Category: Current Events

Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness, Intelligence and Life

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Roger Penrose is a Nobel prize winning mathematical physicist whose most important contribution was work on black holes in relation to the theory of general relativity.  But he’s getting old and so he decided to think about the nature of consciousness and he has come to the conclusion that the phenomenon of human consciousness is caused by quantum effects generated in the cells of the human brain.

Wow!

 

 

If you watch the video, you’ll get a little information how the flow of chemicals in the microtubules or even the shaping of the atoms in the tubulin that makes up the tubules might be responsible for the quantum effects that provide the indeterminacy necessary to make human brain more than just a computer running a program.  Penrose equates that quantum indeterminacy with the basis of human consciousness.

Wow!

Okay, maybe that’s an interesting idea.  Is it true?  Damned if I know.

But I do like the fact that it gives us a way of saying that computers won’t have consciousness.  Lots of people think that if we just make a computer big enough, then it will suddenly develop consciousness because humans have consciousness and we have the best brains in the biological hierarchy.

Of course maybe if we can build indeterminacy into computers maybe they’ll become conscious.  Will that happen when the size of the circuits on the chips become so small that the actual paths that the electrons take become indeterminate?  I guess that’s possible.  We can make the AI as flawed as we ourselves are.  Maybe we’ll be able to make them neurotic or bi-polar or even psychotic if we want.  That’s kind of what happened to HAL 9000.  He became psychotic because he was forced to lie about the mission that was such an important part of his self-image.

And maybe that’s possible.  But somehow I don’t think complexity makes consciousness.  We “know” we have consciousness.  But is that because we have giant brains?  Dogs don’t have giant brains but try to convince any dog owner that his pet isn’t conscious.  He’ll laugh you out of the room.  I don’t think consciousness is a synonym for intelligence.  I think consciousness is a synonym for life.  We’re conscious.  Dogs are conscious.  Even mice are conscious.  Are mosquitoes conscious?  How about protozoans.  What about our individual cells?

I’m guessing the all are.  Obviously, a rotifer isn’t spinning around a pond saying, “I rotifer, therefore I am.”  But I think he knows he’s there in some sense.  Does that mean he has indeterminate microtubules providing him with agency?  Well, maybe it has nothing to do with quantum effects but for whatever reason, In some minimal sense, I think the answer is yes!  Consciousness equals life.

Now don’t ask me if viruses have consciousness.  I’m not going to bring this down to individual DNA and RNA molecules.  That would make my head hurt.  But I believe that life is life and it is all of a piece.  And whatever we have that is called consciousness is only the most exquisite version of what every other creature has writ small.

Whether God created quantum mechanics to allow us to have agency or whether the actual mechanism of our souls is completely impossible to reverse engineer by any human intelligence is unknown and probably unknowable.  What has already become apparent over the course of the last four hundred years of scientific investigation is that the more we learn the more we learn that we know absolutely nothing.

Isaac Newton “knew” what kept the Moon in orbit and how to calculate the orbits of the planets to whatever accuracy he needed.  He had discovered God’s textbook for his creation.

James Clarke Maxwell knew what the equations were that governed electromagnetism and ushered in the modern age of electric power.

Albert Einstein decoded time-space and “corrected” Newton’s laws.

But a generation later, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle forever locked the door on our knowledge of the quantum world.  We invented quarks and gluons and muons and who knows what else.  But every time we learn something new we find out that ten other things are just illusions.  Dark matter and dark energy and string theory and who knows what else crowd around the dark corners of the forefront of our knowledge and we still know less than nothing about ourselves and why we’re here.

Well, I’m okay with that.  Just as long as we’re not kidding ourselves about where we stand with respect to our dogs.  They’re our friends meant to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously.

One of the Ways Drones Have Changed the Battlefield

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FPV (first person view) drones have become ubiquitous over the battlefields of Ukraine.  And they’ve changed the way war is fought there.  These cheap and numerous devices can destroy a main battle tank or drop a munition in a trench without any reliable way of preventing these attacks.

So what’s a tank commander to do?  Well, so far the answer is to cover your tank with sheet metal and chicken cages (see photo below).

These ad hoc modifications sort of remind me of what was done to the Striker vehicles with wire additions used to catch RPG’s before they reached the armor.  The other change in tactics I’ve heard about is outrunning the drones.  Now we have infantrymen riding motorcycles and even golf carts in order to avoid the drones while crossing open fields.  So speed trumps armor for protection for now.

