What a horrible looking contraption!!!

Now THAT'S playing with fire.

Here we are!! Anyone need a graphics card?
<img src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/classifications/computing/upgrades-and-peripherals/graphics-and-multimedia/graphics-cards/ati/images/AMD-ATI_HD5500_5400-420-90.jpg&quot; width=500>
5400

Hey, eyes up here lady!
<img src="http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2012/images/Tevatron-Higgs-results-20120702-mr.jpg&quot; width="600"> That is heart touching story about lemonade stand boy. I have so much to write, but so little time! Aga got a deal for 4th at a waterpark/hotel in Wisconsin, so we are going there. Most of the prices were higher or booked already, it's a busy time, but she's done this before, calls a bunch of places and checks to see if any had openings and if the prices are better. So the great news is that it looks like I will get Spotted Cow 🙂 Anyway I have like four days of work to do in two suddenly. But it has been strange day here at work. My hunch is that on Wednesday CERN will announce discovery or very strong evidence of the Higgs boson. This morning here at work there have been talks detailing all the evidence that D0 and CDF have for the Higgs as well. It boils down to evidence for a two bottom quark decay with only one in 550 chance that it is some kind of statistical error, so that's pretty exciting: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/… [PLEASE DO NOT BREAK LINK]
<img src="http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/images12/thundercloud.jpg&quot; width="600"> Tower, the storms were pretty gnarly here all weekend. These images are all from that one on Friday that caused so much trouble out east. Yesterday I saw a neat thing. Aga was at a surprise baby shower and the women were parking on our driveway. One left her windows open and I went out there to cover them with plastic. I saw a bolt of lightening come from the east, almost horizontally over our house, and then down. It must have hit something at the lab. I could not see where touched down cause my house was in the way. I could not see where it originated from, but from the east the Fox river was along the way. I wonder why it did not strike there? Is it a wive's tale that lightening prefers to strike water? This morning I learned some buildings were struck here at work. Also on Saturday I was driving to Fairbury and along the way I saw some of the damage that the Friday stroms had done. One barn was blown over and in Yorkville there were real honest to goodness big fat trees cracked in half and laying on their sides. So I thought that it must have been like where we were the wind was higher up because of all the obstacles on the ground, but it turns-out that even though Sunday's storms were stronger S of us, two people that live about 20min by car north of me had a lot of wind damage. So I just don't understand weather at all. <img src="http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/images12/is-lightning-frightening.jpg&quot; width="600">

smz, msz #@&……….Geez, I got confused here with my last two comments. Sorry about that. First of all………….I made 5402 and 5403, so yours would be 5404, and this one will be 5405…..GOT IT……or shall we argue about that for forth replies? 😉 That's a cute picture of Jake……I love the sunglasses. You found out how ridiculous 6.0 on J. is to follow. I find that I go to the front page much less because it takes too much time. Yes, it is a shame. I don't know anymore than I did earlier.
Did I put this in the right place?
5405

BB………..Hi! Did you get my reply to you in the last thread? Anyway, good to see you, and that pie looks delicious. I made an Oreo Pie once. The basic ingredients were instant vanilla pudding and Cool Whip…..of course, Oreos. It was really easy and yummy.
An improvement in J. The images are no longer thumbnail size, but the way they should be. Now if they'd just change that front page format.
Good to see you.
5407

<img src="http://www.atlas.ch/news/images/stories/3-plot.jpg"&gt;
Hi Stormies!
That plot is a link but the gist is that there is preliminary discovery of a new boson at 125-126GeV. It's likely the Higgs. There is a big conference next week, ATLAS and CMS would do more scrutiny before an announcement of a discovery, but it was just so danged exciting they wanted to get it out to kick off the conference, that's why they say preliminary. Likely enough review will have happened by the end of the summer to remove the preliminary aspect of it. It's discovery since they have excluded to 5 standard deviations anything else. So anyway, in that plot that's what you see. It's from ATLAS results, almost to 5 sigma (they got to that by combining all channels at both CMS and ATLAS for two years worth of data). Basically the Higgs does not last very long, so you only detect other things like two photons or four leptons at ATLAS. That's what channel means, a particular way the boson decays. Now there are lots of ways that you can get a signal like that to occur without a new boson being the cause, but you predict a certain amount to occur of each from what is already accounted for, when you slam enough together and you see more than you expected, that means the explanation is that there was that new boson at a higher energy in there temporarily that decayed. Now they know (well preliminarily) it's a boson cause of what is detected in the decay channels, they still don't know for sure it's Higgs. That is most likely since it is predicted, but they do not know yet charge, spin, and to high enough precision the ratios of the different decays. The best guess is that in this year and the next before the shutdown, they will have enough info. So for example they might have 5 sigma results for decay channels like two photons or four electrons at both CMS and ATLAS and if the ratios are right of how often each kind of decay happens, then they can claim discovery of Higgs boson. So exciting!

