I decided to try out DuckDuckGo. The tracking didn’t bother me. Those that tracked me would find out very little about me. First, when I can, I write. When I write, I do research, mostly on the internet. One of my books starts out in France so I did some research on France, especially Paris. Oddly, for a few weeks after, I started getting ads about France and Europe. If they were looking for info on me, they struck out. More, all they had to do was ask me. All they needed to do was read my blog. My life is pretty much open.

One thing about it, it did alert me to the fact that people were watching over my shoulder. Many times, it brought some laughter to me. Sometimes, I had to just shake my head.

Now that I am using DuckDuckGo, I still get ads, strange ads. I get ads like a four thousand pound skip loader. I get ads for hydraulic equipment. Stuff I don’t use or ever looked for.

Actually, I find some of them very interesting and even educational. Did you know they build huge commercial generators that run on Gas, Diesel or natural gas. If I had one delivered, I might be able to replace the local power company for three or four blocks. Why can’t they deliver these things to disaster areas. They have them on wheels. The can lift them in with hopter-choppers

Actually, I’d like to have a generator, but more in the 2 to 4 KW range. We do have power outages now and then, but I have a hard time letting go of the money when it is so infrequent, until we have an outage. It would be nice to have one for my Nissan EV too.

When I saw the ad for the skip loader, I spent a few minutes thinking of ways I might be able to use such a thing to make money. Obviously, some people do use them to make money. So picture me rubbing my scruffy little beard trying to think of someone that might need some dirt moved. Actually, I could use the thing for myself, but I don’t think I even have the money for it. If I had the money, I don’t think I’d want to let go of it.

You put the term tractor on the side of a machine and instantly the price goes up 25% or more. Commercial quality you know.

What I’d really like to borrow is one of those big machines that goes in, clamps onto a tree and severs just below where it is being held. Then the machine drives off with the tree in it’s grips. I have about 10 pine trees that ruin my lawn, drop needles on my roof and cause damage to my foundation. I don’t know anyone who has one. Even more, I’m not sure it would be able to get into my backyard. ( I suppose I could take down the fence temporarily.)

Maybe I need to use my regular browser and look for one of those machines. Perhaps I can get a deal for ten trees. The neat thing, all I would need to do is browse and they would come looking for me.

Meantime, I need to find a team to take down that pin oak tearing into my my foundation, before I have to look for someone who will fix my foundation.

Back in the day, there was a very popular song, which most of us enjoyed hearing. I guess maybe I heard it too much. It was sung by Kenny Rogers and was the story of the reluctant hero who, through most of the song was, was known as the coward of the county.

I was reminded of the song today, Only I would change three things. First the character in the song was not a coward but was simply honoring a promise. The character I’m thinking of is afraid to leave the basement and hold a news conference, probably at the behest her handlers, aka puppeteers. Second, she is a woman, representing a party that knows not how to define a woman. Third the hero in the song is called the coward of the county. The woman I am referring to is the coward of the country, a one letter difference, you see.

I learned the phrase when my oldest son was in Little League. It is when the home team provides the biased umpire. To be sure, to really admit it, there were not as many cases of home cooking as I thought.

For sure, we did get some bad calls. On the other hand I am sure most of the umps were trying to be objective. Were there biased umps? Sure. On the other hand, there were umps that maybe called it the other way, to make sure they weren’t being biased.

It’s hard to find an umpire that isn’t biased. I guess even in the majors there might be one or two calls that go the wrong way. On the other hand, their calls are watched carefully and if a bias, either way shows up, someone has a few words with the one making the calls. Moreover, there is a professional pride involved.

I was never a professional umpire, but I was an unbiased one. I went to Syracuse for ten weeks for a school. In the afternoon, I often went for walks through a nearby park. I started watching Little League games on the way. Next thing I knew I was called in as the unbiased umpire. You see, being from Desoto County, I had no bias, at least theoretically, in the games.

I must not have done too badly. They kept asking me back. Either way, no one ever accused me of home cooking.

It is a problem in our society. Getting unbiased people to call strikes and balls. All too often those who sit on the bench in judgement are biased. Even those who try to be unbiased are. Worse yet, many are biased and are open about it.

