Did It Not Occur To Them?

It just occurred to me: what exactly did Scooby Doo's teen gang think the circumstances were that led that caveman to be frozen in ice in such a nonchalant pose? It seems to me he would have been in a pose suggesting panic, struggle, or perhaps exhaustion. Or, more likely, shown evidence of dieing before being frozen.

It would have to be one hell of a cold snap to freeze him in place like that, and very unexpected seeing how he's dressed for summer weather.

I like to think I would have called shenanigans right away.

Anyway, the episode is "Scooby's Night with a Frozen Fright" and it's available in Scooby Doo, Where Are You! - The Complete First and Second Seasons.

Another Weird Dream

Last night I dreamed I was at a chalk board writing a short poem for a contest sponsored by Scientific American magazine. It was supposed to be about toilets. I was writing one about flushing. I don't remember the whole verse - I believe I was reworking it when I was interrupted somehow - but I seem to recall some of the rhymes being "yellow and brown," "flush it down," and "swirling around." I also recall thinking the editors at Scientific American who would be judging the contest would no doubt be impressed with my work.

Dad Update

I just realized I haven't posted an update on my dad for a little while now.

He did end up going into surgery. And they did end up opening up his chest to drain the infection from around the bone, though the surgeon said the bone looked strong. They have a tube in him now pumping him out, and aggressive antibiotics. He's eating, though not as much as they want him to. It's a bit chilly in the ICU and his food gets gold fast. They've had him getting up to use a potty chair, with an assist from the tilting bed. The surgeon will be checking the wound soon and he should be getting closed up either tomorrow or Thursday.

A while ago I read about a study that found that heart surgery patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of complications. Did anybody pray for him and tell him about it? Come on, fess up!

Helpful Things You Can Do On The Internet

Apparently there are several sites on the interweb where a body can sign up to contribute their time to those sites' projects. Here are a few I already knew about or recently heard of, followed by a list of others.

Distributed Proofreaders
I have this on in my blogroll already. Basically it's a site where you can help proofread, one page at a time, scanned and computer-transcribed public-domain texts to be included in the collection of Project Gutenberg. You get to pick from a list of current projects, some of which can really suck you in. (Yes, I have participated in this one.)

Stardust@Home
The Stardust probe traveled to a comet and once there held aloft an extremely light gel block (aerogel, the stuff is called) to gently catch bits of interplanetary & interstellar dust. They then put the aerogel under an automated microscope and took over a million pictures, scanning the position and focus depth along the way. Volunteers scan through the pictures, noting tell-tale signs of dust impacts so that the scientists can retrieve the captured dust for analysis.

Galaxy Zoo
An astronomical photographic survey promises to reveal a good million or more galaxies. The astronomers want to find and classify them all, but while computers are good at finding possible galaxies, they aren't nearly as good as humans at verifying that they are in fact galaxies and noting their characteristics. You can help by looking at the pictures they have gathered and noting whether each is a galaxy, what type, and the direction of rotation for spirals. They say that as a participant you may be the first human to see these galaxies.

And here's a list of others (more details at Distributed Human Projects at distributedcomputing.info)...

• Common Sense Learner
• Distributed Proofreaders Europe
• Project Dolphin
• Twenty Questions
• Open Mind Indoor Common Sense
• BeWeS MouseTracker
• Uptime Project
• The ESP Game
• questsin
• Amazon Mechanical Turk
• Herbaria@home
• systemic

Have fun!

Roll With It Baby

It's been a while since I highlighted the new entries in my list of links, so there's a lot of them here...

Gapminder World
A very interesting interactive animated chart and map of various metrics of countries around the world. Choose any of sixteen different indicators to assign to the X & Y axes and the dot size. Or view the dots in their geographical locations and pick a single indicator for their size. Watch it all animated and see how the values have changed over a period of years since 1960. (Some dots disappear when data is not available.) Fascinating.

RealClimate - Responses to common contrarian arguments (against climate change & its human factors)
I've been seeing a lot of the same arguments against a human factor in global warming. Mostly they seem to originate from the same house-organ/astroturf sources funded by a few corporations. Here's the reality, from people who have actually done the real science.

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense
Another in the bad/pseudoscience debunking genre. This time a Scientific American article that addresses the sometimes convoluted, sometimes simply willfully obtuse arguments put forth in favor of creationism/ID.

