Sammy was the first to click through on of the paying links for me yesterday, and it was worth $0.21 (I can’t click through for myself, because it violates the TOS.)
I’m hosted at rydia now… http://scottobear.com.users.rydia.net/, until scottobear.com slides over to the new host.
To celebrate, I added a Doodle-board message thingie.
currently at – http://scottobear.com.users.rydia.net/picture.cgi, though it’ll probably be on the toybox page once I configure it the way I like it. Sam did a pretty cool drawing already, even while I was just configuring the thing.
Hee.. it reminds me of a puppy version of Walnut.
Animal Crackers are extra delicious if you make the sound of the animal before chewing it up. Bonus points if you make predator noises immediately leading up to or after swallowing. (see also 4/10/2002 entry on Animal Crackers, about 2 paragraphs down for more fun)
That said… I had to look up a camel’s natural enemy. (Predator noises as a man … I do a pseudo-Arabic war whoop and then whip-cracking noise. I’ve since discovered that other than man, the primary predator of the camel is the tiger.
I would not have guessed that.
City of Heroes was cruel yesterday… I must’ve been hospitalized five times.
Do They have bargain basements anymore? I’ve lived at sea level for so long that I’d forgotten about stores with subbasements full of sales…until I found myself using the term. I don’t know what pried that term loose.
Yucatan Brand Soyquitos are pretty dang tasty, and not bad at all diet-wise, but suffer from “serving size syndrome”. a serving is three soy-taquitos, and ten come in a pack. I guess I’ll just divide by three for the remaining lone gunman.
They’re nowhere to be found on the net yet, so I’m guessing them to be a pretty new item. Next time I open the freezer, I’ll post nutritional info.
[update: The box says it’s got 10, but inside were 12. a typo, or a misload? Either way, it meets the rule of 3]
Nutrition Facts: (based on 3)
calories: 220
fat cal. 72
total fat: 8g
sat fat: 1g
Cholest. 0mg
Sodium 160mg
Total Carb 21g
Fiber 4g
Sugars 2g
Protein 16g
Final Note – They are *much* better baked in the oven, rather than microwaved.
Looks like the “Hustler Store” is coming to town after all. A lot of unhappy Victoria Parkers couldn’t stop it from coming in.
Commissioners drop plans for new limits on sex shops
Fort Lauderdale officials backed away from new restrictions on shops selling adult material after porn king Larry Flynt’s attorney threatened to sue.
Under pressure from Hustler Magazine publisher Larry Flynt, the Fort Lauderdale City Commission on Wednesday backed away from tightening restrictions on sex shops.
The city preliminarily approved new restrictions in April after news surfaced that Flynt planned a Hustler Hollywood — a coffee shop aiming to sell much more than coffee — on Sunrise Boulevard.
City officials claimed adjustments to existing rules on sex shops had been in the works for years and were based on studies showing that such stores can lead to neighborhood crime, blight, and other problems.
But before the commission cast a final vote Wednesday, Flynt lawyer Paul Cambria threatened to sue if the measure passed. He said the new rules were vague and clearly aimed at his client’s project, now under construction.
”It appears to be something directed solely and only at this store,” he said. “It can be interpreted as a prohibition.”
The commission voted 3-to-2 against the proposed restrictions, with Mayor Jim Naugle and Vice Mayor Dean Trantalis voting in favor.
The new rules would have made it much harder for a store selling adult material to avoid being classified as an ”adult use,” which is prohibited within 500 feet of residential areas, schools, houses of worship, or public parks.
”I’m disappointed,” said Fort Lauderdale resident Frank Giambattista, a homeowners association member in Victoria Park, near the proposed store. “I guess they were intimidated.”
Commissioners may have been intimidated by Flynt’s decades-old reputation for tenaciously using the courts to defend his pornographic business ventures.
The threat came as the city is trying to emerge from a budget crisis and already is facing its share of costly lawsuits.
Naugle said he thought the proposed restrictions were legally sound.
But even if they had passed, it’s not clear whether the new rules would have affected the new store.
After the vote, Cambria said the new Hustler Hollywood, to open within two weeks, would be an upscale place, selling coffee, T-shirts, ”lotions and potions and magazines” and other sexually oriented material.
He urged the community not to be concerned.
”This is not some sleazy store that people are going to have to worry about,” he said. “The Hustler store is going to be part of a renaissance in this particular area.”
I say let it get built… if people don’t want it, it’ll lose money and collapse on its own. I wonder a bit if that was a bit of straight-bashing, considering how many gay clubs and pride-stores featuring toys and stuff are in the area.
An example as to why I’m not a big one about being an astronaut. Heck, I don’t trust Nasa with my oxygen, let alone with my safety. Plus, I’m a more earthbound sort of fellow, anyhow.
