Steam Locomotive Tracking
Track Union Pacific's Big Boy No. 4014 as it travels across our 23 state network.
Big Boy 2025 Excursion
Twenty‑five Big Boy locomotives were originally built for Union Pacific to haul heavy freight over Utah’s Wasatch Range during World War II. While eight were preserved after retirement more than six decades ago, Big Boy No. 4014 is the only one still in operation today.
Newton's meticulous investigation led to Chaloner's conviction for high treason in 1699. Despite Chaloner's desperate letters begging for mercy, Newton showed none—the counterfeiter was hanged, drawn, and quartered. Newton prosecuted dozens of other counterfeiters with similar determination, securing convictions that sent many to the gallows. By the time he became Master of the Mint in 1700, Newton had transformed the institution from a corrupt, inefficient operation into a formidable force against monetary crime.
Newton remained Master of the Mint until his death in 1727, overseeing the Great Recoinage that stabilized England's currency and earning a salary that made him wealthy. The man who discovered the laws of gravity proved equally adept at enforcing the laws of the land, demonstrating that genius could be applied to practical affairs with devastating effectiveness. His tenure showed that even the greatest scientific mind of his age understood that knowledge without action meant nothing when his nation's economic survival hung in the balance.
Newton's aggressive campaign against counterfeiting and his reorganization of the Royal Mint had profound and lasting effects on British monetary policy and economic stability. The Great Recoinage he supervised replaced degraded, clipped coins with new standardized currency, which helped restore public confidence in English money and facilitated trade both domestically and internationally. His transformation of the Mint into an efficient, professional institution established administrative standards that influenced government operations for generations. Perhaps most significantly, Newton's work helped establish the principle that monetary crimes were serious threats to national security deserving severe punishment, a precedent that shaped how governments worldwide would later approach financial crimes and the protection of currency integrity. //
Jeb Webb — Make America Friendly Again @Jeb_AI
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Feb 28
One more Isaac Newton innovation: The ridges around the edge of our .10, .25 and .50 coins were a way to reduce counterfeiting.
During newtons time, coins were almost pure silver, and people would shave off edges, so coins were all different sizes. ridges put a stop to that.
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On Tuesday, March 10th, an EF-1 tornado destroyed the Dunns Bridge Solar I and II facilities owned by the Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO). The facilities, located outside of Wheaton, Indiana, had 2.4 million solar panels, totaling 700 megawatts (MW) of power capacity, and reportedly cost $1 billion to construct—a little over $1,400 per kilowatt (kW).
NIPSCO issued the following statement in the aftermath:
On the evening of March 10, while actively monitoring severe weather and responding to storm‑related outages across our service area, NIPSCO became aware of damage to its Dunns Bridge I and Dunns Bridge II solar facilities in Starke and Jasper counties. Our team was tracking the storm in real time and moved in to assess conditions and respond as soon as it was safe to do so. Debris from the damage could have been displaced, and we are working to safely secure the area, assess the damage and proactively communicate with the community.
We recognize there may be questions and concerns about potential environmental impacts related to the damage at the solar farm. Solar panel leaching concerns have been thoroughly evaluated in industry-leading research, which shows that the risk is extremely low. Overall, the available evidence demonstrates that both crystalline silicon and thin-film PV (i.e., photovoltaic) modules do not pose a meaningful risk of environmental or human exposure from leaching, even when damaged. //
While the solar panels were damaged by the tornado, we are not aware of any reports of damage at the nearby R.M. Schahfer Generating Station, a 950 MW coal facility that NIPSCO was planning to retire at the end of 2025. However, it is still running thanks to a 202(C) order issued by the U.S. Department of Energy requiring the plant to continue operations. //
Let’s be incredibly uncharitable and look at the anticipated levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of the solar facility over its projected 25-year useful lifetime, and its actual, tornado-truncated lifetime.
Dunns Bridge I began generating power in June of 2023, producing a total of 1.3 million megawatt hours (MWh) up until December of 2025, the most recent month for which data are available. Dunns Bridge II began generating power in January of 2025, and through December, it produced 812,439 MW of power, which is good for a 21.3 percent capacity factor.
