AlanS

When I lived in Texas: Big pick-up trucks with double cabs. offense: These drivers would stay in the left-most lane on the highway until about 50 yards before their exit, then without warning they will cross right in front anything in their way of to make the exit with a few yards to spare. They seemed oblivious the the fact that they almost caused 3 accidents from cars trying to avoid them as the made this abrupt maneuver. Additionally they would throw cigarette butts and fast foot cups out of the truck with a "Don't Mess with Texas" bumper sticker on the back, entirely missing the point of the bumper sticker which was intended as a "Don't Litter" message. (Or at least that is the way it use to be when I lived there). Now that I live in California: Toyota Prius drivers, offense: hyper-miling in the commuter lane, at 60 miles per hour when the flow of traffic is doing 77 mph. My favorite Texas memory. I just moved to Texas from Chicago, and on my first day the weather chilled down to about 34 degrees. No snow, no ice just a little chilly. As a pre-caution THEY SHUT DOWN THE ENTIRE HIGHWAY. Just two days earlier I was driving in -10 degree weather with snow and ice everywhere in Chicago. Drivers there were driving like it was a normal day.... Because it was. P.S. I don't usually judge people by the car they drive, but for the sake of this post I'll make an exception. :)

It looks like they figured out what when wrong. http://mashable.com/2016/11/23/europe-mars-lander-crash-cause/#itWZC2Pczmqa ... I guess the swoopers here can related to that. The lander was under a good canopy but femur'ed on landing.

Some interesting points. There are three green house gases, and water vapor is one. What makes CO2 special is how long it stays in the atmosphere. Water - stays in atmosphere 9 days. Methane - stays in atmosphere 200 years. CO2 - stays in atmosphere 20,000 years. So once we put CO2 in the air it will effect the future climate for 10s of thousands of years. That is what makes it special. Also if you want to see what CO2 unleashed can really do to a planet. Look at Venus. (I'm not being a alarmist that won't happen to Earth, but pointing out it's effects) Methane is a concern because there is lots of it locked up in the frozen tundra of Siberia and Alaska. As that region warms enough to melt the ice it will release all that methane, and cause a "methane spike" that will increase the global temperatures very rapidly. The unlocking of that methane could start in about 50 years and continue for then next 200 years. (According to a Scientific American article I read a few years ago.) True, but what we are doing with CO2 is knocking that system out of balance. The the past million years CO2 was between 150 and 275 ppm. 150ppm == ice age. 275 ppm == our current climate. In the last 50 years we pushed CO2 from 275 ppm to 400 ppm. It will take 1,000 years (min) before the climate reaches an equilibrium state, but once we get that ball rolling we cannot stop it. I'll repost the CO2 chart, that is the most important thing in this debate. This is irrelevant. CO2 is a potent greenhouse gas and we pushed the concentrations to levels not seen in millions of year, and over the next 200 years could push it to a level never seen by this planet in it's entire life time. And how long will it take to get back to the levels that reflect the climate we have now? 10,000 to 50,000 years. This is wrong. Please site a source. Really? The rate of increase seems to be matching current scientific models. I'm not a big fan of the Paris agreement myself, some if it is a power grab by government bureaucrats. But, the climate change deniers - some of whom should and I believe do know better - because they deny basic facts, don't get a seat at the table when talking about solutions. Pure political ideology should never go before facts established by science.

This video shows how the North Pole ice cap has been shrinking. The white ice in the video is the older thicker ice. It use to stay in the North Pole region until it was ejected into the North Atlantic Ocean and then melted. Now it is melting in place in the North Pole. http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/The-North-Pole-is-an-insane-36-degrees-warmer-10623301.php

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/climate-of-doubt/ FRONTLINE: Climate of Doubt The science it real. The problem is politics get conflated into the issue by those who fear the expansion of government. Rather than deny the science they should be part of the sincere debate about what to do about it.

^^^ This.... Your primary process needs to be fixed, so the polarizing extreme candidates do always win. Ranked Voting when there are many candidates early in the primary. National primaries held in stages to narrow the field down to a choice most could support.