Safety trade-offs put space station at risk
By John Kelly and Todd Halvorson, FLORIDA TODAY
CAPE CANAVERAL — NASA keeps flying crews on the International Space Station despite more than 800 known flaws and safety violations, some of which could destroy the outpost or kill its occupants.
In a relentless drive to finish building the $100 billion station on time, NASA managers often accepted extra risk to avoid cost increases, prevent assembly delays and keep the outpost staffed, records show.
Those are the same kinds of safety trade-offs investigators blamed for the 1986 explosion of shuttle Challenger and the 2003 burn-up of shuttle Columbia — disasters that killed 14 astronauts.
Among the problems found in a four-month FLORIDA TODAY investigation:
• The station’s living quarters and Russian-built Soyuz “lifeboat” craft fail to meet a NASA standard for surviving hits by space junk and micrometeorites. A dime-sized chunk of debris could rip through their hulls, sending astronauts scrambling to abandon ship.
• NASA cannot be sure the U.S. segment of the station is bolted together properly because of glitches in a power tool used by astronauts to fasten pieces together. In a worst case, loose or weakened bolts could shatter or come off, slamming into the outpost.
• The 57-foot robot crane that hoists huge station segments into place could fail to stop promptly on command. While remote, the possibility of collision raises questions about whether NASA can safely complete construction.
• Software bugs infest the computer code that runs the station, threatening to transform usually routine commands from Mission Control into life-or-death crises 225 miles above Earth.
“The ISS is a disaster waiting to happen,” a NASA flight controller wrote in an anonymous internal survey reviewed by program managers.
The mounting safety problems and failures on the station increase the chance a crew will evacuate or disaster will destroy the outpost before NASA returns its shuttles to space in March. Another deadly accident could doom NASA’s hopes of sending astronauts to the moon and Mars.
But the agency’s top managers say the situation is not as bad as it seems. NASA is trying to fix safety weaknesses by applying lessons learned from the Columbia disaster to its station project. Managers said there is only a remote chance of disaster, and they promised to order a crew to return to Earth if the station ever becomes too dangerous.
“You make those determinations on a regular basis, knowing with confidence that if there ever is a problem, you’ve got two guys who are going to strap into the Soyuz and be home within a matter of four hours,” NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe said.
The station now can house three people, maximum occupancy for a Soyuz craft.
But bailing out is a last resort for NASA and its 15 international partners. Studies show there is a 50% chance of losing the station if it is left unstaffed for a year. Having a crew aboard to handle problems cuts the risk to 6%.
Independent safety experts wonder whether pressure to keep the station staffed and to complete construction — clearing the way for proposed missions to the moon and Mars — might prompt managers to make poor judgment calls.
“There’s got to be a lot of pressure to keep the space station active and manned, to keep the program alive,” said Arthur Zygielbaum, a former member of NASA’s independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel. “The agency really wants to do what it sets out to do, and there may be pressure on space station managers to accept a little more risk than is warranted.”
Bending the rules
Streaking around Earth at 17,500 mph, the 206-ton station is an engineering marvel. However, in the perilous vacuum of space, the outpost and its crews are in danger even when all station systems work perfectly.
Current tenants Gennady Padalka and Michael Fincke face a food, water and spare parts shortage because of the two-year grounding of the shuttles. Important onboard systems are broken or in frequent need of repair, and fixes are more difficult without the shuttles to deliver parts.
“We’re two failures away from having a serious technical issue,” said NASA astronaut Michael Foale after returning April 29 from a six-month stint as the station’s commander. “We can always handle a failure in any one area right now on the space station and still keep going. But at that point you need to start fixing what just broke.”
The station’s safety woes began before the Columbia tragedy grounded the shuttle fleet. The problems developed during the tenure of former administrator Daniel Goldin and continue under current chief O’Keefe.
Before the first station module blasted off from Kazakhstan in 1998, NASA managers began accepting parts they knew might not function as designed.
Facing political scrutiny because of assembly delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns, NASA chose to fly flawed components rather than fix them. Managers waived more than 800 engineering and safety requirements, often to save time and money, records show.
Challenger and Columbia accident investigators hammered NASA for doing the same thing to keep the shuttles flying in the pressure-packed years before both disasters. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board cited “high-pressure environments created by NASA headquarters” to finish building the core of the station by February 2004 to satisfy the White House and Congress.
NASA space station project manager William Gerstenmaier admits cost and schedule appear too often in agency documents as the reason for bending or breaking requirements. “It doesn’t read real well,” he said.
But NASA safety chief Bryan O’Connor said engineers wrote station requirements without considering whether they could be achieved. In that sense, the former astronaut said they were “goals.”
