This is number one Granddaughter on the new playground near her home in Seattle.
The kiddie zipline is fun and she loves the place.
I found a photo of a playground I remember enjoying which was built by the WPA in the 1930s.
This one was clearly built before we had a surplus of lawyers and kids were sent out in the morning and told to be home by dinner.
I am curious as to the kind … Continue reading
(From https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/dupont/FarmingWithDynamite/)
Here is a link for those who like to read off a Kindle.
For those who like to read over at Fourmilab.
I wonder if there is a sequel to this book. SeaWriter was telling us about C4 cooking in Vietnam. I was thinking of something from Good Housekeeping. Who needs a Dyson or even a leaf blower when all you need is blasting caps and a fuse.
No one tell Mike LaRoche about page 10.
For those who want to order from a catalog. Make sure to get the DuPont Red Cross Extra. I recommend the 40% strength.
Continue reading
Since I am sure all of you are rabid F1 fans, this is probably a totally unenlightening post. (OK. I’ll stop being a smartass.)
F1 season is off to an “interesting” start. LOADS of changes. For those of you who don’t follow/aren’t all that interested/couldn’t care to spend the time, here’s a recap of transpirings.
Last year saw the winning of the car championship by Mercedes (no surprise – they pretty much ran off and hid from all the other teams all year) and the drivers championship won by a truly icky person – Nico Rosberg, son of yet another icky person Keke Rosberg. Father was a nasty piece of work, and son had all the pieces in his corner and STILL won by luck, as his partner … Continue reading
In 1880, Phineas T. Barnum summed up a lifetime’s experience as a showman, entrepreneur, and politician in his short book, Art of Money Getting. I originally produced a Web edition of this book in 2002, and have just updated it to contemporary Web standards (XHTML Strict/CSS) with Unicode typography. In the process, I had an opportunity to re-read it, and once again found it wise, pithy, and inspiring. Barnum has an aphorism for every situation, and an amusing anecdote for each insight.
I particularly love the story in chapter 2 about meeting the showman in London who put him to shame and the story of the Irish harbour pilot in chapter 12,
Like the Irish pilot, on one occasion when the captain, thinking he was … Continue reading
People seem to be getting on with it. Time to get back to work, to play, plan a vacation, start a new job , normal life stuff.
We dodged a bullet and while Washington is still a sucking , festering swamp, it is not out to kill us every day. I no longer worry about some new thing that will make another part of my life illegal or worse.
Time perspectives are moving longer, people are not expecting results every day.
I sense it in the conversations I have with folks. The greeter at the car dealer, the office manager at the excavation company, the waiter at the local diner, the eye doctor and the lathe operator. A calmness , a feeling that things are okay.
People are … Continue reading
I am one of those folks who really needs to avoid carbs. I found out the hard way that if I cut out carbs and do moderate exercise I lose weight and feel great, and if I eat carbs and do moderate exercise I gain weight.
It gets worse as I age.
So I got into paleo eating and found it cut my arthritis pain by 80% and for those stretches where work has me sitting too much, I do not gain weight. It also serves my predilection for grilled meat.
A crisis had me cut a deal with the Red Headed Irish Wisecracker, when I needed her to get back in the saddle and run a client’s office who lost a long time employee while teetering on … Continue reading
Is it me or are we getting as a nation a bit crazy on the Russian thing? They are a people badly led who are trying to get some for their country with a lousy hand of cards. Is anyone here worried that they are doing anything we do not expect?
The fix to beat back Russia is letting them know where we will stop them and oil in the $40 range. Are they going to play cyber games? Of course, along with every other nation and private groups, including us.
What am I missing? If Trump was a Russian stooge, his moves on oil … Continue reading
This weekend was fun living in the future.
My vehicle strategy is a bit off the norm, I have a tendency to buy new, well equipped and heavily warrantied vehicles near each other in time and then proceed to drive them for ten to twenty years. Our faithful companions are being retired, one going to number one son who has had his eye on it for years -(2000 Lincoln LS V8) and the other either being donated or sold to a needy family who is desperate for basic transportation (1998 Ford Expedition).
My F-150 crew cab is on order at the factory, but today’s treatise is about the Red Headed Irish Wisecracker’s new ride, the Explorer Platinum Edition.
Continue reading
Here’s what I’ve been doing the last week. I’m not going to call this a Saturday night science post lest I find myself on a treadmill like at the other place, and besides it’s Sunday morning and before long the silly clock changing thing will kick in. I’d hoped to wrap this up hours ago, but little did I expect that a bizarre confluence of IPv6, Gmail anti-spam filters, and obscure sendmail.cf configuration parameters would devour my entire day.
In 1995, I posted C-ship, in which I used a notional ship able to accelerate at a constant rate of up to 100 metres per second per second and ray-traced images and animations to provide … Continue reading
