I give you funny dueling churches!
But it’s totally fake.
Fake, but Funny
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Category Archives: Idle Chit-Chat
Facebootution
Generally I ignore the offers from Facebook to help me find my long-lost pals and other perfect strangers. But tonight I succumbed to the temptation to look through folk I might want to meet.
There were some names I recognized, with a significant number of common contacts. Then there were others, who invariably had sexy photos, with no connection to me at all. Yet somehow Facebook thought I might want to be friends with them. Huh. How much did they pay, and how is Facebook not guilty of pandering?
The Letter I Just Sent to emusic
The following is what I wrote at the end of the “why did you cancel your account?” survey at emusic:
I’ve been with emusic for a long, long time, and frankly I think things got worse as you succeeded in getting deals with major record labels. Prices kept going up, and the new pricing structure is frustrating. Necessary for getting the big labels, but then I discovered that I don’t much like the music the big labels are putting out. And when ’80’s arena rock bands show up in the ‘alternative’ section, you know that keyword pollution is starting to cause real problems.
So it has become harder to find actual good music (editorials are a huge help, so keep that up), and more expensive to experiment. I can’t take the risks I used to; downloading an album by a band I didn’t know is much more costly these days. So I’m not making as many happy discoveries as I did years ago.
emusic may still be the best online music service, but at this point the commitment to spend a set amount each month is just not justified.
Still, thanks for all the great tunes I’ve downloaded over the last decade-plus of membership.
Remember me?
You would think that damn near forty-eight hours on a train would lead to a burst of blogging activity. I would have thought so myself. But no, I spent the time reading instead. It was pleasant. Then I got back to town and while I had collected some interesting stories on the road, I just wasn’t inspired to write about them.
Perhaps someday I’ll tell you about Charlie, the deep, gravelly-voiced dark-black (Barry White after 10,000 packs) man shorter than me from Louisiana who sat next to me from Los Angeles to San Jose, who was once stabbed in the neck by a random asshole and probably would have killed said asshole if he hadn’t passed out from blood loss first. That’s the way he tells it anyway. At the trial the prosecutor asked Charlie, “what do you think we should do with this man?” “Give him to me,” Charlie said. According to him, that broke up the courtroom. Charlie was all about making sure his grandchildren didn’t get into the same shit he did. He was all right. But man, he liked to talk.
I took refuge from Charlie in the window car (Lounge car? Observation car?) that sat atop the train bar. From Santa Barbara well north a pair of guides in forest green uniforms spoke through a makeshift little PA system, telling us about the history of the places we rolled through. It was pretty cool, actually. Figs, rockets, railroad lore, and pretty scenery. Between lectures I read a novel by a guy who is not afraid to kill people you like. Maybe more on that later.
But I’ve been back now a couple of weeks and then some, and I haven’t even checked in on my favorite blogs. I’m in a twilight place, with an intimidating literary to-do list, and I’m pretty much frozen. I check Facebook more than I ever have before, clearly a sign of the apocalypse. I even retweeted something yesterday. (Spelling checker does not object to retweeted. I’m not sure how I feel about that.)
So, now I feel the need to reconnect. I’ll start with my favorite comics, then go and read the blog episodes I’ve missed, and leave comments that are far past stale.
And here at MR&HBI, I’ve got some ideas. Not new ideas, but ideas. We’ll see.
Original Six?
Many people are pointing out that this year’s hockey championship is especially cool because it’s between two of the Original Six teams. Chicago Blackhawks vs. Boston Bruins. A battle of old-school heavyweights.
Questions to challenge the hockey faithful:
1) How many teams were in the NHL when it first formed? (Hint: it’s not six)
2) How many of the so-called ‘original’ teams in this championship series were part of the NHL when it first formed? (Hint: The ‘nation’ in NHL was not the United States of America).
3) How many of the REAL original teams are still skating? (Hint: the answer is two, Montreal and Toronto.)
4) Is there any hockey fan base anywhere who doesn’t hate the whiny bitches in Vancouver? (Hint: no. Everyone hates Vancouver.)
Skyscraper
Summer Camp!
