Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Peak wingnut was a lie.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

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Other Stuff Open Thread

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I watched the Dem lawyer’s questioning, which was great. Then I watched about five minutes of the GOP questioning, which was just asinine, and I turned it off. It was too stupid to even rise to the level of bad-faith badgering.

Anywho, I figured I am not alone, and maybe somebody should put up a thread for other stuff! Here are some pictures of cats to get us started. From the wonderful @Bodegacats_ account:

This is, as the kids say, “a mood”.
And here we have cats maybe passing the mirror test?

I just concluded a long argument about metadata. How’s your day going?

Reader Interactions

90Comments

  2. 2.

    dmsilev

    How’s your day going?

    Up next, troubleshooting some equipment. Suggestion in manual: Stick probe into hole, but be sure to insulate probe because otherwise 6 kilovolt power will not be your friend.

     

    On the plus side, apparently I won a raffle of some sort run by our Purchasing folks. Have no idea what I won yet, probably a free pad of blank PO forms…

  6. 6.

    Martin

    Metadata is good. More of it please.

     

    CA is further expanding voter access. Voter materials will now also be provided in Bengali, Burmese, Gujarati, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Lao, Mien, Mongolian, Nepali, Tamil, Thai, Telugu and Urdu.

    Basically, all the above languages are spoken by at least 3% of CA residents.

     

    Expanded access for Hmong and Punjabi.

  8. 8.

    Ohio Mom

    Ohio Son and I are at a greasy spoon, eating lunch after his annual planning session with his county Disabilities Services caseworker and his state Vocational Rehab team.

     

    It was a productive meeting but apparently I missed a John-Dean moment in today’s meeting. Looking forward to watching the video and catching up.

  9. 9.

    Jay C

    OK: I really have to do an “IIJM” here: while I quite agree with Major’s assessment of how (at least today’s installment of) the impeachment hearings are going, i.e.: Schiff, Goldman and the Democrats are asking cogent, relevant questions, and expecting cogent answers, while Nunes, Jordan and Castor are either flogging stale conspiracy-theory cliches, or fumbling around with near-incomprehensible minutiae: I really have to wonder how this is playing to the “outside” audience? IOW, not the involved political-news-junkie demographic we Jackals may only resemble by pure chance….

     

    Outside of the brainwashed droolers of Fox Nation, I wonder how this is really playing to the masses wrt their support/opposition to King Orangeanus and his merry crew….

  12. 12.

    MattF

    I pulled a muscle in my side two days ago… so, I’m not moving around a lot. It’s less painful today than it was yesterday, so I’m hopeful it’ll be mostly sorta better tomorrow. Thanks for asking.

  14. 14.

    Leto

    @dmsilev: T/S’ing a power amplifier with old school tube? It was always fun teaching my airmen about those (see that warning: imminent death! Written all in red? I’d believe that… in fact, everything that’s written in red, believe those.)

  15. 15.

    VeniceRiley

    Heard on the radio this morning, in a discussion/mock-a-thon on the topic of flat earthers “The Earth can’t be flat. Because if it was, cats would have already knocked everything off it.”

  16. 16.

    Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)

    Just got back to work — had to run home on my lunch hour to let Iggy and Muppet out, and walk the newest addition to the menagerie.  Meet Chauncey.  3 years old, and he had to spend most of that time in a cage because backyard breeders suck.  We adopted him from a rescue that saved him and 35 other dogs.

     

    He was a timid little thing, until recently.  Now I think we may have a happy little lunatic on our hands.

     

    Yes, Muppet finds him embarrassing.

  17. 17.

    Roger Moore

    @dmsilev:

    Stick probe into hole, but be sure to insulate probe because otherwise 6 kilovolt power will not be your friend.

    Every lab that deals with this kind of stuff needs to have a high voltage probe.  6kV is not a joke.  OK, in my lab it is, but only because all our high voltage power supplies are current limited so they can’t actually kill you.

  23. 23.

    MattF

    @Jay C: My guess is that a ‘something significant just happened’ message has been injected into the Zeitgeist. How many people will overcome their natural and reasonable aversion to politics and politicians… we shall see.

  24. 24.

    oldster

    It looked to me like the first several cats clearly understood that they were seeing an image of something behind them: they looked at the cat-filtered image on the screen, became agitated, and then looked backward at the human (presumably to see whether it still looked like a human, or now looked weird as the screen-image did). I don’t know if that is exactly equivalent to passing the mirror test, but it’s very interesting.

