Nice One, Genomecop.

For those of you who are not accustomed to seeing bot-driven comment spam this might seem a little odd.  However, since I laughed for about 15 minutes straight this morning after reading this comment in an Engadget post, I thought I would put it up here, anyway.

Well said, sir.  Well said.

LOL.

Small Site Update

Nothing to say today... Might as well do a little housekeeping, eh?

I added my list of my MP3 montage music to the sidebar on the right.

Song recommendations welcome.

A Maker in the Making

Usually while I am on the treadmill at the gym I usually tune the TV to the Travel Channel or Food Network since they are adjacent on the "dial" (remember dials?). I like watching Adam Richman cheat certain death whenever Man vs. Food is on, and I think that the Barefoot Contessa has awesome dinner ideas. The Hungry Girl show is pretty good, too.

Shut up. I know how it sounds... although I really didn't consider how it probably looks to those around me until just now... It might explain the lack of eye contact and the surplus of disgusted head-shaking...

Anyway, I will pretty much watch anything to help distract me from the fact that I am on a treadmill, but one show I refuse to watch is that cooking show with the horrifying Southern lady who looks like the plus-sized offspring of a cockatiel and a half-melted candle. Even though I don't actually listen to the show – I rely on closed captioning while my MP3 player drowns out the ambient noise of the facility – actually reading “y'all” upwards of one hundred times an episode somehow makes my ears hurt.

So, while I was hoofing it on Saturday I was flipping through the channels on the TV and ran across Lego Star Wars: The Padawan Menace. At first I thought it was just a toy commercial but it turned out to be a very funny half-hour show about the mayhem that ensues when Yoda tries to take a group of younglings to the Galactic Senate on a field trip.

I got home and DVR'd it for my three-year-old. We watched it together and he loved it. Nothing for it but to put “buy Legos” on the to-do list.

Since he still had $10 left over from a Toys R Us gift certificate he got from his birthday and he has been doing especially well as school we went there to get a little something before dinner. After suffering some extremely hard lessons on what $10 can purchase (or, really, not purchase... He actually threw up his hands at one point and said “I can't buy anything!”) he picked out Lego set 7049: Alien Striker. Not a Star Wars set, but space-y and within his budget.

I said “Fine” although I was pretty worried that the 42-piece kit would be too much for him. He has plenty of Duplo blocks (which he loves) but they are easy to handle and those Lego kits can have some pretty complicated pieces as I recalled.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have sweated it. He can throw together any 48-piece jigsaw puzzle you care to give him without looking at the box top. It's 50% frustrating and 50% fascinating to watch, FWIW. In your mind you are screaming “Find the damn edge pieces first! What are you doing? Why are you starting in the middle? At least flip over all the pieces so you can find everything! How the hell are you supposed to... oh... you're done...”

Once I showed him how to “read” the instructions, he was off to the races. I only had to help him with some pieces because they were, in his words, “too slippery” (read: too small to maneuver and snap into place with weak, clumsy fingers).

“Ages 6 to 14”, eh? To that I say “Pfft!” “Pfft,” I tells ya!

Yep, I am proud. You will understand that, pride aside, I need to write this down now because Future Me won't remember this when he backs his mother's car into my truck thirteen years from now and I find myself screaming at him and accusing him of having garbage spacial skills. My memory... well, let's just say it's not getting better with age. (Sorry in advance, son).

It looks like a whole new aisle at the toy store has opened up for us... him... I mean him. I am happy about the Legos but I am not sure how I feel if he is going to get into the whole Star Wars thing. After all, I want him to be a Creator and a Doer... not a Taker or a Watcher. And, please, God, not the Star Wars Kid... Jimmydunes, I am relying on you, here... :)

Regardless of how things turn out, though, I swear to all that is holy that my kid will always know that Han shot first.

Done is Done

I finally finished Atlas Shrugged and I want to say right out of the gate that I liked this book.

Why do I mention that now? Apparently, there was some confusion as to whether I liked Jane Eyre or not based on what I wrote a while back. Both of these books were recommended to me by my sister and, although I enjoyed them both immensely, I hope she recommends a Foxtrot collection or something like that next 'cuz I need a break from the deep stuff.

I swear my Kindle used to be a lot lighter...

I also need to say that, although I vote, I am as apolitical as someone can get. I am not interested in anyone's political ideology other than my own. Oh, it's not because I think my ever-evolving hodge-podge of tenets I currently live my life by is any better than anyone else's... it's because I know what is right and what works for me (in the context of “now” and with all the logical caveats that statement implies). When I say “I don't care if you qualify yourself as a Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or Whatever,” I mean it. I find discussing categories like that as tiresome as... well... as you are probably finding it reading this paragraph. I just don't care.

So enough of the preamble. Here's my spoiler-free “review” of this... sigh... 1,200 page book. (As Arlo Guthrie would say, “I'm not proud... or tired”.)

