Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Vermin!!!
We have mice. They are always plural, I’m told – the only reason to have a singular form of the word is for fantasies like Mickey. Haven’t seen the mice themselves, but they’ve left little mouse turds all through the kitchen drawers. Blech.
We’re pretty sure they’re coming up from the basement. Despite all my caulking and re-pointing the mortar and so on, it is probably about as permeable to mice as an indoor-outdoor shopping mall is to us.
Now I know they’re just trying to make a living like the rest of us, but I’d just as soon they did it somewhere else.
We have a trap set, of course, and it’s one of those humane ones. If it works, which it hasn’t yet, it sweeps the mouse into a holding container, then we take the whole thing to a patch of woods a few blocks away and release it. Of course, a few days later, it’s likely to be back, at least according to research.
The mice, and the ivy that’s growing through the dryer vent, make me realize how little time it’s going to take after our species is gone for the whole thing to be completely transformed. And we’re not even in the fecund tropics, fa cryin out loud.
We’re pretty sure they’re coming up from the basement. Despite all my caulking and re-pointing the mortar and so on, it is probably about as permeable to mice as an indoor-outdoor shopping mall is to us.
Now I know they’re just trying to make a living like the rest of us, but I’d just as soon they did it somewhere else.
We have a trap set, of course, and it’s one of those humane ones. If it works, which it hasn’t yet, it sweeps the mouse into a holding container, then we take the whole thing to a patch of woods a few blocks away and release it. Of course, a few days later, it’s likely to be back, at least according to research.
The mice, and the ivy that’s growing through the dryer vent, make me realize how little time it’s going to take after our species is gone for the whole thing to be completely transformed. And we’re not even in the fecund tropics, fa cryin out loud.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Explaining Ice: The Answers Are Slippery
This is a really nice piece of science writing from today's New York Times. (Registration required, I think.) It turns out there’s a lot we don’t know about ice, of all things. Like why it is slippery.
The explanation I remember from high school physics or some other dim and distant time, is that ice skating works because the pressure of the blade melts a minute layer of ice, making it slippery. Not so, it seems.
According to calculations, in the best case the pressure from an average ice skate blade would only lower the melting point by .03 degrees F, hardly enough to make any difference. And it doesn’t explain why ice is still slippery to a person standing on it in regular shoes, where the weight is dispersed over a much larger surface area of shoe sole, vastly diminishing the melting effect.
Now, this calculation didn’t require high powered electron microscopes and delicate lasers to figure out. The physics and math necessary to figure out that the “skate pressure melts ice” theory is bogus has been around for years. So why did we get handed the same line of hokum for all this time?
Perhaps because there isn’t any convincingly better explanation, although the Times article does advance a theory from a Berkeley surface chemist that a minute layer of the surface of ice is actually liquid at all time. Our uncertainty is really odd, ice being such a common material and the cause of so many problems. “Why is ice slippery?” may not be the kind of question that gets much funding, although you’d think that the secrets of friction reduction would be, so to speak, a hot topic.
The explanation I remember from high school physics or some other dim and distant time, is that ice skating works because the pressure of the blade melts a minute layer of ice, making it slippery. Not so, it seems.
According to calculations, in the best case the pressure from an average ice skate blade would only lower the melting point by .03 degrees F, hardly enough to make any difference. And it doesn’t explain why ice is still slippery to a person standing on it in regular shoes, where the weight is dispersed over a much larger surface area of shoe sole, vastly diminishing the melting effect.
Now, this calculation didn’t require high powered electron microscopes and delicate lasers to figure out. The physics and math necessary to figure out that the “skate pressure melts ice” theory is bogus has been around for years. So why did we get handed the same line of hokum for all this time?
Perhaps because there isn’t any convincingly better explanation, although the Times article does advance a theory from a Berkeley surface chemist that a minute layer of the surface of ice is actually liquid at all time. Our uncertainty is really odd, ice being such a common material and the cause of so many problems. “Why is ice slippery?” may not be the kind of question that gets much funding, although you’d think that the secrets of friction reduction would be, so to speak, a hot topic.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Burr was actually trying to hit Hamilton
These are troubling times, as the Republic struggles to understand its second-ever VP-involved shooting. (Or at least, the second one that we know about. Most VPs have dwelt in such obscurity that for all we know Thomas Hendricks, upset at the way Grover Cleveland was treating him, spent his off hours blazing away at passers-by from his front porch.)
One thing that troubles me about the Cheney thing are the verbs.
In most of the accounts I have seen, the unfortunately Mr. Whittington was “sprayed” or “peppered” by the Vice President’s gun. I gather that birdshot is not like a .357 magnum slug, but still, those words seem intended to make us think it’s no big deal. Just a little boys-will-be-boys screw up.
On the other hand, when ordinary people get hit by non-lethal shotgun blasts fired by other ordinary people, that’s what happens: they get “hit” or “struck.”
As Ezra Pound is said to have said somewhere (can't find the reference), Keep the words pure and the laws will be just.
One thing that troubles me about the Cheney thing are the verbs.
In most of the accounts I have seen, the unfortunately Mr. Whittington was “sprayed” or “peppered” by the Vice President’s gun. I gather that birdshot is not like a .357 magnum slug, but still, those words seem intended to make us think it’s no big deal. Just a little boys-will-be-boys screw up.
