08:04 – Barbara just left to pick up her parents and head down to the beach for a few days. Colin and I are bereft. She’ll be back Sunday. Colin and I will watch Heartland reruns and play ball while she’s gone. We made it through all but the final three episodes of series five while Barbara was at dinner last night. We’ll watch those three episodes tonight and then start again on series one.
I got email from Cathy Duffy last night. She runs the most popular homeschool curriculum review site on the web. I’d sent her a copy of Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments a few months ago, and she added it to her to-be-reviewed queue. Here’s her review.
We have everything we need to put together 30 more biology kits, except one thing: thirty 125 mL polypropylene bottles. I know we have 60 of those in inventory; I just can’t find them. So I issued a PO yesterday to one of our wholesalers that included, among other things, 60 more of those bottles. They should arrive early next week, and we can start assembling another batch of biology kits.
I spent some time yesterday prototyping a couple of the new kits that we’ll be shipping at the end of this year and into 2013. It’s important to know what size box the kits will require. The biology, chemistry, and forensics kits all fit into a USPS Priority Mail Regional Rate Box B, which costs anything from about $6 to $15 to ship, with the average being about $11. If possible, I wanted the new kits to fit a RR Box A, which costs from about $5 to about $10 to ship, with the average being about $7. That difference means we can price the kits $4 less than we would have if they required a RR Box B.
Duffy’s review was pretty good, if superficial. The bit about the dedication was priceless.
I was unfortunate enough to have a young Earth creationist teaching my AP Biology class. It was compounded by the fact that our text, the BSCS (?) AP Biology book, was one that integrated evolution into the entire text, using it as the thread tying everything together. I complained to school management, but as the teacher was chair of the science department and retiring at the end of the year, nothing was done.
Cathy Duffy’s site is one of the major go-to places for homeschool curriculum reviews, so having the biology book and kit featured there is a good thing. Although I believe she is religious personally, she reviews religious and secular curricula even-handedly.
You might be surprised by the high percentage of public high school biology teachers who are creationist. It’s perhaps not as high as the general population. Of course, the percentage is much, much lower among teachers who majored in biology or indeed any science in college. Most of the creationist biology teachers majored in education and have little or no exposure to real modern biology.
As Theodosius Dobzhansky, himself a deeply religious man, stated in his essay: “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”. That’s literally true. Not “believing” in evolution is as senseless as not “believing” in gravity. Teachers who do not understand this are doing their students a great disservice, and should not be teaching.
More broadly, you might not (alas) be surprised by the high percentage of public school teachers who are incapable of deductive reasoning, unbiased evaluation of data, and other stigmata of the adult human mind.
Wot SteveF said above; too many publik skool teachers can barely tie their own shoes, let alone teach any classes in anything, but there they all are…and this holds true into college and university, with the obvious exceptions of the hard sciences and engineering. I also note that the STEM teachers and professors can write at least as well, if not tons better, than the humanities and social “science” charlatans and neo-Marxists.
Well, of course they can. It’s not politically correct to say so, but the people in STEM are bright and those in the humanities and social sciences are, well, not always bright. (How’s that for diplomatic phrasing?) Obviously, there are exceptions both ways, although there are a lot more bright people in the humanities than there are dim ones in STEM disciplines. That, of course, is because STEM disciplines are in fact disciplines, where there is generally a right answer, whereas nearly everything in the humanities is a matter of opinion. Dim STEM students wash out quickly. Dim humanities students often go on to terminal degrees.
And then there’s the terminal degree for the terminally dim and deluded: the EdD. A more self-important and yet incompetent bunch you’ll never meet. They’re even worse than my classmates in law school, and let me tell you, that’s quite an impressive bar to hurdle.
When I started in engineering school, there were, IIRC, 140 students starting in Physics 101. Two classes of 70, as I recall. It was very crowded to begin with, but that was not a problem after the first couple weeks. By the end of the second year, 7 of us were left. 95% attrition, baby. To be sure, not all of the 133 dropped out of the engineering program. Some of them dropped out of a science program. Also, because of the way Calculus 101 and Physics 101 were integrated, I couldn’t tell you which was the real killer.
