Category Archives: TMI

Some Esplainin'

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“Lucy” look-alikes honour Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday

Sporting upswept hairdos and blue and white polka dot dresses, the crowd of 915 Lucy Ricardos set to establish the first Guinness world record in her honour. It was all part of the annual Lucy Fest in Jamestown, which drew fans from as far away as Australia to the normally sleepy town of 30,000 people in upstate New York.

My folks grew up near Jamestown and I’ve got plenty of relatives in the area. I’ve gone there for numerous family reunions/vacation but skipped this year; the nieces have outgrown the charm of a sleepy town and even sleepier smaller towns around the lake. Reunion is in July so we miss Lucy-fest anyway. Not sure I’d want to cope with that.

But the kicker here is “upstate New York.” “Upstate” as used by many is not a geographical term. It means “not in NY City.” Otherwise you might think of “upstate” as being up — or north— of NY city. And some distance north, too, so it’s not “just outside of the city.” Like the capitol district, Albany/Schenectady/Troy, and points north. You can include areas to the west, like Utica and Syracuse. But Jamestown? It’s at the south end of Lake Chautauqua, southwest of Buffalo and just east of Erie, PA (about about a 45-minute drive) and not even a half-hour drive into Pennsylvania when going south. You’ve really conveyed no information by geographically dividing the state into “the city” and the other 99% of the area that comprises it.

The Market Won't Take Care of That?

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Video: They Sure Don’t Make Pyrex Like They Used To

When World Kitchen took over the Pyrex brand, it started making more products out of prestressed soda-lime glass instead of borosilicate. With pre-stressed, or tempered, glass, the surface is under compression from forces inside the glass. It is stronger than borosilicate glass, but when it’s heated, it still expands as much as ordinary glass does. It doesn’t shatter immediately, because the expansion first acts only to release some of the built-in stress. But only up to a point.
One unfortunate use of Pyrex is cooking crack cocaine, which involves a container of water undergoing a rapid temperature change when the drug is converted from powder form. That process creates more stress than soda-lime glass can withstand, so an entire underground industry was forced to switch from measuring cups purchased at Walmart to test tubes and beakers stolen from labs.

The video in the link has some slo-mo goodness, and explains that there are two categories of pyrex: consumer-grade and lab-grade. So the labware theft is not of vintage materials no longer available, possibly it occurs in order to avoid being tracked by actually purchasing it; there are fewer suppliers of lab-grade apparati than there are department stores selling the cheap stuff.

Taking this idea to the illogical extreme is Texas (surprise!), where it is illegal to buy/sell an Erlenmeyer flask (among other labware) without the proper paperwork, as it is considered an aid to making illegal chemicals. (I happen to own one, along with some beakers — they comprised my bar glassware back in the days when I had housemates and we threw parties; I could mix some pretty precise cocktails, and a 600 ml beaker is a good size for such drinks. The Erlenmeyer flask’s role was that of a wine decanter.) I wonder if this is a “shall-issue” permit. Regardless, it appears easier to get a handgun in Texas than lab glassware. Or Sudafed, since Pseudoephedrine is on the list as well, without mention of a threshold below which it’s not necessary to get a permit. I’d love to hear if anyone in the Lone Star State has applied to buy (or better yet, transfers/furnishes to someone else) a cold-remedy pill.

Run For it, Marty!

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Oh, my God, they found me, I don’t know how, but they found me

I must have zigged when I should have zagged, for I was tagged to do another iteration of the business-y survey that led to my rant-o-rama some time ago. The unholy marriage of business and military jargon. Damn Libyans. Why couldn’t they have been happy with the shoddy bomb casing full of old used pinball machine parts I gave them?

So don’t ask me how we monitor and continuously improve the agility of our key processes for supporting our value creation processes, for I am liable to snap.

The irony is that we’ve been getting more “one size fits all” protocols handed down to us that make us less “agile.” The assessment was a bad fit to begin with (it seems geared toward an assembly line type of business), and my grades went down because of inflexibility that was thrust upon us.

The Wonderful World of Palace Intrigue

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Nothing like a little scandal to perk one up.

Just got an email pointing me toward a “travesty” that is occurring, and hoping to enlist my aid in the fight. Somebody named Art Robinson is screaming about his kids being a victim of political retribution. I felt obligated to look into it, and found a WorldNet Daily article (no, this is not starting out well), written by Art Robinson himself (continuing along the path of not going well). I’d heard of him before, in the context of being a global warming denier extraordinaire, but there’s more, unless you think all of his bad press is conspiracy.

