Cop Car's Beat

Today's Gems on Aging

Although today's The Born Loser strip addresses the thinking of the young (ages 0-30) and the old (ages 60-90), I guess we have to draw our own conclusions about those who are middle-aged (ages 30-60) or ancient (ages 90 and upward). Or...the Sansoms don't really tell us how old is Uncle Ted, do they?

I think that all of us old/ancient (over age 60) people can agree on the philosophy expressed in today's Pickles, below.

City of Derby, Kansas, USA - 150th Anniversary

This is where Hunky Husband and I live. From the City of Derby website comes a video that was made by the Wichita/Hutchinson Ks Public Television station KPTS in cooperation with the City of Derby.

 

ADDITION OF 8/28/2019 9:12am - We celebrated Derby's Centennial, too!

 

In response to Liz's comment, I had started to add the following: "BTW: If you look at the photo in the left-hand sidebar (down at the Year 2018 photo album), you'll see that we helped celebrate Derby's 100th Anniversary. We were much more active in the community in those days." However, it takes too many steps to get to the photo at a size that is informative. The photo is re-posted, below.

 

Cop Car and her VW Beetle

Photo courtesy of the defunct Derby Daily Reporter

 

You can tell that I look just like this photo, today, by seeing my new passport photo at the TOP of the left sidebar. I haven't changed a bit in the past 50 years. (Or course, not!) BTW: "They" no longer allow glasses or smiles in passport photos.

PSA (Public Service Announcement)

Although I cannot find it, I recall that sometime within the past two years I have grumbled about being unable to decipher what is meant by various pictograms. At the time, I was struggling with a "care tag" on a new piece of clothing. Today, in a magazine sent out by the grocery store chain that we frequent was included the following legend. Aren't you glad to know?

Amphibian Day 2019

Continuing a tradition, I'll post a photo of our first sighting of the year of our amphibian friend. Obviously, the same amphibian friend doesn't show up each year. Having shown up, today, this year's amphibian beat out last year's by about one week. Last year's was shown in Amphibians - order Anura.

The little amphibian is so small that it is dwarfed in the basement escape window well.

 

 

 

Deliverance

The poster is from All Hat No Cattle. Not a fan of C&W or bluegrass music, I giggled at the poster.

The video from the movie is a bit over four minutes long. The music pics up a bit after the two minute mark.

The following video features Carl Jackson on banjo and Glen Campbell on guitar .

More from Slashdot.org - Grading Tests, Nuking Mars, Using Old Tech

The following item from Slashdot.org is an excellent rehashing of the reason we were always told "show your work" on tests!

How Should Schools Grade Unexpected-But-Correct Answers On Coding Tests? 76

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 18, 2019 @07:34AM from the does-not-compute dept.

 

There can be more than one correct answer for academic tests of programming ability, writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp:

 

Take the first of the Free-Response Questions in this year's AP CS A exam, which asked 70,000 college-bound students to "Write the static method numberOfLeapYears, which returns the number of leap years between year1 and year2." The correct answer, according to the CollegeBoard's 2019 Scoring Guidelines, entails iterating over the range of years and invoking a provided helper method called isLeapYear for each year.

Which does work, of course, but what if a student instead took an Excel-like approach to the same problem that consists of a (hopefully correct!) single formula with no iteration or isLeapYear helper function? Would that be a worse — or better -- example of computational thinking than the endorsed AP CS A Java-based solution? (Here's a 7-minute AP Conference discussion of how to correctly grade this problem)?

So, how have you seen schools and companies deal with unexpected-but-correct approaches to coding test questions?

 

I'm not sure how I should feel about the following item.

Elon Musk Begins Selling $25 'Nuke Mars' T-Shirts (bgr.com) 83

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday August 17, 2019 @06:34PM from the making-a-statement dept.

 

"Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday evening 'Nuke Mars.' A few hours later he followed it up with 'T-shirt soon'," writes Business Insider.

BGR reports: Musk's tweet is a reference to the theory that by dropping one or more large bombs on Mars' poles, the CO2 locked away in the ice there would be released, giving the Martian atmosphere a much-needed boost... Making the planet's atmosphere denser could help it retain heat and bring it a small step closer to being habitable by human settlers. However, past research has suggested that bombing the planet's poles wouldn't release nearly enough CO2 to be worth the trouble. Elon Musk has publicly disagreed.

It's unclear why the SpaceX boss decided to bring this all up again, but he does have a habit of saying whatever he thinks will get a big reaction on Twitter. Oh, and apparently he's hoping to sell some shirts as well.