Someone who couldn’t deal with Calculus 101 or Physics 101 shouldn’t have been accepted into an engineering or science program in the first place.
Agreed, but a) I imagine they would claim that they don’t know who can handle it until they’ve tried, and b) it was a community college with warm-body admission standards. (I was barely 17 and had dropped out of high school, my family was very poor, and I was the first in my family to go to college. Bottom line, we didn’t have any tribal knowledge or other resources that could have gotten me into a name-brand school to start with, so I did the community college schtick, got scholarships, and transferred to RPI.)
I agree wholeheartedly with both of you, having been in two graduate humanities programs at major universities, going for my PhD, LOL. A bunch of wastrels, poltroons, goldbricks, and neo-Marxist scum. With only one exception at each of the schools I went to; one in medieval philosophy/theology and the other in 18th-C Brit Lit. Both outstanding and kicked our asses.
My regrets are basically twofold: I had the dullest and dreariest old fossils for math and science for the most paht and prior to that, in middle school, some fucking commie buggers or somebody came up with that “new math” shit; my dad was an engineer and even he couldn’t figure it out. Secondly, I had other interests that easily distracted me from any arduous struggle to master that material and that was that; biology was as far as I went in science (after a mediocre year of “earth science,” and Algebra I was where I ran into the wall at quadratic equations. Outside was beer, ciggies, dope, and grrls. Plus rock concerts. And…the late 60s demonstrations, riots, and wacky happenings all over the place. I could sit inside a stuffy overheated classroom staring at algebraic formulae (invented by hadji fucks, natch, to bedevil the infidels) or I could light up a nice doobie, grab a case of beer and hang out with the chicks down by the Sudbury River. Maybe we’ll jump in starkers and have ourselves a ball!
So you can see it was no contest. Could I start it up again and go all the way through calculus and physics? Probably, but why? I’ll be dead as a doornail in a couple of decades, max, and I wouldn’t be using any of it anywhere (not that I used medieval philosophy or 18th-C poetry much, either). Mrs. OFD, however, made it through calculus and physics at McGill, a school that will kick your ass, and spent five years there while also becoming fluent in La Quebecoise, a fucked-up bastardized version of actual French, I am assured, by an actual Frenchman, who runs the CentOS clusters at our site.
Has she used it since? Nope.
I would just like to know enough math and physics to accompany my noob studies in amateur astronomy and archaeology. And firearms ballistics. Maybe explosive yields…
OFD, there are plenty of firearms programs (assuming you’re talking about entering muzzle speed and wind velocity and what-not and figuring out where the bullet will hit 800 yards away) but a quick look didn’t find any open-source. If this is what you’re talking about and it’s a serious interest, I’ll keep looking. A decently written program will guide you in learning the trigonometry, dynamic mechanics, and whatever else you would need.
I know bupkis about the other fields, so can’t offer suggestions. I would think you’d need trig for amateur astronomy but don’t know what else you’d need. Oh, if only you were in contact with someone who had written a book for the amateur astronomer…
Actually, you don’t need any math for amateur astronomy. Just your eyes and a star chart. A decent binocular can keep you busy for a long, long time. Some people do all their observing with binoculars and don’t even own telescopes.
I’d prefer open-sauce for the firearms stuff but am not married to it. I did OK with plane geometry and would feel good about tacking regular old geometry and trig at some point, if I had at least one good use for them.
And for the amateur astronomy, yeah, that’s all I have at present, binocs, pretty good Orions, 10×50, with the eyepieces that help with an old faht like me wearing specs and who can’t wear contacts. Typical eye-opener, so to speak: we look out at the lake with our nekkid eyes and see two or three boats on the Lake (the Lake, by the way, is a hundred miles long and looks a lot like the ocean at times). Then we look through the binocs and see about twenty more boats, and the people on them, and what they are doing. At night up here there is not much light pollution and the sky is just a carpet of stellar diamonds; we can’t wait to check it out with these binocs up in northern New Brunswick at MIL’s (and eventually our) oceanside cottage, assuming it hasn’t fallen into the wottuh by then.
tackling geometry not tacking it….arrrggghhhh!