He ran for congress and lost, and is now accusing Oregon State University of kicking his kids out of the nuclear engineering program as retribution for running. There’s really no corroborating evidence and other than denial of the allegations, the university can’t comment on the details because the students’ privacy is protected by law. But after reading

OSU is a liberal socialist Democrat stronghold in Oregon

I wondered if the emailer realized that I went to grad school at OSU. I also can’t help but wonder why his kids would go there if it was such a horrible, nasty, smelly place.

More blips on my BS detector make me wonder how much of this is fabricated.

Democrat activist David Hamby and militant feminist and chairman of the nuclear engineering department Kathryn Higley are expelling four-year Ph.D. student Joshua Robinson from OSU at the end of the current academic quarter and turning over the prompt neutron activation analysis facility Joshua built for his thesis work and all of his work in progress to Higley’s husband, Steven Reese. Reese, an instructor in the department, has stated that he will use these things for his own professional gain.

Once you get past the smearing, what’s there? Any apparatus that is built by a graduate student belongs to the university, and would be controlled by the student’s advisor or the department. Of course they are going to use it for “professional gain,” i.e. further research. Grad school isn’t camp, where you make something in arts and crafts and take it home to give to the folks.

Lots more smearing and innuendo (it is also rumored that…) which may play to his audience but makes me tune out. If you have to lead off with ad hominem, I have to think you don’t have much in your hand.

Robinson also makes a point of revealing his kids’ GPAs (all around 3.9), but doesn’t mention that in grad school, any grade below a “B” is considered unacceptable. There is no curve, so a 3.9 GPA is not the indicator it is for undergraduates.

The department is now controlled by ideologues, most of whom do not have Ph.D.s in nuclear engineering.

Slander and misleading; it’s the department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics, so you might expect some radiation health physics-realted faculty as well, and the mix depends on what the department does. They all have PhD’s, and the claim is actually false as 7 of the 13 have PhDs in Nuclear Engineering. The last time I checked, more than 50% counts as “most.”

Forgive me if I don’t step up to fight alongside Mr. Robinson.

Added: (It occurs to me that if this is all a fabrication, OSU does nothing, and Robinson gets to claim victory. All because there is innuendo and no evidence.)

Have You Checked the Woodworking Lately?

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A while back I linked to a hidden door picture gallery and mentioned

When my dad remodeled our attic into a bedroom (for me) he put up some bookcases and mounted one on hinges, so you could access the crawlspace.

Having a bedroom in the attic was good for freaking out some of the freshman girls in art class when I was a senior in high school — When a Stranger Calls (“have you checked on the children/the call is coming from inside your house!”) had come out over the summer, so mwuhahahaha, but the real fun was when I was younger, because of the hidden door and the crawl spaces.

Here’s the bookcase set, creating a crawl space behind it:

And here, opened a little bit:

Opened further; the cutout for the electrical receptacle in each bookcase is covered with a one-way mirror, so you can see into the attic if the crawlspace light is off:

Here’s the handle for opening, so it’s not super-secret, but I have no complaints. It wasn’t meant to be hidden from The Hardy Boys (or Nancy Drew). It was meant to be easily opened by kids, so mission accomplished.

The play area behind the bookcase was comfortable for a couple or three ~10-12 year-olds, but the crawl space runs the length of the house, and there was a smaller version on the other side, where the wall connects to the ceiling at a lower point. Add in a chair and a blanket, and it made for a great tunnel system for playing The Great Escape (or Hogan’s Heroes, or Stalag 17, depending on the mirth quotient you wanted to assign the bad guys. Hey, we were 10-ish.)

Ah, but that’s not all. We go downstairs to the fireplace. My dad covered up the fireplace mantlepiece to make some stealthy shelf space. The black molding covers up the seam.

Here’s the right side; the left side is functional as well:

(The vases on the upper right, on the regular shelf, were his work as well; he did a lot of wood-turning/woodworking projects.)

Blogging: You're Doing it Wrong! (Part 1)

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The title is firmly tongue-in-cheek (which does not impair my typing nearly as much as chewing gum does); the theme at ScienceOnline 2011 was quite the opposite of that, except … well, I’ll get to that. Eventually.