This is a good step. The presidential primary process needs to be redone and studies show that ranked voting allows the majority of voters to get someone they like when a field has many candidates. That essentially is one of the problems with our primary system.. if you have many candidates you might like 3 of 12, but can only vote for one. The other problem as I see it, is we don't have all the states vote at the same time. I think we would be better off with a national votes at three different times during the primaries, and at each step you narrow the field until nationally you get to select the winner.

WWF. I'm getting this shirt.

Join me and vote for Elon Musk as a write-in candidate, that way he will get two votes instead of one. :)

I'm talking about the presidential primary to select the candidates. That is where the big change needs to happen. The electoral college would just be a minor change in comparison.

Just as important we need to re-vamp the Presidential primary system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gndkcb12X1c The current system going a state at a time - disenfranchises 99% of the voters. It might have made sense in 1820 before the internet and when the country was much smaller, but right now, if you were to create a system from scratch letting Iowa and New Hampshire be the primary element in selecting a president just doesn't make any sense. I think it needs to be nation-wide and in several stages. Perhaps in the first primary day the top 5 vote getters move on, and people get to select a top 3. Then from there you narrow it down is the following primary election days. But the most important thing is the winner needs to get 50% in a nation-wide poll to get the nomination. I don't think we would have these candidates with a different primary system. It creates people the know "how to work the system".

Even if you write him in, he still will not get any votes. Well they won't count it since in California even an write candidate must register (and he wasn't born in this country so isn't eligible), but I'm still writing his name in. I get to vote for who ever I want.

I'm not so concerned about the 6th. ;) But this is what we need to be concerned about.. on the 6th or 28th or 8th or whenever it is.. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-is-investigating-foreign-hacks-of-state-election-systems/2016/08/29/6e758ff4-6e00-11e6-8365-b19e428a975e_story.html

I'm not so concerned about the 6th. ;) True that...

After dealing with a cyber attack at work on Friday and reading some of the hacker sites over the weekend, my big concern for election day is Russia using a cyber attack to disrupt the election process enough to cast doubt on a HRC win, and Trump starting another meme similar to the "Obama birth certificate" crap. Putin trying to disrupt the election on Nov. 8th with a cyber attack, is a real concern.

Won't that present a small problem for your candidate? Only if I expect him to win. :) But it is also a commentary of what I think of Trump's anti-immigrant stand, that the person I would prefer lead this country is an immigrant.

Somebody might have already pointed this out, but consider that Richard Pryor may have been way ahead of his time in this movie clip. Food for thought.

Your poll is missing this. But I don't see a viable 3rd party option this year. So for the first time I'm just going to write in who ever I want for the presidential race, and then vote in the more important local (Palo Alto city) election issues. My write in is for: Elon Musk.

NASA seems to have landing on Mars figured out, and perhaps other organizations should just leave getting their scientific instruments on the surface up to NASA. In this case we lost a really good microscope on the surface of Mars that could have seen bacteria in the soil. That is a huge scientific loss. http://www.space.com/34094-microscope-seeks-biological-samples-on-mars.html On the positive side though the orbiter is fine, and should be able to methane gas in trace amounts, which while being an indicator of life won't be the final proof we are looking for. That microscope could have been. Also they found the crash site for the lander. http://www.space.com/34472-exomars-mars-lander-crash-site-photos.html

So the US remains the only country to have successfully landed probes on the surface of Mars. Russia - zero in 4 attempts* ESA - zero in 2 attempts Japan - zero in 1 attempt US - 9 in 10 attempts ** * one Russian Lander communicated for 14 seconds before failing. ** We still have a rover that landed in 2003 working, so that is 20+ years of working craft on the surface.

Do we want this country to be a democracy, or an oligarchy? We already limit ourselves to a 2 party, one occupation (lawyers) system. And those two political parties are in danger of being run by just two families. (i.e the Clinton family and the Bush family). Think about this. Hillary Clinton is going to win this election. And after the end of her first 4 year term, in the past 30 years, 22 of those years we had only a Bush or a Clinton in office. We are a country of 350 million people, how is it that our political system limits us to such a small sub-set of those people, and our presidential selection process is so screwed up that only the most narcissistic people win? Regardless of if your left, right or center, something it very broken about our presidential primary system. A good first start IMHO is to never elect someone from the same family to the highest position in the land. Once someone name Bush or Clinton is elected too office, no other person from the same family should be eligible for that post ever. (OK maybe just 3 generations) If we do that we now have 350 million - (about a dozen) people to select from.

