Science

Does anybody in Chicago use Direct TV ?

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I live in the mountains east and north of Los Angeles. Last summer, when I bought my house, I ordered Direct TV for television service as the cable company wouldn’t even schedule an installation until the escrow closed. I had no complaints about the TV service until the first snowfall. I had no service for two days. I called Direct TV and was told that snow interferes with the signal (duh !) and there was nothing I could do. I had a satellite dish in New Hampshire in 1994 and 95 and never had this problem. The next time it happened I called and finally got to a technical advisor who told me there was such a thing as a dish heater but Direct TV had nothing to do with them. He did give the URL of several web sites where I could get more information. I found that I would have to install the heater myself and the dish is nearly 20 feet above my upper deck.

Last weekend, when we had more snow, Cindy was atop a seven foot ladder trying to reach the dish with a broom but with no luck. The angle of the dish, which catches more snow, makes it impossible to brush the dish off. It seems to be a pretty common problem and one would think that Direct TV would anticipate these problems in areas with substantial snowfall. Maybe they could supply the dish heaters as an option, especially when the dish is mounted so high. Then the technician could install both. The new dishes also seem to be of a deeper chord and the location may determine the angle of elevation to the satellite. New Hampshire is a higher latitude, as is Chicago, and that dish seemed to be flatter in my recollection.

Does anybody in Greater Chicago use these dishes and do they have problems like this ? I got nowhere with them, and am not about to try to install a heater on the dish, so I finally canceled and will have to pay a substantial early cancellation charge.

Ah yes, the entomology of war

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[ in playful response to M. Fouche’s recent post here, Butterfly Effect ]

Links: Chaos theory – Nanoscience

Number Gut, Continued

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Many authors have written on these pages about what damage has been done to us humans by people choosing not to vaccinate their children.

I remember just a few years ago when faced with this choice. To me it was a no brainer, but my wife was exposed to other wives/moms her age that had chosen not to vaccinate their kids. I finally convinced my wife to vaccinate the kids by using common sense with her. I said that if there was such a huge connection between autism and the vaccines, wouldn’t we see a huge explosion of autism cases? After looking at simple figures available online, this was simply not the case.

Today on Fox News, it seems that many who wrote here are vindicated – they doctored the data. These guys, imho, should be shot for endangering the lives of millions of people.

Beyond Human

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Anyone recognize this guy?

marvel comics thor

That is Thor, comic character from Marvel Comics. Based, of course, on the deity worshiped by the Norse.

What can this object of ancient reverence do to warrant such regard? Like most thunder gods, he can hurl thunderbolts that destroy his enemies as long as he wields a mystical hammer called Mjolnir.

ultimate marvel thor hammer mjolnis

That is the main thing thunder gods do, after all, and it seemed to be something that would be extremely impressive to the Vikings.

Anyone recognize these?

both-9mm-carry-guns-with-spent-brass-and-loaded-magazines

My favorite carry guns. They are smaller and lighter than that hammer thing, and yet I can still create thunder by no more effort than making a fist.

Sure, it isn’t exactly the same thing. I can’t call the storm like Thor supposedly could, for example. But it still is a perfectly common, well known, mature technology that expands my abilities to something that is impossible for an unaided human being to duplicate.

I’m bringing up the fantastically obvious due to this online article. (Hat tip to Glenn.) Some really strange young woman has a hobby where she cuts herself open in order to shove magnets down amongst nerve clusters. Says she can feel magnetic fields that way.

Read more

A new Ice Age. Maybe ?

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There is a great deal of argument about the reality of anthropogenic global warming. Al Gore is on one side and the weather seems to be on the other. People are even talking about the “Gore Effect.” This is unexpected cold weather that seems to follow Al Gore around. If he comes to town to give a speech about how the world is warming, expect a cold snap or even snow.

Right now, Britain, and much of Europe, are enduring a terrible winter. This has been called the worst winter in Britain in 100 years. The British Met Office predicted a warm winter. London, however, was prepared for snow. A lot of snow. The result has been that London has kept up quite well with the weather except for Heathrow Airport which has been closed for two days. (My niece has been trapped there since the weekend.) Why did London city do better than Heathrow and most of the rest of Britain ?


The Mayor explains. He uses a private weather forecaster who is getting more and more respect from people who have to know about the weather, like farmers and business people.

And the Mayor of London.

Is it really true that no one saw this coming?

Actually, they did. Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded leftie MP Jeremy. Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.

Back in November, when the Met Office was still doing its “mild winter” schtick, Corbyn said it would be the coldest for 100 years. Indeed, it was back in May that he first predicted a snowy December, and he put his own money on a white Christmas about a month before the Met Office made any such forecast. He said that the Met Office would be wrong about last year’s mythical “barbecue summer”, and he was vindicated. He was closer to the truth about last winter, too.

He seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time and serious business people notably in farming are starting to invest in his forecasts. In the eyes of many punters, he puts the taxpayer-funded Met Office to shame. How on earth does he do it? He studies the Sun.

He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.

He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time and he makes a prophecy.

Many of us climate skeptics believe that the sun controls our climate and Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.”

Are we now in a Dalton Minimum ?

Well, it doesn’t look good. How long before the climate science people open their eyes ?

it is a full two years since the month of solar minimum, this was a good opportunity to update a lot of graphs of solar activity.

Read the whole thing.