Crypto-Catholics - Sun Worshippers at the Winter Solstice?

Every year around Daylight Savings Time in the fall and the time change leaving it in the spring I notice that the sign shines so brightly through the stain glassed window at our church, Immaculate Heart of Mary, that whole sections of the pews are unoccupied because parishioners would be starring straight into bright sunlight only partially filtered by the glass. I have a long term project to map those areas of the church but I need to get in there with a measuring tape to develop a good floor plan to do so.

One thing that I have done is notice the odd position the church has on its lot. It is not straight but on the diagonal. In fact, running a line through the church center and through the stain glassed window in the front of the church as in the diagram above shows that the church is oriented to face 123 degrees on a compass, or almost southeast by east. Why should it have that particular orientation. Using the Planetarium program on my trusty Treo or any website which gives a sunrise at 120 at 8:19am today, suspiciously close to the 123 degrees, give or take, of the orientation of the church.

Or it could be that the church is just facing the corner and its angle bisects the two roads that make up the southeast corner of the lot, Shipley Rd, which is the more north to south road, and Weldin Road which is the more east and west road. I used the New Castle County Parcel Search map function (IHM parcel) to get exact coordinates for the roads. These roads are not exactly aligned to a North, South East West grid or the church would point at 135 degrees (90 plus 45). The roads are canted slightly counter clockwise from the grid, which points the church at the sun. (click the picture below for larger)


The final choice I leave up to my capable readers. Is the church pointed at sunrise on the Winter Solstice in homage to the secret sun worshipping sect that took over the church at the time of Constantine, or is it just pointed aesthetically at the corner of the two roads that define the lots? Conspiracy or coincidence?

(I used the New Castle County Parcel Search and the mapping function there for pictures and maps. I also got some maps, aerial photography and coordinates and much more at the Delaware DataMIL, also click on the Map Lab for customer maps and the coordinate system I used to find the street orientations.)

Snow chairs, pillows and blankets

Snow piled up 17 inches high makes interesting "snow chairs"


The snow on the rocks in the creek makes it look like snow pillows have been placed gently in the creek.


Snow blankets cover the rocks near the waterfall on Shellpot Creek.

GR8 FOOD license plate in Pennsylvania

I have seen this Toni Roni truck twice this week on the way to work. It's got it all, an appropriate personalized license plate, GR8 FOOD, a slogan with a double entendre, and a franchise offer so that you can be a part of the experience.

Anybody want to go into business with me?

Waterfall on raging Shellpot Creek

This video confirms that after that night of rain that Shellpot Creek is almost as high as it has ever been this year.  It is interesting to watch and it roars when it is this high.

Shellpot Creek was a raging torrent this morning.

I would say that after that night of rain that Shellpot Creek is almost as high as it has ever been this year. It is interesting to watch and it roars when it is this high.

I will try to post some video later. I have been trying to do so all day.

Shellpot Creek is a raging torrent today

I think that after last night's rain that the creek behind the house is almost as high as it has ever been this year. It is roaring today.

Upstream of the waterfall on raging Shellpot Creek

Upstream of the water fall today was so high that the water draining from across the street down the ditch I had dug to the creek was held up. The creek isn't quite down hill today so the yard isn't draining.

More video of the raging Shellpot Creek

I tried to pan the camera downstream of the creek so that you can see the extent of the torrent.

Waterfall on raging Shellpot Creek

I would say that after that night of rain that Shellpot Creek is almost as high as it has ever been this year. It is interesting to watch and it roars when is is this high.

Picking against the spread in football (is difficult)

This year I am participating in a football pool where you must pick the team that win against the spread for each week. It is much harder than picking the winning team because the spread is supposed to even out the betting money on each side is the wisdom of the crowd opinion of the score difference that has the favorite beating it 50% of the time and losing 50% of the time.

I compiled the results up to week 12 of the current season.

