What did you do today?

[Guzzle]

But. . . Mr. Moynihan. . .when do opinions become facts?

Smoking has never been proven statistically to cause lung cancer, they can't in a free society, but they may want to confirm this with prisoners.
Some sadistic organization maybe already has but hasn't published the findings.

And now, maybe, facts become opinions.
We are definitely on the other side of The Looking Glass.

 

[zannej]

Update. hard drives on my desktop are ok but other than power supply, the rest is toast. Video cards are super expensive right now but my laptop can be used as a desktop once I set it up. I just want to get all the browser stuff, data, etc transferred over from desktop to laptop. on my laptop right now but keyboard sucks. gonna hook up desktop to get some data off of it before it crashes again and transfer to laptop and then hook laptop up to monitor, keyboard, and such. gonna need a chill mat/fans for the laptop and a safe place to keep it away from cats.

 

[shan2themax]

Hello all! Hope everyone is well. I have been busy, had a heartbroken adult daughter have to move back home. About 2 weeks ago.... with 2 puppies. We thought she had a blown head gasket and took her car to shop yesterday. They called today and said the head gasket was fine but the bank 1 converter is shot. So... we will look into replacing that. ECSTATIC the head gasket was good.
Still getting weekly massages, back feels better but this stiffness is a jerk and for the birds. She is interested in buying soaps from me wholesale so I need to really buckle down and get it busy making more products for when the time comes.

 

[Eddie_T]

I've been using Chromebooks for many years. I have a Lenovo PC if I need other S/W but most of the time I don't spin any hard drives. I think Chromebooks can now be interfaced with a printer but I still just copy anything I want to print to a thumb drive and take it to the PC. I don't need any antivirus S/W with the Chromebook and I'm not online enough with the PC to need anything beyond the free stuff.

 

[ekrig]

I watched this 2020 video on climate change. Jordan Peterson predicts that the result of any action now will be immeasurable ten years down the road.

That is a great video. Note however that he is not saying that changes would not be noticeable but rather that trying to measure the impact of changes using the model that is used for the predictions is very hard due to the uncertainty. In other words, how can we try to determine what to do using these models/predictions when the uncertainty is much larger than the effect of proposed changes. (I happen to know a bit about modeling and even know several climate scientists...)

 

[Eddie_T]

I understand, I am retired NASA. I retired before NASA bought the AGW claim presumably to get budget approvals. Dr. Roy Spencer is a climatologist that never bought the change in direction. Changes are so gradual that if we follow the path of Al Gore and Joe Biden all we can do is affect people's lifestyle at present and never measure the results to determine if it were worth the sacrifice. BTW did they ever change the signs at Glacier National Park say the glacier would be melted by 2020? I lived through the nuclear winter scare. he ozone scare and AGW is just the latest "chicken little" scare seized upon by politicians.

I got tired of following the claims regarding correlation. Actually correlation cannot prove causation but you cannot have major causation without correlation. Some reports indicate that if one runs correlations against human caused factors the R-squared factors are less than one could expect with a coin toss. Do we want to change our life styles based upon a coin toss, not me?

 

[zannej]

Shan, sorry to hear about your daughter. Glad the massages are working.

My whole body aches because I made the mistake of riding in the back of my friend's 2-door car. First time I got out was a bit of a struggle. Then we stopped somewhere else and I took almost 10 minutes to be able to get out because I couldn't get my leg to support my weight while bent, there was stuff on the floor, I don't bend well, and I'm too fat. LOL. After that time I told my brother it was his turn to ride in the back because there was no way in hell I was getting out a 3rd time. I hurt myself the other two times.

