News

Yeah…besides being a convenient place to stash a half ounce of bud, which we don’t, but let’s pretend, the lowly sandwich bag may be my salvation when it comes to putting a mag-mount antenna on my wife’s car.

Check this out:

Well, still a pretty weak justification for CB you gave.  You could get the same stuff from local ham ops on 2mtrs as you pass by.
So what I am writing about, I am SCANDALIZED you don’t know how to avoid scratches from the mag mount on the paint.  IT IS SO SIMPLE.  Just put a zip lock sandwich bag on the roof and put the mag mount on that.  No scratches.  Stays on just fine.  At least up to 80mph in my experience. (my deceased partner Judy had a mag mount on her Jeep Cherokee fyi).
Myself, I detest mag mounts.  On all my cars which have been a number, I ALWAYS just bored a hole and put a Larson 5/8 or 1/4 wave mobile antenna in there so I could use 2mtrs.  My CRX SI has it on the back spoiler, works great.  Nice Kenwood mobile in the car.  Don’t do HF mobile now, years ago I did in my MG TD with a webster band spanner antenna.
If I wanted to use HF mobile I would DRILL A HOLE.  Like I said I detest mag mounts.  I confess I do have a 5/8 wave mag mount for my 2mtr base station here at home.  BECAUSE I have a metal roof.  So…putting an unused mag mount 5/8 up there was a real simple way to have a nice 2mtr base antenna.  And I can hit all 12 repeaters in our very large county with it.  Cool. (Humboldt County BTW),
Have a nice trip.  I still like your airplane.

I still like the airplane, too, and I’m still only 80% committed to the car.  All it will take is the right-sized box and zing!  the plane it will be, provided there is a PERFECT weather window.  I’m all about flying when I can, especially over the beautiful Rockies, but even a hint of clouds and I’m back to the car idea….but we still have some time to run on that.

I did have a “Hold it, dude!” from another fellow ham (with an Extra Class ticket):

G,

Don’t know if you are aware, but the app “RepeaterBook, free on Google Play lists repeaters by distance starting with the closest one to your phone. It also provides all the info you need to access them.

Hold it, dude:  When we’re traveling, there are still huge areas with a) no cell phones and b) no repeaters.  So if we needed the 2-meter HT and we’re not in cell range…you following me here?  No repeater directory?

Oh…and one other fellow ham admitted that  lots of the repeaters have moved or put on tones for access, so that’s screwed up the accuracy of things.

The only sure-fire bet for perfect communications on the road would be a mobile kilowatt on the Maritime Mobile net on ‘20 (14.300 USB thanks for asking) or a sat-phone and even then, neither one of those will work well after EMP, at least for a few days….

Although the cacophony of 14.313 will likely persist through it all…

Seasonal Hotel Prices

Speaking of our plans and going north for the heat of the summer, this hasn’t been a bad one, at least so far.  Normally, by this time of year, everything is dried out and ugly around here, but this year things look pretty darn good.

I did find that hotel prices are a heck of a lot more seasonal than I thought including (especially?) those on the road from Texas to Washington where places like Moab, Utah have hotel prices pushing $200 bucks for some at this time of the year.

With the airplane, we would do three days of flying (4.5 hours per day) and we’d overnight in Dodge City, KS and Sheridan, Wyoming and then KSHR to KGEG via KMLP.  So two hotel nights and with the option to overnight at KHLN (Helena) if Mullan Pass gets socked in.

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No, this isn’t a crash.  That comes later.

But the Market’s going to tank this morning, so we begin first-off  with a hat tip to Madison Avenue Mike (in reality a scion of the NYC fashion industry/glitterati) who has a keen eye for the important as opposed to the “obvious” and generously shares his findings.

What he tipped us to is the story out of the Virginia Tech (Carilion) Research Institute that reveals “High-earning investors have neural signals that successfully predict stock market bubbles and crashes.”

They musta missed this website, but we continue…

The key part of the article goes into how more than 300 research subjects were hooked up to functional MRI machines and they were put into an artificial trading environment.  Here’s where it gets cool:

“Traders who bought more aggressively based on activity in one brain region, the nucleus accumbens, earned less.

In contrast, the high earners seemed to ignore nucleus accumbens activity in favor of the anterior insular cortex, a brain area active during bodily discomfort and unpleasant emotional states.

Just before a bubble peaked – as their brain scans were revealing an increased activity in the anterior insula – the high earners would begin to sell their shares.

