I beg your pardon, but...

Not much of a post today. Been working on a problem with our refrigerator for about a full, eight hour day. 

We've been having a recurring problem with our refrigerator's freezer section dripping water which ends up on the floor below the freezer door. It has been happening intermittently and only small amounts we can see. I haven't kept a log, but it started out over a week ago, then has been a mix of sometime it's obviously bad while other days it can go all day without leaking. For most of the time, there has been a deposit of ice on the freezer's floor (inside), and I've tried to troubleshoot it to determine if it's the system auto-defrosting circuit, or just what's going on.

A complication popped up today and it stopped me for at least an hour. This refrigerator has a built-in icemaker and while it's a longer story than this, three years ago last month I moved its input hose from the input of a water filter we use on the kitchen sink, to that filter's output, so that our ice was made with filtered water, not "just" city water. Today, with everything off and cleaning behind the refrigerator, I heard a quiet little hissing sound. It turned out to be that hose was leaking - spraying a very fine mist of the filtered water out behind the refrigerator. I had to turn off the cold water under the sink to stop that spraying.

My fix was to disconnect the icemaker from that water filter, which means there is no connection to water for the icemaker at all. I had to go up to the corner hardware store to buy an adapter to not hook that hose back to the filtered water. The hose is just hanging there, not attached to anything. I think from now on we're just going to live without an icemaker. It's not like we use a lot of ice and neither one of us thinks it's an essential appliance. Since the water in the bottom of the freezer had to come from somewhere it was either the water going to the icemaker, or the refrigerator's defrosting system not working properly, and everything else in freezer looks normal, not too much frost. I think what comes next is I'm going to go buy some ice cube trays and we'll just fill 'em up in the kitchen sink and freeze them on a shelf in the freezer. Just like we used to do 60 years ago.

Anyway, that's why it's an odd day. Back to normal tomorrow.  

It's one-half day

Not one half of a day, one-half day. 8/16, as we write the date as a fraction, reduces to 1/2. 

Sorry.

Around here in East Central Florida, also called the Space Coast, our highlight for this evening is we have a Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral SFS. The launch is for the Globalstar 2-R Mission. The launch time is 9:12 PM EDT. 

The Globalstar global mobile communications network offers global, digital, real-time voice, data, and fax via a constellation of minisatellites. The constellation operates in a 1410 km orbit inclined at 52 degrees.

In early 2022, Globalstar contracted with MDA for the construction of 17 new 2nd generation refresh satellites to replenish the existing constellation. Rocket Lab is sub-contracted to build the satellites' buses and the launch dispensers. 

The launch will be the 14th flight of B1090, and the booster will return to the launch site and we're being "warned" that sonic booms will be heard around here. 

"But that's not all" There's a second launch tonight, this time from Vandenberg SFB and this one's launch time is 9:50 PM EDT. This is the launch of a US Space Force classified payload, and the booster is B1088 on its 18th flight.

USSF-366 is a classified mission for the United States Space Force. It is possibly a batch of classified LEO satellites for a US government entity based on SpaceX’s Starshield satellite bus, based on locations of rocket stage drop zones being exact fits with previous Starlink Group 15 launches. 

Because it's from the other side of the country, this isn't one we can go outside to see, but the 38 minute time delay between the east and west coast launches means we'll be able to watch both on NASA Spaceflight's YouTube Channel. 

“A few moments later ...” OK, an hour later...

Now those two are over, both successful, both fully as expected. The launch itself induced a long-lasting rumble causing a rattle that I could hear in the house, and a the sonic boom from the booster returning to launch site was audible - like someone kicked the back door. 

Of course this isn't from tonight's missions; not with the sun low on the horizon like that. It's a picture I have on file, from Starlink 10-50 mission on July 5, 2026. 

A very slow news day

It's really a very slow news day with nothing particular visibly going on any of sites I typically scan for news. 

In the sorta-news out there, Blue Origin is starting operations of a new ground network called Quartz, reminiscent of NASA's first "deep sky network" - three ground stations spread more or less equally around the globe to receive downlinks from different satellites. More satellites are in the plans. 

Phase one of the Quartz ground stations feature 3.7-meter aperture antennas supporting S-band and X-band frequencies for low Earth orbit (LEO) operations. Blue Origin's Global Network Operations Center provides continuous oversight and incident response across all sites, resulting in a ground communications architecture with no third-party dependencies. Quartz was designed with security in mind and supports radiometric tracking, signal intelligence, and Space Domain Awareness capabilities across all sites.

For those unfamiliar with satellite communications, 3.7 meters (12' 1.6") isn't even remotely big for antennas used for satellite downlinks. 3.7 meters is about the size of the old Satellite TV antennas we had in the early 1980s. Back when they were much bigger than the little dishes we see now. On the other end of the scale, the big dishes of NASA's Deep Sky Network (DSN), used to listen to the Voyager satellites out in interstellar space are 70 meters (240 feet) in diameter. Which is not to compare the jobs they're designed for, just to show that they're like everyday size dishes as opposed to really big dishes. 

An interesting people-related story is on the retirement of Michael Fincke, a NASA astronaut for 30 years. We know him from the Starliner fiasco in the second half of '24. He got delayed from a trip to the ISS due to shuffling crew and ships to fly to the ISS on the Crew-11 mission with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Kimiya Yui, NASA astronaut Zena Cardman and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov on Aug. 1, 2025. That mission was ended earlier than intended when Fincke had a medical emergency. What's interesting in that article is that it contains two videos that total an hour of watching time, and those two videos are said to describe just how "eff-ed up" that Starliner mission was. And, no, I haven't watched those two videos - yet. 

Really, those are the only two moderately interesting stories I've come across today. 

Around "Castle Graybeard" things are pretty much as usual except for yesterday. As I've commented many other times over the years, if there's a movie we want to see, we tend to go to a weekday morning or midday matinee, and yesterday we went to see "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" primarily based on hearing it was doing exceptionally well in theaters, and secondarily because we've seen all of the other Spider-Man movies with this group: Tom Holland as Spidey, Zendaya as MJ and Jacob Batalan as their friend Ned. I'm happy to add they've all gotten better onscreen personas as they've grown. 