I didn't look at the stats for this jumper. Absolutely don't jump with a camera. Maybe you can pack the parachute and let someone else with a camera jump and film the opening.

If you can get a video of the deployment that might be informative.

My dog started as a foster. He was old and deaf and in the shelter for almost a year. He was considered "un-adoptable" and being so long in the shelter was loosing the "people skills" needed to attract an adoption. I was walking him at the shelter already (along with other dogs), so agreed to take him in for a while to get him use to being around people again, to train him and hopefully he would get adopted. He was a small dog (chihuahua-terrier mix) about 10 lbs., and I’m more of a “big dog” person, so I didn’t think the fostering would last very long. But what I discovered was, he had a incredible personality. Old, deaf, and a level of confidence that made him as stubborn as a donkey. He didn’t have any of the “yappie-ness” that some small dogs have. In fact he was very quite. He had a big dog personality stuffed into a small dog body. Our walks always started with him walking up to the door then planting his feet, and giving some token resistance to the idea of going for a walk. He’d look at me with a “I’m not really into to this walking thing”, and I’d look back at him with a “your not pooping in my house” look so with a quick tug of the leash off we would go. Once we were on the walk, there was never any question which way he wanted to go. He mostly wanted to go the “pet store” about 4 blocks away, and I usually wanted to go to the “park”, so at this on intersection we always had a bit of a “negotiation” about which way to go. Are we going to the pet store today, or to the park? If you closed your eyes and just felt the amount of tug he would give, it felt like 20 lbs of pull coming from a 10 lbs dog. Then at some point during the walk, he would just stop, plant his feet and refuse to go further. He was done with the walk, and in full donkey mode. At this point I’d pick him up and carry him back home. I was “walking" my dog, but he was an old so got what he wanted. Another thing I discovered, was he liked people food. Really, really liked it. That year in the shelter must have been torture. Anything I was eating he would want, and eventually got the role of dish cleaner. (At least before I put them in the dishwasher.) He really liked to clean ice cream bowls, and I taught him trick a to get ice cream. He’d bark once, spin once and then put up one paw. When he did that he'd get to finish the bowl on ice cream. Eventually, doing the “bark, spin, paw” became the way he said - “I want ice cream”. But the best example how confident he was happened on Thanksgivings about two years ago. We visited friend and someone else brought their dog, a 50 lbs. Great Dane. Both dogs were under the table during dinner. Then some turkey fell on the floor under the table near both of them. This was Ralph’s chance to nab some good human food, and he went for it. A 10 lb. old and deaf dog in one corner, and 50 lb. teenage normally sweet (except when food was involved) Great Dane in the other corner. In the ensuring flight, the table lifted off the floor and both of us owners had to separate the dogs. Ralph got some of the food, but a 10 lbs dog isn’t going to beat a 50 pounder, and he also got a bit on his back leg with light bleeding, and a trip to the hospital where they shaved all the fur off his back leg, and side. It was a nasty wound, but in Ralph’s mind I’m sure he thought is was worth it to grab some premium people food. Of one thing I’m certain, if a similar opportunity happened again, he wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to go for it. In his final year, he had the dog equivalent of a heart attack and was on medicine. I’d have to administer three medicines from a tube twice a day and despite it likely tasting nasty he never put up any resistance to taking it. It’s almost like he knew he needed it. In his last week he had an episode (maybe a heart attack) was on his side and couldn’t get up. He had no control over he legs, this was the only time in three years I saw fear in his eyes. He went to the hospital again and stayed in a oxygen tent, but this time wasn’t going to get better. On his last day I brought him his favorite blanket and stayed with him until he was gone. I did my best to make sure the last three years of his life were the best three years of his life. I doubt anyone will read this far, but I wrote this to make sure he wasn’t forgotten. He was a foster fail and only with me for three years, but I still miss that dog. It only occurred to me while writing this that I haven’t had ice cream since he passed. I guess, what’s the point if you don’t have anyone to share it with.

Done.. Viso II+ ordered and on the way. thanks for all the comments.