Today will be a day of Automobiles, Coaches, and Trains, in that order. Stopping off in New Mexico to hang with (a whole lot of) family, then heading on to Kansas to be a writer for a while. Man do I need that.
The good news is that I may have the time to reinvigorate this blog, and post some more creative stuff, at least for a little while. I’m going to miss my sweetie something fierce, though.
More from the road (electricity permitting)!
The Ice Man
A variation on a joke we’ve all heard:
Me: Doctor, it hurts when I do this. (waggle arm)
Doctor: Yeah, it hurts when I do that, too! I know just the specialist.
Me (to specialist): It hurts when I do this.
Specialist: Then don’t do that.
The advice pounded into me over a few weeks of physical therapy: don’t do things that hurt. At first I thought the advice was laughable, until I realized just how many times each day I performed through the pain. Little things that put a twinge through my elbow were not things to gut out, they were things to avoid. More pain = more harm.
The other thing I learned: ice doesn’t just feel good, it helps healing at a structural level. I love the cold. I’ve had a knee bothering me for years, and now I work it harder than ever but always I ice it afterwards, with a donut-shaped product called ‘peas’ from CVS. My knee doesn’t bother me at all anymore. Maybe it’s the peas, maybe it’s better workout form, or maybe it’s just natural healing. I don’t care, I’m strapping the chilly donut onto my knee every day. My knee is doing just fine, now, thankyouverymuch.
Then came the elbow pain, and the above dialog. The professionals did a fine job getting me up and running, but the best thing they did for me was to say, “don’t do that.” The second best thing they said was, “put ice on it.” A tantalizing phrase from one of the therapists: “Ice massage.”
My elbow is feeling much better now. Better than I thought it ever would again. The knee’s all right, too. Now it’s my shoulder that’s bringing me down. It’s always something. Happily I live in one of the few countries on Earth that values the overhand throw. Have you ever seen a European throw a ball? Yeah, so you know what I’m talking about.
I live in a country where shoulder injuries are common. When my shoulder got sore, I resolved two things: I would avoid pain, and I would ice. No need to go back to the specialists. Onto Amazon I went, and I found the right icepack for the job. In this nation, options abound when it comes to icing shoulders.
My mornings go like this, now. The alarm clock starts shouting, and my sweetie slaps her hand on a button that shuts it up for a while. I take this moment of wakefulness and snuggle up with the one I love. Sleepiness returns, and I doze deeply enough that when the next alarm comes I jerk almost hard enough to knock my sweetie out of bed. I don’t awaken gracefully. “One more time.” I usually say, and we repeat the cycle.
Then I drag my sorry ass out of bed, weigh myself, and climb onto the exercise machine. When that’s done with, I shuffle to the kitchen and collect the frosty-cold items waiting to make me happy. Knee donut, elbow cooler, and my new shoulder freezer. I can imagine a time when I just dive into an ice bath, I have so many joints complaining.
It could be that I’d heal just as quickly without the ice. I’m not offering science, here. Just an anecdote. But man, I loves me some chill.
Ice for the knee! Ice for the elbow! And now, ice for the shoulder.
Unsolicited Advice
The Ascendant Science
Medicine, it seems, is always the last science to the dance. While one guy was establishing the principles of electricity, one of his friends was being bled to death in the name of medicine. When radioactivity was discovered, health practitioners killed countless patients with it.
For most of the history of humanity, doctors were quacks. All of them. The discovery of tiny creatures that live inside us revolutionized the medical biz, but compared to the physics industry and its spinoffs, medicine was still mostly chanting and waving rattles.
Early in the last century, physical science went through a boom so loud our ears are still ringing today. The second half of the 20th century saw technology go nuts as those fundamental discoveries reached market.
That wave gave us the machines we needed to finally dig deep into how we work as organisms. Allow me to tell a rather long story to illustrate.
I have been working to lose weight. If you use the Internet, you’ve seen ads that read, “New scientific breakthrough can help you shed pounds!” and shit like that. I have long made a point of ignoring those ads, but I became curious about the scientific breakthrough. One night I clicked one of the ads.
