This would not be the first time Trump (or assorted other RW powers) drop a case as soon as it becomes clear how much discovery will reveal. Eg, the Fox News Network paid three-quarters of a billion dollars rather than let what Dominion had from discovery go public.
A number of people have reported that the real reason Trump is dismantling NCAR is to punish Colorado's governor for not releasing Tina Peters from jail. Peters is the former Mesa County clerk and "the 2020 election was stolen" fanatic who was convicted of several state crimes associated with her providing unauthorized persons access to the voting machines in her care, and that person breaking the seals, opening the covers, and tinkering with the insides.
I skimmed some of the stories in the Wyoming press. Wyoming's Congress critters either did not respond to questions, or said that they had not heard from the administration about the fate of the supercomputer center in Wyoming.
The administration announced they will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research because "This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country." Last summer I toured NCAR's supercomputer center in Cheyenne, WY. The center provides free access to supercomputer resources to hundreds/thousands of university earth sciences researchers who would not otherwise have access to that sort of computing power. The center is jointly funded by the NSF and the State of Wyoming (U of Wyoming researchers get priority scheduling for time on the machines).
I found the data portion of the center as interesting as the processing part. The center includes curated content from the massive set of atmosphere and ocean observations collected by NOAA. On the tour, they would open one of the rack doors and let me stick my nose in with the processing blades. The data facility was inside two layers of bulletproof glass.
Hegseth has proposed a plan to significantly reduce the number of four-star generals. The proposal appears to be consistent with the recently released National Security Strategy: increase the focus on the Americas and reduce attention to Europe.
Band -- both marching band and wind orchestra -- was one of the really positive things for me in high school. Not just the music. Our band director was a retired US Army master sergeant, and by the time I was a senior I realized that if you paid attention, he was also giving you a master class in motivating young adults.
How I got to Mint Mobile seems strange, at least to me. My wife and I signed up for T-Mobile's cheap plan, unlimited everything for two people aged 55+. Moved to Fort Collins, where every network's coverage was great. Fort Collins had started requiring all wired networks -- phone, power, cable -- to be buried in 1948. The only tall poles left were the power authority's high-voltage lines, all of the cell companies used them, which is why coverage was great. Then the feds decided putting cell antennas on HVAC poles was dangerous and required that they be removed. Fort Collins now has some of the worst cellular coverage of any city. By happenstance, T-Mobile's was the best in the parts of the city where I spent most of my time. At some point after my wife went into memory care I was fixing up service. Mint Mobile was the least expensive of the discount companies reselling T-Mobile service. At the end of the initial period, they sent me e-mail and text saying, "We recommend you change to this cheaper plan." As I recall, all of my phone service since I was an undergraduate back in the 1970s cost more than the $15/month I'm paying now.
Who says corporate America doesn't have at least some sense of humor left? I got this card from Mint Mobile. It included a fragment of holiday wrapping paper :^)
Before this ends all National Parks will likely be privatized (to private = to plunder); to be logged and mined into moonscapes.
The national parks are so small, and generally don't have the resources the private sector is looking for. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management [1] holdings are potentially more attractive. OTOH, as privately held lands, they fall under state jurisdiction for royalties and restoration requirements. Why is so much of Wyoming's coal mined on federal lands? Because even deep-red Wyoming levies much higher royalties and taxes than the feds do, and has much more stringent reclamation requirements.
[1] I spent too many years in western states, and on a western state government legislative staff in particular. In my head, the BLM acronym is always associated with "What have those d*ckheads done now?"
Warner Bros. has released a trailer and poster for the Supergirl movie coming out next June. Perhaps I'll take granddaughter #1 to the theater to explain it to me.
Regarding today's seizure of a loaded oil tanker, reportedly in transit from Venezuela to Cuba... As I understand how these things are done, ownership of the oil transferred FOB some oil terminal in Venezuela. The owner is almost certainly not the company that owns the tanker. Trump has said regarding the oil, "Well, we keep it, I guess." Part of me wishes that there's some back room paper shuffling going on and tomorrow China issues a statement asking, "Did we just hear you say that you're keeping a million barrels of our oil?"
A bigger part of me fears irrationality, and a back channel message being sent that says, "Nice AI bubble you've blown there. Be a shame if anything happened to TSMC's ability to deliver chips to American companies."