The problems with my computer are not the parts themselves but my brother's un-neutered male cats decided to have a turf war by taking turns marking it. I taped up the side, moved it where I thought they wouldn't spray it, tried locking them out of the room but the dog tore a hole in the door. Stuffed the hole with things and the dog pushed/pulled the stuff out. So the cats kept getting in. One in particular cat was bad about it and would piss right over the top where it would drip down. Got into the fans, the CPU, the motherboard, the graphics card, and soaked in to the crevices of the plastic and stuff. Even after deep cleaning it, the inside still reeks. I love the chassis and the pretty light-up fans but they are so saturated I'm going to have to toss them. Good news is I told another friend about the predicament and he said he's got all the parts I need from an old computer. He wants to keep the hard drives and ditch everything else (not sure why). He said he'd get back to me with the specs on it. If he charges a reasonable price I may buy it and stick my hard drives in and then stick my computer somewhere the cats can't get near it. Even if I have to build a frickin' cabinet and add fans to the side (in such a position that if they pee on the fans it won't much up the computer). I'm a bit miffed at my brother for not getting the cats neutered when he had the $.

Currently looking at purchasing a new door for the room.

On the upside, there was a 120w Sony sound bar on clearance at Walmart. I did a price comparison & it was way lower than online prices. I grabbed it and set it up (although I needed my brother to reach up on a shelf and plug it in to a spot I couldn't see or reach-- if I just had his height and longer arms I could have done it). It's so much better than the speakers that came on the TV. We were having trouble hearing things on some of the programs before and the sound quality is so much better. It's not like the Dolby surround quality we had when my dad has the surround system set up, but it's still nice.

The TV I got my brother for Xmas arrived. Mom spoiled the surprise that he was getting a TV but he was still surprised at the quality of the TV. It's a smaller version of the one my friend got for an early Xmas gift (Hisense U6 ultra quantum LED). Just needed a mount adapter bc the tv had 300mmx200mm spacing but his tv mount was 200mmx200mm. Simple fix. He has it all set up and running.

I'm using my laptop but I decided to plugin my keyboard and mouse to make it easier to use.

As an aside, I saw a new technology (at least new to me) in Bestbuy- Bose headphone glasses. You put them over your ears and it's like having earbuds in without worrying about them not fitting and falling out (I can't get earbuds to stay in my ears). Uses some sort of tech where it vibrates through the cartilage and the sound is very clear. I liked the Bose Tempo ones but all of the lenses are tinted. They don't sell clear ones. Razer makes some good ones as well. Now I am thinking it would be nice to have something without glasses that can hang over the ear and work the same way. Or with certain magnification like reading glasses. For me I'd need prescription lenses since one eye is worse than the other.

They do well to sell adapters to fit on existing glasses to turn them in to headphone glasses, because the prescription lenses are over $300.

 

[Spicoli43]

I have no fear of Greta she is no more a scientist than is Jordan. I would love to hear them in a real debate.

I watched about 12 seconds of the video. She has no idea what she's talking about and was "installed" as the voice for kids or something, simply based upon her not being able to talk without her script. That's the first and last time I will listen to her because the entire idea makes no sense. (Like Climate Change has anything to do with our microscopic selves).

 

[Guzzle]

NASA/GFSC here. Shoulda' stayed there.

BTW, Bayes' Theorem helps with making present day decisions about an unknown future, but you have to keep the numbers straight.

 

[Eddie_T]

Same here, lived in Bowie. However I retired from LeRC (now GRC).

 

[Eddie_T]

I watched about 12 seconds of the video. She has no idea what she's talking about and was "installed" as the voice for kids or something, simply based upon her not being able to talk without her script. That's the first and last time I will listen to her because the entire idea makes no sense. (Like Climate Change has anything to do with our microscopic selves).

Jordan gave her a pretty good put down. They are using kids to try to affect their parents.
Lenin said, “Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.”
Hitler said, “Whoever has the youth has the future.”

 

[Eddie_T]

My spent coffee grounds dyed washcloths. I am suspecting not colorfast though some were soaked in an epsom salts mordant.. They were dyed at different times as the brew grew stronger. I am saving grounds now to dye my khaki Crocs after I wash them.

 

[zannej]

The coffee dyed washcloths turned out well. Do they smell like coffee? Would be great if you could lock that in. LOL.