Freeware small arms external ballistics software
However, not everything there is actually open source with, you know, source. I’ll dig into it tonight or tomorrow and see if any have good enough source code and maybe documentation to be helpful when learning firearms ballistics. (At the moment I’m dealing with wife and daughter. The one should be asleep and the other should be, er, you know, I don’t much care what she does so long as she doesn’t keep interrupting Precious Princess when I’m trying to get her obnoxious butt settled down, in bed, and asleep.)
“At night up here there is not much light pollution and the sky is just a carpet of stellar diamonds…”
I love dark skies where I can see the stars clearly without light pollution. Trouble is, in the northern hemisphere there aren’t many dark sky sites close to cities. And the stars up there are (to me) just an unidentifiable jumble. On the other hand, the southern sky is familiar and beautiful.
Sub Cruce Lumen
That first GNU program looks good for what I am doing right now, thanks much; I guess I coulda done my own research but hey, you wanted a break from the grrls, didn’t ya? I have a long one going for me right now; one in Atlanta the other in Montreal, yay for me, me, me!
“…the southern sky is familiar and beautiful.”
I will have to get a look at it one of these days…way away from any cities or towns. What a difference that makes. Same deal in the north here; ya gotta get away from Megalopolis or the Left Coast or any large city or town. We are actually closer to Montreal by fah than Beantown now but the night sky here is still a huge improvement over where we were before. By a factor of ten or twenty, at least. And we were in a small town in central Vermont before; now we’re on the edge of the Lake. With miles and miles of farmland behind us.
There actually aren’t many truly dark-sky sites east of the Mississippi nowadays. When I started observing in New Castle, PA (population about 35,000) in the mid-60’s our backyard, on the edge of town, was so dark that even when we were dark-adapted we’d run into each other when we moved around. Shadows were cast by the Milky Way. M33 was a naked-eye object for me with direct vision. Of course, back then, at age 13 or 14, I could glimpse stars at mag 7.5 with averted vision and I could see red, green, and blue color in M42.
Here’s a site you might find interesting:
http://www.cleardarksky.com/csk/prov/Vermont_charts.html
And this page explains light pollution ratings on that site by color code. As you’ll see about the best you can hope for east of the Mississippi is Bortle 3, which it sounds like you have. My backyard back in the 60’s was about Bortle 1.5 or maybe a bit better.
http://www.cleardarksky.com/csk/faq/2.html
Incidentally, the 10X50’s are an excellent choice. Their exit pupil is 5mm (50/10), which is a typical entrance pupil for someone in their 50’s or 60’s when fully dark-adapted. They also collect 100 times as much light as your naked eye (5^2 versus 50^2). It just so happens that a brightness difference of 100 is 5.0 magnitudes, so if you can see m5 stars naked-eye you should be able to see stars down to around m10 with the binocular.
Oh, yeah. Barbara and I have our own clear dark sky page:
http://www.cleardarksky.com/c/ThmpsnsYdNCkey.html?1
We are, alas, Bortle 6 or 7. That’s not quite as bad as it gets, but nearly so.
Oh, yeah, High River in Alberta where Heartland is set and filmed is, incredibly, Bortle 5, which is just one step better than our suburban back yard.
Well that was interesting; I posted a reply here and nothing happened.
Anyway, the Georgia Shore site is easily the closest to our location. And our binocs are Orion Ultraview 10 x 50; I have a tripod and adapter but am still trying to figure out how to assemble the bugger.
Thanks for those links and thanks again also for “Astronomy Hacks.”
@ Dave B. from yesterday’s comment:
If this guy’s blog is to be believed, an Argentine style economic collapse is still a very serious problem. He may just be blogging to get Americans to buy his book. But then why can’t a reasonably intelligent Argentine national who has good English skills find a better way to make money than by hoping Americans will buy his book?