I have vague memories of reading the early '70s Spider-Man comics, but I'm sure we started watching the modern Marvel Universe version first trilogy with Tobey Maguire as Spidey, and the next trilogy with Andrew Garfield. When Tom Holland popped up in the last trilogy, I'd never heard of him, but thought he came across well. Since then, I've seen him in other movies and thought he did well in all of them. I think I've read that in almost all the spider-man movies, the guy playing Spidey and the girl playing MJ ended up in some sort of off-screen relationship for a while. I think Holland and Zendaya are the only two who actually got married in real life. I ran across something yesterday that gave me the impression they're both 30. Someone somewhere (Tyrus on "Gutfeld!" I think) conditioned me to react to this by saying they're both grown-ass adults so good luck to both of them. 

I know many readers are anxiously waiting for my review, although most readers have shut down the blog and are reading somewhere else, so let me tell you that I'll give it an 8 out of 10. I think there's a lot going on in the movie and I just got the feeling we're being clued in to a lot of movies yet to come. For example, one of the characters in this movie is named Jean Gray (played by Sadie Sink - whom I've never heard of), and she was a character in the X-Men movies. Is that a lead-in to another X-Men series? Or crossover between the X-Men and other Marvel movies? You know everything I know. 

NASA’s Crew-11 mission members stand inside the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Nov. 13, 2024. From left are Mission Specialist Kimiya Yui from JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), Commander NASA astronaut Zena Cardman, Mission Specialist Oleg Platonov of Roscosmos, and Pilot NASA astronaut Mike Fincke. Image: NASA/Josh Valcarcel

Ran across a fun special events ham station last night

My usual hangout in ham radio has tended to be six meters, (50-54 MHz, and the first VHF band in the USA) and the last handful of days 6 has pretty much done one of its "oh, fuggedaboutit" intervals and nothing has been copyable around here. So last night I did one of those things I tend to do when 6 bores me out ofmy mind and dropped down to HF to see if there was anything going on. It was around 10PM here, so 0200 to around 0230 UTC.  

Dropped to 30m. Heard nothing new. 

Dropped to 80m. Likewise. 

Figuring 40m was likely to be the busiest/most crowded but with the same "nothing new" picture, I went up to 7.074 MHz. Very surprisingly, 40 not only wasn't as busy as I frequently find it, but there were a few stations that my copy of the JTAlert software told me I had never worked on 40. I worked three countries for the first time on 40 but that's not the story. The story is that one of them was a special event operation using the call sign GB64MOD. If you're familiar with the ham web site QRZ.com, this is what you see when you look up that call.  Here's a reduced copy of just one of the graphics on that page:

Their QRZ listing says they have a special web page for this event here. It adds this narrative:

GB64MOD ham radio special event station - Celebrates the spirit of the Mod movement through Amateur Radio.. classic British Culture modern communications with fellow Mods, Ham Operators and Shortwave listeners around the globe!

Calling Radio Amateurs worldwide! - Join us in celebrating Mod culture, music, fashion and more... Lets make this an annual event!

A truly modern Mod revival! Let us know your plans? 

Curtis MW0USK and Kevin MW9KJC.

Now, let me tell you why I'm emphasizing this. While I remember much of the "MOD" music, certainly The Who, and Small Faces that they make buttons for in that graphic, as well as many more, that's not what I'm seeing here. What I'm seeing is more evidence for the movement that says "this is why we were called GREAT Britain" with the implied celebration of being Great and not a place that should be wiped out by the suicidal embracing of immigrants who are wiping out the British culture and society.  Which leads to thinking, "we can be GREAT again and we should work at that." Notice there's nothing explicitly leaning in that direction on the website; just a reminder of those days for those who loved them. Make of it what you will.

If you're unfamiliar with special event stations like this they happen quite frequently. The biggest regular events these days are Parks On The Air (POTA) and Summits On The Air (SOTA). People collect certificates and QSLs from activities like all of these. 

Weekend wrapup

As I mentioned in Friday's post, this weekend was the CQ Worldwide VHF Digital Contest, only I described it incorrectly. Or incompletely. 

CQ Magazine has been running a July VHF contest for years, but with the rather amazing rise in popularity of the digital modes (which I know I've talked about before) a group of hams who prefer the "good old" analog modes like voice, mostly single sideband (SSB), with a small amount of FM, along with CW (Morse code) have been finding the contests much less interesting, and I've read that a noticeable number of these operators have stopped participating in the contests. This year, CQ introduced a new concept: a second contest.  Enter the one you prefer or both of them, your choice. The "CQ Worldwide VHF SSB/CW Contest" was held in the first weekend of July with the same 24 hour interval as yesterday's VHF Digital Contest 1400Z, Jul 4 to 1400Z, Jul 5. No, I didn't participate in that. 

So how did it go? Miles better than contest I keep comparing to, last year's ARRL VHF Contest. With the start and end times for this contest being in the morning, it tends to help to remember that propagation will be toward the sun, with paths in the sunlit part of the day. In the mornings, we'll hear the eastern part of the US, and as far as into Europe we can (if we're lucky), while in the evening we'll get more openings to the west. My perspective on open to the west is that from here on the east coast of Florida, pretty much everywhere is "toward the west." That's how it went, only the opening toward the west coast was over pretty early, long before it was sunset on the left coast.

The two pieces of software I'm running and depending on the most are a second-source of WSJT-X, called "WSJT-X Improved," and a program that helps with human interfacing to WSJT-X improved called JTAlert. Describing how to connect them and even get started is "beyond the scope of this paper" (as they used to say). JTAlert's default display puts up a box where incoming messages are tagged so that we can tell at a glance if we've worked that station before, the station's grid square designation, notes if they're calling CQ or a few other things. When that display window contains a lot of calls, it can be hard to read what I need to get out of it in the 15 second intervals FT8 uses. For much of the contest, that window contained 40 to 60 calls in every 15 seconds. Somewhere in that 40 to 60 second interval is where I'd run out time to read it all.

