JamesSavik

Why the moon matters: The earth is essentially a ocean of viscous magma covered by hard plates connected by joints. These joints are the stress points of earthquake faults. The moons gravity has major effects on liquid water but we're not sure about its effect on magma or the plates that sit on top of it. It may well be that a supermoon may have no effect on a stable series of faults when it occurs. BUT when it works against an unstable series of faults, it could create chaos.

This is an enormous win. With Exodus out of business, they can't mess with anybody else's head.

It's on You-tube Ms. Wolf: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYi5FqpXDT8

Usually when you buy the rights to a book, you assume that the movie is going to be based on the book. Hollyweird is known for taking liberties but in this case they threw away the book and rewrote it. The only thing that the two have in common are zombies, a mysterious plague that causes them and the United Nations. That's it. Max Brooks originally wrote World War Z in the style of Studs Terkel's The Good War. It was a collection of stories told by the veterans of World War II. It had their voice and was an oral history. A critically acclaimed history told by the people that had fought in the war and survived. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_War Brook's book followed this design. It took place in the future. It interviewed survivors of the zombie war and told their story. It was collected by a minor functionary of the UN. Of course that was apparently too difficult for Hollywood. They threw it all out the window. They made a zombie apocalypse movie that shared the name World War Z. Of course in its own right, it's not a bad movie. Brad Pitt stars as a retired United Nations troubleshooter. When the zombie apocalypse breaks out, he goes back to his old job. He travels the zombie infested world in search of answers. As a movie, I give it a C+. However- it loses the entirety of what made the book special. You don't get the characters voice. You don't get the characters. All you get is your typical Hollywood adrenalin-pumping thriller with little or no message or staying power. Read the book. You'll get more out of it. Wait for the movie to hit NetFlix.

The supermoon of 2011 was followed shortly by the Japanese tsunami and quakes. The supermoon of 2004 occurred just before the Christmas Tsunami. The great earthquake that struck Hati in 2010 and Christchurch, NZ in 2011 also coincided with supermoons. So... I wonder what the supermoon of 2013 will bring. http://www.livescience.com/33106-will-supermoon-cause-earthquake-storm-natural-disasters.html http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/supermoon-and-earthquakes-is-t/46883

I know a lot of navy people that have been stationed in Japan and Okinawa. According to people who should know, the sex industry in Japan offers more kink than even squids can stomach.

The human mouth is an astonishingly dirty place from a micro-biological perspective. It's a great place to grow bacteria with moisture, warmth and a variety of food sources plus the introduction of numerous alien bacteria while eating. There are thousands of tame bacteria that live there and a great many those can act badly if they move into another environment. My mother had a long running infection in her eyes that took over a year to clear with powerful anti-biotics. Many bacteria are developing resistance to anti-biotics because those drugs are being over used in the human population and the production of poultry and beef.

>>Whydo so many people hate twilight? Because it sucks.

