Coyote Blog

This is part of a recurring series on the evolution of my n-scale switching layout.  More after the break...

Continue reading ‘Layout Progress: Base & Initial Trackwork’ »

I was emailed this photo as a "shocker" and "outrage" as it somehow is the smoking gun to show what immigrants are after.

Really?  You don't think there is any chance this is a plant or satire?  I understand that the folks protesting are far more radicalized, and have different goals, than the average immigrant, but it really takes a lot of credulousness to take this picture as representative of the goals of Mexican immigrants.

I guess its lucky they didn't send the SWAT team in for her, as she might be dead now:

[Victoria] Aguayo has filed a lawsuit in Maricopa County Superior Court, after she was arrested, indicted, and nearly prosecuted for her "role" in the infamous "Desert Divas" prostitution ring.

One problem: Aguayo was not a "desert diva" and the evidence suggesting she was is laughable at best.

On one of the "Desert Divas'" many Web sites, the agency advertised an "escort" named "Tia." "Tia" is described on the site as being "thin, white, and blonde" and has a tattoo on her stomach that is clearly visible in the topless photo of the "diva" Aguayo's lawyer was kind enough to send New Times.

Phoenix Police Detective Christie Hein identified Aguayo as "Tia" based on the photo on the Web site when she arrested her on August 28, 2008, the lawsuit claims.

We've seen pictures of both "Tia" and Aguayo and we gotta say if Aguayo can be identified as "thin, white, and blonde," so can Aretha Franklin.

Aguayo is -- to put it politely -- more of a "plus-sized" woman, she's black, and is missing the tattoo that is so clearly visible in the photo of "Tia" on the "Desert Diva" Web site.

Simple, um, mistake, right?

After being arrested, Aguayo spent nearly two months in jail before she was granted a supervised release pending an upcoming trial.

While she was in the clink, Aguayo lost custody of her daughter, Jasmine, and has since been unable to get her back.

We associate photos like this one with the devastation of post-war Europe.

In fact, this is a post-war photo, but it is of Charleston, South Carolina after the Civil War.   We seldom think of such scenes as being relevent to the US, but the South was at least as destroyed after the Civil War as Germany was after WWII.   Sherman's march to the sea in Georgia was famous for its devastation, but in their letters, many of Sherman's soldiers say they were particularly ferocious in South Carolina, the state that they most associated with the war and its start  (though much of the devastation in Charleston was self-inflicted, as a fire to burn the remaining cotton and keep it out of Yankee hands spread to the rest of the city).

Full sized image at Shorpy

The civil courts of Maricopa County (which includes Phoenix) are being overwhelmed by photo-radar cases from state photo-radar trucks on state highways.

In the 2008 fiscal year, ending June 2008, the total annual filings in the justice courts amounted to 435,014, which included DUI, traffic, misdemeanor and civil cases, according to the county. Since November 2008, speed-camera cases have flooded the justice courts, averaging 42,326 cases a month, accounting for 50 percent of the filings. Administrators for the justice courts expect the total might reach 600,000 this fiscal year.

Of course the solution proposed is not to get rid of the photo radar but to raise fees to cover the administration.  But you could have guessed that without me telling your, couldn't you?

Electro-Luminescent wire.

I am a little late to the game on this stuff -- apparently hobbyists have been using it for crafting.  For example, who wouldn't want a Tron outfit?

To date, I have mostly sheltered readers from the geekiest of my hobbies: model railroading  (Yeah, I know what you are saying -- how can anyone who spends hours a day at a computer writing on arcane bits of business and economics issues possibly be anything but cool?)  This may soon change, as I am starting a new N-scale layout and I will probably inflict some in-progress photos on you folks.  To get an idea just how crazy I am, I build my own track from wood strips and bundles of rail and tiny, tiny spikes -- so we are not just talking about putting the old Lionel out on a green table cloth.

Anyway, for some time I have wanted to build a layout that is primarily meant to be run in the dark as a night scene.  So I am experimenting with a lot of technologies, from florescent paint to tiny LED's to small bulbs to get ideas for various scenes.  The EL wire turns out to be a dead ringer for scaled down neon, so I expect to use a lot in the city part of the layout.

I will leave you with a photo of the layout that probably inspired more people (including myself) into the hobby than any other  -  by the master, John Allen:

If you get intrigued with his work, more photos are here.

