Toto, I Have a Feeling We're Not in Kansas Anymore

My wife and I just returned from a vacation in Kansas.  Weird?  We flew into Wichita to visit Monument Rocks, a chalk formation from I think Mesozoic Era and the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve.  We had some minor computer issues that required a visit to Best Buy (wrong charger for Rhonda's PC and wrong USB Bluetooth for the mouse) and the prospect of 4 1/2 hours each way after Best Buy opened at 10 AM was not thrilling so went to the Tallgrass Preserve instead and talked to the bison herd.  

We also toured the house of the cattle baron who made his fortune in the Flint Hills, an area too stony for farming.  Interesting combination of Renaissance and Prairie Plain architecture in limestone.  I will have pictures to post tomorrow.  

Kansas is empty and rural in a way that makes Idaho seem crowded and cosmopolitan.  Wichita is a fair sized city, about 394,000 people with a murder problem which I think explains their increasingly relaxed gun laws.  The state as a whole had a 4.9/100,000 murder rate in 2019 which is not good.  Even in towns of a few hundred people some distance from Wichita we saw bars on windows and signs about Meth Watch.

The goal was partly geological study and partly topographical.  (My wife and I have odd notions of fun.)  More tomorrow including the Osage Orange which is not an orange nor particularly edible.  The clever Midwesterners found uses for it nonetheless.

One nice aspect about wealth is not feeling like you are cheaping out on stuff that matters to your happiness as a couple.  Over the salad years, we stayed in some only so-so motels including a Motel 6 once.  Now we stay in Marriotts and Hiltons.

I remember vividly my parents renting a $10/night hotel in Flagstaff on our 1967 37 states and 4 Canadian provinces vacation.  (Seventeen days.)  It was not all that bad of a place but it was not the Holiday Inn. Or the Ramada Inn where we stayed on other nights.  (There were a few nights camping which is probably why I have never been keen on camping. For every warm memory of waking up to bacon and eggs cooking over a camp stove there were at least two others of putting up a tent in darkness at the end of a long drive.)

I think my father was a little sheepish about that crowded, not very nice motel room, but in retrospect that my parents managed to scrape together the money for the vacations we did do says that they considered the broadening experience valuable for us.  My wife's parents did one vacation as she was growing up and they were solidly middle-class.

A Little Humor to Relieve the 'Horror

 11/23 IEEE Spectrum:

Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station is a permanent scientific research base located at what is arguably the most isolated place on Earth. During the austral summer, the station is home to about 150 scientists and support staff, but during the austral winter, that number shrinks to just 40 or so, and those people are completely isolated from the rest of the world from mid-February until late October. For eight months, the station has to survive on its own, without deliveries of food, fuel, spare parts, or anything else. Only in the most serious of medical emergencies will a plane attempt to reach the station in the winter.

While the station’s humans rotate seasonally, there are in fact four full-time residents: the South Pole Roombas. First, there was Bert, a Roomba 652, who arrived at the station in 2018 and was for a time the loneliest robot in the world. Since the station has two floors, Bert was joined by Ernie, a Roomba 690, in 2019. A second pair of Roombas, Sam and Frodo, followed soon after.

These Roombas are at the South Pole to do what Roombas do: help keep the floors clean. But for the people who call the South Pole home for months on end, it turns out that these little robots have been able to provide some much-needed distraction in a place where things stay more or less the same all of the time, and where pets, plants, and even dirt is explicitly outlawed by the Antarctic Treaty in the name of ecological preservation.

For the last year, an anonymous IT engineer has been blogging about his experiences, working first at McMurdo Station (on the Antarctic coast south of New Zealand), and later at Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, where he’s currently spending the winter as part of the station’s support staff. His blog includes mundane yet fascinating accounts of what day-to-day life is like at the South Pole, including how showering works (four minutes per person per week), where the electricity comes from (a huge amount of aviation fuel hauled over land from the coast that will power generators), and the fate of the last egg for five months (over medium with salt and pepper).