OLD YELLOW

National InSecurity In the last week a whistle-blower exposed embarrassing revelations about the NSA. The National Security Agency is so secret that many federal workers that saw references to the "NSA" were told in no uncertain terms that as far as they were concerned that stood for "No Such Agency". NSA's bailiwick is an obscure branch of spook-dom called signals intelligence which has been around since people used to splice into telegraph lines and listen to the message traffic. In World War I, various parties wanted to listen to trans-Atlantic traffic bound for interesting embassies. Later, in World War II US codebreakers turned the Pacific War when they discovered that an attack was imminent on Midway island. Armed with that information, the US Navy was able to surprise the Japanese fleet and sink four of the six carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor six months before. In the Atlantic the capture of a German Enigma machine cracked the German Navy's codes which were used to coordinate U-boat activity. This gave the Allies a tremendous advantage and turned the Battle of the Atlantic. It was scoops like the Midway signals intercepts and breaking the Enigma codes that showed the Allies the real war-winning advantages of signals intelligence. Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Nimitz all made special efforts to expand and improve this vital capability. In the post war world, the US and the UK both knew the inestimable value of intelligence derived by signals analysis. Military and civilian leaders on both sides of the Atlantic knew and understood how vitally important these capabilities were. Even in the post-war build downs, they found the money necessary to retain and improve these capabilities. Once the the Cold War heated up, SIGINT became one of the very hottest areas of intelligence. The Soviets began looking for nuclear secrets well before the end of WWII. Stalin wanted nuclear weapons and was willing and able to flood the US and the UK with spies. In 1946 the US and UK broke a code used by Soviet embassies and discovered how big the Soviet spying effort really was. The project was known as Verona and was a joint US-UK effort. In 1947 the US and the UK signed a secret treaty where they cooperated in monitoring trans-Atlantic cables which became the first widespread surveillance of public communications media in peace time. There was a lot to like about Signals Intelligence. You don't have double agents. You don't have to bribe anybody. You don't have all of the problems that you do when you are running human assets. SigInt never sleeps. It doesn't lie and it never takes a holiday. A great deal of money was spent and it became the West's most powerful and durable strategic intelligence asset. The NSA's ancestor was the Armed Forces Security Agency. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) played a major role in the development of computer, networking technology and eventually even the Internet itself. Billions and BILLIONS of dollars were spent on R&D and the development of new capabilities and technologies. This even included the design, launch and operation of spy satellites with various capabilities like photographic recon, IR recon and the capture of faint radio signals. In fact in 1959 the US launched the Vela series of satellites to detect nuclear detonations. These satellites discovered by chance Gamma Ray Bursters in the distant universe and inadvertently gave birth to orbital observatories and astronomy beyond the visible spectra. In the mid eighties the US and UK brought a system online called Echelon which have the capabilities that we are now collectively freaking out over. It could electronically "listen" to signals and pick up on keywords and focus on individuals. These capabilities have only been improved and upgraded over the years. These systems did not arrive on 9/11. They did not creep out of the Patriot Act. They have been growing and evolving in the shadows for decades funded by literally trillions of dollars in black budgets that your congressman has never heard of. The reliance on SigInt has consequences. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, US intelligence agencies have become dependent on SigInt and allowed their human intelligence capabilities to atrophy. They called it "the Peace Dividend". There were huge defense and intelligence cuts and the US intelligence establishment had to chose. They hung onto their SigInt capabilities at the expense of allowing their human intelligence assets to dry up and blow away. It was human assets that we blew off in Afghanistan that turned around and bit us on 9/11. It was SigInt that was completely blind to hand delivered messages and couriers that Osama bin Laden used to run his networks. It is those human assets that the US has had to develop to fight the war on terrorism. We have purchased the capability with trillions of dollars and concentrated effort over many decades. There have been many, many technological spin-offs that have sparked our economy. Reacting hysterically is simple idiocy. This technological terror has been here for decades. Those of us in the tech business quit talking about it years ago because people labeled us conspiracy nuts and invited us to don tin hats. Our task is to find a middle way to live with the beast but refuse to allow it to devour us. That requires oversight and that's just the sort of thing that spooks hate.

God-hood is an exceptionally ephemeral state. It does not take long to find the feet of clay and that being omniscient is an exceptional pain in the ass.

they really are a cute couple of pups.

if you drink enough, every movie is funny.

GAAAH! It's too hawt to eat. Too much humidity. 96 degrees (35.5 C). What have you got for summer vittles?

There are hard limits on what we can do with robotics and artificial intelligence. So... if SkyNet is really smart, they'll wait a while to kill all humans while we shore up some key technologies.

Whats under those hills can make a big difference too. Big iron and other deposits of heavy metals can skew the local gravity. If you look at the lunar distribution, you might see that some craters line up with the gravitational anomalies. One of the theories is that impact events enriched those sites.

Only the dead have seen the end of war. Only the mad desire it.

