Spasms of Accommodation

Real Life Seems Overrated

2012-02-25T13:30:00.001-05:00

I got this link from @mjrobbins on Twitter. Twitter, bad for our brains? There's a video of a TV interview with Baroness Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist who doesn't seem to understand how Twitter works. She seems obsessed with the idea that "having ongoing relationships in three dimensions" is somehow critical to life.

I hope that's not true.

The defendant of Twitter, Mark Henderson, author of The Geek Manifesto, tried to explain how Twitter builds communities and helps you connect with people you wouldn't otherwise know. And the presenter said, "Well why can't you just meet them down the pub?"

What?! What pub? These people are thousands of miles away! This whole discussion acts like anybody you might possibly have anything in common with lives within 5 blocks of you. Well I can assure you that is not the case. I remember the first standardized test I had in grade school that had a math problem involving walking "blocks" and I had to get up and ask my teacher what that meant. Where I live I can take about a 15 minute walk through the woods to my grandmother's house, but there is nothing else. I can either have one dimensional relationships with people on the internet, or I can have nothing at all.

I do agree that she's right that moderation is essential for everything. I'm pretty good at that. I bought 4 pints of gelato the other day because it was buy-one-get-one-free and it comes in a good reusable container. I have only opened one of them and I just ate a little bit.

The only thing I don't seem to get tired of is taking pictures. I only share a tiny portion of them, but definitely more than anybody else shares with me. I think I understand that emailing somebody a picture of an accomplishment is not the same as sharing that accomplishment in person. But I also suspect that in person I would see their body language and know that they really don't give a shit. Just emailing it to them I get the feeling of sharing without the humiliation. It doesn't bother me at all that they don't reply to the email.

Sometimes I throw pictures up on Twitter, but only the ones of general interest, like a pecan with three segments. I only have two Twitter followers that I have met in person, and both are friends I met online and they live 350 and 900 miles away. Putting things on Twitter really is just like throwing a penny in a wishing well. I once tweeted one of my videos to @DbagChopra relevant to something he said. He made a joke and used the video link in his own tweet. He has 22 times as many Twitter followers as me. The Plays count on my video only went up by one. Just because it's on Twitter doesn't mean anybody is reading it, or clicking on it. I still do it though. I suppose it is natural to want to connect with other humans. So is Susan Greenfield saying that it's bad for your brain if your connection is not reciprocal? Is it unhealthy? Or at worst just a waste of time?

So for me it's one dimensional (or unidirectional) relationships or none at all. I imagine I'll eventually get to none at all, but until then, moderation. I have to go outside now and feel the wind in my hair. Apparently that is critical to my brain health.

Alkali Metals Get More Terrifying

2012-02-23T10:08:00.007-05:00

There's a video going around of the military disposing of sodium in Lake Lenore, a lake that was already highly alkaline. I saw this last week on GuardianUK from a tweet by @GrrlScientist.

Phil Plait saw that video too, then tweeted a link to this website with more alkali metals reacting with water. Don't get bored by the corrosion part. Wait until they put the cesium in water.

It reminds me of the risk of having pure elements on hand to play with, and the stubbornness of some people when it comes to taking science seriously. When I was in the 8th grade my science teacher, Mrs. Burns, had some sodium. It was a few small pieces in a bottle of oil, like in the video above. The wood shop was in the next building at a right angle to the science lab. For some unfathomable reason the shop teacher did not believe that sodium had a strong reaction to air. And for some slightly more fathomable but distinctly nefarious reason Mrs. Burns decided to convince him that it did. So she and the shop teacher went out to the lawn between their classrooms with a cinderblock, the jar of sodium, forceps and a hammer. The students stood at the windows of the science lab looking on. Mrs. Burns reached into the jar of oil with forceps and pulled out about a 1/2" chunk of sodium. She placed it on the cinderblock and quickly backed far away. The shop teacher, whose name I can't remember at all, swung the hammer back over his shoulder and hit the sodium. At which point the hammer reversed trajectory with a suddenness and force that the shop teacher was not expecting whatsoever. The sound it made hitting the brick wall behind him would have surprised him more if the concussion of the sodium explosion hadn't made him deaf.

It's good we have YouTube now so shop teachers don't have to suffer temporary hearing loss to learn a lesson. It looks like 10 grams of sodium costs about $65 now so that was an expensive lesson. 10 grams of Cesium is about $200 though, so at least economy offers a level of safety for shop teachers when they deny science. Also there's a $75 Hazmat shipping fee with any purchase of alkali metals. They must be signed for by an adult.

The Death of the Conjunction Apostrophe? I'm Wont to Revive It

2012-02-23T08:37:00.005-05:00

I've noticed people, particularly young people, leaving out the apostrophe in the conjunction for "will not." Wont is a word, but it has a different meaning than won't, and a different pronunciation the way I learned it. Wont rhymes with font and won't rhymes with don't. When I see, "I wont wait to get a new iPhone." I read it as, "I am accustomed wait to get a new iPhone." It's missing a to and it trips me up. I read it again substituting won't. I am wont to jab at the screen, putting in an apostrophe with my finger.

I Googled this to be sure it wasn't already in common use. I'm not certain I want this to be one of my pedantic frustrations like lie and lay. Some of my most educated and precise friends mess up lie and lay. I would like to stop twitching when people say they are "going to lay down." Google automatically changes a search for wont into a search for won't, so I'm not sure if that means wont isn't even a word anymore or if it's just such a common misspelling nobody cares. According to this question on the MacRumors forum some people notice that spellcheck doesn't catch an intended will not spelled wont, yet don't ever think to look wont up in a dictionary. They accuse people of not understanding the question when people try to explain to them that wont is a word, too, therefore is not misspelled.

If there's a chance to take a stand for the conjunction apostrophe before it's too late I'd like to vote to keep it. If the kids want to communicate with adults they should probably not do things that make it take longer to read their writing. Abbreviations and using one word when you mean another makes reading slower. tl:dr (too long: didn't read) will give way to gs:dr (grammar sucks: didn't read). Studies have shown that it takes longer to read an abbreviation than the words written out. I've always wanted to read a follow up study for people who grow up with the abbreviation to see if this changes with them. I can read WTF pretty fast now, but I say in my head, "What the Fuck?" not "Double-U Tee Eff." Does anybody actually read it as letters? What do you read when you see LOL? I read loll, which doesn't really give me the feeling of hilarity. Which is probably why I never use that when I type.

Mnemonic for young bloggers:

Choose your own font,
As is your wont.
But don't
Misuse won't.

Bonus Points for Nobody Knows

2012-02-18T23:54:00.000-05:00

I clicked a link the other day to what looked like an article on a newspaper web site (but I'm pretty sure I've never actually heard of The Washington Times) I skimmed it and realized it was just another delusional rant by a creationist. Basically the premise was that flagella couldn't have evolved because there are separate parts to make it work and by some irrational argument this couldn't happen simultaneously, therefore, God. I dismissed it as a hopeless case but something about it has been bothering me all week.

