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Several hospitals in Siberia have been placed under quarantine after the death of a woman who worked at an anti-plague institute.
Darya Shipilova, an employee at an institute in the eastern city of Irkutsk, died on the night of 2 October at a regional hospital in the nearby town of Shelekhov two days after falling ill.
Before you get paranoid, plaugue is not unknown in remote parts of Russia just like the American West. It is a legitimate non-bioweapon area of research.
The post Remington Model 10: The Rarest American Trench Shotgun first appeared on Forgotten Weapons.
10/3/26 Reuters describes how the Iranian rial has reached historic lows, which is what Trump is trying to do: crash their economy:
Mehdi Darabi, an aide to the central bank's governor on foreign exchange affairs, blamed the decline of the rial partly on what he said were false predictions by US officials of the collapse of the Iranian economy."It is suggested that the Iranian economy is about to crash... The enemy is using this to affect the exchange rate of our currency," Darabi told state TV, adding that the current fall of the rial was temporary.
We didn't get as much rain as expected this weekend, but it is cooling off. Overcast this morning with drizzle before daylight.
Shortly after daylight, I watched a teal make a low pass over the pond. He decided against it and headed toward Catahoula lake. Teal are a harbinger, being the first ducks to make the trip.
The shop is cool this morning, with one A/C unit running, and it has cycled off.
A lot less hummingbird traffic around the feeders this morning. The smart ones left yesterday, riding the northerly breeze southward.
It's not time to break the flannel out, quite yet, but it won't be long.
** UPDATE TO ADD: After a few minutes, I decided to make a test run on the propane heaters in the shop. Both Belle's big heater and my small one passed the initial start-up.
Best-selling author, commercial airline pilot, and retired air crash investigator L.B. Johnson knows exactly how she got here. She just never expected to arrive quite so soon.
In The Serenity Chronicles, Johnson turns her attention from wreckage to reflection. A bout of septic shock and its lasting consequences forced her to reconsider not only the future she had imagined after retirement, but the very meaning of time. Rather than measure life by what remained, she chose to live more deliberately in the days she had.
Written as a series of candid, sometimes irreverent vignettes, this literary memoir wanders through subjects that initially seem wonderfully random, yet gradually reveal an unexpected coherence. Johnson considers the changing landscapes of the body, the ghosts of family history, the persistence of faith, the enduring gifts of love, and the peculiar indignities that aging so generously provides.
There is grief here, and an honest reckoning with mortality. But there is also laughter, gratitude, and the recognition that even an imperfect life can contain extraordinary beauty.
Johnson writes frankly about what aging takes away—and what it gives in return. Readers may wince in recognition, laugh at life’s absurdities, and find some part of their own journey reflected in these pages. Because being alive is an exercise in enduring surprise.
Sometimes, serenity is not found in knowing what comes next.
Sometimes, it is found in being willing to find out.
In armed self-defense training, “get off the X” means don’t be standing still in a gunfight. The theory is that a static target is easier for your opponent to hit. True enough, but the totality of the circumstances is sometimes such that “standing your ground” and shooting from a solid stance is the defender’s best […]As Love continued to assault her, the victim’s daughter tried to stop him, before he also struck the teen.
The 28-year-old man was shopping in the store when he saw the assault. He grabbed his firearm and attempted to stop Love from further assaulting the victim, according to VPD. The victim was then able to get away from Love.
The bystander attempted to hold Love at gunpoint when Love charged at him and began to hit him. The man discharged his firearm once and struck Love, according to the press release.
Around 10:14 p.m. Thursday, police responded to the 1500 block of Sidon Circle to a report of someone being shot, according to a Lafayette Police news release. When police arrived, the man, who was not identified in the release, told police that he got his gun and shot a boy after noticing the boy trying to get inside.
Police believe Vantrell had forced his way into an apartment when he was shot. He was reportedly armed with a knife.
Vantrell is facing charges of home invasion, terroristic threats and three counts of criminal damage.
Two intruders entered through an upstairs balcony and exchanged gunfire with the person living there. The resident was not injured.
CPD says shortly after the incident, 20-year-old Brian Baker Jr. arrived at Augusta Health with a gunshot wound. He has been identified as one of the suspects and charges of breaking and entering while armed are pending.
Authorities are still searching for the second suspect.
Does a Different Rimfire Suppressor Change Pistol Accuracy – Fibonacci57 Ti? The first DayAtTheRange pistol suppressor accuracy test left me with more questions than answers. And that’s exactly what I wanted. We took my 6-inch Volquartsen Black Mamba, established its accuracy with the muzzle brake installed, and then tested the Anechoic Pip Squeak with four […]
The post Anechoic Fibonacci 57 Ti + Volquartsen Black Mamba Accuracy Test first appeared on Day At The Range.State police said a man tried to break into a home in the 25000 block of Chapel Road, but the homeowner caught the attempted burglary in action. The homeowner reportedly shot the would-be burglar, who was identified as an adult male.
