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Religion in a Nutshell

 

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This is The Honest Truth About Me

 This is my brain. ALL. THE. TIME. The second part of this video, that is . . . 

uhhhh yeah.

Wet Cat Wednesday

 

Hummingbirds - They are taking over and I love it.

About a week ago before I really started feeling bad again, I made a batch of sugar nectar, that's what I call it, for a couple of hummingbirds.  I got the recipe from this woman here on her YouTube channel. She caters to hummingbirds and other types of birds in her Southern California backyard. She talks about what hummingbirds need for food and how to make it. 

We have the feeders out of the sun
under the eaves near the media room window.

Well, I've been making her recipe of 1 cup white granulated sugar with 1 cup semi-boiling water. I use DI water. After the sugar is completely dissolved in the hot water, I add 3 cups cold DI water and continue to stir. I wash out the hummingbird feeders completely with a tiny drop of dish soap and rinse the pieces twice over. I don't want these delicate little ones to get sick and die from a contamination of soap or anything else. Then I pour the mixture of sugar nectar into the feeders and the rest of it goes into ice cube trays. I use the ice cubed nectar to keep the feeders cool. I keep the cubes in a baggy in the freezer until needed.

When I started doing this recipe I didn't think I would get any thing but bees coming to the feeders. Then I saw one hummingbird. Then 3 days later there were 3 little drinkers. Next day 5. And then now we have 7 that David counted this morning and he took the picture to prove it to me. These little shits are telling the whole neighborhood about the new Alfresco restaurant with one Michelin Star that has the best food around.

There are 7 hummers in this picture.
4 sitting and drinking and 3 fluttering.

So the recipe that I got from watching Robbie on her channel was a good thing. I have never gotten this many hummingbirds in one year, EVER. It has always been just one or two and we used the store-bought red junk. Robbie is right, hummingbirds don't care what color their food is just as long as it's good. Tonight I'm going to have David pull the feeders so I can wash them and restock their food for the morning. I'm putting in new hummingbird food every night now because they drink it all up. David says he'll pick up two new feeders at HEB this coming weekend if the population keeps expanding like this. 

Next is hummingbird baths. Yeah, she shows how to make them on her channel too.

Religion in a Nutshell

 

Silly Sign Saturday - Billboards

 

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Wet Dog Wednesday

 

Tickle Me Tuesday - Autonomous Car Pranking

I saw this video that made me laugh and then I found something related to it and started laughing more. I know I shouldn't have been laughing but it's just funny to me that these people figured out how to disable the cars and how to herd them and play games with them. Anyways, please enjoy and here is the video. The second part is taken from here. If you can't bring it up I'll put it below. 

Self-driving cars are, essentially, robots that have the unenviable job of hauling our asses around. Now, what I'm advocating here isn't actual hacking to be destructive (i.e. no GPS hacking to drive cars into petting zoos or kitten aquariums), I'm more just speculating what sorts of goofy, stupid things will be possible once these self-driving cars are common. I'm not actually endorsing anything, so if anyone gets themselves run over in a decade or so, don't come looking for me. I'll probably be in a cult or too obese to leave my van or something, anyway.

I'm assuming a few things now about these future self-driving cars: first, they'll be based on the ones we're seeing now technologically, and second, laws will be in place to let them drive on their own for some things, like in those self-parking demonstrations we've seen. Also, for all of these, I'm assuming they'd be done on cars that are either unoccupied or occupied with owners too drunk or asleep to yell at you to get the fuck away, you idiot kids.

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Aside from creating vast gangs of desperate, hungry valets, cars that park and drive on their own, unmanned, will be ripe for screwing with, like how as a kid you played cruel games on a drunk bison. Here are some ideas I came up with — please feel free to add to the list in the comments!

1. Car Herding!

This one, like most of these, uses the collision avoidance sensors and cameras almost every autonomous car will have. And while I can't be certain this (or any of these) will work, it might! 

For this one, you'll need a group of friends, say six or so. You'll spot an innocent robot car hunting around for a parking place, and then surround it in a loose, wide, circle. Various members of the group will approach the car's hazard-avoidance sensors (usually at the corners and central front and rear) to force the car to stop and/or change direction to avoid you. I was in a prototype Nissan in Japan that did just this.

If everyone works together, you should be able to "herd" the car at low speed in any direction you'd want, sort of like how you could herd a nervous livestock animal or something. I bet it'll be fun. I don't think this would ever be a popular way to steal a car because it seems really, really slow.

2. Instant Unwanted Autocross!

This one takes just a bit more advanced planning and a whole bunch of cones. You see a car heading your way, so you set up a quick autocross or slalom course with the cones and force the car into it. You'll probably have to use the herding techniques to get it into the coned-off area, but once it's in, if you set your cones right, the car's sensors will force it to navigate the autocross track as best it can.

Set one up in a parking lot and run multiple cars through, while taking wagers on times for some serious fun!

3. Roller Skiing!

This one's easy. Put on roller skates, grab a plunger, wait for a car to come by, looking for a spot in a parking garage. When it's close, jam the plunger on the car and hold on for one hell of a probably just-above-walking-pace ride!

4. Auto Sumo!

This one may be tricky, but should be worth it. You'll need a nice big empty parking lot or something and two autonomous cars. Herd them close to each other, then enclose them in a ring of cones. from there, try and get them to circle and chase and go after each other by blocking/revealing the collision sensors. At some point, the cars should start reacting to each other. Each car should have a GPS destination set just beyond the other car, so they are forced to navigate past one another.

The winner is the one who forces the opponent out of the ring first!

5. The Trap!

This one's also pretty straightforward: track a car as it's driving, then surround it with objects (front first, so it stops) so that you've trapped it!