     

    The last cat clearly failed the mirror-test: it got alarmed at the image, and so it attacked the *image*.

     

    All very interesting!

  25. 25.

    dmsilev

    @Leto: Testing an optical device called a Pockels cell. Basically a way of using a big voltage to alter the polarization of a beam of light. We want to use it to chop a beam at a faster rate than what a mechanical wheel can manage, which will involve strobing the 6 kV signal at 100 kHz or so…

  26. 26.

    dmsilev

    @Roger Moore: It’s a tiny amount of current, since it’s basically voltage biasing a capacitor which has very little leakage even at those voltages. So, yes the supply is current-clamped at a very low threshold. Still nothing to play around with, which is why I’m doing this rather than farming it out to my (less-experienced) minions.

  27. 27.

    Elizabelle

    Went to see JoJo Rabbit yesterday.  Really liked it.  Thought-provoking, and serious in addition to comic (plenty of drama in there too.)  Am becoming quite the Taika Waititi fan.  And yes, it’s the movie about the little German kid during WW2 whose imaginary friend is Adolph Hitler (portrayed by Waititi, who wrote, directed, and co-produced the film).

     

    Sondland hearing:  They’re taking a 30 minute lunch break now.  And Sondland wants to fly back to Brussels tonight after the hearing has concluded.

  29. 29.

    JaySinWA

    @dmsilev:

    Suggestion in manual: Stick probe into hole, but be sure to insulate probe because otherwise 6 kilovolt power will not be your friend.

     

    On the plus side, apparently I won a raffle of some sort run by our Purchasing folks. Have no idea what I won yet, probably a free pad of blank PO forms…

    Maybe a 1KV rated probe?

  32. 32.

    Roger Moore

    @Martin:

    Basically, all the above languages are spoken by at least 3% of CA residents.

    I think you have misunderstood what they’re saying.  The rule about ballot languages is done county by county, not statewide, so those languages are being added in counties where that linguistic minority makes up at least 3% of the population.  For example, the law requires that ballots here in LA County be provided in 9 languages (English, Spanish, Mandarin, Armenian, Korean, Khmer, Farsi, Tagalog, and Vietnamese) and the county provides them in 4 additional languages (Hindi, Japanese, Thai, and Russian) that it is not legally required to.

  33. 33.

    Leto

    @WereBear: If our guys were tentative in using the grounding rod in discharging the caps, there was a good chance they’d arc weld the rod to the cap. We had that happen once and saved it as a visual reminder of, “Don’t do this.” Did they also arc a screw driver against another cap, resulting in a good 2mm of screw driver vaporizing? Why, yes they did! We had so many visual reminders of what not to do… ?

     

    Oh, the best one was the contractor doing repair work on an electrical panel in the main Comm Squadron building, somehow not turning off the main power, and then electrocuting himself as well as vaporing a 2-3” hole through 3 2mm thick steel panels. A diagonal  slash, from top left going down to bottom right. He was taken to the hospital and was ok. Nothing serious. But a big revision in how they did electrical work was undertaken. I also got the pictures of the rack to, again, use as “what not to do” aides. ?

  36. 36.

    Roger Moore

    @dmsilev:

    Yeah, I’ve been zapped by one of our 5kV current limited power supplies, and it was not fun, even if it wasn’t lethal either.  Membership in the kV club is not prestigious enough to be worth the initiation ritual.

  37. 37.

    MomSense

    I usually just have leftovers for lunch but today I didn’t have any – so it’s soup and a sandwich at a cafe that is nice for people watching.

     

    Two of my kids went to see Dylan perform last night in Lowell, Massachusetts- which is a looong drive.  Apparently it was amazing and I’m looking forward to all the details.

     

    If anyone is interested here is a link to a Boston Magazine article about the significance of Lowell for Dylan.  https://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2019/11/18/jack-kerouac-bob-dylan/

  38. 38.

    Leto

    @dmsilev: Whoa, cool! Our caps weren’t current limited as we needed to upgrade 10 watts to 50.

