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On what are we to keep our lives focused? It’s a good question during Advent.

Dear Wormwood,
Be sure that the patient remains completely fixated on politics. Arguments, political gossip, and obsessing on the faults of people they have never met serves as an excellent distraction from advancing in personal virtue, character, and the things the patient can control. Make sure to keep the patient in a constant state of angst, frustration, and general disdain towards the rest of the human race in order to avoid any kind of charity or inner peace from further developing. Ensure the patient continues to believe that the problem is “out there” in the “broken system” rather than recognizing there is a problem with himself. Keep up the good work.

–Not written by C.S. Lewis but extraordinarily apropos today

Or another:

Recognize what is in your circle of concern and your circle of control. By keeping focus and energy on things that are in your circle of control, you stay focused on what you can actually do and avoid needless worry about things you cannot control. This focus helps you create real momentum towards goals and reduces a sense of victimhood and blaming others for problems you can neither control nor influence. You can sometimes change or move things that are outside your control in the circles of interests/concern with proper evaluation and effort, but recognizing when you do not have control over a situation keeps you from useless worry and concern about things and people you cannot change.

Stephen Covey

This all matches the central teach of Christ which was even more soul-centered. Right after teaching that one need only have complete trust in the Father’s love and care for them, he tells them the same advice: keep your circle of interest completely encapsulated in your circle of control. Even moreso, justice means that measure you hold against others will be held against you. So stay focused the Father’s love for you and rooting out the evil that keeps you from loving all others.

1“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. ² For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

³ “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? ⁴ How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Matthew 7:1-6

This dog has an existential crisis when a horse comes up to say hi.

Even Atari isn’t immune from Web3 blockchain silliness. Using the AtariX platform, players can mint a non-fungible token that acts as their access pass and compete in the classic game Asteroids on the blockchain.

Players connect their bitcoin/ether wallet and mint NFT access passes. The access pass costs 0.0015 Ether (about $5). On AtariX, the fee allows players to compete against other players, potentially win Atari gift cards, and participate in its ecosystem of games.

Now that motherboards have just about every device one could want built in (surround sound audio, networking, etc), most of us have a few extra PCI slots laying around in our PC’s that aren’t getting used. Don’t lose out – they can be put to good use as:

• Extra USB 3.1/3.0 ports
• PCIe storage cards – some that can accept up to 8 NVMe drives
• Video capture cards
• Audio cards

I went out and got a Fanblack USB 3.2 Gen 2 pci card that gave me 7 more super fast USB 3.2 and USB-C ports. I tested the ports with some of my devices, and the speeds were dramatically improved from one set of front panel ports that likely used a cheaper and slower USB chipset.

Even better, I moved a bunch of cords to the back of my PC and out of the way. Now the front of my PC is clear of cables and devices and it just gets the odd USB stick.

Don’t let those empty PCI slots go to waste. Just make sure you check your motherboard book and put cards in the right slots so each gets the correct number of internal PCI lanes and doesn’t share with other devices.

Links:

• https://www.howtogeek.com/useful-pcie-cards-to-put-in-your-secondary-pcie-slot/
• https://www.pcworld.com/article/2533393/5-useful-upgrades-for-your-pcs-unused-pcie-slots.html#

Electron beam irradiators are used for sterilization and specialized polymer generation/combination. These devices are rated in MeV range and emit astounding amounts of radiation/charged particles.

Anyone even entering the same room as the active device would likely receive a fatal dose nearly instantly. The radiation is so intense, the air itself is ionized to the point it glows blue (seen clearly at timestamp 1:08 in the video below). It’s was an effect seen above the Chernobyl reactor right after it’s explosion.

These devices are placed in special hardened ‘radiation bunkers’ with winding shielded corridors that keep operators safely away from any straight-line exposure to radiation sources. Still, there is a long history of operators that have been seriously injured and killed by huge amounts of radiation when they ignored safety protocols and circumvented safety devices to enter the rooms.

Someone decided to see what it looked like inside an active electron beam irradiator by putting a GoPro camera through the device. To even survive, it was encased in a 3/8″ lead case with a 1/2″ thick 50% lead glass window – with an additional 1/4″ lead plate above the camera. Even with all that shielding, it completely overwhelmed the CCD in the Gopro. As it rounds the final corner at around 1:00, you can see charged particles showing up as static on the video. It’s a terrifying ride through a lethal radiation dose. Give it a watch.