What it means is that we have a serious problem in our society. When the judge and jury is biased and calls a person guilty when no law was even broken, it puts the general population in fear of false judgement. It might even encourage people to break the law. It encourages people to look the other way as the government officials openly break the law.

However, it’s not just the court system. Recently, the director of the FBI admitted a very biased activity in saying he knew the laptop belonged to Old Joe’s son. But why did he cover it up. There can only be one reason, to let Old Joe win the election. This is home cooking at its worst. This is the highest office in the FBI interfering with the election and openly admitting to it, without any fear. And then, of course, they all insisted there was no fraud. Worse, if someone suggested fraud, they immediately hushed them up. They made threats. They immediately made fun of them. They tried to put their businesses out of business.

Then too, there was more home cooking, by the press. You can ignore it. You can try to deny it but it was not only obvious, but in some cases, they even admitted it. This, when they say that the job of the media is to call balls and strikes. Yet they call nothing but strikes when the republicans are up and they call nothing balls when the dems are at bat.

Are we destined to become a third rate society because we have an obvious Pravda making all the calls?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone honestly and unbiased calling the balls and strikes at least half as well as the professional major league baseball umps. Sorry. Not going to happen in our lifetime. And the consequences will likely be far worse than any of us can imagine.

Actually, at this time, I would settle for what we called home cooking when my son was playing baseball. Better than what we have in the no-justice system. Better than what we have in the court system. Far better than what we have in the new media. Even more, it was less obvious back then.

I didn’t look it up so I am relying on my poor memory. Seems to me it was said by Frank Lloyd Wright. His point was that the design should be that the function should be most important and the appearance would take care of itself. Seems a good idea to me.

So, a few days ago, I saw a guy getting in his big, huge pickup, which by the way looked very nice. I noticed the emblem on the side of the truck, something to the effect of certified for offroad. I complemented him on his truck and I duly noted the the offroad certification. He smile and said, “Yup.” I asked him if it was ever offroad. He said, “Nope. No, no.” Somehow I don’t think it will ever be either.

Soon it will be one year since the attack on Israel. More important, there are untold people who have died, mainly because Old Joe decided to finance Iran, one of the major financers of the attacks on Israel. As I said when he did it, one of the basic rules of winning a war, don’t finance the enemy. It’s kind of a dumb thing. Well, it is a really dumb thing to do, that is, unless it was his goal to aid the enemy, which would not surprise me at all.

Have you ever met someone that sets his mind on building something and then builds it. That was my father. He could and did build houses from the ground up with little or no help. This includes, electric, plumbing and all. However, he was not limited to working with wood. About the only thing he didn’t do was weld. I suspect, if he had a mind to, he would have done that too.

Regardless, I have seen him set out to build with wood or steel and with success. He was a man that had to be building, long after he retired. He had two heart attacks and still no one could keep him from building. Indeed, he was building when he had his last heart attack at 70.

I so wished I had been by his side more and leaned from him. When it comes to electronics, I am right at home. Not so much when it comes to replacing facets. I spent two days replacing a facet in the bathroom. I think I am personally responsible for the need to repave the road that leads to Goodman Road. I am sure I wore it out going back and forth to the hardware store. I tried to add a fridge with an Ice maker to the kitchen and I about turned the kitchen into a lake. At least, with the facet, it worked afterword. I had to call for a plumber to help with the lake in the kitchen.

Some folks know how to do things. Other folks don’t. Old Joe was an example of one of those who knew how to do what he wanted to do and he did. Unfortunately, what he wanted to do left the US and indeed the rest of the world in really bad shape. It was as he wanted. It was as he planned. He fouled things up, not because of incompetence, but because of his determination.

To be sure, everything he did benefited the dems and was a disaster for the world. In his mind and in the minds of the dems, he was a great success. And because of that, the world will spend the next twenty years climbing out of the abyss he created, if we ever do. Now, let’s hope we don’t have to find out about Kamala. I would just as soon she never get the chance. Then again, she just might be one of those puppeteers pulling the strings since Old Joe took office.

I would just as soon put Trump back in there. He not only showed he can do things, but his efforts are to the benefit of the people, the country and, yes even for the world. I have an electric car, but I sure would like to see the price of gas back down below 2 dollars a gallon. I would like to see the bankruptcy of Russia, so they can’t try to take over the world. And yes, I kind of preferred the days where we had peace in the Middle East for, I don’t know, another 4 or 5 years anyway.