Others said it is reasonable to periodically adjust requirements as long as careful studies are done first to make sure safety is not sacrificed. The space agency orders extensive engineering studies on the impact of each waiver, even safety requirements that seem trivial, NASA officials said.
“If you set a bunch of requirements that are inviolate, and you know they cannot be attained, are they requirements or ‘desirements’?” O’Keefe said. “Kidding yourself into believing you’re ever going to achieve some of the things that are slated as standards or requirements isn’t going to help.”
Former safety panel member Zygielbaum said Navy nuclear submarines do not sail with known flaws in critical parts.
“If some captain were to override that and sail a ship with a waiver on a critical system, he’d be court-martialed,” Zygielbaum said.
Flawed systems
The station program is reviewing all waivers in the wake of the Columbia accident. The idea is to find problems that could destroy the station or kill a crew.
NASA records outline many such hazards, some life-threatening, some not:
• A shuttle docked at the station could inadvertently fire some of its 44 steering thrusters. The resulting force could cause the outpost to tumble out of control or rip apart both ships. The shuttle and station programs accepted the risk for years before the Columbia disaster. Since then, a safety panel deemed the risk unacceptable, a “must fix” before another shuttle flies to the station.
• On future assembly flights, NASA will not meet a 95-minute time limit for spacewalking construction workers to hustle back to the shuttle and leave in an emergency. Their job sites will be too far away, adding as much as two hours to the time it would take them to escape. Breaking the time limit hurts astronauts’ chance of survival.
• The outpost’s Canadian robot arm might not stop promptly once set in motion. The crane could smash into the station or a visiting shuttle. The result would be “catastrophic,” agency records show. Engineers deemed the chance of failure remote, despite a 2002 close call with the shuttle.
• NASA does not know whether bolts holding segments together are too tight or too loose because of glitches with the power tools used to do the job. That could make the station vulnerable to structural failure, managers admitted during closed-door safety meetings. Broken or stray bolts, or larger pieces of the station, could pop off and smash into the station or spacewalkers.
Biggest threats
Another threat: Paint chips, rocket parts and remnants of exploded satellites that whiz through the station’s neighborhood could strike with the same force as a rifle bullet. Yet, most Russian station segments violate NASA safety rules for surviving micrometeorites and debris strikes.
NASA safety rules say station modules should withstand strikes by debris as large as a centimeter in diameter — smaller than a dime. Anything bigger could poke a hole in the hull, potentially triggering a rapid depressurization and loss of all breathable air.
U.S. astronaut Ed Lu is well-acquainted with the risk.
“If the hole is very large and we have less than 10 minutes until the pressure drops to dangerous levels, we would close off what hatches we can and evacuate the space station in our Soyuz spacecraft,” Lu wrote in a diary he penned aboard the outpost in 2003.
No crew has had to evacuate yet. “Hopefully, we’ll never have to do this, but we’re ready just in case!” Lu wrote.
The Russian segments that fail to meet NASA standards include the Zvezda service module, a command and control center that also serves as crew quarters, the Pirs docking compartment and airlock and Progress cargo ships. Soyuz ships that crews would use to escape in an emergency also do not pass NASA tests.
Russian engineers convinced NASA to let the components fly as-is, arguing that three decades of experience with Salyut and Mir space stations prove they are safe.
“They flew Mir for 14 years with no penetration. They have that heritage and history,” Gerstenmaier said.
Challenger and Columbia accident investigators criticized NASA for using similar logic to keep flying shuttles despite known problems with solid rocket booster O-rings and foam debris.
The late Richard Feynman, a Challenger investigator and a Nobel laureate, likened that mindset to “Russian roulette” in the final report on the 1986 shuttle explosion.
Bugs in system
Another lurking problem: glitches in the software that keep the station flying.
In a confidential survey conducted in November, flight controllers anonymously warned managers that software bugs are the greatest threat to station safety. They said their bosses usually choose to work around problems rather than spend money to fix them.
Several complained that managers do not heed concerns raised by lower-level engineers.
“Sometimes I find serious problems that need to be addressed by the program, but management cannot recognize the significance until much later when it blows up,” one wrote.
Managers said few software bugs threaten safety, but NASA space station project manager Gerstenmaier acknowledged that workers raised legitimate issues.
Gerstenmaier and Bob Castle, the chief engineer of NASA’s mission operations division, said controllers do not really feel software problems pose an imminent danger.
“I hope none of them really believe that we’re a disaster waiting to happen. I don’t believe that,” Castle said. Nevertheless, he added: “They succeeded in getting our attention.”
Heck, I’ve seen what happens when a warehouse doesn’t stick to OSHA rules… add sealed systems and many no-escape situations and that’s a “No thanks, I’ll just work at mission control.” in my book.
