Poles Apart

Seventy-six years ago, a lot of brave men responded to a sneak attack as best they could to save their shipmates and buddies and hold off their attackers; more than 2,000 didn’t make it.

Today, an ugly man whose career began with humor but devolved into bitter smarm, arrogance and attempts to hide his lechery behind self-righteous pomposity talked about what a great guy he was but how he’s forced to quit anyway.

Should have waited a day, Al. Dec. 7 already has enough infamy to go around.

Ah, For a Really Fast Rocket

Stories like this are very often intriguing, prompting speculation about what life might exist on these other potentially habitable worlds, or what they might look like when we are finally able to go there.

But sometimes they're a little depressing, because they highlight the reality that we can't go there -- we're stuck here, and here is a place that's afflicted with way more than its share of reasons to want to go there. Grandstanding twerps, careless hacks, name-calling hypocrites, grotesque creeps and the blinkered or willfully delusional people who support them, bullies without end who use their power to degrade and prey upon victims -- and some foolish people who defend them...

The world of dreams that helps the subconscious process and deal with the strains of the day has a lot of work to do tonight.

International Olympic Committee Provides Historic Hint It May Have a Spine

If you were hoping to cheer on some Russian athletes in the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, you are out of luck. In a move that could actually be the first step in its evolution to vertebrate status, the International Olympic Committe has told that country to not bother showing up.

What seems to have turned the tide is widespread evidence that the various shady performance-enhancing shenanigans indulged in by different Russian athletes and teams were not just good old-fashioned cheating. They were policy, set at the highest levels of Russian Olympic organization. One Russian official was banned for life from any involvement with any Olympics-connected event -- which may actually help lighten the guy's workload, since he's in charge of Russia's World Cup soccer organizing committee. That organization's governing body, which has had its own shenanigan-y episodes, has said the IOC's punishments of Russia would have no impact on the World Cup.

Russia will appeal, of course, but even if it doesn't win the whole matter may be moot, as Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested that his nation will boycott the 2018 games if it is banned from them.

In other words, you didn't fire us, we quit. The East German judge gives that one a 10.

Cool Library, Bro

The Tianjin Binhai Library, shown in this post on the Twisted Sifter site, is mighty mighty cool. The shelves curve around in waves, and their stacked construction also helps create the staircase and seating for library patrons.

While it has room for an amazing 1.2 million books, government censorship means that you could only check out 1.2 of them. Which 1.2? Well, try it and see, comrade. No one will punish you if you select one of the forbidden volumes. We promise. Here, we'll even pinky swear on it.

What Did He Say?

The folks at Open Culture published a listing from the Foreign Service Institute of which languages are the hardest for native English speakers to master. The FSI is the language-training service for the US government, and the article also includes a map of Europe color-coded to show some of the languages for that part of the world.

The European map is interesting because of the little gray patches on the edges of England and Ireland. One seems to be in Scotland, one in Ireland and one in Wales -- although the map legend says those areas are unclassified, we can presume that they are where the languages of Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Welsh still have a fairly strong hold. We can presume that these languages are difficult to learn because it's pretty tough to know what Scots people are saying when they're speaking English, the Irish are deep into a pint of stout and Welsh doesn't even have any frickin' vowels in half the words.

In the list we see languages divided according to difficulty, along with the hours of study needed to learn them. The first group has languages considered the most similar to English and they are usually mastered the quickest. It's interesting because although many of the languages are similar to English they are not all that similar to each other -- your average Afrikaans speaker can't just stroll down a Lisbon rua and begin chatting up the ladies without some serious language software on his selfoon.

The two hardest tiers are languages that come from mostly non-European cultures which also frequently use different writing systems than English. German doesn't reach that level, for example, because although the German alphabet has some additional characters in it like ẞ, it still has a lot in common with English. But the other languages listed vary widely from the English language and the strongly European-derived brand of culture of the US.

Not listed on the chart is the arrangement of jargon your average woke college student or politician at a press conference speaks on a regular basis -- although most of the words involved are recognizable as English, they have been strung together in an arrangement that makes no damn sense.

I Canna Give Ye Any More, Cap'n!

The firing of Voyager 1's back control thrusters may be as close as we get for awhile to Scotty telling Captain Kirk he's at maximum power, since the spacecraft has actually left our solar system and is as qualified to be called interstellar as the Enterprise.

NASA scientists wanted to try to fire the jets as a backup to Voyager's attitude control thrusters, which are getting on in years and not as reliable as they used to be. They're used to keep the communications antenna aligned with Earth -- but at Voyager's immense distances, even microscopic errors in the thrust could mean a loss of communication from the spacecraft. Scientists wondered if the back thrusters, which hadn't been fired in almost 40 years, could be used instead.

So they labored over ancient computer code, designed a plan and sent the signal to Voyager to test it. More than 19 hours later, they received data that showed the plan would work. For awhile, anyway, as the back thrusters have to be heated a bit to work and there's only so much power available to do that.

Of course, this is what NASA's saying in public. Because if the thrusters were really set to fire in some kind of automatic response to a nearby alien spaceship, do you really think they would tell us?

Perspective

Second game of the basketball season for the local high school tonight -- the young men won in double overtime but the young women were on the short end of a 30-point hammering.

But they should not feel all that badly about it, because they're still playing -- while bellowing John Wooden-wannabe in front of me is long past the days that he seems to think are important enough to bust a lung over.