In any case, no space agency is ready to even begin preliminary planning for a crewed Mars mission, much less any long-term efforts to change the climate of the Red Planet. If that ever does happen, bombs may or may not play a role.
The article adds that scientists "aren't fully on board" with Musk's line of thinking, but the t-shirts really are available in the online SpaceX store. Late Friday Musk began promoting them with an optimistic tweet.

"Nuking Mars one T-shirt at a time."

 

The following item makes this oldster chortle.

US Navy Tests WWII-ERA Messaging Tech: Dropping Bean Bags Onto Ships (popularmechanics.com) 70

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday August 17, 2019 @05:34PM from the cornhole-code dept.

Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr writes: In World War II, pilots would air-drop messages onto ships using bean-bags. Just as with sextants a few years ago, the Navy is bringing back old tech, because it works.

Just as during the Doolittle Raid of Tokyo, the purpose is to prevent eavesdropping. You can read more about the modern bean-bag-drop on Military.com or Popular Mechanics. There's a video about the Doolittle Raid hosted at archive.org with bean-bag-drops at 2:39 and 5:19 into the video. I wonder how many high-density SSD drives fit in a standard Navy bean-bag?
"In a future conflict with a tech-savvy opponent, the U.S. military could discover even its most advanced, secure communications penetrated by the enemy," notes Popular Mechanics. "Secure digital messaging, voice communications, video conferencing, and even chats could be intercepted and decrypted for its intelligence value.

"This could give enemy forces an unimaginable advantage, seemingly predicting the moves and actions of the fleets at sea with uncanny accuracy."

Sherman's Lagoon August 13-17, 2019

Sometimes it takes a comic strip to illustrate large truths in life. This week, it was Sherman's Lagoon by Jim Toomey that did so. The first image comprises the daily cartoon strips for August 13-16, 2019, which may need to be enlarged (by clicking on the image) for ease of reading the script.

The second image is today's cartoon panel - August 17, 2019.

Phishy, phishy

    Men'sTall Traditional Fit Comfort-First Shirt with Coolmax

On August 2, I ordered Hunky Husband a shirt from Lands' End online. Immediately, I received an email acknowledging the order and telling me that they would let me know when it shipped out.

On August 7, I received the "shipped out" email. Five days seemed like a longer "time to ship" than normal; but, perhaps they are especially busy.

On August 9, the shirt arrived in the USPS mail.

This morning, I picked up two emails from Lands' End that had been sent yesterday. I picked them up in reverse order. The first one was time stamped at 7:28PM, August 12. It said:

[CC], your return has been picked up by USPS.

Order number 8492900 was picked up for return Monday, August 12, 2019.

[Link for tracking return]

What???? I didn't send the shirt back. I took it to the tailor, yesterday morning, but did not send it back to Lands' End!

The second email that I picked up this morning was time stamped at 11:07AM, August 12, and said:

We are contacting you today about your recent Order #8492900.

We do apologize, but we may have had a packing error.  Please check your order when it arrives and make sure the items are correct.  If not please email us or call us at 1-800-332-4700. 

Thank you for assisting with this matter and again our apologies for the inconvenience.

What???? The order that I received contained the correct shirt which was the only thing I had ordered. See where I'm going here? I checked that the 1-800 telephone number was not the same number as is given on the Lands' End website. Since it did not match, I picked up their "talk back" email address and forwarded the two weird emails to Lands' End with a note that I suspected an attempt at phishing. Well, it made sense, right?

I got an immediate reply:

Thank you for contacting Lands' End regarding your order. 

Your order was sent to the wrong person.    We realized our error and sent replacements to you.  The email you received about your order being returned was in regards to the first order that was sent out to the wrong person, they sent it back to us but you got the email because your email address is on the order.  Please disregard the email.   We are sorry for any confusion.   

If we may be of further assistance, please let us know.  

That's a relief. My final email to Lands' End:

Thanks, Kevin, for explaining the whole thing. I am relieved that the two emails about which I was concerned were, in fact, legitimate communications from Lands’ End. They surely looked real enough; but, without knowing the whole story, I was not convinced (especially since the phone number did not jibe with the one on your website).

It’s a shame that any of us have to give a second thought to security; but, we do.

 

 

Absolute trivia - 8/9/2019

Apple--

This evening, upon finishing eating an apple, I walked into the living room with the core and said to Hunky Husband, "Apple core." He gave me a strange look. I wonder what silly things he learned growing up in a Yugoslavian enclave? He surely didn't learn the same things that I learned growing up in a rural enclave of people whose forbearers had been in the States for several generations. I, of course, had expected him to answer, "Baltimore!"

