The beginning of 2014.

--This day-by-day map depiction of World War II in seven minutes is fascinating. I knew that the Axis started to really begin falling in early 1944, but this map shows how the Allies stopped their forward momentum in November of 1942.

--A friend and hunting buddy this morning announced that it was 6 times warmer than it was yesterday, by virtue of the fact that his thermometer showed 12 degrees Fahrenheit today, and just 2°F yesterday. Thinking that he was joking, I mentioned that his quantities might be off. He asked why. (This guy is VERY smart. He's a paramedic and a computer whiz. So no slamming him.) I responded:
 "Well, degrees Fahrenheit don't actually measure absolute heat. However, degrees Kelvin *DO*. Fahrenheit set "zero" on his scale of temperature as being the lowest temperature that he could achieve, using ice and salt. He set 100 at what he thought was the human body temperature. (Look, it was the late 17th century. Cut him some slack.) Kelvin uses centigrade units above absolute zero. Zero degrees Fahrenheit is actually 255.37K. When it was 2 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday, it was 256.483 Kelvin yesterday. At 12 Fahrenheit today, it is actually 262.039 Kelvin, which is 1.004358... times warmer than yesterday, relative to Absolute Zero."

My buddy made a rude noise.

--It staggered me, the first time that I found out that there was a temperature below which nothing could go.

--And I didn't know until today that the Triple Point of water is used as part of the scientific definition of the Kelvin unit. ("The kelvin is defined as the fraction 1⁄273.16 of the thermodynamic temperature of the triple point of water (exactly 0.01 °C or 32.018 °F).")

--Every year, my wife and I hold off on giving each other Christmas gifts, and then agree together to buy something that we both want in January or February. Well, this year, she broke the agreement, and surprised me by unilaterally purchasing a Rancilio Sylvia espresso machine. I've owned small consumer espresso machines before, but they were the sub-$100 sheet metal stamped variety that turned out indifferent results. This thing is superb.

When you turn it on, it will build up the pressure, and then turn out the light like a waffle iron to tell you that you're good to go. You then punch the switch for espresso, and the double spouts will begin to push out dark rich espresso with a bit of crema atop it. Hit the switch for foam, and open the valve and vigorous foam makes milk magical. Flip the switch to hot water, and you get water perfect for tea or to add to your espresso for an Americano. 

It weighs a young ton. 

It takes up very little counter space. 

There is a bit of a learning curve to pulling a perfect shot. 

It's the nicest thing that I've been given in a long, long time. 

We're going through about a gallon of milk a day in this house, now. 

--I have yet to have built a "Gay Cynic Special": 8 shots of espresso served over ice. Even in Seattle, the barrista's eyes widened at that order. 

--In terms of style and distinctiveness, I think that the other states envy the Texas flag. Well, Arizona, New Mexico, and Alaska don't. And probably not Tennessee.

--What's the deal with the crescent moon on the SC flag? 

--One of our cats two went missing 6 days ago. We've since had several sub-20 degree nights. I suspect that the neighbor shot it. I have not approached him; I cannot be objective. He told my colleagues that he threw out a firecracker to make the cats stop fighting at night. Semi-outdoor cats run a risk, and we knew that.  My younger daughter, who had a serious cat crush on that animal, wakes up crying and saying that she dreamt that he was on her bed. I've had offers of a new cat. I can't. I don't need another creature in my heart, or in my daughter's heart. I need a break.  

--One of these days, some boy will make my daughter this sad. And I'll have to deal with my initial reaction there, too. 

--Here's a well-rendered map of the contiguous continental United States yesterday, showing that the average temperature was 14 degrees Fahrenheit. I like how they put clear delineations at the freezing point of water and at zero degrees F. 

Why...

Why haven't we figured these things out, yet?

Monday. First Day of Spring Break.