It's the idea that the author doesn't buy Darwin's explanation but readily substitutes something entirely implausible and unprovable. That's not how it works. It's like the creationists don't understand that it's ok to just not know. Speaking in broad terms and not about this particular flagella nonsense, if you have some information that invalidates a paradigm then you may be in the middle of a paradigm shift. Now I can't remember if Kuhn said this -- his book is in my mini warehouse and I can't look it up -- but I think there must be a tri-state period in the middle of a paradigm shift where the scientific community just admits they don't know anymore. (I can't avoid this digital electronics metaphor. If you don't understand the origin, there are two states of a transistor, let's call it a 1 or a 0. If it's not either one, that's tri-state. It's a real actual thing, floating between ground and a discrete voltage.) And I actually think of this dilemma this way. Believe Darwin = 1, Believe God = 0 but there has to be another option where you don't believe either one. You believe nothing. You just don't know. Maybe nobody knows. Your mind isn't made up. I just don't think you can even talk to somebody about how things work or how they came to be if they aren't comfortable with complexity that nobody understands. I think the misunderstanding is they think scientists are claiming to explain everything. No, that's not what scientists do. Scientists are fully aware that don't know shit, just ask one. Listen for "but only if" and "as long as."

People that think God knows everything? Controls everything? Designed everything? They just don't have a good handle on what "everything" means. Discussing tiny details about flagella is idiotic. They're never going to get it.

So how do we get the culture more comfortable with the idea of not knowing stuff? More Stephen Fry!

New Windows Logo Reaction -- That's bad

2012-02-18T16:00:00.000-05:00

Windows got a new logo, did you hear? I just clicked a link on Twitter and read all about it. I don't really keep up with Windows since I am happy to say I have not had to look upon a Windows computer in close to a year now. But apparently they're coming out with Windows 8 and that gets a new logo.

Just let that rest on your retinas for a minute. What do you think? Try to name your emotion.... I got "Despair."

I think it's right up there with the Walmart sphincter logo. Read more about the failure they're calling Metro style and see pictures of the logo through the years on the Windows blog.

Filming Hummingbirds

2012-02-18T13:14:00.000-05:00

I love this video! Those cameras! I want to see the whole TV show now. I have a book about hummingbirds with lots of still pictures of them fighting. I did already know that they are quite mean to each other. The high speed, high definition photography does show lots of interesting details though. I like seeing the feathers on their back lifted by the vortex coming off their wings particularly.

The presenter didn't mention the hardest part of filming wildlife -- the waiting. I am constantly amazed that an animal's ability to do nothing interesting for extended periods of time far exceeds my ability to sit and wait for it to perform. They take thousands of hours of work and edit it down to an hour of the best parts. What WOULDN'T be interesting if you presented it that way? Films like these make people interested in animals like TMZ makes people interested in celebrities.

From twitter link by @GrrlScientist

Have you used a government program?

2012-02-17T12:06:00.003-05:00

This quote in Paul Krugman's article "Moochers Against Welfare" made me laugh and laugh.

Cornell University’s Suzanne Mettler points out that many beneficiaries of government programs seem confused about their own place in the system. She tells us that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on Medicare say that they “have not used a government program.”

Have I used a government program? Yes. I've been on unemployment three times. In my 20s I owned an S-Corp and worked as a consultant, getting a 1099 to show how much I got paid instead of a W-2. I had gaps in earning all the time but I never got unemployment. I would finish one electronics design project and work on my house until somebody had another new product to transition to manufacturing. I used to make mad bank when I was billing! And I doubled the value of my house in 3 years. It never even occurred to me that I would use a government program.

In my 30s it became more difficult to find consulting work. Nobody was designing electronics to be manufactured in their own factory anymore. I tried going through a temporary agency to get a job with an architecture and engineering firm. The manager was a former rocket scientist (as in he really designed a rocket propulsion system for a loony rich dude) so he understood the scope of my abilities and hired me as an interior designer. I did AutoCAD floorplans, electrical riser diagrams, and edited Master Specs when I wasn't picking the colors and carpet for projects. There was only about 1 week a month worth of that good-taste-required work, but it was intimidating enough to the other people working there that none of them would do it. I got 1/3 of my old hourly rate and the temp agency got to keep most of what they billed the firm. I was going to do that for 6 months and then be hired permanently. But after 5 months they lost all their contracts with the Federal government to design buildings for Air Force bases and had to lay me off. My manager suggested I go to the unemployment office. What? I could get unemployment from being a TEMP? No kidding!

After that round of unemployment I got some more consulting work and started doing more and more menial things, like painting and carpentry and cleaning. Then I moved down to the ancestral home and got a job at another architecture and engineering firm where I worked for three solid years! A personal record! I made $20,000 a year less than my first year out of college. And I got laid off when they lost their contract with the Department of Environmental Protection. You're darn straight I used a government program.

It seems the more my worth is demeaned by society the more I'm willing to use government programs.

I need to think about that for a while.

Update: I think I might have used a government program as a teenager! I might be guilty of this very delusion in the block quote. I was the only person in my high school to qualify for a Georgia Governor's Scholarship, which paid all my college tuition for two years. That sounds pretty much like a hand out to me! But if you had asked me in my 20s if I had used a government program I probably would've said no. If you think about college scholarships there are a lot more people who have used government programs that don't consider themselves welfare class.

Try an Aspirin Between Your Knees

2012-02-16T20:10:00.004-05:00

OK, I've had it. It's time for a bit of a rant.

The Republicans and their attack on birth control has gone too far. They really need to shut the fuck up. It's not only that the ones talking about it aren't women, it's that they aren't even doctors, and they're talking about medicine. And the ones that are doctors are just out of their damn minds! I'm looking at you, Dr. Ron "Honest Rape" Paul.

I don't give a damn about their religious beliefs. They are irrelevant to a medical discussion. And contraception at this point in modern society is medical. Hell, at this point it's not even contraception. Just like you can take aspirin for a headache or blood clots you can take birth control pills for a lot more than not getting pregnant.

I just got back from Walgreens where I picked up my latest three week supply of birth control pills. I paid $3 for the gas to drive there and back and $26.24 for 21 low dose pills. I have no insurance, but fortunately there is a generic version that doesn't cost that much more than the acid reflux medicine I also have to take every single day. Now why would I, a recluse, need birth control pills, you ask? If I didn't have to go to Walgreens I would never see another live person, let alone a real live man who would be willing to go through the motions of impregnating me. Yet I take a pill every single day that stops me ovulating. The Republicans would probably be appalled that I'm spending Federally subsidized unemployment money on such a vile product.

Well it's none of their fucking business, first of all! Second of all, my doctor in Austin said regulating my hormones is the best way to control my migraines. I guarantee you Rick Santorum has never had a menstrual migraine. Or any other PMS symptoms, like clumsy day, or crying-for-no-fucking-reason-at-all day. I think any man should have to go through that disaster of evolution before his opinion counts. And for the Republicans who also believe in Intelligent Design? Fuck you. There is nothing intelligent about the hideous side effects of sexual reproduction. Fluctuating hormones are a complete disaster. Apparently we got off pretty easy with that though. When I was reading up on animals with striped tails the other day I learned that ring-tailed lemurs have barbed penises to stop the females from having sex with more than one partner because it "alters" them. What the FUCK?! They're primates! Boy am I glad that trait didn't turn up in humans.

I got my prescription for these pills about a year ago when I did have insurance provided by my employer. Since I was 22 and had first migraine and my first gynecological exam I have been required to have an annual pap smear before I can get my prescription renewed. What does cancer on my cervix have to do with controlling my hormones? This is STUPID! It's something I endure gracefully when I have insurance, but when I don't I have to fork over more than $200 to get this prescription renewed. I tried going to Planned Parenthood where I can get a pap smear for only $100. But they refused to write a prescription for birth control for me because I'm over 40. Well fuck you very much! They said there is a risk of blood clots. I have zero risk factors for that. I'm not overweight, I don't smoke, I don't take long plane trips. So I have to shop around for a competent doctor that will agree to write my prescription so I'm not crippled for one week out of every month with debilitating migraines and a very real risk of taking a header down the ladder from my loft. And I have to pay a month's living expenses to make this happen. Every year.