smz, szm, xyz……..It sounds like you had a nice cheesey trip to Wisconsin. I don't think I want to go on a water slide, but kudos to you for doing so. I'm not sure what I was unsure of either……can't find it. My 4th was relaxing with a barbecue with friends. Cooking outdoors with charcoal is banned here, and that's what they have, so she did pulled pork in a crock pot. Of course, she had all the sides, and I made a quickie pie for dessert. It was so quiet the night of the 4th with the fireworks ban. I'm sure people with dogs didn't mind that at all. Peter Orosz will no longer do articles for Jalopnik. He was promoted within the Gawker realm. Peter wrote all the articles on July 4th with his first one being his good bye to everyone. It was funny that the articles were about mostly Europe with it being July 4th. He's an excellent writer and will be missed.
Have a great weekend whatever you do!
5410

smz, mzs, zzz……….How can you cheat at an eating watermelon contest? That's funny. Congrats on your win. Cooler weather has been here for several days, and it's wonderful. Highs are in the low 80's. We've also had several rain showers which were badly needed, and we need more. Of course, the burn areas don't need a lot of rain due to the possible flooding. My weekend was relatively quiet. I went to dinner once at Mexican restaurant where I had (always get it) a chicken avocado salad which is loaded with umpteen pieces of fresh fruit. Very healthy (except for Ranch dressing) and tasty.
There's evidently an add-on "fix" the Gawker commenting system back to 5.0 format. They've been posting a Chrome fix in Oppo for about a week. Now they're posting a Firefox add-on "fix". I have FF. This link says that the add-on has not been reviewed by Mozilla. They say "use caution when installing these add-ons, as they could harm your computer or violate your privacy. We recommend that you only install reviewed add-ons." I'm cautious Clara when it comes to doing anything like this, but the 6.0 commenting system on the front page of Jalopnik is the worst thing ever. What do you think of this add-on? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ko…
5412

Hi Skay,
Glad to hear that you got some rain and good food. It was a very pleasant day weather wise (and all wise) here yesterday. It was our anniversary (12 years) yesterday. The last thing we did was "Rock Around The Block" http://starevents.com/events/rock-around-the-bloc… We watched the band named "Wedding Band" and they were very funny. We also bought some gifts there, most notable glow in the dark jellyfish in epoxy. One for Aga as anniversary gift for the ocean themed bathroom and one as a necklace for her sister. I met the guy that came-up with the idea, he's from AL, and complimented him. He told me it took him five years of trial and error to get the kinks-out! Good work man! I was accused of everything. That I was eating too many at the same time (I would grab two to three slices at a time since they were thinly sliced), that I did not get close enough to the rind, that too much dribbled over my chest (you can see photo at agamama, Jake did really well too BTW. I'd bet he was the fastest eater that was a kid), that the last slices should not count since I swallowed after the time was called, etc. People sometimes surprise me how annoying they can be. We cleaned-up after ourselves, thanked the ladies running the competition for the funny game, while some other people were complaining like, "wash the tables better kids are touching them." I tried to DL that extension to see what it did, but FF complained that it did not match what it expected. A broken DL link or something like that I guess. I only use a few very well vetted extensions myself and honestly I don't think it can fix the real problem which is that so many of the interesting comments just don't get made over there anymore.
Hi Tower,
I always learn so much from you when you comment, thanks! That video with the sort of directed-maze-walking-like behavior of the negative vs the positive charged from the ground was not what I expected, neato! I've seen a strange thing at work where needles grow out of solder joints. They call them whiskers, but they things look straight not curved. Supposedly the new solder is better now about that, electricity does peculiar things. We got that cheese that you mention, with the sheep, cow, and goat milk. I think it was called arica. It is surprisingly good. Michelle likes it a lot. I liked the mild cheddar better myself than the 5 year one, or at least I think it was that one, I ate a lot of cheese. Moose Jaw had beer cheese soup, that was great! I had them make for me a pizza with bacon, alfredo, cheese, potato, and shrimp. The waiter said they might add it to the menu minus the shrimp, call it the baked potato pizza.
Have a good one,
5415