It hovers around the 50% mark as you might expect. But there are fluctuations, and in those fluctuations there is money to be won. As I have said, I don't know anything about football, so I have been trying to see which teams not just win, but do well (or poorly) against the spread in the hopes of figuring out which teams the bookies are having trouble with and get an edge. My results thus far are still about 50/50. I told you I don't know anything about football.

Ultra Final Jeopardy - an answer without a clue

Ultra Final Jeopardy is when you guess the final answer knowing only the category and not the clue. Last night the final category was "Political Nonfiction" and I immediately said "All the President's Men", because, what else could it be. Then the clue came up - This book begins "June 17, 1972, nine o'clock Saturday morning". What else could it be but a book, that book, about Watergate. I was very pleased with myself.

I have gotten some other Final Jeopardy' with only the category and no clue, Walt Whitman seems to be a favorite answer. Granted I only remember the times I do this and not the ones I don't, so there is selection bias. I certainly try to forget anytime I fail to get the final answer even with the clue.

My dream someday is to go on Jeopardy and write in my final answer in the same space as my wager, knowing only the category at that step, just to show what an (obnoxious) badass I am. But in all reality I would just play it straight, because I would want to win.

Close up of the plastic flag

A closeup of the Plastic American flag by Amy Orr. Here you can really see the credit cards that make up the central plastic part of the design.

American Flag in plastic

An American Flag in plastic from the Amy Orr Plastic Culture exhibit at the DCCA. This piece is made of credit cards and flags. She carefully shows that the flags were made in China.

Obama: Hope in Plastic

Obama: Hope in Plastic 2009 by Amy Orr at the Plastic Culture exhibit at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art. I hope that you can see that this copy of Shepard Fairey's copy of an AP photo is made of variously colored credit cards.

Ghostbusters with equipment at Philcon

These Ghostbusters at Philcon had really good costumes. These crappy treo pix don't do justice to the flashing lights, switches and the detail of these costumes.

They were trading costuming and repurposing electronic toys hints with the Pennsylvania Jedi Society. I asked to take a picture since they had put the Ghostbusters theme into my head.

Ghostbusters Truck at Philcon

Saw this Ghostbusters decked out truck at Philcon in Cherry Hill New Jersey today.

Compact Car Only or unless you can't read

These spaces in north Wilmington are notoriously small, so they are correctly labelled "Compact Car Only". I can only conclude that adult illiteracy is still a big problem as the driver of this black pickup truck has failed to follow these instructions. The act is made more agregious by the fact that his tailget has one of those extensions on it, filled with sod, that only makes the truck even longer and more inappropriate for the space. If a car had parked on the other side, though I am not sure how they could, no one could have entered or exited the parking lot.

The alternative to them being illiterate is that they are a jerk. What do you think?

Creepy eyeball left over Halloween candy

Still encountering leftover Haloween candy like this creepy eyeball. It's creepy but I ate it anyway, because it was chocolate.

Fledging sparrows at the end of summer

Towards the end of summer we noticed that some birds had built a nest in the large flower pots that we have on our front porch, but never really saw any birds in it. In early September at the end of summer, all of the sudden the House Sparrows that had hatched were ready to fledge. I captured what appeared to be two babies and two parents during the first flight event. Ah, the wonders of nature.

The Trouble with "V"

We watched the highly-anticipated "V" this past week. I must not willingly suspend my disbelief any more or have lost my senswunda because I couldn't watch the pilot episode (or most TV for that matter) without picking holes in the plot and science. I understand that science must be stretched to accommodate an ostensible science fictional show, but stretch it too far, or perhaps the character's in the show response to it and I think you start to lose your audience. My comments below contain spoilers from the pilot episode so be sure to watch it before you continue reading.

When the aliens show up in their own spaceship in orbit round your planet, you have already lost the battle. They have the high ground and they can just drop rocks on you until you submit. And that's just using the laws of physics as we know them. Interplanetary travel is hard enough, interstellar is practically impossible (takes a lot of energy) given our current understanding of physics. (Charles Stross has recently done a rift on this.) These aliens would need antigravity or something like it, which they apparently do have. I suppose the the V must get to Earth or there is no story.

