Ice Road Truckers

In a 7th season episode of History's television program, Ice Road Truckers, drivers had to cross a frozen lake on thin ice. One of the truckers removed half the cargo his rig was carrying before he attempted crossing.

During winter, truck drivers maneuver huge rigs over frozen lakes and rivers in the Arctic Territories of Canada and Alaska. Only when freezing temperatures allow the creation of roads over frozen grass swamps, lakes and rivers, are the truckers able to deliver supplies and construction materials to the mining and commercial establishments.

The roads are treacherous, but experienced drivers manipulate semi trailers around hazardous curves with snow banks and ditches at every turn.

Drivers who accept the challenges, earn high wages for each run. The appearance of straight stretches of highway can be deceiving with unseen hazards under the ice and snow. Semi trucks weighing as much as 60 tons, can at a moments notice, slide into a ditch or thru a crack in the ice. Drivers make delivery runs 24/7, taking advantage of the frozen roads before Spring melts the lake and river ice.

Watching Ice Road Truckers is a nail biting, holding ones breath, adrenalin rush! The men and women who drive those roads are a special breed!

Mackenzie River Ice Road

It's a scary world by A. Nonymus

It's a scary world out there. For ordinary folks to criminals wanting to create mischief, the revelations that everything we do is being reported, tracked, scanned, digitally tracked via CCTV, and stored, is eye opening, but do we really have to be careful of the microwave, the dishwasher, refrigerator, and coffee maker?

An article in Yahoo Finance on 9 Household Items That Can Track You by Adam Levin details how ordinary items in your home can be used to track and record data about you. Not only can they track you but "bad guys" can even affect medical implants like pace makers and insulin pumps which are all run by micro chips and can be hi-jacked using the same techniques used by the NSA.

If you want to take control of an area, country, state, city, town, street or home, all you need to do is to cut off the electricity, which cuts off the electronic toys and everyone is helpless. This information is used more by criminals or corporations with less than pure intent, but it can be used to apply pressure or threat of serious disruption to services from nearly any corner of the world.

What's happened to us?

And what is happening to all this data that is being gathered by governments and corporations?

Yottabyte: a descriptor of electronic storage capability.

I recently heard this word "yottabyte" and I looked it up. A yottabyte is a really big number equal to a bunch of "zettabytes" - basically it's a trillion terabytes!

The NSA super computer farms described by Robert Gelber in 2012 and more prominently in recent news, can hold multiple yottabytes of data. There are about a half dozen or more of these computer farms - all just happily mining everything! They also pick up all the information from your in-home devices since everything that travels electronically is swept up too. What time you make your coffee, times you use the microwave, when you wash the dishes, how often you do laundry - and what exact settings you use or prefer ... I mean ... where does it end?

One yottabyte can hold ALL the knowledge, books, communications, and all information and data ever created since the dawn of man.

'They' are serious about storing this information and I do mean ALL information.

Who thinks this stuff up?

I used to joke that we 'paranoids' can 'never be too sure', but I never conceived, even in my worst moments of paranoia, of anything on this scale! Even now I can barely grasp the concept, and it literally is breathtaking.

So, just give the microwave a knowing sly grin next time you nuke the java, or run the delicate cycle on your washing machine!


From Wikipedia Yottabyte:

"1 YB = 1000000000000000000000000bytes = 10008bytes = 1024bytes = 1000zettabytes = 1 trillion terabytes.;

"To store a yottabyte on terabyte sized hard drives would require a million city block size data-centers, as big as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island.[1] If 64 GB microSDXC cards (the most compact data storage medium available to public as of early 2013) were used instead, the total volume would be approximately 2500000 cubic meters, or the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza."

[Editor's note: This story written by by A. Nonymus]

Television

What has happened to television?

Television lends itself admirably to the airing of debates on topics of public interest, but recently, courteous exchanges of view has degenerated into screaming matches between diametrically opposed factions. Hosts of live interview programs invite knowledgeable people to appear and express their views, pro and con, on subjects of social and political interest. I enjoy watching them even when I disagree with the opinions being expressed.

Traditionally, the discourse is carried on in a courteous and respectful tone as both sides of a subject is explored and opinions clarified, but recently many people appearing on these programs are so highly charged with emotion, the shows erupt into screaming matches with waving hands, pointing fingers and yelling over each others voice.

Not long ago, Wolf Blitzer on CNN had two women screaming at each other over the voting law in South Carolina. Hannity, on Fox, seems to enjoy having women scream angrily at each other because he never interrupts to ask them to speak one at a time.

This screaming fad seems to have infected many of the TV talk channels. Perhaps if the celebrity hosts of these programs instituted a little more control over the discussions, a listener would actually learn something about the topic being discussed.



Olive Branch

Baby Morality

An astonishing segment on 60 Minutes, a CBS TV program, showcased a study on whether babies are born knowing good from bad. The segment had aired once before, but I had missed it.

Researchers studying child cognition have conducted studies showing that 6 to 8 month-old babies display a strong preference for 'helpers' over 'hinderers'.

The babies, too young to talk and walk, but able to reach for items, are shown scenarios using plush toys like teddy bears.

One scenario shows a rabbit puppet having difficulty opening the lid of a box, and one of two teddy bears watching the rabbit, begins to help the rabbit raise the lid.

When the scenario is shown again with the rabbit trying to open the box, the teddy bear on the other side of the rabbit jumps on the lid preventing the box being opened. Later, when the 'helper' and the 'hinder' toys are held so the babies can take the toy they want, every baby tested reached for the good 'helper' toy.

Researchers also discovered that 3 month-old babies, who are too young to reach for an item, also chose 'helpers' over 'hinderers'. When they were shown the same scenarios the older babies had seen, then offered the toys, their eye movements showed that they looked at the 'hinder' toys for a few seconds, but rested their eyes on the 'helper' toys for almost a minute .

Fractal Flower

I saw this beautiful Fractal Flower by Sharon Apted. Enjoy.

Fractal Flower
Sharon Apted

Crossword Puzzle Words

As I worked a crossword puzzle, I came across a word ending in "erer". As I wrote e,r,e,r in the blank squares of the puzzle book, I realized that I rarely use or spell a word ending in those letters. They seemed strangers to my every day vocabulary.

Wondering how many words I could think of with this ending, I spent a few hours listing the words I could think of, but when I got stumped I resorted to duckduckgo.com for an answer. The computer kept thinking I was asking about "ere', but with persistence, I was astonished to discover 168 words ending in "erer".

As an avid mystery book reader, I can't believe I missed thinking of the word "murderer"!




Arthur Wynne
Inventor of the modern crossword puzzle 1913