Is There an Exobiologist in the House?

I find all sorts of odd critters in the driveway as I leave for work in the morning - I guess they spend the night beating their brains out on the halogen light above the garage and eventually drop to the ground.  This is one of the strangest-looking insects I have run into in a while.  Can you identify it?  I live in Southern Virginia, not in Mid-Cretaceous South America or in the Delta Quadrant if that helps.

No Power No Cry

We came back into town Sunday afternoon to find no (obvious) damage and no power. Lots of trees down all over the neighborhood and one guy down the road had a huge section of his siding ripped off. I had to pick up one stick – it couldn't even properly be called a branch. I guess we paid our dues during Isabel, but my eye is on those two depressions off the coast of Africa right now. We will see.

Power came on just a few minutes ago. I have no generator so we filled the rooms of the house with solar lights from the garden and any sort of flashlight we could find. Candles are right out with a three-year-old running around, of course.

His first day of school was canceled (as was my first day of college, as I recall). No school for him tomorrow, either, for power-related reasons.

I am going to cut this short and just let my sister-in-law know that one of the most hurricane-proof items in existence is the kite she flew into a tree 169 days ago. That's it in the pic.

More later.

It's Gonna Be One Hell of a Storm

If I have done this properly, it should get posted at 9AM EST or so.  If not, it will post itself tonight or not at all...  Only one way to find out.

The family and I are fleeing Hurricane Irene as of now to go to her folks for the duration of the storm.  This storm is so large, though, even folks there are scheduled to feel 39mph winds.  Better than being here, though.

Those of you who need to reach me can do so via e-mail, text, or calling our cells.

Good luck, everyone!

The Backstroke?

My wife, son, and I were in the Lone Star Steakhouse and saw this.  She said "Oh my God... I thought that was a picture of a dead mouse."  It turns out it's just a slightly brown jalepeno in that Margarita.  Which is, of course, much better...  Right?

Liver, Schmiver!

A friend of mine likes to buy wine-based gadgetry like aerators and decanters and give them out as gifts to like-minded folks who have avoided an intervention partly through luck and partly through maintaining a network of friends who simply don't give a damn about each other's health.

God bless him.

The Ice Tube decanter by True Fabrications is a tapered, lead-free glass bottle inside of which nestles a large test tube that you can fill with ice and submerge in your wine to chill it without watering it down.

As "luck" would have it we had a bottle of Louis M. Martini Cabernet Sauvignon 2008 just sitting around all canted and uncooled and junk.

"Why chill a red? Aren't you supposed to drink reds at or near room temperature," you ask. Because I have a new decanter/chiller, wine snob.

The decanter works as advertised and is neat to look at. It appears sturdy and well-made but only time will tell how well it does in the dishwasher. According to the box it holds 33 fluid ounces... or about 1 1/3 standard bottles of wine... or about 2/3 of a 1.5 liter bottle... Any other conversions are left as an exercise for the student.

Well, cheers, fellow earthquake survivors/swamp fire smoke breathers/hurricane flee-ers! Time to pour myself a glass and watch another episode of "REMAIN INDOORS" before the radioactive zombies attack or the meteor hits.  Possibly both.

Did You Feel That?

Well, I was struggling with what to post about today and I was coming up blank, but that problem went away at 1:51PM today.

I was sitting at my desk when my chair started shaking back and forth. I thought it was just a large truck passing by the office but then I noticed some plastic geegaws pinned to my cubicle wall were swaying.

I and a handful of others in the cube farm prarie-dogged and looked at each other incredulously. Questions started to form but then my phone rang. It was my wife calling from her place of work 10 miles from here. "Did you feel that," we simultaneously asked each other.

My first earthquake! In case you have never been in one, the 5.9 tremblor was silent and felt a little like 15 seconds of... I don't know, really. Sort of like the "floating" feeling you get driving in a car with bad shocks, I guess. Not violent and not really uniform, but undulating and very obvious once you keyed on what it really was.

They evacuated our building as a precaution, but it is not clear to me who gave the "all clear" to go back in... Not that I have issue with it one way or the other - I ask merely out of curiosity. I mean, someone had to step up and get the people back inside or else they would have milled about all day. I just wonder what metric was used...

Jimmydunes (who lived in SoCal for a while) said that this one was too "chunky" for his taste and he prefers the rolling ones. He is suuuuucccchhh a geology snob...

Well, no sense dwelling on this any more. As the old saying goes, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself... and the hurricane that is scheduled to pass directly overhead this weekend, of course.

I'm Gonna Need a Montage

This will be my first post using an iPad and a wireless keyboard. So far, so good. Now if only I could post directly from here instead of having to mail this to myself, open it on a PC, add my artwork, paste it into Blogger, get rid of the extra line spaces, and then post it I would really be cooking with gas.