Why doesn't anybody but the one newscaster comment on how much the V look like humans? He asks why they are all so attractive, I would ask why they look anything like us at all. Convergent evolution? Long lost brothers from a prehistoric human space empire? All of these explanations have important consequences, especially for the plot. If they are humans from another place why would Earth authorities ever let them set foot on the planet in these days of H1N1 swine flu, SARS, AIDS and weaponized anthrax, without wearing spacesuits to prevent them contaminating us with diseases we have never encountered before. I think history tells us what happens when two previously isolated human populations encounter each other for the first time.

Perhaps they are not human and are just wearing disguises so that we feel more comfortable around them. That opens up the question of how they developed the disguises and how long have they really been on Earth, how did they learn all of our languages, etc. When the secret V resistance meets and then gets wiped out by V infiltrators, it is not a surprise at how well they fit in give their looks. It is a surprise that anyone needs to be convinced that there are V among us. When the human survivors leave they should have taken some V bodies with them to expose the conspiracy. That would have been more important than their lives.

Perhaps the disguises are due to a really good knowledge of human physiology. Just how did they figure out how to cure human diseases anyway? That sounds like they would have had to do some experimentation to get it right. And thus we are right back to some obvious clues that the V have been on Earth long before they announced themselves and those alien abduction stories might be true.

I suppose because the show is a political allegory of the Obama administration (really) and not science fiction, that I shouldn't be surprised that none of the characters embedded in the story ask any of these important questions. At least they mentioned Independence Day when the ships show up. If aliens ever do show up in spaceships around Earth, they will have to deal with all of preconceptions formed from movie after movie exploring such a scenario. However, the current state of humanity is that it appears that we are alone in the universe, Enrico Fermi himself asked where is everybody. It is hard to explain why there appears to be only one place in the universe where intelligent life exists, even harder to explain why there would be only two. Stephen Baxter has written three novels and countless short stories just explaining away.

In spite of the implausibilities I will continue watching V to see if it improves, and because I seem to get as much fun out of picking apart television series as just watching them these days.

How often does the winner of the third game win the World Series after a split first two games.

As I noticed searches landing on my earlier posts about World Series probabilities, I noticed that fans are asking "How often does the team that wins the third game of the World Series win the whole thing". From history that chance is 68%, from a simulation in which it assumed that either team has a 50% chance of winning a game it is 65%.

A better questions relates to the current situation going into tonight's World Series game. If the teams split the first two games, how often does the winner of the third game go on to win the series? In history, teams have split the first two games 50 out of 99 times, and the next team to win has gone on to win it all 35 of those games or 70% of the time. The simulations show a similar 50% of the trials have a split in the first two games, and 70% of those splits have the team that wins the third game willing the Series.

How often does the first team to win a game win the World Series if they lose the second game?

After last night's loss of the Phillies to the Yankees the World Series is tied one game to one game. I thought that I could update the information from yesterday on the probability that the team that wins the first game of the World Series wins the whole series.

Now the question is "What is the probability that the team that wins the first game of the series and loses the second wins the World Series?" A review of 100 years or so of World series data (plus looking at each series on wikipedia) shows that 50% of the time the teams in the World Series split the first two games. This provides our data set. 50% of the teams that won the first game and lose the second win the World Series.

That makes perfect sense, now the teams are one and one and each team has to win three games to win the whole thing. It becomes a best of five series. Simulations with 10,000 trials and assuming that the teams win 50% of the time confirm the historical trend. In 50% of the cases when the teams split the first two games, the winner of the first game goes on to win the World Series 50% of the time.

How often does the winner of the first game win the World Series

The Fox announcers off-handedly mentioned after the Phillies first game win that the team that won the first game of the World Series has gone on to win the Series in the past six years. I wondered if this was an interesting statistic or an obvious one. If you think about it, once a team wins one game of the series they only have to win three more games, where as there opponent must win four to win. Winning the first game has an inherent obvious advantage. Perhaps that stat isn't so interesting.

