Flo!

We're between the Friday AM and Saturday AM dots.

That's far enough inland that the winds should be only 40 - 70mph or so (!) when the storm gets to us Friday morning. But the local police department put up a map predicting that we're going to get "historic" rain totals because it's going to slow down and drag over us for a day or so. I'll get to see if the new French drains we just had put in are going to work or not.

The whole South Carolina coast just got put on evacuation notice.

Wilmington NC area schools are already closed for the week. Our friends there are coming up to this area to ride it out.

Friday is our 22nd wedding anniversary. I have a special bottle of wine for us to drink in the dark. I think we'll probably have to pass on the dinner reservations we made for Saturday, too.

Who among us does not wish the briny snotty flavor of clams was available in a lickable candy stick?

Two years ago I wrote this post:

Someone at the Washington Post woke up sober.

The Hillary Clinton email story is out of control

Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal. There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.

Yeah. Imagine that.

...according to The Guardian.

Cameras used to be their own devices with lenses and film and trips to the drug store to get the pictures developed. Then, they disappeared into phones, tablets, laptops, and video game consoles. Now, it appears that cameras could someday become as inconspicuous as a pane of glass.

According to new research, a photodetector pressed up against the edge of a window can detect the reflections that bounce around inside the glass—like light signals traversing a fiber optic cable. And some clever processing of those tiny trickles of detected light enables the pane of glass to act like a giant camera lens.

The resulting grainy images (think of pixelated, somewhat distorted and lower-resolution cousins to shots taken by first-generation smartphones) won’t compete anytime soon with conventional cameras for picture quality. But for the purposes of many computer vision programs, a window pane or a piece of car windshield may provide all the resolution that an image processing algorithm or neural network might need.

Hospital uses shady billing scheme to demand $109,000 from a heart attack patient.

NPR runs story about it Monday AM.

Et voila!

UPDATE: Monday, shortly after publication and broadcast of this story by Kaiser Health News and NPR, St. David’s said it was now willing to accept $782.29 to resolve the $108,951 balance because Drew Calver qualifies for its “financial assistance discount.”

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Tuesday that President Donald Trump is considering new regulations on Google's search engine to address his concern that it turns up too many stories that are critical of him.

How about now? Now can we impeach this guy and move on?

If not impeachment, what about a 25th Amendment (sec 4) remedy?

Original story, posted Friday, July 27, 2018: On the evening of Thursday, July 26, 2018, an Ocracoke resident shared a photo on Facebook. It was of a “Trump 2020” flag flying aboard the M/V Frisco, a ferry that runs between Ocracoke and Hatteras.
Mayhem ensued. Politics can be ugly.

The photo made the rounds on Facebook and was shared to the NCDOT Ferry Division's Facebook page. I know I wasn't the only one, but in the interest of full disclosure, it's important to note that I brought the photo to the attention of Jed Dixon, deputy director of the NCDOT Ferry Division.

...

Captain and crew were suspended for seven days without pay.

This showed up in my FB feed today. And in the comments was this from a friend of a friend:

XXX XXXXX If you are interested in knowing WHY this happened on July 26....here you go: My family and I (group of 13) are on our way to take the ferry....one employee hears us speaking French and makes an unacceptable comment to the following vehicule referring about us as M**** F****’s....we do speak both languages and found this to be completely inappropriate and unacceptable....we reported the incident to the manager. The employee was visibly angered about the reporting....the flag flying was done later that day....intolerance does not have a place in 2018...food for thought....

As courts consider whether an Austin man can legally publish gun blueprints online for people to print their own guns at home, Michael Lynn says many plans are already out there, including a basic pistol called the Liberator, which he printed.

...

It took 36-hours and $10 worth of plastic to print 13 pieces that he assembled into the pistol. That convenience is what worries critics. But the quality of fully printed plastic firearms is another issue.

“People have test fired this gun as we’re about to and it blows up on the very first bullet that they put through it. A lot of people are holding this in their hand and that’s like holding an M80 [firecracker]. It’s just very dangerous,” he added.

We took him to Eagle Gun Range in Farmer’s Branch where owner David Prince wanted to see this printed plastic pistol for himself and agreed to let Michael test fire it. He added a one-inch roofing nail as the firing pin and then inserted a single .380-caliber bullet into the barrel.

On the range, we set up several cameras to see what would happen as Prince put that pistol in a vise and tied a string around the trigger to pull it from a distance.

After moving everyone back for safety, Prince pulled the string to fire the pistol and the gun blew itself apart. “First reaction? Wow. Pretty cool,” Prince said.

In slow-motion, the plastic pistol exploded in every direction. “I’m glad we used a string,” Prince said smiling.

Perhaps plastic pistols are a self-solving problem.