I'm trying to make the point that women are going to get emotional about this discussion. Because we are already fed up with the fucking bullshit we have to go through over this medical fiasco. What does a man have to do at the doctor every goddam year from the age of sexual maturity? Not a fucking thing. That pisses me off! I have had false-positive pap smears three times. I had to endure a cryocautery when I was STILL A VIRGIN because the doctor believed I had abnormal cells on my cervix. He didn't treat a lot of women engineers I guess. Probably just never saw a cervix that wasn't worn down from penile abrasion. He thought I needed to have the surface of my cervix cleaned off with about a minute and a half of contact with stainless steel backed up with liquid nitrogen. May I recommend we have all those men on that panel in Washington have a probe inserted into their abdominal cavity and have liquid nitrogen circulated through it for about 90 seconds? I think they should try a biopsy too, where they get their inner sanctum swabbed with vinegar and then a nice big piece of them way up inside is just PINCHED off with what look like long handled wire cutters. (I can't use the term we use in the electronics lab because it's just too....)

If a man wants birth control he can get a vasectomy for a $15 copay if he has insurance. And it is extremely effective. Did you know that the female version of surgical sterilization fails in 1 in 1000 cases?! That's no better at birth control than the pill I take! And it does nothing to help with menstrual migraines. I would have gotten sterilized in my 20s if there was a good way to do it, but there isn't. And I still would have to take a hormone pill every day or suffer debilitating menstruation symptoms every month. And I am pretty fucking pissed off about that. The whole area of preventing-reproduction health has been run by assholes like these current loudmouths FOREVER and women just have to take it. There is nothing fair about the male-centric medical bias and big-pharma lobby mandated annual tests for women. Apparently we can't get any decent research funding for this stuff. Whoever came up with the idea that women need their uterus scraped out if they don't have a baby is two things: batshit crazy and a man. Show me evidence that's a good idea. And get on that hormone regulation thing. If men had PMS this nonsense would have a vaccine you had to get before you could enroll in college, just like measles.

Is this a shitstorm the Republicans really want to start? They start a war on science and a war on women all the while boo-hooing that there's a war on religion? Well they fucking started it! I am prepared to stand up and speak out for women's health and the abysmal state it's in. And I am ALWAYS ready to stand up for not having children. Please! Stop the breeding! I was prepared to sit quietly and pay my $1.25 a day for a pill that apparently any woman with a job at a Catholic business that provides employee health insurance can get for free. Because it is worth it to not have to work with a bunch of believers. But now they are just all up in my face. Kind of a shame I have zero qualifications to communicate effectively and get anything done about this. But if somebody who has a strategy has a petition I can sign or something.... Let's bring it!

I love Andrea Mitchell at the end of this. :: silence :: "Excuse me.... I'm just trying to catch my breath from that." I wish she'd been on camera. I would love to see her face. It's second best to Barbara Walter's reaction in the Herman Cain interview where he says he'd like to be Secretary of state and Barbara Walter does a double take and shouts, "WHAT?!"

I got this video clip from this article.

Wild animals have little reproductive free will

2012-02-14T23:56:00.000-05:00

I got a text from Mama this morning with a picture of a chicken and biddies. She thought a possum had gotten that chicken, but she was hiding on a nest in the weeds in the corner of the chicken yard. I went over to take pictures. I like videos of baby chickens. (Here's one from two years ago if you like them too.)

These aren't any particular kind of chickens. I think they're feral chickens from DeFuniak Springs that my aunt caught and brought back to her chicken yard.

I happened to download this album recently so it automatically started playing when I opened iTunes to look for a song to go with this video. It was a no brainer that it was the one. It may seem dark if you don't know me or my family. My aunt's remark about those biddies: "They are cute. I'm already imagining every one of them on a plate." Here are the lyrics for my mother the English major to analyze.

Grow Up And Blow Away
Artist: Metric
Album: Grow Up And Blow Away
Songwriters: JAMES SHAW, EMILY HAINES

Grow up and blow away

Floating the rent two by two
From the womb
To the holiday
There is no holiday

First double-cross her heart
He wants to start a family
Needing something to go on

If she weren't writing in blood
She'd bring him her jokes
A new liver
And a shovel for the mud

If he were not knee-deep in mud
He'd bring her his drugs
He'd get her a typewriter

If this is the life, why does it feel
So good to die today?
Blue to grey
Grow up and blow away

If this is the life, why does it feel
So good to die today?
Blue to grey
Grow up and blow away

Nobody knows which street to take
He took the easy way
What was the easy way?

First double-cross her heart
He wants to start a family
She always thought she would not

Polarized light, horsefly delight. Zebra stripes, fewer bites

2012-02-13T14:30:00.001-05:00

I've been wondering for a while about the evolution of ringed tails. Why does a raccoon's tail have rings? Why do Red Pandas? Or Ring Tailed Lemurs? The Ringtail Cat? What kind of convergent evolution is this ring thing all about? Is it just camouflage? To look like shadows cast by branches in the trees? It's not easy to get the answer to this question with regular Google, so I kind of keep putting off finding out. Then today I read this neat article about zebra stripes. Somebody finally did empirical tests with horseflies. It turns out that dark colored horses reflect polarized light similar to a pool of water. White horses don't have that invisible-to-the-human-eye resemblance to the fly breeding site. It's well known (apparently, to horse people) that flies bother white horses less. So the researchers tested variations of pattern and found that the wavelength disruption of black and white patterns is even less appealing to flies than plain white. Zebras for the win! (I like how they reveal their true scientist nature by conceding that tsetse flies, a horsefly relative, don't bother any animal out on the open plain, only around water.)

I suppose I could find out just what I want to know about ringed tails from a introductory biology textbook. I used to have one but I didn't have room to keep it anymore. From reading online college papers from people who do have these textbooks I gather that most of the ring tailed creatures, particularly raccoons and the red panda, seem to have evolved from the same distant relative, common to all in the superfamily Musteloidea. The ring-tailed cat is the same family as the raccoon, so it's easy to see how they have similar tails. Ring tailed lemurs? They're a wet-nosed primate, so I don't know. I'll just have to wait for some biology major to write a paper about it, somebody with library access and good search engine optimization.

Looking Angry

2012-02-09T14:25:00.001-05:00

Today my mama suggested I start wearing packing tape between my eyebrows. She thinks these wrinkles make me look angry.

It's an awful lot to ask of a few square inches of tape, to change my whole persona. Looking angry is kind of my thing.

Shooting food

2012-02-08T00:04:00.002-05:00

The science fair was at the White House today. Fun was had by all.

I think that would work even better if you added a squirt of butane and a spark in there with that compressed air. I did some ambient pressure, propellant fired PVC cannons and hand guns back in the '90s. I showed one to my dad's Rotary exchange student from Norway who stuck around after his year to get two EE degrees from Georgia Tech. I think he was in graduate school when I went through my spud gun phase. It was Thanksgiving and we were heading back to visit the parental units for the holiday. I was taking the spud gun to show it off for my dad and brother. We stopped at the grocery store to get some ammunition. Arne was impressed with the sweet potatoes for $0.49/lb. "They have armor piercing qualities!" he exclaimed. Immediately after we fired the spud gun at my dad's farm he wanted to go to the hardware store to get parts for a larger bore model to see if he could shoot a potato clear across his pond. That's when I got into making 1/2" PVC pistols. The waste from the potatoes in the big gun provided up to 6 more shots in my little pistol! I was into the conscientious use of resources even back then.