The scientists believe the high earners’ brain activity may represent a neural early warning signal of an impending crash.”

Even with the market set this morning to blow off 150-points to the downside, we aren’t really in “crash country” yet on the major markets.  But this research has terribly important implications in terms both of learning to trade and (perhaps) one day being screened for that “big job” at a GS or somewhere with a brain scan in addition to the usual HR tools.

By extension, there are a lot of other jobs which functional MRI’s might be useful for spotting real talent:  I can see airline pilots, for example, or neurosurgeons having key areas of brain “lighting up” at precisely the right moments as being a predictor of success or failure..

No More Free Money

Oh, about the market drop this morning?  Part of it is due to the Bank of England not giving the Bankster class more free money to play with. 

This comes at an awful time for the EU because most of the region’s manufacturing just sucks, but then we knew what the problem was from the get-go:  New Millennialism is going to cause the biggest crash in the history of the world, but we’ll work through the moving parts of that one for Peoplenomics readers this weekend.

The main feature this morning is to look at the price of gold and silver.  (Charts up top of this page if you’re not on a mobile device — otherwise this is where I say neener-neener I told you to stick with a laptop and Skype, you idiot!)

Gold is up almost $25 and silver was up to $21.55 and pretty soon, I will hit the phone and call the boys over at CB-Mint (shameless advertiser plug) and ask them if selling my lone gold coin and my lone silver one, will buy us a steak dinner before beef prices disappear into the stratosphere due to the drought…

More after this…

         

Speaking of Drought and such…

The latest US Drought monitor picture looks grim as ever this morning:  The dark patches, which is where things aren’t growing, continue to be most all of the Central and San Joaquin Valley in Veggifornia and the old home of the Dust Bowl, up toward Amarillo and extending into Oklahoma and threatening the “square states” region.

For us carnivores, the bad news is (according to the Drover’s Cattle Network) that meat prices are expected to remain high.  I suppose you already noticed this overs the Fourth.

I can hardly wait to see how the government papers this over in the cost of living report due out next week.  We’ve seen hedonics cut out steak by substituting ground sirloin on the logic thast sirloin is sirloin, I suppose.  But pretty quick, we’ll all be on veggie-burgers and even then prices won’t come down.

So for breakfast this morning’s we’ll be having soy bacon, scrambled air and dried toast as we bulk up for another hard day of “Recovery” and “Change.”

When I look at the cats here lately, I can’t tell if my eyes are watering….or drooling…

Like to thank the prices who clearcut and wreck rainforests, for the help toward turning this into lizard planet.

Madness on Bordering

Conservatives (people who can spell b-o-r-d-e-r without the XXI or apology after it) are incensed with what’s being called an act of war by Mexico and Guatemala: “The Southern Border Program to Improve Passage” which is like putting a human freeway in to dump even more people into Texas and the other border states.

And John Boehner’s control file must have been opened because he’s backed off talk of impeachment.

The real reason?  Border XXI and Canamex and TransTexas Highway are all issues where republicorps have previously screwed the pooch and the democorps have them by the goanies on this one.

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Seems to me that Washington has declared war on America.  I don’t say this lightly:  As a life-long patriot and believer in a strong, secure, well-defended United States of America I am shocked and appalled by the mind-game being perpetrated on the American public by political leadership that is actively subverting the whole premise of international borders; namely to keep it clear which country is which.  It’s been in the works as Border XXI and it’s being unilaterally implemented by (care to guess who?) right now..

But that discussion is quickly becoming irrelevant because the American people are being mass-media hoodwinked into a very grim “deal with the devil” that will end up bankrupting America at either the economic or moral level, and more (more likely) both.  But before we delve into what the numbers say (and this will be another fact-based discussion, not idle speculation), we’ll have decaf this morning since your blood pressure’s bound to rise when you look at the data.

The longwave economic implications?  Socialism flourishes in this economic season and since we already have our modern analog to the Civilian Conservation Corp in place (www.americorps.gov ) why not more government spending to artificially create jobs?  Worked in the last Depression, so why not this one?

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Quick, screen-shot this before it disappears:  In January of this year, the federal government announced they were looking for a “contractor ” to provide “Escort Services for Unaccompanied Alien children.”

This announcement – still available online here – is damning in that it conclusively (at least to me) proves the government knew more than six-months ago that the “child-walkers” would be coming.