The engineer also devoted an entire post to signage at the South Pole, at the very end of which was this picture, which raised some questions for me:...

Ernie, it turns out, has had a dramatic and occasionally harrowing life at the South Pole station. After Ernie arrived in 2019 to clean one floor of the station, lore began to develop that Ernie and its partner Bert (tasked with cleaning the floor above) were “star-crossed lovers, forever separated by the impenetrable barrier of the staircase.” That quote comes from Amy Lowitz, a member of the South Pole Telescope team, who overwintered at the pole in 2016 and has spent many summers there. “I think I made that joke every year when a new group of people comes to the pole for the summer,” Lowitz tells IEEE Spectrum. “There’s only so many things to talk about, so eventually the Roombas come up in conversation.” Happily for Ernie, Lowitz says that it’s now on the same floor as Bert, with the new Roombas Sam and Frodo teaming up on the floor below.

Funny article, which those of you who have worked for startups will recognize and enjoy.

Is This a Gun Problem?

10/31/23 Washington Times:

D.C. police arrested a preteen and charged the child with armed carjacking Tuesday after authorities said he was with the 13-year-old carjacker who was shot and killed by a driver last weekend.

The Washington Times asked Metropolitan Police if the armed carjacking charge meant they found a gun on the 12-year-old juvenile suspect.

MPD still hasn’t clarified if a gun was located either at the scene or if the preteen boy had a firearm.

---

The threat of a gun was why the off-duty federal security officer targeted in the carjacking attempt told police he shot and killed Vernard Toney Jr. in downtown Saturday night.

The officer told police that one suspect was holding his waistband as if he had a gun tucked away. 

The victim’s firearm was legally registered, police said.  

To a 13-year-old?  DC must have misunderstood Bruen very badly.

Priorities

 10/31/23 Washington Times:

A whistleblower has told Congress that special agents at Homeland Security Investigations have been pulled off cases involving child traffickers and sexual exploitation and been deployed to the border to make sandwiches for illegal immigrants.

Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican, revealed the allegations during a hearing Tuesday, challenging Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over whether that was a good use of highly trained agents’ time.

“We are being told to shut down investigations to go hand out sandwiches and escort migrants to the shower and sit with them while they’re in the hospital and those types of tasks,” said the whistleblower, whom Mr. Hawley described as a special agent.

This Will Be a Hard One

11/1/23 Fox News:

Police are investigating a vandalism incident that left an ice cream shop with pro-Palestinian graffiti and broken windows as a hate crime, according to the chain's Jewish owner.

"Last week, on October 25, 2023, our flagship ice cream shop in the heart of the Mission District was vandalized, badly damaged, and plastered with graffiti," Smitten Ice Cream owner Robyn Sue Fisher wrote on her company's site. "The graffiti suggests that the shop was targeted because I am Jewish, and it is currently being investigated by authorities as a hate crime."

The officers who responded to the ice cream shop's alarm found the store's windows shattered, San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) officer Gonee Sepulveda told Fox News in a statement. "FREE PALESTIEN [sic]" was spray-painted on the shop's window, according to Mission Local, a San Francisco-based outlet.

I am leaning towards the "Dairy is rape" crowd as the culprits.  They cannot spell Palestine.  Berkeley or Stanford?  Your pick.

A Couple New Citations to My Work

 Miller v. Bonta Case No. 19-cv-01537 BEN (JLB) (S.D.Cal. 2023) citing State Court Standards of Review for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms at n. 121 and n. 203; Pistols, Crime, and Public: Safety in Early America at n. 134 and n. 149; Knives and the Second Amendment at n. 152

U.S. v. Jackson, Criminal No. 4:23-cr-0089-GHD-JMV (N.D.Miss. 2023). citing Second Amendment Limitations & Criminological Considerations

Someone Must Have Tried This

Yes, that says do not use the fire sprinkler as a clothes hanger.