Jerry Stratton's Blog, page 30

Mark the date for π Day!

Pi Day this year is a Sunday. Here’s a date-pecan pie to celebrate with your friends and family!

Write your rep on ballot security and open elections

Your state should be a model of secure, open, and self-auditing elections. Here’s a sample letter to your representatives.

Why Do the Election’s Defenders Require My Agreement? linked on Editorials

“The purpose of voting today is to give a democratic veneer to an undemocratic regime—not to give the people a say in the direction of their government.” “What we thus have is a voting system that is slapdash, inconsistent, porous, and easy to manipulate—i.e., cheat. Again, by design. The media, the intellectuals, the ‘experts,’ the universities—every opinion-shaping sector of our society—both cheerlead and lie about all of this… to shift blame from those who rig everything, refuse to explain anything but instead gaslight, gaslight, gaslight, onto those who, in response, decline to believe.”

Rolling blackouts keep following me around

Rolling blackouts in San Diego, the Great Southwest Blackout, and now Texas with a week of subfreezing temperatures and dead power.

The Indispensable Man: Rush Limbaugh, 1951-2021 linked on Editorials

“I know precisely when I first heard Rush. It was not long after he started the show and not long after I bought my pad in New Hampshire. I was driving some visitors from London through the North Maine Woods toward New Brunswick in that dead zone where the only thing that comes in is the soft-and-easy station on 94.9 FM from the top of Mount Washington. And then that died, and there was nothing, and I forgot to switch it off so it was automatically scanning up and around the dial as we chit-chatted in the car. And then suddenly it found [Rush Limbaugh].

“And, in my car, conversation ceased. My friends were what you might call slightly skeptical lefties, so they disagreed with what Rush said on the issues but they were rapt by the way he said it. Because they had never heard anybody say it like that before. It was a unique combination—absolute piercing philosophical clarity, and a grand rollicking presentational style honed through all the lean years of minor-market disc-jockeying.”

ERCOT’s Phantom Reserve Margins Spell Trouble for Summertime linked on Editorials

July 8 2020: “Wind and solar energy are intermittent, meaning their contributions to the grid plummet dramatically when the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. And although ERCOT clearly has no control over the weather, this challenging situation is made worse when forecasts are based on assumptions that create a false sense of security about the reliability of the grid.” They were warned: “We can’t expect to be 100 percent secure from every possible risk, but we surely want to do better than barely scraping by. With such a slim reserve margin, unplanned power plant outages or just days with little wind or sunshine could put us into a real emergency—this time with blackouts.”

Bean counting and ballot counting

We treat money far more seriously than we treat the future of our country.

Low-cost, reliable, resilient electricity linked on Editorials

“There is a lot of conflicting ‘information’ about the TX blackouts. Here’s the bottom line: the root cause of the TX blackouts is a national and state policy that has prioritized the adoption of unreliable wind/solar energy over reliable energy.”

Color Computer binaries from decimal values

I ran across a really nice Galaxian/Space Invaders-style program that used decimal data in DATA statements to POKE the program into memory. So I updated cocobin to handle that, too.

Arcane Lore

Lists of spells, skills, psychic powers, and specialties.