Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
All the neighbors have game cameras. So it seemed like a no-brainer for the abbey to have one, too, to learn more about the many wild critters who live here. On its first night, the camera was set up for deer, but no deer showed up. Instead there were only shots of Ken setting up the camera and retrieving the memory card, while bringing a tomato from the garden.
I’ll post photos from the game camera when there are good ones.
These are half-gallon jars.
I wanted to make some no-heat, no-cook pickles to be eaten within the next few weeks as opposed to being preserved for the winter. This is an easy process, because the canning process is unnecessary — there is no need to use a water-bath canner or a pressure cooker. I also wanted to ferment some pickles naturally without using vinegar.
The abbey garden is providing cucumbers for the table, but not enough for putting up pickles. So I bought half a bushel of beautiful fresh-picked cucumbers from a farmer who lives just north of here. The cost was $15 for the half bushel.
To further reduce the amount of work, I used half-gallon wide-mouth jars. For about two hours’ work, I ended up with three gallons of pickles.
Two gallons of the pickles involved nothing more than a vinegar solution poured over the packed pickle jars, with some spices. They should be ready to eat in two or three days. The process for the fermented pickles is to fill the jars with brine on top of the packed cucumbers, spices, and a few grape leaves. They’ll take a month or so to ferment before they’re ready to eat. I used airlock caps that I bought from Amazon. The airlock caps allow fermentation gases to escape but keep outside air from getting in, reducing the risk of mold.
Though pickle cucumbers are supposed to be able to take the heat of the canning process, still I like the idea of pickles that have never been heated. They should be nice and crisp.
So Roger Ailes, an evil genius whose genius and whose evil can be topped by few (other than Dick Cheney), is being escorted out of Fox News. The cover story is that Ailes’ departure (which sounds like a firing) has something to do with sexual harassment. Horse. Wash. The right-wing money and billionaire money behind Fox News couldn’t care less about a little old sexual harassment case as long as Ailes delivers what his bosses want. Corporations routinely buy their way out of sexual harassment cases. It’s just a cost of doing business. Ailes is a pig, and everyone always has known that Ailes is a pig. Something else is behind his firing. What might that be?
We can only speculate and hope for future leaks. But my guess is that the vast right-wing conspiracy is plenty pissed off about what has been happening. Roger Ailes’ job was to help make money for his billionaire owners, to keep the clueless, white, right-wing voters angry, deceived, and paranoid, and to keep them under control. That’s where Ailes failed spectacularly. He grew Fox News. He kept the white idiocracy inflamed and angry. But he failed to control them. Failing to control them not only allowed Donald Trump to get the Republican presidential nomination, it also has threatened the very future of the Republican Party and broke the puppet strings that tie the white idiocracy to the billionaires who expect, for their investment, to set the agenda and get total political control of the country through a preferably legal election. They must be incredibly pissed off, because this election may well cost the right-wing elite not only the White House for another eight years but also control of Congress as well. They stand to lose control of the Supreme Court pretty much forever.
But right-wing billionaires always have a plan. Fox News’ 24/7 paranoia-mongering, hate-mongering, and keeping its target audience completely distracted and deceived is absolutely critical to the right-wing plan, whatever that plan is. That plan may now be starting to unfold, with the firing of Ailes as one of the first steps.
In the coming days and weeks, we need to pay careful attention to changes at Fox News. As usual, pay no attention to what they’ll say about Ailes’ departure and the selection of his replacement. That will be a lie and a cover story, as always. Rather, pay attention to what they do, while deconstructing their cover stories for clues to what they’re trying to distract us from. Changes at Fox News may be the first real clues we get to how the right-wing elite are retooling for a new strategy, now that the old has blown up in their ugly faces.
Update, July 30, 2016: In an interview with Slate magazine, Gabriel Sherman, who wrote an unauthorized biography of Roger Ailes, talks about what he thinks is going on inside Fox news. Here’s the link and a quote: “My sense is that they are not going to just rip the place up before November. But I think they will be watching the political landscape in America as the election unfolds. They have people right now looking at how they are going to reposition this network for a post-2016 landscape.”
