Cop Car's Beat

Good birding & echo from childhood

BIRDING

Yesterday, baking cookies, I stood at the kitchen bay window with binoculars in hand observing the few birds that chose to flit about the open space of our back yard. The open space is surrounded by woods along "our" creek. At the far end of the open space, a crow-sized bird flew from left to right. Amazingly, I was able to get the binoculars up and on the bird ere it flew out of sight - a mere flash in time. The bird was, however, unmistakable to any moderately experienced birder. It was a pileated woodpecker! Although I have frequently read accounts of other birders who have seen pileateds in the woods along the banks of the Arkansas River - which river "our" creek flows into about 1.5 - 2 miles west of us - this is the first one I've seen since one flew across a parking lot in Scranton PA in 1988 (I worked there for several months.) Yeah! To see photos, you may go to David Seibel Nature Photography.

Echo

This morning, lying abed, I heard a segment on "Weekend Edition" on music. They used a term that I don't recall having heard since high school, at least: fandango. Although the NPR team did not use the modifier, as I recall, it was always "Mexican fandango" WIWAK. As a 4-year-old, I lived in the "trailer house" that my dad had built on his Ford truck, in trailer parks all over Texas. (For photos you may go to Livin' the American Dream - Part 1 and Part 2.) Texas has always been home to many people of Mexican descent. After all, Texas was part of Mexico not so long ago. My remembrance was that Mexican fandango was a type of music - much as salsa is a type, now. The NPR team used the term to mean an event, much like a jam session. At any rate, it was pleasant to be removed to my childhood for a moment. If you wish to know more about today's NPR segment, you may go to A Musical Style That Unites Mexican-Americans.

Obligatory fall photos

You may recall my kvetching throughout the summer about how dry it was around here - and hot - which drought and heat were hard on all of our plants. However, the fall-blooming plants are making a valiant effort to put on a show for us. I must reward them by showing them off to you. The following photos were snapped in late afternoon last Wednesday, as a frost warning was out for that night (we reached 28 degrees).

First, an overview of the front of the house/front yard, below, shows how little fall color we have, so far. (And...we're not expecting much!)

      

Where the driveway joins the curbing, on the near-side, I had put in two ice plants in August. One didn't make it, but the other (photo below) has been blooming beautifully ever since!
                            
Between the sidewalk and house is a line of (mostly) mums. The farthest-away lighter "pinK' flowers are roses that only grow about 18" high. The lighter colored mums have been in situ for about three or four years while the darker colored mums have been planted one or two years ago. They were watered only every second or third week during the (continuing) drought; but, I pinched off the buds until mid-July, from which they profited. (Actually, I profited as their beauty was much enhanced!)

                            
A bit closer, the mums look as they do in the photo, below. These are the deepest-colored mums - to the left of the address marker in the above photo.

                            

Below is a photo of the side yard. All of the green stuff is in our yard. In the background would be weeds; except, our neighbor had just done his annual thing of taking out all of the weeds and bushes and trees growing on the little bit of dirt between our yard and his house (not more than six feet - maybe less) and his basement window well. He is not among my favorite people. I fought the weeds for so long that I finally bought bushes to grow in our yard to hide his weeds from my view, if possible.

                            
                   
Please note that our pyracantha don't come close to Bogie's pyracantha. There are three reasons for that: 1) ours are dwarf, 2) the hot summer we experienced, and 3) Bogie is a better gardener! (Yea, Bogie!)

Now that we have had our big frost, Indian Summer has begun. It won't be as colorful as I'd like, but I always enjoy Indian Summer weather.

Flowchart for top 100 Sci-Fi picks by NPR

From Slashdot, one more piece of information that might interest those of you who followed Bogie's example and voted for your top Sci-Fi book picks (see Top 100 SciFi-Fantasy Reads and Vote For Top-100 Science Fiction, Fantasy Titles : NPR.)

Flowchart Guides Readers Through the 100 Best SF Books210

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday October 19, @04:51PM
from the choose-your-own-novel dept.

