So is that one funded by Tesla?

--Ian

Apparently, when a former classmate (female) of yours, with whom you actually were casual friends with 30 years ago back in high school, is gushing all over Facebook about how she's lost 30 lbs and gotten all sorts of ripped and toned over the past year by following this One Specific Multi-Level-Marketing Program, and is posting a bunch of "before and after" photos, in which the "before" all look cute and cuddly and the "after" all look wrinkly and hard, commenting "Wow, you used to be really hot!" is not what they expect.

Well, this is tremendously exciting.

We're doing line-sweeps (fancy RF inspection with expensive tools) of my new hookups to the west (main) and east (aux) antenna combiners at Sears, which is the final box the needs to be checked before I can officially power up the new transmitter on the 100th floor and shut down the tired 22 year old rig on the 98th floor.

I say "we", despite the fact that the people doing the actual work are freezing their nuts off up at the tower, and I'm at home in my warm, fuzzy pajamas, occasionally looking over at monitor #2 on which I have the remote telemetry from the Hancock (backup) transmitter and environmental controls.

Right now, every single TV station on Sears is shut down. Some of them, like us, have off-site backups. The others are poor.

I also have an OTA tuner up in a little window at the bottom-right, with the volume at about 5%.

On the one hand, technology is fucking amazing. Like, I'm logged into three different sites remotely, and I have, as an overlay, a TV tuner up in my attic which is capturing a stream of "what's actually happening on the air right now, for real" and then re-transmitting it via the magic of wireless ethernet to a little VLC Media Player window. And this is all just happening while I sit here with glass number... I dunno... five, maybe? of bourbon in my hand. It's not like I'm pouring singles here.

On the other hand, is there literally one single human who is actively watching this hour-long infomercial for cosmetic dental surgery? Ok, there is one. I spoke with her about a half hour ago. But aside from the person keeping the chair warm in master control, is there a second human watching this?

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...9496ad45d1.png


I have one of those jobs which, if you tried to explain it to someone, they'd interrupt you with "hold on... you get paid how much for this?"

It's hard to explain.

Sleep well, pretty Diamond. I'll be hammering you with about 200kw of input power in a few hours.

I'm gonna keep barely watching / listening to this until about 5am, by which time I'll hopefully have gotten a call from the on-site engineer saying that they're done with the survey, everything is hunky-dory, and I'm clear to re-energize on the main antenna.

I thought I had to do weird and cool stuff between the hours of 2am and 4am...

Bravo Joe, I am jealous.

When we are speaking of concepts such as entropy, decay, thermodynamics, etc., we speak of open systems, closed systems, and isolated systems.

Is the universe itself a closed system? Is it isolated? If not, what is it not isolated from?

What happens after all of the hydrogen contained in all the stars in the universe is fully converted? Does the second law of thermodynamics still apply at this scale? What would actually happen if the universe did reach complete thermodynamic equilibrium- could matter continue to exist?

It has been posited that the universe is expanding. If the universe is the sum total of all space, then what space is it expanding into? For the universe to be said to expand, it must be bounded by a finite physical shape. What shape is the universe? How can the universe even have a shape if nothing exists beyond it? How can "nothing" even exist?

The universe would look like it was expanding from an observer on the interesting side of an event horizon.
"Where we're going we won't need eyes to see"

The third law of thermodynamics says that the universe is a closed system, yes.

It's a bit more complicated than "all of the hydrogen in all of the stars" (stars don't actually use all of the hydrogen and galaxies are creating new starts out of gas clouds over time), but this is called the Heat Death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_d...f_the_universe

The universe does not need to expand into anything, it is space itself that is expanding. The usual analogy is to think of raisins in a ball of dough that is rising.

There are a number of other proposed ends to the universe other than heat death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima...f_the_universe

When it comes to expansion (or presumably contraction) of space itself, energy is not conserved. Dark energy is theorized to be energy inherent to space itself, therefore as space expands it creates more dark energy. The expansion of space also stretches light rays/photons, thus lengthening their wavelength and reducing the energy in them.

--Ian

What if the universe isn't actually expanding, but perhaps it remains the same size while the speed of light is slowing. Perhaps the speed of light is determined by the density of dark matter, and as dark matter is being condensed into the black holes of the universe, the density in the open universe is slowly dropping.

What if a black hole is actually the big bang of a self-contained sub-universe within it? What if our universe actually exists only as the black hole of a superior universe; how many layers deep are we, and what does the top layer "universe" actually look like?

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...d4527f0731.jpg

Team 1511 (FIRST robotics) won the Chairman's award at the Pittsburg regional competition. This means they get a free ticket to the championships in Houston. Although I am no longer involved with the team, my son still is, and I am very proud.

That's excellent, Roger!

Awesome.

First tried to get my wife and I to come out to Houston to judge Championships. Unfortunately we did not have the time in our schedule to go.

Sometimes, brevity is its own reward.

Such as this email which I just sent to the developer:
‎‎‎‎

‎
... and cc:ed the CEO, four VPs, the GM, and the two corp tech gods who actually decide which contracts get awarded to who for IT stuff (all of whom I'm on a first name basis with), after a period of about six months of total non-communication on what is, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively minor promise.

I'm honestly keeping a very open mind as to how they respond. I have a $600k PO to them sitting on my desk awaiting the pen which rleete hand-crafted for me years ago to sign it.


It may or may not get signed.



I'm feeling particularly randy at the moment. I already told one company, with which we've done business for the past 22 years, to go fuck and fuck their own mother this morning. And, mind you, this was a company which proudly advertises itself as "woman-owned," and I happened to be taking a shit early in the morning at the time the president of the company called me back, (from a "We no longer require your services, based on the fact that you try to fuck me over at every chance on inspections of this fire alarm system which you installed 22 years ago, and yet act as though you have no records of when the various components of it require replacement or detailed inspection until after you've already performed the scheduled regular inspection, so that you can charge me for a second service call...") email the prior evening.



I'm in a weird mood right now. I kinda like it. Telling people who you know are on the mafia payroll to go and literally have sexual intercourse with their mothers is titillating.

How many more years until you retire? It should start getting real good the closer that gets.

That is the biggest thing I've learned over the past year.

I find myself in very similar situations, though with slight less money involved.
It doesn't seem to matter what the relationship or how much money has been spent. These companies don't give a SHIT. Just yesterday I bought a $10,000 motor as a spare / replacement for one that is going bad. The motor that is failing / already failed is also $10,000 AND purchased in 2019. They are giving me grief on a warranty repair. (I buy nice shit) these motors are built for nuclear submarines and I'm killing them within 3 years...

I am so glad that I don't have to deal with vendors or suppliers anymore. I just sit at my desk and draw the same things over and over, with only minor variations, and just let everyone else deal with the crap.

To be fair, nuclear submarines do not typically have boiling acid spraying everywhere. :giggle:

And unless they've got some new civilian nuclear submarines (have the drug smugglers gone that far yet?), "built for nuclear submarines" means they were built by the lowest bidder. :)

--Ian

:rofl:
HA! You're not wrong.
Just figured i would have gotten 25 years out of it like we did with the last one is all... Guess this is one of those cases where "they just don't make stuff like they used to".

Did i post the picture of the kitty i caught at work the other day? Most days i'm really unsure what my job duties around here really are...
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...819f3e39de.jpg

Repeat after me: "I will not anodize the cat."