I used to act out shouting “no, no, no” so that my wife had to wake me up. In the dream I would usually be in a situation of powerlesness.
My vampire dreams -- see above -- were infrequent. My wife would wake me up when things got to the huffing and puffing and occasionally whimpering stage. "Vampires again?" she would ask.
I’ve always known that most people can remember at least some of their dreams. But I’ve never done that.
I can remember the last dream immediately upon awakening, but have to review it a couple of times to get it into somewhat more permanent storage. I did that this morning. The dream setting was a hilly suburban neighborhood. The guy down the street was a sword smith who produced "good" magical swords. The guy across the street made "bad" magical swords. The wife of the guy across the street was a serial killer using one of the bad swords. They were framing the guy who made good swords for the killings. When I figured out what was going on, the good smith gave me a sword so I could take on the bad smith. Swashbuckling across streets and yards ensued. One of the backyards was filled with rabbits, we literally had to wade through them. Each rabbit had been dyed a bright color: red, blue, green, yellow.
Sometimes I wake up from the weird ones because, in the dream, I get to the point of "I'd like to speak with the screenwriter, please."
Now that I have an older man's prostate and bladder, I wake up once in the middle of the night because I have to pee. Sometimes I have trouble getting back to sleep after that, another common problem amongst the old. I have very vivid, complicated dreams, which are common side effects of the two long-term medications I take. I seem to dream more than I used to, but don't have any of the symptoms (like waking up fatigued) that indicate excess dreaming. None of the acting-out behavior, the normal REM "paralysis" seems to be working just fine.
I've long been interested in what kind of nightmares people have -- what makes you wake up huffing and puffing with the adrenaline pumping. The only ones that do that to me are dreams about vampires. For unknown reasons, while I know that witches and werewolves and such -- everything except vampires -- are just make-believe, part of me believes in vampires. I don't know if the fear pre- or post-dates the time I finished reading Salem's Lot in bed at 2:00 in the morning. I had to decide if I was going to walk across the room to turn the light off, knowing that I would have to walk back in the dark, or put my head under the pillow to sleep. I elected to put my head under the pillow.
This is great, as an add-on not as a replacement, which is what I assume was the intention? Does this now happen automatically, or does someone have to do things to it intermittently?
It's a very non-traditional add-on, intended to let someone get a feel for what's going on. State of the Discussion, not the discussion itself. CK MacLeod, the original author, figured out how to organize a lot of information into a little space. To be honest, despite the links back to the real pages, it tempts someone to jump straight to comments w/o reading the post proper first. That's a potentially serious downside. There's a widget version of the code that might be better, added at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar.
Every invocation generates a new page that's up-to-date. Speaking broadly, it doesn't require any attention except sometimes following a WordPress or PHP update. I got involved at the other site where it runs after cumulative updates had broken it completely.
Thanks, Charles. As I've mentioned, I inherited this when it was orphaned by the original author. I've kept it running, but have never been through it systematically to clean up. I know there's a bunch of CSS that only applies when the widget (as opposed to page) version is run, and I suspect there's some CSS that's just dead. Once I get past the holidays, I'll apply these corrections and I also intend to address lj's complaint about the comment excerpts.
ETA: And it doesn't come anywhere close to the current practices for things that ought to be included in plugins.
The WordPress built-in get_comment_excerpt() strips out formatting tags. The SotD code I inherited has its own comment excerpt code, and also strips out formatting tags unless the excerpt is the entire comment. That's what happened in the middle comment in your picture.
I’ve written here before about the one day while working an inventory job across CO, NE, SD, WY, MT...
Did you go through Casper? Was the wind blowing? (That's a trick question, for those who have not spent time in Casper.) The utilization factor at 80 meters for wind turbines near Casper is 49%. That is very likely the best in world for onshore turbines. Even the old school fossil fuel members of the Wyoming legislature are figuring out the state can derive far more revenue selling wind power to out-of-state customers than they can make burning coal.
I’ve noticed that the archive site has nothing June-December 2017. Is it lost, or did it not exist for some reason I’ve forgotten?
None of the archive is lost, except possibly a few things during the transition earlier this year. Feeding it from the Typepad export files into WordPress has to be done in chunks, and is tedious. Kudos to lj for the effort he's put in.