After Arne got back to Norway he made his own spud gun but he added a compressed air component. We'd looked up the combustion characteristics of the hair spray we were using to fire it and realized the problem was most people were using too much propellant for the amount of air they had. So Arne added a Schrader valve to his and pumped it up with a bike pump after squirting in the propellant. He said the performance was very good.

I actually sold my first spud gun to a UGA grad for $30. If you went to Georgia Tech you'd get what's funny about that. What's the statute of limitations on unlicensed weapons trafficking?

Panning for Twitter Gold -- Hippie Threats

2012-02-07T12:43:00.000-05:00

I have a lot of free time so I can kind of keep dipping my pie plate into the bottom of the Twitter river. I rinse away lots of dull commentary and lame jokes. I retweet the solid laughs and star the things that amuse me but don't match my idiom. Sometimes as I'm rinsing the mud out of my pan I get some gold dust and a few nuggets. Last night that happened around 2 am on Patton Oswalt's feed. I put down my phone and woke up the computer to make these screen shots. I let Patton edit the selection and these are his retweets. It's impossible to trick Twitter into showing you the timeline in reverse so you just have to read them scrambled up. I think these jokes resonated with me particularly because I just went to the co-op last week and got mung beans. I'm growing my own sprouts. The mung bean joke was the first one.

My favorites are "My dad is a lawyer" and "I'm going to sit by you on the bus."

Sideways Snake

2012-02-06T16:15:00.001-05:00

I shot another reptile video today. I saw a handsome garter snake while I was trying to tidy up some backhoe tracks in my yard.

I tried downloading the iMovie iPhone app to see what it was like to edit it on the iPhone. It's limited, but not bad. At least it gives you an easy way to upload to Vimeo and not just YouTube. But it doesn't work well with video shot vertically. I tried rotating the video in iMovie to take up the whole space. That just makes it come out sideways on the computer. Viewed on the phone it's right though. Apple, I am disappoint.

I hooked the phone to the computer to see if I could copy the file over and export it with the dimensions reversed to get a proper video in Vimeo. But because I copied the photos first and then deleted them the iMovie project was completely destroyed.

There is no way to get video off the iPhone and then sync it back in a smart album like you can photos. Once it's in iPhoto it's kind of stuck. You can put it in iMovie and export it as a movie, but the original editable video is lost to the iPhone. They really need to work on a fix for this. The only way for me to make a vertical video from this is to start over from scratch in iMovie on the computer.

Why no Nature category?

2012-02-05T13:33:00.002-05:00

I made a quick iPhone video again. I wasn't allowed to upload it from my phone until I picked a category on YouTube. I had to put it under Pets and Animals. There's no category for the kind of videos I usually make. Gosh, you'd think I was somehow not that similar to most other people or something.

Update: I got a comment from Ami asking me if these were green anoles (Anolis carolinensis). I thought we might have brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) here now, introduced from Cuba or the Bahamas because I have seen so many odd acting lizards -- they just don't look like the lizards of my childhood anymore. These things are a lot more.... menacing. And I'm talking about when I was a little girl! And they're menacing to me NOW!

Anyway, my Audubon Field Guide says green anoles aren't supposed to have back crests. Clearly these do. But green anoles do turn green and get a black spot behind their eye when they're fighting, like these. So I will claim these are green anoles, but if a herpetologist wanted to contradict me I would listen attentively. Do anoles cross breed when an island species invades their territory? I have a photo of a lizard with a back crest breeding with one without if any herpetologists are interested. Maybe it's a thing males have and the field guide is just not that precise.

Women are Better at Living Alone

2012-02-01T15:27:00.000-05:00

There's a new book out that has data showing women are better at living alone than men. Are Women Better at Living Alone? Sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s new book, Going Solo, explores the question.

To this I say, "Duh!"

Now the reasons for this mostly don't apply to me at all. I am not better at friendships or any of that rot. The reason I'm good at living alone is because I just love nesting. Having a comfortable home is about all I need to be happy. Most men I know don't really pay any attention to where they live.

But aside from being an obsessive nester, Google's pegging me as a man works with this Going Solo angle too.

“and although each of the men we found had his own individual story, together they had much in common: a spouse lost to death or divorce; weak ties to children and other family, or no children at all; a small or nonexistent friendship network; physical or mental illness; a repellent personality.” Apparently they found no such women.

I have weak ties to family, no children at all, a small or nonexistent friendship network, mental abnormalities if not illness, AND a repellent personality!

What is work?

2012-01-28T13:32:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking about what it is to be lazy lately. The Republican nominees keep it in the news (laziness). People that don't have jobs MUST be lazy. What other possible explanation could there be? I saw a clip of Rick Santorum claiming his grandfather taught him that the key to a good life was hard work. "He worked in a coal mine until he was 70," Santorum said, standing relaxed on a stage in slick- soled shoes. I bet he shakes hands with hundreds of people a day. Has anybody felt a callous on any of his finger joints? I don't think standing around talking was what his coal-mining relations meant when they said that about working hard.

Now I can't speak for other unemployed people, but I'm pretty sure I'm not lazy. I wore through the finger of a pair of goat skin gloves last week. In the first four weeks of The Small Year I have shoveled a couple tons of silty sand, arranged a ton of large granite rip-rap, sawed down and hauled around multiple trees, dug roots, and pulled briars. I supervised a backhoe for three days. I've had fun with a sledge hammer breaking chunks of bricks and moving them in a wheel barrow. I moved 600 board feet of lumber, 30 sheets of corrugated steel, a big pile of fiber cement shingles and porcelain tile. I replaced the skylight in a roof and pressure washed 1500 square feet of concrete. And I bought and arranged the delivery of two 60 year old aircraft aluminum mobile homes to reuse and restore. (More about those another day.)

I also read all the job openings that are emailed to me from the automated searches I have set up. I'm not correctly qualified for any of them. I apply for the ones that I'm overqualified for, but I never hear back.

There's a trend now to romanticize the kind of life I'm living. I make all my own bread and jelly and I built my own tiny house. I'm ahead of the hipster curve. But I have to bake my bread on the front porch in a $45 toaster oven that I have to keep in a plastic bin under my front steps because there is no room for it in my house. I don't have a $2000 Thermador convection oven like I had in my house in Atlanta. I'm not avoiding store bought bread to mitigate my successful life that has removed me from the roots of survival. I'm doing it because I failed and now I'm reduced to this -- dividing the recipes on King Arthur Flour's website by 2/3 because if the loaf rises above the sides of the pan it will hit the electric elements in the top of my tiny oven.