So how good was the weekend?  During the 24 hours of the contest, I only worked two new grid squares (where New simply means I haven't worked them before). That's more or less a "Meh" result. This morning, while 6m was open to Europe, I nudged my number of countries worked up to having worked my ninth band DXCC (100 countries worked on each band). Needless to say, I haven't got 100 confirmed, and can't apply for that wallpaper until I get the 100 QSLs. In my work toward the 8 band DXCC I have now, I've just come to know I need to work a bit more than the 100. Five or 10 extra is generally plenty. 

This afternoon, with the contest over, I worked two more new grids, making the weekend total four. That's not remarkably great, but it's a good day. Certainly more than average. I'm trying to work new ones all the time and I know I've gotten two or three in one day several times. Of course, the more you have worked already, the fewer there are left to get in one day. 

This story about 9BXCC fits nicely with the idea of a post about QSLing, which seemed to get a positive reaction.  

And since this needs a picture here...

It was BIC intensive weekend

I really have very little to write about since I spent a lot of time living up to the observation that there's nothing quite like staying BIC to get the best out of time in front of the radio. 

I spent most of Saturday and today BIC and striving to get "new" things on 6m.  My final total was 

• New grids contacted for FFMA credit: 4
• New countries contacted for 6m DXCC credit: 2

While I don't qualify for either, I'm far closer to DXCC than the FFMA. 

The band conditions (propagation) were better from Saturday morning through about 0000 UTC or Saturday evening around 7:30 PM local time, when I came out here to write the "It's Field Day" article.  Sunday morning meant continuing with our search for a new church, but the conditions from lunch through most of the day were pretty poor compared to yesterday.  

Even sitting here now and looking at it, it looks like a lot of BIC time for those amounts of increase, but, there are plenty of times when I spend days in the chair and only get one or two new credits, or nothing new at all. 

Since I've been watching for this, I should update that the SWIFT rescue launch to on the "last" Pegasus rocket has been delayed until Tuesday at 6:23 AM EDT, but it's not from here or Vandenberg. It's from the Marshall Islands.

Northrop Grumman's Pegasus launch vehicle on the belly of their Stargazer heavy lift airplane. Image Credit: Northrop Grumman

So far the weekend is a dud

I mentioned this weekend's ARRL VHF contest a few times and that's where I was all of Saturday - at least until 11:00 PM local (eastern US) time.

It's hard to know this is correct, but yesterday, I thought it might have been the least active, and least interesting of these contests. Ever. Compared to the activity I heard last weekend, it was very low activity and very poor propagation.

Naturally, if I say it was bad, the obvious reply is, "how bad was it?" 

As I've said many times, I tend to use a software package called WSJT-X and a mode called FT8. The "JT" is for Joe Taylor, the physicist who developed the mode and puts the software out for free and I believe the whole name reduces to Weak Signal by Joe Taylor - eXtended (more than just the original few features). The big picture overview is that the FT8 software transmits and receives in alternating 15 second intervals.  And now I can finally answer the "how bad was it?" 

Last weekend, during the busy periods, I would see that in 15 seconds, the software had demodulated and put on screen over 50 different transmissions. For perspective, most of yesterday, I saw four to six. Sometimes it would show two and I don't recall ever seeing the incoming calls get to even 10. The only good part is that while I didn't catch any new stations or new areas I haven't contacted (worked) yet, I did get propagation openings into southern parts of Arizona and California.  

It's practically impossible for me to read over 50 call signs going by in 15 seconds and recognize any I need to respond to. Yes, I have some software that helps with that, too. 

Well it's just after 9AM here, and the band looks even slower than yesterday, but I'll go turn the station on. 

 

 

A weekend catchup

I've been referring to this as the year of "guess what broke this time?" That's not quite true, though. It's not only unexpected things breaking it's all sorts of extra expenses, which makes it more like "guess what extra expense we have this time?"  

But before I go there, let me throw in a neat YouTube Short video I stumbled across this afternoon. It's about the Voyagers and presents a lot of fun facts.

If that doesn't work for you, here's the YouTube link itself. 

---

The day got taken up with one of those "things we've gotta do" that ended up with some extra impacts, so to speak. We bought this house and moved in here in June of 1984. We've painted it numerous times, planted citrus trees in the backyard, then when a couple of deep freezes killed them, replaced three citrus with one oak - which grew so big that we had to remove it in 2022. The only tree we put in the front yard is a maple, which we got because I grew up in Miami and never had trees with leaves that changed colors. That was one of the first "home improvements" we did and the tree has stayed relatively healthy, growing a little bit every year. I'll hazard a guess the tree is around 38 to 40 years old and around 25 feet tall.

Within the last few weeks, I was looking things over with the aim of seeing if we needed to trim back the tree as hurricane season approaches. I was surprised to see a major branch that looked dead. Nothing growing on it. This tree is to the left when we go out the front door, and the branch is on the left side of the tree, so I'm guessing that's why I didn't tend to notice it until recently. Nine times out of 10 we're going out the front door, we're walking to the right because that's where the driveway is. I just don't walk over to look at the left side of that tree often enough.

After a bit of study, today turned out to be the day to trim back the maple. One of the things I had to do that didn't show up until I studied it a bit more was that there was another branch that was in the way and the whole task was a bit more complicated than just trimming back that one dead branch. Another issue was that the one I needed to cut was about 10 feet above the ground. To get into the position to cut that dead branch, I had to use my multipurpose ladder which has earned the nickname of the OCHFR or Overly Complex and Heavy Finger Remover. It was tough cutting that branch with my reciprocating saw standing on the ladder, stuck between it and the area I had to work in. At some point, the saw blade broke through into an open area near the center of the branch and everything went flying.

