Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   common sense appeal to the Dorito
Thursday, August 20 2009
I had a low-output air compressor, but today I took delivery of one many times more powerful. The idea is to use it with an air hammer to increase my stone removal capabilities down in the greenhouse. But when I took the compressor down to the greenhouse and plugged it in to an 120 volt outlet, it ran for about a second and died. Evidently the voltage drop on the 70 feet of 12 gauge electrical cable was too much for its beefy motor. So it looks like I have to buy 100 feet of air hose so I can run the compressor in the garage and pipe the air in from there. This leads to an interesting question: which offers more resistance to the flow of power, 3/8 inch air hose or 12 gauge copper wire? I don't even know where to go to answer this question.

The weather continues to be hot and humid, conditions unsuited to operating any sort of heat source. So this evening Gretchen put together a salad using lettuce, lime, olives, beans, and the Good Lord only knows what else. I'm not normally a big fan of the olive flavor, but this salad was the bomb. It tasted like whatever it is that encrusts a Hint-of-Lime Dorito, if only that encrusting stuff could somehow be freshly-harvested. I mixed mine with the random fragments at the bottom of a bag of conventional yellow corn corn chips and it was one of the best meals I'd had in awhile.

A recent episode of the AstronomyCast podcast got me interested in the nimrods who think they've figured out that Einstein was wrong. So I did some Google searching and came up with a central clearinghouse of such nonsense: Crank.net (which has its own sub-clearinghouse on Einstein). My favorite of the Einstein-deniers was Fred Hutchinson, who, no surprise here, is a bit of a religious nut. Part of what makes Fred Hutchinson so fun is his appeal to common sense, for example:
Einstein claimed he was inspired by the beauty and harmony of the cosmos. But a picture of everything melting into every other thing is the epitome of ugliness and disorder, as we learn from surrealist artists such as Salvador Dali. A regimented closed system is the barrenness of a prison. Order, yes. Beauty, no.


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