There are a zillion reasons for him to do that and all are related to the way the economy is being handled. I think the most plausible chain of reasons is as follows.
– The value of the local currency is worthless.
– There is only one (legal) way to exchange their currency to US dollars which are considered hard currency. The person that wants to exchange local to USD needs to contact the local IRS and claim the amount he wants to exchange.
– There are also restrictions on credit card use in foreign countries.
– The IRS checks assets and declared taxable incomes and authorizes a very small amount (since the dollars are Meant to be for payments of things which are in the nation’s interest and not for luxury or personal needs)
– The exchange institution does the xchange.
If he publishes outside Argentina and gets USDs outside of Argentina he receives hard currency with no problems. The alternative is the black market which is at about a 30% premium and rising.
Good explanation, Marcelo, thanks. And the black market is becoming increasingly important here in the U.S., too. The times they are a’changing and a hahd rain is gonna fall….it don’t take a weatherman…
When I started in engineering school, there were, IIRC, 140 students starting in Physics 101.
My freshman class at Rice, a pretty good STEM school, had almost 200 of 750 freshmen declare Physics as a major. In the end,10 of us got Physics BAs. 3 were Space Physics and Astronomy submajors, 7 were pure Physics. Of the pure physics majors, 3 were Navy ROTC and went into the nuclear program. I know at least one of my classmates is a Physics professor, who had done work on twistor theory.
One of the compensations in driving between Canberra and Adelaide (1140 km by road, 970 km as the crow flies) is that once you get on to the Sturt Highway the sky is just about as black as you could want. I’ve occasionally stopped part way between towns to look at the sky for a while. It’s very nice and relaxing, I really wish I lived in a black sky area. One of my pals used to live in the outskirts of Yass, a small town 50 km NW of Canberra. Another pal brought his Meade telescope down from Sydney and we did some observing. Saw the surface of the Moon in detail, the rings of Saturn, and so on. His place, on 20 acres, was only 2-3 km from a major truck stop but was well shielded by hills.
I just got an e-mail from Amazon recommending that I buy our host’s two astronomy books. Sorry, did that years ago. They must have started keeping records in the past 2-3 years as they’ve warned me that I’d already bought several books I was looking at.considering
I named physics and pure maths as my proposed majors way back in first year, 1976. I loved them both but ended up majoring in computer science, as I didn’t want to be a poor, unemployed physics grad.
High River isn’t far from Calgary, lots of light pollution from there. There being nothing in the way to block the light.
My sister lives in an area that would be 1 on the Bortle scale, ten miles up a twisty mountain canyon from a town of only 8,000. I watched a Perseid shower at her place in the late 70s that was simply staggering. Just looking up at the Milky Way is amazing, and you realize that Sagan was off by orders of magnitude with mere billions of stars.
Most of the creationist biology teachers
majored in education
Not news, but I still find it astounding. At the high school level, the first requirement should be a degree in the field you teach. Otherwise the teacher is likely to know less than the better students.
As an example, my son in 9th grade is taking physics. He loves science and math, so even though they are just starting mechanics, but he is surfing the Internet, learning and asking questions about quantum mechanics. If he had an American teacher with an education degree… well, I I don’t think the reaction would be positive.
Speaking of light pollution I am heading to La Push Washington for two days and nights. No phone, internet or TV. Far west coast. No large towns for several dozen miles. Hoping for some really dark skies to get some star motion images. But I need to figure out how to get my good (heavy and stable) tripod on a plane. I am also hoping for some decent sunset images.
I am going to Port Townsend (Beckett Point) to toss the relative’s ashes. Making it into a vacation at the same time. Looked for a small town with little to nothing and La Push seemed to fit my needs.
“At the high school level, the first requirement should be a degree in the field you teach. Otherwise the teacher is likely to know less than the better students.”
Just about all my high school teachers were really good. Some of them were objectionable, but at least knew their stuff.