At a higher level what we are seeing is the beginning of automated weapon systems fighting each other on the battle field.  As soon as we have drones attacking drones we have to wonder where the humble foot soldier stands in this rapidly escalating clutter of deadly devices.

Update:

War Pig:

Infantry will be necessary for the foreseeable future. Urban fighting is still beyond drones. Furthermore, you do not own or control territory unless you have a soldier standing on it with a rifle and fixed bayonet.

Drones are a fine tool for some fighting and reconnaissance. They make good suicide weapons and you save casualties by using them. Our 6th generation fighters will have in-cockpit pilots as an option, not standard. But because of the reasons you stated about quantum mechanics and the human mind, drones/robots will not replace infantry/special ops/guerrillas. Humans can be darned unpredictable. In fact we can be crazier than a squirrel on methamphetamine. One way Bobby Fisher beat the supercomputer at chess was to make wildly unorthodox and apparently random moves. Confused the computer and he won.

Having worked on the ground where making life miserable for the other side by misdirection, dirty tricks and random acts of sabotage, I can say that the more random you go, the more the other side tries to analyze your acts and tactics until it takes up more and more of his resources and drives him to distraction. If humans have problems with that, given we’ve had a couple million years to improve our internal programming; what chance does an inflexible machine have?

Tales from the Van – Part 1 – The Sisterhood

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Many years ago, I commuted into Boston for work.  And because at the time there was no commuter rail from where I lived, I took a van in.  We all paid a fee and some of us drove the van on occasion and on those days, we’d get a day knocked off our fee for the next month.  And I’ll have to say that we had a very “diverse” cast of characters.  And I mean that by every definition of the word.  Not only racially, ethnically, careerwise and socio-economically but also philosophically and by personality type.  We were a motley crew.  We even had a guy who worked for one of the intelligence agencies (or so he said).  There were a few people who couldn’t stand each other and there were some very close friends.

But even though most of us didn’t know each other “in the real world,” for an hour in the morning and the afternoon we spent our time talking about the events of the day and the latest sit-com and our work day and our home lives and anything else to pass the time.  And it’s a funny thing but to the people on the van what we thought about the world was a pretty important part of our day.  We would argue politics and social trends.  And once in a while, the guys would even get together for a social gathering.   One time I had the boys over for a poker game and sandwiches.  It was a great success, meaning no one lost too much and everyone ate too much and drank way too much beer.  And this cemented the male camaraderie of the van immensely.  Once you’ve bluffed yourself to a pot with a broken straight it’s almost like you’re boyhood chums.

There was a feminist contingent on the van too and they would provide a united front when explaining why men were the cause of all the problems in the world.  That is until they needed help with a flat tire or an angry motorist on the road.  I remember a time when I was riding shotgun while one of the most strident feminists was driving the van through Boston street-traffic.  It was an awful ride.  We were in a bumper-to-bumper jam and she had lost all patience and was laying on the horn every other minute or so.  Finally, the guy in front of us in a brand-new sports car, throws his car into park, jumps out of his car.  He’s about six foot five and comes running over and bangs on her window with his fist.

Well, this champion of female equality, jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran to the back of the van like a shot.  Which I found hilarious.  Until I realized she had left the van in gear.  So of course we rolled into the back of the sports car.  Now I had to climb over the hump and get into the driver’s seat.  The engine had stalled out and I had to nurse it back to life and then throw it into reverse to separate us from the sports car.  All the while the irate driver is hopping up and down screaming over us hitting his car.  I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I shrugged my shoulder and pointed out to him that traffic was moving and tried not to laugh.  After he convinced himself that his bumper wasn’t much the worse for the bump and realized that if he wanted to make an accident report of it, he’d have to tell a traffic cop that he had been threatening a woman driver for being a woman driver he slunk back to his car and we proceeded.

But that little demonstration had us laughing at the sisterhood for a good long time about having a concrete answer as to, “What good are men?”  But pretty soon the sisterhood had convinced themselves again that women were the only intelligent life in the universe.

There was another occasion when the gals were plotting their takeover of the world.  And they had managed to set off one of the less easy-going guys with their claim that a pack of five women could kill any man in a fight.  They badgered him for a good long time and they could see this talk got under his skin so they did it all the more.  They demanded that he tell them how he could possibly hope to fight against five opponents.  After all, they said, if all of them constantly pummeled him from all sides they’d eventually injure him enough to overwhelm him.