I had been watching the first tomato for weeks, ever since it was the first bloom. Just two days ago, it had started turning red. It was to go into the ceremonial first tomato sandwich of the summer. But, this morning, Sophia the chicken followed me into the garden through a gate that I had left open. The chickens are not allowed into the garden during garden season. Her chicken eye immediately spotted the red, and my gardener eye immediately spotted Sophia making for the tomato. Before I could head her off, she had taken a bite.
Tomato number 2 will make the first sandwich, and the remains of tomato number 1 will go into a curry.
Wikipedia commons
Once upon a time, if a thug wanted to take your money, he pretty much had to be close enough to hold a gun on you. Not anymore. These days, somebody halfway around the world can steal from you. Estimates of the size of the global criminal economy approach $1 trillion a year, or roughly 1.5 percent of global GDP. There are a lot of people in the world who make their livings from crime. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up as their victims.
A couple of recent scrapes with the criminal economy have reminded me of just how vulnerable all of us are, assuming that we have a computer, a cell phone, a bank account, and credit cards or debit cards. Don’t we all?
Increasingly, criminals try to reach you through your cell phone. Long ago I stopped answering calls from unknown callers outside my area code. Just yesterday a scammer with an 855 area code left this voice mail:
“Hello, I’m calling in regards to a formal complaint that’s been filed against [name of friend in California]. If you have any information that can lead to the whereabouts of this individual, please contact us at 855-207-2381. Again, 855-207-2381 or press any key on your dial pad to be connected immediately. Our next step will be filing the necessary paperwork with the local county court. Thank you for your cooperation.”
I had heard of this scam before, so all I did was alert my friend in California. His mother and sister had received similar calls. How did the scammer get my telephone number? I’ll never know. One possibility is that malware on my friend’s computer or cell phone compromised his address list. But what’s troubling about this particular scam, though, is that it generally targets people who have had previous minor scrapes with the law, so it’s easy to believe that that person is in trouble again. I suspect that the scammers are scouring public records. About 12 years ago, I had posted bail for this person after he was arrested for an unwise altercation with a parking lot attendant. My name would appear in the court documents, which are public record. The scam, I understand, is to try to get someone to send them money to drop a charge, though there is no charge.
A few months ago, I took responsibility for maintaining the web site for the Democratic Party in my county. The web site had been hacked a few months earlier and needed to be cleaned up. I did the cleanup work, rebuilt the web site, and went through the onerous process of getting Google to remove the dreaded “This site may be hacked” line in Google searches. About two months later, in spite of some extra security precautions, the web site was hacked again. I cleaned it up again. That very night, it was hacked a third time. Criminals use this kind of web site hacking to build their “bot” networks. Hijacked web sites can be used to distribute malware, to send spam, to market illegal products, or even to host illegal forms of porn.
I certainly am not boasting, but this web site and blog have never been hacked. Though I have taken every precaution I know how to take to secure this web site against hackers, constant vigilance is required. That takes time. The security logs for this blog show that it is regularly under attack. I recently added the ability to block access to this blog to most countries outside North America and Europe. Until I started that country blocking, most of the hacker probes came from Russia, Ukraine, and Asia.
There are three categories of global crime to which most of us vulnerable: Identity theft, online risks such as malware, and credit card fraud.
I’m no stranger to identity theft. Some years ago when I was living in San Francisco, someone using my name and Social Security number got a telephone in San Jose and ran up a bill that they never paid. Believe it or not, the law required that I prove to the telephone company that I didn’t do it, as opposed to the telephone company having to prove that I did. You can imagine how much time and aggravation that cost.
Secure banking
If you’re concerned about identity theft, online security risks, and Internet privacy (we all should be), then I’d recommend that you do some Googling and reading on precautions that you can take. A good place to start is the Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://ssd.eff.org/
However, I do want to talk a bit about secure banking.
For 25 years, I have been using the same account with Bank of America. When I opened the account, I had just moved to San Francisco, and Bank of America was a San Francisco hometown bank. Some years later, after an ugly buyout, Bank of America moved its headquarters to Charlotte. It’s now a big bank, and a mean one. But I have kept my Bank of America account because the bank has never been mean to me personally and has never charged me a cent. Bank of America also has some of the best security of any bank. Twice in the past, someone has made fraudulent charges using my debit card number. In both cases, the bank immediately detected the fraud, alerted me with phone calls and text messages, cleared the fraudulent charges, and sent me a new debit card.
