Category: Uncategorized

06:49 – I finally finished cleaning off the kitchen table Sunday. I’d had the microscope and various other stuff set up there to shoot the cover image. Barbara’s happy that she has her kitchen table back. I’m happy that I have my microscope back. It wasn’t doing me any good sitting on the kitchen table.

Instead of moving the microscope back onto the microscope desk in my office, I set it up on a stackable table that’s about 18″ (46 cm) high. That puts the primary eyepiece a bit too low to be comfortable, but it also puts the back of the Pentax DSLR at a level where I can see it without standing up. That’s desirable because I’m now shooting images with the Pentax K-r, which is the first Pentax DSLR we’ve had that offers live-view. That’s important because it’s nearly impossible to focus through the microscope using the focusing screen. Without live-view, I often shot literally 15 or 20 images with slight focusing tweaks for each to get one usable image. With live-view, I can instead focus on the 3″ (7.5 cm) LCD monitor, which is both brighter and sharper than the TTL focusing screen, so my success ratio should be a lot higher. Not to mention that it’ll take a lot less time and effort to get usable images.

I’m not exactly going on hiatus, but posts and replies to comments here are going to be short and sporadic for about the next three months. I just talked to Brian Jepson, my editor, yesterday, and we agreed on a drop-dead book deadline of 31 January. Brian needs that to make sure the book will be available in time for Maker Faire next May, and of course I also want that. Not to mention the fact that being available in time for Maker Faire also means the book will be available in time for summer session.

I’ve already been on a seven-day work schedule for some time. Well, the truth is that I’m always on a seven-day work schedule. But now I’m going to ramp it up somewhat, to perhaps eight hours a day of actual writing on weekdays (which is kind of like working 12-hour days at most jobs; ask any writer) and at least six hours of actual writing on weekend days. I won’t have time (or energy) to do much else.

09:08 – I keep a small stock of drugs on hand for emergencies, typically 100 capsules or tablets of each. Antibiotics like amoxicillin, ciprofloxacin, doxycycline, metronidazole, tetracycline, and so on, as well as diphenhydramine, tramadol, and several other common drugs. In the event of a catastrophe like Katrina, I don’t want any of my family or friends dying for lack of a common drug. I keep them in the freezer at -20C, where they’ll remain usable for probably 20 years or more.

So, the other day I (finally) received my order from Home Science Tools, 25 bottles of 30 g each of potassium iodide. It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to stick one of them with my emergency drug stock. If a reactor meltdown occurs and I-131 is released, 30 g of potassium iodide provides 230 adult doses of 130 mg each. I haven’t measured, but I’d guess that a 2-liter soda bottle full to the brim holds 2,300 mL, or close enough not to matter. That means that dissolving the contents of that 30 g bottle of KI in a 2-liter soda bottle full of water provides 230 adult doses of 10 mL each, which happens to be two teaspoons.

Not that Barbara or I or her family has any need of KI, nor do many of our friends. The goal of taking KI after an I-131 release is to saturate one’s body with non-radioactive iodine, to prevent uptake of radioactive I-131 by the thyroid, which ultimately increases the incidence of thyroid cancer. However, thyroid cancers typically take decades to develop, so there’s little point to anyone over 40 years old taking KI.

Jerry Coyne posted yesterday about something I’ve been going on about for years: the incredible rip-off that is academic journal publishing.

Here’s the way it works, at least for science academic publishing. We, the taxpayer, fund science studies. Scientists do the work and write up the results as academic papers. Each paper goes through the peer-review process, in which other scientists–working for free–review, edit, and comment on the paper. The final paper is submitted to an academic publisher, who then copyrights the paper and publishes it, usually both in-print and on-line. The journal then charges very high fees to anyone who wants to read the paper. None of the money the journal charges is returned to the taxpayers, nor to the scientists who did the original work and wrote the paper, nor to the scientists who peer-reviewed the paper.

The companies that own these science journals–notably Elsevier, Springer-Verlag, and Wiley-Blackwell–make massive profits at the expense of the taxpayers and the scientists. The journal publishers contribute next to nothing to the process, and earn profit margins of 30% or more. Not gross margins. Profit margins. As Coyne says, this has to stop.

There are now some open-access academic journal publishers who post their work for free download. The problem with most of those is that they’re paid up-front, charging scientists (which of course means the taxpayers) thousands of dollars to publish a paper. The real answer to this problem is for the US government, Google, or some other large entity to start publishing science papers for free. No charge to publish them, and no charge to read them. I’d go further. Elsevier and the rest have unjustly profited on a huge scale for decades. It’s time for someone like the US government to say enough is enough, and to put all of those old papers to which Elsevier and the others have unjustly claimed copyright into the public domain, where they belong. They were produced with taxpayer funds, and by any reasonable standard they should have been in the public domain all along.

Alaska, where men are tough and women are tougher. This young Alaskan woman let her small dog out to pee one evening, heard a ruckus, and found a large bear in her yard trying to eat her dog. So she did what any Alaskan woman would do: stormed up to the bear and punched it in the snout. The bear, knowing what was good for it, dropped the dog and fled. Woman and dog are fine, and the bear probably learned its lesson.

Which reminds me of the old joke about the young guy sitting in a bar, listening to the old guys talking about what it takes to become a Yuker. The old guys tell him that if he wants to be a real Yuker, he has to kill a polar bear and rape an Eskimo woman. So, a few days later the young guy staggers back into the bar, all torn up. “Okay,” he says, “where’s that Eskimo woman you want me to kill?”

I think I mentioned a few days ago some interesting work that scientists had done on DNA recovered from victims of the Black Death. Abbie Smith speculates convincingly that the Black Death was caused by morons.