On the other hand, when ordinary people get hit by non-lethal shotgun blasts fired by other ordinary people, that’s what happens: they get “hit” or “struck.”
As Ezra Pound is said to have said somewhere (can't find the reference), Keep the words pure and the laws will be just.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Cubs, Bears, Liberty: Which of these is not like the others?
So the Pittsburgh Steelers won the Superbowl. My residual affiliations with the ‘burgh (parents grew up there, grandparents lived there, I even lived and worked there for a few years) made me root moderately for the Steelers, although had the Seahawks won I wouldn’t have been heartbroken.
Because either way, a team with what I consider an appropriate name for a sports team would have won. By appropriate I mean the plural form of a common noun. When I was a boy we followed Lions, Tigers, Giants, Red Wings, Bears and so on. (We walked miles through 3 feet of snow to do so, I hasten to add.)
We could speak meaningfully of one Yankee or several. A Canadien or a group of Canadiens, though we probably didn’t pronounce it right. I guess we could have spoken of one White Sock, though I’m not sure anyone ever did.
What I’m having trouble dealing with is the practice of giving teams abstract and semi-abstract nouns, or the singular form of concrete collective nouns for names: Orlando Magic, New York Liberty, Colorado Avalanche, New England Revolution, or – a favorite of mine, the Fort Meyers Miracle, a Minnesota Twins farm team whose owners have included Bill Murray and Jimmy Buffet. (They did OK last year, with or without divine assistance: 11 games out of first in their division, but with a respectable 74-59 record.)
It gets sportswriters and others into all sorts of consistency problems: “The [Charlotte] Rage is another one of the League's long-standing teams and are celebrating their fifth season,” reads a press release from the defunct Arena Football team. Answer.com says that “The Colorado Avalanche are a National Hockey League team,” but “The New York Liberty is a Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) team.”
Most of the social phenomena I notice augur the decline of Western civilization, and this trend is no different. It speaks to me either of an ersatz collective identity - "we're not just a hastily assembled group of overpaid egos who will be playing somewhere else next season, we're the Wyoming Anomie" - or an evasion of individual responsibility: the Magic may have blown the game, but you can’t pin it on any individual ... Magician, I guess. What is a member of the Magic anyway? a Trick? a Spell?
It also seems related to the growing practice of associating teams not with cities, but with states or regions, although that may simply be an additional piece of leverage for owners as they negotiate stadium deals with cities: “Hey, we don’t have to be in Denver. We could move anywhere in Colorado and not change the logo.”
Because either way, a team with what I consider an appropriate name for a sports team would have won. By appropriate I mean the plural form of a common noun. When I was a boy we followed Lions, Tigers, Giants, Red Wings, Bears and so on. (We walked miles through 3 feet of snow to do so, I hasten to add.)
We could speak meaningfully of one Yankee or several. A Canadien or a group of Canadiens, though we probably didn’t pronounce it right. I guess we could have spoken of one White Sock, though I’m not sure anyone ever did.
What I’m having trouble dealing with is the practice of giving teams abstract and semi-abstract nouns, or the singular form of concrete collective nouns for names: Orlando Magic, New York Liberty, Colorado Avalanche, New England Revolution, or – a favorite of mine, the Fort Meyers Miracle, a Minnesota Twins farm team whose owners have included Bill Murray and Jimmy Buffet. (They did OK last year, with or without divine assistance: 11 games out of first in their division, but with a respectable 74-59 record.)
It gets sportswriters and others into all sorts of consistency problems: “The [Charlotte] Rage is another one of the League's long-standing teams and are celebrating their fifth season,” reads a press release from the defunct Arena Football team. Answer.com says that “The Colorado Avalanche are a National Hockey League team,” but “The New York Liberty is a Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) team.”
Most of the social phenomena I notice augur the decline of Western civilization, and this trend is no different. It speaks to me either of an ersatz collective identity - "we're not just a hastily assembled group of overpaid egos who will be playing somewhere else next season, we're the Wyoming Anomie" - or an evasion of individual responsibility: the Magic may have blown the game, but you can’t pin it on any individual ... Magician, I guess. What is a member of the Magic anyway? a Trick? a Spell?
It also seems related to the growing practice of associating teams not with cities, but with states or regions, although that may simply be an additional piece of leverage for owners as they negotiate stadium deals with cities: “Hey, we don’t have to be in Denver. We could move anywhere in Colorado and not change the logo.”
In any event, the Republic is in grave danger.
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Isaac Newton started like this, I hear
I'm supposed to be writing a report for a client on broadband access but I was distracted by the fact that the sun has finally come out here. It came pouring through the window, causing me to grab a prism that is part of the thin layer of junk and doo-dads that covers a lot of surfaces around here, and verify that indeed, as Sir Isaac found, you get the colors of the rainbow. Cool. (Why do I have a prism on my desk? I don't know. I got it when I was a sciency little kid and I can't get rid of it. I also have my Cub Scout binoculars, but I may put them up on Ebay and see what happens.)
There is some faint connection to what I'm supposed to be doing - the fact that light has colors lets us do wavelength division multiplexing in fiber optics - but mostly I'm just screwing around avoiding work.