Long story short, I ended up getting knocked off the ladder and landing in the grass with the saw nearby but not stuck into me. I was able to get up fairly quickly and nothing seems broken, but I'm a bit more sore than I expected to be. So that's why the low-effort Saturday post.

My other, other stuff going on

I occasionally mention other things I'm working on or that are going on. Life is the simplest word and I think it was Beatle John Lennon who said, "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." That's what this little post will be about.

Let's start with something I haven't talked about in a long time: guitars. I've got a small batch of guitars, like pretty much all players who can get more than one instrument tend to. Unlike the vast majority of home players, I built two of those guitars; an electric guitar from a kit back around 2015, and an acoustic that was more like a very extended repair job. It was a sales demo model from some guitar store and before sending it around to show what their guitars looked like inside, the manufacturer, Breedlove, sliced most of the left side of the guitar off. 

The long story is I started playing in junior high school, around 1967 or '68, and like most others, I learned what was referred to as rhythm guitar. Playing chords. I played in a couple of garage bands, and at a couple of parties, but I never really fantasized about being a musician. It was enough to make some sounds that didn't hurt people's ears or they even actually enjoyed. 

In my "young adult" years, through my 20s, I hardly played at all and didn't get involved with guitars again until maybe 1988 or later. I picked it up with intentions to practice more often a few years ago. Those plans would get derailed every now and then by either an injury or osteoarthritis. Over roughly the last year, that second one had me unable to play for a year or more. The effect of the arthritis was limited entirely to one finger, my left hand's middle finger. The very last segment of that finger, the one that you press onto a string to change the note you're playing, rotated left or toward my pinky finger. 

How much did it tilt? I don't really know how to measure that with what I have, but I'll estimate 10 degrees. The rotation wasn't the issue so much as the insane pain it caused. I'm gonna bet you've heard someone say, "it hurts to look at it?" Exactly.

About a month ago, I realized that I had bumped that finger on something and it didn't hurt. After some time trying to figure out if it was really gone, I started thinking what I could do to test it. I picked up one of the guitars I'd regularly practice with and found I could play without the insane pain.  The problems now are the same ones everybody picking up a guitar and starting to practice faces. Building up calluses on my finger tips so the strings don't hurt as much, strengthening the muscles involved so when I go to play some chord that makes all six strings sound, I can apply even pressure and put all the strings on the neck. Most importantly though is agility of those fingers, and knowing what to play. As in re-learning a few songs. 

My tendency in here is to put up some picture that's relevant or related to the topic, but tonight, I was going to link a video from Woodstock that I've run before. The problem with that is YouTube has decided we're not allowed to embed it, but I think I can run a link to it HERE. And here's a picture:

A photo of my repair job on the Breedlove guitar. The guitar is on my workbench but just for posing, in the final post on this job.  

The finger has better and worse days, so it's not entirely being back to normal and I have no way to know if that's even possible.

It's Resurrection Sunday - Happy Easter

 

It's Easter, Resurrection Sunday, and as I do regularly, I look at what I've posted for the major holidays in the past, and often modify them quite a bit. Not wholesale tear it up and start over, but some extensive additions and deletions.  FWIW, this one is largely unchanged from 2024.

Looking for the Living One in a Cemetery

Luke 24: 1-12 New Living Translation

24 But very early on Sunday morning^[a] the women went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. ² They found that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance. ³ So they went in, but they didn’t find the body of the Lord Jesus. ⁴ As they stood there puzzled, two men suddenly appeared to them, clothed in dazzling robes.

⁵ The women were terrified and bowed with their faces to the ground. Then the men asked, “Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive? ⁶ He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead! Remember what he told you back in Galilee, ⁷ that the Son of Man^[b] must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and that he would rise again on the third day.”

⁸ Then they remembered that he had said this. ⁹ So they rushed back from the tomb to tell his eleven disciples—and everyone else—what had happened. ¹⁰ It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and several other women who told the apostles what had happened. ¹¹ But the story sounded like nonsense to the men, so they didn’t believe it. ¹² However, Peter jumped up and ran to the tomb to look. Stooping, he peered in and saw the empty linen wrappings; then he went home again, wondering what had happened.

---

Coming from my background, becoming an evangelical Christian was a large change.  I had studied biochemistry and microbiology in college through my third year before life imposed some detours, eventually getting my degree and starting my career as an engineer late in life (over 30).  I had been an amateur astronomer since about age 10, so between them I was deeply marinated in the standard model of Cosmology as well as conventional biological evolutionary theory.  Frankly, I wasn't giving it much thought any longer, but my wife had re-affirmed her faith (she had first accepted Christ as child) and I was having all of my mental models disrupted.  She had started a subscription to Bibical Archaeology Review and the constant refrain from archaeologists, not religiously motivated, along the lines of "we thought this was old Jewish folklore, but here it is" got me thinking "if that's true, maybe there's more that's true."  Strobel's The Case for Christ, played a role in filling in the gaps in my historical knowledge.  

I went forward for Baptism in 1995 in an evangelical church and an important part of that change was because the pastor had a similar background to mine, at least in the biochemistry/microbiology. He was a pharmacist and the director of the pharmacy department in one of the local hospitals. He quickly became one of our closest friends in the worst time of our lives - Mrs. Graybeard's cancer in 1997. It's a long story, but in the last couple of years the church's elders dumped him. As the story came out, we found a new church - a nearby Southern Baptist church. Our pastor started going to another Southern Baptist church, but closer to his home. He passed away a little before Easter of '24.  

Easter is the most important day in Christianity and far more important than Christmas because of the resurrection.  Everyone has a birthday, but history only records one resurrection.  The resurrection is essential to Christianity; without it there simply is no reason for Christianity to exist.  Since virtually everyone, including honest atheists, agrees Jesus was a real man in history (I've always found it amazing that Jesus' existence is better attested in ancient sources than that of Julius Caesar - but no one claims Julius Caesar was not a real person) and died on the cross, the question becomes whether or not it can be verified that Christ was seen after the resurrection by someone other than the closest circle of disciples. Strobel says:

Did anyone see Jesus alive again? I have identified at least eight ancient sources, both inside and outside the New Testament, that in my view confirm the apostles’ conviction that they encountered the resurrected Christ. Repeatedly, these sources stood strong when I tried to discredit them. 