I was presented with a video. Generally, when I want the answer to a specific question, I HATE video. But in this case, I understood that the video existed for the very reason I dislike them: the producer wants me to go through a lot of shit before providing me the nugget I want. From their point of view, video is perfect.
With the sound off, I watched as cartoon people were drawn and erased, showing a variety of body forms. Finally, a word came on the screen: Leptin. I stopped the video and fired up Wikipedia, where I was offered an explanation with lots of words I didn’t know. I knew enough of them, however, to understand that leptin was created by fat cells, and when leptin levels go up enough to be noticed by the brain, you feel full, and your metabolism cranks up. Injecting leptin into obese mice helps them lose weight; it doesn’t work so well in humans. Also, leptin was found in the 1990’s.
Then there’s Ghrelin, identified about ten years ago. Ghrelin makes you feel hungry, and slows your metabolism. The Wikipedia article about ghrelin identifies exactly which gene builds it, how it’s matched with a (perhaps unused) counterpart, and where it binds to receptors in the brain. There are drawings of the damn thing.
I trust the drawings, but it all seems vaguely magic.
I think this is just the beginning. The human organism is the most complex thing in the known universe, but we’re starting to figure out how it works. Next comes how to fix it when it’s broken; how to address the exact problem without mucking with other systems. We will move from drugs to viruses — those that attack specific bacteria and those that give the host the ability to produce a particular protein. It’s pretty cool.
That technology explosion? We’re starting to feel the biology echo, and it’s going to change everything.
Some Excitement in the ’Hood
I was just finishing up with my post-workout ice regimen when a helicopter buzzed the house. It sounded much meatier than the usual news chopper or police bird. And lower. The windows rattled and the walls reverberated, then the sound faded.
Only to return a couple of minutes later. On the third pass I went outside to see what was going on. That’s when I saw the smoke. There is a hill directly behind our neighborhood, and it was on fire.
The view from our house.
Over the throb of the helicopter, I could hear the fire itself, crackling as it romped through the dry grass on the side of the hill. No sirens, however, despite the proximity of the fire to my neighborhood. The brush is pretty low, and there are railroad tracks along the back of the property, so the chance of the flames reaching structures on our side was pretty low.
So rather than prepare the two hard drives that serve as backups to all our systems, I grabbed the camera and walked down to the fence at the back of the neighborhood.
Happily for the helicopter driver, and for spectators on the sidelines as well, there is a little pond right next to the site of the fire. I got some good pics, but the helicopter descended completely out of view during fill-up.
The helicopter rises from loading at the pond, shrouded by smoke.
The helicopter getting a load of water, with a lucky accident as the camera focussed on the fence.
The above pictures I got while standing on a neighbor’s boat, in exchange for a promise to share my pictures with him. Then he told me a house number that doesn’t exist. Huh. Anyway, thanks, Steve!
This one’s my favorite, I think:
The chopper drops a load of water directly upslope from firefighters.
The Helicopter would sound a siren just before releasing the water, to warn crews below. In this case, the water almost directly onto the ground crew.
The fire helicopter passes directly overhead after releasing a load.
At one point the fire flared up right next to the tracks, and the helicopter diverted and dropped a couple of bucket loads right in front of us. I have video, but I’m still working on getting it in the right orientation.
An exciting day! I hope none of the firefighters were hurt, but hats off to guys who will put on heavy clothing and go tromping up and down a grassy slope that’s on fire. Thanks, guys!
America’s Oldest City
There’s a town in New England called Jamestown or Jonestown or something like that. It has signs proclaiming it to be America’s first town. But it’s not even close to that. Not even remotely close.
Let’s start with America’s actual oldest town, and work back from there. It’s hard to say for sure, but the Acoma Pueblo is probably the oldest burg in the US where people still live. It launched around the year 1000, give or take. That’s a bunch of years before any European mofo visited our shores. These days, Acoma is a kind-of-crappy little town on I-40, but that crappy little town is the oldest still-occuipied settlement in North America. Truly, America’s oldest city. A little reverence is due when you drive through.