Hugh Pickens writes writes "T. N. Tobias writes that over the summer, over 60,000 people voted at NPR to select the top 100 science fiction and fantasy books of all time. The result? A list of 100 books with a wide range of styles, little context, and absolutely no pithy commentary to help readers actually choose something to read from it. Now SF Signal has come to the rescue with a 3800 x 2300 flowchart with over 325 decision points to help you find the perfect SF or Fantasy book to meet your tastes. Don't like to scroll? There's an interactive version that let's you answer a series of questions to find the perfect SF book."

BTW: I followed the flowchart and it came up with a suggestion that I read "The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe" which includes five of Douglas Adams' novels "in One Outrageous Volume". Excellent suggestion. I will have to check to see; but, I believe that I have already read the five books; but, his work is good enough for me to read them again! So...the flowchart obviously works for me!

Old barns & dead trees

In Pete's Pl., posted by Janeywan of Life in Westcliffe, Janeywan included an observation: "I'm fascinated with old barns and dead trees." I share her fascination. Some years ago (perhaps 17 or 18), I purchased a wet-on-wet painting of an old barn (or shed) and a dead tree from Rita Zaudke, with whom I worked for several years. I contacted Rita, this morning, to gain permission to post a photo of the painting. Her gracious reply included:

 Thank you for asking. A person needs to always ask permission to photograph someone else's artwork regardless of what they will use it for. Sometimes it is for commercial projects and other times its just to share with others. But by all means you may photograph it and use it how you see fit. I'm glad you still enjoy the artwork. Sometimes young artists will contact me asking if they can paint the same scene which I might have on my website. I always let them because everyone has to start somewhere. If you want to see more, go to: [http://]www.fineartofitaly.com/index.html.

Thus, I am able to post a photo of Rita Zaudke's much-appreciated painting.

                                       

By the way: 1) The painting is more beautiful than my camera skills allow to be shown, here. 2) I highly recommend going to Rita's web site. Not only are Rita's paintings beautiful; but, her web site, itself, is a work of art.

Looking at the youngsters

The Physics Department of our local state university invited me (and Hunky Husband) to attend a reception that they were giving this afternoon in appreciation of one of the department's alumni who has been quite generous in his financial support of the department for the past two years. I accepted, gladly, since the alumnus being honored had been in undergraduate school at the time I was pursuing graduate studies. Of course (see A Look Back in which I discuss being completely forgettable), Bill did not at all remember me. He could not even recall having any "girls" in his physics classes. So be it.

What I really wanted to convey, though, was how delightful it was interacting with some of the current graduate and undergraduate students. Hunky Husband stood in one place, conversing with one young student for 15-20 minutes! The young man was completely at ease interacting with HH and, later, as things wound down, the student made the observation to anyone within hearing distance that it was wonderful being able to meet and talk with some of us old folks (he probably didn't use those words!) - that, "This is what life is all about!"

Each and every one of the students made an effort to meet the guest of honor and his wife, Cathy (whom Bill credited with putting him through school - she was for 30+ years an RN) and to meet me and HH. Each was willing to discuss their research with us older folks, and one asked me to send him information on the computer about which I blogged on 10-20 Petaflops!

In addition, at the reception, I had the opportunity to chat with one of the professors whom I've seen at seminars and such over the past three years, but with whom I hadn't had face-time. As she rose to leave (she is to leave for Spain, tomorrow, where she will present a paper on research that she and one of her graduate students have been doing on quantum neural networking - as in computers) she observed that she was happy that we had finally been able to chat. She offered that she was surprised by how much we have in common (she is 20 years my junior).

On occasion, I read a blog posting/rant on how the world is going to hell in a hand-basket - which is, invariably blamed at least in part on young people's not having any respect for their elders. Since today's interactions are, almost invariably, the sort of reaction that I have been accustomed to observing in young people, can you understand my lack of understanding such postings/rantings?

All I have to do is observe the younger generations, particularly in my own family, but also those other youngsters with whom I come in contact, to know that such generalizations and accusations are unwarranted. Thanks to the students who, today, reaffirmed my faith in the youngsters. May your future be bright!

 

10-20 Petaflops!

For anyone having at least a passing acquaintance with mainframe computing, here's an interesting tidbit from Slashdot.

