65 thoughts on “Feb 11th 2016 – Pay the price”

  1. Anyone have suggestions on TV antennas? We were the lucky beneficiaries of incompetence by our cable providers up until last week (2 years of free premium cable!). All we use the idiot box for is local and national news (and the occasional brain leeching...), so we're really just looking for something that will haul in cbs pbs etc.

    1. I've got two at home:

      They both work really good. The top one is in the basement and the bottom in the living room. No problems with reception on either.

      1. Cosign on the first one. We put a TV in our dining room recently because human conversation is abhorrent to us, but have no intention of paying an extra howevermany dollars a month to get it hooked up to DirectTV. Cheaptoy's first linked item is the one we went with. It works very well.

      3. Gosh, I should get one of those. I have something that folds and has an actual extendable metal antenna.

        2. I definitely still have metal bunny ears for my little TV. Work great as long as you live in town and have decent sight-lines.

        3. We used to have one of those and it worked like hot garbage for where we are. Some channels worked great, but you'd have to move it all over the place to get others. Antenna tech has come a long way in this cord cutting culture we're moving towards.

      4. I've got one like that and I can get PBS, ABC, and CBS but it struggles with NBC and Fox. And I think NBC and Fox are the stations closest to my house. I'm probably 10-25 miles from all of them.

        2. I can never get CBS (WCCO). Everything else worked pretty well, depending upon if the microwave was on or where people were sitting and standing.

    2. It's been a while since I even bothered with an antenna, but I did some experimentation on pulling in HD signals with an older analog antenna. It had some kind of "amplification" mode where if you plugged it in and turned it on, it was supposed to get better. My results generally speaking, were:

      1) For VHF channels, adjusting the dipole antennas to 1/4th the wavelength of the signal gave me the best reception. Yes, I calculated this and measured the distance that I extended the antenna, and yes, I was fucking pumped when it worked.

      2) There wasn't much to be done about the UHF channels. I could rotate the circular antenna, but in general it didn't help me very much.

      3) Plugging in the antenna improved reception even when I didn't turn on the antenna. I thought this may have been due to grounding the antenna, but that is a total guess.

      1. I used to get radio reception (KDWB in New Ulm in the valley!) from a combo TV/radio that was plugged into the coax cable connection. Disconnect it and the radio reception went away. I deduced that the coax cable served as an antenna picking up the FM signal. Was it the coax in the house? The neighborhood? The whole town? I have no idea.

        Anyways, I wonder if the powerlines in your house work the same way on the TV signals.

          1. I used a steam radiator as an antenna for my crystal radio set as a kid, so it makes sense to me.

  2. so, for years I parked on the street for free in a residential area and walked about a mile to my office. When I changed jobs in the fall, my walk got longer by about 8 blocks. On lots of days, I don't have the time or energy to walk that far, so I've gotten in the habit of parking in a city parking garage. Early-bird price is $6 for the day, which translates to around $126-$132 per month if I were to park daily. I decided to look into a monthly pass for the same facility. $135. WTF? Why in the world would it be MORE expensive to give the city guaranteed revenue? Basically, they want me to pay a convenience fee.

    Yea, I know. It's a relatively small difference. I just had this silly idea that there would be a discount, rather than the other way around. Grumble, grumble.

    [checking the market for monthly parking passes in downtown, that $135 is on the low-ish end of market rate; I suspect that the city is driving prices because it owns a lot of the capacity and is providing a focal point for pricing]

      1. I'm hoping we get to start using this to express outrage for all manner of not-particularly-socialistic grievances.

        1. And I wonder if electing a declared socialist would force opponents to be creative in finding ways to antagonize/villainize him/her.

        1. Early bird gets the...satisfaction of knowing they're making a sound, if not particularly advantageous, financial move?

        2. Yea, the monthly pass gives 24/7 coverage, so I could leave my car there overnight on the occasions when I have to travel (via air) for work, and the regular daily price is like $8.50 or something. One time I left before the "after 4:00 p.m." condition ("in before 9:30, out after 4:00") on the early bird special and I paid like $12.

    1. Good article on the subject.

      I have questions: If these two black holes were "only" 29 and 35 times the mass of the sun, how much mass (or maybe a question of density?) is required to make a black hole? If the sun were to suck up enough asteroids is there a tipping point at which it gets blackish? 2 suns? 4 suns?
      If only there was a Doctor (of astrophysics) in the house...

        1. Well sure, if one

          assumes that the theory of general relativity remains valid at these small distances.

          But c'mon; we're not likely to find that we're going to making any revolutionary discoveries about gravity, time and space, now...

          1. No, but it did have one of those adorable little 22 microgram ones stuck to the lens and those buggers are really, really hard to remove...

            1. Sometimes you want to go
              Where evil Sauron knows your name,
              and he's always glad you came.
              You wanna be where his eye can see,
              Like a mountaintop sphere of flame.
              You wanna be where evil Sauron knows
              Your name.

      3. First off, I'm super, super pumped about this. The LIGO team scheduled the press conference for this announcement earlier this week, so I've been excitedly waiting to hear for sure what it was about. Since LIGO basically only does one thing, and that thing is detect gravitational waves, everyone assumed this is what it would be, but still very, very cool to hear it officially.

        As for black holes, it's more a matter of density than mass. As far as relativity goes, there's nothing that disallows a black hole with the same mass as the Sun, but even if you added a huge amount of mass to the Sun itself, it would never form a black hole. In the Sun, fusion in the core and just the fact that the gas is so hot keeps the Sun from collapsing. There are plenty of stars that have way more mass than the Sun, and they are just stars, not black holes.

        In fact, we know of at least some stars that have more mass than these two stars combined. Eta Carina is somewhere around 100 or so times the mass of the Sun. But, because it has the pressure support from fusion going on in the core, it is still a star, not a black hole. It will eventually run out of fuel, fusion will stop, and the core will collapse into a black hole, but for not, it's just a really, really big star.

        1. Also, the density part. Black holes have such huge gravity not just because they have a lot of mass, but because that mass is concentrated into such a small object. The closer you get to something, the bigger gravity gets. So, if you have a black hole, you are extraordinarily close (as in within a few hundred miles) to a huge amount of mass. That's why gravity becomes so strong that even light can't get out.

          2. even if you added a huge amount of mass to the Sun itself, it would never form a black hole

            I find this reassuring. I won't cancel any weekend plans.

            1. Oh, the Sun will certainly wipe out all life on Earth, leaving a scorched, dead planet. It just won't do it this way.

                  1. Now I wanna know if it was the sun destroying the earth or the cancelling of weekend plans that reminded you..

  4. Keith Law has the Twins minor leagues ranked 3rd overall despite Sano no longer being a prospect:

    “The Twins have high ceilings, they have probability, they have starters, they have relievers, they have lots of position players. I guess they don’t really have catching, if you want to pick nits,” Law writes. “But for a team that runs low payrolls, they’re in damn good shape.”

    1. Is Probability from Venezuela, and is he doing the single-name thing like the Brazilians? More importantly, what's his K/9? I look forward to seeing him in action.

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