Now, the US can kick Turkey out of the F-35 program if they want to. They'll need to be refunding some significant amounts of money, in that case.
What they cannot lawfully do is seize the two F-35s that have already been delivered to the state of Turkey.
War? No, Turkey isn't about to declare war on the US immediately.
A generations long grudge, serving a brutal dictators interest, courtesy of our own malfeasance?
Check and check.
Also, why has no one in the US media even referenced the facts here, since this little note in the middle of a long article from a nearly dead source back in April?
It's not a matter of no one's writing about it. EVERYONE is writing about it. I still haven't seen anyone mention the fact the Turks already own 2 F-35s though.
Who are palindromes really for?
Are palindromes for people who like to end at the beginning?
Or for people who like to begin at the end?
Or for people who like to start in the middle?
Or for people who do only half the work and say they are done?
How an LED works
Giving in to their intense natural attraction, the electrons and the e-holes venture further and further towards each other from opposite sides of the P-N junction. Into the the semiconductor's forbidden zone of depletion they wander. Ignoring all inhibition to stop, their growing excitement causes the depletion zone to become smaller and smaller. Finally the depletion zone becomes so small it disappears. They are suddenly surprised and shocked by a climactic explosive rush of current. It can only be described as electric. The LED lights up brightly as current flows freely. The LED continues to glow brightly until the forward current blissfully subsides and the forward voltage drops below the threshold. The electrons stop flowing and go to sleep. The depletion zone once again grows in the P-N junction keeping them separated.
For those that prefer illegal links
Definitions are important.
Nonetheless; A bit for the other side of the brain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7lhMAOxLxw
I always hear "Money for Nothing" in the background watching this scene.
In particularly "the little faggot with the earrings and the makeup"
Yeah buddy, that faggot was my role model.
Movie scenes are rarely, if ever, perfect. If you can reply to this with a good cogent criticism of the fight choreography please do.
I spotted a few myself, but relatively minor, I consider it better than most films that came after it to say the least.
Why was Guthrie doomed in this fight? I can put it in a few words, a sentence fairly well, a few paragraphs with reasonable thoroughness surely; can you?
Music is notes in time.
What is it about music that captures the human heart?
Definitions are important.
Music is notes in time. Without notes, or without time, there is no music. Am I wrong?
I think I am right. And I think this is why this form of art is so powerful to us. Because...
Definitions are important.
Humans are naked apes who specialize in time-binding. From our most natural to our most artificial environments, this is one constant key to our success - and sometimes our fatal weakness. We do not exist only in the here and now. We remember deeply. We dream of the future. We remember the words of generations long ago turned to dust, and we dream of generations yet to come. Because of this, we could predict, and plan, and harvest nutrition our cousins could not. We expanded into climate change, as they shrank before it.
Anyway music is all about time-binding. Notes in time. You plot time on one dimension, and then you plot something else, usually pitch, or some approximation of pitch, on another axis, and you have music. You have a platform on which to imitate every distinctly human activity.
It's NOT "the universal language." It's not a language.
But it does share some pretty basic characteristics with every language.
Real abstraction is a hallmark of language, and music doesn't quite pull that off without language to supplement it. But our ears are (as befits a species with thin skin, little strength, no claws, and a poor sense of smell) actually very sophisticated, and we can appreciate a great deal of variation musically.
Harmonic scales, diatonic scales, pentatonic scales, a set of drums that don't really have any specific root pitch (but are nonetheless quite distinct to the ear) - all of those things are notes. But if you really want to push the definition of music to the limit, you play a single note for the whole track. Good luck with that. If you want to go one step further and prove I'm REALLY wrong? Play no notes.
Yeah, John Cage got me. Or I'm calling him out (well, sort of, if he were still alive and I ran into him I wouldn't 'call him out' I'd try to buy him a drink, but whatever.)
I think he was deliberately pushing things past the edge to show us where the edge is. Notes and time. That's where the edge is.
And time? Even that can be played with. For the most part, it's a convention so that multiple musicians can play together and not fall apart. If you're playing alone, or if your group is well rehearsed/tight knit, you can speed up and slow down at will.
But here's the important part. You, as a group or a solo performer, you project notes in time. You can bend your notes and you can bend your time - and the audience experiences that as a ride along with you.
Music is not a language, but it can be used to enhance and to *comment upon* language.
That last part is where it truly becomes transformative. Where the language says 'x' and the music says 'probably not x.'
Thoughts?
Is Albania's government falling?