Could these encounters have been hallucinations? No way, experts told me. Hallucinations occur in individual brains, like dreams, yet, according to the Bible, Jesus appeared to groups of people on three different occasions – including 500 at once!

In the end, after I had thoroughly investigated the matter, I reached an unexpected conclusion: it would actually take more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a follower of Jesus.  

I still think a great summary is "Five Confounding Facts About Jesus' Resurrection" a 2016 post at Donald Sensing's Sense of Events, which has been gone for a while and replaced by Sensing Online.  He has done several excellent posts on the subject, including Jesus and History and links to articles put together by working scientists, "On what basis would a scientist accept the Resurrection?" and "Is Belief in the Resurrection Unscientific?" Do yourself a favor and read this year's (2026's) Easter post at Sensing Online. 

Enjoy your day and your time with your family. I actually woke at 3AM this morning telling myself I forgot to do an Easter post. As I've said almost every year, churches seem more crowded on Christmas than Easter but everyone has a birthday while there's only one who had a resurrection.  That's more important than a birthday.

 

Little Paul Ehrlich's Dead

The news broke last week that the famous 1960s biologist and apocalypse fearmonger Paul Ehrlich had shuffled off this mortal coil. I've written about Ehrlich many times over the years, but didn't feel particularly moved to write something about him. Frankly, people who make predictions about the future and are wrong far more often than right don't interest me much.  

Just for fun, I looked up every post I've done that mentioned Ehrlich, and this 2018 post about his most famous book, "The Population Bomb," came out on top.  

First published in May of 1968, I was 14, I recall it being talked about widely and seriously.  It was by a scientist after all.  The Stanford University biology professor famously claimed that population growth would result in resource depletion and the starvation of hundreds of millions of people.  I recall conversations about "hamburger wars" as people fought to the death for dwindling supplies of food.

Ehrlich prophesied that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s (and that 65 million of them would be Americans), that already-overpopulated India was doomed, and that most probably “England will not exist in the year 2000.”

In conclusion, Ehrlich warned that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” meaning “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

Doomsday prophesy sells, and doomsday from someone with a handful of letters after their name (MS, PhD etc.) sells even better.  The future didn't turn out quite as dismally as Ehrlich suggested; he famously lost a bet where he picked a "basket of commodities" and bet that these five metals would go up in price in 10 years (1980 to 1990) - they declined in price an average of 57.6% while the population increased. Nevertheless, he influenced a generation or two of policy makers. 

And that's the basic problem with fearmongers like Ehrlich. It doesn't matter how many times people create demonstrations that argue against their predictions and the fearmonger's predictions don't materialize, they keep getting published. You can look up virtually every prediction he advanced and they don't come true. The first article I ever wrote about him was five years before that one, June 2013, about how many people could fit on Earth. 

It starts with a simple idea. First off, I recall hearing around 25 or 30 years ago that the entire population of the world would fit in Jacksonville, Florida, without resorting to high rise apartments: just the square feet of Jacksonville divided by the number of people. It would be highly impractical, each person only gets about a 2' by 2' square, but did you ever think the entire population of the world would fit in a single American city? 

That 2013 post has a graphic of how many states of the USA would be required to house the entire population of the world and goes one better by showing the number of states required for different population densities. It shows, for example, if we housed every single person on earth with the population density of Paris, they would fit into the area of three states: Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas.  If we used the population density of New York City, the entire population of Earth could fit into the area of Texas.  Likewise if we used the more generous suburban spread of Houston, the whole population of the planet would fit in the middle states of America. 

But none of that is the point of tonight's post. 

By the time 1970 rolled around and I was in high school, one of my favorite bands was the Moody Blues, a progressive rock group that had been creating some big hits over the last few years of the '60s and on through the '70s. In 1968, a couple of members of the band wrote a song called Legend of a Mind about another popular figure of the late '60s/early '70s, Timothy Leary. That song is probably remembered by most people who heard it at the time using the song's refrain, "Timothy Leary's dead". 

Legend of a Mind

The Moody Blues

Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in

Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in

He'll fly his astral plane
Takes you trips around the bay
Brings you back the same day
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in

Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in

He'll fly his astral plane
Takes you trips around the bay
Brings you back the same day
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary

Along the coast you'll hear them boast
About a light they say that shines so clear
So raise your glass, we'll drink a toast
To the little man who sells you thrills along the pier

He'll take you up, he'll bring you down
He'll plant your feet back firmly on the ground
He flies so high, he swoops so low
He knows exactly which way he's gonna go

Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary

He'll take you up, he'll bring you down
He'll plant your feet back on the ground
He flies so high, he swoops so low
Timothy Leary

He'll fly his astral plane
He'll take you trips around the bay
He'll bring you back the same day
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary

Yesterday morning as I was waking up and getting up to start the day, this music was playing in my mind. And then my brain did something I never expected. It turned "Timothy Leary's dead" into "Little Paul Ehrlich's dead" which keeps the meter of the song and the number of syllables the same.

Now I just need to come up with a couple of lines for the other places:

Little Paul Ehrlich's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in

Little Paul Ehrlich's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in

He'll fly his astral plane
Takes you trips around the bay
Brings you back the same day
Little Paul Ehrlich
Little Paul Ehrlich

Cover art for the Moody Blues "In Search of the Lost Chord" album, 1968. The source of the song Legend of a Mind. 

As Kermit said ...

... time's fun when you're having flies. I hope it's not a stretch to realize I'm playing with the words of the saying "time flies when you're having fun."

Six months ago, September 7, 2025, I posted that the count of the total (all time) views of the blog had surpassed 10 million views. 

