Guard Dog

Bruce what did I tell you once? There are only like 10 people posting here. You might be speaking to him everyday and don't know it!

Ahh the ravings, the threats, the promising of our total destruction... good times!

Not if they only heard about evolution from others.

The world would be a better place if the people who say they follow Jesus actually paid attention to the things Jesus said and did and followed His example.

If we are discussing some sort of "soft" transition, dressing and acting as the preferred gender, that is all good with me. Even light hormone treatments. This is all reversible if desired later. Once you start having surgery and cutting things off there is no going back. Not to OEM normal at least. That is life altering and NOT a decision to be made by someone not mature enough to understand. So save the surgery until after adulthood.

Let's see. We don't allow kids to own or carry firearms, drive cars, enter into legally binding contracts, or give consent for sex or other things because they are not emotionally or educationally mature enough to understand all the implications. But, there is a group of people who think we SHOULD let them have life altering surgeries? Surgeries that will eliminate the possibility of having biological children. That will make them susceptible to future health difficulties and complications particularly since their bodies are still growing? Anyone see a problem here? Being transgender is a hard thing to deal with and if transition brings relief then more power to them. Nut it is not at all unreasonable to insist the individual be a consenting adult capable of making an informed decision.

The idea of getting into a twist over religion or lack thereof, makes no sense to me. There are two possibilities: either there is a God or there isn't. Either there is an afterlife or there isn't. The existence of either cannot be verified so you have faith or you don't. If they don't exist believing in them changes nothing. If they do then disbelieving changes nothing. Suppose for a moment God does exist and is a supreme being and creator of all things. Such an individual is completely beyond the comprehension of us. So it's absurd for one person to tell another "God wants this" or "This is God's will". So the idea that a bunch of middle easterners had conversations with God 4000 years ago strains credulity. But that does not rule out God's existence. I look at it this way. Don't be an as---le and everything will work out fine. If God is what most folks believe He is then you'll be in good shape. Be honest, compassionate, and charitable with the fellow humans and I think it won't matter that you believed in God. I think God will believe in YOU. And if none of it was true than at least you will be remembered as a good man but the folks you knew and made the world a little better while you were in it. There are my own opinions of course. I believe in God and Jesus because the events of my life led me to that. But I have no more insight than anyone else so it would be foolish for me to insist on anyone else sharing my conclusions or criticizing them for their lives leading them to different conclusions. BTW if you have never read or watched The Life of Pi you should. It's an entertaining story but it also has a very enlightened take on religion.

Hey my view on religion and belief can be summed up as "whatever get's you through the night". (I stole that from a Law & Order episode, Jack McCoy actually said that). If an appeal to Paul Maud'dib got him through Civil Procedure who am I to tell him he's wrong. There is one thing a KNOW about God, religion, Allah, Buddah, etc: we will all find out the truth one day. Hopefully not for a long time though.

As long as teachers give tests there will be prayer in school. As long as report cards and college entrance exams are a thing you won't be able to keep God out of education! There was a saying in the USMC: There are no atheists in combat!

G & I got back from vaca last night. We had a great time in Calgary and Stampede was a lot of fun. We took the back roads home through North Dakota & Minnesota and stopped often. It was a great time all around. Going out to work with her today. My job is to keep the patients distracted with apples and sugar while thermometers get shoved in their rears. We're taking B out to dinner tonight. Life is pretty good!

I haven't been following baseball like I usually do. I've been seriously busy these last six months. But this is too good not to share:

10 year old girl denied abortion in Ohio First off what the F--K is going on here? WHY is no one asking the obvious questions here? Namely who the F--K is having sex with 10 year old children??? And if this is a case of rape.... what am I even saying of COURSE it's rape, a 10 year old child can't give consent, WHY is this even an issue? Abortion is legal in Ohio in cases of rape. Seriously, Congress has had near 45 years to get their s--t together and not rely on a court ruling everyone KNEW was going to go down one day. The government is f-----g useless. So is the media. This story is all over with no one asking the relevant question.

When I said they could not have felt coerced I was referring to players from the opposing team. According to the Vox article linked opposing team players would frequently join him.