--I wrote this yesterday, and then got up to have dinner with the family before watching movies. I apparently never hit Publish. So consider yourself on Monday, 3/11/2013, when reading what follows:

--I slept in this morning. It was glorious. I was awaken late in the morning in that bestest of ways: my co-worker called me to tell me that he had some money for me from an off-duty gig that we had worked together recently. (Yeah, the definition of "best way to be awaken" seems to change, with age.)

--The sun is brilliant, and the wind has died down. A long-sleeved shirt or a sweat shirt still feels good. This is the best part of the spring.

--It's really green, out:

 

--The cattle and the verdant field make me think about this amazing talk given by an ecologist, about how to stop desertification, using more cattle.

--My elder daughter has been trying her hand at composing music for the French horn, this week. More impressively, she's writing duets. For a couple of days, I'd find pieces of paper like this lying around:

But she since has downloaded a composition program called MuseScore, which allows her to put it up much faster and neater, including multiple instruments. I haven't complimented the results, yet, because I've not heard anything that I much care for, yet. But I am impressed that she tries this stuff, and she's not even a week into it. I'm looking forward to hearing a piece that I'll love for its own merits.

--My 10-year-old daughter decided to bake blackberry muffins, this morning. I've had worse mornings than drinking coffee, listening to one daughter arrange a duet for herself and her friend, while my younger daughter pulls muffins out of the oven and serves them with hot butter, as the sun streams in the open doorway.

--We cleaned the house. When I pulled the rug out of the sun room to sweep and mop under it, I expressed with dismay that "we could just about grow tomatoes in here", while looking at the dirt on the tile where the run had been (for just a few weeks. Yeah. Should be pulled weekly. It's a big heavy rug, and a chore.). My younger daughter looked at me oddly, and pointed out that we are growing tomatoes in the sun room. We've got a flat of tomato puppies by the window.

--I have a big industrial strainer mop bucket. It's oddly comforting for me to use it and clean the tile throughout the house. When I used to work at an eatery 20 years ago, mopping was of course one of the many jobs around the place, and no one much cared for it. I never minded it. It was a necessary task, with immediate results. No one bothered you when you mopped. Now, on my big ceramic floors, I just try not to fall on my butt.

--Today's cleaning agent: Fabuloso Citrus Fruit. Now, with baking soda!

--My younger daughter employed a school project, this afternoon. She had made a solar oven out of a pizza box, some foil, and some black construction paper and plastic wrap. She put some wienies in it to heat up. Unfortunately, the Family Cat (Oliver, the fat one) was impressed at the hot meal of meat just laid out for him. He came in with his nice hot hot dog. My daughter went to spank him, but I stopped her. How could he be expected to do otherwise?

--A neighborhood border collie has been worrying my daughter's show rabbit in the hutch. It was bad enough when she was pacing back and forth in front of the hutch; now she has taken to chewing on the frame of hutch:

My younger daughter decided to deal with the matter by painting the lower frame member with a paste made with cayenne pepper. The bratty neighbor kid whose family owns the border collie protested that this would hurt her dog. When my younger daughter told me about this, I rolled my eyes, wondering what she would think of the fact that the last time I saw the dog doing her thing, I borrowed my kid's Red Ryder BB gun, and bounced a BB off the dog's butt. (Sadly, this bit of operant conditioning alone wasn't enough to convey to the dog what I'd hoped to convey.) But we don't mention that to the neighbors, because people aren't always rational about their pets. Put a cigarette out on their kids' faces, and it's no problem, but kick their biting dog away from you, and they lose their minds.

--Fresh Brussels sprouts with roast chicken and baked potatoes tonight. I used to only be able to get down Brussels sprouts by imagining them to be cabbages, and myself a giant. But now, I guess they're okay, with butter.

--Root beer floats for desert, which is funny, because I just wrote that I almost never buy sugar soft drinks, and then later today I bought a two litre bottle of root beer.
    

Smart.

Google is releasing The Next Big Thing, called "Glass."