What would I next ask?

Music--

Sometimes, when bidding good night to HH, I sing, "Do you love me?" His answer is invariably spoken - "Of course, I do!" or "Yes!" As a side note, I've never heard the man sing even one note since first we met 63 years ago. I know that he played clarinet in a dance band while in high school and I know that at times (at least, during the past 20 years) when I was out of the house, HH was teaching himself to play piano. But...he...will...not...sing! (Nor will HH play the piano when I am within hearing range.)

From what musical is "Do you love me?"

Smoke--

There was wood smoke in the air while I worked in the yard yesterday morning. This morning, the air looked pink before sunrise - and there was still a slight odor of wood smoke. No news reports have mentioned either phenomenon.

Anyone know of wildfires that might have caused the phenomena? (This is one question to which I, myself, have no answer.)

Genealogy--

I was contacted by a woman who had seen the photo a married couple in my family tree on a genealogy website. She said that the woman in the couple was a cousin to her mother-in-law. She asked permission to copy the photo of the woman in the couple to use in her own family tree. Of course, I gave her permission; but, it threw me for a loop that she cared that much about the cousin to her mother-in-law! (The woman whose picture she wished to copy is the wife of one of my husband's uncles!) Then, I was asked for information on the son of the woman in the photo.

Do you think we need to worry about people who are that distantly related? (I won't tell you how far out in the weeds my own family tree stretches. It is so easy to just let the software add people who are related to the people in my established family tree!)

ADDITION OF 8/9/2019 10:45PM - Dirty Dancing

OMG! Ingineer got into the groove and mentioned a movie that had not even occurred to me in connection with my sung question, "Do you love me?"

Ice Plants

For the past 10 years or so, I've purchased several ice plants which I've planted in one section of the planting bed between our driveway and neighbor Fred's yard. Some of the ice plants thrived, growing into rather large patches over a few years. Others died during the winter. However, of the ice plants that were planted prior to 2018, none are now alive and only one that was planted in 2018, has survived - and it looks straggly.

I think ice plants have not loved the rains that we've been having during the past two or three years. The planting bed provides natural drainage running from the street to the woods/creek; and, During heavy bouts of rain, standing water graces the far edge of the planting bed. This year, I put in four new ice plants, placing them a short distance up-hill from that far edge of the planting bed to allow them to escape the most likely standing water pools.

Straggly ice plant - planted in 2018

Four ice plants from 2019 - planted a bit uphill from the 2018 plant

Yesterday, I went to the nursery outlet up the street from us, intent upon buying a basket of flowering plants to solve a newly-made problem. I came home empty-handed. Hunky Husband was appalled when I told him I bought no flowers because they were too expensive. When I told him the price, he handed me the money and told me, "Go buy your flowers!" Awww...isn't he sweet? (As if I had thought that a $21 bunch of flowering plants would keep me from eating for the rest of the week!)

Actually, it was difficult for me to pick out a basket. They had so many kinds of plants from which to choose - some with multiple colors of blossoms, others with fewer. I instantly fell in love when I spotted hanging baskets of ice plant!

Ice plants in hanging basket - nearly heart-shaped

Ice plants have such lovely foliage - especially the kinds that were in the baskets. I found a leaf in the house and it took me a couple of seconds to realize what it was. It looked and felt like a blob of wax!

Closeup of ice plant - in hanging basket

So...what was the problem I was solving? The heavy rains had weighted down the multitudinous new canes on the white crepe myrtle so badly that most of them lay on the ground. I used a bird feeder support pole to stake up the crepe myrtle canes. Since the pole is black, I might be prone to walk into it while pulling weeds - and - HH, being about 7" taller than am I might poke his eye on an arm sticking out from the pole, should he ever be in its vicinity. OTOH: Neither of us is apt to be injured in a collision with ice plants! The basket of ice plants acts as a stand-off from the post and its arms.

Street view - crepe myrtles screening hanging basket of ice plants

The basket isn't seen and the pole isn't noticeable (it's at the corner of the garage/garage door); but, I enjoy viewing the ice plant from the back side.

While taking photos, I snapped one of the two "dividers" I placed in the planting bed using the masonry blocks that I removed from the approach end of the driveway the other day.

Note the hole at the bottom of the fence at the right-hand end of the nearer divider (may require enlarging photo by clicking on it). Fred's dogs like to peer through it. In addition, they like to peer and bark through a similar hole in the fence that parallels the street.

Rosie at her peering hole - may require enlargement for visibility