Some Blog Site

I was inspired by this FoxTrot comic strip

to figure out exactly how many horsepower would be the equivalent of 350 elephantpower.

My answer: 2800 hp.

But then I got to thinking “What other animal-power could there be?” So I came up with a list. And made it into a web page, so that you could find the equivalent of the power of various animals. For example, a 2009 VW Rabbit actually has about 71,000 rabbitpower.

Anyway, head on over to Some Fun Site and try the Animal Power Converter to figure out how other animals compare to horses.

I will note that Bill Amend must have done his research, because as far as I can tell, the elephant is the most powerful land animal. A blue whale would theoretically dwarf the elephant in terms of horsepower, but I kept the list to land animals.

When comparing animals, remember that power is a function of force and distance and time. So an ox might be able to generate a lot of force, but it is not very speedy so it has a low power rating. And a cheetah is very fast, but it can’t move a lot of weight at that speed so it also has a low power number. A transmission could help in each case – give the ox some higher gears and give the cheetah some lower gear.

And if there’s an animal you want added to the list, please leave a comment here.

A while back I posted some information about Tree Climbers Guild, although they might not appreciate that I capitalized their band name here.

I’m taking this opportunity to point out that their songs are now on YouTube. Feel free to enjoy some of the sounds of my college days.

Tree Climbers Guild album

I know people have already done all the coronavirus comparisons to Disney’s Tangled, but I think our governor is filling her role too well. She compares quite easily to Mother Gothel.

And for those of you who aren’t familiar with Tangled, how about Stockholm syndrome? Think about it – a captor (Whitmer) keeps innocent people captive (Michiganders who aren’t sick) and tells them it’s for their own good and they believe her.

We are supposed to help this COVID-19 die down so we don’t get a second wave? That’s vague enough that it is always true. A second wave inevitable no matter how long you postpone, so give us information about how we’ll know it’s safe enough. Something more concrete than “trust me”.

Similarly, how flat a curve is flat enough? The growth rate has tapered off, the daily new cases have been on the decline for some time now. We were supposed to stay home to flatten the curve. Without a clear definition of when the curve is flat enough, I say it is. If you disagree, please let me know why Michigan hospitals are closing and laying off their workers.

Finally, why not let people work, who can work by themselves? Like lawn services, surveyors, some contractors, etc. “But science says social distancing works…” Sure, and if the point is to prevent person-to-person interaction, why did the governor ban surveyors from working? They walk in fields and forests alone, taking measurements. The same could be said about the guy who mows our neighbor’s lawn by himself, or at least he would if he could.

Anyway, here are some images that illustrate our dear leader’s decisions.

Some of our kids’ teachers sent out a link to a site that we could use to keep up on grammar lessons while schools are prohibited from meeting. It is called No Red Ink. It appears they are thorough in that their website promos display good grammar.

I half expected the marketing copy to have the common error of matching the verb with the nearest text rather than the actual subject – but it didn’t so I’m impressed. In case you’re wondering, the subject is one school district so the correct verb is uses to match the singular subject. The common mistake is to take the closest noun (2 school districts) and match the verb to that.

I also noticed they use the Oxford comma, so that makes me happy. I haven’t seen one of their actual lessons, so I can’t vouch for the completely, but their first impression was a good one.

One upside to being sheltered in place is that there are now some new accents on the Accenterator.com site. You can now train yourself how to sound like Elmer Fudd, Scooby Doo, or Mark Wahlberg. Oh, and there’s Beaker.

And it seems the German accent code went missing. I’ll have to re-write that one, as the only other place a backup might be is on a laptop that’s in a building that is closed due to fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Officially it’s closed because it has been deemed a non-essential business, but I’m thinking liability is a factor too.

Anyway, Elmer Fudd was the easiest to write. It took longer to find a decent picture of him than to code his accent. And the Boston accent (“smaht pahk”) took much longer to write than I expected. It was supposed to be just replace the Rs with Hs but it turns out to be more complicated than that.

I suppose I could have gone on with America in July and America in August, but the image was getting a little too long, plus I don’t want to predict exactly when we’ll be out of trouble. I thought that sequence from The Empire Strikes Back was a good fit for how things will go, but if you remember that part of the movie, Han Solo just moved into another bit of trouble and it wasn’t good for him just yet.

I thought about trying to caption who Jabba and cronies are in the world of 2020 – something like “countries who didn’t cripple their own economies” but it’s a little early for that. But I’m guessing there will be some countries in decent shape by the time America gets up and starts stumbling around – maybe they handled things better or maybe they were hit earlier so they recovered earlier.

For brevity’s sake, I should have stopped after the second image. Use that as the TL;DR version.

In case you can’t tell, those are glass cruise ships.

Because there’s no better incubator of diseases than cruise ships.