IMDB - old style (The new layout SUCKS. Switch all IMDB links to this URL and spread the word!)
IMDB has changed their layout. Their research indicates that most visitors concentrate on the main portion of the screen and largely ignore the links to additional information in the left hand sidebar. Accordingly, they have moved much of what had been in the center section to the left hand sidebar. (Boggle!) IMHO, they should have simply changed the visual styling to emphasize the connection between the main section of the screen and the sidebar. While it lasts, use this link instead of their main URL to get the old style IMDB. If enough people do this, maybe they'll catch a clue.

PR Watch - See who's behind the message.
A useful site that explores and exposes the real source of many messages & ideas you hear passed around on a variety of subjects. Is it the truth, or is it PR? That's the question this site asks and answers.

John's Secret Store at printfection.com
John's Other Secret Store at printfection.com
As you may have noticed (I've mentioned it here enough) I've been designing and selling shirts & gifts at cafepress.com. Recently I learned of this other similar site - printfection.com - with its own selection of goods. They allow "shop owners" to set up categories & subcategories in their free shops (cafepress charges) so I've begun putting up some of my favorites & best sellers to take advantage of their different selection of colors & styles. I've heard their print quality is good too. I have two shops there. The "other" one is the one I won't be showing my parents. ("Bad" words make conservatives cry.) I find that while they seem to have greater potential than cafepress in control of size & position & such, they lack certain controls that would allow easier editing and mass changes.
NOTE: I've recently learned of a "wrinkle" in both sites' printing process for dark shirts that is forcing me to make alterations to many of my designs. If you plan to order one of my darker shirts pleas contact me first here and I'll let you know if the one you want is safe to order yet. Otherwise, you might get a white border around the design.

That's it for now. Hopefully I won't let the roll grow so much before the next update. Happy surfing!

Symptom or Cause?

Or maybe both?

What am I talking about? An apparent dearth of science reporting in this country, and a failing in science education. I usually get my news throughout the day through the AP feed of my local paper's web site. Today when I arrived at the Secret Headquarters I noticed the page design had changed, and Science was missing from the list of sections. WTF??? Remembering a trick I had picked up, I edited the URL, substituting "RANDOM" for the code for my local paper after "SITE=" to have it redirect me to a random paper. The first site that came up had the full complement of sections. I breathed a sigh of relief and bookmarked it.

Now at my Secret Lair, I tried the same trick. This time I'm not having such good luck. I've been through a couple dozen randomly selected sites and not one of them is carrying the science section. This is an outrage.

It raises (no, not "begs") the question: Is this a symptom of poor science education in this country? Do the papers not carry science news due to lack of interest? Or does this shortage of exposure to science cause a lack of interest in science education?

UPDATE: I finally found one: http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/fronts/HOME?SITE=AZTUS&SECTION=HOME I do think I will keep looking for one with a simpler layout, and AP search. If I don't find one tonight, I'll email myself the one I found at the Secret Headquarters.

Learning Every Day

I've got some Snapple bottles lined up on my desk. Let's take a look at the "Real Facts" in the lids...

"The temp. of the sun can reach 15 million degrees F."
Sounds about right, but is it? A quick search finds solarviews.com where they say: "The Sun's outer visible layer is called the photosphere and has a temperature of 6,000°C (11,000°F)." Not quite 15 million, but that's just scratching the surface. If we delve deeper: " Solar energy is created deep within the core of the Sun. It is here that the temperature (15,000,000° C; 27,000,000° F)..." Ahah! 15 million degrees C and 27 million degrees F. I suppose somewhere in between the surface and the core the temperature would be 15 million F, so technically the lid is correct, but I don't think that's what they meant.

"The most sensitive parts of the body are the mouth and fingertips."
Now, some of you romantic types may be thinking there's something else more sensitive, but have your ever seen a blind person pull down their pants to read? I didn't think so. I happen to know this one is correct, so we'll move on.

"Swimming pools in the U.S. contain enough water to cover San Francisco."
At first glance you might think "Wow, that's a lot of water." or "Wow, that's a lot of pools." But what exactly are they saying? They don't say "All the swimming pools combined." The implication is that each and every swimming pool in the U.S. has enough water to cover San Francisco. "Yeah, right!" you say, and possibly with good reason. But notice also they did not specify how deeply San Francisco would be covered. According to answers.com, S.F. covers a 47 square mile area. If you assume an average pool size of 10,000 gallons and trust my math, that comes out to a depth of 3.109692907397719148936170212766x10^-7 meters, or 0.3 micrometers. A water molecule measures close to 2 picometers, less than 1/150000 the depth, so it's not like there wouldn't be enough water, and it's also obvious that any size pool will do. Looking at it practically, though, that's like 1/100000 inch of rain, which would probably evaporate pretty quickly unless San Francisco was experiencing one of its famous fogs at the time. If that were the case, however, the damp on everything might be more than the pool water. Technically, though, I say this one's correct.