The idea of wearable computers has been around for a while, but no one has really fielded a worthwhile model. (Oh, I know that Apple tried it, but this is completely different.)

IF this works (and eventually, someone will get it right), this will be a bigger deal than broadband was to the Internet.

Google is thus far kind of hit or miss on some new apps, and their branded hardware has never set a benchmark, to my knowledge. But this is a new device that hasn't really been fielded before, and their marketing strategy is pretty smart.

See, you have to apply to get the right to pay $1500 for one, right now. That will of course change, later, but right now, your price of admission is a grand and a half, and an application that includes an essay, and perhaps a video.

Why? Because genius, that's why.

They're beta testing. You want your beta testers to be invested in the product, or they'll put it down without input.They must have some confidence in it, to be trying this. But maybe some design guy sold it to marketing with:
"Hey, we can't fail! We get to claim that we're beta-testing, not generally releasing the product, and each enduser is paying us to do the research. Worst case scenario is that it's back to the drawing board. Best case: we send a service pack module upgrade, and proceed with production as is."


The weak point isn't going to be the shaky video; it's going to be in the speech recognition. It needs to NOT fire off some app, just because you left it on while walking through a noisy crowd, or while watching a movie.To quote my friend Ed: "You know it's only a matter of time before people start using Google Glass to make their own pornos."
He's probably right, but there have been wearable cameras for a long time. I think that it's the integration that will be the big deal. Google is pretty good at taking existing technology, and integrating it. Look at the excellent job that they did with Google Maps integrating with their search engine, with their one-of-a-kind StreetView, and their superb Earth. (You haven't downloaded Google Earth to your machine? I don't even know you, anymore.)
 
Some worry that it moves us a little further down the slippery slope of not having to interact with human beings around us. I submit that it will pull our heads up. Right now, when I want to interact with the Internet, I sit down and face a computer screen, in a corner. I am effectively sequestering myself from the world.  Something like this could permit the easy give and take of data, while out and about.

In a year, we'll know if this one took or not.  Given the proliferation of 4G smart phones out there (with which it will pair), I reckon that it's got a fighting chance. Eventually, someone will get us there.

Blustery.

I was down in Austin watching a very good friend get sworn in as a trooper today.

Driving back north, the wind went from a 20+ MPH tailwind to a 30 MPH crosswind to a 30+ MPH headwind.

Well, here's what it looks like now:

I am fascinated by the Wind Map.

First Day Of December.

--My wife just purchased my younger daughter her first pair of brand-new cowboy boots for Christmas. (She'd had others, but not brand-new to her).  After tax, they went $192. They're turquoise and brown. When my wife told me this over the phone, I said, "Good Gawd! Jeez!"

She responded, "Oh, they're not that garish. There were lots of men's boots that were more wild-looking."

"It's not the color! It's the price!! $192 for a 10-year-old's boots?!? What do we do when she grows out of them?" I exclaimed.

"Oh, I'll inherit them," she said. "I wear her size."

"Good Gawd! Jeez!" I said again, for a different reason.

--Very humid. Cloudy. High in the high 70's today. Wind is fresh, out of the southeast.

--I've been working a lot of off-duty, on top of my fire shifts and my work and grad school. I'm tired.

--The main cafe in town has a Mexican cook and some decent Mexican food, but no breakfast burrito on the menu. I've been ordering a breakfast burrito made special for about a year, there. Now I find that our new rookie with the PD thinks that he started the trend there. He's a good guy, but he clearly needs his comeuppance. I've been this week campaigning to get them to name it the "Matt G Burrito." It's just a bit of schtick, but it would be funny if they did make it. (I have them make it with grilled jalapenos, cheddar cheese, onions, sausage, and chorizo. )

--I didn't make my Christmas tamales for Thanksgiving this year like I meant to. I still plan to make them. I typically just debone a rotisserie chicken and spice it in a hot pan for filling. I've got some pork, too. I've also got some beef. And a little venison. And some mushrooms, for veggie tamales....

