Wall to wall coverage of Maryland--the media and the audience.

When Occupy Wall Street began, and at the dawn of the Arab Spring, throwing off oppression in whatever form was a rising principle and of course reporters who regard themselves as eye witnesses to history are going to focus on such things and keep close track of what develops...until it's brought to their attention that they've been ignoring what the police have been getting away with all the time the press' attention was focused elsewhere, so now they're watching the police with ardor since the Ferguson situation.  And they focused elsewhere because their competitors were, and why does the media look to scoop each other on a single major event?

Ratings...and that means attracting an audience.  It looks like audience expert Rush Limbaugh is failing in that department these days.  He and the right wing flock are supposedly upset about Stephen Colbert's taking over David Letterman's seat, but the reason Colbert is taking over is Colbert's ratings on Comedy Central.  That pesky "fickle" audience again.  So blame it on the type of audience, why don't ya--demographic profile has GOTTA be different.

Well, how 'bout considering the shrinking credibility demographic and you'll understand why Brian Williams got suspended and why Robin Williams' show, "The Crazy Ones", got cancelled.  Oh dear--Limbaugh and Williams and Williams mentioned in the same breath--I can hear the howls from here.  Nonetheless, the common denominator here is the audience, interchangeable with the term "ratings", and when you're a radio chain mogul who has blown a massive wad of moolah on a long term contract with a guy who is the radio Pied Piper of the radical right wing wacko demographic for as many years as Rush has, what the hell could possibly go wrong? Rick Unger of Forbes magazine thinks he's got it figured out, and what he says about the sponsors of Limbaugh's program is the same principle every other show sponsor goes by: how big an audience ya got?

I've said it before and I'll say it again--if a performer isn't attracting an audience, sponsors will think the performer isn't worth spending their money on, so they shouldn't act so damn surprised when they get the axe.  Limbaugh hasn't gotten the axe yet but he's still bound by a contract that his boss apparently wishes he hadn't gotten into.

(Yup, I acknowledge that the articles linked to are old; it's just that word has just come down the pike that Limbaugh is moving to a smaller Chicago station from his old lavish digs, and Stephen Colbert's takeover of Letterman's show is imminent, and it's true that CBS' expectations of "The Crazy Ones" was unrealistic--we'll see if it's also true of their expectations of Colbert).

Edited to add a comment about Unger's editorial about how networks don't seek the over 50 demographic because of the diminished spending power of the close-to-retirement set.  Next to nobody retires with a retirement package anymore and Social Security alone doesn't cut it.  But with that demographic myopia, they're leaving out all the seniors who ARE old enough to have been part of the set who retired on a pension when everybody had one.

There's also the matter of Limbaugh's fans getting older.  There may come a time where he'll have to move out of Chicago and go back to Cape Girardeau cuz that's the only place where he'll still be a celebrity.  Maybe The Purple Crackle will take him in as a permanent stand-up comedian.

Interesting how the Purple Crackle is considered to be Cape history--it was founded and rose to notoriety not in Cape proper, but on the Illinois side in East Cape.  It burnt down with some regularity until it moved from Illinois to Missouri...but that article I linked to recounts that history, including how it got its name--it doesn't mention that Limbaugh was a patron of the East Cape establishment, ha.  He WAS.  Ah, yes--it opened in 1939, so I'm going to have to add that tidbit to my post about the 1930s. 

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Tuesday Clarafication: The above post was written rather late at night when I was looking for the existence of  other news and Baltimore was all I could find, and that would include any sort of news item online that I could link to about the news I'd just heard about Limbaugh moving his facilities to smaller, more humble digs.  The old links were all I could dig up last night. By no means do I suggest that Limbaugh is somehow more important than the events in Baltimore, but I do suggest that it's not the only thing happening in the world, and that includes the superficial nods all the news entities were giving to the disaster in Nepal.

I'll now mention how surprised and relieved I was about an apparently new Facebook feature that they added apparently during the space of time that they banned me for being a fake person: people who reside in areas where there are natural disasters are now able to check in to Facebook just to announce the fact that they are safe.  And it is with great relief that I found out that my friends in that area have indeed checked in as safe via this Facebook feature.