IMHO the Pure Maths department had the best and nicest staff I’ve ever encountered anywhere. I didn’t really like the professor (there was only one), and one of the lecturers was basically incompetent. I remember asking him a question in a tutorial (the subject was Rings and Modules – an abstract algebra course) and he couldn’t figure out the answer – to his own tute question. I ended up solving it myself and explaining it to him.
The Pure Maths department at Adelaide Uni.
Had to Google Map La Push, WA. I suspected it would be on the Olympic Peninsula, but couldn’t remember it from my drive around there decades ago. As I suspected it’s not on the main drive roads, but at the end of the line. Should be plenty dark (as in isolation booth dark) for your star motion pics, if it isn’t socked in with rain and clouds. It’s the wet season, you know. We call the West Coast the “Wets” Coast for a reason!
I am quite familiar with the west coast environment Mr. Grigg having lived in Oregon during the 1960’s. I was on the east side of the Cascades so did not receive as much moisture as the coastal side. We still had our share of rain. I also traveled much of Oregon and southern Washington delivering cattle, picking up hay and other supplies.
I wanted a place on the coast so it would be dark and hoping for some sunset images. I also wanted a place that was not too far from Port Townsend and La Push seems to be about a 2.5 hour drive. We did consider Astoria but that is too far south for our purposes. There are not a lot of settlements on the west coast of the Peninsula.
November is supposed to be the storm season and people arrive to watch the Pacific storms. We may get hammered with rain and weather and be forced to stay inside both days. A risk my wife was adamant about bringing to my knowledge.
So you are indeed correct. We may get rained out the entire time. But being storm season perhaps the storms will move through quickly. People in that area don’t tan; they rust.
“Speaking of light pollution I am heading to La Push Washington…”
Watch out for the vampires and werewolves.
Ah, but anyone who’s seen that old movie, The Green Berets, knows that the sun sets in the east.
Ah, yes, John Wayne: The great American hero who fought in every war except the real ones.
Hey ech, one of my partners got his PhD in Chemical Engineering from Rice. The guy is one of the smartest people that I know. He was head of Chem Eng at OU in the 60s and 70s before he went commercial. Every once in a while I will get an intern for a while from Rice and be amazed at how smart these guys are. Almost as good as TAMU “”.
knows that the sun sets in the east.
It does if you in the southern hemisphere. Trust me on this. I heard it from a student here at the University of TN. Says because the toilets swirl in the opposite direction the sun also goes in the opposite direction. I think he is a psychology major.
Ah, so he believes at least two things that aren’t true…
No, three things. He thinks he can actually get a job with s psychology degree.
One of my nephews is working on BA degree in history. I have told him to get a STEM degree until I am blue in the face but it goes nowhere. His mother, my SIL, tells me that he can get all types of jobs with a history degree.
We used to have a self-taught fortran programmer who had a degree in English back in the 1990s. Very good analyst and programmer but was prone to the liquid lunches.
Your SIL is correct. Any number of employment doors open for the history grad. True, most of them involve the words “Do you want fries with that?” and will lead to her offspring living at home until age 40, but such a devoted mother who is so full of advice should welcome that.
Our son has an Honors degree in history which he got at a Canadian university, where they make you actually work. He left there and had a short succession of mostly dead-end jobs at Enterprise Car Rental and a Verizon store. He is now a business strategic intel analyst specializing in the IT industry for an up-and-coming startup here and has an offer coming up for a job paying twice as much down in the Peoples’ Republik of Taxachoosetts. And he got his current gig from a friend’s recommendation.