Final score: 2/3

Rollin' Rollin' Rollin... Keep Those Web Sites Rollin'...

Another trio of links:

Scientific American The latest in science news, and highlighted articles from the print edition. You can, I think, see all the articles with an online subscription. RSS feed available.

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing BOINC for short. Install it and hook up with one or more projects to let your computer use its idle time to help with massive computational projects being distributed in small chunks to participating computers. Projects include:
* Mathematics and strategy games
o Rectilinear Crossing Number
o SZTAKI Desktop Grid
o Riesel Sieve
o Chess960@home
* Earth Sciences
o BBC Climate Change Experiment
o Climateprediction.net
* Astronomy/Physics/Chemistry
o LHC@home
o Einstein@home
o Quantum Monte Carlo at Home
o Spinhenge@home
o SETI@home
* Biology and Medicine
o World Community Grid
o SIMAP
o Predictor@home
o Malariacontrol.net
o Tanpaku
o Rosetta@home

Rogue/Suspect Anti-Spyware Products & Web Sites A very important resource if you're trying to rid yourself of or defend yourself from spyware & adware. It not only has a list of good software to use, but also instructions on how to clean your system, and a list of supposed anti-spyware programs that are actually spyware/adware themselves or are at best ineffective.

Another Serving Of Rolls

Three more additions for the blog roll:

Science News Online Updated weekly, this is the online edition of Science News, The Weelkly Newsmagazine of Science. It offers featured articles from the current issue, web-only features, and an archive of past articles. It also has an RSS feed which I may add to my feeds (as if they ever update.) I've referred to more than one article here when answering questions in Yahoo Answers.

Project Gutenberg It's the famous Project Gutenberg. the first producer of free electronic books. They claim to have 20,000 free e-books available and counting. I believe most all are available as plain text and some are available in HTML, Plucker, or MP3 audiobook form.

Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders The main source of new books for Project Gutenberg. Sign up and help produce the electronic books by proofreading one page at a time via their web interface. I've done a few myself and it's not hard. Just familiarize yourself with their conventions and markup and jump to it. You get to pick from whatever books are currently being proofed.

We're back! We're Sick!

We're back from our New York City trip. We had planned on doing a morning tour of the harbor on the Circle Line, but we both woke up with colds after our adventure on the tour bus. Take my advice: don't ride an open-top tour bus when there's a thunderstorm in the forecast. I plan on posting some select photos, but haven't decided whether to put them in an album on the front page or post them one at a time in the blog. Anyway, here's a rundown of the trip, with Google Maps links where I can find the spot:

Day 1: Worked a bit at the shop to get a last few orders out then drove to Gettysburg. Spent a bit more time than anticipated in the museum and weren't able to complete the CD-guided driving tour. What we did see was interesting and I got some good pics dispite the rain & mist. After grabbing a quick bite at the KFC just outside the park, we drove on.

We didn't start looking for a hotel until around 9:00 PM and didn't find an affordably priced one until around 11:00. I think we were driving through some sort of golf resort rich section of New Jersey. We went out to get a bite before bed and ended up driving for half an hour without finding anything but night clubs, high-end restaurant, and one closed Burger King. They did have some nice holiday lights in the town square, though. My wife had some crackers and we went to bed.

Day 2: The hotel served a free breakfast (and for $120/night it better) that was pretty good. They had a cook there making omelettes to order and a waffle station where you could make your own fresh with premeasured cups of batter. They were fresh and delicious. Out in the parking lot I took a pic of a couple huge houses neighboring the hotel. We were definitely out of our element.

Driving on we made our way to New York, or rather to the hotel near Palisades Park New Jersey. It was still early so we dropped off our luggage at the desk and, on the advice of the desk clerk, took the bus from the Vince Lombardi Park & Ride to the New York Port Authority bus terminal.

We walked towards Times Square and once there bought a two-day ticket for the tour bus but talked them into giving us three days because of the rain in the forcast. (The tickets are sold by agents on foot near each stop, and seemingly everywhere else.) We waited a bit for the bus and went on the downtown tour. (Here's a map of their downtown & uptown routes.) We saw lots of neat stuff and I got lots of pics.