Technology makes life so easy!

But to the business at hand. I need some new music, and I need your help. Not just any music. Not necessarily good music. Just some stuff to help me stay motivated on the treadmill while drowning out the new idiot at the gym that won't stop with the off-tune caterwauling, weight-slamming, grunting, and clapping. Something to push through the pain.

I'm gonna need a montage.

Here is a list of songs and the movies they came from on my music player that qualify:

1) Winner Takes It All - Over the Top
2) Push It to the Limit - Scarface
3) Like to Get to Know You - One Crazy Summer [Thanks for the correction, Jimmydunes]
4) One Foot in Front of the Other - Revenge of the Nerds
5) Gonna Fly Now - Rocky
6) Hearts on Fire - Rocky IV
7) Number One - Real Genius
8) Eye of the Tiger - Rocky III
9) Walking on Sunshine - Secret of My Success
10) Holding Out for a Hero - Footloose
11) Montage - Team America (or South Park 'Asspen' Episode)

Wow. That's a lot of Sylvester Stallone movies.

It's pretty sad when you see them all in a row like this, but the list is not nearly as pathetic as a lot of the other stuff on my MP3 player. I have no illusions that my music is anything other than garbage, and my catalogue might even possibly be a borderline cry for help.

Nonetheless, I would like to expand my Montage collection. Can you name some songs and movies that should be in the list but aren't? Leave a comment. Thanks!

The Great Dismal Swamp: Now 25% More Dismal!

Short post – thunderstorm's comin'.

Five or six years ago Jimmydunes and I went hiking in the Great Dismal Swamp. It was an awful experience - the less said about it the better.

If there were only some clue that it would have been so bad we never would have tried it. I mean, I figured it would have been awesome with the word “Great” right in the name of the place... Talk about disappointing...

Wait... I am reminded of a line from an old Simpson's episode: “'Great' meaning 'large' or 'immense'. We use it in the pejorative sense.”

Oh. Well, I'm an idiot...

Anyway, the swamp's been on fire since August 4th and they can smell the smoke (occasionally) all the way in DC. Occasional poor visibility and a near constant “CODE ORANGE” air quality alert sometimes makes being outside fairly miserable even when it isn't 100+ degrees out. When will this underground peat fire finally be out? No one knows. The best “answer” anyone can give sounds like the start of a math brain teaser or something (quote from NBC Washington) rather than a target date:

"Even if six inches of rain fell in a week," Timothy Craig, the Great Dismal Swamp Wildlife Refuge's fire management officer said, "we would still have to run the pumps for a month to put out this fire."

In any case, I hope that the firefighters and anyone living near the swamp stay safe. Good luck, guys!

Here's to hoping the upcoming storm will help...

Stop Me If You've Heard This One

My wife and I were sitting in church...

Well, she was sitting... I was fidgeting and staring at the hymn board adding and subtracting the columns and rows and diagonals, breaking the numbers into their prime components, and wondering why the thing was simply called a “hymn board” when virtually every other object/room in a church has some bizarre cheating-at-Scrabble-sounding name (pyx, narthex, etc.)

Church is hella-boring. This is a good thing, at least for me.  Allow me to explain by way of example.

Once, we visited a church that had two dedicated musicians. About midway through the first song I wondered if the organist and the pianist hated the music they were playing, hated the instruments they were playing, or merely hated each other because it sounded less like they were complimenting each other's tune than it sounded like they were playing some sort of psuedo-musical version of Rock-em Sock-em Robots. The one thing they did seem to agree on is that “adagio” is basically the same as “allegro”, so songs on par in peppiness with “If You're Happy and You Know It” or “The Hokey Pokey” came out sounding like Klingon funeral dirges. They did usually start and finish at roughly the same time, though, so good for them.

For me, this “change-up” was an unwelcome distraction.

See, I need a certain staid predictability during a service to allow me to find my center much in the same way sitting on a yoga mat and trying to will your heart rate lower and lower does. I am peripherally aware of my surroundings – this allows me to stand and sit when required and not drool down my tie, for instance - but I am mostly tuned out in the geeky way I described in the first paragraph. I would be shocked if someone told me pulse was above 60bpm.

But this time I was fidgeting because the 10% of me that was paying attention to things alerted me to the fact that I must have heard the story of The Good Samaritan about a billion times in my life, either formally or in passing. The same thing goes for story of The Good Shepherd, the Creation Myth(s), and the parting of the Red Sea. Even if you have never stepped foot in a church, odds that you know enough of those stories to “get by”. Heck, my kid has been taught the (highly abridged) story of Jonah and the Whale at least four times that I know of in his short life.

