Posts Made By: Rod Kaufman

Yup, don't count "non-Floridians" who live and die of covid in Florida and otherwise mess with the numbers and you've got nirvana!
"Health officials have repeatedly warned about a potential fourth surge as state leaders eased restrictions and several lifted mask mandates. The first warning sign came when case numbers, after weeks of steep declines, appeared to level off -- with the country still averaging tens of thousands of new cases daily. That kind of plateau previously predicted surges.
Cases of the worrying variants -- notably the highly contagious B.1.1.7 variant -- have also climbed and are set to become the dominant strain by the end of March or early April.
Meanwhile, governors and local leaders have eased restrictions on indoor gatherings, citing fewer Covid-19 cases and more vaccinations. And spring break crowds are gathering in Florida and nationwide air travel numbers are hitting pandemic-era records."

"Michigan cases are increasing the fastest, with more than a 50% jump this week compared to last, according to the Johns Hopkins data. Delaware, Montana, Alabama and West Virginia have also seen big increases."
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/18/health/us-coronavirus-thursday/index.html

The latest HS coming from the mouths of the GOP and magamedia:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4Rz73PxT1E

Originally Posted by David Cotterell

In my neck of the woods a spruce 2x4x8' dressed stud was about $2.50 - $3.00  a year ago.

Today i checked.  $8.00......  Plywood Aspenite sheets which used to be $10 are now nearly $40....

Apparently low interest rates are driving a housing boom which supply cannot keep up with.  At least, that's what they told me at the Home Depot....

I'm thinking of having a garage built here but not at these lumber prices...

Is this happening in the USA too?

Dave

The price of lumber has increased in the USA , too. I don't think it's quite has high as in Canada, though.

Here's what's on the horizon that just might bring the cost of wood, not to mention housing down, and in fact, way down:
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/business/money-report/3d-printed-housing-developments-suddenly-take-off-heres-what-they-look-like/2548981/

And, for an astronomy break, the mars rover "Curiosity" spotted clouds over Mars on March 19, 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0uyHpM0n5w
Awesome detail!

Originally Posted by Darian Rachal

Thanks, Rod. Very nice video.

You're welcome. I thought it would be nice to take a break and consider the worldly view from another planet!
PS: I post in cloudy nights which doesn't have a politics forum but even that can be a real downer at times so I'm taking a break from that, too. Some of its just too hard to swallow like huge threads on whether or not an old piece of pothole glass should be used for grinding a mirror. Five or more differing opinions of the resident "experts" on the same ronchi or DPAC results. It's worse for interferometry. An observer claiming he can see m51 from a brightly lit parking lot with a 67mm refractor. People who think they can see the central star in the ring nebula just about every time they roll their scopes out onto their driveways. Enough!

Originally Posted by Greg Shaffer

You mention the single most irritating thing about CN for me.....The use of "handles".

Not to mention the repetitive wiseass comments like GSO 6" F8 mirrors are likely spherical and or have other inherent problems. That's bullshit. There's many fine examples of them online. Here's a nice video taken through one of 'em: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyWVWcS0_vw

Originally Posted by Jim Moscheck

I wish the equipment forums here were more popular, 15 years ago you could ask a question and get answers pronto. Not so much anymore. I used to go by my real name on CN, but changed it a few years ago for privacy reasons. Still, I think back to a very long thread in the eyepiece section before I "discovered" astromart. I had sold a 24mm Panoptic to a guy who has become a fellow club member and he wanted info on the eyepiece as it didn't work too well in his homemade dob. Turned out he had never noticed coma before in his newt as he only used narrow field EPs up to that point. He thought the eyepiece might have been taken apart and put together wrong. I'm sure that EP ended up costing him a lot more than he actually paid since he bought a Paracorr to correct the coma and more wide field EPs to go with it after all the advice he got here.

Back on topic, I have a bunch of woodworking project lined up for this spring and need to buy some more wood. I'm redoing our hot tub enclosure and I bought and made the cedar sides/doors last fall and even then the lumber was expensive. Oh well.

In general, I found the threads in the astromart in the past to be more specific than the multipage threads on CN. For example, CN has a pinned thread on reflector collimation and that ought to be more than enough. Repetitively though, you still see the same issue with some boob who can't collimate a simple newt if his life depended on it. And, of course, there are multiple replies, some of them contradictory, that apparently fail to help with an endless sea of issues that probably serve no other purpose than to confuse that hapless boob in the first place. And, of course, if the scope isn't collimated correctly, the off axis aberrations will appear even worse in the eyepiece. In other common instances, repetitive threads reoccur on where to have a mirror recoated. A simple forum search would show the past threads that have already discussed the same thing, ad nauseum. I recall one jerk who stated he had did his "research" on mirror coating on CN and didn't find anything so I posted three links from a forum search in reply to his BS and never heard from him again. One has to wonder where the heck their moderators are when this sort of nonsense occurs again and again.

Originally Posted by Greg Shaffer

You mention the single most irritating thing about CN for me.....The use of "handles".

As a CN moderator, can't you contact the administrators and ask for a change so real names are attached to real people?

Originally Posted by Mel Maki

How many people would they lose?  Fifty percent?

I think it would be an improvement...