The Taos pueblo has been continuously occupied since long before Europeans tripped over the continent on the way to India. This isn’t a matter of who was here first; there is a condo complex in North America dating to the time of William the Conqueror. It’s still occupied, largely unchanged. It’s still condo, but the covenants are a bitch.
So, OK, the claim by Jamestown that they’re the oldest burgh on the continent is clearly delusional. But what do we care about those crazy aboriginals? What really matters is when Europeans built themselves a town.
Only, the Spanish were building towns in North America for a full century before the English set timid toe to shore in North America. Santa Fe was a going concern by the time the Pilgrims staggered ashore.
That leaves Jamestown as the oldest settlement in North America founded by people who speak English. Which, you know, is really the seminal moment in world exploration. I’d be proud if I lived there. Really.
Lost Opportunity
A while back I drove through a wind farm to visit a particularly smart friend of mine. I noted on the way that many of the turbines were still, and brought it up with Enrico Fermi (that’s not his actual name).
“Big problem with wind,” Enrico said, “is that it doesn’t blow when you really need it.”
I accepted it at the time, but today I say ‘fie’. Fie! Spin those turbines. If the power’s not needed immediately, it can be stored. Use the power to pump water back up to the reservoir behind a dam. That’s quality energy storage.
There’s a reservoir south of where I live, large and flat with a modest power-generation station at the end. It’s always windy there. If there were windmills local, set to pump water back up into the reservoir, then that modest power station would be able to put out a little more. It wouldn’t matter if the wind blew when no one cared, the power would be stored for later.
The reservoirs behind dams are our nation’s batteries, and they’re rechargeable. Mostly we rely on the sun to move water back upstream, but that doesn’t mean we can’t push the process a little bit.
Getting the Numbers Right
Apple found itself on Greenpeace’s dirty list last year, receiving harsh criticism from the environmental group for its North Carolina data center. Based on Greenpeace’s estimates of the energy consumed at the facility, Apple was responsible for a lot of coal being burned. That’s not good.
While I’m really glad there are organizations like Greenpeace holding corporations to a higher standard than does our government, and I understand that Apple is a prime target for all sorts of activists because using their name generates a lot of press (Foxconn also makes Samsung toys), I really wish the activists would be a little more careful. It’s their own credibility at stake as well as Apple’s.
NOTE: I am completely aware that I come across as a shill for Apple in the following paragraphs. I went back over the text with the conscious resolve to temper the narrative, to be more balanced. The thing is, there is no balance. Greenpeace was stupid, and nobody won.
Take the data center in question. Both Greenpeace and Apple agree that Apple has built the largest solar farm in the US and the largest fuel cell generation plant in the US to provide power to the facility. Apple says those provide 60% of the power needed to run the place, and they are expanding the solar farm with the goal of reaching 100%*.
Greenpeace says the power those the solar and fuel cell plants generate is just a drop in the bucket, and the rest of the power must come from coal. Yikes. Apple says the facility will use 20MW when fully up and running, and they’ve got that covered. Greenpeace says it will use five times that much, and Apple certainly does not have it covered. That’s a big discrepancy. How do the two organizations end up so far apart?
Outsiders have used various methods to guess how much computing power is in the sprawling facility. The footprint of the building is very large; if it were filled with servers from wall to wall, power consumption would likely be much higher than what Apple claims. The thing is, the building is not filled to bursting with raw computing power, if public documents are to be believed. In fact, only about a third of the square footage is devoted to humming hardware; the rest of the building is devoted to ‘other stuff’.
So where did Greenpeace get their power estimate? According to an article I can’t find the link to anymore, the reasoning goes something like this: “Apple says they are spending a billion dollars on the facility. A typical billion-dollar data center would burn 100 MW of power, based on the performance of similar data centers. Even if Apple gold-plates the whole building, they’re not going to spend five times more for a 20MW facility than their competitors.”
OK, I can follow that logic, but you have to be careful that you don’t follow it off a cliff.
Here’s the thing: that billion dollars includes the cost of the largest solar farm and the largest fuel-cell generation facility in the United States. Greenpeace is including the cost of providing clean(er) energy to inflate their estimates of how much dirty energy the facility is consuming. If Apple simply used coal-fired electricity in their plant, they’d look better in the face of Greenpeace math.