We can simulate a World Series by choosing a probability of winning a game, 50% seems a fair starting point, and then counting games. Once a team wins four games, perform no further game simulations for that series. Simulating 10,000 series allows the collection of some statistics and probabilities. For instance, the number of games in a series if the games are a toss up (one team wins 50% of the time) is shown in the chart below.

The exact result for how many games will occur in a World Series if each team wins 50% of the time is 4 games 1/8 of the time, 5 games 1/4 of the time and 6 and 7 games 5/16 of the time for both. This is a good check on our simulation.

The results from 100 years of World Series (including only best of seven series) closely parallels the simulations, with four game series slightly more common.

To answer the first question, 10,000 trials shows that if the games are a toss up the winner of the first game goes on to win the World Series 65.6% of the time. A glance back at almost 100 years of World Series, (eliminating ones that were not best of seven, and using wikipedia to see which team won first), shows that historically the first team to win wins the series 66% of the time. Perhaps that stat from Fox isn't so surprising.

Varying the probability that one team (say the National League team) wins from 50% lets the simulation explore the probability that the first team to win a game wins the series. Obviously if one team wins 100% of the time, they win the first game and the series. This is also the same as if one team wins 0% of the time, the other team wins the first game and the series. The middle result (50% probability of winning a game), reported above, is 65.6%. The plot below shows how this varies with the probability of the National League team winning. Given that the historical result is that the first team to win a game in the World Series wins the Series 66% of the time, it is reasonable to expect that the chance one or the other team would win a given World series game is close to 50%, or at least somewhere between 40% and 60%.

Finally the simulation reveals the number of games played, the series winner and the winner of the first game. The plot below shows that histogram.


Because the simulation is only 10,000 trials, the results here are probably plus or minus 0.5%.

Caterpillars

At the end of September, I noticed some large banded and spotted caterpillars finishing off the last of the parsley in the garden.

There were about five caterpillars.

They crawled up and down the stems denuding the plants of any leaves. When the y got the end of a stalk they would get confused and then turn around and start down again.




I thought that these might be Monarch Butterfly caterpillars, but a search at this site revealed that these are likely to be the second instar or moult of the caterpillar stage of Black Swallowtail caterpillars. The pictures match and the wikipedia article (Black Swallowtail, Papilio polyxenes) even mentions that they like to eat plants from the carrot family like dill and parsley.

You are reading the polls and this chart incorrectly

TYWKIWDBI presents a chart aggregating polls from Pollster.com which seems to indicate that the Democrats and Republicans are losing voters who are becoming independent. Here is TYWKIWDBI's repost of the Pollster chart:


That conclusion can only be made if you actually ignore the points (besides the fact the the X axis labels are lost). Pollster has plunked a solid line which appears to be the average of the data from all of these polls. That's all well and good, but the points that the average is made from are all over the place. here I have replotted the polls and included the 90th and 10th percentile of the last 20 polls for each of the party affiliations. The heavy solid lines are the average of the last 20 polls, red for Republicans, blue for Democrats and green for Independents, the lighter solid lines are the 90th and 10th percentile of the last 20 polls. The points are the individual polls plotted on the ending date of the poll period. The data is all right under the chart at Pollster.com.

Close examination (click on the chart above for a large version) of this very cluttered chart reveals that you could draw lines which trend up or down or stay the same for any any of the affiliations and not leave the area between the between the 90th and 10th percentile lines. Print it out and try it or replot it yourself.

The most you can confidently say about this chart is, "wow, there is a lot of scatter in these poll results." I don't think that you can state with confidence that there has been a statistically significant change in Democratic or Independent affiliation. I am not even sure there is a decrease in Republican affiliation. Shame on you Pollster.com for putting in those average lines, and shame on you TYWKIWDBI for reposting it with your faulty conclusions. Bad statistics, bad presentation (including my cluttered chart).