I took every history course my high school offered, including two years of AP American history, and when I went off to college and grad school, I somehow got tracked into English Lit but always loved history more, and in the PhD program I moved from English to Medieval Studies, which is amazingly interdisciplinary in these times. Problem being that I would have spent a total of ten years on it and learning half a dozen dead languages and been damned lucky to get a job as a transient “gypsy” professor at podunk community colleges out in the hinterland somewhere, a semester here, a semester there, with long-ass commutes and poverty wages, pretty much what I had done as a teaching assistant at the two grad schools I attended. And once all the old Marxists and neo-Marxists completed their hugely successful Long March through academia’s humanities, social “science,” and administrative departments, they pulled the tenure ladder up after themselves. And now I’m a sys/net/security admin for a huge corporation and defense contractor with security clearances. By the way, a while back I may have mentioned that on the glass catwalk a few months ago I noticed that the PowerPoint slide for our co-tenant in the building here featured “AIR BURST WEAPONS SYSTEMS.” Some kind of class they were having. Today’s lesson is “GROUND-BASED AMMUNITION HANDLING.” And they just laid off thirty or forty people, too.
Of course I fully understand the need for defense systems and a strong military, blah, blah, blah, but I sure would like to have all these chickenhawk PHB manglers and PP presenters and sales hucksters and carny barkers visit a couple of sites where their nifty systems did their work. And the hospitals and morgues after that.
I’m all in favor of learning all you can handle about history and English Lit and applied math and transistor theory and every other thing you can cram into your head. However, I don’t think it’s a very good idea to go $50k into debt to learn it, especially when you can learn most of it for free. True, there is the credentialing aspect, but the generic BS and BA have been so devalued (like the high school diploma before them) that the credential doesn’t mean much of anything.
Charles River Associates (I’m not sure if that link is any good for another user) puts out history monographs on a variety of topics. They’re often available for free on Kindle; I’ve downloaded probably a hundred of them. The English Lit classics are all in the public domain and one can find discussion of them all over the internet. True, what you find is often shallow, biased, or just plain wrong-headed, but the same goes for professors. Many technical and other topics are available for free from MIT and Harvard, as well as Wikibooks. (The MIT and Harvard offerings have been uniformly of high quality, per my sampling. Wikibooks on technical topics, which have been completed, are often quite good; the problem with them is that they tend to be abandoned.) If one is interested in education, that should be enough to keep him busy for a while. If one is interested in the credential, a community college or even a “prestigious, non-accredited institute” should serve as well as Union College (a very expensive but not very good school in Schenectady, NY).
Lynn wrote:
“We used to have a self-taught fortran programmer who had a degree in English back in the 1990s. Very good analyst and programmer…”
Ah Fortran. Along with Pascal the computer language of heaven. And Compass is the assembly language of heaven.
I got my meal ticket, a BSc in computer science and maths, in about 1979, then got a BA in medieval studies and history while I was working. I love history, and it’s one of the subjects I would have liked to have taught if I’d become a high school teacher, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a first degree.
Anyone who blows fifty grand, in some cases fifty grand a YEAR to get a bullshit credential is out of their mind, but as Dr. Gary North keeps saying, apparently hundreds of thousands of parents and their kids keep doing it, when, as SteveF points out above, one get a pretty good education on one’s own now, and the cred can be had for probably around fifteen grand, total. This goes for MBA’s, too.
Nowadays, except for the STEM subjects, it is a big giant scam, and millions are in debt for decades to the tune of billions. Cui bono?
Cui bono? Not me, that’s for sure.
I imagine that if the populists (of whichever nominal party, though trending Dem) stay in power, there’ll be some kind of “bailout” for college students and grads who were tricked into signing for huge debts which they can’t repay. Which means that, as usual, We the Productive get boned, along with our grandchildren.
I love reading history, too. Not all STEM folks are ignorant of history. In fact, on average, I’d say they’re more knowledgeable about history and other humanities than are most non-STEM college graduates.
After all, as Santayana said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to Groundhog Day.
Word.
We are always getting boned. I usually like to be greased a little, first, but no such luck.
At this point I don’t really see any other alternative but to remove the present rulers from power, by whatever means necessary. It is not yet time, but events may conspire to set up a window of opportunity at some point, hopefully within our lifetimes, but we shall see. Many of us are bone-tired of being boned.
