The strangest thing is happening with this blog.

Something in the entry for March 2 has attracted 90 TIMES more visits than the average readership for just about any other entry. And I can't figure out what exactly about that day is attracting page views.

The entry is about a heat sensor I was using in an Arduino experiment. The only things about the entry of significance was a Chinese address from which I had obtained the sensor and the specific name of the sensor: DHT22.

That page can't be attracting readers because it is important or funny or significant in any way. The page views must be from specific searches or robots programmed to look for certain key words.

In either case, the only two things likely to be of such specific inquiry are the sensor (and that Chinese address. Everything else in the entry is vanilla information.

To test my theory, I added the Chinese address at the bottom of a subsequent entry. If people or content robots were looking for that address (or part of that address), I should see a rise in its page view. So far, nada.

I guess a second test will be this page: the specific name of the sensor. DHT22

DHT22

DHT22

I am convinced that The Donald really has no desire to be president. I think he's in it for the publicity. He's still peddling his "brand." What a douche.

I realized today that I feel sorry for middle easterners. Not the ones who try to kill us; they deserve whatever punishment we administer. Not them, the rest. The people who just want to live doing something to earn a living, find someone to share the experience of life with, grow old peacefully while watching one’s family expand. And they get to do that in the middle of sand and rocks, dryness and heat.  Seems like the one thing that makes life out there even possible is the ocean of oil they sit on.

Up to now, the oil has been their ticket to wealth but that flow is choking off. It is a finite resource and societies today seem to be more inclined to find alternate ways of deriving energy.

I see this as a wonderful opportunity for the Arabs to segue their oil money into the next means of energy generation–what they have most of–the sun. Then they should create a bazillion new jobs building solar farms, stringing wiring, storage, transmission, etc.  Hell, they could run wires to foreign places to provide electricity.

Being able to create energy, alter its form, then transmit it from one point to another to do work, is a pretty valuable skill for mankind’s prosperity.

Also, any nation (including ours) that borders an ocean, should be creating new jobs by building desalinization plants. Lots of work for lots of people. Scientists to determine design and location allowing for sea rise, engineers to build, people to construct, workers to run and maintain the plants. The plants would become beehives of economic generation stemming from the ability to turn seawater into fresh; billions will be created by providing the liquid of life in a steady availability.

Virtually unlimited water can then translate into food (and luxury).

Have to add another book to my virtual library.

The Terror by Dan Simmons.

The book is a fictionalized telling of Britain's John Franklin expedition in 1845 whose purpose was to discover and map the Northwest Passage. Inthralling story. Naval version of the Donner Party in some ways. Nearly one thousand pages of amazing work considering that's a thousand pages of description of the arctic. Not an easy task. And yet, he pulls it off.

Within those 1,000 pages of frigid exposition is a shipload of doomed men who endure—until they don't—horrific experiences. The characters are so finely drawn that you get to know many as individuals. You also get to know much about boats, the Royal Navy, survival, ice, despair. It's all entwined. Including the presence of a malevolent monster who whittles away expedition members in varied gruesome ways.

I'm ordering a book on the real expedition to compare it to this historical novel. (From what I've learned so far, The Terror meshes with what's actually now known about the fate of the expedition–minus the monster, I'm guessing. (Unless one sees the monster as a metaphor.)

A fine read.