It’s chapter three, on Woodrow Wilson. Go take the quiz, and discuss.
An Economic Gloom Roundup
Over at Instapundit. Lots of links to depressing news.
Sunspots
They may finally be starting up again, after a long drought.
No More California Dreamin’
If California is really where national trends start, the nation is in trouble. The good news, though, is that an anti-big-government revolt may be brewing out there.
[Update]
Michael Barone: Are Americans getting cold feet over Obama economic proposals? Let’s hope so, finally.
An Interview
And, by the way, I don’t want to start yet another long and dumb argument, but I am not going to capitalize it. Capitalize Luna, capitalize Selene, but not moon.
Because “moon” isn’t its name. It’s “the moon.” The word takes a definite article. We don’t say, as Tarzan might, “Me going to Moon.” We say, “Me going to the moon.” When we use the definite article, at least in context, we all know which moon we mean (if it were a discussion about Jupiter and its satellites, then we would know from context that it wasn’t Luna). When we stop using the definite article for it, and it gets officially named “Moon,” then I’ll start capitalizing it. I don’t expect that to happen any time soon.
Continuing Computer Problems
I’ve got a hardware problem of some kind.
I put in a brand new terabyte drive and installed Fedora 11 on it. As I was doing some package updates, the screen froze, just as it did yesterday, when all the trouble started. When I tried to reboot, it didn’t even recognize the drive as a system disk. I rescued it, and fsck said the boot sector was clean (I don’t know if that means no problems, or it has no data).
I did a full memory check overnight last night, so I don’t think it’s that. Maybe Carl had the right idea about a bad video card, but how would that cause it to trash the hard drive? Any other ideas?
Five Stimulus Plans
…better than Obama’s first one. It’s not hard.
If they want a “second stimulus,” step one would be rescinding the first one.
Computer Disaster Update
For those following my travails yesterday, there’s good news, and bad news (and the bad news may be really bad). This morning, it finally logged me in, but it takes half a forever from the time I type in the password and I actually get a desktop. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I can’t find my old data where I backed it up yesterday.
I had backed it up to a file system on sdb3. But when I went to look for it today after logging in, /dev/sdb3 no longer exists. All there is is /dev/sdb1. And when I try to mount it I get the message “type lvm2pv not recognized.” Just how screwed am I?
[Update]
I’m hosed. Sort of, depending on whether or not I can find a wizard. Fedora decided, without asking me, to format both my drives as a single file system. The data’s still there, but not easily found. To top it off, the second drive is dying (which I didn’t learn until this morning). So I’ve shut down the machine, and am going out to buy a new big drive, load a fresh OS on it (without the other drives present), and then see how to go about the recovery. Fortunately, the data is redundant on both drives, which may make it a little easier to find, even with the superblocks and tables munged.
[Update mid afternoon]
In doing the new install, I’m pretty confident that I fornicated with the canine. It probably asked me if I wanted to format both drives, and I didn’t look carefully enough at what it was asking me. But Fedora started the whole thing…
The Bogosity Of The BMI
Here.
We got a Wii fit a few months ago, and it tells me that my BMI is high, though within the normal range (23.5), and it’s always encouraging me to set a goal to lose weight, but I don’t think that 170 lbs on a 5’11” frame is overweight, particularly when my waist size is only a couple inches more than it was when I was a kid. We ought to start debunking this.
How Far Does ESAS Stray From Aldridge?
So far that you can’t even see it from there. A devastating analysis that I hope everyone on the Augustine panel reads. And note that this is something that the press, even the space press, rarely, if ever, talks about.