Something I wrote earlier this year: Stigmata of Tyranny
Bah. Screwed up the link. Trying again: Stigmata of Tyranny
Oh yeah, we’re already there.
Bookmarked, thanks.
I could have sworn I posted this when the topic came up, but either it didn’t take or something went wrong. Re: light pollution. The US has awful night lighting. There are so many lights that leak in every which direction, instead of being directed down. Big difference from Europe, where the northern countries have replaced almost all outdoor lights with ones that do not project any way but down.
Sometimes I take a back road from Indy to Tiny Town (the main route to the Indy northside before the Interstates were built). There is a new high school called Mt. Vernon right on my route, which is a part of a town called Fortville. This time of year, when I go home to Tiny Town after dark on Fridays, I pass that school with its football field lit up, along with parking places, and the whole exterior of the building. It is uncanny to clearly see that the many light fixtures project light down, and the area above the lights is actually black from dark. Manufacturing, farm buildings, and homes around the school provide a dramatic visual contrast to those superior lights.
I mentioned this to some people at lunch the other day, and they thought any attention to such a thing as how lights direct illumination was a worthless waste of time, thinking, effort, and money; furthermore, they thought I was nuts for even caring about it. So much for reducing light pollution in this country.
“So much for reducing light pollution in this country.”
There it is. Matters like that are way, way down the attention scale of most imbeciles in this country and most, from what I have seen, would be perfectly happy to see the entire nation paved over with asphalt, concrete and glass and lit up 7 x 24. I’ve bitched about the same thing, Chuck, or simply bemoaned the extension of the gods of concrete, glass and asphalt to every possible space, and people have laughed at me and said, in essence, “bring it on!” Anything commonsensical like directing lights down and not up don’t even show up on their radar screens and we are fools and lunatics for even thinking about it.
Full cutoff lighting fixtures help, but western Europe is about as bad in terms of light pollution as the eastern seaboard here in the US.
Here’s a map:
http://www.lightpollution.it/download/mondo_ridotto0p25.gif
Yep, that also shows the concentrated populations. But gee, now I feel sorry for Greg down in Oz, where it must be dahk all the time. No wonder he stays in front of his computer searching for more nude pics of HILLARY!, Madeline Albright and Janet Reno.
Wow. Germany looks to be one of the brightest. Not my experience, but I did live in the former East longer than anywhere, so maybe all we had was new fixtures there. Berlin itself is mostly gas street lighting, except on the dual-lane highways and Autobahn.
It was dark enough that I had the very pleasant experience of getting a full-frontal body hit from a young woman on a bicycle. It was so dark that we did not see each other until it was too late; no bicycle lane was marked off, so they feel free to use the whole sidewalk. Both of us were surprised as hell, but I sure would like to try that again sometime.
It’s an actual (composite) satellite image, so nothing is exaggerated. There are several interesting features. I think the difference between Japan and Australia is stunning, as is the difference between North Korea, which apparently has only one candle for night lighting country-wide, and South Korea. And the whole Calgary-Edmonton strip looks like they must have thousands of anti-aircraft spotlights fired up and pointing straight up. How else to explain how two metro areas each about the size of the Triad metro area are so bright on the map? Or it may just be that the Triad is just as bright but kind of disappears in the brightness that covers pretty much the entire East Coast.
And as much as I might enjoy a full-frontal collision with an attractive young woman, I think I’d draw the line at one who was riding a bicycle at the time. That must have hurt.
One of those maps focusing in on North Korea.
And one of the comments was “does not North Korea like electricity?” That country is so totally fucked in this modern world it beggars belief. Mass famine, cutting off feet of people who try to sneak out; and the latest goofball shit: wacking their top generals with firing squads because they drank or smiled or something during this official year of mourning for the last fat evil little toad that ran the place. It is so fucked that it would be interesting to go there and see it firsthand. I nominate Barack Hussein, since he is evidently so intent on replicating it for this country. (Mittens seeks to replicate a gigantic Mormon bank/stock exchange crossed with the holodeck of the Starship Enterprise.)