Police said the suspect was taken to a Cincinnati-area hospital and is expected to survive his injuries.
ISP said the two people involved in this incident knew each other.
The shooting occurred around 2:45 p.m. Tuesday near 845 S. Figueroa St. when a suspect or suspects exited a vehicle and shot at a man standing behind a Smart & Final. The victim pulled out a gun and fired back at the suspects, the LAPD said.
The victim was injured and transported to a hospital in critical condition, police said.
Divemedic has been geeking out about home network stuff which has been a bit of a walk down memory lane - I once had a supervisor who turned down my request for a 2400 baud modem "because you can't read that fast". You see, at 1200 baud, a text file comes down at around one line per second, and a fast reader can read that fast. Sorry, Borepatch, no speed for you.
And quite frankly, nobody in the late 1980s got much speed. We had big VAX computers and the standard wisdom was that "You'll never get more than a megabit per second out of TCP/IP". And it was standard wisdom because nobody did.
Enter a fellow named Van Jacobson. He looked at the source code for popular TCP stacks and decided that it could be improved. WAY improved. TCP wasn't implemented in the operating system, as an OS service; rather, it was implemented in a user application. The problem with this, thought Jacobson, was that every time you wanted to send a packet the OS had to do a context switch to let the (user-land) data structure containing the packet go to the OS kernel.
Jacobson thought this was stupid, and that networking should be the job of the OS. He hacked IP into the Unix kernel and all of a sudden not only were you getting more than a megabit from TCP, a single Sun Workstation could saturate a 10 Mbps Ethernet.
IBM basically said that this was because Ethernet was stupid and primitive, and IBM's Token Ring network enforced bandwidth sharing.
Enter Jacobson again. He defined a mechanism called "Slow Start" which he added to his hacked TCP code. Basically, whenever you started to send data, you would start slowly and increase the speed gradually until you hit congestion. What he found was that not only would his Sun workstation saturate a 10 Mbps Ethernet, but 5 or 6 Sun workstations would saturate that same network while gracefully sharing the network between them.
So why do I say that he made the Internet possible? Imagine a bandwidth-constrained Internet - constrained either because Internet Protocol was too slow or because more powerful computers hogged all the bandwidth. There would be no Tik-Tok, no Youtube, no Netflix, no Zoom.
And it instantly made Sun Microsystems into the Ferrari of computers. As Networking took off, Digital Equipment Corporation couldn't compete with lower cost workstations that were much, much faster. That was it for VAXen, and for IBM's Token Ring, and for ISO's Open Systems Interconnect protocols, and for Asynchronous Transfer Mode. The problems that these technologies were designed to solve were suddenly obsolete.
All because of Van Jacobson.
Not many people remember this time of massive upheaval, but we all owe Jacobson a huge thank you.
“Tis better people think you a fool, then open your mouth and erase all doubt.”
Students will no longer be graded based on a yearly average, or on how late they turn in assignments. Those are just some of the major grading changes approved this week by California's second-largest school district.
The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) is overhauling the way it grades students. Board members say the changes are part of a larger effort to combat racism.
“This is part of our honest reckoning as a school district,” says SDUSD Vice President Richard Barrera. “If we’re actually going to be an anti-racist school district, we have to confront practices like this that have gone on for years and years.”
According to data presented by the district, under the old grading system, teachers fail minority students more than White students – a lot more.
During the first semester of last year, 30% of all D or F grades were given to English learners. One in four, 25%, of failing marks went to students with disabilities.
By ethnicity, 23% went to Native Americans. Another 23% of failing grades went to Hispanics. And 20% of D or F grades went to Black students.
By comparison, just 7% of failing marks went to White students.
Because turning papers in on time is so white.
ROOT BEER IN GRANNY’S BATHTUB
by Carolyn Cramer Goldwasser Oct. 1, 2026
Yes, I got to help my Granny Annie Langley Naylor make and bottle root beer. I was 8 years old in 1950 and she was 65 years old. She did things in an old fashioned (even for then) kind of way. Her cook stove was a huge cast iron, woodburning stove, (meaning the heat to cook on the top and in the oven came from pieces of wood burning inside one end of it). Out of the top of the other end of it rose a curved shiny metal smokestack that fitted tightly into a hole in the actual brick chimney, thru the kitchen side of the wall. Next to the smokestack was a cast iron shelf on which a very big tea kettle sat, keeping water hot.
On the living room side of the wall, there was a heater which burned “fuel-oil”. It was about two feet away from the wall and it had a similar smoke- stack that fitted into a hole on the other side of the same chimney. All the smoke and fumes from both stoves went out of the brick chimney (which extended several feet above the top of the roof) up into the sky.