Limbaugh is originally from Cape Girardeau, and I'm intimately familiar with Cape Girardeau, as it happens...

Pic of a much-overhauled Dinky in Cape Girardeau's lovely Capaha Park. It didn't get the classy paint job until much later in its life, and it had jagged edges in its metal in various places yet kids could climb into and onto it at the time prior to its spruce-up.

The FM radio station I used to work at, in Cape Girardeau--no longer there or in existence. KFMP. It was almost fully automated, and it's the automation system I worked on that parlayed my better job with boiler/turbine control systems at Illinois Power Company.

Dean Speidel, if you're still with us, here's a shout out to you.  You were a helluva guy to work for, work with.  The next few shots are of SEMO.

Tuesday mini-UPDATE: just now caught the Baltimore presser which urged kids to still go to school as if the school was a proper replacement for parents, and the parents who kept their kids out of school clearly know that school is no substitute for parents keeping a direct eye on their kids.  Baltimore, schools aren't parents so stop pretending that they are.  If they were proper parental substitutes, then the last riot wouldn't have happened. FAIL

OH gimme a friggin' BREAK already, those of you who think I don't care what goes on in Baltimore even though my main issue is that it isn't the ONLY news out there, but to listen to the media entities, you'd get that impression.  I'm following other situations across the globe and if it wasn't for Twitter, I wouldn't have found out about THIS very important development.  You give me license to claim that you don't care about those girls on the same basis that you claim I don't care about Baltimore, you know.  Nigeria is right next door to Cameroon and I have extended family there, so don't get all self-righteous about your myopia.  I have an aversion to myopia.

Earth moving into the future united as a planet

...or not...

Eurozone, ASEAN, TPP, AIIP et al aren't global per se, but they're running into each other on an already-established global market and in the presence of megalomaniacal religions vying to control everything everywhere without learning from history that such a thing is beyond human capability, based on the failure rates of all the previous empires of the past, all of which were based on the same megalomaniacal religious premise.

There's been a sort-of global market (everywhere minus the Poles and the Americas) since antiquity, a trade party that Europe was extremely late to, but in "discovering" the Americas leveraged their way up the trade food chain, so to speak, and the latest efforts in the latest trade treaties are pretty much reinventing a rather old wheel, struggles to dominate trade being the objective...until we arrive at a point where Pacific partners would need to negotiate with Asian partners, and both those would need to negotiate with the Eurozone, which already negotiates with Atlantic partners, and it's those negotiations which will further the interests of an entire planet.

South America, as is the case with North America, finds itself on both the Atlantic and Pacific so although it's not such a big deal of being on both coasts in the North, you find that South America being commercially demarcated down the middle with interior nations being left out of both sides and Panama sitting in the catbird's seat.  If that continent seeks to enjoy unity as a contiguous continent of mutual commercial interests, you can't cultivate a division like that.  A similar rift exists in Eastern Europe outside the Eurozone where Greece and Turkey both sit in the catbird's seat as domination of the Ukraine becomes more important to many others besides the two belligerent parties directly involved.

This post is being typed prior to the Big Interview of President Obama by MSNBC's Chris Matthews, and when that takes place, odds are pretty good that I'll have more to add about this, including opposition to TPP fast-tracking by the AARP, unions, and the like.

Watch this space.

WikiLeaks text of TPP draft
NHK World report on TPP
NPR's On Point analysis of the TPP
The interview on MSNBC "If we don't write the rules on trade with these countries, China will"
The interview Part 2
The interview, Part 3 (About Iran, Yemen, not the TPP)

Obama: past trade deals didn't work for us but we now have the opportunity to put in labor standards, environment standards, and equal access to their markets as they have to our markets. Labor et al jumps to conclusions based on past trade agreements while the TPP sets new precedent and it's being prematurely judged. The problem with NAFTA was problematic enforceability, while the TPP lays out specific penalties. 

Past trade agreements have not resulted in better wage equality so a thrust of the TPP is not just about trade surpluses/deficits, but about exporting what we're particularly good at, for small business as well as large.  "We're good at services" and making things no one else in the world can make, and we're just not competitive as a provider of low wage labor--we "should compete for the high end". "IT, talent, innovation...and we're still doing great in manufacturing". 

