Click-bait!

Doing something vs. doing nothing.

According to the story, "passenger was charging a mobile phone with an external battery charger when it suddenly caught on fire." I have never heard/read of any L-I battery spontaneously starting to burn for no reason. The guy with the battery was charging it! (doing something he had probably done many times in the past with no problems)

I fly a Mavic doing geology and charge both the iPad and the controller while I am hiking from one site to another. In the future, i plan to keep the drone case open for at least 5 minutes after plugging the chargers in.

Apropos of nothing, today's Tucson paper published a letter from a guy who questioned how Facebook could lose 18% of its value when he never thought it had any value in the first place.

Elaine, Elaine, may I respectfully suggest that you do a little more reading. The liberal-conservative divide is far older than 8 years. William F Buckley? David Brooks? ... ever read anything by them? When the conservatives started hating conservationists, things were going down hill. Now the term actually means authoritarian brutalists (Brooks, NYT, yesterday). I will agree that a lot of the division blew up during the "obummer" years. After all, he's not an American and not even a human being (that's what the "obummer" klaxon signifies to a frighteningly large number of my fellow citizens - no dog whistles here).

We do have a president doing what he promised to do but he promised to burn the country to the ground. Trump has truly made China great, again. Xi must think he's died and gone to heaven. Trump is a good friend of our traditional enemy Russia - it's sort of hard to make them great, but he's trying. Trump loves Lil' Kim III, hereditary king of C*******t North Korea. Of course the civilized people are screaming in outrage. He's Making America Gray Ash!

Dan, out!

Why is Elaine2025 shouting? Because that's what she thinks is expected of her. It's what people in her tribe are supposed to do. Somebody decided that civilization was a bad idea and that we should get rid of the one we have. So here we are, writing nasty comments about each other; attributing bad attitudes to folks we have never met and about whose lives we know NOTHING! I don't need to attribute anything to ole 2025, she was abundantly clear in her unnecessarily nasty posts.

We are all citizens of America and we are all responsible for supporting the society in which we live. Although I am morally a liberal, I am the staunchest of conservatives when it comes to that society. I have a pretty good life, I understand the structures that make that good life possible and I don't want anybody breaking them just because they think it might be fun.

If you want to burn something down, start with your own house!

This is an experiment. D******e Donnie has got hizself a bona fide cult here in Trump-puram. (Cue sinister laughter) "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" (more sinister laughter) Donnie does, he's the devil!

Everybody who has ever been a child knows that the worst possible thing is to be separated from your parents. And the worst possible person is somebody who would do that, absent some major parental failure. How much evil will today's cult members buy? Just asking. I can't forget that in my lifetime (from 1940), young men got close enough to see the faces of other people who looked exactly like them and shot those people down, day after day. That's a lot of evil but those boys were in a cult, just following orders.

Don't bother to reply by telling me how much you h**e my liberal ass, I KNOW that! Besides, you've got work to do. Make America Gray Ash!

To the ATTIC witcha'
trump-trump-trump-trump-trump-trump-SLAM!

Yeah, we did that, too. Found out that the 30 buck wine was not as good as some of the $10 (and cheaper) stuff. Bought a really expensive bottle of champagne for the 50th four years ago and found that the cheap stuff we followed it with tasted better.

The little plug-in "buck" that you stick in the cigarette lighter socket to charge your cell phone does, indeed, provide 5V. Be careful of the current rating, most cell phones require one amp (1000 mA), my iPad requires 2.4 A and the cheap ones won't charge it.

The car runs on 12V, and that is what is available in the socket. A "buck" changes the voltage from 12 to 5, they're quite clever devices. The cigarette lighter socket/plug is the standard for 12V car systems.

As a field geologist, I live out of my 4runner and regularly charge drone batteries, computer batteries, power-pack batteries and camera batteries when I am in the desert. Each camera has a unique battery shape and voltage. I purchased separate 12V chargers for my Nikon and Lumix from Amazon.

Faststone is intuitive, I still use it for my web stuff although I have a Lightroom/Photoshop subscription.

Don't write naughty words on walls if you can't spell.

<<I always confused Air Force Generals in uniform at the airport as bag men/porter. >>

When I was flying in the Navy Reserve out of Pt Mugu, I wore my uniform on the way home to Tucson Sunday nights because I could get a half-price ticket. One Sunday, while waiting for may bag, an elderly lady came up to me and asked if i would help her with her baggage. Of course I would, being young and polite, and had a goodly cart of luggage to hand off to the real skycap when he finally arrived.

I'm a bit surprised to have not yet seen this comment on the debacle from Ecclesiastes (9:11):

... the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

A somewhat overweight Chief handed a pail to a young sailor and told him to bring back a bucket full of steam. The kid returned the pail with an inch of water in the bottom.

"This ain't steam!" roared the Chief.

Replied the kid, "Sure it is, just add your hot air."

I find cemeteries to be quite wonderful places and was a gravestone photographer when we lived in Boston. The stones are marble which replaced slate as a common marker material in the early 1800s after the wire saw was invented and marble became cheap enough for most families to afford stones. Alas, marble is calcium carbonate which is soluble in acid rain. Some New England cemeteries are gardens of featureless stone, the carving having been etched away over the years. Some markers were sandstone, predominantly Mesozoic Newark group redbeds famous in "Brownstone" buildings because it was easy to quarry and to carve. It is cemented with carbonate and tends to rot on the face of the stone, leaving the edges intact.

While I lived there, I carried a mirror in my my car to reflect sunlight at a low angle across the stone face to reveal carving. Me and the genealogists who were, generally speaking, rather unfriendly.

As to what the man in the photos was saying, I used to walk through the stones and read the names aloud as a way of honoring people I had never met. My favorite cemeteries were Catholic and full of Italians with glorious, melodic names.