The History of Car Talk

tom-rayIncluding the tale of a tragic mistake by NPR and, for the first time ever, the true story about what happened to that radio trophy that George Peabody gave us.

A lot of folks want to know how we got started.

To answer this, we need to quickly review some basics of biology: in the beginning there was our magnificent mother, Elizabeth Magliozzi, and our esteemed pere, Louis Magliozzi.

Tom and Ray's parentsOkay, okay, we know - you couldn't care less about our formative years, when Tommy took apart and rebuilt our dad's heap over and over again - each time having a few extra parts, until eventually there was nothing left to disassemble.

“Appellees concede that laches may not bar a constitutional challenge to the substance of a statute.“ //

the Governor and State of Pennsylvania just argued to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in the Kelly case, and the Supreme Court agreed, that laches should bar a constitutional challenge to the substance of a statute. That is the exact opposite of what the Governor and State “conceded” 22 years ago. So much for legal and political ethics. //

The voters of Pennsylvania are given a meaningful and necessary role in amending their State’s constitution. A vote of a majority of the electors in a general election is the required final step to adoption of such amendments. The Defendants in the Kelly complaint deprived the Electors of their right to validate the proposed amendment passed by the General Assembly, and they put the amendment in place without their approval.

That was “disenfranchisement” of the Pennsylvania electorate. Who is to say that Pennsylvania voters might have rejected “no excuse” mail-in balloting if not for being disenfranchised.

Playwright David Mamet (who is not a conservative) writing in the Wall Street Journal comes to a different conclusion. Our experts are making bad decisions because that is all they know how to do.

We have seen shameless incompetence rewarded before.

Consider Prof. Frederick Lindemann, a close adviser to Winston Churchill during World War II. He treasured his access to the prime minister. Experts couldn’t get near Churchill unless they came through Lindemann. He feuded with everybody he perceived to be a threat, and was especially threatened by Sir Henry Tizard, who helped to develop radar, one of the most useful tools in the war effort. Naturally Lindemann mocked it. Later, Lindemann dismissed the possibility that the Germans were developing a liquid-fueled rocket capable of bombing London—the V-2.

Lindemann was feted and honored to the end of his days.

Or consider Joseph Stalin’s science adviser, Trofim Lysenko. He, too, had complete access to the boss. He believed that plants, like good Communists, could be educated—that peas and wheat could be trained to grow in winter. The Soviet ministry of agriculture, acting on Lysenko’s bogus theories, managed to ruin crops all over Eurasia and starve as many as 10 million people. Later his ideas influenced agriculture policy in Mao’s China and killed several million more.

Lysenko was a talented flatterer. He outlived Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, dying peacefully in 1976.

Now we have climate change and its attendant alarmists. In 2001 a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted a recent study claiming that the Earth’s temperature had risen dramatically during the period coincident with the introduction of fossil fuels—the famous “hockey stick graph.” The news media, backed by those parts of the “scientific community” the media chose to honor, presented this analysis as though it were indisputable fact. In fact, it was riddled with problems. That would have been fine—no harm done—except that the American left, and the running dogs in education and the press, saw the fear occasioned by the hockey stick as an opportunity. No correction was forthcoming.

Most recently we have Covid-19. The New England Journal of Medicine reports that masks are useless outside health-care facilities, that there is little possibility of catching the virus from a “passing interaction in a public place.” Happy news, save that they, one week later, issued a squishy semiretraction, saying, in effect, “It couldn’t hurt.”

What could the shutdown hurt? A pandemic was allowed to destroy the American economy. Tens of millions are driven out of work, cover their faces, and walk down the streets in fear of their neighbors.

A friend owns a restaurant. He is going broke. He had seating outside, but winter approaches and heaters are back-ordered until next spring. He is holding on. One is “permitted” to sit at his tables and eat without a mask. Indeed, how would one eat while wearing one? Does the virus know that one is sitting down?

He greeted two regular customers the other night, and sat at their table to chat. He took off his mask. The customer informed him that the regulations stated that employees of a restaurant are required by law to wear masks at all times. The owner put his mask on and rose. But does the virus know he is an employee of the restaurant? With whom would he argue, being an employee and a proprietor? With the virus?

The virus here is government—or at least the incompetents who advise our rulers and cannot admit the legitimacy of dissension. Absent intervention, this virus may eventually kill the host organism.

Jonathan Turley
@JonathanTurley
Replying to @JonathanTurley
...Darcy calls for every tweet by Trump to be labeled as disinformation while asking “and why stop there?” Precisely. Once you cross the Rubicon of speech regulation, there is little reason or inclination to stop. //

What is chilling about Darcy’s writings is that they reflect the view of many now in Congress and in the Democratic Party. Indeed, they reflect many in the Biden campaign. Once a party that fought for free speech, it has become the party demanding Internet censorship and hate speech laws. President-Elect Joe Biden has called for speech controls and recently appointed a transition head for agency media issues that is one of the most pronounced anti-free speech figures in the United States. It is a trend that seems now to be find support in the media, which celebrated the speech of French President Emmanuel Macron before Congress where he called on the United States to follow the model of Europe on hate speech.