Jaguar Supercomputer Being Upgraded To Regain Fastest Cluster Crown69

Posted by Unknown Lameron Tuesday October 11, @02:44PM
from the twenty-quadreeelon-laser-sharks dept.

MrSeb writes with an article in Extreme Tech about the Titan supercomputer. From the article: "Cray, AMD, Nvidia, and the Department of Energy have announced that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer will soon be upgraded to yet again become the fastest HPC installation in the world. The new, mighty-morphing computer will feature thousands of Cray XK6 blades, each one accommodating up to four 16-core AMD Opteron 6200 (Interlagos) chips and four Nvidia Tesla 20-series GCGPU coprocessors. The Jaguar name will be suitably inflated, too: the new behemoth will be called Titan. The exact specs of Titan haven't been revealed, but the Jaguar supercomputer currently sports 200 cabinets of Cray XT5 blades — and each cabinet, in theory, can be upgraded to hold 24 XK6 blades. That's a total of 4,800 servers, or 38,400 processors in total; 19,200 Opterons 6200s, and 19,200 Tesla GPUs. ... that's 307,200 CPU cores — and with 512 shaders in each Tesla chip that's 9,830,400 compute units. In other words, Titan should be capable of massive parallelism of more than one million concurrent operations. When the server is complete, towards the end of 2012, Titan will be capable of between 10 and 20 petaflops, and should recapture the crown of Fastest Supercomputer in the World from the Japanese 'K' computer."

 

Cray, for years and years, held the admiration of us mainframe users. An hour's worth of computer time on a Cray was much sought-after and "priceless". Can you even imagine 10-20 petaflops? Double wow! (Or petawow!)

Who knew there are 13,000 satellites orbiting the earth?

Update of October 10, 2011

In response to a "Well, why didn't I think of that?" query by la peregrina as to how many of the 13,000 satellites are actually space junk, I did a bit of research.

After stumbling about a bit, during which time I confronted the issue of timeliness and comprehensiveness of data, I found myself at the mother source: NASA Orbital Debris Program Office. From the Volume 15, Issue 2, April 2011 Orbital Debris Quarterly News, I retrieved the following table.

SATELLITE BOX SCORE

(as of 30 March 2011, cataloged by the

U.S. SPACE SURVEILLANCE NETWORK)

Country/ Organization	Payloads	Rocket Bodies & Debris	Total
CHINA	100	3374	3474
CIS	1406	4635	6041
ESA	40	44	84
FRANCE	49	431	480
INDIA	41	130	171
JAPAN	114	72	186
USA	1142	3679	4821
OTHER	487	111	598
TOTAL	3379	12476	15855
Source: www.orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov

Earlier, I had found the website of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The site explained:

The UCS Satellite Database is a listing of the more than 900 operational satellites currently in orbit around Earth. Our intent in producing the database is to create a research tool for specialists and non-specialists alike by collecting open-source information on operational satellites and presenting it in a format that can be easily manipulated for research and analysis.

In later data listings, the total number of operating satellites was listed by UCS as being 965, with about 440 of that number being launched by the USA, about 90 by Russia, and about 55 by China (PR). By downloading the UCS Satellite Database, I determined that the remaining operating satellites were launched by other countries including Luxemberg, Canada, Indonesia, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Mexico, Egypt, Turkey, France, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Czech Republic, Nigeria, Israel, Australia, Sweden, India, Pakistan, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, Brazil, South Africa, Switzerland, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Vietnam, Singapor, Norway, and various joint and multinational ventures including the European Space Agency.

Who knew that so many countries had launched satellites to orbit the earth?

Another bit that I picked up in my delving: There are about 500 satellites orbiting our moon. Whether those 500 are included in the "orbiting earth" numbers, is anyone's guess. I don't really care enough to worry about it!

Original posting of October 7, 2011

Thanks to Visual Astronomy, which I found through Starts With A Bang by Ethan.

For fans of "Person of Interest"

If you've enjoyed watching the new TV series, "Person of Interest", you should love this posting from Slashdot.

