Tag: arjay enterprises
Have you ever questionedhow the transition from gasoline powered cars and trucks to electrified ones willwork in practice? To wit: The Spy does have a possible solution to #4-5a on the list. Keep many of the gas stations open, but change what they sell to reusable and recyclable component materials. Assuming for the sake of argument that future batteries consist of (metal) plates immersed in a liquid electrolyte, why not rather than recharging batteries directly using electricity, use the regular…
Have you ever noticed that most people pronounce the name of this month as if the first “r” were not there, viz. “Feb-you-air-e” rather than “Feb-roo-air-e”? That’s on the level of the ads one hears on radio stations from third mortgage loan sharks saying “our criteria is less strict”, or the habit of our neighbours in the terra incognita to the south of our frozen north failing to distinguish between “metre” (an international standard unit of length) and “meter” (an…
July-August 2023 Apologies are certainly in order, as the Spy let not just a day or two of July go by with no column, but the entire month. Put the lapse down to senility setting in if you will, for he simply forgot until queried at month’s end by the editor of one of the magazines to which these random ramblings are syndicated. Even then, the Spy thought “no, impossible; I surely wrote and sent it, but for some reason…
Apple’s M2 Pro MacBookis a wicked fast production machine. The Spy’s reader will recall he got one to replace his 2019 MacBook Pro, which has never been very rugged, reliable or power smart, and has now been relegated to recording his lectures and uploading them to Streams. The new machine never gets warm even when in heavy use, and he still does not know what the fan sounds like, if indeed it has one. On boot it pauses to think…
…like an arrow (a) “but fruit flies like a banana”, is an excellent sentence to illustrate the difficulty that speakers of other languages have in learning English. Even most who grew up in English could not parse the parts of speech in the following: “Did you know that…that that that that that that followed was redundant?” …like an arrow (b) is a common aphorism to be sure…one many people would use to refer to its speed–a subjective perception of course,…
The April Fool, A.K.A. The Northern Spy took a break from April foolishness this year, except to wake up the sleeping-over grandchildren with a clarion call to go outside and play in the snow. Believe it or not, ye who be denizens of Terra Incognito to our South, but this part of Canada does have snow-free months–unlike Calgary, place of the Spy’s birth, which has the occasional year where it snows at least once every month, and the saying is…
Last month, the Spy said of the botched Ecoline window installation: “Yes, if one can believe the scheduling department, the installers shall return(!) on January 4 (that’s 2023 BTW) to fix their errors and damage, install a long list of items missing from the first delivery, and make everything honkey-dory. But given the history of this thing, if you believe all will be well at the end of that day, I know of a really busy bridge I can sell…
To talk of many things but rather than ‘shoes and ships, and sealing-wax, Of cabbages and Kings, And why the sea is boiling hot, And whether pigs have wings,’ and also with apologies to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the Spy will instead speak of windows, wackiness, and the weather, Of controllers and cameras, Of furnaces and hernias, And what else is really hot, And whether digital assistants, new MacPros and EVs have wings. Windows, wackiness, and the weather The Spy has…
Apologies to our impatient reader for the extreme lateness of this column. The Spy is attempting two full time jobs at once (his own and that of his boss, who has a concussion) plus handle the fiscal year end and budget for his church, and that of the Science faculty, all at once. Moreover, he spent the last weekend (Thurs-Sat) at the Murdock College Research Conference in Vancouver WA (5+ hour drive). Things got a little hairy. Climate change is…
The Webb Bang No, that is not a spelling error, but a reference to the James Webb telescope, successor to the Hubble platform, and capable of producing images of long ago and far away. Initial results are disconcerting, as they seem to blow up long accepted models for the “early” universe, by revealing spiral galaxies much like our own, but at distances of sufficient light years that should in theory have revealed early post Big-Bang chaos from before such galaxies…
The Spy’s Reader who’s been lurking around here a while will be familiar with his many discourses on the mutual effects of society and technology upon each other (including the entire currently-being-revised textbook on that theme referenced below among his web sites). In order of technological sophistication, the three (kinds of) civilization to date are/were the Hunter-Gatherer, the Agrarian or Agricultural, and the Industrial. Hunter-Gatherer societies are usually nomadic, and transition to Agricultural mode with the invention of the plough–which…
It’s often been said that half of Physics can be summed up in the sentence “You can’t push on a rope.” The other half is: T M A U H S W T Well, the Spy has said both often enough, at least. It’s a common belief, reinforced by a boatload of Speculative Fiction led by Isaac Asimov’s books featuring thinking robots, that RSN (Real Soon Now) we will succeed in creating true thinking machines that will either be equal…
Technologically speaking it has been the worst of months, it has been the best of months, or perhaps neither. On the low tech side of things, the Acme engine (never terrific) on his 40+ year old BCS Mainline walk behind tractor that he lately uses only as a tiller, choked out its last while preparing his garden for planting. Moreover, it went out with a bang, one that in the Spy’s experience, strongly evidences a broken rod. Dead dead in…
The Spy has it on good authority that on Monday next week after the markets close, Apple will announce the takeover of one-time rival IBM for a cash and stock package valued at $162B, just under a 25% premium over where the latter’s stock was trading this week. Given that Apple’s own market cap at nearly $3T is some 23 times that of the company that once dominated the tech world, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO brushes the purchase off in…
Last Month’s chat ended with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are no doubt laughing at the North Americans who must seem to them bent on destroying the very democracy we once touted as superior to their brutal and genocidal dictatorships. Surely they can now go to war, annex their neighbours (and eventually us) into a totalitarianism that brooks not a whisper of dissent from the glorious leader’s agenda, and expect the west to remain supine as it is swallowed whole….
A couple of recent purchases are worth a mention here. First up is Apple’s second generation TV+ Siri remote –product A2540 with the aluminum case, now sold with the Apple TV. 4K, but also available for standalone purchase. This is the replacement for earlier iterations of the Siri remote in the black case–a rather poorly designed piece of work in the Spy’s view. Its touch pad was far too sensitive, making cursor control difficult, even haphazard. Moreover, it had no…
On the world stage, 2021 started with the failed violent coup attempt against the government in Washington, proceeded through an assortment of bad to worse COVID-19 news, the Afghanistan fiasco, deepening hostile divisions in the formerly more temperate and tolerant United States, worsening political situations in many parts of the world, the first potential breezes presaging the winds of war in India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Europe, and of necessity, the United States. The only plus for general peace was the…
It used to be that the three most important things to business success were location, location, and location. Today they are the content of your inventory, the content of your web site that permits access to ordering said inventory, and how content you make your customers (you don’t want your reputation slagged on social media do you?) Apple seems to consistently navigate all this in a manner that leaves many of its competitors in the dust. Yes, there have been…
Some four decades ago when many of us knew some form of net-based document linkage was coming, just not who would instantiate it and what form it would take, the Spy coined the term “metalibrary” to refer to the collection of all a society’s knowledge, in whatever medium, together with the means of accessing them. He reserved the term “The Metalibrary” for such collection in electronic form, somewhat anticipating the linguistic distinction later adopted for “internet” versus “The Internet”. The…
To the thieves who stole jewelry from my Bradner home on September 16–two questions: 1. How much did your fence give you for 52 priceless years of memories? Enough for a couple of fixes each of your favourite narcotic? 2. Why didn’t you also take the flowers in the living room? You could have made a “big spender” impression on your significant other. They were, after all, still fresh from my wife’s funeral. And a comment: I do not pray…