TPP compels countries with no environment policy to have one.
* It's not a secret deal because of 17 public briefings (I observe that the various drafts and negotiation process remain secret, which is why WikiLeaks stepped in)

The nature of labor is changed to where computerized machinery does routine work people used to do, but this change doesn't mean that only highly educated high-end people get labor benefits; it's the people who used to do the work that can learn to operate the machinery that does the work, which means ongoing education. Though we've moved from primarily agricultural to primarily technological on the world market, we're still the world leader in agricultural production. Bottom line is that status quo no longer works and is no longer a viable option; the opposition to TPP is just protecting status quo.

 * It's not a "fast track" deal because what's being sought is nothing beyond what previous Presidents after WII have enjoyed, and Congress lays out what kind of deal they want, the President negotiates for stuff and brings the results back for Congress to read and vote on.

The key to upward class mobility is education (and I observe that we're in a nation that has turned education into a rake-in-big-bucks-low-delivery-of-low-quality-product-except-sports.  This includes the "job retraining" racket in community colleges, particularly in the State of Illinois via which I speak from direct experience.  If you want to see posterboys of what's wrong with community college education, look at those in Illinois first.  They abound.  Permit me to save you hunt-n-pick time: start with John A. Logan College).

China is the big "gorilla in the room" and doesn't play by the same rules and is bullying other countries to sign on to its deals which put American companies to a disadvantage while not having high labor and environmental standards. Despite doom/gloom whining to the contrary, the U.S. is still the world's biggest economy (and I've heard that it's China's which is now the world's largest. I wonder what happened there).  We can put people to work now working on infrastructure, medical research and development(here we go again with the debate on who does that better--industry or government?  Problem is that industry is too dependent on government, so either way, we're screwed).  It all boils down to this bottom line in writing trade agreements: us vs them, as in U.S. vs China.

Warren: the agreements were reached in secret and waiting until it's a fait accompli is a large part of what's wrong with it.

Rep. Gerry Connolly: the TPP is an agreement with nations that the U.S. already enjoys a trade surplus with, not a trade deficit, with 11 of the countries we have existing trade agreements with (I observe the China factor as a future rebuttal to this point--status quo now is guaranteed to change later. I also observe that Japan is darn near adamant about maintaining its current tariffs--even though "Abenomics" has been a less than stellar success in Japan--under any TPP agreement--so much for equal market access. Obama does mention the Japanese tariff situation much later, near the end in the Part 1 video)
Success is in education, technology, talent. VA is now "Silicon East" compared to being mainly dairy 50 years ago--but this is now an international economy.

Debbie Askin: IT is already 60% of money made by export in her company, and that's where the jobs are: knowledge services.  The TPP 'levels the playing field".

Dr. Abhijit Dasgupa: Agrees with Askin as that applies to the health care arena, information/knowledge needed by health care providers.  

Jim Corcoran, VA Chamber of Commerce: The Dulles corridor is booming because VA exports equal quantities of services and manufactured goods to the tune of about $35 billion per year.
 

Mini-UPDATE: don't hold your breath on my commentary about what the President said because I was out at the Garfield County office getting my stormspotter info updated, and there's another class in the foreseeable future...so, what'll happen first is an update to my previous post about the weather, with graphics to go with that cloud formation I spotted, and explain what anviling is.  But it's late right now and I'm not going to do any more for tonight.  Done, and commentary is above.

Wednesday Mini-UPDATE, NHK Edition: One of the reasons I'm sure is behind the push for a fast-track is Japan's friendly overtures to China despite China's  building of maritime military facilities in the South China Sea, and the TPP's intentions, apparently, are to curb China's military ambitions by curbing China economically.  Japan, clearly, is having none of that as the mayor of Okinawa continues to make an issue of evicting the U.S. military base there (it's a campaign plank that got him elected, it's said).  Japan clearly is in favor of being a factor in China's concept of a New Silk Road, North/South unifications and a whole raft of things the U.S. looks upon unfavorably.  Even if the TPP approval in the U.S. does get expedited, it's still going to run cattywonkers to China's big plans.  Russia, still embroiled with its own local megalomanias, might very well get caught with its proverbial pants down either way.