To quote from the supporting documents:

“A. Introduction

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a component of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has a continuing and mission critical responsibility for accepting custody of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) from U.S. Border Patrol and other Federal agencies and transporting these juveniles to Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelters located throughout the continental United States. ICE is seeking the services of a responsible vendor that shares the philosophy of treating all UAC with dignity and respect, while adhering to standard operating procedures and policies that allow for an effective, efficient, and incident free transport. The Contractor shall provide unarmed escort staff, including management, supervision, manpower, training, certifications, licenses, drug testing, equipment, and supplies necessary to provide on-demand escort services for non-criminal/non-delinquent unaccompanied alien children ages infant to 17 years of age, seven (7) days a week, 365 days a year. Transport will be required for either category of UAC or individual juveniles, to include both male and female juveniles. There will be approximately 65,000 UAC in total: 25% local ground transport, 25% via ICE charter and 50% via commercial air. Escort services include, but are not limited to, assisting with: transferring physical custody of UAC from DHS to Health and Human Services (HHS) care via ground or air methods of transportation (charter or commercial carrier), property inventory, providing juveniles with meals, drafting reports, generating transport documents, maintaining/stocking daily supplies, providing and issuing clothing as needed, coordinating with DHS and HHS staff, travel coordination, limited stationary guard services to accommodate for trip disruptions due to inclement weather, faulty equipment, or other exigent circumstances. In emergency situations, the Contractor shall be called on to provide temporary shelter locations (such as trailers) with shower facilities for juveniles who are pending placement with HHS when bed space is unavailable nationwide for extended periods of time.

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The lighting came up (as planned) in the new UrbanSurvival sound studio where (in the future) podcasts and such will originate from, along with the odd assortment of singers and local arts by invitation only. 

The main thing is that it leaves only three projects left:  Floating the leveling compound on the floor and then laying the engineered floor (1).  After that, there’s the installation of the sound conditioning (ATS Wedge Foam Acoustic Panels (Burgundy) – 24x24x2 (6pk), $49) (2).  And then the construction and installation of the console.

Designing the console is really a simple thing once you hang out at Lowes a bit:  I only need a four-foot wide desk (the mixer isn’t too wide) and you can pick up a section of prefab kitchen counter for $54-bucks with a dark (almost black) faux granite that has enough design in it to make an optical mouse happy.

Slap on sides and legs (one see of plywood, a couple of two-by-fours whacked up, just so) and you can have a really good looking console for about $150, which includes the over-sized slide-out keyboard drawer.  That’s another prefab, by the way: Valencia Series Underdesk Keyboard/Mouse Shelf, 28w x 12d, Mahogany.  Sure, it was $35-bucks, but I figure (perhaps wrongly!) that my time is worth something and by the time I diddle around with the hardware and finishing, guess what’s cheaper?

This whole construction project, build-out, and then operation of the studio will come together this fall in an online recording engineer school.  Though, I will be careful to note that this won’t get you a job since it’s avocational (recreational) in nature.  But by the time you’re done with it, this will be the coolest way to get your church choir, PA system, home recording/garage band sound set up you can find.

My thinking is that $29 bucks for a whole course (including books, videos, equipment lists, basics of recording/mixing, and construction details, and completion certificate) is a lot more effective than the “hit and miss” approach.

One of the reasons for our trip up to Tacoma this year is to sit down and record (if we can) with one of the most proficient soundmen/engineers you’ve never heard of.

If you’re wonder who this old school marvel is?  No, he doesn’t have any albums out that you’d recognize.  But you’d sure recognize the megastar voice talent he did the sound for:  US Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

I’ll let you know if that comes together…but the studio is coming slowly but well.

Hi-fi aficionados love to brag about their high-powered systems, but the main monitors in this little project are really quite modest:  For the mains, there’ll be a rack of four super-tweeters sitting on top of a Bose 901 (Series II) and for bottom end a modest Polk subwoofer. Tri-amped, of course

The idea is not to have hugely loud sound:  the goal is to have perfectly clean sound.  At the other end of the room will be “fill” speakers (Bose 201’s) which are mainly for sound reinforcement going into the house.  Anything over 85 dB for a long period of time can damage hearing so having a 120 dB sound system may seem cool, but it’s really, really dumb.  (See Dangerous Decibels Org)

The trick-shot to this is each of the speakers is separately amped and there’s a equalizer on each channel;, as well.  Since my experience began doing “proof of performance” measurements in broadcasting, that’s where the studio set-up portion of the course begins…how to run channel measurements and so forth.