     

    Just as an aside, we made sure our Airmen were comfortable with the grounding procedure. We would demonstrate it a few times, and if they were uncomfortable with it, we’d come over and watch/help them with it. For their practical (test), they would have to read off the directions  while they did it themselves. Reading/pointing to the steps was always required. Reinforced safety and understanding of the tasks being performed.

  40. 40.

    Major Major Major Major

    @oldster: I don’t know if that is exactly equivalent to passing the mirror test, but it’s very interesting.

    Some of them definitely seem to understand that it’s a mirror, and that there’s a 1:1 correspondence between “the creature holding me” and “that freak in the mirror.” It’s not passing the test in the strict sense since it doesn’t demonstrate self-awareness, only mirror-awareness.

     

    Some commenters note that the test as canonically constructed puts animals with the tendency and means to manipulate their environments at an unfair advantage. e.g. elephants, chimps. Dolphins don’t technically pass the test because they can’t touch the marks on themselves, but scientists handwave it away since they turn to look, and Everybody Knows dolphins are smart.

  41. 41.

    Emerald

    I have created a Balloon Juice app for my iphone! There’s a little browser called Puffin (free unless you want the pro version). It accesses Google. You open Puffin, Google, search for Balloon Juice and it comes up. Thereafter, every time you open Puffin, BJ comes right up.

     

    And the Puffin icon is a sweet image of a puffin, which looks nice on your phone.

     

    Done!

  43. 43.

    Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)

    @Major Major Major Major: He really is.  He was so timid two weeks ago; now he’s a playful, waggy, goofy little thing who’s not afraid to happily bound away when I try to get him to come back in the house so I’m not late getting back to work.  He went from “OMG what’s going on this isn’t a cage what do I do now” to “Hey, I like life outside the cage I can do whatever the hell I want with no repercussions hooray!”

     

    Maybe he’s making a little too much progress.

  44. 44.

    Leto

    @Roger Moore: Good friend of mine was zapped by one of our caps. Can’t remember the voltage, but it was pretty good. Had a permanent black dot on his pinky where it got him. Just an absent minded gesture that got him. It was something he’d point out to the Airmen as another safety reminder.

  45. 45.

    Leto

    @Elizabelle: Avalune and I want to see JoJo, though it might be one we catch HBO when it comes out here in a bit. I feel like we don’t have any weekend time between now and February! Too many holiday/too much stuff to do!!! ?

  48. 48.

    dmsilev

    @Roger Moore: As an undergrad, I got zapped by a 2 kV source once. Not fun, but no real damage. I have absolutely no desire either to repeat the experience or to learn what even higher voltages feel like.

  51. 51.

    Kay

    The Dem lawyer is good. He’s good enough that you don’t focus on him but instead focus on the witness which is the point of this exercise. I’m pleased they hired him. He seems completely unrattled by all the nonsense the GOP pols are throwing out. Focus, focus, focus.

  53. 53.

    Roger Moore

    @dmsilev:

    One of my coworkers was zapped by a serious high voltage source many years ago.  It was, IIRC, about 20kV and was bad enough that she didn’t have to touch anything to get zapped; it arced between the metal and her hand when it got too close.  Fortunately, there was someone else around to rescue her, because the current was apparently enough to make her muscles freeze.

  54. 54.

    Aleta

    @HumboldtBlue: Breaks show up for me in your comment.  (And are showing up in my comments today  too.)

     

    Test

     

    Tes

     

    ETA I can see the breaks I put in. Until today they weren’t happening for me either.   (Air Safari 12.1.2)

  55. 55.

    Roger Moore

    @Kay:

    I think hiring an actual prosecutor to do the questioning is a sign of how seriously they’re taking this.  They care more about doing it right than they do about getting their names and faces on TV for their 5 minutes of questioning.

  56. 56.

    scav

    @Gin & Tonic: Well, maybe more that entire buslines are no longer stopping at / have never stopped at / are revaluating the concept of stopping anywhere near his vicinity and he asked his mom for permission to hide under this nice gilded five-star fully parked bus over here. Agreed though, the other elevator clearly plummeted quickly.

  57. 57.

    Kay

    Sondland is gross and corrupt but he’s just a temp. Palling around with the wrong crowd.

     

    I am so going to enjoy Rudy Giuliani being indicted. There should be street celebrations with car horns and spontaneous dancing. Nabbed. Finally.

  59. 59.