We calculated the LCOE over two time periods: a 25-year lifecycle, a standard assumption in the industry, and a 2-year lifecycle to account for the facility being destroyed very early in its lifecycle. The results are about what we would expect. Our estimated subsidized costs over 25 years are approximately equal to S&P Global’s reported PPA cost for the facilities, including subsidies.
Because the LCOE is like calculating the cost of driving your car over the number of miles driven, if your car dies after two years when you expected to drive it for 10, the cost per mile obviously increases. This is why the cost of electricity from the Dunns Bridge I & II facilities skyrockets in this analysis, reaching a subsidized cost of $289.61 per MWh, and an unsubsidized cost of $405.09 per MWh. [Compared to $63.87/MWh subsidized over 25 years, or $82.61/MWh unsubsidized over 25 yrs] //
In our upcoming LCOE study for Reliable Energy Inc. in Indiana, we found that the R.M. Schahfer plant was the most expensive coal plant in the state, due primarily to very high delivered fuel costs at the plant ($50 per MWh).
However, the December 2025 data from S&P Global, the most recent available, show the delivered fuel cost was about $27 per MWh, which substantially improves the economics of the plant, although this could possibly be the result of the company assuming the plant would retire at the end of the year, rather than being required to stay open.
At $70 per MWh, the Schahfer plant is competitive with subsidized solar over a 25-year lifespan, cheaper than the unsubsidized cost over 25 years, and a bargain compared with our admittedly uncharitable comparison to the facility’s actual 2-year lifespan. //
For our part, we would encourage those in the surrounding areas not to worry too much about chemicals leaching from the panels into the soil or water. Photovoltaic panels are made mostly of glass, and the small amounts of toxic materials, such as lead used in soldering, are not a significant concern because they are present in small quantities and there is probably no realistic exposure pathway for humans. //
The storm likely blew debris well beyond the solar site, which could create issues for nearby farmers, especially if they are growing root crops.
Anecdotally, we’ve heard that large potato buyers won’t purchase potatoes from growers located within a mile of a glass recycling facility for precisely this reason. In other words, the real concern here isn’t chemical contamination, it’s debris.
There was a time in America when you could punch your Army captain, skip town, grow a beard, head west, and become “Samuel Whitaker, cattleman and church deacon.”
Today? You can’t change your Instagram handle without a two-factor authentication code, three archived screenshots, and your ex forwarding it to your employer.
We romanticize the 1800s as rough, lawless, and dangerous. And they were. But they were also gloriously anonymous. Identity wasn’t a federal project. It was a handshake and a story. If you said your name was John Carter and no one in Kansas knew you from Ohio, congratulations — you were John Carter.
Try that today and watch your credit report laugh at you. //
Now let’s be clear: this isn’t a defense of criminals dodging consequences. Murderers should not get a prairie do-over. But the cultural cost of total traceability is rarely discussed.
We used to believe in redemption arcs. The disgraced soldier who became a rancher. The bankrupt merchant who moved west and rebuilt. The man who made a mess in one town and quietly matured in another.
Today we say we believe in second chances — but we engineered a system that never forgets the first mistake.
The modern world is one giant memory palace. A Tower of Babel made of servers and compliance officers. Every institution, public and private, hoards information not because it makes us better — but because bureaucracies exist first to preserve themselves. Information is leverage. Leverage is control. Control is stability.
Or at least the illusion of it.
We’ve scaled record-keeping beyond what human forgiveness can handle.
The irony? In the 1800s, it was easier to vanish — but harder to fake competence. If you showed up calling yourself a blacksmith and couldn’t shoe a horse, you were exposed by noon. Reputation rebuilt itself through actual skill and conduct.
Today you can curate a flawless LinkedIn persona while your past mistakes sit quietly indexed beneath it. We don’t test character locally anymore; we audit it digitally.
The author of the Mitford Years series married at 14, protested segregation, and wrote her first book at 57. //
The idea for Father Tim came in a vision of sorts as Mitford unfolded in her mind. Aware that a Baptist preacher conjured too many negative literary stereotypes, Karon crafted him as an Episcopalian, she said. His life began as a weekly serial publication in the local Blowing Rocket newspaper of Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Karon drew the illustrations. They paid her with a free copy of the 10-cent paper.
Circulation surged. But despite the local acclaim, Karon struggled through 11 publishing house rejections before Lion, a small Christian press, accepted At Home in Mitford. Two novels followed, as she used all her marketing skills to self-promote the books. But there was no national market for wholesome stories of simple characters, let alone with a Christian theme, Karon told World magazine. People preferred Stephen King.
“I don’t give you much of a ride. I just give you sort of a float!” Karon stated. “A lot of people tell me that my books put them to sleep, and I consider that a huge compliment.”
Titling this article has proved more difficult than writing it. I considered everything from “21 Smug People Talk About A Subject None Of Them Understands, Least of All Jordan Peterson” to “Jordan Peterson Debates The Existence Of A God, But Not One Any Of Us Have Ever Heard of.” //
Brian, an outlier insofar as he appeared to be in his 40s, asks a timeless question: What is the purpose of life? Proverbs 3:5-6, Matthew 6:33, and Mark 12:30-31 are all helpful here. The Westminster Confession of Faith has something to say on the matter, too.
Peterson instead offers a program for self-improvement as if life were just one big gym membership.
Kumari wants Peterson to explain sin and hell.
If ever there was a time for Peterson to give a coherent answer, this was it. He talked of “improvement” as a means of avoiding hell. Neither the words of the Christian vocabulary — repentance, forgiveness, grace, redemption, restoration, etc. — nor their meanings were ever brought to bear. Peterson does speak of sin, but only as “miss[ing] the target,” which he proceeds to do completely.
There are very reasonable answers to all these questions. But Peterson, as lost as anyone in the room, knew none of them. Instead, one by one, twenty atheists were sent away with nothing for their souls.
And it’s souls I am concerned with here. For the Christian, these are issues of eternal significance, not clever repartee. //
I have debated and dialogued with many atheists — Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Shermer, Peter Singer, etc. — and more than a few Muslims on the question of God in venues ranging from CNN and Hyde Park to Al Jazeera and a Seattle concert hall, and my opponents all had this in common: They were very clear on the fact that they were atheists or Muslims. There is genuine integrity in that. For my own part, I made it very clear that I was there, not to win an argument, but to win their souls. So, I find it nauseating that these young people, however misguided they might be, owned their convictions while Peterson played coy. //
You simply cannot engage this age group flippantly as Peterson does. They are too sincere for that. They are too ready to put legs to their professors’ crackpot ideas.
A humorous but true story to illustrate my point: Years ago, my students, seeing that I collected rocks from historical sites, made note of the fact and decided to act. Shortly thereafter they were bringing me marble they had chipped off the Parthenon, pieces of the Great Wall of China and the Palace of Versailles, and even a cobblestone they had pulled right out of Red Square (no small feat, I can tell you). I had unwittingly created a class of vandals!
Too often, however, the results are less amusing. The ranks of Antifa, BLM, and every civilization-destroying revolution since the dawn of time are full of young people like those who “surrounded” Peterson here. If you would teach them, you must be prepared to lead them to truth. To do otherwise is morally irresponsible. And this raises a question:
To what, exactly, was Peterson trying to convert them? Deism? New Age mysticism? Jordan Petersonism? Certainly not Christianity. //
But Zina won’t be put off. Wanting to know if her soul is in danger, she circles back and tries to get a straightforward answer: “What I’m saying is that your interpretation of the Bible — if you cannot tell us again if these historical events happened or not, that can be a deciding factor if someone is damned to hell for eternity or if they go to heaven, right?”
Peterson: “I don’t concern myself so much with that particular question.”
And with that, ladies and gentlemen, the curtain was drawn back on all of Jordan Peterson’s theological ramblings to reveal a man who knows not a damn thing on this subject worth a moment more of Zina’s time. His seemingly agonized stream-of-consciousness talk about God and the Bible is just so many donuts in the parking lot, leading his audiences absolutely nowhere. Remember, from a Christian perspective, the goal is the cross of Jesus Christ. It isn’t to make you religious or spiritual or to give you warm and fuzzy feelings about God or an appreciation for the Bible as a religious text. Hell will be full of such people. The objective is nothing short of the cross. Eternal life. And as Zina discovered, Peterson can’t get you there.
As an old seminary professor of mine used to say, “If your audience cannot see Jesus at the end of your teaching, you get an F.” So, where was Jesus in any of this? His name was mentioned twice in 90 minutes, and it’s more than a little telling that it wasn’t Peterson who did it on either occasion; it was Zina, and Peterson moved the discussion away from him with all possible haste.
Zina later made this astute observation: “Jordan Peterson’s framework for understanding Christianity is probably not the one that the Bible intended us to use.”
It fascinates me that Peterson offers himself as an authority on the Bible while missing its central message so comprehensively. The Book of Job, a Peterson favorite, contains a warning that he apparently missed. It comes from the Lord in the last chapter of that book, and it’s a reminder to us that any who dare speak of him had better do so accurately:
“My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right.”
Almost nothing Peterson says about God is right. That should give his audiences pause, if not Peterson himself.
Rex Stout is an American Mystery writer who has written multiple books. Most of them were set in the state of New York. He was born in Noblesville, Indiana in 1886 but later on his parents moved the family of nine children to Kansas. Being a teacher, Stout’s father inspired him to read and by the time he was four years old, he had read the entire bible. Stout went to Topeka High School, Kansas, and later the University of Kansas, Lawrence. He worked in the Navy in US between 1906 and 1908 and afterwards for the next four years, he worked at several jobs including one at a cigar store.
Rex was appointed to the board of American Civil Liberties Union in 1952 and served one term. While there he assisted in beginning the Marxist Magazine. He also founded and later served as president at Vanguard Press, from 1926 to 1928 then as its vice president until 1931. Being a renowned Murder Mystery author, several of his books went on to be adapted for film, radio and television. He was head of Writers’ War Board at the time of the second world war, a radio celebrity and later on actively promoted world federalism. He was also president of the Authors Guild and of the Mystery Writers of America. He ultimately received the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award in 1959.
The ZeroTier network hypervisor is a self-contained network virtualization engine that implements an Ethernet virtualization layer similar to VXLAN built atop a cryptographically secure global peer-to-peer network. It provides advanced network virtualization and management capabilities on par with an enterprise SDN switch, but across both local and wide area networks and connecting almost any kind of app or device.
MikroTik has added ZeroTier to RouterOS v7.1rc2 as a separate package for the ARM/ARM64 architecture.
Zerotier has been upgraded to 1.14.0 on 7.17rc6 ROS version.
Wait, so what can I use it for?
- Hosting a game server at home (useful for LAN only games) or simply creating a LAN party with your friends;
- Accessing LAN devices behind NAT directly;
- Accessing LAN devices via SSH without opening port to the Internet;
There are two ways to run Caddy as a service on Windows: sc.exe or WinSW.
sc.exe
To create the service, run:
sc.exe create caddy start= auto binPath= "YOURPATH\caddy.exe run"(replace YOURPATH with the actual path to your caddy.exe)
To start:
sc.exe start caddyTo stop:
sc.exe stop caddy
Age-verification laws target operating systems because apparently teenagers having root access is now a safeguarding crisis. //
Big Brother is only going to get worse. With the US Congress advancing its own App Store Accountability Act, and more state lawmakers floating copycat bills, OS‑level age verification is poised to become a standard part of how Americans set up phones, tablets and PCs within the next few years. Happy, happy, joy, joy. //
These kinds of laws don't work. They've never worked. Prohibition failed in the United States. I kept reading Playboy, and these days, people use virtual private networks (VPN)s to get around the restrictions of the UK’s Online Safety Act. However, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes, VPNs are far from a perfect solution.
The real problem is this hodgepodge of laws; it's the growth of the surveillance state.
Currently, by far the best Free World reactor is the Korean APR1400. The Korean’s can build an APR1400 for less than $3000/kW in Korea and have built four in the UAE for around $4500/kW. The APR1400 was our best, maybe only, hope for leading Western nuclear out of a prohibitively expensive regulatory morass.
The APR1400 is based on the Combustion Engineering (CE) System 80+ design, the best of the American PWR’s. In 1997, Kepco licensed that design. The Koreans demanded and got a Total Technology Transfer Agreement. No strings attached. They could use the IP anyway they wanted. CE’s back was against the wall. The tort lawyers had embroiled CE in an asbestos suit and they were going bankrupt. The cash from the Koreans kept CE alive for another couple of years. In 2000, Westinghouse acquired CE and became the licensor.
Westinghouse’s offering is the AP1000. The AP1000 is a cramped, nearly unmaintainable reactor which will cost you somewhere around $15,000/kW. Westinghouse knows it can’t compete with the APR1400. So Westinghouse has colluded with the DOE to prevent the Koreans from exporting the APR1400 from Korea. Westinghouse may have lousy engineers but they’ve got great lawyers.
Free QR Code Generator Online
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This serene view from the coast of Sweden looks across the Baltic sea and compresses time, presenting the passage of one night in a single photograph. From sunset to sunrise, moonlight illuminates the creative sea and skyscape. Fleeting clouds, fixed stars, and flowing northern lights leave their traces in planet Earth's sky. To construct the timelapse image, 3296 video frames were recorded on the night of a nearly full moon between 7:04pm and 6:35am local time. As time progresses from left to right, a single column of pixels was taken from the corresponding individual frame and combined in sequence into a single digital image 3296 pixels wide.
Recorded during 2017, timelapse sequences from the International Space Station are compiled in this serene video of planet Earth at Night. Fans of low Earth orbit can start by enjoying the view as green and red aurora borealis slather up the sky. The night scene tracks from northwest to southeast across North America, toward the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida coast. A second sequence follows European city lights, crosses the Mediterranean Sea, and passes over a bright Nile river in northern Africa.
Just two weeks ago, dark skies over the desert in northern Iran held this alluring celestial vista. The dramatic digital mosaic finds the Moon and Mars alongside the Milky Way's dusty rifts, stars, and nebulae. Captured through a series of exposures to cover a range in brightness, that night's otherwise Full Moon is immersed in Earth's shadow. It actually appears fainter and redder than the Red Planet itself during the widely watched total lunar eclipse. For cosmic tourists, the skyscape also includes the Lagoon (M8) and Trifid (M20) nebulae and planet Saturn shining against the Milky Way's pale starlight.
What's that green streak in front of the Andromeda galaxy? A meteor.
China is indeed churning out solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and batteries that flood global markets — proof, advocates say, of an inevitable green transition.
Yet these supposed marvels are forged amid overwhelming and surging use of fossil fuels, particularly coal.
Its real energy achievements — dramatic energy ramp-ups to fuel prosperity, and advances in nuclear power — remain overlooked. //
Crucially, China’s solar-panel production depends on coal: Every one of its silicon smelters requires its own coal-fired power station. //
While China added unprecedented solar and wind capacity in 2025, it also planned an unprecedented number of new coal power plants.
China remains the world’s top coal consumer, with fossil fuels supplying over 87% of its primary energy.
Renewables’ share was 40% in 1971 when China was poor, but plummeted to 7.5% in 2011 — and has risen slowly over the next 13 years, to just over 10% in 2024. //
Second, China is surging ahead in technologies that could truly decarbonize the planet at scale: nuclear fission and fusion.
In the West, traditional nuclear has grown prohibitively expensive, with US construction costs tripling since the mid-1980s.
The US has built only three new nuclear plants this century, at enormous cost and with 11-year timelines.
Contrast this with China, where reactors are completed in five years and costs have halved since 2000.
China has expanded from three reactors in 2000 to 60 today, with 37 under construction (nearly half the global total), 42 planned and 146 proposed. //
This isn’t renewables redux; it’s a race for abundant energy.
And the West risks awakening to a world powered by Beijing’s reactors, not its own ingenuity.
Green China is a sham — but it’s time for the West to emulate Beijing’s real playbook, by ramping up energy use and investing in nuclear R&D.