--My moustache has grown to previously-unseen proportions. It's getting unruly.

--The 'stache may be gone in a bit, too. I'm considering hacking it off. It sure 'nuff hacks off my wife.Which is funny, because the beard that she wants me to wear again sure wasn't worn Amish-style.

--Our arraigning magistrate told me that, after figuring in his regular work and his salary for coming in every day for setting bonds, he only makes about $9/hr on his salary on months when they have No Refusal Blood Draw Weekends.

--They're doing those more and more, including Thanksgiving weekend, now. I'm okay with them-- the officer gets a warrant, under probable cause, to take the defendant's blood. Anymore, it's getting rare to take a breath sample for DWI's.

--I went to a trial the other day in which the defense attorney went after the character of the arresting officer, in a case where his client had clearly committed the action. The officer's character was not the issue. While I appreciate that the attorney had a tough case to defend and and was charged with putting up a spirited defense, I think that it's reprehensible to make a personal attack on the character of the officer and his reputation, especially when the officer was actually trying to help his client when the defendant attacked the officer. It's been a long time since I had a defense attorney do that to me, but it makes me seethe. It's not actually that common of a practice, when an attorney wants to continue to practice in the same county. Believe it or not, I actually have quite a bit of respect for most attorneys that I know. Not this one.

--There are black spidery things that appear on the Martian dunes every summer, and go away every winter. We don't know for sure what they are. That's awesome.  A known unknown.

--I've never understood why people have made fun of Rumsfeld for his Unknown Unknown statement. In addition to being a succinct statement of logic, it was a lovely answer to a question that he didn't want to (or could not) answer.

--I made one of my famous bourbon sours the other day using the juice from a Meyers lemon that I had picked one minute before from the potted tree in my sun room. Oh, crap. It really does make a difference. I was afraid of that. I've only got two more lemons left on that little tree.

--Do Meyers lemon trees self-pollinate? It had small fruit on it when we bought it.

--The more and more that I run across dogs in our town, the more convinced that I am that at least 1/3 of all dog owners should NOT own dogs. Maybe half, even. If your only interaction with that pack animal is to feed and water it for a couple of minutes a day and your dog spends the rest of the day entirely alone, I'm talking to you.

--Although both my parents have dogs that are sometimes a beating for me to be around, I in no way  could include my folks in that exclusionary group. Their dogs are living the high life.

--If reincarnation were for real, a person could do worse than to come back as a retiree's dog.

--People are shocked to learn that Rosa Parks wasn't a passive, hapless victim.What does it matter? She was being wronged. Her intentional act of passive resistance was a singular act that motivated a change.

--I don't understand motorcycle rides in which a dozen or more riders all cruise a single itinerary together on weekends. Some do this every temperate weekend. I thought that the draw to motorcycling was freedom? Having caravan'd a few times with friends, I have found that while they can be fun when you have time to stop at other people's whim (It's like being on a train with one of those emergency brake cables accessible to every kid who wants to stop to look at a woodchuck.), but they do restrict your freedom.

Because weather is awsome.

Check out the wind map.

It would be even more awsomer if it could be tweaked to display changes over a given period of time.

Micro climate.

I've always been impressed with how, even though the Official Weather Station for our area may report temperatures of, say, 39 degrees, I could have frost on my lawn. Or how when the weather station shows dry and still just a mile away, it's raining and gusting at my house.

Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get. Micro climates personalize what you get on a regular basis. Maybe your house is near a creek, in the shadow of a hill and in the lee of the wind? You'll find that your house is dank in the cool months and muggy in the warm months, despite your local predictions of dry and fresh.  Maybe you live next to a major heat sink, like a large concrete parking lot and between large low brick and concrete structures? In such a case, your first impression out the front door will always be that a sweater or jacket is less necessary than the rest of the people in your zip code.

I also like to watch weather come through, and see the reactions by the weather stations. For example:


Click to embiggen.
 