When done, it will be about as good a studio as you’ll be able to find for a total cost of less than $4,000 which includes room construction (but doesn’t include the high-end Sennheiser mics).

The very first session I ever did live sound on was the Charles Lloyd Quartet, back in 1967 when they played the University of Washington HUB Ballroom.  The Monterey Jazz Festival version of Forest Flower Sunrise can be found on YouTube over here.

I was totally impressed with Lloyd’s piano player on that set:  A fellow who is still making incredible music today:  Keith Jarrett.  As a matter of fact, Jack DeJohnette was in that set, too…and along with Gary Peacock they make up the Keith Jarrett Standards Trio…a sample of which (goes good with coffee) is over here. 

It’s an hour 44, so plan on a second cup.

Two Books Worth Reading

My friend Chris Tyreman, who’s at the epicenter of that Jewish studies group up in Saskatchewan (a center of radical thinking, lol) has release a couple of books on what the group has found in their research to date.

The first is The Destruction of Sabbath: Tracking the History of Deception.  The reason you might find this one interesting is that it explores how Christendom went from being a lunar-cycle based religion to the (whatever you want call it) that it is today.  There’s a good deal of evidence that lunar cycling is vastly more important to human consciousness evolution than you might otherwise think.  And that’s without getting into the woo-woo *but statistically valid* data about why humans go just a little bit nuts around the full moon.

If you’re not in synch with lunar Sabbath, you may be missing a key part of spiritual development because (hate to break it to you) but Sunday ain’t Sabbath.  There are some groups that still hold to the lunar cycle (Muslims, for example).

So I would recommend this one very highly since the moon’s link-up with religion is very important and I’d suggest that when we toss out thousands of years of tradition (cross-culturally when comes to the moon phases) that we miss something.  Big.

What the book doesn’t answer is still bugging me – and that’s the who and the why the “right” days of rest and festival got “jacked” from the West, but there’s this city-state in Italy that’s high on my suspect list which goes back to the seemingly deliberate retooling of scripture out of the earliest available texts.  And that brings us to what?

The second book is more about what Self-Defining Hebrew comes up with (besides Sunday isn’t the right day off most months).  100 Questions You Never Thought to Ask and Didn’t Want the Answers To.

This is where the concept of earthlings as “planting” of an interplanetary civilization (which did things like set the moon in its unique position and parted the air from water, and such) are detailed.  It fits much closer with what science has to say about how Life evolved here and if nothing else, it will add even more questions to your list of “WTF is really going on here?”

The group doesn’t have all the answers, but if you have scratched your head at some of the “one time use words” in Strong’s Concordance, SDH is a refreshing alternative view that suggests maybe the traditional interpretations of various concepts have been corrupted over time.

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We might as well “head this one off at the pass” because no doubt there will be some people who will ask:  “What’s with the story over on Before It’s News about how Wifi could kill millions of people?”

Ah…damn fine question there…damn fine indeed.

So you go read the story and I’m sure the first thing you’d want to do is run out and unplug all the wireless routers in the office.  But is that practical?  (I have three wireless networks here so “going dark” would not be a smart business move, lol.)

Maybe that’s extreme, but there’s a lot of thinking that needs to be done in this area.

To begin with, there are two kinds of radio energy”  Ionizing (as in “cooks people”) and non-ionizing (as in AM radio and shortwave/ham radio HF bands).

The simple fact is that the higher the frequency of a radio signal, the more it tends to ionize (heat/cook) a person.  And just how fast?  A matter of frequency:  The higher the frequency, the more danger is posted by ionizing radiation. 

Climb the tower of a 5 kilowatt AM radio station while it’s running to change a tower light 180 feet up?  No problem (except you need a dry board to make sure you don’t become a replacement for the tower base insulators, which could be a shocking experience.

On the other hand, put your head into the main lobe of a 100 KW FM transmitter up on that same tower and now you’re into the real of potential serious harm to body and mind.

That’s the difference between 1 Megahertz radio and 100 Megahertz radio.  And as you go up in frequency?  Yes, you can kill birds with high power radars…and the typical router is around 2.4 GHz, which is right next door to the microwave cooking band…so there is something to worry about.

But how much is “safe?”

No one really knows, for absolute positive/certain.  While some countries have much lower radio frequency (RF) exposure limits than the US/FCC standards, there’s much yet to be learned.

