Technology

The tinfoil hat types love the idea of Electro-Magnetic Pulse weapons. They love the idea that an EMP could fry every computer in the world, all at once, and force us to give up knowledge, returning to a 1950's dark age existence. Mostly, they like this because they have that letter switching brain disease, the one whose name I can never remember. They can't use a computer so they hate everyone who can. I dislike those people.

I don't dislike the idea of basic skills. I'm all in favor of those. I'm baffled by adults who can't cook their own dinner, or can't drive a manual transmission, yet have the time to constantly Tweet and update their Facebook page. WTF is wrong with you? Use your time a little more wisely.

If say, the Chinese launched an EMP over the USA and fried our computers? It would piss us off, but we'd be back up in hours in many places, weeks in the worst hit. Why? CDROMs are immune to EMP. So are DVDs. They're OPTICAL data, not magnetic. So EMP doesn't affect them. Also, with the Cloud, data is mirrored all over the world so my emails and blog posts are in Sweden and elsewhere simultaneously. Fry the local server, when the ISP comes back up and I type in my username and password, kept in hard copy, it logs in and there it is. Just a minor hiccup. So an EMP is only hours of frustration for common people, possibly requiring replacement of a PC which would mean days rather than hours, and the military would just launch the nukes and burn the appropriate city to ashes in minutes anyway. So EMP is a bad move. Ergo, its unlikely to happen alone, or at all.

The tinfoil hat brigade forgets that technology has been organized into useful libraries on how to build it or improve it. The Way Things Work was the hardcopy book version. How Things Work .com is the same deal, only online. CNC, someday better programmed but functional now, would let us build any replacement part for any factory or machine we needed, including vehicles and military weapons, to just keep going and going. If China goes stupid and attacks us or its neighbors, Shanghai will be hit, instantly, and that's that for mass production. The rest of the world will take what it learned from Chinese manufacturing, remember that we don't have slaves here, and train kids in CNC so we can continue on without China at a slightly higher price. Too bad.

The Tinfoil Hat Brigade buy cars without fuel injection because EFI is computers and they can fry in an EMP attack. Maybe that's fine, but EFI passes smog emissions and carburetors mostly don't. This comes up a lot with motorcycles and scooters, which are mostly still carbureted. I'm curious about learning how to adjust one properly. Fuel mixture and RPM adjustments and how to adjust the choke. I don't know those things. They might be interesting. My first car was a VW bug, which was a carbureted 4 cylinder. Fiddled with that a lot, trying to make it perform. The BMW that came after it was EFI, but it had compression problems from a dirty head, needed to be torn apart and cleaned. Really should have done that. It was my best driving sports car, the only one that really cornered right. Good transmission too. I still miss that car. Sold it to an angry divorcee who drove it like a bat out of hell. She probably destroyed the engine. Some people don't like machines very much, they express rage through them. My brother used to Floor his accellerator and kept burning up the rings in his cars, requiring an engine rebuild. This is weird because he was good to his reel to reel tape recorder but couldn't do the same care and maintenance to his car. We are not the same kind of people, he and I. I'm in less of a rush, and I look 8 years younger but I'm actually 2 years older. Not having 4 kids is part of that.

Last weekend, I explained to my Dad, who is 72, how a thumb drive works. A solid state key-chain hard drive that plugs into a USB port and will hold entire Gigabytes of data, like his favorite digital pictures, his financial backups, documents, whatever. My brother had asked for pictures of mom. So now he'll get them, far easier than a CDROM, by thumb drive. Cost? $8 at Staples. I showed him how to plug it into the USB port, and how to select all pictures, and how to copy and paste them onto the drive, just like that. He was shocked at how easy it was. Wants help repeating it, but asked about updating files or adding new ones. Being live-in tech support was one of the things I've done since last October when my money ran out and I had to move home. The sewing machines are coming out this week. Along with the thread. Soon this will be my room, properly. Maybe even get a TV so I can play my Xbox or watch a movie. Nah. This monitor is great. I just need a TV-IN card so I can use it on this. Or ignore the Xbox and just buy a few PC games.

It is a windy day today, not listed in the news at all. There were coyotes yelping last night, just a few. All mom's flowers are blooming. Even the Azaleas are out. And the Rhododendrons. The situation is baffling, but we deal. Makes me want to bicycle more, or hop a quiet motorcycle and just muddle around on the back roads. This is a good place to live. Mom was happy here. Dad has friends. I guess we'll be okay. Nothing is ever ideal.