This was a very different kind of conference than I am used to attending. Despite costing about 1/4 to 1/3 of what I am used to seeing as a registration fee, there was an awesome amount of stuff in the swag bag we got at check-in, including a couple of books, and that doesn’t include the other book we got at the mixer on Friday night, which was held in a bar that had been rented out for the evening, with free drinks (at least for beer and wine). Not in the exhibition hall with a ticket for one free drink. The books at the giveaway were all wrapped in brown paper to mask their identity (though the authors were not, and several did short readings from their books), but I scored Mathematical Methods for Optical Physics and Engineering after after a skull in the stars pointed out that, as a textbook, it was the biggest book there. It retails at more than half of the registration fee. So, score. And then then there was more swag at the conference, too; some were items that couldn’t be put in a swag bag, like t-shirts (so you could pick your size). Even the ID badges were better than I’d seen. Big, and with a 2-D scan code of your URL on it.

Dinner on Friday was novel, too. You signed up for a slot at one of several restaurants, which nicely solves the dinner diffusion problem, and each group had one or two of the authors present. I sorted on food type rather than author, and ended up at the Italian place. The waiter had an unorthodox approach; after I ordered my entrée he told me that everyone else had ordered a salad as well. Wow! Using peer pressure to move salad. I think we all had a pretty good time, up until we had to pay. We split the check, and did so according to who drank and who didn’t so we make the nondrinkers subsidize the drinkers, but despite the gratuity being included we still came up short. “Everyone pay $x” should work, but we had to get seven people to kick in an extra buck and even then, we were a nickel short. Not exactly dine-and-dash, and I hope that it’s not worth extradition so I hope its safe for me to admit it.

The varied backgrounds made things very interesting as well. Lots of biologists, writers, others in the publishing business, librarians (who all seemed to know the librarian at the Naval Observatory and her predecessor, and agree that they are both awesome) and Brian Malow, a science comedian who wanted some tips on physics to improve the accuracy of his jokes, and also traded some comedic information once I mentioned that I draw the occasional science cartoon.

Then there was the gender breakdown. I hesitate to expand on this, lest I stick my foot in my mouth, but I’ll be blunt: there aren’t many women attending the conferences I usually go to. And I had previously not been in any conference discussions that included being told that her conference nickname (to be worn on a t-shirt) could be “The Other Penis Lady.” Believe it or not, that had never happened to me before.

The “talks” themselves were not the traditional presentations of talking for 90% of the allotted time and then taking a question or two at the end. Generally the panel gave short presentations and then solicited input and discussion from the audience and in most cases spent less than half of the time on their prepared talks. One went a little over, but the presenter was basically begging for more audience input, and only one filled up as much as 75% of the time showing slides. It underscored the feeling of “nobody is really an expert at this” and that everybody could make a contribution.

Technology was a new experience, too. For all of the cutting-edge technology that gets discussed at an atomic clock talk, nobody live blogs, tweets or streams video of it. At this conference there was the background clacking of keyboards and most of it seemed to be on twitter (is that technically live blogging or is it just real-time tweeting?) I was having trouble enough taking a few notes and still listen to what was being discussed, because I’m way out of practice at that sort of thing.

I’ll have more of substance soon (I hope). Depends on how much time I can embezzle in the next few days.

Part II

It's Not All Glamour

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Grad School Cost of Living

[S]top trying to make a bong out of a damn Pert Plus bottle and pay attention you undergrad noobs, I’m about to drop some grad school economics on you.

Alternate version, via an MIT professor: Girlfriend, car, hobby. Pick one.

I bit the bullet and shared a house with two other grad students for four of the six years I was in school. Rode my bike or walked to school on weekdays when parking permits were required. Tutored for beer money.

via @JenLucPiquant

The Taming of the Screw

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I found myself looking for something in the basement workshop while I was home for the holidays: an adjustable slide clamp (if that’s what it’s called), so that I could hold a piece of laminate in place after I had glued it. The front of the TV table was peeling away and needed to be fixed.

I couldn’t find one. I didn’t even know if my mom owned one, but most of my dad’s hand tools are still in the workshop, so if there was one it should have been there. But the only clamps I could find were smaller C-clamps and wood clamps (the kind with two threaded rods) but nothing that would fit over the depth of the TV table. This dredged up memories of looking for tools on orders from my dad, when I had been conscripted into Saturday morning repair work, which I resented, because it ate into play time; I wasn’t getting to use any of the fun tools, so what was the point? Of course, I sucked at using those tools, even if they were the ones that were relatively safe for me to use, but at the time that was completely beside the point.