TowerofPower………….We had a wonderful rain last night, and the trees are so happy now. I think we might have had close to an inch. It wasn't good for the burn area in the Waldo Canyon fire area in Colorado Springs. They had to close one lane of US 24 because of a mud/rock slide. It has also been cooler for the past three/four days in the very low 80's. But the heat returns tomorrow, I guess. They are saying that the Waldo Canyon fire containment is 98% now (or it was last night anyway). Hot spots keep flaring up.
Later!
5417

@MZS: Good afternoon MZS, Hope You're doing well 🙂 I've been meaning to ask you, is that photo of the lighting over your work place, your photo? If so it's really really amazing! 🙂 Anyway, I don't know If I mentioned it before, but the little bunny family we had, moved out(over near the Church behind my house, too noisy our place) but we have another little animal. A Chipmunk! The little guy(or girl? how do you tell them apart?) is the cuteist little thing, It's fun to see watch him come out and look for nuts. We've set some peanuts out for him and he comes out and nibbles on them and gets the nut, and scampers away. He's very fast! Also I haven't gotten a photo yet, but my Dad said he's brought some Squirrel to help eat as well. I'm sure it's quite the sight.
<img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7110/7552493580_c0cf98577c.jpg&quot; width="500" height="332" alt="026">
I've got a few more of him, It's really funny to see his checks get bigger and bigger with more peanuts 😉
5421

smz, szm, hop…………Did you find out where the water in the pool went? Fun and games. I just got back from out-of-town and Chinese buffet………I am happy. It was the first time I took my Escape on the highway, and I was very impressed with its performance and nice ride. I also learned more about some of the buttons and switches. Before long, I'll know all about it……..or most of it anyway. While looking at the food on the Chinese buffet, I couldn't but help think of that pickup with all the dead animals on it that you got the h/t for today. I giggled to myself. A doo-rag, or durag or do-rag is this:
<img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Dorag.jpg/220px-Dorag.jpg"width="500"/&gt;
5423
BUICK BOY………That chipmunk is darling. What fun you're having with all the cute critters. How is your summer going? Are you still going to college this Fall? I periodically check on the Stormchaser thread on Jalopnik….."No Comments Found." It looks like that is history. Good to see you!
5423

@Skaycog: I'm glad You're leaning every new aspect of your Escape! It can be a fun exercise to learn something new. I can't believe it's Thursday already!!!!! The week flew by! Nothing really new with me, just enjoying our nice hot weather, not too hot and not cold at all 🙂 Here's another photo of our Chipmunk eating nuts, this is from the same photo I posted yesterday. It's a set. I have more too.
<img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7254/7552491982_b6aea8aa0d.jpg&quot; width="500" height="332" alt="033">
5425

Detective mzs…
It sounds like you quite enjoy hunting down problems. That is strange how your pool water disappeared but at least you got the faucet fixed! I find things like your pipes now and then that weren't created with the best of thought or care. My porch flooring started coming apart recently. It turns out that the previous owner put new flooring down with small finishing nails and they were breaking and thus the boards were pulling up from the frame. I got some nice woodscrews and screwed them all down last week. The thing is now as solid as concrete. Just need to get to painting it now! But not this weekend, I'm heading to a friends for an apartment warming get together.\
5427

zms, msz, bow……..What a busy Friday, and the day is flying by. I have a trip to the mountains planned for tomorrow. I can't wait to see how my Escape does. I'll be trying out the transmission S (Sport) feature for the first time. When gearshift lever is in S, it provides additional grade (engine) braking and extends lower gear operation to enhance performance for uphill climbs, and, I assume downhill grades. Also, I look forward to 20-degree cooler temps and beautiful mountain scenery.
Your plans?
BuickBoy………..Colorado has a lot of chipmunks, and people feed them out of their hands. I've never done it because the cute little critters have been known to bite. I just like to watch them. My weekend plans are above. Oh yes, Papa Murphy's chicken, bacon, artichoke, spinach pizza tonight. I LOVE IT!
TowerofPower……….As I said above, I'm going to be learning more about my Escape this weekend. I found out today when I filled it with gas that it doesn't have a gas cap. It has an "Easy Fuel" system. You just stick the nozzle through a black flexible barrier-like thing and squeeze the handle. Have fun at your apartment-warming this weekend! Stay cool!
5429