Check out what's going on there. The two weather stations on the map on the right show vastly different temperatures despite their proximity. But also you'll note that the higher temperature station still shows a wind from the south, while the western one now shows a brisk wind from the northwest. On the bottom graph, you can see that the change in the wind brought some rain that ramped up quickly, and the top graph shows that the temperature and the dew point dropped rapidly in concert with the changing wind direction (fourth graph). All in minutes.

I have GOT to get a decent digital-compatible reporting weather station.
For I am a weather geek.

Femtophotography.

I've always been impressed with the 1/millionth second photography. Bullets through apples, milk splashing, stuff like that. It's still amazing.

But it hadn't occurred to me how we could use lasers and digital cameras hooked up to serious computer processing to take faster pictures.

We can view images of light passing through small semi-transparent substrates in realtime perceptible time.

Watch this video, and be awed:

Monday bits.

--Saturday we practiced drafting and water movement at the fire department. It was actually pretty fun. First, we threw up a temporary pool, made of a folding steel frame and rubberized canvas. It was about 10'X20'X3'. I pulled the lever over the chute at the rear of the tanker truck, and we had the tanker emptied in under three minutes, and 3,000 gallons in the pond. We then practiced drafting water from it through the engine, and had guys practice handline technique, refilling the pond. We also nursed the tanker, and used it like an "engine" to pump to a handline. We were taught to have the nozzle man backed up by a hose man, both leaned forward into what looks for all like a stance for shooting SMGs and shotguns. But it was just a piddlin' 1.75" attack hose, so the guy in back wasn't strictly necessary. (NOTE: The guy at the nozzle gets all the glory, but it's the guys behind him that do the real work. If they're doing their job, the nozzle guy has it very easy.)

--When I got on the nozzle, I asked for more pressure. I had my backup guy step away from the hose. I called to the engineer: "More pressure! MOAR!!"  They took me to 170psi (100 foot hose), and I finally felt it feel like it might push me over. I wasn't doing it as a stunt; I really wanted to know how much I could handle on my own. Frequently, we arrive at a fire with nobody much to help. An engine might arrive with one engineer and a hose man. I feel very confident about handling a 100 foot 1.75" hose with 150psi. 170, I could do, but I want a really firm place to stand, and I want the engineer to have eyes on me. More than that, and I'll look like this guy, but not having as much fun.

--I noticed that the round analog gauges showed some space for negative pressure, and showed us somewhat above zero when the pumps were off. I asked why. The captain explained that they showed atmospheric pressure. He snapped his fingers to recall it. I mentioned that it was 14.7 pounds, or about 30 inches of mercury.  He said, "Yeah, I knew it was somewhere around 20 psi." Later, in the firehouse during whiteboard talk, one of the young cocky guys looked up from his iPhone and announced happily that atmospheric pressure was 14.7 pounds, unlike what I had said. "You said it was about 20 psi!" He crowed. I found myself surprised at irritated this made me. "Look, you might not have been paying attention in school, but my A's in college physics were earned, you little piss-ant," I began. "I could no more forget SATP than I'd forget the speed of c or the distance of an A.U.!" He scurried off.

--My old college roommate had the cork break in his bottle of MacAllan sherry-casked 12 year-old. He called me over. After we reduced the volume, it was filtered and decanted. What a fine way to spend a Saturday evening off.

--My neighbor has offered to put up the rest of my fence for a case of Budweiser. I bought said case, and learned that he drinks longnecks only. So now I've a case (minus two) of Bud red in cans. Maybe we'll cook with it, or just keep it around the house for friends. Eh.