I calculated how much it costs me to make my own bread. It's almost $2 a loaf. My dad makes money off investments and then uses it to buy bread direct at the Flowers Bakery that he drives by every day and gets it for $1.60 a loaf. I can't argue that my way is better. If I went to town to buy a loaf of bread it would cost me more like $5 a loaf because of the transportation cost, so it's still a good deal for me to make it, but if I had any kind of job making at least $10 an hour it would no longer be a cost savings to do stuff like bake and make jelly. A batch of mayhaw jelly represents over 20 hours of work. And you only get about 8 jars of jelly. And the jars and sugar come to $1.60 per jar. You have to do it because your time is really worthless and you have no other source of condiments or because it's your hobby. Both fine options. But let's be honest about which is which. I've done both the six-figure a year high tech job and the scraping by with my own muscles and sweat. Both are legitimate activities. But when somebody all educated and rich decides they want to do what the poor and uneducated have been doing forever because they think it's charming? Well, it's a bit insulting isn't it? You assume you can do their job? It's as bad as my old boss thinking I could do a secretary's job because, "It's not rocket science!" What an insult to secretaries! I AM a rocket scientist! It's not just because I'm GREAT at rocket science. (I'm not) It's because I'm NO GOOD at repetitive tasks with no big goals. You wouldn't ask a secretary to go out in the field to inspect sea walls and make a big spreadsheet to analyze them, why would you think I can keep track of other people's calendars and make their travel reservations? It's a completely different skill set!

I've actually seen people with a shovel that didn't know how to use it. "You know you can jump on it with both feet, right?" I've said. They're just poking at the dirt like they're serving ice cream or something. You gotta really put some force into it! Pine tree roots aren't going to move aside like the pralines in the ice cream. I approve of people learning these skills, I'm just not sure they know what they don't know. If I'm wrong about this then I'm just a giant baby, which is entirely possible. Maybe I thought building a house was really hard work because I'm a princess. Maybe to other people who also aren't conditioned to it it's not a daily struggle with dehydration, exhaustion, pain, and the nagging feeling that you aren't exactly sure how to do the next step.

This week there was an article on Slate titled Farmer Groupies and Chicken Coddlers. The author uses the term "unsettled DIYers" to describe people who try to live like me yet hold onto their modern views of animals as pets. You'll notice in my description of all my work there was no livestock involved. You know why? Because I'm not a naive romantic. I know how hard it is to kill a chicken. I'm not into it. My aunt raises chickens to eat. One year the day after Thanksgiving it was my job to keep my young niece in the house while my mama and aunt when out in the garden before dawn and slaughtered all the chickens. (It's easier to catch them when they're asleep) I felt like I had wasted my time trying to protect my niece by occupying her with pancakes when her beloved relatives came sauntering into the kitchen with their flannel nightgowns splattered in blood.

If I want to eat a rabbit I'll shoot a wild one. I haven't done it yet, but I also haven't bought any meat since that 12 pound turkey I got for $0.69/lb in December. (I still have some of it in my freezer) Unlike these modern-day farmer wannabes I'm not just playing at it. I'm poor. There is no way in hell I'm taking a sick chicken to the veterinarian. I can't even afford to go to the doctor myself. I don't have a garden either because the return on investment on a fence is so great. I did the math. It's cheaper to watch the sale ads online and buy groceries when they're marked down than to have a garden. Better to shoot animals that eat wild produce than fight with them over domesticated stuff.

One of the problems with working hard by yourself and trying to convey to others what it's like is that it's inconvenient to take your own picture. It breaks the flow of the job. I end up with a ton of pictures whenever I have to hire somebody to come do something and none of me doing the stuff I'm the most proud of. I have started editing video of the backhoe work done in January because I love watching heavy equipment work and maybe other people would like to see that too. I'll finish it if we ever get some bad weather to give me a break from working outside. Meanwhile here's something I did entirely on my phone while I was out in the yard, including upload. You'd think the iPhone would work with YouTube to deal with vertical videos better. I was just trying the automated options to put it on YouTube. Vimeo is still better, but it's a lot more steps to get the videos on there.

Northern Lights over Norwegian Lapland

2012-01-27T13:04:00.000-05:00

Get ready for the weird Guardian UK sound effect at the beginning of this video. Then it's silent and beautiful.

Demographics by Personality

2012-01-27T11:06:00.001-05:00

Google is consolidating their privacy policy and people are getting testy. I read a commentary on it that had a link to go see what Google thinks they know about you. This is the ad preferences they use to determine what ads you see. I don't know why this bothers people. I would much rather see ads relevant to my interests than 10 steps to a flat stomach.

I was reading through the list thinking Google's doing a pretty good job of targeting my ads, then I got to the demographic section and the scales fell from my eyes.

And people wonder why I'm such a misogynist. Well, I just don't have anything IN COMMON with women! Google knows!

For the record I do not care about Google's privacy policy. I find it convenient that all their stuff is well integrated and free. I know I don't get something for nothing. Also I am who I am and I'm not hiding it from Google or anybody else. It helps that I'm a recluse in the middle of nowhere. If I had to worry about real life people stalking me in a city I might do things differently.

The Defiant Marshmallow pointed out on Twitter that with this demographic setting I will always be up to date on the latest cures for erectile dysfunction. So I've got that going for me.

Space Weather and Slingshots

2012-01-24T20:53:00.005-05:00

Today has been an interesting day to be a physicist because of the solar storm. I've been following links on Twitter all day to information about the coronal mass ejection and induced ground current and the promise of spectacular aurora tonight. If you live up North go look! Nothing to see here in the Deep South.

Dr. Ian O'Neill posted a story this afternoon about airlines diverting their polar routes. I asked him on Twitter if he found it interesting that the airline says the change is to reduce the risk they'll lose radio contact with the plane and don't mention the increased radiation to the passengers and crew. I sort of remember learning that it was the bad kind of radiation back in college, but they could have changed their mind since then. He sent me back this link to a great NOAA chart. Here's the relevant excerpt.

The first number column is Flux level of greater than or equal to 10 MeV particles (ions)*, the second is Number of events when flux level was met (number of storm days**) The *** note says *** High energy particle measurements (greater than 100 MeV) are a better indicator of radiation risk to passenger and crews. Pregnant women are particularly susceptible.

These units are confusing. Basically it's saying this measurement isn't really that good for judging harm to humans. They're measuring the less energetic particles or slower moving protons. Flux is just a complicated way of counting them. Dr. O'Neill confirmed my hunch that basically it's the protons that get you. The faster ones are worse and they aren't calculating a flux level for those, so it's hard to say how bad it really would be to fly in a plane over the North Pole right now. The radio interference is an easy call though. Go the long way.

A solar storm has many parts. It starts with a solar flare. The magnetic field lines in the corona of the sun sometimes get too close together and they have to rearrange themselves. (Like in Ghostbusters, when it comes to magnetism you can't cross the streams). This sudden rearrangement is a solar flare. First it shoots out x-rays at the speed of light. This is the stuff that interferes with the radio transmissions. If the spot on the sun is aimed at the earth those x-rays get here in about 8 minutes. (Remember not all the stuff the happens on the sun is headed our way. Most of it misses.) Next there is a blast of subatomic particles (protons, electrons, and heavy nuclei - sets of protons and neutrons with no electrons, typically it's the middle out of a Helium atom, also called an alpha particle) which get here later. That speed is not a constant, it can vary by the intensity of the solar flare. That's why this NOAA chart has the different ratings. It's like Joerg Sprave on the Slingshot Channel shooting different marbles into ballistic gel to see how deep they penetrate. It's the penetrating power of a particle that is a health concern. Think of a proton like a marble and an alpha particle (that heavy nuclei) like the rock. The marble goes deeper into the gel.

