Some Blog Site

Around here, there are a lot of red-winged blackbirds. They usually look like this:

Fun fact: all the red-winged blackbirds you see are males. The females are a dappled sort of brown and white. I saw one once. I keep looking for more, but the males are all around the pond by the road and the females are nowhere to be seen. Maybe because they blend in better or maybe because they don’t go out and about as much – I don’t know.

And I don’t normally get a good view of them flying, so that side profile is the one I usually imagine if I’m picturing a red-winged blackbird.

For good measure, here is a view of a red-winged blackbird with his wings out.

I do like red-winged blackbirds, and I also like SR-71 blackbirds. So I thought I’d combine the two.

Behold, the red-winged SR-71 blackbird:

I think it never caught on because normally if military planes have any particular colors, they are the colors of their country. In that case, these planes might have been mistaken for being from Spain or Catalonia, or from Liechtenstein 200 years prior.

There are plenty of downsides to the Covid-19 pandemic, but there are also some benefits to how things are going. Here are some of the silver linings I’ve seen.

1. Teens get enough sleep. Enough studies were showing that schools have their start times backwards that some schools around here were looking at changing things so the elementary schools start earlier and high schools start later. It’s better for teenagers to be able to sleep in. But the district that was seriously considering it decided it didn’t want to mess with the status quo so it dropped the matter.

Then the coronavirus arrived.

Now, my teenagers get up whenever they want to. Although if the oldest one isn’t up by lunch we remind him to wake up. Their developing bodies get all the sleep they need. They do their schoolwork in the afternoon, and still have time for whatever in the evenings.

2. The open office plan is dead. Before this, the company where I work was just about to convert our office from standard cubicles to the open floor plan for “increased collaboration”. We’re an engineering department, we need decreased distractions. No one in our building wanted the open office, but headquarters decreed it so it was going to happen.

Then the coronavirus arrived.

Now, an open floor plan means “increased contamination” and CDC guidelines make it a bad idea. When I do go back to the office (see point #3) it will remain old-school cubicles for a while longer until management decides what the new CDC-friendly trendy office plan will be.

3. Work from home is required. Working from home was always an option, but it was frowned upon if one took too much advantage of it. It always helped to have an excuse of why you needed to be home that day, such as a sick child or an appliance being delivered. I suppose a sick appliance or a child being delivered would also have been valid. Officially, no excuse was needed – the excuse was just to avoid being seen as a slacker.

Then the coronavirus arrived.

Now, those of us who can work from home are discouraged from going to the office. In fact, we must get approval beforehand if we want to go into one of the buildings. I’m saving hundreds of dollars on gas each month, I’m getting to enjoy hours of my life each week not commuting, I eat lunch with my family, I don’t have to think about packing a lunch – I just open the fridge, I get to sleep in, I get to be outside while it’s sunny, I go days without combing my hair, etc. Work-from-home is a major part of social distancing, but it’s good for many things besides that.

I might be able to come up with some more benefits, but those are the main things to me.

For those of you who enjoyed the heyday of the Magic Eye posters, whereby focusing your eyes at a depth that’s not the surface of the paper you could see a hidden image, I have used my considerable knowledge of spreadsheets to produce a 3D image.

Behold, the Magic Spreadsheet:

Uncross your eyes until the letters align; unfocus your eyes until the double image matches up with the image next to it.

What I did here was put the bottom row with the same indentation of 0, the middle row gets an extra space each cell to the right, and the top row gets two extra spaces each cell to the right.

The shading was just for fun.

For your next presentation, try hiding some cheap stereograms. If you’re presenting your screen from a work-at-home situation, no one can see you cross your eyes.

It’s interesting how much difference context makes. For example, consider these slogans:

• Keep your laws off my body
• My body my choice
• Politicians make bad doctors

What does that make you think of?

What if I said the context is Covid-19 and government-mandated wearing of masks?

The interesting part to me is that the two sides of those slogans flip if you change the context from abortion to quarantine.

Talk about public health and social distance and masks and shutting down gatherings, and all of a sudden the conservatives are the ones saying

• Keep your laws off my body
• My body my choice
• Politicians make bad doctors

and the liberals are welcoming laws and executive orders that limit what they can do with their bodies and they are trusting politicians to make good medical decisions.

Of course that’s a generalization and there are exceptions, but in general that’s how it appears these days.

So it seems to me those slogans are not true because people don’t believe them across the board. Also, “if you don’t like masks then don’t get one.”

P.S. I was going to submit this as an idea to the Babylon Bee, but I couldn’t find anywhere to send it. Their contact form has a dropdown list of reasons to contact them but the glaring omission of “article ideas” made me think they did that on purpose.

I would have reformatted it first – something like “Conservatives and liberals are engaged in negotiations for who gets to use which slogans. The initial proposal was to have the conservatives return ‘My body my choice’ on June 1 and retain ‘Politicians make bad doctors’ throughout the summer, but talks have stalled over ‘Keep your laws off my body’.”

I didn’t fully write the article, as you can see, but it’s mostly there.

I noticed some people were trying to use the German accenterator to sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger. The problem is that Arnold is not German, and he doesn’t sound like the stereotypical German.

So I went ahead and created an accenterator page for everyone’s favorite Austrian farmer. Go visit the Austrian accent page to try the accent.

One thing I noticed is there are many similarities between The Ahnold and a Boston accent. Try each of them with a phrase like ‘smart park your car in Harvard yard’ and see how close they are.

So why doesn’t Arnold sound like he’s from Boston? I think it’s mostly the tone of voice. That’s one of the drawbacks of written English – no tones. Say that phrase with a lower, more even tone and it’s Arnold. Say that same phrase with a higher, brighter tone and it’s Bostonian.

For those of you keeping track, you were expecting this week’s post to discuss the most popular baby names of 2019. I know I certainly was.

But, alas, that is yet another effect of the coronavirus – no more baby name lists until further notice. Don’t blame me – that was the decision of the Social Security Administration.

Here is their reason for not fulfilling their annual tradition: “Out of respect and honor for all people and families affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the announcement of the 2019 most popular baby names is being rescheduled to a to-be-determined date. ”

Now there are several reasons that would have made sense to me – reduced staff, higher priorities at this time, etc. – but “out of respect and honor”? That does not make sense to me. How are people honored by not being able to see what names are popular? Maybe some medical workers are pregnant and want to check their possible names against the list – how are they respected by withholding the list?

I just don’t get it. Why that reason? Did they not want to tell us the real reason they don’t have the list?

Anyway, my annual post of the real most popular baby names is postponed until the SSA agrees to release their list.

I was inspired by this FoxTrot comic strip

to figure out exactly how many horsepower would be the equivalent of 350 elephantpower.

My answer: 2800 hp.

But then I got to thinking “What other animal-power could there be?” So I came up with a list. And made it into a web page, so that you could find the equivalent of the power of various animals. For example, a 2009 VW Rabbit actually has about 71,000 rabbitpower.

Anyway, head on over to Some Fun Site and try the Animal Power Converter to figure out how other animals compare to horses.

I will note that Bill Amend must have done his research, because as far as I can tell, the elephant is the most powerful land animal. A blue whale would theoretically dwarf the elephant in terms of horsepower, but I kept the list to land animals.

When comparing animals, remember that power is a function of force and distance and time. So an ox might be able to generate a lot of force, but it is not very speedy so it has a low power rating. And a cheetah is very fast, but it can’t move a lot of weight at that speed so it also has a low power number. A transmission could help in each case – give the ox some higher gears and give the cheetah some lower gear.

And if there’s an animal you want added to the list, please leave a comment here.