--My daughter was upset that her tennis coach had told the kids that if they skipped the tournament that he set up tomorrow, they were off the team. This after he had changed the date of it. Lots of kids had planned to go on a trip to see a play with the school, and had a mandatory band practice. I found myself sitting in the office with the principal today, saying, "Look, I refuse to slam the instructors in front of my kids, but can we PLEASE back the pressure off my kid a notch, here? She loves it all." She assured me that this would all be worked out to my satisfaction. This would be the first time that I've ever been in the principal's office on either of my kid's behalf. I really meant it when I said that I support them whole-heartedly. I suspect that that sentence is uttered in that office with somewhat less sincerity by some.

--This week we have a board of review for a new officer, which I am to sit on. I'm picking up my partner to have him sit on the board, too. It'll be good to see him back in the saddle in some way, again.

--Asparagus is shooting up out of the ground in our garden at such a speed that one should wear eye protection while about the garden. I'm only sorta joking.

Wednesday night random thoughts.

--So apparently a pretty funny spare actor named Daniel von Bargen decided to check out, and shot himself in the temple with a .38 , only to find that it didn't work.  Still alive and now blind, the guy called 911 and summoned help. This confounds me. First, because all the news reports reference his work in Seinfeld rather than in Malcolm In The Middle, but second, because the guy had to put down his gun, find his phone (he was blinded by the shot) and call 911, and then wanted them to come help him. Amazing. He had been unhappy about needing some toes amputated, before. I would not have guessed that he would find life more worth living after having caused brain damage through a failed suicide attempt. Huh. I'm not trying to make the case that he should have just shot himself again; I'm merely pointing out that the logic that had him shoot once would seem to me to induce a second shot. Perhaps he didn't have a second round chambered?  Interesting.

--Well-cooked lentils are worth eating. Seriously.

--I have to evaluate what best plan to use to bolster my mom's fence against my brother's dog that he's leaving there. She's my next door neighbor. I don't want to have to chase the damned hound whenever it gets out. This means some work today. And money. I'm thinking about buying an Invisible Fence setup and running the wire along on the fence with staple gun.

--Why don't we standardize the buttons on the device that we swipe our credit cards or debit cards in? The questions are always different. The soft keys are in different places. One machine says: "Your total is $25.81*. Is  this okay? Push 'YES' if you wish to proceed." The next machine says: "Your total is $25.81. Do you want cash back? Push 'YES' if so." And so on and so forth. Look. I just want to swipe the card, get my receipt, and go. Why am I having to look at each proprietary system? When I get into another manual transmission vehicle that I've not driven before, I don't need to study on the fact that the accelerator is on the right, the brake is in the middle, and the clutch is on the left. Can't we just standardize these things?

--It was 80 degrees today.

--My shift partner and best work friend is leaving to go to another agency soon. I have cracked the ice and permitted him to see this blog. It's kind of fun finally letting someone from work know about this thing. He's sworn to secrecy, and I know that he won't tell. He's a great guy.

--There is some evidence that I've been burning the candle from both ends. I don't buy it, though. I've been pretty lazy.

--What's your experience with the durability and corrosion resistance with the firearms finish known as "French Gray?"

--I'm going back to sleep. Need to bank it for the weekend. I should actually be working on my take-home test on Homeland Security.


_________________________________________
*Note: This is the root of all evil.

Excercise for you physics boffins.

In my new hobby gig as a hose-dragger, I've been practicing SCBA drills. We've been changing bottles in the dark or with a blinder mask on, donning and doffing at speed, going through obstacle courses with wax paper in our mask plates, etc. At the end of each exercises, you go to the compressor and refill the tanks. This is a fairly straightforward process, but one can't just dump the air from the waiting storage tanks in all at once, or the SCBA tanks get hot, and the air doesn't seem to want to go in. I mentioned the issue of the liquid boiling up, and one of the younger firefighters said, "liquid? It's just air. There's no liquid." I tried to explain that, thanks to Charles' Law (and Boyle's Law), gases under enough pressure do go to liquid state*, but he didn't get it.