    Leto

    @dmsilev: So in Afghanistan, the electrical system in our building wasn’t grounded properly. This is the main building where everyone on base worked. I discovered this when I had to unplug some of my tactical radios and zapped the absolute shit out of myself. 230v/50hz. After about the third time, when I finally took a multimeter and found out exactly why this was happening and how I was specifically doing it, unplugging the cable became a two man operation. One to hold the radio, the other to unscrew the cable. Each person would have a hand in their pocket (old school style).

     

    FFS civil engineering, you had one job…

  60. 60.

    Kelly

    Yesterday 15 month old Phoebe decided 8 week old Martin is her kitten. She chirps, trills and plays nice now. She’s been in the habit of tearing things up when she’s bored. We’d channeled it to mostly brown paper grocery bags. She’s much too busy for that now.

    https://imgur.com/a/ha7v1gg

  63. 63.

    Kay

    @Roger Moore:

     

    It’s not just “prosecutor” though, IMO. There are a lot of bad prosecutors. He’s a really solid lawyer who stays focused and came to get the job done. There’s nothing off-putting about him either. Nothing that draws excessive attention to him. A lot of people would have treated it as their chance for “history” or “celebrity”- I get none of that. There’s no huge ego getting in the way. It isn’t supposed to be “lawyer show” and he’s honoring that.

  65. 65.

    Leto

    @Roger Moore: Got another story! So some of the transmitters we use in the military operate on the Low Frequency band (think single digit hertz). They’re for national emergency style communications. They’re also pushing this through the ground, over a few hundred miles. The transmitters involved in this operate in the multi-hundred thousand kilowatt range. The electrical charge they build up in the surround area is enough that the cars outside the facility all require their own grounding claps. Pull up to work, get out, clamp your car. A friend told me about his first duty station where someone forgot to do this, came out to their car, and was essentially blown back about 20-25ft after they touched the handle to their car. Again, they were ok, nothing permanently damaged, but yeah, teachable moment.

     

    I’m starting to think about it now, and man do I have so many “teachable moments” with regard to electricity and people doing dumb things.

  68. 68.

    dmsilev

    @Leto: There was an episode in Iraq where the contractors building the base managed to electrocute several soldiers taking  showers because, again, incompetence in grounding.

     

    Worst I ever saw first-hand didn’t cause any injuries but certainly had the capability: We have a large walk-in Faraday cage, basically a metal-walled room for screening out RF from the environment. The idiot who installed the power circuits inside the room swapped the ground and the neutral wires, so all of the power was returning on the ground line. Which is the walls of the room. Easy to fix once we located the problem, but …yikes.

  69. 69.

    Kay

    @Elizabelle:

     

    My husband was asking me which one he is last night and I was short with him – “I don’t KNOW”

     

    I get confused about their generations. They all look either middle aged or old. I don’t know who begat whom. Even the babies look like adults.

  70. 70.

    JWR

    Wow! Adam Schiff sure knows how to spin a yarn, don’t he? (And I only use the word “yarn” because it sounded better than anything else. ;) )

  71. 71.

    Leto

    @dmsilev: Oh, I remember that. KBR motherfuckers. That was part of where the IG identified that they weren’t fulfilling their contractual obligations, recommended withholding payments, KBR threatened to pull all their workers out, so the IG was over-rode and $$$ went out despite KBR failing in their contractual obligations. /smfh

    That… that’s not how a Faraday cage works! A lot of our facilities have Faraday cages built in, so yeah, that would be really bad… glad no-one was injured!

  72. 72.

    Roger Moore

    @Kay:

    A lot of people would have treated it as their chance for “history” or “celebrity”- I get none of that.

    Realistically, though, he’s going to go in the history books whether he makes a big production of it or stays in the background.  But staying in the background makes it more likely he’ll go down as the guy who brought down Trump rather than the guy who could have brought down Trump.  That’s what he cares about: doing the job right.

  74. 74.

    Roger Moore

    @dmsilev:

    The idiot who installed the power circuits inside the room swapped the ground and the neutral wires, so all of the power was returning on the ground line. Which is the walls of the room. Easy to fix once we located the problem, but …yikes.

    They make a tester for this that sells for less than $10.  Any electrician who doesn’t use one (or the equivalent) deserves to be fired.

  75. 75.

    LuciaMia

    @Kay:

    I am so going to enjoy Rudy Giuliani being indicted. There should be street celebrations with car horns and spontaneous dancing.