Do we go regularly? No. Certainly not above what Wikipedia says is “average”, but that makes my point even more... pointed, I guess.

The Bible is a long book, but it is largely inappropriate to draw life lessons from. Calm down, calm down – I am speaking purely statistically, here... Pick a page at random, style of thing.

Anyway, tribe populations, tabernacle building instructions, and the endless lists of begats and begottens aren't going to make the cut into the Sunday service. Ancient dietary guidelines, under-reported zombie attacks, and other hard-to-explain stuff will also be skipped. And the more... um... esoteric sections of the books of Revelation and Job are probably not going to be shoehorned into any but the most borderline manifesto-ish sermons.

Secondly, a lot of the year is eaten up by stuff surrounding Easter and Christmas and other holidays, and there are only a handful of pages that are appropriate to read around that time. Finally, the material has been pretty much the same for hundreds and hundreds of years. See, you can easily tell if you are in a “cult” rather than a “church” if your pew bible a) has “Version 4.1.1” or similar on the front or b) suddenly contains sloppily tacked-in loose-leaf appendices referred to as the books of Skippy or Chad.

So I wanted to know how many times I had heard, formally, the Water into Wine story (or whatever) in my lifetime. To do that I needed two things. The first was a word count of each book in the Bible. The second was a large enough sample of the readings to determine what passages were hit upon over a certain (longish) time period.

Oddly, it was hard to find a user-friendly version of a book-by-book word count of the Bible without venturing into the creepier parts of the Internet WHERE RELIGIOUS FOLKS SPEAK IN ALL CAPS FOR SOME REASON. I guess I am just accustomed to “the Google” spitting out an undebatable answer to questions like “How many words are in the book of Genesis?” that I was a little dismayed to find there appeared to be no single trustworthy resource for exactly what I needed. I was certainly not going to count words by hand.

Sigh. Fine. Code-writing time (I dislike programming, FWIW). I found a text-only version of the King James Version and my program counted all the words verse-by-verse, chapter-by-chapter, and book-by-book. Great. Now what?

Well, it turns out that getting a list of passages that have been read over the past several years is easy if your church (like mine) uses something called a lectionary (Oh, red underline it if you must, OpenOffice word processing program... it's a real word). Apparently there are dedicated passages that “must” (well... some are optional) be read and these passages progress in a three-year cycle – years A, B, and C. That makes my job a little easier – I only need to count up the words in three years worth of readings and I will be close to my answer.

I sighed and wrote another piece of code to help automate the counting of the words in all of the passages referenced by the lectionary (optional ones, too). Even with this program this was a real pain because readings routinely skip verses or cross chapter boundaries. The program then boiled down those results to eliminate duplicates.

Enough chat. Here's the data. All errors are my own, of course, but I don't think there is anything here that is so out of whack as to buck the overall trend.

Definitions:

Total                 = Number of words
Used                 = Number of words in book referenced in lectionary (duplicates included)
Percent             = Used/Total * 100%
Unique              = Number of words in book referenced in lectionary (duplicates eliminated)
Unique Percent  = Unique/Total * 100%

Click to Enlarge

NOTE 1: You will notice that some books (Hebrews, for example) appear to have in excess of 100% of it's content used over a three-year period. This shows that there is a lot of repetition in the lectionary covering this book. As a matter of fact, although only 40% of the book is used, the passages that are touched upon are used a little under three times each.

NOTE 2: My count of 789,617 words for the King James Bible is close but wrong. I am man enough to admit that. It deviates by less than one quarter of 1%, though, from other word counts out there... Perfectly fine for what I needed. Again, I have to say that any errors are my own.

Hey! Who doesn't like a nice histogram? Here is the table above in chart form, grouped into 5%-wide bins:

Click to Enlarge

And here is the data in a slightly different form where each book's unique contribution is summed percent-wise. It is interesting to note the three sharp rises (Books of Genesis, Psalms, and Matthew) followed by plateaus:

Click to Enlarge

Here are some summary statistics:

• Least Used: 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Obadiah, Nahum, 2 John, 3 John, Jude (0%)
• Least-Used-Without-Being-Ignored: Judges (1.0%)
• Most Used: Ephesians (69.0%)
• Most Repeated: Philippians (Used/Unique = 2.99)
• Least Repeated-Without-Being-Ignored: Judges, Ruth, Nehemiah, Esther, Micah, Haggai, Zechariah, Philemon, 2 Peter (Used/Unique = 1.00)
• First 5 Books of Bible (Pentateuch): 10.9% used
• Entire Old Testament: 11.8% used
• Gospels: 47.7% used
• Entire New Testament: 44.5% used
• Entire Bible: 19.3% used.