I don’t think there was a separate water heater in that house. But there was plumbing, and cold water would flow into the kitchen sink, bathroom sink, and bathtub. The water in the kettle above the cook stove was always hot, so granny would grab it and pour some hot water into the cold water in the tub to warm it up enough for us kids to take a bath. Only on Saturday nights we got baths. Other times we washed in the sink, with less water.
So how did we make Root Beer? First, you save the glass soda bottles from last year. Then you gather or buy roots (from which the name root beer comes). Wintergreen is the only root I remember granny naming, but it seemed to me there were several different kinds of roots involved. She roasted and boiled the roots to make a dark brown liquid in a giant pot. Then she added a big bag of sugar and boiled it some more.
She did tell me how they had dug and roasted chicory roots to make “coffee” during the Depression – chicory is bitter, and so is dandelion root, which they may have used for the root beer as well as for the “coffee.”
So, then the bathtub was scrubbed clean and rinsed well. The stopper was securely put in place and several gallons of the dark brown, warm sweet liquid were poured into the tub to ferment for a week or so. She stirred it every day watching for bubbles to form when it was ready. The root beer got the bathtub. It was summertime, warm weather, no school, no baths. Warm weather all day and all night was needed for the fermentation to proceed properly. So we made root beer in summer.
Next step: last year’s glass bottles were put in the giant pot covered with water and slowly brought to a boil, to be sterilized. They then cooled, in the water. A funnel and a ladlecargol helped us fill the sterile bottles, as we sat on thick towels on the bathroom floor.
We moved to the kitchen table and the heavy steel bottle capping tool was brought out, as were the many thin discs of soft metal that would become lids for the bottles.
The bottling tool worked with a handle on a lever, which we older kids could pull down, to exert force onto the top of the metal disc, which we had set on top of the full bottle; the bottle was held securely in place below the lever, by a clamp, which was a part of the boxy form of the tool. The soft, thin metal disc was forced over the top of the bottle, bending into a bunch of evenly spaced little crimps around the edges, holding it securely onto the top of the bottle, keeping the liquid and the bubbles inside for many months.
Root beer has no alcohol content. It is bitter and sweet and fizzy and it was considered healthier than regular beer with alcohol in it. And kids could drink it! My grandparents were members of the Salvation Army and were against alcohol. My mother was an officer in the Salvation Army before she married my father. There were no alcoholic beverages in our house, ever.
I think it is not a coincidence that after I was grown and married with kids, I studied and learned to make several kinds of fermented foods: including Kosher dill pickles (lots of bubbles, sour but without vinegar – just salt, garlic, dill and cucumbers), sourdough bread, raising without yeast; and Amasake, a drink.
Amasake is made from whole grain glutinous rice cooked soft, with extra water, and then fermented with koji (a fermentation starter), in a warm oven, for a couple of days, just long enough to let the starches (carbohydrates) in the rice chemically change into sugars. It gets stirred from time to time. The fermentation breaks down the skin of the whole grain, and it gets mushy and sweet. It can have a similar taste and consistency to a milkshake if it is pureed and chilled. I helped some macrobiotic folks at the Grainaissance mochi factory, near Berkeley, make amazake to sell, flavored with cooked fruits and nut butters. Yes, a good substitute for milk shake.
Quickly stopping the fermentation (by boiling it) prevents the sugars from progressing to become alcohols. “Amasake” means Sweet Sake. If you let it ferment past sugars, then you have regular Sake – the Japanese alcoholic drink.
Miso and soy sauce are made with soybeans and grain, fermented in the presence of salt, which controls the fermentation. The soy proteins become more accessible, being already partially digested by the fermentation process. Not just a flavoring, but they are good high protein foods. And they are an important part of a vegan macrobiotic diet.
Miso and soy sauce are dark brown, like root beer. And here I am, many decades later, still involved with dark brown fermented foods! Yesterday, I cooked my breakfast soup with miso in it. Today I flavored my breakfast porridge with a splash of soy sauce. Thanks, Granny for teaching me how to cook and how to grow food in your garden. And for saying grace before every meal: “Bless this food to our bodies and make us grateful, teach us how to be kind and to help each other. Amen.”
Cheers!
As I have previously discussed, the core of all machine tools is a 20 threads/inch leadscrew. One turn of the screw is 0.50". If you can narrow that down to 100 divisions, you can easily move pieces on that lead screw .01". This is beginning to get accurate for mildly precise work. But how do divide a circles into 100 equal divisions. Think back to the suffering of high school geometry. Dividing a circle in half is just drawing a line across the center point. Another diameter that crosses the center point gets you 4 divisions of 90 degrees. How do you get to 100 divisions? Even more useful, 360 divisions? I often think about having to rebuild civilization even without a 20 threads/inch screw thread. (Okay, not on your list of concerns.)
How do you get this capability if you lack a starting reference for 360 degrees. This has been bugging me for years. This video explains how it was done.