The main thing is that while the initial thresholds were set based on ionization/heating effects, there are deeper effects, down at the DNA level that have been only partially explored.

One of the best books out in terms of the basic science (through its publication in 1985) is The Body Electric: Electromagnetism And The Foundation Of Life by Becker and Selden. 

The problem is (and then touch on this in the last of the paperback in the section Political Science) that there are huge commercial forces at work.

You see, over the past 40 years, there has been tremendous cost reduction in extremely high frequency technologies.  But at the beginning of the period, it was axiomatic that “the higher the frequency, the higher the price.”  Solid-state devices like transistors (and a side order of tunnel diodes, if you please) were not always so high-frequency friendly. 

But it’s not just the devices themselves (and high-precision manufacturing):  It’s also the assembly processes.  40-years ago, we couldn’t even find a four-layer PCB and now 6-layer PCBs are commonplace.  More, sure, but added cost.

And then there’s this whole matter of surface-mount technology.  What makes the SMT process different that 40-year old technology is that old style (leaded parts and single-layer boards) meant that each component lead because critical because at extremely high frequencies, they were a significant source of stray capacitance and inductances – and those led to lots of design nightmares like unwanted oscillations and so forth.

Now, though, it’s not uncommon to have a multilayer board with extremely small, short leads (the components for an old fart like me require a microscope to do right) and the multi-layer boards mean a “ground plane” can effectively encapsulate one part of a circuit and isolate it.

But so much for the how-to part:  The real question is still out there:  How much radio-frequency energy is too much and more importantly, what mix of energies can be especially bad for you?

If you’re looking for a business template to think about this RF Exposure issue with, try the petroleum industry’s fracking model:

Like fracking, the higher level of RF exposure is a short-term expedient answer to a long-term problem.  While, no doubt, some occasional bursts of energy may be responsible for advances in DNA, it may only appear so because the “winners survived.”  No telling how many genetic mistakes died over the course of humankind’s evolution, were burned at the stake, or whatever.

What some good science is beginning to ask now, though, is a fundamental question:  How much is good…and as what point do we tip into bad….just like Fracking with its pollution of groundwater and setting off earthquakes?

In both cases the real culprit is money…but you already knew that.  RF – radio frequency – energy is no joke.  It’s also terribly under-studied.

And when news does come out – like “Effect of mobile telephone on sperm quality: A systemic review and meta-analysis” just out June 10 and here on the government’s PubMed website, we read where study authors Adams, Galloway, Mondal, Esteves, and Mathews  have run up another warning flag:

“We conclude that pooled results from in vitro and in vivo studies suggest that mobile phone exposure negatively affects sperm quality. Further study is required to determine the full clinical implications for both sub-fertile men and the general population.”

I bet the major router companies won’t ante up for more work in this area…until a suitable replacement product for wifi and cell phones is ready…

When you stick a cell phone in your pocket, it’s not as dangerous as climbing up past a high-power FM transmitter, I’ll grant you that.  But, on the other hand, that son or daughter in the wings will have (maybe) 60-90 years to materialize the effects.

And you wonder why I don’t carry a cell phone unless absolutely necessary for business, and then at arm’s length (or greater) if I can? 

BTW/PFB

Around here that’s a simple one to figure out:  Back To Work / left over Pizza for Breakfast.

Goodbye Independence

Oilman2 spied this fine catch “U.S. military totally dependent on Chinese production” to keep our military functioning.

As if you need to be reminded of the question I was asking this weekend, but here it comes again:  “What was it we were celebrating, anyway?”

Market Outlook

From reader Michael:

“George, caught your C2C, but cannot believe my ears. Dow 25,000?

Wow.

Even a retrenchment of 50% from there is still pretty great, no?

I guess your final answer is:   we dodged the bullet? “

Yes, there is a non-zero chance that the market could have a huge blow-off.  The way it would happen would be similar to how the final blow-off was set up for 1929:  The Fed raised rates from 4 to 4.5% in late 1928.  This caused money to come flooding out of the bond market and into the equities (stock) market. 

As I’ve explained, in more detail to Peoplenomics readers, there is some resistance ahead (around S&P 2,050-2,082, but once through that, we could have a runaway pop up to the unreal prices of Dow 25,000 and S&P 2,500 or even higher.

What stokes it?  All that “made up money” coming out of dark pools of money and when that happens, Katie bar the door.

Megaquake  to Come?

Of course, when the market meltdown eventually comes, the stock market will no doubt be looking for something to blame it on.

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