For years, I’ve paid my bills online using Bank of America. Almost all my spending went through my debit card. I carry very little cash. Though I did not need a credit card, Bank of America kept tempting me with a credit card with “cash back” benefits. You get 1 percent on all purchases, 2 percent at grocery stores and wholesale stores, and 3 percent at gas stations. That would add up to a few hundred dollars a year for me. But what really sold me was a feature that was not available with my debit card. It’s the ability to create temporary “virtual” credit card numbers for online purchases. You assign enough money to the virtual card to cover the purchase. The virtual card expires in a month or two. And the online merchant never knows your real credit card number. I now use virtual credit cards for all online transactions, and I “locked” my debit card, which I still have, to block transactions. I can “unlock” the debit card any time from my computer or cell phone. Another free benefit that came with the credit card is a free monthly credit report. All in all, I think this is a pretty good deal. Bank of America is giving customers the ability to protect themselves, which also protects the bank. And as long as you pay your bill in full at the end of the month, there are no charges for the card, and you get “cash back.”
Don’t lose things!
A couple of months ago, on a trip to Asheville, I thought I had lost my wallet. It turned out that I had not lost it. Rather, while riding in a friend’s vehicle, my wallet had fallen through the crack between the seat and the console when I had awkwardly gotten my wallet out to pay us out of a parking deck. But in the three-hour period in which I thought my wallet was lost, I realized what a pain in the neck it would be to lose it. That would be an invitation to identity theft, and all one’s cards would have to be quickly canceled and replaced. Precaution: Make a copy of everything important that you carry with you so that you know whom to call and what has to be replaced.
Where is law enforcement?
As far as I can tell, almost no one ever gets arrested and prosecuted for online crime. Criminals now routinely ignore do-not-call lists, etc., and they get away with it. We spend untold billions of dollars on the low-level threats (more rare than lightning strikes) that are hyped in the media, such as the threat of terrorism. The political class have been worse than useless in taking a rational approach. Instead, for political gain, they hype non-existent threats such as transsexuals in bathrooms and do next to nothing to defend us against these new forms of global crime. We’re on our own.
Living off the grid and leaving no digital trail is a wonderful fantasy, but almost no one can pull it off. Corporations and governments know a heck of a lot about us. All we can do is try to prevent information about us from falling into the hands of the criminal economy.
There is an old saying that has become known as Segal’s law: A man with a clock always knows what time it is. A man with two clocks always wonders what time it is.
This is a nerd post. Sorry, non-nerds.
Normal people, I’m going to guess, are perfectly OK if their clocks are within a minute or two or three of the correct time. To nerds — and to much of the technology that you use every day — even a single second is an eternity.
Let’s look at a little history.
When I was a child, the two most accurate clocks that I can remember were the clock on our kitchen stove and the electric clock that sat on the shelf above my grandmother’s rocking chair. Because I was a nerd child, I found out how those clocks kept time. They did it by counting the 60 Hertz cycles on the AC (alternating current) power line. Even in the 1950s, power companies had pretty good methods of keeping the alternating current that powers our homes alternating at a stable rate. So, to be accurate, those electric clocks only needed to be able to count those 60 oscillations per second on the electric power line with a synchronous motor.
Time and frequency are very closely related. You can confidently say that something oscillates so many times a second only if you know, very precisely, how long a second is. By 1920 or so, our technologies had reached the level at which the accurate measurement of time and frequency — and the coordination of time and frequency from one place to another — became very important to economic and technical development. One of the first ways of solving this problem was with special radio stations operated by the National Bureau of Standards. Shortwave radio listeners were very familiar with these broadcasts: “At the tone the time will be, X hours, Y minutes, Coordinated Universal Time.” These broadcasts continue today, though GPS has now made the broadcasts largely obsolete. We’ll talk about GPS in a second.
Nerds knew (though the general public didn’t care) that those radio broadcasts were disseminating not only a time standard but also a frequency standard. If you have a shortwave receiver than can be tuned to 10 Mhz (Mhz = megahertz, or a million cycles per second), you’ll hear a click once per second and a voice announcing the time once a minute. But the frequency of the carrier signal also is very precisely controlled. The frequency of the broadcast is as close to precisely 10 Mhz as modern technology can get it, and that’s pretty close. So if you had a need to accurately measure frequencies, you could tune some special (and very expensive) radio equipment to these radio broadcasts and use the frequency of the carrier signal as a 10 Mhz frequency standard. Other expensive equipment, called frequency counters, if given access to a highly accurate 10 Mhz reference signal, could accurately measure all other frequencies.