I’ve talked before about the strange phenomenon of people’s hands getting smaller. The other night, I happened across this page, which has a graphic illustration (scroll all the way to the bottom) of how to choose the proper grip size for a tennis racket.

So, I measured my hand. Sure enough, the yardstick told me that my proper grip size was right on the line between 4-3/4″ and 4-7/8″, which according to that article is one or two sizes larger than a man with a “really big hand” needs. I don’t think of myself as having particularly large hands. I can just barely palm an NBA basketball, or at least I could before I started to get arthritis in my hands. If you have a ruler handy, measure your own hand and see what your proper grip size is. My guess is that if you’re a guy with small hands it’ll be 4-1/2″ (11.43 cm); if you’re a guy with average-size hands, it’ll be 4-5/8″ (11.75 cm); and if you’re a guy with larger than average hands, it’ll be 4-3/4″ (12.07 cm) or more.

08:16 – Reading about the Norwegian mass murderer, there’s something I don’t understand. He thinks muslims are invading and taking over Europe, forcibly spreading their hateful beliefs to a previously civilized part of the planet. Okay, I get that. He’s right. If Europe has any sense, it’ll expel muslims with extreme prejudice, as should the US and other civilized countries. Muslims are nothing more than Nazis in drag, and the proper response to a muslim is the same as the proper response to a Nazi.

What I don’t understand is why he set off his truck bomb next to government offices, in an area presumably largely populated by ethnic Norwegians, and then shot up a youth camp presumably largely populated by ethnic Norwegian young people. Why not park the truck next to a mosque during services and then shoot up the survivors? Or, since he apparently had enough ammonium nitrate to make five or six more truck bombs, why didn’t he park truck bombs outside five or six more mosques during services? What was the point to slaughtering a bunch of ethnic Norwegians, most of whom were presumably non-believers, and most of whom presumably weren’t much happier about the spread of islam than he is?

11:34 – I’m always leery when calls of racism are made against ordinary people or institutions, but if this article is correct this is a pretty blatant case. This young woman earned the highest GPA in her graduating class, and yet was denied her position as sole valedictorian. Furthermore, her mother’s appeal to the school authorities was denied on questionable grounds, and delayed until the question became moot. The young woman in question is black and a single mother, and the school district in question is in the Deep South. If the facts stated in this article are correct and complete, it’s reasonable to ask if this young woman was denied her rights simply because the authorities didn’t believe she was the right kind of person to represent her school.

Now, it’s possible that there were extenuating circumstances. For example, the article mentions that she took a heavy load of AP classes, but does not mention which ones. Let’s face it, an A in AP History or AP Literature or AP Foreign Language shouldn’t have the same weight as an A in AP Biology, Chemistry, Physics, or Calculus. Many school districts award 5 points on a 4-point GPA for an A in any AP course, but if an A in one of those non-rigorous AP courses is worth 5 points, then an A in a rigorous AP subject should be worth at least 6. So, although the article doesn’t give details, it’s possible that the students in second and third place had only slightly lower GPAs and had taken a boatload of rigorous AP courses. In that case, they probably deserved the valedictorian and salutatorian positions. Or they would have, had the school district made those changes to the way GPAs were assigned. As it stands, the only justification I can see for their position is that the other students may have had a wider range of extracurricular activities, which in any event should not be given any weight for academic honors. And, of course, as a single mother, the student in question probably had more limited opportunities to engage in such activities.

I periodically despair about the state of tennis in the US. For decades, we regularly produced a crop of world-class players, from  Tilden and Vines and Budge and Kramer to Schroeder and Riggs and Gonzalez and Trabert to Ashe and Smith and Connors and McEnroe and Agassi and Sampras. And that’s just the men.

But for the last ten years or more we haven’t had any truly first-rate players on the pro tour. The best we can come up with are players like Roddick and the Williams sisters, decent players but not true greats. So I’m always glad to see up-and-coming young players like Kiah.

The video is from about a year ago, when she was still 15. She has several other videos posted, showing her serving and so on. Watching her play, I’d guess she’d play about even with most fair-to-middling 15-year-old male tennis players–those good enough to make the tennis team at a large high school–although that’ll change over the next couple of years, as the boys continue to get faster and stronger, while she doesn’t. If I’d played her when I was 15, I certainly wouldn’t have taken the match lightly. I’d probably have beaten her four matches in five, and maybe even five in five, but this girl has enough tools to be dangerous.

I hope there are a whole lot more like her out there.

Here’s the best take I’ve found this morning on the impending collapse of the Eurozone, although, if anything, it’s still much too optimistic. The beginning of the end, indeed. Things are much nearer the end of the end than the beginning. We can only hope that the federal government and US banks throw no more money down this rathole.

If I had to guess, I’d say the three I’s, Ireland, Iceland (a provisional EU country), and Italy, will be next, followed shortly by Spain, then Belgium and France. Germany and the UK will be the last major EU countries standing, and even they aren’t too stable. Poor Switzerland. The only one of them with any sense.

A Florida jury today returned a verdict of Not Proven in the Casey Anthony trial.

Well, not really, because for some reason the rest of the world has not yet adopted that useful Scottish verdict, AKA “we know you did it, but the prosecution didn’t prove its case”.

As you celebrate Independence Day today, please take a moment to think about the men and women of our armed forces, past and present, who have willingly risked, and all too often lost, everything to defend our freedom. I worry about America, but there can be nothing very wrong with a country that continues to produce men and women like them.

Barbara’s new WordPress blog is up and running here. Please visit it and leave her a comment. Be nice.