Got a call from my friend that he needed help moving a dresser. Went over with the truck, backed it in, and waited 15min for him & my brother to clear it off, empty it out, and get it out to the truck. got out the tie down straps and let my friend tether it up. Drove it to his place and backed the truck in so it could be unloaded. It was too bulky for me to get ahold of in any way. Put my tie downs away and waited for my brother to finish gabbing so we could go check mail and then go home. Got kidney stones again in my left side so not feeling great.

I also discovered that the tape that was on the gap in the glass in my window is gone so all that cold air is coming in. I forgot to grab my tape from my friend's house.

 

[Flyover]

I only ever read one book about smoking (this one, "For Your Own Good" by Jacob Sullum) and it's been a while but I remember it indicated something like smoking increases your odds of getting lung cancer by a few percentage points. Way less than the 100% that seems to be claimed by anti-smoking people, but not zero. (3% might be an interolable risk to a lot of people, and rightfully so.) Makes sense too: our lungs are definitely not evolved to inhale concentrated smoke. There's a good reason you hack and hack and think you're gonna die when you take your first ever drag on a cigarette. But yeah, the villainizing of smokers and outrageous lying about smoking is not good. Some things could count as "noble lies" but that ain't one of them.

 

[Guzzle]

For a smoking co-worker I looked up mortality for smokers & non-smokers. Sickness is one thing but not too many people argue if someone is dead or not.

So nobody dies at 16 from smoking (IMO because they haven't smoked long enough) & nobody dies at 90 from smoking (because they would have already died from it if they were going to). The peak age was 45.

IIRC, the cigarette makers file obscurely-worded patent applications for new cigarettes in foreign countries.
These corporations are bad actors, they probably have intelligent sociopaths running them (the dumb sociopaths usually land in jail or in padded cells).

BTW, there is supposed to be a built-in lifespan for people (85 years) & depending on how you slice & dice the data, it does appear to be true.
The data also suggests that the "The 27 Club" is real, but Mick Jagger has beaten the odds here.

 

[Guzzle]

The shop welded a sleeve onto the cat. conv. pipe so now the car runs much quieter, $310 which includes the $130 towing charge.

I shoulda' learned to weld.

I heartily recommend Certified Auto Repair, Inc. at 301-279-9451 & I heartily do not recommend any dealership.

 

[Eddie_T]

Dr. Jen parrots the mantra that supplements simply pass in urine. I can believe that excess vitamin-C might but what is metabolized seems to help me avoid the common cold. I haven't had a cold in so many years that I can't count the decades. Also my BP got a bit erratic about 20 years ago and I stabilized it with a hawthorn berry supplement. I know that it works because over the years as BP crept a bit I increased dosage and it went back to my norm.

 

[Eddie_T]

I smoke a pipe a bit, not more than one bowl a day if that much. I don't inhale but I like the smell of the smoke so there you go. I quit in 89 when my wife quit cigarettes, it just didn't seem right to keep smoking.

 

[Flyover]

I smoke a pipe a bit, not more than one bowl a day if that much. I don't inhale but I like the smell of the smoke so there you go. I quit in 89 when my wife quit cigarettes, it just didn't seem right to keep smoking.

I did similar. Smoked cigars with my best friend in high school, did a little pipe smoking in my mid 20s. I'm talking once every few weeks frequency. Never inhaled, liked the smell and the slight buzz. Quit when it just started making me feel more nauseous than anything, and my pipe (a "churchwarden", the kind with the long curvy stem) got clogged up and I didn't feel like cleaning it.

 

[zannej]

I detest the smell of cigarette smoke. It just bothers me. I have damaged lungs from the croup as a child and I've always hated that smell. I start coughing and it makes me feel nauseous sometimes. I have the same reaction to perfumes and a lot of strongly scented things-- I can't set foot in a bath & bodyworks store. My eyes water, nose drips, I sneeze & cough....

I knew an old man who was still smoking at 91 years old. Got lung cancer that spread to his brain. So, it eventually killed him but it took a long time.

Got a sinus headache today. Kidney stone is kicking around on my left side so I'm feeling a bit bleh.