Do you remember in the 1980s when “quartz” watches became a big deal? Quartz oscillators have been in use at least since the 1920s, but in the 1980s it became possible to make quartz oscillators small enough and cheap enough to fit inside a watch. Oscillator is a nerd word, but it refers to a simple circuit that produces a sine wave (alternating current) at a certain frequency. When you turned the dial on an old radio, you were changing the frequency at which the receiver oscillates. You were tuned to a station when the receiver oscillated at the same rate as the transmitter of the station that you wanted to listen to. The receiver used a variable frequency oscillator, because turning a dial changes the frequency.
A quartz crystal oscillates at a known and fairly stable frequency. Let’s say that there’s a quartz crystal in your watch oscillating at a frequency of 32,768 cycles per second. An easy circuit to build into a watch is a “divide by 2” circuit. If you send the signal through a “divide by 2” circuit, you get half the frequency, or 16,384. Divide it again and you get 8,192. If you do this division 15 times, you get a signal that is pulsing at once per second. Use that signal to move the second hand, and you’ve got a watch.
Though quartz watches are about ten times more accurate than mechanical watches, they’re still far too inaccurate for demanding requirements. Over time they drift, probably by seconds per week. Oscillators based on the properties of rubidium or caesium are more accurate than quartz, and both are used in expensive time and frequency equipment.
But, these days, how does our technology handle the need for highly accurate time and frequency at a reasonable cost? These days it’s done with GPS.
How GPS works is fascinating in itself, but let’s save that for another day. The important thing is that for GPS to work, the GPS satellites must send an extremely accurate time signal to the GPS receiver — your smart phone, for example. If your GPS device displays the time, you can count on it to be highly accurate.
These days, anyone who needs an accurate time and frequency standard uses special GPS receivers. Cell phone towers need both accurate time and frequency. Electric power generating stations now use GPS timing to coordinate the “phase” of the current on the power grid. The computer systems used by banks, or by stock trading systems, require accurate timing and are using GPS references. Most 911 call centers now use GPS references to ensure accurate time records, which are required by regulations.
Nerds like me often have apparatus at home for accurate time and frequency measurement. The cheapest way to go is to buy on eBay equipment that is considered obsolete by commercial users but which still works perfectly well.
In the top photo, a GPS receiver is tracking satellites and displaying the time. The output labeled “10 Mhz” is carrying a 10 Mhz sine wave “disciplined” by the GPS time signal so that the 10 Mhz reference signal can be trusted to be highly accurate. In the lower photo, that same 10 Mhz is being sent to my Hewlett Packard 5335A frequency counter, which is saying, “Yup, that looks like 10 Mhz, when compared with my built-in reference oscillator.” However, the GPS 10 Mhz reference signal is more reliable than the frequency counter’s internal oscillator, though that Hewlett Packard internal 10 Mhz oscillator is very good. The frequency counter has a plug in the back for a 10 Mhz external reference signal. So if the cable from the 10 Mhz output on the GPS device is plugged into the back of the HP frequency counter, then the frequency counter will use GPS as its frequency reference rather than the less accurate internal oscillator.
So, if you were at my house and wanted to know what time it is, I might suggest that you ignore the clock on the kitchen stove and go look at the GPS clock. It will be right within a millionth of a second, and that’s good enough for a nerd, most of the time.
I have seen my resident triplets fairly often, but I had assumed that the odds were poor that I’d ever catch them close enough together for a picture when I also had time to run for the camera. But here they are. They were in the back yard eating grass and browsing along the edge of the woods and the orchard fence.
The first squash are in. The tomatoes will follow soon. Everything in the garden is blooming copiously, and last night a good rain fell. I’m hoping for a good garden year.
As for the figs, it’s highly likely that the squirrels will raid the orchard and get to them first. The fig wars should begin in a few weeks.
As for the deer, these two no longer make any pretense of living in the woods. They live in the front thicket, and this year they ate every last one of my day lily blooms.