I wish I had more pictures of my old work, but they seem to have been lost in a move.  All I have left is a few poor-quality, poorly-scanned under-construction photos of my first layout from years and years ago.

Postscript: Can a hobby be geeky if Rod Stewart shares it?  He has built an absolutely stunning layout - one photo below and more here. 

And yes, the work really is his own, he didn't just pay someone to build it for him.

Some cops just abuse power, and make up rules as they go along.

Gordon Haire, a former newspaper reporter and former police officer, was sitting at a table on the campus of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston when he snapped a photo of a university police officer strolling towards him.

Officer Tim Wilson then came up to him and told him he was not allowed to photograph the Galveston National Library, which apparently is so top secret that only a Google search will reveal its true appearance.

Wilson told him it was against the law to photograph the building because it is a security threat.

Haire, 66, told Wilson he did not believe him.

Sensing the impending terrorist threat, Wilson asked for Haire's identification.

But having lost his drivers license, Haire was only able to produce a Medicare card (he had arrived by bus for a doctor's appointment).

The cop then asked for his full name and date of birth, then relayed that information to a dispatcher through his collar microphone.

"He's giving me a hard time," the cop said to the dispatcher, according to Haire.

The cop finally left, but not before informing Haire that it was illegal to even photograph the sidewalk.

Julius Shulman, creator of perhaps my single favorite urban photo, has died at the age of 98.  I like the black and white version linked above better than the color, which I confess I had never seen before.

I thought this was really cool.  I am not really into caption contests, but there seem to be so many possibilities for this one.   The first 9/11 that wasn't?  An early Air Force One photo op?

via Shorpy

This has become one of my absolute favorite photographs.  If I had to come up with an advertising campaign defending modern society against those who are anti-growth, anti-wealth and anti-technology (like, say, our new National Science Adviser John Holdren) I would use this picture on the posters.  (via Shorpy, which has a huge version here)

This was a bit of history I never knew:

"Wall Street bomb." Aftermath of the explosion that killed dozens of people in New York's financial district on September 16, 1920, when a horse wagon loaded with dynamite and iron sash weights blew up in front of the J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street. The attack, which was attributed to Italian anarchists, was never solved. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection.

This is from Shorpy.com, a blog that has daily posts with really nice photography from the 19th and early 20th centuries.  The photo above is actually just a thumbnail - go to the original post and click on the full size image.  All of their photos are posted in huge, high-resolution scans.

I know there are people who take the position that all PR is good PR, but really, do you really want newspapers running a photo spread entitled "Hookers Made Famous by [Fill In Your Name]"?

This is an awesome photo.  I am a total sucker for depression-era southern photograph.

Over at Climate Skeptic, I have what could be called a climate Rorschach test.  Look at these two images below.  The left is the temperature plot for Lampasas, Texas, a station in the NASA GISS global warming data base.  On the right is the location of the temperature station since the year 2000 (the instrument is in the while cylinder in the middle of the picture under the dish).  Click either picture to expand

So here is the eye test:  Do you read the warming since 2000 as man-made global warming due to CO2, or do you read it as a move of the temperature instrument to a totally inappropriate urban site to which the instrument was moved in 2000, contaminated with hot asphalt, car radiators, nearby buildings, air conditioning exhaust, etc?

You should know that NASA's GISS reads this as man-made global warming, and reports it as such.  Further, NASA actually takes the raw data above and in their computer model lowers temperatures in 1900 and 1920, actually increasing the apparent warming trend.  For the record, the GISS opposes this kind of photo survey as worthless and argues that their computer algorithms, which correct for urban warming at this site in 1900 but not in 2007, work just fine with no knowledge of the specific site location.

This photo (via Maggie's Farm) shows life in the United States during a time when the US emitted more CO2 than Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and other greens want to set as the new emissions cap.  In 1940, the US emitted about 33% of 1990 levels of CO2, vs. the green's target of 20%.

My photo survey of the Tucson USHCN climate station is still creating a lot of discussion.  Discussion, for example, is here, here, and here.

And you too can have the satisfaction of contributing to science.  All
you need is a camera (a GPS of some sort is also helpful).  I wrote a
post with instructions on how to find temperature stations near you and how to document them for science here.  Believe it or not, for all the work and money spent on global warming,
this is something that no one had done -- actually go document these
sites to check their quality and potential biases.