I have more stories about weird Front Range weather than there is room for. I'll settle for the recurring nice one in winter. When you go to bed, it's 5 °F. In the middle of the night you wake up because the Chinook is howling. When you get up in the morning it's 55.
I live in MA, where we definitely have winter, but I live pretty near the ocean, which has a mind of it’s own as far as seasonal cycles of warm and cold go.
The northern part of the Front Range urban corridor -- from 20 miles south of Denver to 20 miles north of Fort Collins, and 25 miles east onto the plains -- is a strange little area for weather. At the north end of that is the Cheyenne Ridge, a 2,000 ft high east-west barrier. At the south is the Palmer Divide, a 2,500 ft high east-west barrier. Plus the mountains to the west, of course. Among the weird things that happen is the Denver Cyclone. Broadly speaking, some or all of that area is protected from the worst of the regional weather.
The area was a traditional site for winter camps for Native American tribes, avoiding the much more severe weather in the mountains or more than 20 miles out onto the plains.
also… you might not need ‘!important’ on ObWi’s WP theme.
CharlesWT:
Would adding the following style setting to the head work?
I suspect you're both on the right track, and that adding a bit of CSS for a:visited in the "Additional CSS" section of the site customization would do the job. And that !important wouldn't be necessary.
it’s pretty simple to add color to visited links in wordpress:
I visited the site cleek pointed to. Just for the record, the CSS it recommends uses both pseudo elements and the !important modifier. I oppose both of those on general principle because they exist outside the JavaScript document model so cannot be modified by the user. As I've said in other places, "If there's some aspect of your page's styling that is so critical the user must not be allowed to change it you ought to be using PDF."
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Author, author?”
This would not be the first time Trump (or assorted other RW powers) drop a case as soon as it becomes clear how much discovery will reveal. Eg, the Fox News Network paid three-quarters of a billion dollars rather than let what Dominion had from discovery go public.
"
A number of people have reported that the real reason Trump is dismantling NCAR is to punish Colorado's governor for not releasing Tina Peters from jail. Peters is the former Mesa County clerk and "the 2020 election was stolen" fanatic who was convicted of several state crimes associated with her providing unauthorized persons access to the voting machines in her care, and that person breaking the seals, opening the covers, and tinkering with the insides.
I skimmed some of the stories in the Wyoming press. Wyoming's Congress critters either did not respond to questions, or said that they had not heard from the administration about the fate of the supercomputer center in Wyoming.
"
The administration announced they will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research because "This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country." Last summer I toured NCAR's supercomputer center in Cheyenne, WY. The center provides free access to supercomputer resources to hundreds/thousands of university earth sciences researchers who would not otherwise have access to that sort of computing power. The center is jointly funded by the NSF and the State of Wyoming (U of Wyoming researchers get priority scheduling for time on the machines).
I found the data portion of the center as interesting as the processing part. The center includes curated content from the massive set of atmosphere and ocean observations collected by NOAA. On the tour, they would open one of the rack doors and let me stick my nose in with the processing blades. The data facility was inside two layers of bulletproof glass.
"
Hegseth has proposed a plan to significantly reduce the number of four-star generals. The proposal appears to be consistent with the recently released National Security Strategy: increase the focus on the Americas and reduce attention to Europe.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/pete-hegseth-to-slash-4-star-generals-in-pentagon-shake-up/ar-AA1St2RB
On “Weekend music thread #08 How do you get to Carnagie Hall?”
Band -- both marching band and wind orchestra -- was one of the really positive things for me in high school. Not just the music. Our band director was a retired US Army master sergeant, and by the time I was a senior I realized that if you paid attention, he was also giving you a master class in motivating young adults.
On “Open Thread”
How I got to Mint Mobile seems strange, at least to me. My wife and I signed up for T-Mobile's cheap plan, unlimited everything for two people aged 55+. Moved to Fort Collins, where every network's coverage was great. Fort Collins had started requiring all wired networks -- phone, power, cable -- to be buried in 1948. The only tall poles left were the power authority's high-voltage lines, all of the cell companies used them, which is why coverage was great. Then the feds decided putting cell antennas on HVAC poles was dangerous and required that they be removed. Fort Collins now has some of the worst cellular coverage of any city. By happenstance, T-Mobile's was the best in the parts of the city where I spent most of my time. At some point after my wife went into memory care I was fixing up service. Mint Mobile was the least expensive of the discount companies reselling T-Mobile service. At the end of the initial period, they sent me e-mail and text saying, "We recommend you change to this cheaper plan." As I recall, all of my phone service since I was an undergraduate back in the 1970s cost more than the $15/month I'm paying now.