After the actual solar flare there can be another phenomenon, a coronal mass ejection. The corona is a plasma -- all the particles are free, not bound up in atoms with a set of protons, neutrons, and electrons. It's electrically neutral, so there are an even number to make atoms, but they aren't all arranged as hydrogen, helium, and so on. So when the magnetism of the corona rearranges itself (a solar flare) and kicks out a portion of the corona, it sends more subatomic particles flying. In the case of the coronal mass ejection yesterday they were going about 5 million miles per hour. That's slower than the second part of the solar flare, but still darn fast. It hit the atmosphere at 10 am my time.

So why is being bombarded by high energy protons especially bad for pregnant women? My understanding is that if a proton collides with the the exact right spot it could could cause a mutation in DNA. In a fetus the cells are rapidly replicating themselves, so it can magnify the damage. The faster the proton is going the more energy it has to do damage when it collides with something. (Subatomic particles are tiny. They can go right through you and come out the other side cleanly, like shooting a pellet gun through a chain link fence. Neutrons are notorious for doing this. Protons aren't quite as good at it. They have to be going pretty fast to get through your skin. Those heavy nuclei, they can't get through a piece of paper going their normal speed.) Of course the odds are extremely remote that a proton shot out of the sun would skitter along the magnetic field of the Earth to the hole at the North Pole, go through the outer layers of an airplane, through a woman's skin and tissue to collide precisely with an atom in her fetus and break the DNA. And then there is the remoteness that the resulting break would turn into a nasty tumor one day. But if you increase the number of particles and their speed (more intense radiation) then it's pretty obvious that the risk is increased. The same thing could happen in an adult and could cause them to get cancer, but fetuses are creating new cells much faster and could duplicate the damage rapidly. In 2006 scientists at Brookhaven National Labs announced that proton radiation is more dangerous than previously thought. I read this article after I wrote this paragraph, but it looks like I got it right. If you want to know more about the biological damage from protons and how they measured it, click that link. Here's another good one from 2009 describing an experiment to expose a faux astronaut to a beam of accelerated protons to simulate a solar flare.

I often have a hard time understanding the language of risk in medicine, but this one I get. I agree with O'Neill that a plane ride to view the aurora would be wonderful. I would totally do that. I don't care if I get irradiated. But if I was a pregnant woman? No way. Send me a link to the YouTube video after you land.

This post needs multimedia. Here's the slingshot video I mentioned.

Update: Here's a new article by O'Neill that gives great detail about aurora and the coronal mass ejection factors that affect it.

This article in IEEE Spectrum is really good too. Explains induced current in pipelines and other conductors and discusses some historical solar events.

Earthquakes Induced by Fluid Injection, FAQ

2012-01-24T11:01:00.000-05:00

Last August I wrote about the earthquake in Virginia and wondered if it had anything to do with crustal rebound or aquifer drawdown. That led me to learn about fracturing and deep well liquid injection related to the oil and gas industry. I'm still kind of weirded out by the idea that one commercial enterprise is allowed to do something in one spot that can affect entire regions. What's the point of having a government again?

The USGS just put a new Frequently Asked Question page on their website compiling all the fluid injection answers in one place. That will be handy for bloggers next time there's a weird earthquake. The answer to this question interested me particularly. They've had evidence since 1966 that that injecting wastewater into a deep well can cause an earthquake. My whole life they've known about this. They have evidence of all kinds of nasty things that can happen from drilling for oil and gas, like contaminating aquifers. But nobody thought maybe they should stop poking giant holes in the earth like some kind of voodoo doll?

The whole concept gives me a strange uneasy feeling. What are they doing about it?

USGS supports both internal and external (university-based) research on the causes of induced earthquakes. This research has a focus on injection-induced earthquakes, both from wastewater disposal and from enhanced geothermal technologies. USGS and its university partners have also deployed seismometers at sites of known or possible injection-induced earthquakes in Arkansas, southern Colorado, Oklahoma and Ohio. The USGS is also providing advice to the Environmental Protection Agency about how to assess the earthquake hazard associated with wastewater injection activities at Class II disposal wells.

That's it? They're assessing the hazard? Did it occur to anybody to just make them stop doing things that have vast unpleasant side effects? If the US had said, "Hold it right there!" in 1966 and invested in alternative energy research instead of letting the oil lobby run everything, imagine where we'd be now. They didn't even say "Figure out some other way to process the contaminated water." It was surface water right? Shoving it down into the crust of the earth kind of takes it out of the water cycle, no? Is that really a good idea? I mean, I am not delusional enough to think quantities like that are significant compared to the ocean, but it's just a nasty trend. I don't think it's ok for corporations to transfer geological resources like that. It seems wrong. We want this, we don't want that. Let's put this fossil fuel into the climate and take that water out. Who the hell do they think they are?!

I know some people get really worked up when a Democratic campaign manager in Arkansas comes home with his children to find his cat on the porch with his head bashed in and "LIBERAL" written in his fur with a marker. That's just one family and one cat. (And he wasn't even that liberal. They were just about the head to church.) With this injection business we're talking about something that could affect more than one STATE. It seems like more people would be mad at the oil companies about it. Even though I don't understand it I can recognize that the bulk of people only care about furry warm blooded things, and others not even those (the cat basher, for example). Apparently seeing the big picture and having an emotional connection to things like rocks and water makes me a genuine mutant. A worried mutant.

Ready, Aim, Snake!

2012-01-18T12:05:00.001-05:00

These are the cast iron and copper parts of the wall-hung toilets from the burned-down house in my yard.
After sawing it off and putting it down on its side my friend Ronnie declared it looked like a cannon.
I moved it to the old porch and aimed it down the walkway to improve the perception of my defenses.
Yesterday an oak snake found the thermodynamic properties of metal suitable for his cold-blooded needs.

These anole lizards are also really common here. You don't usually see them in such an
adorable arrangement though.

Opposing Smart Meters? Sounds pretty stupid to me.

2012-01-16T12:36:00.004-05:00

I am on the side of my skeptic friends as they rail against the anti-vaxers, but I don't really have a very strong emotional connection to it. Maybe because it's closely connected with the health of people and I don't really identify with people that much. But today when I saw this headline in my Fine Homebuilding email newsletter I had to click it. Attacking technology makes me furious.

• Smart meters opposed for privacy and health concerns

"What? That's idiotic!" I thought. I have a smart meter. Well, I guess that's what it is. Apparently this term means different things to different people. In it's most advanced form individual appliances would have computer controlled relays on them so when the power company restores power after an outage they can make sure every single air conditioner on the system doesn't kick on simultaneously. It's just good engineering to stagger them over a few minutes, it's not an invasion of privacy. In my case it's not that advanced. My meter reports when it has power and so when it doesn't they can analyze power outages. My power went out twice in the last two weeks, but it's no big deal. I don't have to call the power company. I just switch off my computers and the beeping battery backup units and wait. They know which line has a tree on it because they can see which meters are down. They send a crew to fix it. It usually comes back on within an hour or so.

The other thing it does is report the kilowatt hours used. I live 15 miles from town, out in the woods down a 1/2 mile dirt driveway with a locked gate. I was delighted that my power co-op installed an electronic meter when I first built my house. It's been there since 2005 when I got temporary power to build my house. How else are they going to know how much to charge me? Send a man out here in person once a month? That seems like the personnel cost alone would practically double my $40 a month bill!

There are a lot of different kinds of digital meters with enhanced features, some that transmit their data over the power line, some over the air. The over-the-air ones used to be a short range deal where a reader drove around the neighborhood and pinged each meter from a truck. I used to know about these things back in the 1990s because Schlumberger had an office near my house in Atlanta. I had an interview with them once. I haven't caught up my knowledge entirely, so please don't think I'm claiming expertise. This is just me expressing my gut reaction. My quick research didn't tell me the details of the operation of my meter nor could I confirm any of the ridiculous sounding claims the opponents are making.