Don Surber writes:

The tax-exempt Environmental Integrity Project in Washington, D.C.,
issued its annual list of the 50 dirtiest power plants in America. This
is illustrated by a photo showing steam "” water vapor "” escaping from a
cooling tower. Sigh.

I made this same point long ago, laughing at the huge number of air pollution reports that are illustrated with pictures of steam plumes.  I also showed how photographers seemed to try to photograph the steam plumes at sunset, trying to turn them brown-looking to make it look like pollution.  Unfortunately for pollution-report illustrators, power plants have been cleaned up enough that they don't really emit visible smoke plumes any more.

I am releasing version 1.0 of my Skeptical Layman's Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming.  You may download the pdf (about 2.7 mb) from the link above or by clicking on the cover photo below.  In the next few days, I will also be posting an online HTML version as well as offering a printed version at cost.

Update:  The HTML version is here, and the book can be purchased at cost through this link

The purpose of this paper is to provide a layman's critique
of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory, and in particular to
challenge the fairly widespread notion that the science and projected
consequences of AGW currently justify massive spending and government
intervention into the world's economies. This paper will show that despite good evidence that global temperatures
are rising and that CO2 can act as a greenhouse gas and help to warm the Earth,
we are a long way from attributing all or much of current warming to man-made
CO2. We are even further away from being
able to accurately project man's impact on future climate, and it is a very
debatable question whether interventions today to reduce CO2 emissions will substantially
improve the world 50 or 100 years from now. 

I am not a trained expert on the climate. I studied physics at Princeton University before switching my
major to mechanical engineering, where I specialized in control theory and
feedback loops, a topic that will be important when we get into the details of
climate change modeling. For over ten
years, my business specialty was market prediction and sales forecasting using
modeling approaches similar to (if far less complex than) those used in climate.

My goal for this paper is not to materially
advance climate science. However, I have
found that the global warming skeptic's case is seldom reported well or in any
depth, and I wanted to have a try at producing a fair reporting of the
skeptic's position.  I have been unhappy
with several of the recent documentaries outlining the skeptic's case, either
because they skipped over a number of critical issues, or because they
over-sold alternate warming hypotheses that are not yet well understood.  To the inevitable charge that as a
non-practitioner, I am not qualified to write this paper --I believe that I am
able to present the current state of the science, with a particular emphasis on
the skeptic's case, at least as well as a good reporter might, and far better
than most reporters actually portray the state of the science. Through this paper I will try to cite sources
as often as possible and provide links for those who are reading this online,
this report is best read as journalism, not as a scientific, meticulously
footnoted paper.

An outline of the paper is as follows:

Forward: What Are My Goals For This Paper

Chapter
1: Management Summary

Chapter
2: Is It OK to be a Skeptic?

Charges
of Bias

The
Climate Trojan Horse

The
Need to Exaggerate

Chapter
3: The Basics of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) Theory

Chapter
4: The historical evidence

The
long view (650,000 years)

The medium view (1000 years)

The
short view (100 years)

Sulfates,
Aerosols, and Dimming

The
Troposphere Dilemma and Urban heat islands

Using
Computer Models to Explain the Past

Chapter
5: The computer models and predicting
the future

The
Dangers in Modeling Complex Systems

Do
Model Outputs Constitute Scientific Proof?

Econometrics and CO2 Forecasts

Climate
Sensitivity and the Role of Positive Feedbacks

Climate
Models had to be aggressively tweaked to match history

Chapter
6: Alternate explanations and models

Solar
Irradiance

Cosmic
Rays

Man's
Land Use

Chapter
7: The effects of global warming

Why
only bad stuff?

Ice
melting / ocean rising

Hurricanes
& Tornados

Temperature
Extremes

Extinction
and Disease

Collapse
of the Gulf Stream and Freezing of Europe

Non-warming
Effects of CO2

Chapter
8:  Kyoto and Policy Alternatives

Kyoto

Cost
of the Solutions vs. the Benefits: Why
Warmer but Richer may be Better than Colder and Poorer

Chapter
9: Rebuttals by AGW Supporters

Please feel free to download and share.  If you find errors, omissions, mistakes, gaps or anything else you would like to comment on, please email me at the address on the cover.  In particular, I have tried to be careful with copyrighted material, but if I have used any of your material without your consent, let me know ASAP and I will remove it.