So finally, he said, the tactic he would use would be to get a strong hold on one woman and bash her head into the ground and then do the same to each of them consecutively.  He believed this would have a twofold advantage.  Firstly, finishing off one opponent completely would significantly improve his position in the fight.  But more importantly, he believed that psychologically women would be unlikely to continue attacking a man that had just bashed a woman’s head in.

His logic seemed to have been persuasive.  The gals gave up that thought experiment completely and the rest of the ride was very quiet.  After that they didn’t bother him about the war of the sexes, so to speak.  I think they were kind of scared of him.  What he said must have struck them as accurate.

But by the next day we had some new thing to argue about.  I think it was the Oscars.  The girls had a very long talk about that with very little help from us.  But at least things were back to normal.

Week Two of the Campus Hunger Strike Begins – Oh the Humanity

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If you pay attention to the young woman holding the speaker in front of the speaker you will notice that it will take at least a couple of months of fasting before she will be able to fit in her jeans without the use of a pry bar or the application of vaseline as a lubricant.

When we reach week ten I’ll be interested to see if any of the “hunger” strikers have lost any weight at all.

Princeton.  Must be great to be able to horse around on an Ivy League campus playing Che Guevera and still have Mom and Dad foot the bill.  And even better to then get a job at an Ivy League school or ABC News because of your connections.  Why didn’t I do that?  Oh, yeah.  Because I don’t have any connections.

 

 

Made in the USA

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I remember when I was young, I got into a lot of discussions with family members who were union guys.  Cops and firemen and iron workers and other trades.  And they always said that the Republicans were bad for America because they were on the side of big business.  Now this was while the Big Three automakers were taking it on the chin from Toyota and Honda and I was claiming that the UAW was the problem.  I said the union workers were getting paid three times what auto workers made in Japan and because of that Ford couldn’t sell cars in America at a profit.

And maybe I was right about that.  At least maybe partially.  Maybe partially the Ford and GM engineers weren’t as good at making cars as their Japanese colleagues.  But whatever the case, American autoworkers priced themselves right out of a lucrative industry and Toyota ate Detroit’s lunch.

I guess American industry’s takeaway from this lesson was if you can’t beat’em, join’em.  And so, they decided not only to get rid of all those pesky union workers in America but also the engineers, the management and even the plant too and just have everything made in East Asia.  Whether it’s China or Vietnam or Thailand, the correct play was to make it over there at a fraction of the manufacturing cost via third world labor rates.  Well, you can’t say that our business leaders aren’t innovative.

Forty years of watching American corporate policy has cured me of cheering for the captains and the kings of industry.  I can see now that coordination between government, industry and labor is the correct way to maintain a healthy balance that benefits consumers, workers and capital.  In the post World War II era I think Japan is the model that I would point to as a workable model.  Of course, American government, culture and business practices differ substantially from Japan but I think that the American government’s handling of industrial policy has been demonstratively deficient in providing the American workers with gainful employment and has also failed to maintain a satisfactory minimum base of manufacturing capacity to assure independence in the case hostile governments withholding commerce in strategic materials.

So, over the course of these many years I have had a chance to reconsider my stand on labor/management relations.  What I’ve decided is that the government’s role is critical.  There must be balance that involves preventing a monopoly from existing on either the business or the labor side.  Competition should exist both between individual corporations and individual unions.  A union monopoly is just as detrimental to business as a corporate monopoly is to consumer concerns.  And one other union problem I see is that government workers shouldn’t be unionized at all.

Another government concern is that manufacturers of products required for national defense and other critical applications should be made domestically.  All of this requires minds that can think strategically and without prejudice for either side of the labor/management divide.  But we have nothing like that going on in Washington.

When I look at the situation as it currently stands for such critical manufacturing as high-end computer microprocessors and battle field munitions and our current dependence on foreign manufacturers, it makes me wonder if our political leaders are idiots or traitors.  We have allowed most of our industrial manufacturing capacity to be disassembled and sent offshore to China.  This disregard for the lack of gainful employment of their countrymen has to be discouraged in the only way these corporations understand; their bottom line.  It must be legislated that if their products are built by foreign workers then they will be tariffed and taxed the same as any foreign products brought into this country.

So, forty some-odd years later here I am saying where’s the “Made in USA” label on that MAGA hat?

Overhead

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I was reading an article about how at one particular college, from 1990 to 2022 the number of tenured faculty decreased.  But during that same period the administrative staff increased 500%.  So, let’s say there were a thousand administrators at the college in 1990.  That would mean that there were six thousand in 2022.  Think about that.  They must have had to build out the campus enormously just to provide desk space for that many new people.  And try to imagine how these non-teaching employees made learning better at this college.