They smart-meter opponents say on this tea party website say the radio transmitter is going to give them cancer and that the power company can tell what TV show they're watching and turn it off if they want to.

When I first reported the installation of smart meters in Georgia in the February 4, 2011 issue of Georgia Insight, the project had been under way since 2008, under the radar. In places smart meters were installed, most occupants had no idea their meter had been replaced or that the new one is a two-way radio frequency communication device. They didn’t/don’t know it emits radiation 24 hours a day around the clock, deposits electrical “noise” and high-frequency spikes throughout the wiring and is remotely read every 15 minutes (96 times each 24 hours).

After running errands April 20, 2010, we accidentally learned that our analog meter was gone. The clue: our digital clocks were blinking. Georgia Power had shut off the electricity to install a smart meter on the outside wall, 14 feet from the location of our bed on the same wall inside.

In September 2010, my husband Robert was diagnosed with skin cancer for the first time in his life. He had surgery. At his first three-month check-up, the plastic surgeon found two more spots of skin cancer, which were, subsequently removed, as well. His six-month check-up will be in September. Also, both of us experience continual ringing in our ears.

I need to work on my skeptic response to this topic. The first thing I think of is to tell them to shut up about the radio frequency transmission because they can just walk under the transmission line with a compass if they want to see electromagnetic effects. The radio in the meter seems trivial to me compared to the actual electrical power coursing through the wires. That's probably not a good argument. And as for the stuff about skin cancer? Well that just tells me this person is an idiot and probably can't be educated. Also, I've had my automatic meter since 2005. This is not a new conspiracy. This is just good management.

I clicked the link in the Fine Homebuilding article to the Stop Smart Meters website. There is no sentence in there that doesn't make me mad. This paragraph is particularly good.

Do you care about wildlife and cutting carbon emissions? Smart meters do not result in energy savings, according to Reuters. They may even increase energy consumption. There is also emerging evidence that wireless, non-ionizing radiation (from cell phones, wifi, and ‘smart’ meters) harms wildlife and damages trees.

What the hell are they TALKING about? The power company clears giant swaths of the forest and has a Bush Hog mower on a 30 foot articulating arm to mangle trees that encroach on the right of way and these delusional people think the RADIATION is damaging trees? This is the sacrifice we have to be prepared to make if we want food kept cold in refrigerators, lights at night, fresh water pumped out of the ground to drink, and all the other wonderful things we do with electricity.

Look, if the tea partiers are proud to be Americans why don't they want a technologically advanced power system that shows our engineers are the best in the world?

If you want the freedom to watch Fox News in your house you have to have electricity and radio frequency radiation. What the hell do you think TV is?! Those big towers BROADCAST it right out into the air all day every day.

I think it's wonderful that I can get electricity and a phone line for DSL at my house without paying the actual up-front cost for the poles and conductor and the man with the equipment to put it in. It does make me proud to be an American. And when people tell me that I should have solar panels and go off the grid I get defensive. That would cost more than my whole house! That is no kind of way for this country to get ahead. We have to invest in our power system and increase efficiency for the whole grid. Each individual spending $30,000 on solar panels is not fair to those of us who are trying to live 4 years on $30,000. It would be much better if the utility company could do something on a large scale and sell me just a little bit of it every month.

My electric utility has 3292 miles of line and 18,623 meters. That's less than 6 meters per mile of line. America is HUGE and not all of it is in the city. Technology is actually even more important in the rural areas than in the city when it comes to power distribution. I hope nobody scares my neighbors about smart meters. They are already prone to believe insane shit like planets are coming to smash into the earth. I'm expect somebody telling them smart meters make their ears ring would give them suggestive tinnitus on the spot.

I am just not worried that my utility is invading my privacy by knowing how much power I use. This is a company that still has a website that says "This web site best viewed with a screen resolution of 1024x768." There is just no way they have the inclination or technology to save and analyze constant energy usage information. They need all the support they can get, not attacks by paranoid and ignorant people.

* Update 1/22/2012: New article on IEEE Spectrum site says the smart grid will be seen as a failure if all it does is reduce meter reading costs. I wonder if people even grok the reliability improvement? If their power still goes out frequently, even though it's shorter times, probably not. It is a dilemma. All they respond to is lower cost. When it gets abnormally cold for a month they get a huge bill and claim it's a mistake. People really have no clue. I think what will make 2012 a good year for the smart grid is very mild weather.

Hobbit House is a Mouse's Dream

2012-01-04T10:31:00.000-05:00

Do they not have termites in Wales? This article about a man building his own house for around £3000 disturbs me. I see a lot of stuff about small homes where people say how easy it is, you can do it too. If that's what they think after building their own house then they didn't do it right. Maybe I only think it's hard because I built mine when I was 37 year old, 120 pound woman and they're all strapping young men.

Maybe I only think building a house is hard because I took all those engineering classes and I know the risks and dangers of doing a bad job and they are artists who didn't take statics. I took it twice. I had to drop it the first time because I was failing. Statics is really hard. For those of you who don't know what statics is, here's the summary from the Georgia Tech course catalog: Forces and moments; equilibrium in two and three dimensions; multi-force members; equilibrium, centroids and friction. Hmm, that's still not layman's language is it? Well, take it from me, it's important shit. It's the study of what it takes to hold up the built environment. It will give you a healthy appreciation for what you don't know. I think this is what scares me about people that make it sound trivial to build a house. They don't know what they don't know, and that's dangerous. Statics is about things that aren't moving. You can add a live load, like wind or traffic or people dancing and that's still statics. Dynamics is when you add degrees of freedom and introduce momentum and inertia. I changed my major so I could take Classical Mechanics in the Physics department instead of Dynamics in the Mechanical Engineering Department because my brother told me flat out I would never pass that class. The Physics professors were just better teachers than the Mechanical Engineering professors. They were just really old and had figured it out, not a slight to the ME department. It was enough of an advantage for me to manage in Physics. My brother took Dynamics though, and he assures me that if a tornado lifts my house out of the ground it will just roll along intact like a tumbleweed and I can get a crane and just put it back in place. Once he knows the wind speed it took to pull it up he can calculate the countermeasures I need in the foundation to keep it from doing it again. I designed it to hold the house up and straight and forgot the possibility there would be forces LIFTING the house. And this is me, trained in engineering. What did the artist forget when he built his house?

This artist with the hobbit house claims he built it with nothing but a chainsaw, a chisel, and a hammer. I am not impressed, I'm worried. I spent more on tools to build my house than he spent on his whole house. I already had them, though, bought to work on other projects, so it was a good use of my resources to build a house. The most important tool I had was my dad's college copy of Ramsey and Sleeper's Architectural Graphic Standards. It has tables where they've worked out all the statics ahead of time and tell you how big your beams have to be to span the space you want. It tells you how many nails you have to nail in a pair of 2x8s to achieve the required strength as a beam and a myriad of other important information. Besides reference material, here's the top 50 tools I used to build my house: (In order of importance.)