We use the Scott air packs with carbon fibre tanks, and I hadn't realized just how awesome they were until we did some training with a neighboring agency that uses old Scott air packs with old steel tanks. The carbon fibre tanks are slightly larger than a 3-litre bottle in diameter, and a bit longer. They are filled to 4500 psi. The steel tanks are much larger --about 11" in diameter and a few inches longer-- and weigh about 4 times more. The steel tanks only go to 2500 psi.  Here's the thing: both hold 45 cubic feet of air.

Interestingly, both packs will take each others' bottles, but the more modern carbon fibre bottles have to be bled down to 2500psi before being put on the older packs. Better than nothing, but not good. Given the decreased volume, 2500 psi on one of those is not much.

Supposedly, 45'^3 of air is good for thirty minutes. In my experience, I get about 10 to 15 when laboring. Hey, I'm a big boy.

While refilling the carbon fibre bottles, the same young guy gets really frustrated at how very long it takes to get from 3800 psi to 4000psi, which we've set as the minimum amount that the bottles must be filled. The large electric compressor labors for a long time, long after the storage bottles are depleted.
I told him that I am quite sure that the mass of air stacks with the volume-- it's not a linear progression for amount of air inserted for a given volume over a given time from 2500 to 2700psi, say, as it is to 3800 to 4000 psi.

So here is my question, and Stingray, take note:

For a given cylinder of, say: 6" X 21", what is the amount of volume of air (at STP) being inserted between between 2500 psi and 2700 psi?

Then, what's the volume of air (at STP) being inserted between 4000 psi and 4200 psi?

Express your answer in equivalent cubic feet, at STP.

________________________________
*EDIT: Though, probably not in this case. Consensus seems to be that the pressure isn't high enough to achieve liquid air, in these bottles.

Well, that's cool.

As I'm now 40, I finally got into the doctor's for my 40,000 mile checkup. "Check me out from head to toe," I asked.

The doc did the normal poking and vitals-taking, and looking, and ordered a bunch of blood tests to see what all was going on inside me. I allowed that I actually felt fine.

"As to the prostate exam," he finally said, "we use the Prostate Specific Antigen test.  The PSA is a much better indicator than feeling, through a rubber glove, and through a colon wall, a specific gland which we have personally  probably never checked before, for change. The digital-rectal exam is 60% accurate. We can do better than that. So we'll just look at your blood, and if the PSA is too high, we'll deal with it from there."*

I looked at him, realizing that I got to leave my pants on.

I pointed at my face in a circular motion. "This is not the look of a patient who is disappointed."

They should advertise this from billboards along the highway. "We'll check your prostate, without putting our finger where the sun doesnt' shine."

__________________________
*Yes, I'm aware of a fairly high incidence of false positives. But that's okay; you run it again, and if it's still positive, you run an MRI, CAT, and/or sonograph.

Ruh Roh, Hraggy. Brahd Shience!

See now the imminent storm to the eastern coast.

The importance of this hurricane Irene isn't its speed. It's not that this is the umpteenth storm of the year. It's just that it's bearing down on a raking path through some of the most populated portion of our nation. That's it.

This is not a notable climate event.

This is weather. Just like this long hot spell for us (we missed the record, darn it. Who wants the silver? Bah!), is just weather.

Just like that long icy period that we had at the end of January here in north Texas was just... weather.

I'm not a climatologist*, but I've taken Research Methods, and I've taken Statistics, and outliers happen. We tend to throw them out.

Trying to take anecdotes and turn them to prove your personal theories on climate is NOT GOOD SCIENCE, people.

______________________
*It's amazing how many folks do tend to want to argue with them that are. I'll listen, but really, if your argument is based on anecdotes, your science ain't up to snuff, y'know?

Space. I can't help that I love it.

Today I listened to a broadcast of RadioLab, in which they did several quick audio essays about space.

Look, I know that it's pushing it a bit to say that the Constitution authorizes our government to spend my money on space exploration. But I love that we're doing some of it. The very last story in the one-hour show is about trying to get private companies to explore space.