DHS Goes Ahead With 'Pre-Crime' Detection Project328

Posted by Soulskillon Friday October 07, @11:40AM
from the somebody-warn-tom-cruise dept.

suraj.sun tips news that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has begun testing its project to predict future crimes on members of the public. The Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) project is "designed to track and monitor, among other inputs, body movements, voice pitch changes, prosody changes (alterations in the rhythm and intonation of speech), eye movements, body heat changes, and breathing patterns." A field test was performed at a large venue earlier this year, and documents recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request indicate that testing is proceeding on other members of the public as well. "It's not clear whether these people were informed that they're participating in a FAST study."

Throwing away perfectly good hand tools

Am I the only one who is careless enough to throw away perfectly good hand tools? (We won't go into the small diamonds and remote garage door opener that I have pitched into the trash!)

I am prone to carrying a bucket (an old detergent tub) about the yard with me as I weed. Inside the buck I also tote a "weed digger". Several times in the past 12 years, I have dumped out the weed digger with the weeds when tossing them onto the compost heap that I keep in our woods. On occasion, I have immediately realized what I have done. On very rare occasion, I have actually been able to find and retrieve the weed digger. Usually, however, it has yet to see the light of day. Fortunately, weed diggers are not expensive tools - even if, as I do, one insists upon buying strong ones instead of flimsy ones.

With one weed digger, however, I took a precaution. I spray-painted its wooden handle with yellow paint - so that I could see it, at least. That particular weed digger had been used, for many years, by my father who had wrapped the handle in electrician's friction tape to protect his hand from the splinters that age had, inevitably, produced on the wooden handle. I have a sentimental attachment to that tool.

At times, instead of simply carrying the bucket about with me, I throw tools into the garden cart. I proceed, then, to pile cuttings from bushes and trees into the cart. Yep, inevitably, I have thrown the pruners out with the cuttings. In addition, I am prone to absent-mindedly placing a pair of pruners on a log, or hanging it from a limb, and forgetting about them. In any case, I have wasted "vast amounts" of money on replacing hand tools.

The most recent time that I threw away a weed digger, I searched the compost heap for several minutes - to no avail. That heap is hiding at least $200 in tools from me, now. Anyone have a metal detector? (It might even turn up a platinum earring that I lost while working in the woods several years ago. That's another $275 (replacement cost) of metal being secreted (or perhaps it's been washed away in a succeeding flood) in the woods. When I went to my favorite hardware store (Hupp's, in Wichita) to buy a replacement weed digger, I also picked up a container of goop - some sort of artificial rubber/plastic. The goop is used by electricians to insulate the handles of pliers, and the like, or by other workers to provide a cushioned grip on their tools. The goop comes in the primary colors, plus black and white. I bought yellow, for visibility.

Below is a photo of my highly-visible hand tools (my father's weed digger is on the extreme right-hand end of the line.) Perhaps I can stop losing so many tools. Bogie should recognize the pruner on the left-hand end of the line as having been marketed by her long-ago employer. Hunky Husband had gifted me with a wonderful set of two pruners, some years ago. I fear I may have lost the other pair - or - perhaps I've even put it away in the case in which the pruners came. But...I don't know where the case is hiding!

                                     

For our family

My blog friends may be excused if they wish to skip this maudling stuff from the matriarch of our bloodline - me! It contains some stuff that may strike you as "just too, too cute!"

Since my digital camera is not an expensive item, I (without even thinking about it) handed it to Next Generation 1 when he reached for it, yesterday. A few minutes later, Hunky Husband observed, "There's a red light!" Yes, NG1 was recording his first video - at age (almost) 17 months - all 2 seconds of it. I preserve it for family and posterity. Below is Hunky Husband as seen through the critical eye of his elder great-grandson!

 

Here is the video artist, himself (below):

 
BTW: The shirt says, "Big Brother". When HH left his chair to retrieve something from the basement, NG1 took that as his opportunity to occupy the big chair. He scrambled up into the seat, plopped his butt in place, and beamed for the camera!

Below is "Little Brother" - NG2 with HH. NG2 is nearing 5 months of age.

 

Doesn't this (photo below) look like Madonna & Child? (Really - you have to ignore the Cheerios!) Actually it is NG1 with his grandmother, Dudette. They make a beautiful pair. Dudette accused NG1 of thinking of her as his own private food bar.