It's typically not a good indicator of the long term health of a state when "protesters" wearing fire-retardant gear and respirators have the police holed up in front of the "government headquarters" and are throwing molotov cocktails at them.
"Opposition protestors tossed Molotov cocktails at the Albanian government headquarters on Saturday, while the police responded with tear gas. The Balkan country’s accession to the EU is to be decided in less than two months."
If you watch the video, it's actually very odd. The "protesters" start with bottle rockets, firecrackers, and fireworks of all sorts. Which strikes me as an attempt to provoke a reaction. When no reaction is forthcoming, then the molotovs start coming out, and also smoke to cover their positions. And then tear gas comes at them. But these folks were equipped to handle that as a minor inconvenience, and apparently the standoff continues.
I'm not going to give you any kind of good guy/bad guy analysis here. Maybe the cops are the good guys, because they literally have their backs to the wall and molotovs coming at them before they return fire. And even then they're trying to be non-lethal. Hard to ask for more restraint from them really. Did he order it, or is that the cops themselves?
Maybe the protesters are the good guys though. Because Albanians have been ripped off by their own government for generations and I doubt very much their current PM is a saint, or uninvolved in the most recent rip-offs which stripped the country of so much of what little it had left.
In terms even of pattern recognition, this is an odd one. If the Russian Federation has a stand on such a matter, RT will usually let me know. The same way that in this country NPR will let me know what the Democrats (well some of them) think, Faux News will let me know what the Republicans (well some of them) think, CNN and MSNBC will let me in on what the dumbest think... but anyhow, from RT, on this, mum's the word it seems. Russia doesn't seem to have a position.
Only slightly odd. Albania IS a historical Soviet bloc nation. Ideally, I'm sure Putin and his team would like to keep every one of them on board. But it's on the other side of hostile territory, recently looted, and even back in the Soviet days it never really paid its way.
Hrmm so here's my best guess. West is indeed financing a "color revolution" event against its own client. RT refrains from saying so because Russian Federation not inclined to waste any capital against it because they already wrote this off, and lost effective control, some years ago. I'm just guessing comment if I'm wrong.
I do know that the "Democratic Party" boycotted the election then refused to accept the results - pattern recognition sees that as starting to match with a Shadow intel operation.
But the US and EU have backed Rama publicly, and he's not getting any support from RF. Sure sounds like "we" are overthrowing our own puppet government.
If you know more about him, please post. Sources too if possible. I really don't know much about him.
One reason people say they own a cat
There are many reasons. Who owns who is unclear.
Some people in a rural area say they keep a cat because: "it keeps the vermin down".
What does that mean exactly?
1. the cat reduces the population of vermin?
2. the cat has a remarkable ability to not vomit up the vermin?
The google definition of vermin, and especially the google images page for vermin, would suggest that meaning 2 is what is intended by that "keeps the vermin down" phrase.
I don't eat brains.
Those death metal guys they like to wear black/they like to draw pentagrams on their back
They like headbangin'/Those death metal guys.
Rockabilly guys like hot rod cars/they like hot women and their neighborhood bar
Death metal guys will grow long hair/and work real hard to have an evil stare
They're kind of medieval/those death metal guys.
Jerry Lee Lewis shot his bass player down/down to the ground with a .38 round
But death metal guys would have eaten his brains/and people call Jerry Lee Lewis insane.
Rockabilly guys like rockabilly chicks/death metal guys think they're all country hicks
But death metal guys still live with their mom/on the internet learning how to embalm
So they go kill a dog/those death metal guys!
It's really kind of hard to live in harmony/hot rod cars and blasphemy
Hair in your face or hair way up high/I'm a rockabilly cat not a death metal guy!
<solo>
I'm a rocka, I'm a rocka, I'm a rockabilly guy
Rocka, I'm a rocka, I'm a rockabilly guy
Yeah! Woo!
I'm a rocka, I'm a rocka, I'm a rockabilly guy
And I don't eat brains
Like death metal guys
Like death metal guys
Like death metal guys
Like death metal guys
Death metal guys!
<not an html link disclaimer here> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0EJjqVjPgU </stdsclaim.ho>
The English Channel
I heard someone talking about The English Channel?
Then I realized. My cable package does not include The English Channel!
Is there somewhere it is available streaming online? (for free, of course, because socialism, and/or entitlement)
If I lived in England and did not get The English Channel I would be so mad I would swim South all the way to France!
(for extra credit one could try swimming North all the way to France)