"
Who says corporate America doesn't have at least some sense of humor left? I got this card from Mint Mobile. It included a fragment of holiday wrapping paper :^)
On “How are you sleeping?”
Before this ends all National Parks will likely be privatized (to private = to plunder); to be logged and mined into moonscapes.
The national parks are so small, and generally don't have the resources the private sector is looking for. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management [1] holdings are potentially more attractive. OTOH, as privately held lands, they fall under state jurisdiction for royalties and restoration requirements. Why is so much of Wyoming's coal mined on federal lands? Because even deep-red Wyoming levies much higher royalties and taxes than the feds do, and has much more stringent reclamation requirements.
[1] I spent too many years in western states, and on a western state government legislative staff in particular. In my head, the BLM acronym is always associated with "What have those d*ckheads done now?"
On “Open Thread”
Warner Bros. has released a trailer and poster for the Supergirl movie coming out next June. Perhaps I'll take granddaughter #1 to the theater to explain it to me.
On “How are you sleeping?”
...having oil not under US control...
Regarding today's seizure of a loaded oil tanker, reportedly in transit from Venezuela to Cuba... As I understand how these things are done, ownership of the oil transferred FOB some oil terminal in Venezuela. The owner is almost certainly not the company that owns the tanker. Trump has said regarding the oil, "Well, we keep it, I guess." Part of me wishes that there's some back room paper shuffling going on and tomorrow China issues a statement asking, "Did we just hear you say that you're keeping a million barrels of our oil?"
A bigger part of me fears irrationality, and a back channel message being sent that says, "Nice AI bubble you've blown there. Be a shame if anything happened to TSMC's ability to deliver chips to American companies."
"
I used to act out shouting “no, no, no” so that my wife had to wake me up. In the dream I would usually be in a situation of powerlesness.
My vampire dreams -- see above -- were infrequent. My wife would wake me up when things got to the huffing and puffing and occasionally whimpering stage. "Vampires again?" she would ask.
"
I’ve always known that most people can remember at least some of their dreams. But I’ve never done that.
I can remember the last dream immediately upon awakening, but have to review it a couple of times to get it into somewhat more permanent storage. I did that this morning. The dream setting was a hilly suburban neighborhood. The guy down the street was a sword smith who produced "good" magical swords. The guy across the street made "bad" magical swords. The wife of the guy across the street was a serial killer using one of the bad swords. They were framing the guy who made good swords for the killings. When I figured out what was going on, the good smith gave me a sword so I could take on the bad smith. Swashbuckling across streets and yards ensued. One of the backyards was filled with rabbits, we literally had to wade through them. Each rabbit had been dyed a bright color: red, blue, green, yellow.
Sometimes I wake up from the weird ones because, in the dream, I get to the point of "I'd like to speak with the screenwriter, please."
"
Now that I have an older man's prostate and bladder, I wake up once in the middle of the night because I have to pee. Sometimes I have trouble getting back to sleep after that, another common problem amongst the old. I have very vivid, complicated dreams, which are common side effects of the two long-term medications I take. I seem to dream more than I used to, but don't have any of the symptoms (like waking up fatigued) that indicate excess dreaming. None of the acting-out behavior, the normal REM "paralysis" seems to be working just fine.
I've long been interested in what kind of nightmares people have -- what makes you wake up huffing and puffing with the adrenaline pumping. The only ones that do that to me are dreams about vampires. For unknown reasons, while I know that witches and werewolves and such -- everything except vampires -- are just make-believe, part of me believes in vampires. I don't know if the fear pre- or post-dates the time I finished reading Salem's Lot in bed at 2:00 in the morning. I had to decide if I was going to walk across the room to turn the light off, knowing that I would have to walk back in the dark, or put my head under the pillow to sleep. I elected to put my head under the pillow.
On “Site Experiment”
Question: How do you insert line breaks into a comment without causing it to post?