The first one was about the meaning that, Ann Druyan, widow of Carl Sagan, puts into the golden record that she directed the production of, just before it was launched with Voyager. I have to admit, her story got to me.

It's a quick hour, divided up into short essays, if you'll give it a listen.

I've always wanted to know that.

Falling under the "science that we're not real sure we can use, but darned if it isn't interesting" category, some Harvard boffins with good high-speed video and X-ray motion cameras have answered the question of how a dog's drinking mechanics works.

This footage shows that as the tongue touches the surface of the water, the liquid adheres to it, creating a water column as the tongue is drawn back towards the mouth. The dog then snaps its mouth closed just as the water begins to fall backwards towards the bowl.

Go click on the short video-- it's pretty cool.

The damage done by one man.

When you're a parent of a child with severe autism, you may very well find yourself search for a reason why your child was born with this inability to relate to the world. I imagine that it would be very easy to find yourself grasping for something, anything, to make sense of why your child had this handicap.

So when we started hearing about a study in England, relating vaccinations to the uptick in autistic cases, it must have been very seductive indeed for those parents to believe in it, even before the study was validated.

Good science has peer reviews, and has validity questions asked and answered. If your samples are contaminated with poor representations, or your data was not interpretted the same way, or you used biased methods, then you will get junk science, which cannot be replicated when good solid methods are used.

The English study, conducted by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, was worse than junk science; it was fraud.

And that fraud has led to a giant decline in vaccinations throughout the UK and even the US. Consequently, measles is up to the highest level in 13 years. Vaccinations rates fell 80% (can this be true?!?).

Another scientist named Deer says that he has not only found clear fraud, but a clear motive: pounds sterling. Apparently, lawyers were paying Wakefield to find these "facts," Deer says.

The British government have stripped Wakefield of his medical license. He says that it's a witch hunt to get him for saying something unpopular.

But there have always been scientists who were willing to speak out and say something unpopular, in the defense of good science. If Wakefield's notorious conclusions are correct then he'll receive support of his methods by legitimate members of the scientific community.

At this point? We don't have any proof of a link between vaccinations and autism. Even if there were a link, we can't point to Wakefield's study for proof.

But we can point to damage done to many children, but the acts of one bad "scientist."

Parthenogenisis.

LabRat discusses the crazy, crazy world of gender determination in lizards that give birth without having sex or even contact with lizards of the opposite sex. . . and it will make you reel.

NASA misses the most basic point in science: preserving documentation.

You ever run across one of those conspiracy theorists who claims that we never went to the moon, and that NASA filmed the Lunar landings in the desert, using mock-ups? I have. They're tedious. The thing about conspiracy theory is that you can NEVER prove that there wasn't a conspiracy. We cannot prove what is not; we can only hope to prove what is.

But when you start allowing basic evidence of what Is to come into question, you open the rabbit hole for conspiracy theorists to try to pull you into their argument. Then, whether or not they've been in the least bit successful, the very fact that you HAD that argument is proof that "some skeptics are involved in discussions as to the veracity of...." whatever it is that they're trying to prove.

So when you're the frickin' National Aeronautic and Space Administration, an organization made up of self-confessed geeks and scientists, you probably would do well to act like scientists, and preserve your documentation of the most controversial project that you've ever spent the public money on: the Moon landings. It seems that NASA has discovered that it taped over the original video that Apollo 11 beamed down from the Moon, with later data.

NASA, are you guys trying to needle the detractors? Keep up this kind of sloppy science*, and I'm going to stop scribbling love notes to you.

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*Yes, evidence preservation is part of science. A boring, less glamorous part of science, but a very necessary one.

Scale: the impact depends on the viewer.

You could see everything in this in 10 seconds.

I spent a good 10 minutes, myself.

I feel very small.

But it's a shame that it didn't show parsecs in the scale.

However, it did teach me about the yottameter. Yotta was not a prefix that I had heretofore known. Interesting. It looks very useful. Well, to someone.