Of course, what Darcy considers “disinformation” or what Blumenthal considers “robust content modification” is left dangerously undefined.

The command line option --purge permanently deletes a directory or file, including any historical versions, from your account. It is not reversible.
Use

To run this or any command, first completely close SpiderOak One, and be sure that all SpiderOak One processes have closed correctly. Then:
On Windows

Open a command prompt window. Enter the following text into the window at the prompt, then press enter:

"C:\Program Files\SpiderOakONE\SpiderOakONE.exe" --purge=\path\to\file

Replace \path\to\file with the actual path to the file or directory that you wish to delete.

Deleting files from other devices

By default, --purge runs on the device that you are seated at, and this is the recommended way to use it. You can optionally specify a different one by adding the --device option to indicate the number of the device you are interested in. If you don't know the device number you want, then first use the --userinfo option to see a complete listing of computers in your account and their device numbers.

Be careful when purging a file from a device that you are not seated at. If the other device is acting on the file at the same time that you purge it, data corruption can occur. For that reason, we advise that you only do so when the other device is not running.

Although you can delete data on a different device, their operating systems must match. For example, while seated at a Mac you cannot delete files that were uploaded from a device running Windows.
Scope

Only files and directories can be purged. To purge a device, use the GUI. To purge a numbered journal, use --tree to look up the path associated with the journal, then give that path to --purge.

If you only wish to delete historical versions but not the current one, then use ​--purge-historical-versions.

Pilots were often served specially made meals just for them, which were freshly cooked onboard as per Pan Am's luxury standards.

All meals onboard Pan Am flights are said to have been cooked to "fancy" "restaurant" standards.

This was not a task taken on by chefs though but by the cabin crew themselves.

However, cabin crew could not serve up both the pilot and first officer with the same meal.

Instead, they had to cook two entirely separate meals for both of them.

According to Dr Evans, though, this was less to do with the pilot's specific demands and instead was a vital safety precaution.

Mostly, it was to stop both pilots from getting food poisoning - a lesson illustrated by a serious outbreak of food poisoning on board a Pan Am flight between Copenhagen and New York in 1970. //

Dr Evans adds: “The plane was met at John F. Kennedy airport by an array of ambulances and fire engines.

"Thankfully, as per protocol, one of the pilots had not eaten the shrimp cocktail that day.”

This is a rule that is still followed today with many airlines.

CNN has a breaking story out of China where documents have been acquired which reveal that the Chinese communist government authorities have not been honest in their reporting of the crisis within their country. The documents show that the Chi-Com leaders were intentionally downplaying the crisis and deceptively underreporting the figures they were dealing with on the Mainland. //

As this is their own BREAKING report you understand the grave delivery and urgency in the presentation, but what is also unmistakable is the tone of surprise, as if this is somehow a new revelation to things. The idea that the communist leadership was not being completely transparent with numerous aspects of the outbreak has been long seen, but CNN has been part of the cabal of news agencies which have taken a more defensive posture in its approach to how that government had been responding.

“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” Musk tweeted in May 2018. //

The NYT dos not have sovereignty over information, and it is not their place to decide what is true and false, nor is to control what is said, where it is said, and by whom. The tech community has a message: The New York Times Company does not reserve the right to speak first, nor does it reserve the right to speak last

“The record is insufficient to determine any reasonable solution that would strike an appropriate balance of competing interests. There is strong opposition to the Commission’s proposals from many commenters in this proceeding, including our nation’s airline pilots and flight attendants.

“A number of commenters argue that the results of international studies and operations may not adequately reflect whether onboard mobile operations can be safely permitted in the United States.

“The record is insufficient to determine any reasonable solution that would strike an appropriate balance of competing interests.”

The AEI host asked Mackey about a section in his book where he wrote about “cultural intelligence,” specifically three kinds of cultural intelligence: the traditional, the modern, and the progressive.

Mackey slammed the progressive worldview, which he said was distrusting of science “except when it serves their ideology.”

“Progressives, because they they dominate academia, Hollywood, and the media punch way above their weight class in terms of their actual numbers, but that’s the cultural war,” Mackey added.

While saying that some of the things that progressives value are important, Mackey added, “but we can’t throw out capitalism and replace it with socialism.”

“That will be a disaster,” Mackey continued. “Socialism has been tried 42 times in the last 100 years, and 42 failures, it doesn’t work, it’s the wrong way. We have to keep capitalism, I would argue, we need conscious capitalism.”

Q: As we all know, atomic clocks are being used to measure time and the GPS system. But I was wondering based on what was the first atomic clock calibrated and how accurate this calibration was based on our standards nowadays?

A: More specifically, caesium atomic clocks realize the second (see this Q&A for the meaning of realization) or, said another way, they are a primary frequency standard. Generally, when a new primary standard is being developed—for whatever quantity, not only time—and has not yet become, by international agreement, a primary standard, it should be calibrated against the primary standards of the time.

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