We hopped off in Greenwich Village to get some lunch. (You can get on and off at any stop for the duration you pay for.) We ate in a little pizza joint on a corner and who should walk in for a slice but John Rzeznik of the Goo Goo Dolls. If I had a camera phone I would have taken a pic while making a fake call, but all we had was the regular digital camera and I didn't want to be too touristy. We just finished our lunch and left without making a big deal of it. I'm not sure, since I didn't get a good look, but I think another band member was with him. The pizza was really good, but for the sake of the band's privacy I won't post the name of the joint.

We hopped back on the tour bus and saw lots of other sites, including a glimpse of the World Trade Center site through the churchyard of the Church of St. Peter as we passed by on Broadway, and our best view of the Statue of Liberty as we swung around the tip of the island, the United Nations buildings, and Rockefeller Center where they had lit the tree the night before.

After cleverly pretending to be guests to use a hotel's lobby restrooms, we took the uptown tour, seeing many sites including Central Park, several museums, the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Grant's Tomb, and a few mansions & churches. We also passed the site of the shooting of John Lennon, in front of his home by the park. Unfortunately, the bus was moving just a little bit and the pics I got are a bit blurry.

After the tour we met up with my wife's family and ate at Planet Hardhollyrockwood, or whatever it was, by Times Square. (Actually, we ate near Darth Vader & Chewbacca costumes, so I guess it was Planet Hollywood. At my sister-in-law's insistance, no doubt.) The food I had was decent, actually, but not as good as that pizza from lunch.

After that we headed back to the hotel. The Port Authority was hot as hell, and we had just missed our bus and had to wait a while for the next one. I think switching the thermostat there must be a union job.

Day 3: After a late start, due to much socialization with the family over breakfast in the hotel lobby, we headed into town again. We started off by hopping a tour bus and jumping off at the American Museum of Natural History and seeing the Cosmic Collisions show in the planetarium. After the show we wandered around the museum, mostly in the vertibrate evolution exhibits. I got some nice pics in there, including some nice ones of the grounds, Central Park, and the city out the windows. It was rainy out but nice and comfortable inside.

The only glitch was when we were watching an orientation video in a large darkened alcove furnished with several wooden benches. I spotted something moving in the aisle. Turns out it was a mouse. The kids there seemed quite amused and tried to chase it.

We lost track of time - there's no way to see all if the museum in a day - and missed the last uptown tour bus so we had to take a taxi back to Times Square. It was a wild and weaving ride, but very smooth for all that. I gave the driver $15 on a near-ten-dollar fare. Was that too much?

We debated a bit on what to do next, and decided on doing the city lights tour. It looked like the rain had stopped, but as it turned out it wasn't quite done.

We toured around the city a bit, stopping at Lord & Taylor's store to walk past the window displays and popping inside to see the interior decorations. (Got pics.) The tour map doesn't indicate very well the route of the city lights tour. It turns out it includes a trip across the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn. That was an interesting drive at night from atop an open-top tour bus. Very windy. We stopped at a nice little pier under the Brooklyn Bridge (I forget the name) for some pictures of the skyline and an ice cream cone for my wife.

It started to rain so we headed back to the bus where they handed out cheap plastic ponchos. I had my coat with a hood so I put mine over our bag. The heavy rain naturally hit us as we started back across the bridge. All we could do was hunker down and try not to let our hoods blow loose. One woman ahead of us had an umbrella that kept blowing inside-out. Another tourist next to us had an abandoned poncho blow back into his face. There was much laughter.

By the time we got back into town the rain had stopped so we continued with an abbreviated tour. We did pass by Rockefeller Center again. The place was lit up beautifully. A nearby building was lit up in blue floodlights woth projected white slowflakes falling down its side. I didn't take any more pictures, though, for fear of a sudden downpour hitting the camera. The tour guide said we could take the lights tour again the next night if we wished, but we were planning to leave anyway.

After that we headed back to the hotel, by chance meeting up with my in-laws as we waited on the bus platform. My MIL is a bit freaked out by busses. She doesn't like not seeing the road as they go over bridges & overpasses. She had her eyes closed for much of the ride.

Day 4: The next morning we both woke up with colds. We had planned on taking the morning cruise of the harbor, but decided that we couldn't take the 40-degree temperatures and packed up to go home. Fortunately, without extra stops a direct route home is an easy half-day drive.

So here I am at home, sick in my jammies & robe. I'll post pics later this week, possibly over an extended period.