irony

Irony:

A few weeks ago, my mother discovered I had downed several trees and demanded that I promptly cut them up to fit her fireplace... a reasonable request unless you are a woman just 2 years recovered from a $200,000 back surgery.

Me 'I'm not cutting up heavy logs fro you to chance ruining your back again.'

Irony... Today, I decide to wrestle the big logs into the woods as a kind of Summer cleanup... and threw out my back.

Last 3 hours, flat on my back on a heating pad because 'I didn't want to cut them into smaller pieces'

ReLearning lessons you already know is painful. :)

Where's book 8 ??!

Question: "Yeah yeah, the links are 'cute' and stuff, but, really, where's book 8 (Quantum of Souls) already!!"

Long story short, 3 pairs of prescription reading glasses...

Long story longer...

Almost 20 years ago (late 90's), I was considering trying my hand at programming again. I had lots of success with it as a child, but things in the computer world had changed since the 80's when I last sat behind a keyboard, so I decided to take a few classes and find out just where I stood.

If it was going to take thousands and thousands of dollars to get caught up, I'd probably take a pass. But I'd only know if I sank a toe in the water.

Late 90's that's exactly what I did. The programming wasn't too hard, and I was very enthusiastic... at first. But by the end of the year, I was hating it and I couldn't figure out why.

In retrospect, I found out that I was printing a ton of things out, and that should have been a clue. But at the time, it wasn't.

I was blind to it.

In the early days of classes, it was nothing to spend 8-12 hours a day pounding away at the keyboard. By the end of the year, it made me depressed to even turn the damn computer on.

I figured it was just that my heart wasn't in it. Coding, itself, was really not that hard, I kept telling myself, but I just couldn't get 'into it'.

So I took a chance and decided to try writing again. I had written a 'version' of Houdini scientist in the 11th grade and so I decided to, obviously, skip over 3 books and start my new writing adventures with "The Heredity of Hummingbirds" (book 4) on my brand new Compaq laptop.

About halfway through it, I was dealing with crippling depression and headaches, but I powered through, then started on "Mourning after Dawn" (Book 5).

Time to backtrack just a little.

Color blind people don't know on their own that they are color blind.

Nearsighted people don't know that the world looks different to everyone else.

And I didn't know that I was color blind until a state fair around the age of ten, or that I was dyslexic until my last year of high school, or that I was hypersensitive to back lit screens common to all phones, tvs, and laptops. It took me three years to figure out my hypersensitivity to screens.

On 5-23-2003 NEC decided to dump their 'golf pro' laptops called the Versa Daylite. It was $1,000 more expensive than all other laptops in its class, and came with a dull, tiny 10.1" screen that the market hated... but that I needed because it had a back light that you could turn off.

This is the difference between an iPad and a Kindle with the e-ink 'paper' screen. If you want to read for an hour, an iPad will do, but if you want to read for 12 hours a day, every day of the week, 9 out of 10 eyes will thank you for using the Kindle with the e-ink and no back light.

It didn't dawn on me until a power failure when I used the laptop screen (a regular one, not the NEC) as a flashlight. It lit the room bright enough to read a newspaper at 20 feet. Most phones come with a flashlight app that turns to screen bright white.

I have a box of florescent and LED lights that I never use because the flicker or spectrum of the light from them gives me headaches. Most people don't have this problem, but I do.

Most people are not color blind, but I am.

And most people are not dyslexic, but I am (mildly).

Now, 2014, quantum of souls started out fast, I was on schedule to have it done in a year, then I hit a wall.

My NEC crashed, the screen has a bunch of scratches, and the power supply died.

But those are just annoying excuses.

My real problem, the one my color blind eyes couldn't see, was that my eyes were going on me.

Which, sad as it seems, was far from obvious.

I can see the screen just fine.

I can see the screen on my phone just fine (I just can't stand looking at it for more than an hour a day).

In fact, last month when I got my first eye test in 20 years, my eyesight had actually improved, according to the numbers. So I was entirely befuddled as to why I couldn't seem to concentrate or focus when writing.

But it turned out that my left eye was the only one that could see the screen, when before 2014, both eyes could see the screen. Dollar store reading glasses had helped (in 2014) but just barely.

Right in the middle of the book, my ability to see the screen (what mattered most) had all but vanished.

I needed 3 pairs of reading glasses, with 3 unique prescriptions.

1 for reading the phone or books.

1 for reading a laptop, and a third for reading desktop screens.

(And a fourth for driving, watching movies, or tv, but I'm really nearly 20/20 with that, so I just couldn't believe I had eye problems)

I can see some colors, but not most colors, so I had no clue I was colorblind (technically, colorblind is black and white where color deficient, me, is some colors).

I could easily use a regular tablet, laptop, or desktop screen for up to an hour without feeling ill, so because it wasn't immediate, it took me an incredibly long time to put two and two together.

And my dyslexia is very mild, just bad enough to make editing books more difficult than it ordinarily would be.

Bottom line, with a little luck, hopefully I'll finish it this year.

$6.95 for a pair of prescription reading glasses makes all the difference in the world.

For those really curious.

OD    OS

1      0.75 SP

-.5    -.75 Cyc

62    110  Axis

I might be celebrating Earth Day wrong :)

Climate change is not a joke!!

A climate scientist, a politician, and a fifth grader are asked to get the temperature of a glass of water.

The politician consults his richest campaign donors and reports their preferred (most profitable) choice. In a pinch, he'll even poll the audience for the answer.