I was talking to one of G's patients yesterday. Well, the patient's owner anyway. Her actual patients don't say much. He is a retired divorce lawyer. I told him a little about my experiences. He said it sounded like I was well represented both times. Anyway he told me a story that only reinforced my notion that humans not evolved primates but more likely DE-volved primates. His client was a well off middle aged man whose wife was having an affair. He had started the paperwork for divorce but not filed. Before filing he found out he had end stage cancer and would probably pass on within the year. He would be gone before the divorce would be near final. His wife became angry and spiteful when she learned he knew of the affair and told his she was "just waiting for him to die" so she could move her boyfriend in and "have fun" with his money. The lawyer said he's never seen anyone half so cruel and heatless. Coming from a lawyer that is saying something. So the man, his daughter (not related to the wife) came up with a plan. They changed his life insurance beneficiary from his wife to his daughter. Then waited. They didn't need to wait long. The wife maxed out one of his credit cards taking her boyfriend to Mexico for a vacation. So they filed for divorce then to put a freeze on martial assets. The man passed away shortly after and the will to his estate became a probate matter with the daughter and ex-wife contesting the estate. The daughter received the life insurance benefit and the lawyer said she was "set for life". Must have been a good one. The lawyer was so disgusted he offered to represent the daughter in the probate dispute for free. So now it's in probate court. The idea they had was not to win, it was to burn the estate to the ground. The daughter would end up with next to nothing from the estate but so would the wife. They forced the appointment of a Receiver and dragged it on for years. In the end the estate was settled with a four figure check for each. Over $1M in fees, receivership costs, etc had burned a million dollar estate to less than $20k. The daughter got the life insurance and the wife didn't even get enough to cover the cost of the trip she took to Mexico with her boy toy. I told him that was a great story! He said he's seen a lot of people get screwed over but that was the only time he felt good about it.

@GromnirThere is a distinction between what Coach Kennedy is doing and some of the other examples. In Lee v. Weisman for example the school graduation ceremony was opened and closed with prayer. That's a no-no. And I agree with them (the Court). It's a school function in progress with a captive audience. It is coercive. But in Kennedy's case the game is over. The official school function has ended. No one is obligated to return to the field once they have left it. The students that joined him chose to do so. And it was students from both teams often enough I understand. Certainly they could not have felt coerced. As I understand it he was giving motivational speeches with religious undertones. That MIGHT be questionable depending on when. If it was in practice or before a game or during a game that would be problematic. If it's after a game when the school function is ended and not in a place where the players are a captive audience (meaning not in the fieldhouse) then I don't see the problem. Anyone objecting is not compelled to participate. Go back to the bus or locker room and get cleaned up. Apparently one player felt he playing time would be cut if he didn't participate but that feeling was never put to the test. If it were and it was then that is a different story. I think firing Kennedy was still appropriate though. Suing to defend his praying after a game was one thing. That is his right. He took it to the press, social media, etc and created an unnecessarily combative atmosphere. That led to the folks in the stands mobing the field in support and created a somewhat dangerous situation. That was all on him. He turned a private devotion worthy of protection into a public spectacle and yet another tedious "culture war" battle. Sorry Coach Kennedy but that is where you lost me. And besides: "And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you" Matthew 6:5 ESV

Lauren Boebert Says the Church Is Supposed To Direct the Government Hey that worked out well in the past right?

Not really. They get paid and it's voluntary. They are not compelled to work. Slaves don't get that choice.

I think I figured out a work around. In radio physics antennas are polarized in a certain way. The antenna's polarization is basically the direction of signal transduction. Our network is using cross polarization. That means we are transmitting four 100 MHz carriers vertically polarized and four 100 MHz carriers horizontally polarized. That way we maximize BW. We get two carrier blocks of the same frequency on the same antenna. Doing some experiments today and the problem is mitigated when one block of four carriers or the other is locked. I think the reason for that is we use a software algorithm called XPIC (cross polarization interference cancellation) that, coupled with the high order of radio carrier modulation, places some unforgiving signal to noise ratio demands on the system. Free space path loss is a measure of how much the air in the antenna far field attenuates the radio signal expressed as a ratio so that goes right to the heart of SNR. Locking a carrier comes with a price though. 256 QAM (Quadrature amplitude modulation) gives us 8 bits per symbol, 256 symbols per wave cycle gives is 2kb per cycle. 2kb per cycle means 800 MB throughput x 4 = 3.2 GB throughput. x2 with XP enabled = 6.4 GB shared over all users walking in and out of the auditorium. By shutting down XP I'm cutting that in half. BUT... 3.2 GB that isn't dropping at a 7% rate (anything more than 2.8% drop rate is unacceptable) is better that an unreliable 6.4. Will it work? Don't know. Seems to but I need at least a week of data to make a determination. My brain is exhausted and I have a headache from squinting at a spectrum analyzer all day. I'm going to get a big steak for dinner than drive home. No G on this trip so meat is back on the menu boys!

