10 Thoughts for August 30, 2014

1. Google X officially unveiled its 2 year old skunkwork program, Project Wing: A really cool drone to deliver packages.  This drone is not like other drones you've seen, to be sure: It flies in horizontal position like a plane, which makes it extremely efficient in flight, but then orients itself vertically and releases a tethered package that drops rapidly at first, but slows down and gently touches down on the ground as the tether is released.  Cool stuff.  I'm still partial to my cats with drones, though.
2. Rationing?  Yeah, that'll work.  Not.  Venezuela, suffering from shortages in the first place because of price controls and other wrong-way policies, is going deeper into socialism and instituting finger-scanners to ration goods.
3. Silica in the water?  It's okay to ingest.  But it does create buildup of scaling -- the stuff you have to clean off your ceramics and glass wares.  It is the core reason why you use a rinsing agent -- the blue liquid that you fill into that little compartment in the door -- with dishwashers.
4. Have you seen Canada NATO's tweet?  It's gone viral.  I'm going with a new hashtag: #UkraineisnotRussia.
5. Vladimir Putin said the laughable: Don't mess with Russia because they're a nuclear super power.  That was a stupid boast, huh?  As a super power, using nuclear weapons against a smaller country that does not have nuclear weapons (like the Ukraine) would cement Russia's fate and isolation and would result in charges of crimes against humanity.  Against any other nuclear super power or its allies, Russia would seal a parallel fate of death and burning.  And every time Russia makes these threats, they only push former Soviet bloc / Warsaw Pact states closer to NATO and the west -- see Ukraine's request to join NATO and to fast track its application to the EU.  By pseudo-bravado, Putin ends up exhibiting vulnerability, that he must tell us the obvious.
6. The Finns, it seems, are slowly coming to realize just how much of a thug Russia has become, and have entered agreements for greater cooperation with NATO, while its defense minister suggested the need to join NATO.  That Putin has threatened World War III were Finland to join NATO, should demonstrate just how crazy Putin is.
7. Saw an awesome thing early this morning while riding the bike on the Eastside Esplanade: A DJ spinning tunes from a portable system, right next to the walkway.  The party never ends.
8. The next-generation high end CPUs are here: Core i7-5960X, i7-5930K, and i7-5820K.  We're talking 8- and 6-core CPUs with 2x multi-threading, so it's like 12- and 16-core machines when running multicore-supported software.  The best deal is the 6-core i7-5820K, at ~$400.  It's roughly comparable to the current i7-4960X, except that the older CPU costs ~$1050.
9. 105 -- The number of plays USC Trojans had against Fresno State.  Broke the PAC-12 record they did, and within a spitting distance of the all-time NCAA FBS record of 115.  The offense looked smooth and crazy loaded, with 10 different players catching the ball.  It didn't matter who was in there at wide receiver, every one of them was grabbing balls out of the air and gaining chunks of yards after the catch.  This was way more impressive than when Norm Chow was running the offense with Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart at the helm.  Sark's the real deal and the Trojans are going to be a tough opponent for Stanford, next week.
10. A word about the Fresno State game: I don't understand how, if the NCAA is trying to protect athletes, why they allow offensive line players to tackle below the knees, or allow them to roll on the ground to take out defensive line players.  Every time I saw this during the game, I held my breath, knowing next week USC would be playing Stanford.  These techniques are illegal in the NFL, so why does the NCAA allow it?  I call foul.