So my job was holding the flashlight and being reminded every attention-span-interval to point it at the target, and fetching the new tool that was needed when an unexpected problem arose. The trouble with this is twofold: tool taxonomy, and spooky tools. I knew the names of very few tools as an eight year-old — the difference between a regular and phillips-head screwdriver, different kinds of pliers and wrenches (why is an Allen wrench considered a wrench? It breaks the paradigm of fitting over the head of the bolt), even hammers (what the heck is a ball-peen?) were not innate knowledge, and since I wasn’t actually using them, I didn’t have a lot of motivation to learn. Even if I knew the name of it, it had the ability to cloak itself like a Romulan warbird, as if the tool were the embodiment of Lamont Cranston, able to cloud my mind so I couldn’t see it. Whatever tool I was sent to find, I simply could not see it some significant fraction of the time, but it would pop back into view once my dad approached the pegboard. The same effect persists in looking for tools in the lab, when they aren’t in their lair (if they are, I know where to look). They have a chameleon-like ability to blend in on the lab bench until you ask someone else where the widget is, at which time they turn fluorescent orange and stands out like a fluorescent orange widget.

 


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Disappointed, but not Crushed

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I tried going to the rally today, but didn’t make it.

Going into DC always carries with it the question of “where do I park?” and the one definite answer to this is “Work.” Owing to that reason, easy access to the metrorail system (“The Metro”) was never really a consideration for choosing a place to live, but it also means the occasions I need to use it, it’s a time-consuming chore. So I decided that driving in to work and catching the metro in DC was a better option than doing so from home. I hiked over to the Woodley Park station (and since most of you have never been there, let me tell you it’s like you’re descending into the bunker at SAC-NORAD or something. The station is 150 feet below the surface, and the second escalator is 200 frikkin’ feet long.) I bought my ticket and went down to the platform, and then was confronted with this:

All of the cars on all of the trains were packed. I was in the station for a half an hour and it was like this the whole time — one or two skinny people were able to insinuate their way into the cars, but that was it. I held out an irrational hope that the next train would be better, but of course it never was. I finally realized that there was no way of getting to the rally on time or even fashionably late. I had no plan B. (I could have initially chosen to hike to the DuPont Circle station to catch the metro, which wouldn’t have improved my chances of riding, but then I might have been tempted to just walk) Since at this point my net investment in going was only a few hours of my time, and I was not meeting anyone there, I just said fuckit and hiked back to my car and drove home. I went via Rock Creek Park on the way back, which was a nice way to go, and caught the last part of the rally on TV.

Tom's Back

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As promised, Tom’s back. (Wearing a NYC subway tee given to me by my brother)

I won’t get into whether it was a well-deserved vacation — I’m a federal employee and I am entitled to it. And now, of course, I’m exhausted. Vacations are restful in one sense, but tiring in another; add to that the drive back, through Pennsylvania’s road construction “paradise” and entering the Washington traffic at rush “hour” on a Friday, with its stress and fatigue. Add to that the toll that eating vacation cuisine puts on you. I’m glad I have the weekend to recover.

I did all the things I promised I would. The reunion had ~150 attendees, and I got to see all of my aunts and uncles and all but one first cousin on both sides of the family (the outlier being a Florida resident, on my dad’s side, i.e. not drawn in by the reunion of my mom’s side of the family), and loads of more distant relatives. Of course you can’t get that many people together without some melodrama, because not everybody gets along (owing to some slight, real or imagined) but I try to stay away from all that. I plead ignorance and apathy, and not necessarily in that order. It’s just so high school.

Even without the reality non-TV, we had an eventful week. Rain early on, peaking with a storm on Saturday that spawned several tornadoes, with damage being done just a mile or two up the road (including destruction at a condo where we had stayed a few years ago). The weather after Sunday ~noon was fabulous, so the lack of air conditioning wasn’t a problem at all. Got out geocaching Monday – Thursday, with the only issue being that I didn’t have time to download the clues, note the size or read the backstories of the caches, which undoubtedly cost me a find or two; micro-caches in the woods are tough without a clue, with a potential search area of up to a thousand square feet (or even more, on occasion). It also helps to know if you’re looking for a pill bottle vs an ammo container.

I also put my cameras to work, and will be processing the results and posting them soon. I’m way behind on internet reading, but did manage to finish two books I was working on (Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre, which had popped up on my radar recently, and Collapse by Jared Diamond, that I’d been working on for seemingly forever)