Obviously, this is absurd.  During those thirty-two years automation has made all of these “administrators” worse than useless.  Whate they really are is a drain on society.  All they do is attach more mouths to the government trough that pays for all those enormous loans that colleges manufacture as their primary product.  So, most of the increase in college costs over the last thirty years has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of educating college students.  Certainly since 2020 a new component of this scam is the DEI infrastructure.  Whole wings of college buildings must be crammed with bureaucratic activists writing propaganda papers and issuing edicts to force ever more oppressive requirements on students and teachers to pay homage to the holy trinity of diversity, equity and inclusion.

What is wrong with this picture?

Well, it’s two-fold.  Most importantly, it’s eveil.  It’s harmful, toxic and stupid.  We’re damaging the students who are being propagandized with this stuff and we’re warping society with these lies.

But in the second place, we can’t afford this waste.  America is the most affluent society that has ever existed on the face of the Earth.  But we’ve drained the well dry.  Everywhere you look people are drowning in debt and can’t pay their bills.  And worst of all are all the college students and graduates staring at six figure student loan debt.  And a lot of them can’t find any jobs better than Starbuck’s barista and will have to move back into mom’s basement because rent just doubled.

And colleges aren’t the only bureaucracies staggering under the weight of administration inflation.  Federal, state, municipal and local bureaucracies are full of libraries, schools and other offices that have grown their own bureaucracies where expansion is a constant state and no one ever gets laid off.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden have grown the bureaucracies with single-minded intent.  Every one of those administrators or whatever they call these civil servants vote Democrat, every time they can.  It’s not even a question.

Every red state governor should make it his highest priority to eliminate all of the DEI and other leftist headcount in all government agencies and especially in state colleges.  But if Trump gets back in the White House his first priority should be to drain the swamp.  And whereas the most strategic departments to empty out must be the Justice Department, FBI and CIA, nevertheless, right afterwards it behooves him to make a general purge of all the agencies that perform affirmative action and all the other DEI related damage.  And then if I were he, I’d write executive orders that would mandate colleges to bring their finances in line with a more reasonable overhead.  No more $50,000 or $100,000 a year tuition bills.  Tell them the government can only afford $10,000 a year.  I’ll bet there’ll be a whole lot of Associate Directors of DEI slinging coffee at Starbuck’s that next year.

So that’s my idea.

What If?

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I was following some of the Pro-Hamas protests.  There is a “hunger strike” going on at Princeton.  One of the goofy kids there was a scrawny girl who said she has been on the hunger strike for almost one hundred and five hours.  She hasn’t had any solid food in all that time.  So, I guess she’s living on Gatorade and orange juice.  And I thought, “Well, she’s gonna lose some of those extra pounds she’s been trying to lose for the beach season.  That’s a plus.  And then they started telling us of all the innocent people in Gaza; women and children that were starving and being killed by bullets and bombs.

And that’s true.  While the IDF and Hamas shoot it out, the human shields that Hamas has emplaced will be killed.  Now that’s a horrible thing.  But when Hamas went on a rampage back in October, they were killing men, women and children.  And they weren’t trying to shoot IDF soldiers hiding behind these people.  They searched them out in civilian towns and murdered them face to face.  They killed parents in front of their children.  The murdered infants and then cut their heads off.  They raped women and then killed them for good measure.  Then they took some of these victims back to Gaza to add to their stock of human shields.

So, if the Israelis want to prevent the next massacre how do they do that without capturing or killing Hamas?  And if Hamas, as a policy, hides in the mass of Gazans how do you fight them without killing those they hide behind?  When we burned down Dresden and Hiroshima, did we separate out the women and children?  No.  Shouldn’t the Hamas fighters confront the IDF face to face, man to man?  Are they cowards?  And shouldn’t the “innocent” Palestinians sneak away from Hamas and leave them to their fate?

Most of these questions have no good answers.  War is horrific even when it is only soldiers involved.  What can you say about women and children dying in war?  There are no words.  But what do you do with an enemy that murders your women and children as a policy.  That makes the need to destroy this enemy an existential imperative that overrides most of the moral sanctions against extreme actions.

I wish there were a magic strategy that could be used against Hamas without harming a single Palestinian civilian.  If there were one, I’ll bet the IDF would be using it right now.  But there isn’t.