zms, smz, cab……..What I said about my new gas tank was funny out of context. I hope your weekend was as much fun as it sounded like it might be. Brats……….yum! I had a great Saturday driving in the mountains, and I'm so very impressed with the performance of my 1.6L EcoBoost Escape. I even learned out to manually downshift with the S gear. Being used to a 4.6L V8, I really thought the Escape would seem gutless, but I was totally wrong. I can't praise it enough. It was a fun day in the beautiful Rocky Mountains and 20 degrees cooler too. Sunday was church, then home cleaning, paperwork, etc with NASCAR on TV in the background. And here it is Monday again.
5231

Buickboy…………Yes, I heard about the recall early this morning from Morning Shift and also my Ford Store. I've looked at my carpet, and I don't know what they are talking about. I don't know if ALL the Escapes will be recalled or just some of them. That Turbo did excellent in the mountains………..it sure made a EcoBoost believer out of me.
That chipmunk's cheeks are so full. It looks like they're going to explode. So cute.
5433………CORRECTION…….we were off by 200, thanks to *cough* mzs and me directly below *cough*

smz, szm, fax…………..It sounds like you had a real fun night out with the guys and really put away the beer. What's tilted kilt? That stock car is really flat looking, and has really been around the track a few times. It's a lovely day here with not much new. I had dinner last night with a girlfriend who is a teller at a bank and was working the drive-thru window yesterday. A gal pulled up and put her deposit in the box and while my friend was processing it, the gal put her right leg up on the dash and started shaving her leg. That's unbelievable………what class. It takes all kinds, doesn't it? How much longer is your SIL going to be there?
Happy Taco Tuesday!
5435

smz, zms, pup……….I don't find any errors here, and it doesn't run slow for me either. That was fun on the Duett post yesterday, and I wonder if anybody took us seriously. Ha! That's a great picture of you when you were younger. You looked like a teenager.
Well, my Escape is being recalled. I heard about it first on Jalopnik this morning. I talked to my Ford Store, and Ford Motor Co. called them and told them to come and pick up my Escape and rent me a car. The recall is only for the 1.6L engine, and mine is the only one sold in this small town. It's kind of scary that I took it to the mountains over the weekend. http://media.ford.com/article_display.cfm?article…
Who is Gordon?
5439

mzs, szm, mop………The car that FoMoCo rented for me is a 2011 Mazda 3, and I'm not impressed with its comfort or its ride. I haven't driven it long enough to comment on its performance. It was hard to find a rental car because of the Waldo Canyon fire in CO Springs. I guess I'm lucky to have anything to drive. Life goes on. Remember that reverse 911 call I had last week? The attempted armed robbery at WalMart was a hoax, and the woman has been arrested for false reporting. What is wrong with people? That shooting in Denver area made me cry. That young man is sick in the head.
Well, it's Friday. I have no big plans for the weekend. Same-o, same-o.
5441

mzs…
I've been to the Tilted Kilt in Madison a couple of times. It's since closed but it was a neat place. Much better food and atmosphere than compared to Hooters, but in the grand scheme of restaurants it really just like 90% of other sports bars. And the girls don't really wear kilts so much as just plaid cheer-leading skirts, very disappointing, kilts would be much cooler.
We had some crazy storms Wednesday. I was visiting my parents after work in Mount Horeb and ended up in the worst place for the storm. My parents lost a large 2.5 foot diameter willow tree and the neighboring farm across the street had a similar sized tree fall into their house. Everyone is ok, it hit the garage portion on the roof and kind of rolled off to the side ripping up some shingles, plywood and siding but nothing too terrible. It was so windy the house kind of shook with this low rumbling sound. I estimate the winds were a solid 60-65mph. I think it's funny how most dogs get afraid during storms, yet my parents little dog could care less.
Have a good weekend!
5443

