May 17, 2012

111.13.8.19

I've been sitting here all day watching as I get huge numbers of refers from all over, to 8+ year old posts on USS Clueless. And the IP is always the same: 111.13.8.19

He crawled kuro5hin.org, and followed the few links there to me. He crawled janegalt.net. He crawled freerepublic.com. He crawled drweevil.org. johnquiggin.com. gnxp.com.

And he just found ai.mee.nu. I fear he's eventually going to crawl my server and hammer it into the ground.

So who is this wonderful person? A reverse DNS fails. APNIC says it belongs to China Mobile Communications Corporation. So is it a gutsy user with lots of money to pay for bandwidth? Or is it the government of China looking for things to block in the Great Firewall? Or maybe some native Chinese search engine's crawler.

Christ knows. I was seriously considering blocking him in my firewall, but if it's really a citizen in China, looking at conservative web sites, I don't really want to exclude him.

UPDATE: You know, you can hunt all through the APNIC web site and if you can find any indication of where in hell it's located, you're better than I am. Even the job listings don't say where they are.

I had to visit Wikipedia to find out that it's in Brisbane.

UPDATE: Our friend just found bojack.org and samizdata.net. Also perfidy.org. ashbrook.org.

UPDATE: He just started dumping my site.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 05:10 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 233 words, total size 1 kb.

May 09, 2012

Today's sad refer

I sometimes see google searches in my refer that I think are noteworthy. Here's one that makes me a bit sad:

who+were+we+fighting+in+world+war+1

Whoever this is, why didn't they learn about that in school history class? Unfortunately, that's a rhetorical question. I already know the answer.

For the record: once things settled down and everyone was involved, on one side the major players were Imperial Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottomans (Turkey). On the other side the big teams were Britain, France, Italy, Imperial Russia, and eventually, the United States. There were a lot of other countries involved (e.g. Belgium, Canada) to a greater or lesser extent on one side or the other but few of them made much difference at all.

Imperial Russia was knocked out of the war by the Russian Revolution, about the same time that the US began sending significant forces to France.

And who won? Well, pretty much no one. Austria lost the worst, Germany probably second worst. The US lost 117,000 dead and didn't really gain anything out of the war, but among the big players that was the best outcome. So I guess it would be fair to say that the US was the best loser, if that makes any sense. Maybe, we could say the US lost the least.

The war formally ended with the Treaty of Versailles, which in my opinion is the most misbegotten, ill-conceived "peace treaty" in all of history. It pretty much guaranteed another war, and starting in 1939 we got it. "World War II" really should have been called "World War I, the next generation" or "WWI part 2" or maybe "Son of WWI", because that's what it was.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 01:18 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
Post contains 285 words, total size 2 kb.

May 07, 2012

The changing solar system

I read a minor rant one time by Larry Niven, that went something like this: "How the hell are we supposed to write SF about the Solar System when you astronomers keep changing everything?"

I think it was a comment about his story "The Coldest Place", which assumed that Mercury was tide locked, and its dark side was eternally dark and very cold. It actually turns out that Mercury is tide-locked, but it's in a 3:2 resonance. Basically, a Mercury day is 1.5 Mercury years long. But it means that all parts of the surface are exposed to the sun about half the time.

I'm rereading Heinlein's novel "Space Cadet", which is subject to a bit of that. I just encountered a scene where Pete, from Ganymede, mentions that the surface gravity there is 32% of Earth. And it occurred to me that this might have been subject to revision.

I was right. The current estimate is that the surface gravity is 14.6%. The earlier estimate was based on guesses about the moon's internal composition, which assumed it was about like Earth: rock and metal. We now know that there's a hundreds-of-miles-thick layer of ice, which is a lot less dense.

The mass of Ganymede was calculated based on how it affected Galileo's flybys, so it's very accurate. The earlier number was little better than an educated guess.

The last third or so of this book is where things really changed the most, though. It was written back when the orthodoxy (at least in SF) was that the surface of Venus was a jungle. Of course we now know it ain't so. The surface of Venus is the closest approximation in the Solar System of traditional Hell. There is no life on Venus and there never will be. The temperature on the surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead.

None of which takes away from enjoying the story, of course. But it's interesting to think about just how much the Solar System has changed during my lifetime -- or at least, how much our conception of it has changed.

When I was a kid, there were nine planets. Now there are only eight.

UPDATE: They changed things on me again. Now the orthodoxy is that Mercury's day is two Mercury years.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 05:59 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
Post contains 387 words, total size 2 kb.

May 05, 2012

Mommy, what's a buggy whip?

Here's someone asking what a "carriage return" is.

I learned to type on a manual typewriter. Summer school between 6th and 7th grade. And if you want to know it, that was the single most valuable course I took in all my years of schooling.

And part of learning it was using the carriage return. And now there are people who don't even know what they are... sob, I'm getting old...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 12:13 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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May 01, 2012

Give Obama the Medal of Honor!

Another Hot Air Green Room post.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 08:51 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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April 18, 2012

End of an Era

One of my favorite games in the old days was Super-hero League of Hoboken. For those not familiar with the US, Hoboken NJ is just across the Hudson river from Manhattan. This year's US F1 is going to be run there.

I've been hoping GOG would acquire that title, but it hasn't happened. It's a DOS game, and I bet it would run under DOSBOX. But my copy is long gone, and them's the breaks.

Hoboken's name is obviously funny, and as a town it's strictly bedroom. Most of the people who live there work somewhere else, particularly in Manhattan, to which they commute on the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) subway which runs under the river.

One of the PATH stations used to be under the World Trade Center. I'm not sure if it's still in operation.

Anyway, Hoboken is one of those places like Poughkeepsie which pretty much brings a snicker when mentioned, even if unjustly, just because the name is so strange.

And that's why it was used in this game, which is completely tongue-in-cheek. It's full of topical jokes which probably haven't aged well.

One of them is that at one point in the game the League goes to one particular place, and Dick Clark is running a concert, "...and he still looks young!"

Well, not any more. He died today, age 82. Bummer.

UPDATE: Another joke was that at one point the League finds a bunch of corpsicles. They revive two of them, and it turns out to be George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin. Steinbrenner hires and then fires Martin twice in the ensuing conversation as they exit.

The League also visits Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Sadly, it isn't there anymore. It was torn down last year.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 01:43 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 296 words, total size 2 kb.

April 13, 2012

Big storm coming

If you live in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, or Iowa, please spend all of tomorrow in your storm cellar.

This isn't a joke. NOAA thinks there's going to be a boat-load of tornadoes tomorrow.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 09:03 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 36 words, total size 1 kb.

Hilary Rosen and the M word

I've made another post to Hot Air's Green Room.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 04:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 15 words, total size 1 kb.

April 10, 2012

Tattoo fad -- foreign writing

You all are familiar, I assume, with the American fad to get tattoos in Chinese, usually resulting in gibberish or something really embarassing.

Seems that the new fad in China is to get tattoos in English.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 06:19 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 41 words, total size 1 kb.

April 06, 2012

Another flying car

Only this one's an autogyro.

And there's no possible way it would be street legal in the US.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 06:36 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 21 words, total size 1 kb.

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