10:14 – I’ll finish my final pre-editing pass on the lab sessions today and get them off to the reviewers. At that point, I jump back into the early narrative chapters to do clean-up and rewrite. I should finish that in the next few days. I also have a dozen or so images left to be shot, which I’ll do this weekend. So, for the next ten days or so, I’ll be busier than the proverbial one-armed paper hanger, incorporating edits and comments from reviewers and getting the manuscript ready to go to production on 31 January.
I was about to order gelatin and yeast on-line, until I realized that it’d be cheaper and faster just to make a visit to the supermarket. Sure enough, the local Lowes Foods has yeast for $0.59 for eight packets of 8.75 grams each, so I’ll just buy enough of those to make the first batch of kits. Same thing for gelatin, cheap and readily available. I’ll just buy a couple pounds of unflavored gelatin and repackage it for the kits.
12:52 – I’m uploading the last of the lab session chapters to the server right now. That takes a while, given that Time-Warner caps upload speeds around 125 KB/s (still an improvement over the 45 to 50 KB/s we got until a few months ago) and some of these chapter directories are rather large. Even with thumbnailed images, some of the chapters are 10 to 15 MB, and the scores of high-res images tend to add up. I think this batch totals something like 1.5 GB.
I’m going to reward myself by taking a ten-minute break and then jump back into the early narrative matter. Most of that doesn’t require tech review, so I wanted to get the lab session chapters available first to the reviewers.
I’m in my usual worry mode now. For some reason, I always think that the material I’ve submitted is going to end up after formatting and lay-out as a 30-page pamphlet or something. Of course, that’s ridiculous. No book I’ve ever written has come in under the allotted page count, and some have been significantly larger. Oh, well. I covered what I wanted to cover, and soon it’ll be on to building biology kits and starting on the re-write of the forensics book. I already have an idea for a lab session I want to add to that, but I’ll have to do some experiments to see if it’s practical. (Hint: it involves raw meat and flies.)
You get 125KB/s? Lucky you! RoadRunner here caps upload at about 60. And I’m paying for an upgraded business-class connection. Normally it’s not an issue, but once in a while I need to send hundreds of megabytes to someone, what with me having a business, and it’s really annoying for it to take hours. Days, sometimes, with the drops and retries. But RoadRunner here is a monopoly, so it’s not like they have to worry about customer satisfaction.
Regarding the unflavored gelatin, yes, please do include it. At least around here (Albany, NY, area) it’s not available in the grocery stores. I’d have to get it online. It may be available locally in a little Asian grocery store or in a farmer’s supply store or something, but I wouldn’t know where to look.
Including the yeast is not a concern for me. The home brew supply store sells many varieties, the grocery store has a couple, and a couple of bakeries sell specialized baking varieties. For that matter, I could just stand outside a clinic and ask women in the parking lot if they could give me a yeast sample “for scientific purposes only”. Actually, recording their reactions could make a funny video.
Wow, you guys get bad internet. Here in the UK, generic ADSL has provided 256kbps upload for 10 years; recently other operators with newer equipment offer better – I’m getting 1.0mbps uplink. Cable is generally better, if you’re in a place where cable exists – 10m down, 2m up, or better for more money.
I know my relatives near Charlotte on RoadRunner get 50meg download, and 10meg upload on a business grade connection.
I was speaking of 125 KB/s, not kilobits. In other words, about 1 megabit/s up. My download speeds are typically 15 megabits/s.
RBT wrote:
“I already have an idea for a lab session I want to add to that, but I’ll have to do some experiments to see if it’s practical. (Hint: it involves raw meat and flies.)”
I thought it would involve live dissections of politicians and how to get away with it. Oh well.
I do believe politicians are a source of meat. Not palatable meat, to be sure, but flies aren’t picky.
Which would make them Democrats, I suppose.
As much as I’d love to use a dead politician (Republican or Democrat) for a lab session on forensic entomology, it just won’t work. Flies and maggots have their standards. They’re pretty low standards, of course, but flies won’t land on a dead politician and maggots won’t eat them. You’ve probably heard the phrase “gag a maggot”, which originally referred to why maggots turn up their tiny little noses at the idea of eating dead politicians.
Well, then, the obvious course of action is to set parasites on live politicians. Fitting, that.
I, like OFD, am beginning to like this SteveF fellow.
What’s not to like about women’s tennis? Especially with lovelies like these strutting around the court… 🙂
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-21/kvitova-advances-as-kirilenko-retires/3785982
Indeed. And very strong and athletic, too. I got turned on to womens’ tennis back in the 80s because of my ex-wife, who played her whole life and was on her university’s team. We used to go to the Virginia Slims tournaments in New England and saw some amazing stuff, like Martina turning 360 degrees somehow in mid-air and slamming a serve that would have killed somebody. Also telling off some drunk asshole in the crowd who was ragging on Pam Shriver during a doubles match. And the twin towers, Claudia and Helena playing doubles, with Claudia cursing in German. Also met Martina and her SO coming out of an elevator at the Worcester MA Marriott once. Cute little blonde about half her size.