You know, I wonder what answer I’d get if I asked one of the “starving” hunger strikers a hypothetical.  Now, under the strain of extreme starvation maybe she couldn’t muster the clarity of thought to answer me but I’d ask, “What if you lived in a neighborhood and you had a family living next door that really hated your family?  They were poor and dysfunctional and hated you because you were rich and happy.  And let’s say that several times the police were forced to come and arrest members of this family for attacking one of your siblings.  And let’s say that one day the worst members of this family went crazy and broke into your house and killed your parents and raped your sister and cut your baby brother’s head off and kidnapped you little sister and took her back with them to their house.  And you called the police and told them what had happened and they went to the house where the killers were but they came back later and said that they couldn’t do anything because there were small children in the other house including your sister so it was too dangerous to attack them.  So, they were just going to issue a warning to the killers not to do it again.”

How would that be?  Would that make everything all right?

The Story Isn’t Over Yet

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Every day I hear about all the latest nonsense out of Washington, New York and Hollywood and think, “How will we ever fix all this stuff?”  And I read the price on the gas pump and listen to Camera Girl’s lament over the cost of chicken or vegetables or pumpernickel bagels and I think, “How the hell are we supposed to keep up with this inflation?”

Then I think, “But the story’s not over yet.”  I remember when I was just twenty-three in 1980 and Camera Girl and I were living in our first apartment.  We were poor as church mice and Jimmy Carter had managed to get mortgages up to 18% and inflation was at 13% and even the incredibly cheap company that I was working for in my first job gave us a once in a lifetime bonus just to keep us all from starving to death.  And back then plenty of people were saying that the good days for America were over and we had to accept that prosperity was over.  And I thought, “How are going to do this?”

But people rejected that defeatism and when Reagan took over things got better; eventually, a lot better.  And slowly over time we got a few breaks and we managed to live happily ever after (we hope!)  And so, there were kids and grandkids and maybe I’m starting to hear the first signs that another generation will be in the offing.  And what else is there to hope for anyway?

Sure, Joe Biden has decided to follow the Barack Obama playbook and destroy America.  I think they may have overplayed their hand.  They have done such a truly awful job of running the country that even their supposedly bought and paid for constituencies are screaming over the results.  It seems to me that it’s only a matter of time before most everyone is going to demand someone competent put a stop to the destruction and drastically change course.

And until that time, I think it’s my job to lend whatever and however much support I can to those currently paying the bills for those who can’t yet.  And that most definitely includes moral support.  We’re all liable to shout about the doom and gloom that we see all around us.  Well, sure.  That’s what I do every day.  But remember that the young have to keep going after we’re gone, so make sure that the things you say are actionable in a positive way.  Saying it’s all over or things will never be as good as they were is just defeatism.  We don’t know that.  Lots of people have smartened up in the last ten years and a lot of the old traps that we fell in before won’t work anymore.  The days of the neo-cons sounding the charge for us to sign up for the next forever war are over for most of us.

There are signs here and there that leaders are beginning to provide some hope for Americans in several areas of the country.  If any of them are at all smart they’ll begin to coordinate their actions and try to build up a movement.  That’s what we should see beginning to happen and in very small ways I think I can see some of that happening.

So, I’m not asking for unbridled exuberance over the immediate future.  We are sunk in a morass of debt and hog tied by administrative policy that strips us of our constitutional rights but I don’t believe that the situation is hopeless.  The story isn’t over yet.  Be part of the solution.  Try to keep that in mind.

The Golden Mean

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Today I was thinking about normalcy.  I looked through my archives and I have at least six posts that have the word “normal” in their titles.  So I read through some of them.  One of them was a celebration of life coming back to normal after the COVID lockdowns.  But the others were about defying the culture’s attacks on normalcy.  Things like celebrating sexual dysfunction and deviancy, especially with respect to indoctrinating children.

And so, it got me thinking about normalcy as a greater good.  And even averageness as opposed to either depravity or perfection.  Certainly, when compared to the ugly and even deformed there’s nothing wrong with pointing at perfect beauty as its polar opposite.  But most people aren’t perfect.  They’re ordinary.  And in the psychotic world of social media like TikTok, the only acceptable identities are either girls with faultless synthetic beauty (“TikTok face”) or the various mutants celebrating their separation from human normalcy with body positivity (morbid obesity), individuality (face piercings and blue hair) and gender affirmation (amputations and hormone therapy).

