Its either pull a carriage or off to the dog food factory. Ask the horse for its preference.

I thought this was going to be a thread about me microwaving frozen dinners because the wife was busy at work.

Transient overvoltages. Basically, equip power systems with high performance surge arresters, lightnig arresters. These will shunt high voltages that could damage expensive equipment and cables to ground.

EMP would stil knock the power systems down. Breakers would trip and the lights would go out. Probably for days. But if equipment damage can be minimized, the its pretty much just a case of restarting things.

Blast damage from a low altitude hit isn't a utility problem. No sense in resoring power to a smoking crater. You isolate the damaged areas, get the lights back on elsewhere and cary on with what's left.

I used to be a scientist like you, until I took a marshmallow in the eye.

No lollygagging.

Wow ... so, are there any other things like that it does? I must confess, this is the first I'm seeing this.

Over the years I've always had a college ruled composition notebook nearby to jot down important ideas, instructions, tasks, etc.

For me, I have never seen any of the technology solutions to have ever gotten better than this.

In terms of flexibility, robustness, availability, and the lack of the need to fiddle endlessly with technology which almost does most of what I want (but with more effort)... I will stick with my black hard-cover lab books. It's independent of my employer, my time zone, what kind of power plugs are used locally, and vendors who decide they don't want to support it any more.

I've got a stack of them which go back almost 20 years. I've used them day in and day out. If I can come up with an approximate timeline as to what I'm looking for, I can usually find what I'm looking for fairly quickly.

Every now and then a co-worker will wonder why we're doing something a certain way, or how we decide on it ... and I can usually dig it up in my notes pretty quickly.

Go ahead, use your fancy cloud technologies, your scanning pens, your digicam pics of your notes ... me, I'll stick with the low tech solution which has served me well for many years.

Sure, I'm a grumpy old man. But I was grumpy 20 years ago. Now I'm just grumpy about different things. Endlessly fiddling with technology which isn't really any better than a pen and paper is one of them.

For me, the optimal solution already exists. If you are feeling really fancy, get one of those pens with the 4 different color inks -- you can annotate and mark things up to your hearts content.

I'm pretty sure it's already here, and has been for some number of years.

I hope you don't work as an English teacher.

Birdies are going to become very common.

You still need to get the ball to the green.

And, I assure you, for most middling golfers ... they are over par before they're on the green.

Say you're like me, and your longest shot is about 160-170 yards. Assuming I don't flub any shots (ha!), on a 510 yard par 5 hole, that means it takes me three shots to hit the green on a really good day, and slightly more on a typical day. Even with a big giant hole, I'm not going to one-putt most of the time. That ignores sand, water, missed shots, terrible shots, trees, and other things which mean I'm not going to be on the green in the right number of strokes for a birdie anyway.

In my experience, people who are at about my skill level are more likely to take 5 or more shots to even reach the green on a par 5, and that's before they're likely to make 2-4 putts.

You want to know how you can really make golf more accessible, reduce play time, and frustrate people less?

Have more courses put in more forward tee boxes to cut down the overall distance they have to travel to get to the point where they'd be putting, and encourage players to realize they're not as good as they think, and play the forward tees. Have casual players decide that if they're within a club length of the hole it's a gimme or in or otherwise good enough.

Unless you're playing in a tournament, a league, for money, or any reason which requires you to strictly play by the full set of rules ... the average players' score is already a bit of a fiction, and they know it. Stopping pretending that it's anything else.

Unless you're a highly skilled player, just play a loose approximation of the rules, and understand that my score of 115 might not be measured in the exact same way as your score of 73.

And even if you also scored 115 and we're tied, I saw you move your ball on 4, I saw you ground the club in the sand on 6, I know damned well you took a mulligan on 7 and 9 that you didn't count, and thought nobody notice you improve your lie on 11,14, and 16. And I know I did all of the same things.

The scores of amateur golfers don't mean the same thing as when Tiger Woods plays. And the sooner we stop asking them to do that, the more people will just play golf.

Don't change the hole size, just realize that the rules of competitive golf can't be applied to most of us in any meaningful sense of the word, and get over it.

we came up with a rule. If you can't score a par on at least one hole, you can't come back for 5 years

LOL, I'm a pretty bad golfer ... I've never scored below 100.

There are many many days if I followed your rule I'd have to stop playing entirely. :-P

My principal criteria for selecting a golf course is proximity and price. My home course is a 25 minute drive, and my membership costs about $1000/year for all the golf I can squeeze in, so going for a quick 9 after work is feasible in the summer. The green fees tend to be more like $25 without a cart.

I enjoy playing, but I'm under no illusions that I'm any good. And all of those courses that people yearn to play I just laugh at ... no course that costs that much money to play is worth me even trying. Because, as you said, my skill isn't up to the task, and my pocket book says I'd rather play 5 cheaper rounds than 1 expensive one just to say I did it.

Golf simply doesn't need to be that expensive of a pursuit. If you're a high-handicap golfer and you think you want to play on one of these courses, you're mostly wasting your money.

In the mean time, I'll just keep slogging away at the courses I'm willing to pay for, and slowly get a little better as I go. If nothing else, it makes for a rather good walk (I never play in a cart), and is something the wife and I enjoy doing together and in the company of friends.

Golf can be quite enjoyable (albeit frustrating) if you take a realistic approach to how much it's supposed to cost you.

While I could probably spend the hours, I just don't find the cost justified. I'd rather take some of the younger ones in our family to a putt-putt/minigolf.

LOL, the course I play at has a par 3 course attached. They'll let a family of four play for something like $25. You see all sorts of little munchkins out there trying it out.

I don't ever pay more than $30/round, but mostly I play at my home course because I have a relatively inexpensive membership and it doesn't cost any more once I've paid. About $1000 gets me all of the golf I can play with no additional fees.

I'm inclined that it's that aspect that they're really trying to save, by making people get less frustrated about balls not going in while they're talking business deals, drinking expensive drinks, and paying up the wazoo to play at a course in the first place.

Hmmm ... I play at what is best described as a rougher public course.

Nobody is talking business deals that I've ever seen. Nobody is drinking expensive drinks (there aren't any). And nobody is paying up the wazoo for the privilege of playing there.

Perhaps you don't actually know anything about golf and how it's played in the real world by real people?

Because while there will always be places where you need rather a large amount of money to play, in most places, there's also courses which are affordable, not quite as perfect, and definitely not the domain of people doing business deals.

I know an awful lot of little old retired ladies who get out and play at least weekly. They're by no means well off. They're at varying degrees of skill level. And they don't give a rats ass about their score. Mostly it's about the walk, the company, and spending a few hours outside.

What you're talking about doesn't match in any way my experience with golf ... and I've played over 100 rounds each of the last two years.

Unless you live in an area that has nothing but expensive, high end golf, it's nowhere near as expensive or pretentious as you claim. Not by a long shot.

Meanwhile, an English major can always get a job at Starbucks.

Try outsourcing that.

Isn't that much when you consider all of the nation's electric utilities. It'll be interesting to see how Congress spins this: As a requirement to be imposed upon each utility as a part of their normal maintenance and reliability obligations. Or as Impending Doom, requiring the immediate transfer of federal funds into the coffers of the nations' utilities. Including the investor-owned outfits.

I'm placing my bet on the "Doom" option.