Hose Testing.

From Kestrel, who notes she had enthusiastic permission to have these posted. Click for full size!

These are hoses waiting to be tested.

The hoses are laid out straight and hooked up to a machine. It fills them with water, and then measures the pressure. Hoses have different pressures they are rated for. These particular hoses will have 400 pounds of pressure. When they fight fires, they will not use near that much pressure – they will only use 125 to 150 pounds of pressure, because if it’s higher than that, the firefighter will not be able to control the hose.

Some hoses are rolled up afterwards, and some are folded carefully right on the engine ready for use. That box they are folding the hose into goes onto the engine.

The ladders have to be tested too. Nobody wants to climb a ladder, in full turnout gear, carrying a charged hose, and have it fail. The ladders are subjected to 500 pounds of pressure, which is carefully measured with gauges.

The engines have to be kept full of water and fuel, so they are ready at all times to go on a fire if necessary. This is engine 2 getting filled with water. This is a fairly small engine and “only” holds 750 gallons of water. That’s 6,000 pounds, or three tons. The bigger engines hold 1,200 gallons, which is 9,600 pounds. That’s a lot of mass… never pull out in front of a fire engine! They have a hard time stopping suddenly.

A close up of the control panel on engine 2. Fire engines have a lot of knobs on them…

Back at the station, all done with hose testing for another year.

© Kestrel, all rights reserved.

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain.

A while back, Rick asked me about Bitcoin. Along with the rather alarmed look on my face, I shook my head and said “stay the fuck away from it.” That said, I wasn’t in a position to explain all the reasons why, or the history of it and all that. I just muttered “stay the fuck away” again. Conveniently, David Gerard has a book all about that! Many of you are familiar with Mr. Gerard from Rational Wiki. I got this for Rick, but of course, I had to read it too, because book.

It’s excellent, covers what you need to know, and is informative, entertaining, and sometimes, horrifying. So if you’ve been curious, or thinking maybe you ought to “get in on that”, read first. You can read select excerpts from the book here.

William T. Horton.

Chris Ford: Affinity &emdash; Horton1

Click for full size.

William T. Horton is an artist little know these days. His work is stark, yet full of expressiveness and intensity. The Public Domain has an excellent article up, with many images. Just a few more here. Click all for full size.

The publisher Leonard Smithers (1861–1907) launched, bankrolled or otherwise helped the careers of an impressive variety of names: Richard Burton, Aubrey Beardsley, Aleister Crowley, Ernest Dowson, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, and Max Beerbohm were all referred to as “Smithers People” at one time or another. He drew to his circle the most eccentric and interesting characters of the era and in 1896 launched the arts and literary magazine the Savoy to showcase many of them. Aubrey Beardsley was made art editor while Arthur Symons was placed at the editorial helm. While not entirely a “Decadent” outfit (it also published George Bernard Shaw and Joseph Conrad), the magazine became a lightning rod for the curious and in it, as Bernard Muddiman wrote, “the abnormal, the bizarre, found their true home”1. It also launched the career of an illustrator and mystic named William T. Horton. Arguably one of the most fascinating and most unusual of all the “Smithers People”, he published very little work and remains almost completely unknown today.

Chris Ford: Affinity &emdash; Horton2

The Path to the Moon from Horton’s A Book of Images (1898). Click for full size.

Chris Ford: Affinity &emdash; Horton3

Horton’s cover for Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1899) — Source: private scan from book. Click for full size.

Chris Ford: Affinity &emdash; Horton4

One of two Horton images featured in H. Rider Haggard’s The Mahatma and the Hare, a Dream Story (1911) — Source. Click for full size.

You can read and see much more at The Public Domain. Horton’s A Book of Images can be seen in its entirety here. W.B. Yeats’s introduction to A Book of Images is well worth reading, too.

Sunday Facepalm.

Janet Mefferd is all manner upset over a protection in place for LGBT seniors living in long term care. Honestly, I would have thought this would have been too much, even for asshole Christians to target, but no. So many people walk this life in a quiet and often desperate quest for basic acceptance and respect. It’s not an awful thing to expect the barest acceptance and respect to at least be proffered at the end of life, but no, this is a major problem.

On yesterday’s episode of Janet Mefferd Live, Mefferd discussed an article published by The Daily Signal that claimed that the California bill violated the First Amendment rights of doctors and staff working with aging LGBTQ patients. Mefferd also claimed that the bill was offensive to Christians.

“When you consider that we are not to bear false witness as Christians, we cannot call people by the opposite pronoun that they really are,” Mefferd said. “We can’t. It’s lying. It’s engaging in a fiction that is dishonest, and the government cannot compel you to lie.”

Oh my oh my. All of a sudden, you just can’t bear false witness! When it comes to lying, you really have a hard time beating religious people of all types. Christians excel at lying, but of course, if you’re lying for Jesus, it’s okely dokely. Christians lie every damn day, it’s nearly part of the creed, along with stretching, twisting, and battering their own “biblical truths” on a regular basis. We won’t even get into the mass lies of creationists and ‘intelligent design’ proponents. Goodness me, you gotta refer to people by their pronoun of choice! The sky will fall down any moment now.

To be quite clear, using any given person’s pronouns of choice is not a lie. They have let you know who they are, that’s all. Think of it like infants – there’s a reason people ask about infants, you can’t really tell, and they prefer to be respectful. Why not be that way with all other ages? It’s no skin off your nose, and when you offer basic respect to others, you’re much more likely to get it back throughout your life, even when you find yourself in long term elder care. On the other hand, declaring other peoples’ lives to be a fiction is a poisonous evil, and one which should be stopped at every turn. Aged Reasoner has a post up in which it’s stated that you can’t truly know what goes on in someone else’s brain, and I agree with that. We do our best to communicate with others, but in the end, we have to take most people at face value, and go by not just words, but also actions. It is not up to Ms. Mefferd to blithely declare anyone else’s life a fiction; to determine that what happens in their brain to be a lie; to decide that a very person’s life is a lie. There is no attempt to deceive on the part of LGBT people, quite the contrary.

“The fact that they will make no religious exemptions shows the fury with which they view us,” Mefferd continued. “And that’s really not an overstatement, by the way.”

Sigh. No, it’s not fury. Rather the opposite, Ms. Mefferd, but christians aren’t exactly good at figuring out this whole respect toward others business, they think it’s something owed only to themselves. It’s always all about them, and their beliefs. And yes, that’s one fuck of an overstatement, Ms. Mefferd. You don’t get to opt out of the basic rules of a civil society when you like, and of course, that makes you about nuts with spiteful anger. You always want exceptions “give us an exemption!” Then you turn to your wailing and gnashing of teeth, claiming this, that, and the other is persecution. It’s not persecution. You’re simply expected to be inclusive and respectful, which I do realize is christian bane. Go off and create your perfect christian utopia, where you can treat all people like shit, and busy yourself with shoving your nose of judgment everywhere. You’d be happy, and so would everyone else to be shot of you all.

Via RWW.