We also enjoyed the matches at Longwood in Chestnut Hill, MA, played on GRASS courts, what a blast.
This was a real eye-opener for me, having been into football and track.
I’m surprised you haven’t commented on the Apple education even announcement. As an author I’m curious about your thoughts on their free authoring program and push towards electronic textbooks. This to me seems right up the alley for homeschoolers.
I’ve only ever played one top-ranked woman, and that was back when I was about 15. She was practicing serves, and I was doing the same. Watching her serve, I remember thinking “she’s pretty good, for a girl”, so I asked her if she wanted to hit some balls. She’d been watching me serve as well, so I guess she decided I’d give her a game. She did end up winning a few points off me, but I beat her at love. Even then, I had the killer instinct.
It wasn’t until later that I realized who she was. Jane “Peaches” Bartkowicz. If she’d mentioned the “Peaches” part, I’d have twigged, but she introduced herself as Jane Bartkowicz. At the time, she was ranked, IIRC, #7 on the women’s tour.
When he was in college, in about 1974, my brother and the rest of the tennis team went down to Florida to practice while the weather was still bad up north. They were in Fort Lauderdale, which was where Chris Evert lived at the time. She used to practice with the Ft. Lauderdale high school boys tennis team, and I guess she decided to try playing some college guys instead. I’m not sure how many sets my brother played against her, but I do remember him mentioning that she was a really good player but hadn’t taken a game off him.
The only other women’s tennis player I had anything to do with was Evonne Goolagong. I was way early for a WTT tennis match, and was sitting up in the balcony pretty much by myself, watching the warm-up sessions. Evonne Goolagong, wearing sweats, came through an unmarked door, and came over and sat beside me. We watched the warmups and talked for probably half an hour or so. She’s a very nice woman.
I think that was the same WTT match that I was heckling Newcombe from the immediate sideline. (Heckling the other team was not just acceptable but expected at WTT matches. People even cheered for double faults…) After Newcombe had hit the third practice lob into the net, with me jeering him each time, he walked over toward me holding out his racket. What the hell. I took the racket, the other guy threw up a gimme lob, and I hit a resounding smash perfectly. I knew to quit when I was ahead, so I bowed to Newcombe and handed him back his racket. That’s the only time I’ve ever been cheered on a tennis court.
I guess I considered it beneath my contempt, as all authors and publishers should. Apple basically demands an exclusive, not just on the title but on the author’s other work. As an author, I can give away anything I produce with their tool, but I can’t sell it other than through the Apple store. The tool doesn’t produce standard Epub (2 or 3), and uses proprietary Apple extensions. I read the agreement, and it basically says that if I publish one title with their tool, I’m agreeing to publish all my other work with them as well (with, of course, that exclusivity). Any author or publisher who signs that contract is a complete idiot.
Re Apple: Apple doesn’t give things away from the goodness of their
heartsbalance sheets. It’s all intended to benefit them in some way. It never fails to boggle my mind that Apple was able to sell their brand as supporting the creativity and freedom of the little people, and that there are enough people stupid enough to buy into it.Re female athletes: Even someone as uninterested as I has noticed that in contests of speed and power, professional female athletes perform at about the level of upper-tier male amateurs. Equivalently, top females are about at the middle of the male pack.
But our lords temporal are still trying to jam them down our throats as front-line combat troops. The brass love it and push it; ask some grunts what they think.
I think it is a disgrace and a rank obscenity to see American women coming home in boxes and in wheelchairs from our continuing series of unsuccessful clusterfuck foreign adventuring wars. Yet another sign of the coming collapse of what passes now for Western civ, “…an old bitch gone in the teeth…”
Nowhere near upper-tier male. A really good professional women’s tennis player might play about even with a good high-school male tennis player, and she’ll get stomped by a decent college male player. Put it this way. I don’t know how low the men’s rankings go in tennis, but I promise you that a guy ranked at #10,000 would regularly beat top ten women. Actually, a guy ranked #100,000 probably would. There’s just no comparison in speed or power. The top women look good only when they’re playing other women. If they play a competent man, they’ll look very bad.
Yah, OFD. I was the beneficiary, if that’s the word, of some of the early US Army attempts to run men and women through the same basic training. Training was babied down to the point of uselessness.
And sometime later, early 1990s, I was privileged, if that’s the word, to listen to a female major lecture that with just a bit of extra physical training (with specially trained coaches), 80% of women could come “near” the level of strength and endurance expected of male soldiers. Uh-huh. I’ve been ordered to carry the packs of female soldiers who weren’t able to keep up on a road march. (And, because I’m big, my load was 40 pounds heavier to begin with.) Female truck drivers and mechanics as a rule aren’t able to change tires. On field exercises, female soldiers were set out on guard while their male unit-mates were set to work digging the foxholes.
I’m all in favor of women being allowed to serve in whatever capacity they’re able to. The operative word is “able”. If you’re going to put a women is as an artilleryman (sic) or truck driver, you need to look at all of the job’s requirements and require that she can do them, not just cherry-pick the easy ones and leave the rest for the men to pick up the slack.