That's 10 million views in 15-1/2 years, or around 645,000 views per year. Last night after I posted that summary of the Space Launch System's Exploration Upper Stage being cancelled, I noticed that the total had gone over 12 million views. That's 2 million more views in six months or 4 million more views per year, over six times more than that 645,000. 

Screen capture from Blogger's statistics display. If that number is tough to read due to its size or whatever, it's 12,014,668.  

While I'd like to claim that I really get four million views per year, that's on the order of 11,000 per day and what blogger reports as views per day doesn't tend to look like that. It just has lots of variation and isn't remotely constant. 

I really should add that I feel honored and humbled by all the nice things said in the comments going through my medical junk this week. Thanks to you all. 

Now that the big one is mostly over with

Yesterday's adventure with getting Radio Frequency cables shoved up my circulatory system into my heart didn't go quite as smoothly as hoped but was far better than possible "worst case" scenarios that played off and on in my mind.  

I had expected to come home last night but instead spent the night in the hospital due to some excessive bleeding in a couple of the areas that cables or IV fluids went through. Which turned in bruises as the day went by.

So with the combination of less good sleep due to being in a hospital and general raggedness from the collection of bumps and bruises, I'll take tonight off, too. This is just a little note to keep anyone interested up to date.  

 

 

It's likely to be a touch and go week

I've talked about this before, but I've had pretty frequent and essentially completely asymptomatic atrial fibrillation issue, first noticed last April. After a handful of additional tests through the year, I saw the cardiac electrophysiologist I was referred to at the start of last December. The Farapulse procedure he'll do to burn out areas of my heart that are causing the improper heartbeat will be this Wednesday, March 4th. I have a time to report for the procedure although the hospital considers that "preliminary and subject to change" until they call me Tuesday afternoon. 

I consider being able to sit here at the computer for blogging to be at risk for both Tuesday and Wednesday with Wednesday being "almost certainly" a day off. It's really a WAG. There's at least a dozen "what ifs" that can affect those so it doesn't make much sense to speculate. 

I also have to get some lab work done tomorrow but that should have no effect on things here. 

The part I know the least about is Wednesday after the procedure. The doctor's office said to plan to spend Wednesday night in the hospital but the handful of videos I've watched all pretty much say people go home afterwards. It's hard to know if they just want me prepared to spend the night if I have to and details like 20% go home the day of the procedure or if it's more like 80%. I guess I'll find out.  Back in '16 was the last time I spent the night in a hospital and while I went home the next afternoon, I was pretty well doped up for a couple of days after that. 

I don't know how restricted my movements and life will be as I heal.

Image from a Boston Scientific advertisement for the Farapulse system. This is the thing they're going to shove up a blood vessel from my thigh all the way up to my heart.

This may be my oddest post ever

But it's still better than last year's.

Last year's post was an awkward one about having forgotten it was this blog's 15th blogiversary, but it was almost a full month late. I posted it on March 15. This one isn't that late, only a little. My 16th anniversary was Saturday the 21st. 

My first post was February 21, 2010, which was a Sunday. Since dates move around, instead of celebrating on February 21, I've just used the last Sunday in February. That would have been yesterday, so I even missed the make believe anniversary. 

So let's do the obligatory thing;

Copyright Adobe Stock, as you can see...

As always, I thank you for stopping by. It's hard to know how many people stop by to read by Blogger's stats, part of that is real differences in people stopping by but my gut feel is that most of the "funny business" isn't real. Check out this plot of traffic for the last 90 days. 

Which is more realistic, the peaks up above 20,000 views per day or the ends mostly under 5000? I'll bet those days with over 10,000 views are some sort of either cyber attacks or something nefarious. At random times, I'll get comments that are obviously spam - not related to the post at all, links to other sites, usually outside the US. Stuff like that. I generally delete those but leave the "deleted" message in hopes that the ones doing it will realize the comment will only be there a few hours. 

---

So let me pass on something that I think many people will find interesting, especially hams and broader radio hobbyists. We have just gone through at least 1-1/2 days without one visible sunspot. I first saw this yesterday afternoon, and we don't know when or where the next spot will show up. This is the first time without a visible spot in four years. There's a hole in the sun's atmosphere and we've had minor (G1) geomagnetic storms off and on since yesterday, caused by the solar wind getting here both faster and stronger. 

Both of these things are evidence that cycle 25 is decreasing toward solar minimum. That's not to say we're virtually there, that's likely to be four years away (plus or minus something) just to say that it's almost certain that the "good days" of the cycle are going to be less frequent going forward 

Trying to keep up with the Weather Forecasts

The "bomb cyclone" that's affecting the SE USA is also hitting us here in Melbourne. It has been forecast to be cooling off by midday on the Weather Underground 10 day forecast around that long (10 days). It started out a bit higher in temperature and oscillated around that but has settled a bit lower over the last few days, as tomorrow morning's low dropped from 27 to 25.  I know that doesn't mean much without some of idea of what normal temperatures are like, so I copied some data from a .pdf handout that the National Weather Service has on their local website. 

Note this is a couple of years old and you can see nothing more recent than 2021 in the week I clipped out. You'll note the record lows for the 1^st and 2^nd are 32 and 33 respectively. Tomorrow's forecast of 25 is far below the record and Monday's low is forecast to be 28, compared to the record of 33. The lowest temperature ever recorded in a February isn't visible here: it's 27 on February 26, 1967. We look to break that record as well tomorrow, moving the coldest ever in February to the 1^st.

 The Weather Underground Forecast just changed tonight's forecast to this:

 

There have been consistent forecasts for a small chance of snow flurries primarily on the Gulf Coast north of the Tampa Bay area, as well as farther north on the East coast. This is the first mention I've seen of snow in this area. 

As someone said, "Global warming... Is there nothing it can't do?" Dang... sarcasm again...

---

For those wondering, the SLS/Artemis Wet Dress Rehearsal started earlier at 8:00 PM EST or 0100 UTC.