Weather excitement in Oklahoma today & Great Math Mystery-NOT

Oh, 'tis the season and you'd think that Okies are as used to tornadoes as Louisianans are to hurricanes, something along the lines of throwing tornado parties like there are hurricane parties.

Nah.

What I've been doing offline since my last post was brush up on my Morse even though the FCC doesn't require that for amateur tickets anymore because there's still a lot of utility to code--it'll get through intelligibly when voice can't, and that's a fact.  Also wanna shoot for an Extra ticket one of these days.  And even though EARC is still an icy, inhospitable old boys club, I'm actually looking forward to working with Hoenigsberg in the upcoming weeks to re-certify and re-activate.  With the other amateur clubs I belonged to in the past (all of them vastly more hospitable than EARC) I rather enjoyed working as a member of the team, and, come to think of it, that's what I enjoyed most about working with Civil Defense when it existed, young as I was at the time.

My current ticket expires in September so I'd like to make good use of that time to maybe up to a higher grade so I can work those ARES phone frequencies for a change.  Getting better at Morse will put me on some of them with just a Tech Plus ticket even if the FCC won't let me do phone there.

I'm admittedly rusty at stormspotting and can use a refresher, but some things kinda stick with ya from the first time, like for instance what I spotted today as I departed the parking lot at Oakwood Mall...

That formation on the right end of that cloud bank is something I recognized as the start of an updraft tower.  I was right, because 2 intersections past that parking lot, the thing grew huge and anvilled...

...so yeah--I can still recognize an updraft cell before it becomes a tower.  A tower that anvils, though, indicates a high likelihood of hail, and from the reports I've heard from south of here, there was hail, alright, from tennis-ball size to pea-size that fell like snow.

Here's the last shot I took of that cell...

It's good to know I remember a li'l somethin'.
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Tuesday Insert: I attended a stormspotting class given by Garfield Co. Emergency Management, where I just got a refresher on this stuff and there were useful graphics presented...and so I'm going to borrow one to show the exact anatomy of what I was looking at.  Comparing the diagram to this cloud formation I noticed, you'll more clearly see that what caught my eye the first time was what's called the overshoot.  And yeah--the next two pics of the formation show what's properly called an anvil.

I also found this gem on YouTube...

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It also looks like there's gonna be some storm action shortly--the night sky is alight with the sparks of lightning.  To the north and to the west.

Now if y'all 'll excuse me, I got some brass pounding to do, hi.

It's a Monday UPDATE preceding the Sunday UPDATE below because it's great stormspotting news that just arrived--Hoenigsberg is hosting a stormspotting class tomorrow evening. DAMN this is extremely short notice, but I'm dropping everything to go.

Mini Sunday UPDATE, PBS Nova Edition: I just watched the re-play of the Great Math Mystery presentation, which evoked a couple of chuckles at the apparent attempt to mystify math with statements along the lines of how everything in the universe seems to conform to it--this, after observing that pi's myserious inability to achieve a finite quantity in the decimal system, as if the decimal system was the only number system out there to work physics with.  It isn't, and in a number of previous posts (as well as in different discussions elsewhere in cyberspace), I've made repeated mention of the shortcomings of our numbering system and certain aspects of math that are forced to depend on it.

Honestly now--Declaring that the universe is mathematics itself is like declaring that because a daisy can be described in English means that the daisy itself is English.  Please.

Coders know all too well that in machine code, it's the binary system that rules, and hexadecimal is used to make binary more palatable to human conceptualizing.  It's no different with the decimal system also being a physics code for the purpose of interfacing with human conceptualizing and there's no mystery to that, either.  It's also true that whether machine code or physics code, math is a language--and in the case of physics, including astrophysics, math is a language that expresses relationships.  Therefore there's no mystery in what the Nova narrator expressed astonishment at: that relationships in physics can apply anywhere in the physical universe.  He says "WOW!" and I say "DUH!" because it's so obvious when you get beyond the star-struck blithering.