I SK8 license plate in Delaware

I think this woman skates, as evidenced by the I SK8 license and the SK8 sticker. The question is ice skating, roller blading, skateboards or roller derby.

Roller Derby would be cool.

FAT license plate in Delaware

I didn't notice that the driver of this Toyota truck with a FAT license was particularly overweight. Perhaps FAT is meant as slang meaning good.

Steampunk or wood punk old-fashioned Saw Mill running at the Upper Peninsula State Fair

I took these videos of the saw mill that they usually have running at the Michigan Upper Peninsula State Fair in Escanaba, Michigan, when we were there on vacation this past August. The saw mill runs using a power take-off (PTO) from an old steam engine driven tractor. All day long these guys cut huge tree trunks into usable lumber. I heard that people with lumber from their property sometimes wait until the fair so they can cut sawn boards from this mill, for authenticity's sake for their cabins or old buildings.




The circular saw is huge, it looks three feet across. The mechanism holding the lumber cleverly moves the lumber another board thickness after each pass of the saw so that many boards can be cut from a log of the same set thickness.




If the apocalypse came tomorrow, I think these guys could still be running their saw mill and getting your boards for your new back country cabin to wait out the coming troubles.




You can see the resulting in the video above as well as a a view of the steam engine.

I tried to get a closer view of the actual engine running the saw mill here:




Looked like a coal fired steam engine.

Risk of H1N1 flu vaccine blown out of proportion, and bringing out the crazies

My response to the bad science and statistic going around about getting the H1N1 flu vaccine. Due to this tweet.

From 7 reasons to Avoid the Swine Flu Vaccination especially for Children:

She starts with this crazy disclaimer:

I do not vaccinate and believe there are many many good reasons for that choice. As a mother of four grown children I faced the decision as a parent, which can be very difficult in our vaccine culture. I have four very healthy children, young adults, who have never been vaccinated. They do not have the allergies, asthma or other chronic diseases that are epidemic in children these days, and they all have terrific immune systems with lifelong immunity to childhood diseases, and yes, once-in-awhile they get the flu and they get over it. It was my belief, that given the vaccine load placed on children and infants (a still growing load), the compositions of the vaccines, and the unknowns, that the risks of vaccines were not worth an arguable benefit.

And then goes on to list the reason based in bad statistics and bad science. This was my comment:

While it is great that your four children are healthy, they do not constitute a statistically significant sampling of non-immunized people. They have also benefited from the fact that everyone around them is vaccinated from the diseases they didn't get (polio, measles, diphtheria, typhus, etc.). You are also conflating your unwise choice to not have your children immunized with your relatively neutral choice to not get the H1N1 flu vaccine.

For the various mild influenzas, vaccination helps to avoid a mild illness. If you are in a risk group then the flu will not be a mild illness and you might want to avoid getting the flu bu getting vaccinated. You don't mention being in a high risk group so feel free not to get the vaccine. The rest of your arguments are spurious and not well thought out (toxins?) and show a lack of understanding of statistics and risk. It is too bad many will take your neutral advice on the H1N1 vaccine and extend it to other vaccinations with bad effect.

I probably won't be able to get it anyway since apparently Delaware supplies are lower and slower than expected.

DE State population of ~800,000.
CDC say the maximum that DE can order is 520,000
400,000 are in the priority groups in DE.
DE acute care hospitals ordered 127,500 doses and received 4,900 last week.
Expected 111,000 by end of October, now getting 73,000.

The news Journal article doesn't clearly distinguish who is getting the vaccines and numbers. There is some mention of Public Health officials and of the hospitals. Typical confusing News Journal article.

Preserve us from previous homeowners - three inaccessible electrical junction boxes

Someone please save me from previous homeowners. I, of course, always follow the electrical code and do perfect work whenever I do any electrical work in any of the houses that I have owned, but those guys that owned the houses before me, what do they know?