Averageness is a hidden strength in the world.  Disdaining normalcy is a disease.  Even those who actually encompass some extraordinary perfection in either appearance or other characteristic like strength or intelligence rarely find greater happiness in their lives than people who just get on with the ordinary business of earning their bread and feeding their families.  Take as an example Bruce Jenner.  An Olympic decathlon champion who had immense athletic ability, good looks, fame and fortune.  Now he’s a celebrated eunuch who pretends to be an old woman.  And his children and step-children are carnies hawking depravity as a product.  A more miserable ending for an extraordinary talent I can’t imagine.

Convincing children, especially teenage girls that unless they’re flawlessly beautiful that maybe there is something wrong with them; maybe they’re even transgender, is an example of how the perfect can be the enemy of the good.  What we should be telling kids to consider is how they can best utiilize the gifts they have and how lucky they are to be healthy and normal.  After all, average and normal leave plenty of room for kids to grow up happy and healthy.

What we should be celebrating are people living their lives in the real world without anyone capturing it for clicks on social media and without anyone caring whether it’s photogenic enough for TikTok.  Real life has nothing at all to do with the internet except maybe for the ease of finding a YouTube video on how to replace the battery in your laptop or how to program your camera to shoot on two memory cards.  For that stuff it’s actually useful.  It shouldn’t be there to tell kids what they need to look like or act like or sound like.  That’s how you end up with these idiots on campus with openly gay boys in keffiyehs extolling the virtues of Hamas, an organization that would throw them off of buildings if they happened to fall under their jurisdiction.

And the only way to embrace normalcy is to live normally.  And that means in the real world.  You need to do things in real life and specifically you need to get out of your house and spend time with people.  And that is what all smart parents should be doing with their kids.  Get them out of the house and force them to put their phones away and do actual things with actual people.  And the best thing they can do is work.  Because work is the basis of human life.  And work that forces them to come in contact with people is invaluable.  Even the most introverted intellectual must learn how to interact with his fellow man.  I mean, if you’re Albert Einstein you can end up as a genius in an ivory tower.  But even Einstein began as a clerk in a patent office.  And he was probably a better man for having done it.

So average looks, average intelligence, average salary.  But if you work hard and learn how to live in the real world, then probably you can have a good life.  So, forget about Harvard, see if you can get a job fixing dishwashers or troubleshooting a network.  Leave TikTok to the beautiful people and the insane.

Camera Girl, Guns and Glory

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So, today Camera Girl and I attended a gun show.  Well, no.  The guy there told me it wasn’t a gun show.  And it was described as a Shooting, Outdoor, and Military Expo.  And he was right there was other stuff for sure.  They had World War II vintage trucks and jeeps and lots of veterans were there like the guys from the Geronimo Foundation who had details of the reenactments they do of D-Day and other paratrooper deployments.

There was a lot of interesting things besides guns.  For instance, what the heck is this?  I’m sure it made a lot of noise and blew up a lot of stuff but what is it called?

 

But there were a lot of guns, so to me it was a gun show.

There were all kinds of antique guns and there were a lot of rifles from the World Wars.  But there were also countless modern weapons that ran the gamut from hunting rifles to self-defense to just enthusiast favorites.  I think most of the machine guns were from World War II but being completely uninformed I couldn’t really say for sure.

But I got a whole load of shots mostly with my Voigtländer 10mm f/5.6 manual focus lens.  In tight spaces such a wide-angle lens helps out.  Of course, the manual focus aspect is not so helpful but it was still manageable.

I’ll be processing all the files and then I’ll add them to the Photo of the Day rotation to give everyone a break from my close-up documentation of my corner of Dunwich.

And I had some very interesting conversations with the denizens.  One fellow was Vietnam era Army and he was telling about his time on the logistical side of that war.  He said that if someone made a requisition for any kind of supply it had to be provided.  One day someone came in and ordered three helicopters.  And they had to provide them!

Well, it was a very interesting time and I enjoyed it.  But I’m still as ignorant of gun knowledge as I was before I entered the hangar (it was at an airport).  I asked Camera Girl if she wanted to try the helicopter ride that was available.  She gave me a very squinky look and I let it go.

I’ve been meaning to get a gun for the house for a long time.  I’ve only delayed this long because Camera Girl has Sicilian blood on her mother’s side and providing her with a firearm always seemed like stretching my luck.  But now that we saw so many exciting choices, who knows.  Some of the young guys at the show were playing around with guns that had the light or laser aiming assist.  Suddenly I had the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger showing up at the compound and I thought maybe I’m better off building a panic room instead.  Well, maybe I should do both.  After all, in the upcoming cannibal interregnum you can’t have too many precautions.