Pi is a finite quantity that appears to be infinite because it's been confined to decimal system analysis.  Math can't work productively without quantification and you can't quantify either infinity or zero--and when you add the shortcomings of the decimal system onto the failure to quantify infinity or zero, you've got a serious problem with expressing certain relationships in the universe that continue to escape us.  Just as Western Civilization was hobbling its own science by its adherence to the Roman number system until the far more scientifically advanced Arabs taught them the Arabic number system, algebra, and the basics of how their number system worked better, we have now arrived at the limitations of THIS numbering system as well.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, as it can't be said often enough--the Arabs defined a workable zero for Europe, and at our current mathematical impasse, re-defining the zero is the key to get beyond that impasse.

And speaking of mathematics and physics...

Postscript for hackers re: "ransomware": He who laughs last has made a backup. People who backup regularly will just laugh in your sorry faces.  I know that *I* will.  Every file that I consider to be important is a file that I have a copy of offline, losers.  I also refer you to the posting I made about taking revenge on hackers who leave files on my computer in the NCH malware incident, in which I also mentioned getting revenge on Yatoula/Xiti.  You can't do anything you want to do unless you're online yourselves, and when you're online, that's MY opportunity, because I know how to use your software to find you where you live.

Luvz ya, Fareed, but you left out a few important points re: AIIB, TPP, China

Of course it's true that a number of the U.S.financial allies ignored U.S. attempts to persuade them to not join China's AIIB, but they did anyway, and it's likely that Republicans will make repeated attempts to paint this as lack of U.S. leadership/Obama's entire fault for this, but take a look at what Iceland's efforts to divorce U.S. financial sway independently of China, which I posted about not too long ago.

It's the global financial/banking collapse under Dubya's watch which causes today's refusal to follow any U.S. finance leadership anywhere and it doesn't matter who is president.  It's the U.S. conservative religion on finances which has demonstrated how wrong it is and you can consider Iceland and allies who join up with China's AIIB to be the U.S. capitalism religion's heretics in such numbers that we can all call them Financial Protestants at this point, and that's also what's causing the near-fatal snag with the TPP, and, conceivably, the TTIP--China.

China's looking more attractive to the global market place than the ham-handed U.S. these days, and y'all have Dubya, and his Party, to thank for that. Fareed Zakaria overlooked this awfully big elephant in the tent when he addressed the AIIB matter this morning.

(I did make the attempt to locate an explanatory link for China's AIIB and the best that came up was stuff on the Bank China--sorry. It is an investment partnership that China's advocating as an alternative to the U.S. World Bank).

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Sunday addendum, 60 Minutes Edition: I just heard the phrase "smartest IT guys...are no match..." against hackers, in context of the Sony hackery by N. Korea. I just shook my head, laughing out loud.  The smartest IT guys working for Sony aren't smart enough to do what I did on the private network over here--it works like the internet but there's no connection to the Internet for things that are internal operations. A separate gateway is connected to the Internet for only those functions for which the Internet is required.  The system is designed such that NO internal functions rely on the Internet, and the Internet is used for communications as a separate system. DUH.

So the wiz kids at Sony made ALL Sony internal functions Internet-dependent?  Pretty st00pid, in MY book.  It IS possible to make a LAN system to facilitate internal functions with NO Internet dependencies. GeeeeezLouise.

So Hillary's running. Yeah, surprise surprise surprise--didn't see THAT one coming. {/sarcasm}

And now for something completely different: I attended a delightful presentation of the Pirates of Penzance at the Enid Symphony, and it got a well deserved standing ovation.  Indeed, I stood too, although I was holding my camera, for I applaud profusely any presentation that so closely involves the audience, as this most certainly did. The maids made first appearance not on the stage but in the balcony area, went down the stairs and up the aisles to reach the stage, singing.  Ah, but that wasn't all.  Here's a clip of the intro:

Spotted a Chautauqua regular (and supporter too, by the way):

Another Chautauqua regular and major supporter was honored at this performance, too: Lew Ward, of Ward Oil.  My hat's off to you too, sir.  Now--how does one go about putting a full orchestra on the same stage as the actors?  Well, how 'bout putting a few horns in the balcony...

Hey, how 'bout that backdrop, hm?

You saw that right, in the balcony and on the stage: the entire orchestra was dressed as pirates.  After intermission, the bass fiddle guy put a Jolly Roger on its neck..just not in the next clip...

Ahhh, what's next...yeahhhh, THAT's wut I'm talkin' 'bout....