In my opinion, this novel can be separated into three sections:

The first section (which was my favorite and which takes up the first 85% of this book) can be summarized like this (wear headphones if you are at work):

The second section (the next 10%) is a looooooooonnnnnnggggg speech. Once you get to this part, you can safely skim it or skip it without missing anything or feeling the least bit guilty. Dude, seriously, a three-hour speech with no breaks? On all channels? During prime-time? FCOL, somebody throw a pie or something!

The third section (the final 5% of the book) is a description of the most unlikely rescue mission ever conceived. Picture the gang from Ocean's Eleven replaced with a rag-tag band of life-long industrialists who rely more on “the element of surprise”, “suicidal audacity”, and a “can-do attitude” rather than “military skill”, “planning”, or “firepower” to extract a comrade from an extremely well-defended torture chamber. This whole portion of the book made me feel like Ayn Rand looked at the huge pile of pages next to her typewriter and said “Holy crap! I better finish this up! This is getting way out of hand!” then quickly tacked on this Mack Bolan-esque ending. Frankly, I am surprised there wasn't a car chase complete with a description of watermelon crates or chickens or plate-glass windows being smashed apart in a wacky, mayhem-filled closing scene.

Overall, I thought this book was awesome and I am looking forward to the next recommendation from my sister.... Just not right away :).

Look Out Below!

UARS, a defunct research satellite, will be re-entering Earth's atmosphere and mostly burning up on its way to the ground sometime in late September or early October. The resultant fireball will be quite spectacular even in the daytime assuming it falls where someone can catch a glimpse of it.

Due to the complicated structural geometry of the satellite (that is, it's not a perfect sphere) and since the Earth's atmosphere fluctuates significantly over even short time periods the exact minute of reentry cannot be predicted. This means, when the official decay starts, the center of the 500-mile-long impact zone cannot be determined to within better than +/- 7,000 miles. It could land anywhere.

This article states the odds that someone on the planet will be hit by the surviving portion of this satellite are 3,200 to 1.

“No. No no no no no. That can't be right,” I thought to myself.

A quick aside. I was going to post some comparative odds here that dealt with the usual “being hit by lightning” or “dying in a plane crash” stuff but I found that both of those things are shockingly frequent when you actually do the math, even though “everyone” knows that those things are so rare as to be inconsequential. I'll leave that for a future article.

 In any case I knew from various sources out there that 1) something has survived reentry about once a day (or week, depending on where you look) over the past 40 years and 2) no one (or only one person, depending on where you look) has ever been injured by falling orbital debris. The odds of being hit, according to this source, are “one trillion to one”. Way different than 3,200:1 and way more in line with what I “knew” the right answer was.

So which is correct? After some digging I eventually found a reliable source for the 3,200:1 claim, but there were no justifications given for that number.  Let's do some back-of-the-envelope estimations. Surely we can get to an answer that is within an order of magnitude of the 3,200:1 estimation or the 1,000,000,000,000:1 estimation, assuming one of them is right.

Based on the orbital data, anyone who lives between about 57N and 57S latitude is at risk. The world population is about seven billion, and nearly all (~90%) of those people live between those latitudes. Assuming that each person takes up one square meter and dividing by the surface area of the planet we get 65,580:1 per piece of falling debris. The satellite is calculated to break up into 26 survivable pieces, making the odds that someone will be struck by a piece of this satellite somewhere around 2,500:1.

My rough guesstimate (Really? No red underline, OpenOffice word processing program? What a world...) shows the 3,200:1 number is probably correct after all. Huh. You learn something new every day...

You can catch updated information regarding the orbital decay and reentry of UARS at http://www.space-track.org/.

Are You Sure You Don't Want to Borrow My Thesaurus?

"More inclusive"...  the phrase you are looking for to sell scales to people who weigh over 400 pounds is "more inclusive".  As on-the-nose as it is, "broader" is not the word you should use here, IMHO.

Jaws With Pineapple Salsa

After going to the gym and getting my truck inspected I went to the grocery store with the intent of buying crab legs and flounder for dinner. I got the flounder but found they had no crab legs. They did have shark, though... Go figure. I never tried it so I thought I would give it a go. If it was gross or if I cooked it badly (thereby rendering it gross) it didn't matter - I always had peanut butter sandwiches at the ready and will have gained a few XP nonetheless. Win-win.

For those of you who have never had shark steaks, do yourself a favor and try them. They are very easy to cook – just brush them with a little bit of olive oil and throw them on the grill. You just kind of know when they are done. If you can cook a beef steak, you can cook these. Since I had some pineapple and some pepperoncinis I made a quick salsa – equal parts of each, a little cracked pepper and a little olive oil.

How was it? Shark meat is the least fishy tasting fish I have ever tried. It has the texture of (and tastes very much like) steak. Really unexpectedly amazing. My impromptu salsa also rocked, FWIW. Definitely getting shark steaks more often.

Some of you might be thinking “Oh, la-ti-freaking-da, Uncle Moneybags. Aren't you afraid that the cost of your exotic snack will dip into your 50-year-old-scotch-and-monocle-polish fund? Boo-hoo... you had to cook it yourself? What's the matter? Didn't it come pre-packaged with a team of geisha that prepared and fed it to you while they entertained you on the shamisen?”

Um... no. But I understand where you are coming from.