. 68

Unfortunately, it was long distance and dark, so conditions were not very good for photography.  Still waiting for that perfect photo-op, but it's surprisingly hard when most family visits we get are at sunset and sunrise.

Update:  By the way, for any of you dog photographers out there - is there a good way to get rid of the bright eye / green eye in dog (or coyote!) photos that is the equivalent of human red eye?

I think most of us are familiar with the clever movie poster for An Invconvinient Truth, with the smoke from a factory swirling into a hurricane:

In fact, this same picture of a white plume coming from a factory or power plant stack is often used to illustrate articles on pollution.  Just searching the first page of images googling "air pollution" gives us these relatively similar images illustrating air pollution articles:

Here is a big Roseanne Rosanadana Emily Litella moment for all of you using these images:  The big white cloud coming out of all those stacks is steam.  Water vapor.  H2O.  Though actually a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, no one has had the temerity to label water a pollutant (except in that great Bullshit! issue when Penn & Teller get environmentalists to sign a petition banning dihydrogen monoxide).  All of these guys are using big plumes of water vapor to panic people about pollution.  That is because most pollutants emitted by combustion are invisible.  Visible smoke was licked by most plants decades ago (here is the only "factory" picture in the google search I could find with actual smoke). 

Just to avoid being misunderstood, my point is not that pollution is OK because it is invisible.  My point is that these scare pictures are yet another example of how environmentalists feel its OK to ignore science to advance their agenda in public.  Sometimes they even go further, as Small Dead Animals points out, resorting to photo-shopping to make things seem worse, but the dreaded steam plumes are still there front and center.  (I noticed that several of the pictures above where photographed at sunset.  I thought at first this was to make them look prettier, but maybe they liked the effect because it made the steam look browner without photo-shopping).

I did not go too deep into the Google search, but I went far enough to award my personal favorite for a scare picture that has nothing to do with the point being made:

This one is a classic, with the sad-faced little girl and her asthma** inhaler super-imposed over a scene of "industrial pollution."  Except, the scene is from a nuclear power plant!  The unique shaped cooling tower is almost exclusively used on nuclear power plants, but the ultimate proof is the small nuclear reactor containment dome you can see to the right.  That plume, which is supposed to represent pollution, has to be 100% water.  There are no combustion products at a nuclear plant, and even if there were, given the way the cooling tower works, this can only be water vapor coming out of the cooling tower.  The really sad and pathetic thing is that this illustration is from the air pollution site at Battelle, which is a world-renowned private scientific and technical organization. 

What's my point?   I think that scientists and academics, in their increasing arrogance, have no respect for the general public.  The only way I can consistently interpret scientist's actions, for example around the global warming debate, is to hypothesize that they consider truth and facts important when talking to other scientists, but irrelevant when talking to the public because, in their mind, the public is stupid and its OK to tell them anything.  I will leave you with this
quote from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NOAA) climate researcher and global warming action promoter,
Steven Schneider:

[In talking to the public about the climate] We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements,
and make little mention of any doubts we have. Each of us has to decide what
the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

** By the way, there is growing evidence that increasing reported asthma rates are not correlated with outdoor air pollution. I wrote about this here, and hypothesized that the growth in asthma has coincided with the post-70s-energy-crisis steps everyone has taken to better insulate and seal up their houses and buildings, making indoor air pollution more of a problem.

Update: I started to think the dome I was calling a nuclear containment building might be telescope dome on the top of the building below.  It's not.

I am not sure I have ever seen a better parable about the virtues of industrialization, world trade, and the division of labor than this experiment documented in Wired Magazine (via L. Rockwell at Mises):

When educator and designer Kelly Cobb decided to make a man's suit
only from materials produced within 100 miles of her home, she knew it
would be a challenge. But Cobb's locally made suit turned into a
exhausting task. The suit took a team of 20 artisans several months to
produce -- 500 man-hours of work in total -- and the finished product
wears its rustic origins on its sleeve.

"It was a huge undertaking, assembled on half a shoestring," Cobb
said at the suit's unveiling one recent afternoon at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art.

"Every piece of the suit took three to five pairs of hands to make,"
Cobb added. "Every garment you wear took three to five pairs of hands
to make too, but you don't know whose hands or where."

