Part of the weekend doings was the snow/sleet/freezing rain that took place on Sunday. Removing the 4-5 inches of heavy snow took quite a bit of time and effort as snowblowers usually have difficulty moving that kind of snow. It didn't help that quite a bit of it along the edges of The Manse's driveway was also waterlogged, making it that much heavier than it already was. It also means the only way to move it is with a shovel.
With the warm temps today almost all of the sleet and ice that was left on the driveway melted away by noon.
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The ongoing debate/argument about Google's intolerance for 'white, heterosexual, conservative males' rages on.
Many see former Google engineer James Damore as a racist and misogynist. Others see him as a symbol of what has gone wrong at Google and other Silicon Valley tech giants. When diversity and tolerance are defined as excluding no one except white, heterosexual, conservative males, and working to extinguish thought that is too diverse, meaning it doesn't follow Progressive guidelines, then a company like Google has indeed abandoned its motto, “Don't Be Evil”, for a new one, that being “F**k Whitey!”.
One of my co-workers, a middling Progressive, seems to think that all of those smart people working at Google are somehow more knowledgeable about life in general than the rest of us. But in my experience, many of those smart folk are indeed much smarter than many of us...in their narrow field, but totally clueless and inexperienced when it comes to the real world and how it works. (To quote one of favorite movie/TV lines, “They couldn't find their asses with both hands.”) They believe they know how the world works, or should work, without understanding that their limited knowledge about society in general means that they are making the very 'problems' they claim they are fixing much worse than they already are.
It seems they believe that “if everyone did things my way, everything would be better.” That's the same reasoning every totalitarian/authoritarian dictatorship has used to make things worse. Why would they think they'll do any better?
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The more we learn about Nature, the more we find out that Nature has beaten us to it in regards to improving on mankind's inventions. A case in point being how the structure of shark skin has been found to reduce aerodynamic drag and increase lift.
"The skin of sharks is covered by thousands and thousands of small scales, or denticles, which vary in shape and size around the body," said George Lauder, the Henry Bryant Bigelow Professor of Ichthyology and Professor of Biology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and co-author of the research. "We know a lot about the structure of these denticles -- which are very similar to human teeth -- but the function has been debated."If shark skin denticles can greatly reduce drag while increasing lift, the efficiency from wind turbines to air travel can be greatly increased at very little cost. With the increase in efficiency the amount of power needed to get an aircraft airborne and to maintain speed is reduced, something that will also save fuel.
Most research has focused on the drag-reducing properties of denticles, but Lauder and his team wondered if there was more to the story.
"We asked, 'What if instead of mainly reducing drag, these particular shapes were actually better suited for increasing lift?'" said Mehdi Saadat, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and co-first author of the study. Saadat holds a joint appointment in Mechanical Engineering at the University of South Carolina.
"Airfoils are a primary component of all aerial devices," said August Domel, a Ph.D. student at Harvard and co-first author of the paper. "We wanted to test these structures on airfoils as a way of measuring their effect on lift and drag for applications in the design of various aerial devices such as drones, airplanes, and wind turbines."
"These shark-inspired vortex generators achieve lift-to-drag ratio improvements of up to 323 percent compared to an airfoil without vortex generators," said Domel. "With these proof of concept designs, we've demonstrated that these bioinspired vortex generators have the potential to outperform traditional designs."
Who says Nature doesn't have anything new to teach us?
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While Adam Schiff may have thought his memo would derail the points brought up to counter the GOP memo dealing with the Russia investigation, it may in fact have caused harm to the Democrats' claims.
These guys just keep digging that hole deeper and deeper. You'd think they would have figured out by now that all they're doing is digging their own graves, figuratively speaking.
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Apparently global warming has gotten so bad that Brazil is experiencing “a year without summer.”
Remember, summer begins on December 21 in Brazil and ends on March 20.That doesn't bode well for Brazil. I wonder when the glaciers will starting covering Brazil's rain forests?
This summer has already seen 12 days of frost, while the summer of 2008/2009 saw 13 days. It’s also the seventh frost of 2018, making it the biggest number of frost days for the start of the year in 64 years!
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So the barking moonbats of climate change have now declared that both hamburgers and milk are leading causes of climate change.
As the good Cap'n Teach reminds us, “Isn’t it interesting that these 1st World Warmists always come up with ways to attempt to deny Other People the same things they themselves had? Will these same Warmists deny their own kids milk?”
Of course they won't because Shut Up!
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And that's the belated news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where temps are headed up again before our next snowstorm later this week, preparations are being made for the upcoming boating season, and where Monday wasn't all that bad this week.