Oh hey, I never get tired of anything by Gilbert & Sullivan. I just wonder why Iolanthe doesn't get more popular by comparison, though.  Or Mikado. Some considerable years back, during the Reagan administration, the CBC did a rip-Reagan-royally rendition of The Gondoliers.  The Gondoliers--that's another one that deserves a revival.  So could Molière, for that matter.  No, that's NOT a G&S production, that's a vintage French satirical playwright, another favorite of mine.  Tartuffe, peut-etre--it comes to mind immediately. That would be timely indeed.

So, then--how 'bout a sample of a modern major general...

I daresay my Erinadar went off. I detected a wee trace of Irish lilt in that gent.
...and now a word for our sponsors and a zapped parrot...coq au vin, anyone?

Hail, hail, the gang's all here with cat-like anvil chorus tread...

...and in comes Queen Victoria to save the world...of course we all know who saves HER.

A standing O well earned, and a great time was had by all!

This one's just for you, Auntie Beeb

Late May UPDATE, Richard Prince Edition: Seriously countering the Beeb's complaint about my YouTube video explaining the actual science of bigger-on-the-inside, transdimensional engineering that has been on Earth for centuries long before the Beeb even existed, which uses a short clip from a Tom Baker episode of Doctor Who to make the point...(whew!)...is the recent "landmark decision" in the favor of Mr. Prince, who borrowed the works of others to make his own collages with, and who successfully claimed Fair Use protection to use others' images in his collages, entirely to my own astonishment.

I had long considered collages to be a legit art form, but more that didn't fall under Fair Use.  My video clearly falls under fair use the same way that book and movie reviews fall under that when they quote or show clips with the aim toward public discussion thereof, and any adverse decision by the court in my direction would put the BBC above the law covering all public discussion or criticism altogether...which put the odds of the BBC winning an actual lawsuit against me somewhere between slim to none. As of the Prince decision, the BBC's odds don't even reach slim anymore.

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May UPDATE: Second round of appeals initiated and it looks like we might actually be going to court. Anybody who is weary of copyright troll bullying may feel free to donate to the defense fund because a win for me in this case will change the copyright troll world forever as a precedent. Donate HERE <<< I removed the link because GoFundMe took it down, no doubt because of inactivity for so long.  The update on this end is that Auntie Beeb hasn't sued me yet, and no news is good news.  SO FAR.  With the Prince decision, the old girl is more certain now that she's going to lose than she was before, so I'll bet she doesn't think that a law suit would be a smart thing to spend tax money on doing, especially in the face of a budget cutting Parliament.  Just speculation on my part, anything can happen without a doubt, but Auntie Beeb's odds of prevailing went down further than the bottom it had already hit under ordinary Fair Use rulings.

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Me & Auntie Beeb's World Service go 'way 'way back, and it's how I was first introduced to Douglas Adams, and via Douglas Adams, became acquainted with Doctor Who in its heyday in the form of one Tom Baker.  Then the BBC yanked the plug on the World Service to North America and kept sliding downhill from there.

So Auntie Beeb revived the Doctor, and yeah, I watch on a regular basis, sort of, but that's after figuring out the time travel thing myself, being the Impossible Person I always was. Well, it's come to pass that this blog has been getting a lot of hits from the UK, and judging from the stats, it looks like the minders I have aren't all Chinese.  I'm thinking that perhaps Autnie Beeb is getting cross over all the similarities between myself and Clara Oswald--none of my doing, of course; it's how Auntie Beeb designed Oswald and via whom.  Isn't that right, Tom Baker?

Well, we can start this dance by my showing how TARDIS, short for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, can't be either copyrighted or trademarked because it's generic science.  I might play with crayons and get artsy-fartsy on occasion, but I'm a woman of science first, and I can make the case.

I'm about to upload the video to YouTube first, though, so since this post automatically circulates on the Google Plus community (where there are several Doctor Who groups), and since an upload to YouTube *also* automatically gets posted to G+ as well as to Twitter, just consider this a preliminary heads up on what's coming, though not too much later.  When that's done, I will then imbed the video in this post.  Later.

Ah! Here we go!