Ahead of the first launch window for Artemis 2, which runs from Feb. 8 to Feb. 11, NASA will complete a mission countdown simulation to power on and fuel the Space Launch System rocket. Operators are expected to be called to stations about 49 hours ahead of a simulated T-0, currently scheduled for Monday, at 9 p.m. EST (0200 GMT, Feb. 3).

"I've had worse"

Or how to tell you've had a bad weekend without going into more details. 

I'm sure most people are saying something along the lines of "what??" Let me back up a bit and start over. 

Something I talk regularly about is my ham radio hobby, and the annual VHF contests I play in a few times a year. There are several of these contests over the course of the year, where the goal is to exchange a piece of information, sometimes two small pieces, and call signs, of course. Well, the real goal depends on why you're playing in the contest. If you're trying to win the contest, it's different than if you're trying to contact places you've never confirmed contact with. 

While there are more than these three, the USA's national ham radio organization, the American Radio Relay League, puts on three contests per year, June, September and January - around the second weekend of the month. Without a doubt, I consider the June contest the best of the year; my results have always been worse than June's in the other two. The reason June is better is purely that the radio propagation is regularly among the best of the year. Another group/company - ISTRC it's CQ Magazine - puts on a July contest and that one is also good. 

Long introduction out of the way, the title is my summary of the contest so far. "I've had worse." At 2PM Eastern (1900 UTC), when the contest started, the band was better than usual, with stations in New England coming in strong and steady. As is often the case, the openings weren't to all of New England, but to a small stripe of the grid squares. I clipped this image of the grid squares in the area from a US Map that Icom America gives away at hamfests. 

The exact spots I was hearing varied a bit. Most often I heard the stripe of FN31 and FN41 north to FN35/FN46. At other times I heard FN00 and 01 in western Pennsylvania, and FN13 quite often. In my quest to contact every grid square in the continental US, the four I'm really hoping for in FN are 57 and 65 to 67.

In and out of the shack for a while (making a jar of Mayonnaise to turn into Caesar salad dressing) and a few other things didn't change the overall picture of being open to a few of these grid squares, the squares I could hear just moved down into the SE states, until this evening when the only grids I heard were peninsular Florida. EL96, 97, 98, 99, EL 87, 88, 89, and EM 00, which is as far into the NE of Florida as we can get, and includes some of SE Georgia. 

The contest continues until tomorrow night at 0359Z (which is actually early Monday morning UTC, not Sunday night). That's 10:59 PM Eastern time. I'll keep the station on and keep trying "asbestos" possible.

In memory of Scott Adams

A departure from the normal here due to Scott Adams' passing away sometime between Monday night and this morning. I've known since it became public that he had aggressive stage 4 prostate cancer and that it looked like he wasn't going to make it to the end of 2025. It looks like he got a longer extension than many. Some of that was undoubtedly personal; perhaps genetics, perhaps attitudes and we heard several times in his last year that he was familiar enough with and to people in high places that could help. 

Like most, I got to know Scott Adams through Dilbert when the comic first started making papers and magazines. We have some Dilbert cartoon collections around the house but I'm not sure about his "real" books. By the time the TV series came out in 1999, I was a regular who watched every episode.  This clip is one of my all time favorites from Dilbert's world.  

Over the years, I've run many Dilbert cartoons.

I posted this on September 8, 2015.

This one was November 25, 2012.

This may be the oldest one I have. It says: Dilbert for September 30, 1995. Amazingly, I remembered it almost word-for-word.

Of course, this next one spoke to me. Alright, they all did, but this one in a different sense. 

This one affected me for life:

Yes, I have bike shorts and always refer to them as my dorky pants. I used to have a printed version of this cartoon on my office wall. 

Related to companies that patent minor things but sue any company that gets close to their turf.

When talk turned to grade inflation in college, this one had to show up:

I believe that's every Dilbert cartoon I've ever run, and it's a bit of guaranteed outcome that when I'm looking for some humorous thing to include, I'll go to cartoons I remember, but it's going to be tough for a while.  I can't claim to have any tremendous insights into Scott as a person. His last interviews bring some things I can relate to, along with things we'll all face someday.  One of my first quotes from Scott was in a post in the fourth month of the blog: 

Like Scott Adams says on risk vs reward:

For a manager: Success: you get tons of money. Fail: someone under you gets laid off.

For an engineer: Success: you get a handsome certificate, suitable for framing. Fail: think Space Shuttle Challenger, Columbia, Hyatt Regency walkway. Money lost, possibly large numbers of people die.

Perhaps the most recent risk/reward quote of his will live much longer. From his final post to X about becoming Christian:

"I'm not a believer but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So here I go," according to the statement by Adams.

"I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven."

So long, Scott. I hope we meet on the other side some day.

A Big Anniversay Coming

This post is going to be ham radio heavy, especially old ham radio. If you don't care about that, go check out the blogs on the right side of the page, and check back tomorrow to see if I could find any space-related news. 

Back in December, I noted that it was my 10th year of retirement, December 18th to pin it down.  Ten years of retirement is a good milestone, but coming up in early February is bigger to me.

February will mark my 50th anniversary of getting my first ham radio license. 

Do I mark the day I got the license and made my first radio contact? Do I mark when the license was issued, or whom I had the first contact with?  I know none of those details, and I've torn apart the shack trying to find either my old license, or a logbook. I would have sworn I had both of those, but I sure can't find either. 

What I remember first about that beginning is that my first week on the air was during an annual, week-long contest that the American Radio Relay League used to put on specifically for Novice License holders, called the Novice Roundup. This guy says that was the week of February 7th to the 15th. While I'm not sure when my first contact was, I do remember that my first contact was a station not far from where I'm living now.  I also vividly remember working California for the first time during that Novice Roundup. When you have zero experience with radio, working the other side of the country is exciting! All new contacts with a new place are exciting. 