After seeing an article that was embarrassingly and egregiously full of crap, I created a much more relevant 10 tips... James Savik's 10 tips for young men 1. Pull up your pants so you don't look like a prison punk. 2. Know exactly what those Chinese characters mean before they become your tattoo. Unless you read and write Mandarin, you really wouldn't know the difference between "wisdom and strength" and "little bitch". 3. Know what to do in a fight. Kick balls or clock somebody with a brick. The object is to get away without scars, not to win an MMA trophy. 4. Know how long to take shit and when to say "up yours". 5. Own a knife. 6. Know the basics of handguns. Ignorance kills. 7. Have some idea of what you will do if the shit hits the fan. Don't wait until you are covered in it and the fan is sitting there slinging it across the room. 8. Wear the right shoes in the right size. Looking Cool doesn't mean SQUAT when you are on your feet all day. 9. Sometimes you just have to have the steak. 10. Never, ever, even accidentally have sex with one of your significant other's siblings.

James Savik's 10 tips for young men (I'll make more if you're hot) 1. Pull up your pants so you don't look like a prison punk. 2. Know exactly what those Chinese characters mean before they become your tattoo. Unless you read and write Mandarin, you really wouldn't know the difference between "wisdom and strength" and "little bitch". 3. Know what to do in a fight. Kick balls or clock somebody with a brick. The object is to get away without scars, not to win an MMA trophy. 4. Know how long to take shit and when to say "up yours". 5. Own a knife. 6. Know the basics of handguns. Ignorance kills. 7. Have some idea of what you will do if the shit hits the fan. Don't wait until you are covered in it and the fan is sitting there slinging it across the room. 8. Wear the right shoes in the right size. Looking Cool doesn't mean SQUAT when you are on your feet all day. 9. Sometimes you just have to have the steak. 10. Never, ever, even accidentally have sex with one of your significant other's siblings.

Agreed. The less said about Fred Figglehorn ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Figglehorn ) the better.

Ray Manzarek Dead: (one of) The Doors Founding Members Dies At 74 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/20/ray-manzarek-dead-the-doors_n_3308853.html Ray Manzarek, most known as a founding member of the '60s rock band The Doors, is dead. According to a message posted on the the bands facebook page, Manzarek died of bile duct cancer while in Rosenheim, Germany, on Monday, May 20. He was 74. Wife Dorothy Manzarek and brothers Rick and James were by his side. ___________________________________ Ray Manzarek was the highly influential and and innovative keyboardist for the Doors in the late sixties/early seventies. The following clips show Manzarek's use of the organ in "Light My Fire" and the electric piano in "Riders on the Storm". When so many bands were power trios, the Doors and others showed that if you were innovative in their use, keyboards could and did add serious depth and strength to any line up. RIP Ray. You will be missed. -JS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvVCCMG-JoQ

Earth would be as beaten up as the moon if it wasn't there. What doesn't hit our moon is often deflected by the geometry of the gravitational differential between the earth and the moon.

I couldn't have said it better myself. In fact I think that I have. I call the re-makes regurgitation- something the Hollyweird people barf out to cash in on someone else creativity. If you are going to re-imagine a movie, do what was done with Judge Dredd. Make it much, much better than the original.

I remember when the eye of Katrina moved over us. We thought it was all over. The skies cleared, rain stopped and the winds stopped howling. Electricity and comms were out so we didn't know that we were in the eye. We were in for another 16 hours of 100mph winds, storm, lightning and random tornadoes. The scary part of it is that you you can see the other side coming toward you at some point and it doesn't look at all friendly. Katrina wasn't the most powerful storm ever. What it lacked in wind velocity, it made up for in its slow speed of advance. Most hurricanes blow through relatively quickly. Because a front in Arkansas slowed Katrin's speed of advance, that bitch hung around for 36 hours.

Lately there has been an emphasis on the field part of my job as a field engineer. I have been driving quite a lot. I've been listening to audio books. Some I've read, some I haven't. Dune, Frank Herbert Ender's Game- Card Foundation- Asimov Cryptonomicon- Stevenson Ubik- Dick Red Storm Rising- Clancy Out of the Dark- Weber There's something I really like about audio books. Hearing the spoken word does something for a novel. It's something as a writer that I've taken note of. Now as I've writing something, when I finish a section I read it aloud to hear how it sounds. I think that makes a GREAT difference. There are profound differences in how we write and how we speak. It's off topic but it is something that writers really should pay attention to if you want to find that elusive thing called your voice.