What does it mean and where did it come from? Perhaps some have wondered about the term. It is easy to look it up. However, there is more to it than you will find on many internet sites.

First, it is an abbreviation for hertz, a term originating in the early 1960s to replace the electronic term cycles per second, or frequently just cycles. It sounds really technical, but it’s not. The term cycle is likely as old as the English language. You get up in the morning, you eat breakfast, go to work, pause for lunch, go back to work and return home, etc. Then, next day, you do the same thing. It is a cycle which occurs at the rate of once a day. Okay, there are variations. There are weekends, holidays and, yes, those wonderful vacations. But you get the point. I’m trying to make this simple.

Specifically, in electricity, it refers to something that happens on a regular time. Mostly, it means the times that the flow of electrons reverse their flow, mostly in wires and mostly per second. If we have a wire going north/south then the electrons flow north then south. If we are referring to house hold electricity, that happens 60 times per second. Hence, the term 60 cycles per second, or cps. Note, each cycle the direction changes twice. So, at 60 Hz, the electrons actually change directions 120 times per second.

Then, one day, somebody, I don’t know who, decided cps is confusing, I don’t know why. I’m not that smart and I figured it out. So they invented the term hertz. If you know why they decided on that, maybe you can tell me on a comment.

At any rate, as we in the science community like to do, they decided on Hz for the abbreviation. The long and the short of it, it is that simple.

How-some-ever, it does get complex in a hurry. In the US, the standard way electricity is moved from one place to another is normally 60 Hz. It has been determined it is an efficient means of transmission. Obviously, there are people who disagree. In some countries, they use 50 Hz. If I had to speculate as to why, I would say it is to keep us from using our appliances in their countries.

In most airplanes, they use 400 Hz. It works good there because they don’t have to transmit the electricity as far and it allows them to make things in the plane smaller and lighter.

Perhaps the general public has gotten used to the term suddenly when the home computer hit the stores. Suddenly, everyone and his or her cousin was using the term megahertz without having an Idea of what it meant. Well, they did figure out that that the higher the megahertz the faster the computer.

Here’s one for you. The first computer I owned ran at 1 MHz, or one million cycles per second. The second one ran at 16 MHz. This is referred to as the clock speed. That’s right, computers have clocks in them. In this case, the electrons do not normally reverse direction. They try to make the clock frequency a square wave.

Da. What is a square wave. Let’s put it this way. If I had a switch, a light and a battery. If I turned the switch on and off one time per second, lighting the light 1 time every second for a half a second, then turned it off half a second, this would truly be a square wave with a frequency of one Hz. When the electricity flows, it flows full voltage for half a second. Then, for a half a second, nothing.

Let’s imagine that you are very fast and you could turn that switch on and off 60 times per second, then you would be generating a 60 Hz square wave. Well, my 1 MHz Vic computer had an electronic clock inside it that electronically switched the electric flow at a rate of 1 million times per second. Now I don’t know about you, but that’s faster than I can do it. And, by today’s standards, that is slower than slow.

Today, they talk in terms of GHz. What is a GHz? That is a clock being turned on and off at the rate of one billion times per second. Let’s get this strait. That is beyond human comprehension, or at least mine.

So. Now that we have this incredibly fast clock, what do we do with it? The clock, as the name implies is used for timing. Most everything that happens in a computer happens at a specific part of the clock cycle, for instance, maybe when the current flows, but it could also be when it stops flowing too. The clock is what insures that everything happens at specific times. Otherwise, it would all happen more or less at random times and the outcome would be totally uncontrolled and unpredictable.

If we go back to my little 1 MHz computer, it performed work by following instructions. Some instructions were completed in one clock cycle, some in two, and some in three clock cycles. In general, we could say the computer could execute at least 330 thousand instruction per second. This was a function of the clock speed. If somehow, we could speed up the clock speed, we could make the computer go faster.

Therefore, over the years, one of the primary concerns of the engineers was to increase the clock speed and making the other parts keep up with the clocks.

So, here I am typing on my Inspiron 24 (2 MHz) at a rate of maybe 50 words per minute. And this machine is waiting on my every keystroke. I would guess well over 99 percent of the time in Idle.