We are renovating the second floor bathroom and are to the point where the floor is up, and the walls that had tile on them are out (all done by Lynn, it is really her renovation), which gives unprecedented access to wire new plugs and add an exhaust fan (all done by me, I do the electrical). Breaking up the cast iron tub with a sledge hammer was also lots of fun and one of the few tasks besides electric that I have done, mostly by virtue of the weak but still present sexual dimorphism of homo sapiens.

The other day we took the medicine cabinet off of the wall, because we are going to save it and recess it properly and guess what we found.


A hidden electrical box right behind it. This is not allowed by code. More fun was the realization that the box was connected to two other boxes that had been walled up behind the drywall years ago. We suspect 2001 based on the date on the Corian sink we removed.


This box is in the wall covered up to the right of the stud bay with my new correctly wired outlet. This outlet was at the end of the run. At least they covered the outlet with a plate. Possibly the code allowed this back when they did it. I doubt it.


This box is on the wall covered up to the left of the stud bay with my other correctly wired GFCI outlet. This stud bay was only six inches wide. I was surprised they was an inaccessible junction box there. This was the box with the most issues because the power came down from the attic through a hole in the studs to this box on the left and then across to the center box and the one on the right.

These boxes had power going through them, and worst of all the lights above the opening are powered through them. A glance at the internet reveals that you are not allowed to have inaccessible junction boxes. This guy had to rewire a junction box with a lot of wires that he found, you guessed it, behind a medicine cabinet. He provides good pictures and a nice tutorial on the process. This idiot asked advice about whether he could have an inaccessible junction box. The comments are universally no, but then he wants to solder the wires together and leave them in the wall and argues his point. I suppose he was looking for just one person to say it was OK.

One of the best uses of a digital camera is in this situation where I could put the camera in the bays and see what was going on much easier than trying to poke my head in there. I was able to get rid of the box on the right by unwiring the center box.


I then figured out that the light above was connected with the copper wire. Once I convinced myself that the left box only had the wire with power going in and the black wire coming out the center. I cut those to get the box out and proceeded to figure out how to connect the light's copper wire to the power wire without doing it in an inaccessible junction box. One idea would have been to turn the junction box around and have it be accessible with a plate over it on the other side of the wall, which is inside a closet in the next room. I finally realized that I had enough wire to pull the power wire and the light wire up through the top plate into the attic and connect them in an accessible junction box in the attic. Problem solved, light switch works again, after about a half a day of thinking about a solution and then fixing it. It also wouldn't be a remodeling job if at the end I didn't have to do the final wiring up in the attic amidst the blown in fiberglass insulation, by flashlight, because the attic light was on the same circuit breaker that I turned off to do the work.

The final excitement in this drama is an old problem to me since we have been in this house almost three years now. The house was wired with aluminum wiring. At this point most readers have fainted dead away or are calling the fire department right now because they just assume my house is on fire because it has aluminum wiring. I know that this type of wiring is associated with an increase of the rate of fires, but it can't be that large since so many of these houses from the 60's and 70's still exist and this one was around to for us purchase. I always use the correct fixtures that are compatible with aluminum wiring or I pigtail with copper wiring. I also use the correct UL listed purple connectors with anti-corrosive paste in them if I must have copper and aluminum wiring in the same junction. Many sites say these are inadequate, but those are usually sponsored by the much more expensive cold weld alternative companies that can only be done by an electrician or by very paranoid home inspectors. I have been warned.

Lascivious Croatian Chicken beckons to you from the spit

A picture didn't do justice to the lascivious movement of the chickens slowly turning on the spit at the Michigan Upper Peninsula State Fair back in August, so I captured a video. Watch how the chickens turn and each flap of a wing or kick of a leg as they turn seems to beckon you to eat more delicious rotisserie chicken.




This booth had Croatian chicken, which appears to be spit rotisseried chicken, but with extra spices and a crispy skin and I am sure extra fat and butter somehow cooked into it. It was so good that we had it for lunch that day and then on the way home got another one for dinner.