Oh-ho, a quick question right outta da gate: where's the sound track from? This should interest my Chinese minders considerably, as they should find that sound track quite familiar--they use it to jam radio stations they don't like, on shortwave.  Here in the States and elsewhere, we call it a "firedrake".

Auntie Beeb very quickly filed a dispute with YouTube about this video, quite predictably claiming copyright infringement, and I very quickly filed a dispute with the Beeb's claims.  Check.

Proudly AMERICAN, not British. Get it? Got it? GOOD.

As I stated in my rebuttal, neither the BBC nor any other entity can claim copyright on physics, and the clip was used solely to illustrate science for public discussion and that falls withing the Fair Use copyright section.  You know--that pesky Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107.  Now then--until YouTube decides the matter, here's the Blogger-sized low res vid so that you can see for yourself that the Beeb's claims are false:

Contained within the video is the nature of the challenge to any claim the BBC might have on "transdimensional engineering" because dating all the way back to Gutenberg, it has been PUBLIC DOMAIN PHYSICS.  Science isn't copyrightable--it falls under patents, ON THE CONDITION that it is NOT already in the public domain, as this science is.

The video itself makes the case that the Beeb can NOT copyright generic science, and I'm sure the Beeb prefers to quash the argument's persuasion more than it wants to quash any (bogus) copyright infringement claim.  En garde, Beeb.

Mini-UPDATE 2: Just as soon as I put this post out on Twitter, I got Followed by @engproblem_s  and for that, I'm greatly honored. Fact remains that while the Beeb might whine about copyrights, its biggest problem is that it doesn't own any patent for time and relative dimensions in space physics.  And via G+, I just got Notified that +eLibrary - Open eBooks Directory added me to its Circles.

Hey--y'all KNOW I'm right--books have always been bigger on the inside than on the outside, and the Beeb doesn't own any exclusive patents on the design of the book. Dear Auntie Beeb--copyrights don't protect science. You need patents.  Show us your patents or STFU 

Mini-UPDATE 3: Answering a challenge--I never said that I never used books for time travel.  I just don't rely on them exclusively; I use them primarily for navigation, and the book I used in the video does indeed come from my core's navigation system.  Am I an historian?  Not only no, but hell no.  Am I an amateur historian?  Chautauqua scholars know in their bones I'm beyond amateur, and they know for a fact that I'm no "scholar" either.  Am I a history buff?  That would be true if we left out the future part of things; I'll take it, but it's a vast understatement.  What's left?  Time traveler.

Mini-UPDATE 4: Surprised at the claim of navigating the future? Most of us are doing that already, only we don't recognize that as such. Chess masters do it all the time, and people who think navigating the future is a matter of following a time line (when time isn't linear) to stuff that hasn't happened yet but it's carved in stone that it will happen.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: the future isn't pre-destined and there's no such thing as predestination.  If there were, we could all sit back and just let time happen without trying.  You people know better than that.

Seriously--the next generation, now being trained from kindergarten about coding, will acquire an intuitive feel for time travel both ways, for they will have intuitively mastered the IF THEN ELSE branching, map it out, and be able to see that the path from START  to any single possible END out of a flow chart full of ENDs, will understand how the illusion of time being linear came about, as well as the illusion of time flowing came about.  That's why it's called a FLOW CHART.  And the elite few who programmed Big Blue to play tournament quality chess know this for a fact already.  Figuring out how many bazillion possible moves exist from START obscures the FACT that not all of the possible moves are possible given certain conditions, which is how a chess master knows at his first move, how many moves he'll arrive at a check mate in.  IF the opponent moves to permit that ELSE Plan B which results in a check mate in a few more moves.  And so on.  Certain moves will result in certain END OF GAME in short order IF those conditions exist.

That's how it's done, people.  And, seriously, Auntie Beeb--you need to step aside and stop your impediment of real science with your imaginary bullpucky.  You're holding humanity back, and here's a reminder of why you and your government were apt models for Douglas Adams' Vogons. Auntie Beeb, if anybody can serve well as a model Vogon, it would be YOU.

I heard the bells on Easter Day, their old familiar carols play...

...of peace on earth, good will to men...