The climate scientist takes a hundred readings of the air above and around the cup, enters them into a dozen computer models, then reports the average of those results.

The fifth grader sticks the thermometer into the water, gives it a stir, and reads off the number.

Sadly, this joke is not as far from the truth as it should be.

Hundreds of years of weather data has given us unprecedented accuracy at predicting storms and deciding between shorts and jackets, but the idea that it is even remotely useful at determining if or how much heat is being trapped (by greenhouse gasses) has as much value as measuring the air above and around a cup.

If there was evidence of heat being trapped by the atmosphere, it won't be found in the 14 pounds per square inch of rapidly churning air above the ground, but in the first 14-100 pounds per square inch of the ground beneath it (where nobody is looking for it).

When you want to know if the water in the cup is getting hotter or cooling off, you don't ask a politician or measure the air above the cup...

This is not to say that climate science is not a legitimate science, it just that its predictive value doesn't extend much beyond a choice between shorts and jackets.

Take a breath, calm your fears, the world will not be ending tomorrow, even though All Gore won a Nobel Prize for predicting it would nearly a decade ago.

Trump is a live grenade in the hands of a battered wife.

Trump is a live grenade in the hands of a battered wife. Nobody believes it's the right tool for the job, but the police (tea party, occupy wall street) did nothing to stop the abuse that escalates every year, and she and the country are desperate for any kind of relief.

The left tried reasoning with their political class through occupy and black lives, the right with the tea party, only to see the political class of both parties double down on their abuse and misuse of the country.

Ted Cruise, Rand Paul, and Sanders are like good divorce lawyers and marriage counselors that we all know the abusive husband won't listen to or pay for. (Ask Cuccinelli about how the party can tank a Cruise or a Paul or a Sanders, something that can't be done with a Trump grenade)

Reasoning is out.

All that's left is the grenade.

It's not the right tool for the job, we all know the mess will be horrendous, but for the sake of the kids playing outside, it might be time to pull the pin and have an end to the endless abuse.

Headline "GLOBAL WARMING LA Methane Leak Spews 1,200 Tons of Gas Daily"

Ironically, PATRICK J. KIGER, who wrote the story for Discovery, may have just scientifically proven that their is no such thing as a greenhouse gas and not even know it.

Taking a step back, according to greenhouse gas theory, methane is 1,000 times more powerful than CO2. This has complete scientific consensus and is the basis for 100% of all computer models.

And until last month, there had been no way to prove it one way or the other. The only proof that greenhouse gasses even existed at all has always resided inside computer models.

Question: what is the difference between a science fiction author and a theoretical physicist? They both write fiction, but only the author knows it is fiction (they both have about an equal chance of being disproven).

Scientifically speaking, you can NOT prove a theory, but you can disprove one through experimentation, and every time you disprove a theory, science moves one step forward.

Now, nobody in their right mind would pump 1,200 tons of methane (1,000 times more greenhousy than CO2) into the air as an experiment. But that's exactly what happened by accident. And the thousands of people evacuated are proof of the gas clinging to and saturating the ground. This is the greenhouse gas equivalent of an urban island effect... but instead of increasing temperatures by double digits as every computer model mandates, we have zero.

A town has been saturated with methane that is "1,000 times" worse than CO2, the escaping gas is even at a temperature well over 100 degrees F, and even STILL, ZERO measurable greenhouse effect due to the 'heat trapping' effect of 1,200 daily tons of a gas "1,000 times" more powerful than CO2 being pumped into the air.

Case closed.

Methane has just been proven, scientifically, to NOT be a greenhouse gas, and by extension, CO2 is now on life support too. 

Let me state this another way, if a scientist wanted to prove that methane was a greenhouse gas, they would release 1,200 tons of it (cooled to room temperature, unlike the heated accident) a day into an area, closely monitor the concentrations and watch the temperature "runaway" with the greenhouse effect. The absence of this, is proof that methane is NOT a greenhouse gas and that the theory is wrong.

http://news.discovery.com/earth/global-warming/la-methane-leak-spews-1200-tons-of-gas-daily-160114.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1

No, I'm not a vegan

Militant vegans, we've all met one, demand meat eaters stop eating meat, but all their alternatives are... expensive and yuck.

I've always heard the argument that it takes 30 pounds of corn to make 5 pounds of chicken, meant to mean that fake chicken should be 1/6th the price of meat, but I've never seen that theory proven out in any store I've ever gone to. Everywhere I look, vegan meat has always been more expensive.

My point in saying this is that militant vegans (those that demand others convert) would be better served working on a vegan meat that tastes good and is cheaper. In a recession like this, they've squandered 7 years where they could have converted millions on the basis of price alone.

1/6th the price would be nice, but even 10% less would convert millions.

Now that I've cast some stones, let me say I think I found it from a farm that specializes in survival food.

Basically, my understanding is it's a farm that cooks big batches of their own food in their own kitchen and then freezedries it and cans it, all under their roof.

They sell through Walmart.com a 25yr can of fake beef and chicken that is one year shelf stable after opening and works out to a dollar a pound and tastes reasonably well.

If they skipped the freezing, drying and canning, and just put it in a 5 pound tubes for local supermarkets, my math suggests they could turn a profit as low as 50 cents a pound.

Augason Farms Emergency Food Beef Vegetarian Meat Substitute, 37 oz

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Augason-Farms-Emergency-Food-Beef-Vegetarian-Meat-Substitute-37-oz/22985155