You can't just hit enter?
"
This is great, as an add-on not as a replacement, which is what I assume was the intention? Does this now happen automatically, or does someone have to do things to it intermittently?
It's a very non-traditional add-on, intended to let someone get a feel for what's going on. State of the Discussion, not the discussion itself. CK MacLeod, the original author, figured out how to organize a lot of information into a little space. To be honest, despite the links back to the real pages, it tempts someone to jump straight to comments w/o reading the post proper first. That's a potentially serious downside. There's a widget version of the code that might be better, added at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar.
Every invocation generates a new page that's up-to-date. Speaking broadly, it doesn't require any attention except sometimes following a WordPress or PHP update. I got involved at the other site where it runs after cumulative updates had broken it completely.
"
Thanks, Charles. As I've mentioned, I inherited this when it was orphaned by the original author. I've kept it running, but have never been through it systematically to clean up. I know there's a bunch of CSS that only applies when the widget (as opposed to page) version is run, and I suspect there's some CSS that's just dead. Once I get past the holidays, I'll apply these corrections and I also intend to address lj's complaint about the comment excerpts.
ETA: And it doesn't come anywhere close to the current practices for things that ought to be included in plugins.
"
And just an observation about italics.
The WordPress built-in get_comment_excerpt() strips out formatting tags. The SotD code I inherited has its own comment excerpt code, and also strips out formatting tags unless the excerpt is the entire comment. That's what happened in the middle comment in your picture.
On “Open Thread”
I’ve written here before about the one day while working an inventory job across CO, NE, SD, WY, MT...
Did you go through Casper? Was the wind blowing? (That's a trick question, for those who have not spent time in Casper.) The utilization factor at 80 meters for wind turbines near Casper is 49%. That is very likely the best in world for onshore turbines. Even the old school fossil fuel members of the Wyoming legislature are figuring out the state can derive far more revenue selling wind power to out-of-state customers than they can make burning coal.
"
Colorado: sunny weather punctuated by acts of god.
Front Range Colorado summer mornings are glorious. The afternoons are a total crap shoot.
"
I’ve noticed that the archive site has nothing June-December 2017. Is it lost, or did it not exist for some reason I’ve forgotten?
None of the archive is lost, except possibly a few things during the transition earlier this year. Feeding it from the Typepad export files into WordPress has to be done in chunks, and is tedious. Kudos to lj for the effort he's put in.
"
I have more stories about weird Front Range weather than there is room for. I'll settle for the recurring nice one in winter. When you go to bed, it's 5 °F. In the middle of the night you wake up because the Chinook is howling. When you get up in the morning it's 55.
"
I live in MA, where we definitely have winter, but I live pretty near the ocean, which has a mind of it’s own as far as seasonal cycles of warm and cold go.
The northern part of the Front Range urban corridor -- from 20 miles south of Denver to 20 miles north of Fort Collins, and 25 miles east onto the plains -- is a strange little area for weather. At the north end of that is the Cheyenne Ridge, a 2,000 ft high east-west barrier. At the south is the Palmer Divide, a 2,500 ft high east-west barrier. Plus the mountains to the west, of course. Among the weird things that happen is the Denver Cyclone. Broadly speaking, some or all of that area is protected from the worst of the regional weather.
The area was a traditional site for winter camps for Native American tribes, avoiding the much more severe weather in the mountains or more than 20 miles out onto the plains.
"
cleek:
also… you might not need ‘!important’ on ObWi’s WP theme.
CharlesWT:
Would adding the following style setting to the head work?
I suspect you're both on the right track, and that adding a bit of CSS for a:visited in the "Additional CSS" section of the site customization would do the job. And that !important wouldn't be necessary.
"
it recommends altering the ‘visited’ pseudo-class (one colon, not two as with a pseudo-element)
Yes, pseudo-class. My mistake.
"
it’s pretty simple to add color to visited links in wordpress:
I visited the site cleek pointed to. Just for the record, the CSS it recommends uses both pseudo elements and the !important modifier. I oppose both of those on general principle because they exist outside the JavaScript document model so cannot be modified by the user. As I've said in other places, "If there's some aspect of your page's styling that is so critical the user must not be allowed to change it you ought to be using PDF."
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.