More broadly, if feminists of the “we’re all equal” stripe were honest in their claims, they’d demand the elimination of separate men’s and women’s sports, military fitness standards, and all the rest. Compete on a level playing field, just as they say they want.
My elder son ran a medium-distance race in junior high school, I think it was. Call it a two mile race. He was in the back half of the boys group, not a great showing. While I was waiting, I also saw the girls’ two-mile race. One girl was way ahead of the rest, totally smoking the second-place girl by like a minute. Very impressive.
… until I saw the times. She’d taken thirty seconds longer than my son. The second-place girl was behind the last boy.
I don’t really have a problem with women in combat, as long as certain conditions are met. Of course, biologically it makes no sense to risk women of child-bearing age. It takes them nine months to make a baby, versus a few minutes for a guy.
That aside, I wouldn’t allow women in any role, such as ground combat, where the strength and speed of men is desirable or necessary. If a woman can’t carry her weight, literally, she shouldn’t be there. Of course, they changed the physical fitness requirements when they started admitting women. If the standard is that a guy must be able to do 70 real push-ups and 20 real pull-ups, the same standard should be required for a woman. (My friend Mary Chervenak can indeed do 70 real push-ups and 20 real pull-ups, not to mention running the average SEAL into the ground, but she sure couldn’t do that carrying a 130-pound pack, so that disqualifies her.)
The other problem I have with women in combat is that we men have a couple million years of evolution that makes protecting our women instinctive. A guy will do incredibly stupid things in combat to protect a female comrade, things he wouldn’t do if it were another guy being threatened.
Despite that problem, I wouldn’t have a real problem with women flying combat. They’re in fact better suited to flying warplanes than men are. They can take more G’s, and (being gatherer women rather than hunter men) their situational awareness is excellent. And I’m sure the best of them have aggressiveness and killer instinct equal or superior to that of any man. I remember my dad mentioning that B-17’s didn’t have power steering, and that the pilots needed to be strong guys to wrestle the controls all the way to Berlin and back. I’ve never even been in a modern fighter, but I’d guess they all have power steering and power brakes, so there’s no reason a woman shouldn’t be able to fly them as well or better than a man.
But ultimately, I agree with you. The idea of letting our women be shot at and blow up makes me very, very uncomfortable. I read Brian Bilbrey’s list of weekly casualties every Sunday, and I grieve for each and every of our young men who died in service to their country. But when I see a young woman’s name on there it really, really gets to me.
“The other problem I have with women in combat is that we men have a couple million years of evolution that makes protecting our women instinctive. A guy will do incredibly stupid things in combat to protect a female comrade, things he wouldn’t do if it were another guy being threatened.”
Bingo. Even for a split second, a grunt is gonna be looking out of the corner of his eye to make sure sweetie-pie is OK (this is true also for street cops, BTW, of which I was one, AFTER the mil-spec stuff, not at all uncommon, we dig the adrenalin rush, man) and that one second can get them both waxed. And guys will also do incredibly stupid things to protect MALE comrades, as well, as I have cause to know. Although “stupid” sometimes translates later to Bronze and Silver Stars and the MOH. But again, it can also get them both killed, the exception being that it is EXPECTED when they are both men. We’ve been built for use as killing machines and cannon fodder since we gathered together in hunting packs and in the first villages. There were no women among the Greek hoplites or Roman legions.
Can they fly jets in combat conditions? Maybe. A very few. And unfortunately we’ve already seen a couple of examples where the brass allowed some to get pencil-whipped through training and then whitewashed lethal accidents afterward. A very few can also hump a pack for tens of miles and then snap off sniper-level shots; I have seen this done in regular, winter and primitive biathlons. Key word being “few.” Not enough to bombastically generalize that we should now be loading up the front ranks of our modern hoplites with young mothers and grandmothers.
Like Bob I have a hard time seeing the pictures of the guys every week (shades of the ‘Nam war on network TV when I was still in high school and before I went myself!) on the Jim Lehrer Newshour, for example, who are KIA over in the Sandbox. But seeing women KIA’s is like unto a knife in the gut, and exceeding shameful. What kind of country is this?
SteveF wrote:
“Re female athletes: Even someone as uninterested as I has noticed that in contests of speed and power, professional female athletes perform at about the level of upper-tier male amateurs. Equivalently, top females are about at the middle of the male pack.”
Yeah, but female athletes make a bikini (as in beach volleyball) or a miniskirt and tank top (as in tennis) look good. I don’t think many guys, and certainly not any members of this forum would.
I’ve been watching the Australian tennis a bit lately, and turn off when the guys come on. The guys play better but the girls look better.
I don’t like the idea of women in combat either. I don’t object if they’re on a reasonably safe platform like a navy ship or AWACS, but I wouldn’t want them placed in physical risk, for the fear that they’d underperform and also because of the effect they’d have on the guys, who might do stupid things to try to protect them.
Hey is Australian tennis like Australian football?
It would be if there were enough Martina Navratilovas around.