Wow. No wonder I feel I hear the same stories constantly. Less than 20% of the whole Bible is referenced at all, and each of the things that are referenced are repeated an average of 1.9 times per three-year cycle. This means a 40-year-old who has been going to church the “average” amount of time (43%) for his whole life will have heard any randomly-picked Bible lesson given a minimum of 11 or 12 times. And that is just in a church setting, mind you: this does not include television and movie references, literature, Sunday School, etc. The “11 or 12” number is probably conservative by half. The real number is probably closer to 25 and much, much higher for Easter and Christmas related stuff.

Hmmm... Let's say a Bible is 1,000 pages long. That means that we are left with a book that can effectively be condensed to 193 pages. Using the percentages above, that translates to an Old Testament 91 pages long and a New Testament 102 pages long.

But the other 807 apparently unused pages certainly lend some heft to the tome so I don't recommend removing them. Perhaps replacing them with coupons, ad space, or Sudoku contests might be the way to make use of this excess real estate while generating revenue for the church. I presume Amazon and Google are working on the matter...

Now that I have an answer to my question I can get back to tuning out the world for fifty minutes every other Sunday or so. Unless that unbearably perky guest guitar player dude is scheduled to show up again to kill my chi, that is. In that case I'll be tuning out the world while shoveling mulch and trimming the hedges, instead.

Meh... zen is zen.

That'll Fix Your Little Red Workbench

My son likes to pretend to fix things using his various play tools so for his three-year birthday I wanted to give him his own workbench and starter toolset. 

Too early, you say?  Maybe... maybe not.  The original plan was to build him one so about a week before the event I bopped off to Lowe's to pick up the parts that I needed to make that happen.

On the way to the lumber aisles I walked by a small section devoted to kids projects.  Red Toolbox has pre-packaged kits that have all the parts you need to build birdhouses, old-timey toolboxes, and even little catapults - the same kits you may have seen kids and parents assembling on Saturday mornings while you were at Lowe's picking up caulk or something.

The people that put together the kits also sell a workbench - a nice looking one at that.  After running the numbers it turned out to be cheaper than what I was going to build as well.  And, honestly, a kit was going to look nicer and save me a lot of time I didn't have.  I threw the unexpectedly heavy box onto the pushcart and picked out the old-timey toolbox and a starter set of kid's tools.

The toolkit contained goggles, a Philips and a flathead screwdriver, a wood file, a hammer, a saw, a measuring tape, and a clamp.  I also picked him up a little smock and gave him a small $10 cordless screwdriver I had laying around.

I brought the box home, opened it up, and located the instructions.  My heart sank.  It was a pretty thick book, and I had flashbacks to the Windsor Playset project and any number of badly documented furniture kits I have assembled in to past.

But this was different.  The reason the book was so thick wasn't because there were dozens upon dozens of vague, tiny drawings accompanied by descriptions that sound like the author 1) is pressed for time 2) has a personal grudge against you and 3)  simply can't be bothered to translate "grizzled hardware expert speak" into "English".

The first several pages of the manual contain immaculate drawings of all the hardware in the box, complete with descriptions of the parts.  For example, it doesn't just say "squinntzy block, quantity 4".  It tells you what each part is made of in general, English terms, like “square pipe”. Awesome.

I checked off the labeled, simply described parts one by one until I got to the end of the list. On the bottom of page 16, it says, in small, soft gray block letters "Thank you for the time spent assembling our products."

I swear to God, after decades of puzzling out how to put together entertainment centers, playsets, ceiling fans, and an endless parade of coffee and end tables and God knows what else seeing this simple statement was like getting a big ol' hug, a chuck on the arm, and a "You can do it, sport" all rolled into one.

I had to read it a few times to make sure I was seeing it properly.

I blinked and wiped the proto-tear from my eye and got to work following the very simple, very clear instructions.  The steps were small and, not only that, every once in a while a "step" would not require any assembly at all.  It would show you a picture and say "if you have done everything correctly so far, your workbench should look like this", which, to me, translates to "How ya doin', champ? Say, that looks great! You want a soda or a snack or something?  No?  Well, just let me know if you change your mind".

Insert contented sigh here.

The final product is solid, attractive, adjustable, and the boy enjoys it immensely.  We put together the toolbox kit you see here.  He was very proud and we are in the process of painting it now.

The only thing that makes me a little sad is that the kit was not made in the USA. But, if this direction imports are taking with regards to quality, price, and ease of assembly (I am assuming the workbench is not radioactive or outgassing toxic mutagens, of course)... well, to paraphrase Kent Brockman:  I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords.