You correctly answered 11 out of the 12 possible questions, which means you did better on the quiz than 82% of the general public.
Couldn’t remember where the DJIA has been hanging out recently.
You can check out nationwide results by age, gender and education level.
I went out hiking Saturday, taking advantage of the awesome weather that just showed up. Did some geocaching, but also brought my new camera out to Huntley Meadows Park, a wetland wildlife sanctuary about 40 minutes to the south of me. We had a downpour on Friday (after rain off and on all week), so I knew it would be muddy off the main (paved) trail, but mid 70s with relatively low humidity is just too good to pass up.
About an hour into my hike, I was passing through a meadow area on a soggy path, and I kept hearing a bird chirp right behind me, but there was no tree nearby. I finally spotted it — he (it could have been a she) was dive-bombing me! Either he felt I was intruding or he really didn’t like my Asilomar Beach hat, but either way he was aiming for the head and pulling up at the last second, despite me not having a “strafe me” sign on my back.
I was a little startled, but since I wasn’t hiking with Tippi Hedren I didn’t think I was in too much danger. I got the last pass on film, after this I guess I was far enough away from the nest (there were several birdhouses near the trail). The video camera was still set for 420 fps, so I got it in slo-mo.
Instructions upon reaching the age of 25.
Grow up.
And when I instruct you to grow up, I do not mean that you must read up on mortgage rates, put aside candy necklaces, or desist from substituting the word “poo” for crucial syllables of movie titles. Silliness is not only still permitted but actively encouraged. You must, however, stop viewing carelessness, tardiness, helplessness, or any other quality better suited to a child as either charming or somehow beyond your control. A certain grace period for the development of basic consideration and self-sufficiency is assumed, but once you have turned 25, the grace period is over, and starring in a film in your head in which you walk the earth alone is no longer considered a valid lifestyle choice, but rather grounds for exclusion from social occasions.
20 items.
4. Develop a physical awareness of your surroundings. As children, we live in our own heads, bonking into things, gnawing on twigs, emitting random squawks because we don’t know how to talk yet. Then, we enter nursery school. You, having graduated college or reached a similar age to that of the college graduate, need to learn to sense others and get out of their way. Walk single file. Don’t blather loudly in public spaces. Give up your seat to those with disabilities or who are struggling with small children. Take your headphones off while interacting with clerks and passersby. Do not walk along and then stop suddenly. It is not just you on the street; account for that fact.
I developed some of these earlier than 25, thanks to being in the navy (they frown on being late, for instance, though they’re not too keen on having you walk in heels). OTOH, being in grad school, and the corresponding lack of money, delayed a few others.
Lots of great stuff on kottke recently
Dan Baum: The Following Account of My Short Career at The New Yorker Ran as a Series of Tweets on May 8, 11, and 12, 2009
Three tweets: (Thufferin’ Thuccotath!)
of arms. Tom Wolfe is right, I think, when admonishes young writers to ignore the old advice about “writing what
you know,” and instead write about what you don’t know. If you have to learn about something from scratch, he
argues, you don’t bring any lazy preconceptions. John said I was welcome to give it a try. “Think about trying a
Our program is a professional service to the financial industry; rats are being trained to become superior traders in the financial markets. Using our own methodology in accordance with well-established animal training techniques, our subjects learn to recognize pattens in historical stock and futures data as well as generating trading signals. We provide solutions for tick based trading data and day based data. RATTRADERS rats can be trained exclusively for any financial market segment. They outperform most human traders and represent a much more economic solution for your trading desk.
Only-slightly-3-d art: Simon Schubert (small folds in paper) and Marco Maggi (slides 06-9 through 06-12 are “pencil on aluminum foil”)
Mmmmm. Free-range kids. Salon.com: Stop worrying about your children!
Basically, being exposed to all of the worst-case scenarios on TV has coupled with our poor ability to assess risk of unlikely events, results in parents being way too overprotective. I see kids getting driven to and from things I would have walked/biked to (and had I asked to be “chauffeured” I would have gotten a scowl that would have disfigured me for life), and parents wait with/for their kids at the bus stop. Perhaps there’s a socializing aspect to that, but if it’s for safety it’s probably unwarranted.
Everything that we do has a product that we can buy that’s supposed to make our kids safer, as if they’re born without the requisite accoutrements. Then there is something we can do as parents to be more careful, to be more protective. The assumption behind all of that is that if you are a good parent, you should be protecting your child from 100 percent of anything that could possibly go wrong, and if not, you will be blamed and Larry King will shake his finger at you.
I also like the point about how kids used to become “adults” at around age 12 or so, rather than being sheltered from life, and how constant supervision is smothering.
The fun of childhood is not holding your mom’s hand. The fun of childhood is when you don’t have to hold your mom’s hand, when you’ve done something that you can feel proud of. To take all those possibilities away from our kids seems like saying: “I’m giving you the greatest gift of all, I’m giving you safety. Oh, and by the way I’m taking away your childhood and any sense of self-confidence or pride. I hope you don’t mind.”
Not only was Wednesday Tax Day, it’s also audit season at work. I got a call recently about one of my recurring purchases for nitrogen gas (and the bottle rental), to make sure it’s within the rules. You see, I’m not allowed to buy hazardous materials for the lab with my credit card, with the exception of “commonly available HAZMAT,” which I interpret as anything I can get at the hardware or drug store. Examples of these would be batteries and toner cartridges (two things explicitly listed in the government instruction), partly (mostly?) because they have disposal restrictions.
There was a brief period where the rule was being interpreted as no purchases at all unless you were HAZMAT trained, but we had nobody with a credit card who had such training. There were people who could buy Certaindeath Juice™ if need be, but only if the order had enough zeroes on it — you needed to buy Certaindeath Juice™ in bulk — and our orders didn’t qualify. So I couldn’t buy things that a nine-year-old with a five-dollar bill could get at the grocery store. That Catch-22 eventually got cleared up, but not because anyone understood the phrase “mutually exclusive” or could read a Venn diagram.
So, back to the nitrogen. Is it a hazardous material? I don’t really know for sure. There are HAZMAT rules for sale, use and transport, and I don’t know which ones apply to my situation. You can’t (easily) ship compressed canisters on an airplane — I’ve purchased some things which had to be shipped by ground transport because of this restriction, but once you took care of this, there were no HAZMAT issues. So for nitrogen my gut says no, and more importantly, my lungs say no, based on continual exposure to an 80% mixture for an extended period of time, interrupted briefly by replacement with Helium on a few occasions. I can’t find any official wording that tells me which criteria I should use for HAZMAT purchase restrictions and how to differentiate it from a non-hazardous material, in such a way that you don’t just classify everything as hazardous. That would be the government way, of course. Nitrogen is a simple asphyxiant — it can displace oxygen and you can die. But I can have the same outcome with the plastic bag, so I fear that somebody is going to insist that plastic bags be deemed HAZMAT. Filing cabinets can be made top-heavy and become a danger if they were to fall over and crush you. (Back in my navy days we got periodic safety messages that invariably included a story of someone tipping a vending machine and being crushed. Also the tally of how many things fell off of aircraft). Paper? I can cut myself and bleed to death, or wad it up and choke on it. Is paper HAZMAT? Oh, crud. I hope I don’t give anyone ideas.
The criterion can’t be that there is an MSDS for it, because you can find an MSDS for water. I can’t buy drinking water because of food purchase restrictions, but what if I needed some deionized water for the lab? What are the actual dangers? Hmmm. Prolonged exposure will make you pruny just doesn’t seem to cut it for a hazard. Drinking gallons of the stuff can kill you, but as with the above, examples, that just means that everything is hazardous. At least I have the “commonly available” loophole.
Seems to me that a common-sense approach says no. It doesn’t react with me chemically, it’s not toxic and isn’t a fire hazard. There are safety issues, as with all things; if you try hard enough, anything can be dangerous.
I was waylaid by dust bunnies yesterday. It started in the lab; I was exposing the fresh layer of sticky mats as I usually do, and noticed that the air disturbance (quite a flourish if you want to get the sheet up in one motion) had sent some dust bunnies scurrying. I tracked them down and captured them with an unused section of the mat, but they really shouldn’t be in the lab at all — that’s what the mats are for. We don’t let the cleaning crew in, because of safety issues and the potential for damage. But the mats have proven to be stronger than the floor, and the tile has been failing, so there are areas that have been mat-less for a while, and that has helped the bunnies thrive. I bought some frames (non-skid backing rather than adhesive) for the mats, so the mats can be reintroduced. Open season on dust bunnies! My colleague that signed the receipt for the mat frames said, “Mat frames. Cool!” Sure. He’s the one playing with the pulsed laser.
So I get home, and there’s a dreaded “Can’t connect to the internet” error on the computer. So I went searching for the likely suspects — cycle power on the modem and router, and then recheck all of the connections. Which requires some crawling around in places that have more dust bunnies! I had to wield the bunny-buster to ensure I got out alive. Turns out my phone jack had died, so no more DSL from there. I had to move the model and router to another room, and now I’m relying on wireless (and had some trouble with the router. Obviously an ally of the bunnies)
How do you measure yourself against other bloggers?
By height.
Wow. I’ve been doing this for a whole year.
It’s not surprising that I started at this time of year, since the football season is mostly over and there’s a huge gap in the day wanting to be filled, and the weather isn’t consistently good enough to expect to be outside much. I had kicked around the idea of blogging for a little while, once I realized there were blogs out there that weren’t political rants or diaries, neither of which hold must interest for me.
And, of course, it’s a work in progress. My idea of what the blog should be about has morphed over time as I discovered how much harder it is to write (hopefully good) posts than I naively thought it would be. It doesn’t help that my general niche in physics (atomic) was already very ably occupied by Uncertain Principles, so even if I were capable of discussing atomic physics as well as Chad, there still wouldn’t be much point in covering the same ground. The more popular aspects of physics would run me up against Jennifer at Cocktail Party Physics (now with several other contributors) and later Twisted Physics. The discussion of cornerstones of physics is better left to those teaching it, as Built on Facts and Dot Physics do so well. I’m not going to blog about particle physics, condensed matter, or any of the other disciplines within physics. Other physics blogs that survey the physics news use pretty much the same sources that I do, so there’s no new ground there — you have to comment on it sometime to add value. (And I’ve only mentioned a small slice of the blogs out there. No slight intended by that or the fact that I probably need to update my blogroll)
I’m also a little bit hobbled by working where I do — the government, especially the military, have rules. If it’s classified, you can’t talk about it. If it’s not classified, you still can’t talk about it, because it might still be sensitive; you have to wait until it’s cleared for official release. (Anything I’ve posted specifically having to do with my technical work has been published somewhere). I’ve been doing quite a bit of administrative work in the last few years, and even when I can spend time on the atomic clock project, there’s the tunnel vision that sets in — focusing only on the project and things immediately related to it. I try to keep my head in the game by discussing physics online, particularly at this blog’s host and occasionally elsewhere, but refuting crackpots gets old and repetitive. I don’t work in academia, so there isn’t that experience to draw upon; the teaching experience I have has some limited relevance, but not a lot.
So I’ve tried to carve out another niche. Blogging gives a different perspective, and forces me to go out and see what’s going on in the world of physics. I think I’ve read more papers because of blogging than for work this past year. I also like technology and weird things, so I’m going to find those links anyway, but at least now I feel like it’s not a waste of time to do so, since I share. I like learning about those little do-it-yourself science projects, and I’ve added a DIY science category)
Milestones:
I went over 1000 posts sometime in mid-December. Not as impressive as it sounds, though, because my links tend to each be in a separate post. Almost 50,000 visitors. That number is a little uncertain because the stats counter wasn’t in place when I first started.
What I’ve observed:
Writing posts or email when you’re sick is a bad idea. There’s too much “The hell? Why did I say that? I’m an idiot!” involved. At least post drafts can be deleted, and you can start over.
Writing well is hard. When you’re explaining things to a person you get feedback to let you know if you’re being effective.
I often think of something to add after I’ve posted that would have made it just that much better. Call it blogger’s remorse.
Ok, then. Back to the physics, the geekdom, and the nonsense.
via Kottke and reminded by Chad posting his list. I didn’t travel a whole lot, owing to various conflicts.
Places I visited, in which I spent at least a night in 2008
Niskayuna, NY
Dewittville, NY
Pacific Grove, CA
Cities I got screwed out of visiting because of bureaucratic SNAFUs
San Francisco, CA
Honolulu, HI
State College, PA
It’s just 7:30. In stark contrast to just a few years ago, nobody else is up yet. There was a time when my nieces would be staring at the clock, impatiently waiting for the agreed-upon time when they were allowed to wake everyone else up. No more. They’re teenagers.
And here is a physics-related safety message for the holidays:
Hallmark Recalls Jumbo Snow Globes Due to Fire Hazard
Hazard: When exposed to sunlight, the snow globes can act as a magnifying glass and ignite nearby combustible materials, posing a fire hazard.
Incidents/Injuries: Hallmark has received two reports of the snow globes igniting nearby materials. No injuries have been reported.
Well, duh. Convex surfaces and a larger index of refraction.