     

    And hogsheads of wine on every street corner.

  76. 76.

    Another Scott

    @dmsilev: I remember crawling under a bed as a kid and finding a damaged power cord plugged into an outlet and getting a funny zzzaaaazzz feeling when I touched it.

    That was enough.

    My grad school adviser got zapped with about 3kV from an RF power supply (for a sputtering system).  No real damage, fortunately.  Lucky (but insufficiently careful!) man.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  79. 79.

    Mnemosyne

    @Kelly:

     

    The only thing that tired out our year-old cat Keaton was getting him his own kitten. Glad to see that the process still works. ?

  81. 81.

    Kelly

    Years ago at another house I went down to the basement and discovered the water heater was leaking. When I shut the fill valve off I discovered the previous owner hadn’t grounded it. A small zap considering it was 220. I was wearing well padded Rockports which may have helped.

  82. 82.

    Mnemosyne

    @Kay:

     

    Andrew is Prince Charles’s younger brother, if that helps. His ex-wife Fergie made a big tabloid splash in the 1980s and their daughters are big proponents of those funny little “fascinator” hats.

    HTH.

  84. 84.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    Has anyone thought about how the recent news about Trump and the hospital visit are part of Trump trying to cop an insanity plea, to let the GOP off the hook?

  85. 85.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    (I could edit the comment above, but I realized I want it there, alone.)

     

    It just came to me, from out of thin air. Today, Trump had a sharpie-note. Yesterday, there was news of him acting strangely. Then there was the hospital visit. I think the GOP is getting desperate, and wants to pretend that they’ve been covering up for his *illness*, not his *criminality*.

     

    And to that, I have one thing to say: Jared Kushner wanted to be able to talk to the Russian government with no oversight. There is no lawful purpose for doing that. They knew damn well they were covering up for criminality all along. There’s a special sort of contempt I’ll hold them in forever if they’re now going to pretend “poor Trump, battling dementia…”.

    (Yes, *I* also thought I’d reached maximal contempt, and THEN they’re okay with Trump using Giuliani as a consigliere . Attorney-client privilege is a precious right, and to abuse it, when you’re an officer of law enforcement… well, it’s one of the few times where I’d let someone use “rape” as an analogy, because both are an abuse of a sacred trust. And now, I’m finding that there is, indeed, still room for more.)

  86. 86.

    Roger Moore

    @LongHairedWeirdo:

    There have been a number of people who have suggested that Trump’s unscheduled visit to Walter Reed was trying to lay down an excuse for him to leave office early.  I see a few problems with that theory:

    • Trump isn’t going to quit without a literal gun to his head
    • There is some evidence that Trump is in even worse physical shape than usual
    • If they were trying to lay down an excuse for something like that, they’d be cleverly leaking details to set up the story, rather than keeping everything hush hush
  87. 87.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    @Roger Moore: Agreed, but my point is, they might tell Trump “it will keep you out of jail”. Someone might have finally clued him in that his “perfect” phone call could end up before a jury, which would take about 2 seconds to decide, beyond a reasonable doubt….

    And, it gives them cover – “we had NO IDEA what was going on in that poor man’s MENTALLY ILL DON’T YOU LIBS CARE ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS IF IT’S A REPUBLICAN!!!!!!!! – uh, poor man’s mentally ill brain.”

    And I’m calling bullshit early. They covered for known criminality.

    But most importantly, I hope the meme, that they *might* do this, will spread, to infect the “jury” (the American people), so that evidence for and against is viewed with appropriate skepticism.

  88. 88.

    JWR

    @Another Scott: In HS electronics, I was working on an old TV set and got zapped with 400v (or so I was later told.) Almost knocked me off my workbench and distorted my sense of the world for a few minutes. Electricity can be very unfriendly at times.

  89. 89.

    Gravenstone

    @Another Scott:
     

    I remember crawling under a bed as a kid and finding a damaged power cord plugged into an outlet and getting a funny zzzaaaazzz feeling when I touched it.

    My bedroom as a kid had a naked light fixture dangling from the ceiling (think Waltons). I managed to discharge 110V across my left hand – thumb to forefinger holding the fixture, twice when changing bulbs because I kept forgetting the proper orientation of ‘off’ on the wall switch. Yes, I am occasionally a slow learner.

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