M. Thomas Apple's Blog, page 3
September 1, 2024
Sorry for the long absence…
Haven’t posted anything in about five or six weeks. Sorry!
I was going to initially post something about the Boeing crew that got stranded on the ISS, but NASA kept delaying their decision to use SpaceX. It was a given that they’d have no choice.
Boeing, quite obviously, cannot be trusted to spend millions of taxpayer’s dollars and make a proper spacecraft.
Anyway, I’ll start posting something more interesting soon.
In the meantime, here’s a Star Trek TOS selfie by Catwoman. I mean Lee Meriwether. (S3:14, That Which Survives)
July 17, 2024
Time to see the Perseid Meteor shower! ☄️
The Perseids get their name because the shooting stars appear to stream from a point in the sky where the constellation of Perseus is located…The constellation rises in the northeast, but meteors should be visible all over the sky if conditions are clear.
The best time to watch is after midnight in the northern hemisphere. The meteors are actually debris leftover from the Swift-Tuttle comet, discovered in the early 1860s.
The annual celestial event started this past Sunday and lasts for about two months, but the peak this year is around August 12th.
Perseus looks like this:
See https://www.constellation-guide.com/constellation-list/perseus-constellation/ for more information about this group of constellations as well as the famous Greek myth behind them…
July 9, 2024
Who wants to train AI for free, hands up! 🙌
Post a comment on Reddit, answer coding questions on Stack Overflow, edit a Wikipedia entry or share a baby photo on your public Facebook or Instagram feed and you are also helping to trainthe next generation of artificial intelligence.
Well, if they’re scrubbing my public FB page for data,
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
I’ll take up my vorpal sword and
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
O frabjous day!
PS I hope this helps hapless mindless office workers compose emails.
July 4, 2024
Railway Robot in Japan
West Japan Railways (West JR), one of six companies that make up Japan Railways Group, has unveiled a giant “humanoid robot” to work on heavy machinery on its lines…
https://www.railway-technology.com/news/japanese-railway-introduces-infrastructure-robot/?cf-view
Interesting that in English the official name is West Japan Railways Company, while in Japanese it’s JR Nishi-Nihon Guruupu (JR西日本グループ), which means Japan Railways West Japan Group. It’s one of six “companies” that comprise what used to be “National Railroad” (Kokutetsu), owned by the government.
JR West is renowned to be badly run and somewhat corrupt. I wonder about this “robot” project. With the increase in “human accidents” (ie people hit by a train), I think it’d be better to hire more workers than to reduce staff and have the top level desk jockeys pocket the…
Oh. 
June 25, 2024
China just returned rocks from the Far Side of the Moon
But China has also offered to share at least some of its new moon samples with American researchers, and NASA is allowing the U.S. scientists to submit proposals.
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/24/nx-s1-5015208/china-return-first-ever-sample-return-moon-far-side
This is a welcome change of heart. International politics need not prevent international space exploration.
On the other hand…
China is not planning a mere short-term, flags-and-footprints presence on the Moon. Their ambition is more like Nasa’s Artemis than it is Apollo. China plans to launch two separate missions to the south pole of the Moon around 2026 and 2028 – including testing using lunar soil to 3D print bricks – as precursors to a lunar base.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240510-change-6-is-just-the-tip-of-chinas-space-ambitions
A little competition might be just what’s needed to get humanity into space.
But a little competition might also go a bit too far…
“May you live in interesting times…”
June 24, 2024
And the $10,000 question is…
What jobs have you had?
What jobs have I *not* had would be a better question.
Right…
Lawn mower (right after I got my “working papers” at age 14, along with my social security number — this is now assigned at birth in the US)Pizza dough maker (seriously, that’s all I did at first)Pizza maker and deli worker (same restaurant)Tarred the school parking lot and roof (no idea what this job would be called)McDonald’s (who hasn’t? Both opening and closing, including cleaning the deep oil fryer. Ugh.)Gymnasium weight room staffGymnasium pool cleanerVolleyball court setup and take downSoftball umpire (all four work-study jobs at college with a max number of hours per week)Bookstore clerk (Barnes & Nobles)Dishwasher (summer time only)Short order cook (same restaurant as the dishwasher job)Stock boy (stationery store for all of two days)Temp worker (stuffing envelopes for three days, yawn)Blockbuster clerk (out of business video rental store—anybody remember VHS tapes?)Bookstore clerk (used bookstore in Ann Arbor, mostly stocking and organizing overflow in the basement, although I did help set up a comic book and gaming store annex)First year composition teacher (this was a paid TA job for one semester in grad school)Computer software store clerk (mall seasonal job—I got in trouble once for suggesting that a customer try another software store for a game series we didn’t carry rather than lie by saying we’d let him know when we got it; I hadn’t realized lying was company policy…)Computer salesperson (my first “full time” job—I lasted two months—definitely not slick enough to work for sales commish)Kinko’s (computer design department)Weekly newspaper (computer layout)A small H&R firm (computer design…you can probably sense a trend…)Assistant language teacher (the jump to Japan)Language instructor (late night after school cram school for junior high kids)Assistant Professor (both part time and full time contractual)Professor (it’s amazing now to see how I wound up teaching TESOL…)This may not include some odds and ends here and there when I was in JHS and SHS. I worked a lot of summer jobs and Christmas/ New Year’s break jobs. I worked most weekends while I was a full time students, and most Friday evenings, too. I don’t recall the pay for all of them, but I remember the pizza dough job paid $3.15 an hour, and four years later McDonald’s paid a whopping $3.75 an hour.
You know, I’d be very interested to find out what jobs my colleagues have had. In college when I borrowed money to study abroad in Germany, my classmates wandered around Europe for the summer while I returned and had exactly $0 to my name and worked double-shifts. I wonder how many literature or history professors spent summer days getting burned on their arms with 400F cooking oil or getting yelled at by bankers because their document wasn’t printed fast enough…
June 22, 2024
Obvious, really, but..
How do you waste the most time every day?
Probably by responding to pointless writing prompts .
June 16, 2024
Starliner to Earth: “We have a problem…”
Starliner, the Boeing spacecraft whose launch was delayed by a helium leak, has now developed four additional helium leaks after docking successfully with the ISS.
They had to delay the docking due to a little problem with thrusters…
Five of the 28 thrusters were not operating but, after troubleshooting, Boeing recovered four of Starliner’s malfunctioning jets and NASA allowed the spacecraft to dock.
So their return to Earth has been delayed so that they can run some more tests.
I sure hope they have built some redundancies to this system. Remember, this is Boeing. QC is not exactly high on their priorities list…
BLOCK
This is how I’ve been feeling the past couple of weeks…
Just too hot. And too busy. And tired.
And my favorite baseball teams keep losing.
At least for Father’s Day my wife got me nice food and drink. Maybe that’ll help get my mojo back…
(The image is of my youngest daughter’s art bag from last year. She has also complained of not being able to write much lately…)
May 26, 2024
At SuShi High Tech Tokyo: A “flying” what?
From Kyodo, who captioned the image “flying vehicle” but headlined the article with “flying car”
“I look forward to flying cars becoming a normal means of transportation.” (Gov. Koike)
“Normal means” for whom, exactly? I can’t imagine the average worker in Tokyo will be able to afford this thing. Even if they had a physical space to store in.
And, you know, I think I’ve seen a “flying vehicle” like this somewhere already… 
(FWIW it was part of a conference on technology and sustainability, cheekily called “SuShi High Tech”: https://sushitech-startup.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/en/)
