Jump to content

A Thread for Random Musings


Old Man

Recommended Posts

We had another cold wave come through here Friday afternoon; since noon Friday most of a foot of snow has fallen, most of which is still with us.

 

We have kept the bird feeders stocked, including the hummingbird feeder.  I have found that if I bring it in after dark, let it thaw on the kitchen counter, and put it out again early, and while it is slushy by end of day, they can syill get liquid food.

 

This morning I slept in til 6:30, and after setting the coffee going, I took the hummingbird feeder out.  The ornery little git was out there waiting, and cursed me vehemently the entire time it took me to go out through the door, negotiate the snowy back porch, take the one step up the rockery so I could hang it, reverse course, and get back in through the back door.

 

And I thought the cats were impatient.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Townsend's warbler 

Ruby-crowned kinglet

Anna's hummingbird 

Bewick's wren

Bushtit

Dark-eyed junco

Northern flicker

Steller's jay

Black-capped chickadee 

Starling

Red-breasted nuthatch

 

White-crowned sparrow 

Fox sparrow

Rufous-sided towhee

Varied thrush

Downy woodpecker

Pileated woodpecker

Chestnut-backed chickadee

Song sparrow 

House finch

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

About 9:30 last night, as the temperature was rising and the snow was beginning to turn to rain, a couple of branches in the Douglas Fir in the back yard broke off and came down.  Took out the back fence.  (Context: by Monday evening we had had well over a foot of snow fall since about noon Friday, so there was pretty considerable buildup all over; Seattle area has been pretty much paralyzed.)  No damage to anything but fence and foliage, but an unnerving thing to listen to right before going to bed.  I went out and confirmed that the deadfall was not blocking anything but back yard (it didn't impinge on the arterial street right behind the back fence), so I took pictures, the wife called the homeowners' insurance, and once the snow has melted away I'll be able to maneuver out there (about a foot and a half of snow inside the yard, where there had been some drifting behind that fence before it was taken out), consider my options, and start cleaning up.  The ones that broke off ... I think I can encircle the thickest part of the fall with both my hands (one hand is completely out of the question).

 

Oh, and DSL service into our neighborhood seems to have died an hour or two prior to the branch-breaking, so the boredom level is higher at home than we have become accustomed to.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

…It was conceived mentally on the 8th [of] March in this year one thousand six hundred and eighteen, but submitted to calculation in an unlucky way, and therefore rejected as false, and finally returning on the 15th of May and adopting a new line of attack, stormed the darkness of my mind. So strong was the support from the combination of my labor of seventeen years on the observations of Brahe and the present study, which conspired together, that at first I believed I was dreaming, and assuming my conclusion among my basic premises. But it is absolutely certain and exact that the proportion between the periodic times of any two planets is precisely the sesquialterateproportion of their mean distances…

 

It's  400 years since Kepler's 3rd Law of planetary motion was found and published.  68 years later, Newton showed that this relationship is required by the laws of motion and gravitation, and Newton's extension of Kepler's 3rd Law remains the means by which we determine the masses of astronomical objects.

 

Oh, and "sesquialterate" means the 3/2th power.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
On 12/31/2011 at 5:15 PM, Cancer said:

Re: A Thread for Random Musings

 

Once upon a time, at the dawn of the Web (1994, 95), when you typed "cottage cheese" into the few available search engines, you usually got this page as the only hit. Good to see it's still around.

 

Still there!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sometime in the last few months my institution acquired Yet Another Assistant Vice President.  What do AVPs do here?  They spend money.  So they get lots of spam.

 

Unfortunately, his email address here is different from mine in only one way; take my email address, slap one more letter on the end of the username (just before the "@"), and then you have his.

 

Or, more to the point, take his email, drop the last letter off the username, and bingo, I get it instead.  I note that spammers with money have tools that know how to get around the spam filters, so not all of this stuff gets shunted to the junk folder; one or two a week drop into my inbox, like diarrhea into a sick-house toilet.

 

I'm not gonna double the spammers' suckerlists by sending them a correction (actually, I did do that once, before I realized what was going on), just resigning myself to manually deleting more stuff ... again.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dear Cranky Guy Who Honked At Us While Lady P Was Getting Out Of The Car:

 

A) Get over yourself. The extra 30 seconds you had to wait to swap out your propane tank isn't that big a deal. And, frankly, neither are you.

 

2) As it turns out, I don't have a firearm in the car. The next guy you honk at might.

 

iii) Bite me.

 

Respectfully submitted,

-P

Link to comment
Share on other sites

32 minutes ago, Cancer said:

Think that might be a "mouse shoulder" posture-generated RSI thing?  I've had one of those, generated by a bad workstation plus chair plus mouse location.  It wasn't sudden onset, but it got pretty bad.

 

Not this time; I've had that pleasure as well. It's in my left, i.e. useless shoulder. I suppose that's a blessing in a way. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...