Hi Stormies,
Still not well 🙁 But I came into work early since I was so worried that things would not get back right after the power outage. I think I will go back soon to rest more. Only two boards misbehaved, oh crap I just heard an alarm 🙁 Well that was not too bad, just a restore that glitched an SRM. Doctor gave me some antibiotics because I was supposed to take Kevin to the STP300 on Sunday. I really really tried to get better in time, but failed 🙁 It's a bad flu. It's funny, now my cranky demeanor Thursday makes sense. Aga took them, it was a small disaster, whatever, the people that sell tickets are not very clear in my opinion. In the end they could not go to the pits 🙁 But they still had good time, but they got bored. Kevin said, "They just went around and around." Well duh! Aga shot some video, amazingly awesome to me, so fast, and the noise, the glorious noise! I can only imagine the smells 😀
Skay,
The Mazda3 is a car I really liked, isn't that funny! But it was too expensive, especially so for the hatchback. I expect that I like my cars to ride more firmly than you. The gearbox is very nice, hard to describe, just natural to go from gear to gear and fast seeming. Clutch very easy to feel and straight forward as well. And everything inside was so simple, I always like that, I'm one of those goofballs that dislikes confusing tech. The Aurora thing threw me too, because we live two towns over from Aurora IL. Then I also have a friend who is from there, but he is in Europe right now, I'm pretty sure but I haven't heard back from him. His friends and family that I know about have not been in the news thankfully either. That's just awful, and now all the annoying portion of the guns and religion people doing what they always do 🙁 You know about my brother right? I helped him to get help when he really needed it. I read that the mom was not surprised, I wish families would help before things like this happened. It's very sad.
Hi Tower,
I think you must have been very excited to be in that storm! I'm glad no very bad damage occurred. Someday I will have to go to a Tilted Kilt. While sick I have been watch Cosmos on netflix. It is very good, but not in the way I expected. It's so hopeful, sort of like the Seasame Street of science documentary if that makes sense. And Sagan makes these very strange but interesting segues, like a bit of legend from 1100s Japan in a round-a-bout artificial selection example in the end. I also had no idea really about the history of Kepler and Brache was so interesting, it's something like a little about astronomy, maybe mostly, but more like a philosphy like we really are not much, have not been around much, are similar to everything else, and hopefully we make good decisions for the future. But the flu might be affecting me, I started noticing how various things look so trippy yesterday, like clouds and fish, ha!
Have a good one,
5444

Hi Skay,
I just noticed that 402 that is not a 402 that you showed to Vavon in this post. That's a weird car, it looks like half of a Volvo PV36 and half a PV60 that was changed into a wood gas car. Volvo in fact made PV5x cars during WWII that were wood gas right from the factory, they came with a trailer though not built in the back like that. Anyway, they all used the basically the same inline six engine (with SEVEN main bearings – Volvo was part of a bearing manufacturer back then after all). Maybe there was a model like the 36 for taxicab use that this is based on?
<img src="https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/s720x720/484427_870199560970_1137807609_n.jpg&quot; width="490"> I'm feeling a lot better now, not well, but almost great. It's hard to sleep in the night though when I sleep during the day though. After work Kevin has an outdoor orchestra concert I am pretty excited to go to. I had to leave work after about six hours yesterday and I went home to take a nap. I hope to make the whole day today. My ears feel normal again, yippie! And I lost 6.x lb! Though the diarrhea was really terrible 🙁 I got secondary ear infection but warded-off bronchitis thankfully. After the fact I can tell when I am getting sick from my writing of all things! I wish I would be able to figure it out as it's happening, oh well. Here's a really great cartoon Gosia did of Aga, and yes Aga made pancakes for her 😉
Hi Tower,
<img src="https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/s720x720/487375_10151133234550030_277925922_n.jpg&quot; width="600"> We had some storms again, last night. It was not too bad here, but some branches were down all the way on my bike ride to work. On the night between M-Tu there was a bigger one. "Susan Stephens took this pic on N. 1st St., DeKalb" from the WNIJ facebook page. My friends out in Sycamore and DeKalb had a lot more damage. They got lucky though as the fallen trees only took out parts of a fence and not the house or siding right next to that in the worst case.
I missed you stormies 🙁 have a good one,
5446

zms, smz, flu……….Gosia is quite an artist! I'm very impressed. That crown is very fitting for Aga. You really had a nasty flu. Did anybody else in the family have it? Here it is Friday……yay! I got my Escape back Wed. It was washed and filled with gas as Ford Motor Co. said they would do. My fuel line didn't have a crease in it, but they replaced it anyway. I'm sure loving having it back.
I'm going to get a new place now and will post it after this one.
5448

Wow. That actually looks somewhat good! It appears as though they put thought and engineering into how the vehicle would look when finished, as opposed to just strapping a bunch of stainless steel bins in the trunk.