Last December we celebrated the birth of the kid that got killed a few days ago, and with Passover, we celebrate kids who got the death penalty for things that a pharaoh did (while the pharaoh got off free without a scratch on him), and y'all wonder why I'm still skeptical, quoting a Christmas carol intended to counter-argue the skepticism. The words to that carol were penned in 1863 and we're still awaiting the results.  The kid that was supposed to bring peace on earth was said to have been born slightly over 2,000 years ago, but begged to differ when he said that he didn't bring peace, he brought the sword.

Oh, I know it's drizzling here and it's easy to blame the dour outlook on the weather on a day supposedly for sunshine, flowers, fluffy bunnies and colorful eggs, but just yesterday I added a video in my Mother Machree & Co. post--a video of the Irish Rovers featuring the late Jimmy Ferguson singing a witty ditty about "The Orange and the Green" ---and today, on CBS' 60 Minutes, The Troubles were dredged up again with blame being laid squarely on the Boston College's Belfast Project to remind us all that there was a reason behind Sinead O'Connor tearing up the Pope's picture on Saturday Night Live... and the Orange and the Green are really no laughing matter.

Peace on earth--it's a good thing I wasn't holding my breath for THAT to happen.

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It's a good time to mention a debate about Islam on Twitter a couple days ago, where the assertion was made that it's overdue for a Reformation like what happened in Christianity, that Islam needed a Luther. I pointed out that when Saud deposed the Arabian ruler to create Saudi Arabia, his house established Wahabism as exactly that reformation.  I was told that wasn't even close to being similar, and I pointed out the similarities as follows:

1. The Reformation affected only Roman Christianity but didn't affect the Orthodox; Wahabism affected only Sunni Islam in Islam's Holy Land and didn't affect the Shiites...after I pointed out the error of presuming that Islam is monolithic first.

2. When you get to the brass tacks of any religion, it boils down to establishing for a given ruler a Divine Right to Rule.  It's essential that believers believe without question a ruler's rule, and that's what the Wahab Reformation was all about: a fellow Muslim was deposed which would have been regarded as an act against Allah without what Wahabism preached.  King James Stuart I would have continued to have extreme difficulty with the Puritans if he hadn't re-"translated" the Bible with particular attention paid to how Paul's Epistle to Romans was carefully worded.  In ancient Egyptian history, a queen was deposed mercilessly when she ran afoul of the high priests.  Gautama was a prince who ran afoul of the ruling Hindus of his time, so don't try to tell me that Buddhism is an exception.  There are NO exceptions.

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Monday UPDATE on this and related time/history theme: Charlie Rose's interview of Kazuo Ishiguro about his latest book, "The Buried Giant", has an impact on what's written in time and what is preferred to erase from history, what's forgiven and what isn't.  And what was once forgiven resurrects to again be unforgiven.  There is no such thing as "history written by the victors" although the victors certainly attempt to destroy competing accounts of their own accounts of what happened...or those combatants, now seeking peace, agree on hatchets to be buried...Sinn Fein notwithstanding, Turkey re: Armenians notwithstanding...etc...

As time travel goes, you don't have to be a timelord to remain stuck in time like the Civil War re-enactors do, or like the Northern Ireland Protestants do, or like all people who hold long time grudges do, or like the Hatfields and McCoys did...much like the fictional Brigadoon of yore...never going forward.  And you don't have to be a timelord to move forward in time either.

Time travel into the future is too often a matter of personal choice than of any miracle of science.

But holding one's constitution together over time might very well be. Whether for real or in fiction.

Captive audience

First Good Friday in Enid

...when I get around to posting the videos.  Had a nice conversation with a supporter in the last election, too. With spray cans, one artist downtown brought back the 1980s fad of van painting, but it wasn't vans he was painting and he wasn't using auto laquer with an air brush--it was strictly spray can art.

In the meantime, think science with Easter Eggs.  I may dabble in the arts now and then, but, first and foremost, I am a woman of science.

12 Experiments with Eggs (BuzzFeed)

....and I'm sure by now you get the drift.  Enjoy.  For the record--in my humble opinion, EVERY Friday is a good one.

Mini-UPDATE: It's too late tonight to do much more than produce a teaser for Enid's first First Friday festivities for today. Watch this space.

Yup, that hot dog vendor is the one that provided the free dogs at Vanhooser's event. Bingo.

Now meet Enid's own Tom Boepple...