OFD wrote:
“But gee, now I feel sorry for Greg down in Oz, where it must be dahk all the time. No wonder he stays in front of his computer searching for more nude pics of HILLARY!, Madeline Albright and Janet Reno.”
I don’t need no pictures of them. Sandra Bullock called a little while ago, said she wanted to fly over and have her wicked way with me. I told her she’d have to marry me before I’d let her do that. She said she’d think about it.
OFD wrote:
“…and the latest goofball shit: wacking their top generals with firing squads because they drank or smiled or something during this official year of mourning for the last fat evil little toad that ran the place.”
You see, the North Korean leadership isn’t that bad after all. And when Stalin was busy offing his rivals in the Moscow Trials of the Thirties, White Russian emigres penned some verses thanking him for killing so many of their old enemies, and invited him, when he was done, do add his own carcass to the pile.
RBT wrote:
“And as much as I might enjoy a full-frontal collision with an attractive young woman, I think I’d draw the line at one who was riding a bicycle at the time. That must have hurt.”
I wondered about that too. I mean, surely the bike hit Chuck first. And, according to our former Strasburg informant, the German women don’t have norks worth mentioning.
Norks?
Ooh, I know! North Koreans. Sort of like how well-off English families had Indian servants, Germans would have Koreans. Not so much, anymore.
Shock Absorbers. Tits. Boobs. Pillows. Melons. Mosquito Bites (poor girl). Fried Eggs.
Norks may be a purely South Australian word for boobs, I don’t think I’ve heard it anywhere else.
I knew that, actually. I read a story with a couple of Australian girls chatting and the slang was easy to figure out from context.
Quite true. Most German women—East or West—have tiny titties. Which is fine by me. As I have maintained from adolescence, “Who needs more than a mouthful?” Never have understood the attraction to big boobs at all. Way too easy to get smothered.
Actually, I was not hit by the bike at all. Not sure exactly the collision path, but only her body hit me–perhaps from trying to turn to avoid me. I literally did not see it coming. It was on the one very dark stretch between the S-Bahn and our house. I was listening to the iPod, and wham, she hit me full in the chest. My arms being free, my reaction was to wrap them around her, which I suspect kept her standing. She screamed from the hit, and I just kind of moaned, being shocked by her scream; but she did not fall, nor did I. She very quickly mounted the bike and rode off. Shame. Although I was happily married at the time.
Very few unattractive women (or men) in Berlin. After Jeri passed, my daughter came to visit me to help pack, and take 2 suitcases back herself for me. We did a couple days in Berlin during her 2 weeks with me, and at one point she commented, “Dad, the people here are all so good-looking.” (She had spent 6 months of foreign study in Germany and Austria, but had forgotten, I guess.) IMO, that has to do with being trim and women not using much make-up or having big hair like the countrified fat chicks around me now have. Most people are good looking under those lean, minimalist conditions.
In fact, the truly excessive make-up in the US really makes me wonder how women do not see in the mirror that they are making themselves up as clowns. It is quite repulsive to me. Dusty Springfield used to do it intentionally as part of her image and act, but geez women, you look like clowns—literally.
Generally speaking I detest “big hair” and grossly excessive makeup – although I do love bright red lipstick on a sheila.
I think plumpness is attractive, up to a point. My first girlfriend, who was a very nice girl, was rather overweight, and suffered many barbs for it – but not from me.
The brunette I had a crush on when I was 16 was as skinny as a bean pole. She always wore slacks to school, except for one day in Year 12 when she wore a dress. Then I understood why she almost always kept her legs covered. They were like toothpicks – and her chest was like an ironing board. The next girl I really liked was a short plump blonde, with above average boobs. I must say I like boobs on a chick to be above average, but not too far. And silicone is just grotesque.
Yes, I enjoyed the sightseeing in Germany and Austria, I don’t remember seeing a fat person there apart from the American tourists. When I was in the US there were plenty of fit, healthy people. And lots of people who could afford to lose 20-50 Kg.