Multiple pairs of safety glasses, shooters earmuffs, and mechanics gloves
12" Compound power miter saw with electric brake
16' and 25' measuring tapes
Battery powered impact driver
Sand filled dead blow mallet
High quality utility knife
Mechanical pencils
4' level
Speed Square
4 Quickgrip clamps
Extension cords
Vice grip pliers
Corded drill
Plastic folding saw horses
Air compressor
Air powered framing nailer
Snapper shear Hardiboard cutting tool
16' extension ladder
Carpenter's Square
Air powered palm nailer
Jigsaw with wood and metal blades
10" circular saw with wood blade and Hardiboard blade
Reciprocating saw
Chisels
Purdy paint brushes
Air powered trim nailer
Air powered stapler
Caulk gun
Palm sander
Belt sander
Post hole diggers
8' step ladder
Water level
Chalk line
Plumb bob
Bevel gauge
20' extension ladder
PEX tubing crimp tool
Large assortment of drill bits
Ratchet and sockets for lag bolts
Bench mounted belt and disc sander
Drill press
Power planer
10' step ladder
Shovel and hoe
Tile cutter
Thinset trowels and grout floats
Lineman's pliers
Needle nosed pliers
Hammer

I read farther into the website about this house. They don't even own it. They were just asked to build it and allowed to live there for free while they did. Well that makes all the difference! If you don't have to maintain it for the rest of your life who gives a shit?! I built my house with a lot of attention to making sure it wouldn't be a burden on my nieces 50 years from now. I made it low maintenance and capable of being shut down for long periods of time. If you're just building a house for an art project, pssshhh. Don't even put that on the internet. That's not fair. You're spreading false information! All the people saying they would just love to live in something so warm and adorable just didn't notice there's no hot water in there. People assume "house" includes some basic criteria. Nobody shows photos of the water heater in Architectural Digest, you just assume there is one. Not so here. Saying it's really inexpensive and only took 4 months to build, yet it doesn't have the basic amenities like water under pressure and bathing facilities isn't really fair.

Common Sense vs Least Common Denominator Sense

2012-01-03T13:01:00.006-05:00

I just listened to Phil Plait and David Morrison on WHYY debunking doomsday scenarios. The radio host used the term "common sense." It struck me suddenly that it's not actually common anymore. What we mean when we say common sense is actually logic. Which a lot of people don't have apparently. How do we determine the distribution? Has the scale tipped? Is common sense now rare sense and that's why America is turning against the science, technology, and innovation that made this country a superpower in the first place? Is least common denominator sense the majority now? I suppose we could take a simple poll and see how many people know what least common denominator means. If they don't know, they are it.

"If you sound like you really believe this stuff people will buy it. And that's the problem," says Phil Plait. But HE sounds like he really DOESN'T believe it. Why don't people believe him?

David Morrison attributed the phenomenon of believing doomsday scenarios to cosmophobia. Instead of being excited about the discovery of new planets people turn it into something to be afraid of. Children become sensitized to this. They believe the universe is their enemy.

Phil made the analogy with the ghosthunters shows where they go to an old house with a video camera and spend the night. (I've never seen one but there was an episode of Castle that used a Ghosthunters show as a plot point. They explained all the ghosty stuff with logical explanations by the end of the show.) In a ghosthunter show every sound becomes a ghost instead of what it really is -- rats in the attic, wind blowing tree limbs against the siding, thermal contraction. If you're scared of some upcoming event then everything points to that.

They should have psychologists on this show to explain this bizarre human tendency to the astronomers. None of this makes any sense to me, and by extension I assume most trained scientists are confused by why people look for evidence to confirm what they already believe. Isn't the point of public education to teach people to think critically? If I have some hypochondriacal theory that I have attention deficit disorder and should be on stimulant drugs I go online and find out that I would never be able to secure that diagnosis based on the fact I already admitted on my blog that I've never lost a pair of sunglasses.

The first caller on the show was Steve from Georgia. He said he remembered Duck and Cover. He said he's been through hurricanes so he knows what it's like to be without electricity. OK. So what? I was surprised that Phil didn't point out that Duck and Cover was really stupid. It wouldn't do a thing to protect you from nuclear fallout. Instead Phil said it's important to be prepared for disasters. It's a smart thing to do. Keep an emergency kit. But you should be prepared for what might realistically happen. Yes, in Georgia we lose power a lot. We have a lot of trees and elevated power lines and lightning. I am prepared by having uninterruptible power supplies for all my computers and my network equipment. My power went on and off three times last night, then stayed off for an hour. For no apparent reason. It was cold and windy is all. But I shut down my computers and network in a controlled fashion, turned on my flashlight, heated my supper on my butane hotplate instead of in the microwave and used my phone to keep talking to my friend on instant messenger.

There's a difference in being prepared and being paranoid. I guess the difference is instead of just making adjustments to changing conditions, the paranoid person freaks out. Instead of trusting that the power will come back on when the crew resets a blown breaker or reconnects a broken line the paranoid person assumes it's personal? Something is out to get them? David says he doesn't know how pervasive this attitude is. Is it 1% or 5% of the population? Either way that's a lot of people.

The next caller said her brother bought into this bunk, joined a cult and killed himself. Way to really bum out the scientists. As a person that leans towards engineer even more than scientist I want to think of a solution to this problem. I can't think of anything though. Educate everybody? That seems increasingly impractical. Reassure them? Discourage people from scaring them in the first place? Why can't you say fuck on TV but you can spread patently false information designed to make people paranoid? David said he gets email from children who are so terrified of the end of the world they are contemplating suicide. That is shocking! Ask an Astrobiologist is now a suicide hotline? That is really not fair. The whole reason you go into a field like astrobiology is because you prefer to think about extraterrestrial bacteria instead of the disturbed minds of other humans. This made sad for him.

David said that he is a still a working astrobiologist. He works on interesting projects on Mars and other planets. He took on this small side task to answer question on the Ask an Astrobiologist website and now 80% of the questions he gets are about 2012 doomsday nonsense. The radio host said, "I sense the frustration in your voice." David said, "Yep."

Before I listened to this I didn't know people thought this planet Nibiru was coming to crash into the earth. I didn't know they were attributing normal geological, weather and climate events to Nibiru. And apparently any random inconvenience. It explains an experience I had the other day at the gas station. I pulled up to get gas for my lawn mower and the attendant said over the loudspeaker, "No cards, only cash!" So I checked that I had paper money in my wallet and started to pump my gas. The attendant came out to talk to me. He said the network connection for the credit and debit card transaction processing equipment was down. "I heard it was because of a planet," he said. I did a double take and asked him to repeat it. "You think your phone is out because of a PLANET?" I assured him that was not the case. "First of all, a PLANET? Not even a star? A planet doesn't emit electromagnetic energy. Second of all, all our telecommunications are on fiber optic cables now, which is very resistant to radio frequency interference, even if there was something to generate this interference in the first place. And third, I have Windstream internet service the same as you and it just goes out all the time. Their server is in Arkansas. It's not exactly Silicon Valley. They do what they can. It will come back on as soon as they get the possum out of the plenum."

2012 Doomsday Scenarios and the people that believe them: Yet another reason I am delighted with my decision to be a hermit.

Update: From @astroengine, a good article where the author seems to have listened to this same radio show. Shepherd: Can the Doomsday scenarios -- at least for 2012

Like Father Christmas, apocalypses and other "last things", Armageddon and the afterlife heaven and hell, death and judgment, serve as a rudimentary behaviour control. Do what we say and you'll get brightly wrapped angels, virgins, and bliss on a stick, in heaven or paradise. Disobey and it's burning for eternity, or reincarnation as a cane toad.

"Bliss on a stick" is my new catch phrase.