The rotisserie was a hue mechanical affair, run by a motor. The tenders made sure that there was charcoal enough to keep the chickens hot and cooking and would move the big spits as appropriate.

Just thinking again of how delicious it was makes me want to get more. Just have to wait until next August and travel to Escanaba, Michigan again to get some.

LCROSS to crash into the moon on Friday morning

Howard reminds me that LCROSS is scheduled to impact the moon on Friday.

Astronomy Service Slooh Will Let You Watch The LCROSS Impact Live On October 9 at 7:30am EDT.

"The Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite will hit the moon to created a crater 14 meters in diameter and 2 meters deep. The resulting analysis will help assess how large bodies will damage planets along with an assessment of current water levels in the moon. Plus it involves blowing holes in the moon."

I have been following LCROSS on twitter since its launch. It tends to post quippy remarks about its position and snippets of traveling songs and moon songs. For instance:


These song quotes are from Ticket to the Moon by ELO.

This quote is from the Grateful Dead song, Yellow Moon. This is the tweet that started me worrying about LCROSS's sanity. It's the kind of thing a computer would say before it took over the laboratory and started killing everybody.


Quotes from Space Truckin' by Deep Purple.


LCROSS's nightmare above is courtesy of Bat Out of Hell by Meat Loaf.


I have this song on my iPod, "Fly Me To the Moon", the Frank Sinatra version.


I also have this song on my iPod, "Destination Moon", the Dinah Washington version on Ultra-Loung Vol 15: Wild Cool and Swing' Too. The other quote is from Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan.

I have now become invested in its fate and I will be sorry to see it crash into the moon.

I realize that whoever is posting for LCROSS is trying to generate interest but having a twitter feed to which anthropomorphisizes a device destined for destruction is getting to me a little. Especially since the discovery of water on the moon by other means may make its destruction fruitless. It claims that it isn't doomed but on a heroic mission like some that have gone before:


Perhaps I am felling a little maudlin.

(other moon songs can be found here.)

Nice parking job

The inconsiderate driver in the black SUV parked their car across the line in a double parking space so no one could park in front of or behind them. Very jerky considering the parking lot was full to capacity as it was during a children's consignment sale.

Not to be deterred the person in the red car parked in the space in front of the jerk anyway. I can't really blame them as I thought of parking there myself. What I really wanted to do was park behind the balck SUV and block them in. Instead, my revenge is to impotently rage abouty it here.

Pink Floyd fan in Delaware

This PKFLYD license plate in Delaware declares the owner to be a true fan.

I just want to know, which one is Pink?

New website design

I am thinking of doing this to the website, what do you think?

The new honest hypocrite.

(via MattHearn.com)

AQUMINI license in Delaware

Not sure what AQUMINI is supposed to stand for on this Delaware license plate but I have never seen a Q on a Delware license before so I captured it in a photograph.

This license also declares it self to be a centenial license plate 1909-2009, but I am not sure what centenial it is celebrating, maybe of the DMV.

Speculations from the crowd?

Venn diagram of Baseball team names and origins

This fascinating diagram of Major League Baseball team names groups them together by type and origin.


There are more links with the origins of the team names at FlipFlopFlyBall.com. The name origin of "Phillies" is obvious, but did you know the Detroit Tigers are names after the Detroit Light Guard military unit, known as "The Tigers." So they are only named after an animal because what they were named for was named after an animal.

(via Neatorama, via Kottke)

Magenta Screen of Death?

I have heard of the blue screen of death, and like everyone I have, very rarely, had my computer reset suddenly, but has anyone ever heard of the magenta screen of death?

Every so often my computer screen suddenly goes blank and shows one color like this, one time it was bright green. The hard drive light blinks still so I suspect that the computer us still working but the video output is broken. Turning the monitor off and on doesn't fix it, and I have been to lazy to unplus the monitor from the computer to see if haty fixes it. Any ideas?