The 4-oz steak I bought was $2.40. This is on par cost-wise with sirloin steak and might even be a little cheaper. This brings me to the real point of this article: How is that even remotely possible?

According to Wikipedia, 800,000 tons of sharks are caught each year around the globe. Assuming an average weight of a mako is 800 pounds per shark that's about 2 million sharks per year. Yikes, that's a lot.

But how many cows die per year? Shockingly, I couldn't find an easy answer to that but WolframAlpha thinks that 70 million tons of beef are consumed worldwide each year. The average cow weighs 1,400 pounds that means that 100 million delicious, delicious cows volunteer to become food each year. (Obviously, I am assuming, here, that about the same percentages of shark and cow are steak-able... This is wrong, but not super-wrong... probably close, even).

Doesn't this mean that, on average, shark steaks should cost fifty times as much as a cow steak of the same size? Also, I didn't mention that the shark steak I bought came from Ecuador! Ecuador, man!  Not only is that 2,500 miles away but I would think that it must take a lot of specialized people, time, and equipment to hunt, catch, and kill a shark. In comparison, to hunt, catch, and kill a cow would take me about 20 cents in gas, about five minutes, and a rock.

I'll be the first to admit I don't know jack about economics but that just blows me away. I mean, what kind of world do we live in where I can get a hunk of shark meat sent to me from near the source of the Amazon River for about the cost of a typical shipping fee on a book from Amazon.com?

Answer: A freaking awesome one.

God Bless America

'Nuff said.

Extremely Famous Last Words

Normally I don't comment on small World Events like this... My wife brought it to my attention yesterday and I thought it was too awesome to not say a little something about it.

According to this news article, an 81-year-old woman in England had the words “Do Not Resuscitate” tattooed on her chest. As neat as that is, there's more. To cap it off she had the letters “P.T.O.” tattooed on the back of her upper right shoulder in case she was found face down. P.T.O. means “Please Turn Over”.

Nice...

You can read the article for yourself to see what her motivation was. Frankly, I think it trumps the hell out of my idea to have “BURIED WITH A SACK FULL OF GOLD COINS” inscribed on my tombstone to get suckers to unearth me every few years or so...

Puzzle News

It has been a while since I have posted a hint to one of the puzzles on my Secret Puzzle Page.  Here it is:

Desk Puzzle Hint #2 (Posted 09/08/11 20:00): Fcnprf frcnengr gur ahzoref, abg pbzznf.  Sbe rknzcyr, gur svefg guerr ahzoref ner 96, 120, naq 69,181,920.

Just copy and paste the above ROT-13 encoded gibberish here to read the hint easily.  Ignore it if you are not ready for a hint quite yet.  I will paste the hint into the Puzzle Hints Page as well.

Good Luck!

More Randomness

Not enough to write about for a long post. So here is a bunch of little stuff. Enjoy!

Despite the 12 inches of rain from Hurricane Irene, a couple more inches from the remnants of Hurricane Lee, and the best efforts of our Laissez Faire Firefighting Task Force, the Great Dismal Swamp Fire still burns. According to this Daily Press article, the fire is 90% contained. According to the same article, a refuge spokesman says “that doesn’t mean that it’s out”. Good to know. I guess that means that those of us who attempt to drive across bridges that are 90% complete or like to ride around in boats that are 90% waterproof should just step back, enjoy the foul-smelling haze, and postpone any hikes through the smoldering remains of the park for a while longer.

I took my three-year-old on his first log flume ride this past Labor Day. He loved going up the hill and around the gentle curves. He then lost his mind from fear after the first little drop. As we helplessly approached the giant drop he (as Terry Pratchett would say) passed through fear and came out the other side, expressing total glee at the giant soaking splash at the bottom and laughing at the fact that my hat was blown clean off. It is not clear if he will want to give it a go again in the future… I will ask him once he comes out of fetal position and quits it with the maniacal giggles and the sleep-screaming.

I discovered that I can throw a football well enough to earn carnival prizes, but I am miserable at trying to grab stuffed Angry Birds with a claw game. I attribute the football thing to rubbing my Buddha that I built out of rabbits’ feet and leprechaun poo. I blame the bird thing on a lack of 1980s montage music at the arcade.

I have been drinking a lot of tea over the past couple of months, mostly at work. My current batch is Numi Gunpowder Green Organic Tea. Not bad. Dunkin’ Donuts has started selling Keurig K-Cups of their coffee. That’s just plain ol’ awesome.  Only available at select doughnut shops for now, but coming to Amazon September 21st.

I am 65% of the way through Atlas Shrugged. I started reading this at the suggestion of one of my sisters, and I am pretty excited to see how this is going to finish. I love the book so far but I think it has changed my day-to-day behavior somewhat. For example, in the past I used to express mild annoyance at those ever-present fund-raising groups waving “CAR WASH” signs around at intersections. Now I find myself firing paintballs and lobbing trash out the windows at them while screaming “DIE, PARASITES, DIE!!! YOU ARE WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS [EXPELTIVE DELETED] COUNTRY!!!” I am very impressionable, you see.

More later...