Cobb's suit (see photo gallery)
is a demonstration of the massive manufacturing power of the global
economy. Industrial processes and cheap foreign labor belie the
tremendous resources that go into garments as simple as a T-shirt.

"It definitely makes you think for a minute before you buy that $10
skirt," said Jocelyn Meinhardt, a New York City playwright who sews
many of her own clothes. "It didn't just grow on the rack at Forever
21. It's too easy to forget that people made it."

I took my daughter on a day trip to Magic Mountain, one of the better parks around for roller coasters (it's it still not Cedar Point, IMHO, though if you like inversions, Magic Mountain is the place).  We went on Friday because she had a special day off from school, and there was no one at the park.  In the first 30 minutes, we rode several of the top coasters all alone.  The only problem is that I am more used to getting a bit of a break between rides, waiting in line and such.  Anyway, we had a blast.

For those not up on their amusement park trivia, Magic Mountain was "Wallyworld" in the movie Vacation and is home to the first ever looping rollercoaster, the Revolution, which was featured in the movie Rollercoaster.  Since that first inversion, coaster designers have gone nuts.  The first roller coaster we rode on Friday, called Scream, had seven inversions in one ride.  It was also cool because it had no car.  When we were in the front, we were just strapped into chairs with nothing around us but the track below our feet - really cool.  Picture being the front guys in this photo. Through the day, we probably survived 50 inversions. 

Coaster designers have really gotten creative.  We rode sitting, standing, and lying on our stomach (what is called a flying roller coaster, you are sort of in the same position as in a hang-glider).  We rode on top of the track and hanging from the track.  One of the challenges of ride designers is to push the gees, both positive and negative, without making it downright painful.  Millennium Force at Sandusky Park is rightly considered perhaps the best roller coaster in the world because it plays with the gees without torturing you (the negative-G hills are great).  I thought several of the rides at Magic Mountain went over the line, in particular the Batman hanging coaster and the Tatsu flying coaster, when there were a few turns when I thought my head was going to explode.  Overall, we liked Scream the best - smooth, fun, scary without being painful.

Update: I said Millennium Force is the best coaster out there.  This one, also at Cedar Point, which I have not ridden, is the most elemental --  No  subtlety here  (go to the POV gallery on the right and watch the video).

Dear Hewlett-Packard:

I have a quick question.  Why is it you cannot design a paper handler on your printers that will reliably handle your own paper?  I am using HP photo paper, and about every sixth copy I will have two pages stick together in the paper feed, resulting in an off-center image and wasted paper and ink.  Oh.  I think I just answered by own question.

Coyote

About a year ago, after years of driving cleanly, I had a spate of 3-4 traffic tickets, mostly photo radar (in the same dang spot!) plus this silly one.  I received a warning that further tickets in the next year would lead to revocation of my license for a year.  Gulp.  So I have been driving like a grandmother, until yesterday when I got nailed for 45 in a 30, while arguing with my kids in the back seat. 

Now I will have to see if there is any way to mitigate or reduce the threatened punishment.  A one year's revocation, which by the way is longer than they give first time DUI's in this state, is a pretty harsh and financially burdensome penalty.  Especially given my small business requires a lot of driving to our remote locations and I contribute a lot to driving our kids.  I'll let you know how it goes, but if anyone is experienced with these situations in Arizona, feel free to comment or email.

...not

Today Dec 23 Mostly Sunny 77°/46° 0%			77°F Check Your Local Event Forecast
Sat Dec 24 Sunny 76°/45° 0%			76°F
Sun Dec 25 Partly Cloudy 78°/45° 20%			78°F

Merry Christmas from Paradise Valley and the Coyote Clan!  Every year for our Christmas card, we try to do something unique.  We always end up with a homemade card that costs 10x more than a nice store-bought one.  This year was no exception, burning through any number of expensive HP ink cartridges.  I used a neat free program called Andrea Mosaic that creates a photo mosaic of any picture you choose using a folder full of secondary pictures used as the tiles.  This is a very easy project with the free software and I have found it a sure-fire way to impress people.  Nothing a geek loves more than the reaction of "How did you do that?"

Also, I think I set the record for most pictures of my kids included in a single Christmas card, with something like 300 in this mosaic.
Update: Actually, I see that this is an older version, since I can see side-by-side picture repeats in the mosaic and in a later version I learned to make the program not do this, but you get the idea.