The only thing I could find that I think is useful was in a QSL card box that was full of cards from my early days in radio. I think that card was from my first QSO. It says the date and time was February 9th at 4:15 PM, on 3.720 MHz - allocated to Novice licensees in those days. February 9th was a Monday, and the typical way that contests are timed is to start at midnight (UTC), so 0000 UTC on February 7th would have been in the evening of Friday February 6th in EST (I lived in Ft. Lauderdale, FL at the time), and that means the license would have arrived in the mail, no later than that Monday, although it's best to think it might have come a day or more before that first contact. 

I don't remember enough about how well the station was checked out and "ready to go" for the contest to decide if waiting until Monday was necessary. I don't remember much about what I was doing all day in February 50 years ago, but I think I was in one of the junior colleges nearby. I would have gotten home, made sure the station was OK and tried to make some contacts. 

The station itself was kind of "high end entry level" station: a Heathkit HW-16 transceiver and HG-10B VFO - those weren't available to novices until about a year before then. Those two are considered such a classic pair that there are hams using them today. I went to this guy's site, K3MSB.com, to copy his station picture because it looked better than the others that came up.

Image credit to K3MSB, Mark Bell.

Yes, I built both of those kits, put up the antennas with some help to tune them for use, and did everything to get a signal on the air. 

I can imagine someone saying, "why today?" Why talk about an anniversary of something that happened in early February of 1976 short of 50 years ago? Mostly, to be honest, because I've been trying to narrow things down better, about a path and project that took up much more time than just a day in February. I took the exam in December of '75, and started working toward that in the summer of '75. The FCC probably took 6 weeks to process the papers and send me the license.  Somewhere in there, I became a ham in everyone's eyes. 

Happy New Year 2026!

New Year's Eve is upon us, and I just want to wish all of you a happy New Year.  By this time of the year, pretty much every year, I'm sick of the "year in review" shows on TV, so I'll just post a little about my year in review.  It's customary to start the New Year with a reference to the Roman god Janus - his name is where January gets its name - who could look both backward and forward at the same time, so we can do the same thing.

It seems to be a pattern of the last several years that a major part of the year revolves around some medical crap. Without a doubt the worst of 2025 was March 1st, when I woke to my little buddy Mojo, our old man cat, passed away in my arms. To be honest, I’m not completely over that. I don’t see him in his favorite places around the house like I did at first, but certain pictures or tunes still choke me up. We brought another cat into our lives in July, Independence Day weekend, but she’s not a replacement, she’s a completely different “personality.”

My semi-annual visit to my GP in February was boringly normal, but April’s annual visit to the cardiologist was the start of an “adventure” (only slightly sarcastic) that still hasn’t played out fully. I’ve mentioned this many times, but a short summary is that on my birthday in 2013 I started having weird heartbeat sensations that ended in being told I had various arrhythmias including afib, PVCs, PACs and more. At this April's visit, the technician doing an echocardiogram asked it I ever had trouble with my afib and I told her I don’t know that I ever had it besides that one time 12 years ago. She replied, “you’re having it now.”

After several visits with my “regular” cardiologist, that vocal exchange happened with other people. My cardiologist referred me to a cardiac electrophysiologist and the short summary is that I’m currently heading toward a procedure with him to burn out areas of my heart that are causing the improper heartbeat. I don’t have a date assigned, yet. The ablation uses a radio frequency source called a Farapulse to do the burning, which seems appropriate for a guy who designed radio receivers and transmitters.

The big thing of the year was I finally got my umbilical (belly button area) hernia repaired on June 12th. It was all pretty much by the book until about one week post surgery. Still living with the “don’t lift anything heavier than a coffee mug” I stretched out in bed to take a nap and I woke up, noticed my abdomen was covered in an itchy rash. I treated it with benadryl or calamine/benadryl mix and it would knock out the itch for a few hours. I was able to bump up my appointment with the Physician’s Assistant for the post-surgery checkup, and he just confirmed what I was doing. He said that I had never said I have allergic reactions to things they used, and I pointed out that never having had one doesn’t mean I ever had whatever it was they used that gave me the rash. Surprising to me is that one of the old suture incisions still gets itchy once or twice a week. Cortisone or those other things still work.

After a few months post-surgery, I started pushing toward doing core strengthening mostly with sit-ups. I’ve gotten back to doing a hundred situps on weightlifting days so like a couple of times/week. For a variety of reasons mostly related to the need for the ablation, I’ve gone from riding the bike three days/week to walking, which is unrealistically easy.

As for looking toward the future, my crystal ball is cloudy. I'm a "real money" guy and the gyrations of the central bankers have had me expecting economic collapse Real Soon Now for about 20 years - certainly before the '08 collapse. I had seen talk of the subprime crisis developing in '06, before it started and led to the '08 collapse. I've written so many times about economic collapse that haven't come true that I've stopped believing in myself - or my ability to predict it. I've also written about the collapse of technological civilization, the "new dark ages" so many times that the same conclusion happened. I'm just not going to put out wrong predictions again. I'll do a post on the collapse when it happens.

A couple of years ago, I thought (and still think) I could see the Crusades 2 point 0 approaching with Islamists openly attacking other countries. When we see the DEI mind virus pushing into STEM colleges and programs, when competence, hard work, and attention to detail are derided as "white supremacy" or whatever, will you ever feel safe crossing a bridge or riding a commercial jet? So few people actually know how to design the critical parts in the essential electronics we take for granted, if the semiconductor fab plants were suddenly gone - intentionally or by some natural disaster - could they be recreated?

I think it's going to happen, I just don't know when.

On the stuff we watch the closest here: space exploration, I expected that Starship would have reached orbit two years ago or maybe more. I remember asking if something as ambitious as Starship could reach orbit in fewer flights than the vastly simpler Falcon 1. On the other hand, they know vastly more than they did about making orbital spacecraft back then, but something as ambitious as Starship has never flown. That said, I think they make orbit this year. As for other predictions, Rocket Lab's Neutron will fly, and there's a rumor going around that Rocket Lab is going to buy the leftover-hulk of ULA.

Let me leave it there, along with a wish for a very Happy New Year to everyone who stops to read here. May it be healthy and fun for all.