It's a good suggestion but it won't help in this instance. Hospital and other indoor applications use a DAS (distributed antenna system) concept. A single radio carrier will have multiple antennas. Think of it like multiple sprinkler heads that all get their water from the same pipe. Whereas the 5G concept with massive MIMO is more like multiple water hoses zip tied together but each hose has a different water source. If EHF 5G were to be brought inside a building then each radio becomes it's own "cell" with hand-off and reselection challenges to be worked out. Plus the higher the frequency the lower the power has to be at user level. Outside the radios are mounted no less than 3m from the closest a human could pass to to them. in EHF each reduction of mounting height means a reduction of ERP (effective radiated power) by 3 dB (50%). So if they were any lower the power would need to be attenuated so much they wouldn't work at all. That's why DAS systems are so much more efficient for indoor use.

I wish. The only thing in my control here are those four radios. And I can't move them without 1) getting approval from the facility, 2) completely re-engineering everything and 3) rework the construction from my budget which is pretty small. I'm going to have to come up with something out of the box or increase antenna downtilt and live with a the coverage gap. Probably the latter.

Love it! Plus I can frame it as a cost savings for them. Look at how much they will save in cooling costs when the air volume of the building is reduced by 70%!

In my profession there are no "wise old men/women". Nobody knows everything, no one is an expert and on any given day you might see something no one has ever seen before. Here is a great example. I do RF Performance work for a company that designs, sells, and maintains private 5G networks. Mostly to Universities and various government entities. My job is to optimize performance on completed projects. The weird problem happened on a pretty large customer facility. It was strange enough I had to go see it for myself. The radios our networks use operate in the EHF band. Just under 40 GHz. Our radio signals have a wavelength of just over 7mm. That means the radios have a very short "footprint" (how far they can transmit and have the customer handset reply) so we need a lot of them. We have four positioned new the entrance of an auditorium type building at the facility in question. These radios are dropping attachments like crazy and driving up reselection and foreword error correction on surrounding nodes (this is a bad thing). I had the vendors replace everything, I had them work with me over the phone trying to tweak alignment and placement. Nothing worked. I came out here yesterday to look for myself. I meticulously went through the engineering again. There is a thing you learn in EE called the Friis Transmission Equations. You can use it to calculate important stuff like free space path loss, etc. Here is the thing... what is actually happening does not conform to Friis. The ratio of transmitted power to received power is off based on radio F, expected path loss, and antenna aperture. Now ordinarily we'd just conquer the problem by increasing radio power. But these radios are not on a tower, they are close so people. So transmit power is kept very low for safety. Here is the thing, the entrance area to the building is enclosed on three sides and has four revolving doors that lead into the building. The building is soft top (Teflon) "dome" auditorium and is pressurized inside to 1.1 ATM. Every time the doors revolve the pressure inside the dome "normalizes" (meaning increases) the pressure in the partially enclosed entrance area because Robert Boyle said it does. Now, what affect does atmospheric pressure have on radio wave propagation you may ask? If you'd ask me yesterday I'd have said none. But RF tends to behave in somewhat unpredictable ways in EFH. About 10 years ago Oxford did a study that showed at 29 hg (1 ATM) and humidity < 30 changes in atmospheric pressure did affect path loss changes in UHF radio signals. It amounts to .01% for every 2 hg change. But UHF radio has a wavelength of 1 m at the low end and a .01 change in path loss of a 1 m radio signal is statistically negligible. And besides, where on earth at ground level does atmospheric pressure change so rapidly. Constant pressure is one of the things that makes the Earth so awesome. Well, I'll tell you where: in the partially enclosed entrance area of the building I came here to see! AND a .01 path loss in a 7mm wavelength radio signal is statistically significant. In fact it accounts very closely to the path loss deficit I'm observing. How freaking cool is that? Now, how the heck to I solve this?

Supreme Court rules for coach whose prayers on football field raised questions about church-state separation SCOTUS got this one right. I really thought they would get Kagan to swing to the majority on this one. It went 6-3. I was expecting 7-2. Oh well. Didn't read any of the reasoning yet but seems like the right outcome. The separation of Church and State should not empower the extermination of voluntary public religious expression on personal time just because the individual involved happens to be a state employee.

Iraqi Drought Reveals Stunning 3,400-Year-Old City Covered By Tigris River I think I sacked this city while playing Old World.