Put another way, yes, Apple will pay five times as much for a data center as others will, if it means they don’t have to pay so much for power in the future. Apple is building a data center that is much less vulnerable to future energy cost spikes, which is a smart thing to do when you have the cash on hand now to control costs down the road.
Apple knows that electricity is its lifeblood, and there is a major initiative to make the company energy-independent. That’s just smart. They are also focussing on renewable sources for that power, which increases the up-front costs significantly, and won’t pay off for decades. From hearing the speeches, I honestly believe that doing what’s right is important among the execs at Apple. Note to investors: Apple is also becoming very good in the clean energy business. Ahead of the curve as an energy provider. I wonder, idly, if some of those dollars spent in North Carolina are to establish a beachhead in the coming energy war.
As for Greenpeace, they’ve said they’re happy about Apple’s commitment to clean(er) power, and they hope the tech giant keeps improving. We can all agree on that.
—–
* Time flies. Since I wrote my draft, I’ve seen a letter from a Big Shot at Apple saying the facility is now 100% renewable – though that’s a slippery term, and corporate big shots aren’t generally noted for honesty. They don’t lie so much as spin. But still.
Something My Science Textbook Lied About
It was fifth grade. Science period. There were two teachers responsible for the entire herd of fifth-graders, so they were not specialized in any particular field. Just give the kids a general idea of all the subjects, and the specialists will fill their heads later. Our teacher relied heavily on the veracity of the textbooks we were provided.
I remember this day well. I was sitting over on the right side of the classroom. The goal of the exercise was to understand the Scientific Method. I capitalized Scientific Method in the previous sentence because understanding it is really friggin’ important. It’s how we got here, for better or for worse.
The textbook chose Bernoulli’s Principle (these days, the press would doggedly refer to it as Bernoulli’s Theory, and imply that it might not be true even as planes passed overhead) as the Nugget of Knowledge that we, as young scientists, would ferret out through a process of forming a theory and putting it to the test experimentally or through observations of the world, then revising or scrapping the theory if the test did not yield the expected results. (The revising and scrapping parts were not included in this exercise, which is too bad, because it’s the fundamental strength of science.)
For me, as the evidence was exposed in the pages of the text, it was a puzzle to solve. A race with my fellow students to get the answer. Halfway through the lesson my hand shot up, and when recognized I gave the “right answer”. I recapitulated Bernoulli. I was a little disappointed by the teacher’s reaction. I had the right answer, but the important thing was how we got to the right answer. That’s what the scientific method is all about.
But even before the glow of my triumph was diminished by the cool reaction of the teacher, I was bothered. My gut told me that one of the key pieces of evidence cited by the textbook was, in fact, bogus. But it was a SCIENCE BOOK. It was right. It had to be.
The false evidence: You know how when you’re in the shower the dang shower curtain will assault you, pushing into the tub and wrapping around your leg? That was presented in this little science exercise as evidence of Bernoulli’s Principle. Even in fifth grade, even as I read that supposed clue to bring me to a conclusion I had long since surmised, it wasn’t working for me.
For years hence I thought of mechanisms where the rushing shower water got the air moving around it, lowering the pressure on this side of the curtain. But that would have required noticeable wind.
Yet, I continued to believe that shower curtains assaulted one because of Bernoulli’s Principle. The science book said so. I tried to make the water-coupling-with-air theory work. As I showered I tried to measure air flow. I held my hand next to the curtain on many occasions, forming explanations for why I couldn’t feel the wind. If I couldn’t come up with the explanation, that was my failure, not the theory’s. Um, principle’s.
The fact is, shower curtain assault has nothing to do with Bernoulli’s Principle. It’s convection. Finally I had to accept that my Science Book had been just plain wrong. It took many years to get there.
So here’s the true lesson about Scientific Method afforded me that day, one that took me years and years to learn: Don’t invent complicated explanations for why the other guy is right, when there’s a better answer in front of your face. Then prove the better answer. Proving the better answer is a step that a lot of our ‘science rebels’ miss. The actual science part. They deserve every bit as much disbelief as the mainstream guys do.