One of the tenants was cooking, the oil overheated and caught on fire. She threw water on the fire.
The water superheats, boils immediately, and the steam carries the flaming oil into the air, giving you a rising plume of fire. That's what she got upstairs; the ceiling is now covered in soot.
She is ok; she is only mentally scarred, not physically scarred.
For a vivid demonstration, watch the following (UK) 30 second public service announcment:
Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society: This is a matter of great importance to the integrity of the Society. It is being sent to a random fraction of the membership, so we hope you will pass it on. By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal, entitled "The Climate Science isn't Settled," for a balanced account of the situation. It was written by a scientist of unquestioned authority and integrity. A copy can be found among the items at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u, and a visit to http://www.ClimateDepot.com can fill in the details of the scandal, while adding spice. What has this to do with APS? In 2007 the APS Council adopted a Statement on global warming (also reproduced at the tinyurl site mentioned above) that was based largely on the scientific work that is now revealed to have been corrupted. (The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat.) We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 Statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done. None of us would use corrupted science in our own work, nor would we sign off on a thesis by a student who did so. This is not only a matter of science, it is a matter of integrity, and the integrity of the APS is now at stake. That is why we are taking the unusual step of communicating directly with at least a fraction of the membership. If you believe that the APS should withdraw a Policy Statement that is based on admittedly corrupted science, and should then undertake to clarify the real state of the art in the best tradition of a learned society, please send a note to the incoming President of the APS ccallan@princeton.edu, with the single word YES in the subject line. That will make it easier for him to count. Bob Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Hal Lewis, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Will Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics, Hartford
Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil
(Of course, there is a facebook/Moveable Type connector that I just found now while writing this...and the one that MT puts at the bottom of my page, so we'll see how that works out. Certainly the ability to blog from FB into MT is nice, but even Facebook has a limitation of how many characters a status update can have makes that particular blogging channel suboptimal if the goal is to Say Something Of Import™) UPDATE 20 August 2009 Of course, there's nothing new under the sun: Jeff Atwood said it a while ago.
Somewhat more closeup, this is what my Palm Treo could make out:
Certainly not your usual fare!
Well.
Today at school was the “Reina Varon Memorial Business Fair”—the 4th graders in the school get their parents to donate some amount of stuff, and then try to sell it off to the other students in the elementary school, and the proceeds go to various charitable organizations.
Well one kid brought in to sell:
Now we’re the proud owners of “Bubbles” (sometimes called ”Dag”, after the Hebrew word for fish דג). Elana is going to dig out her old fishbowl, and we are starting all over again. (I am not counting the “sea monkeys” that son #3 got for his birthday as a gift: fish barely cut it as pets, brine shrimp are cubicly less so...)
To be filed under “weird stuff my friend Mark showed me” is "bulbous bouffant” by the Vestibules. It’s not exactly new by any measure except to me.
It is quite the radio theatre of the absurd.
Imagine a non-vulgar Beavis & Butthead & friend scripted by Samuel Beckett, with plenty of Can“eh”dian accent, and then making a smooth segue into an a capella version of Stomp.
You will never look at a gazebo the same way again.
(Yes, yes, I know it’s been a while since a posting; I’ve got a few in the queue, I promise.)
This evening the family and I went to Plum Beach, a little bit of beach right off of the Belt Parkway between exits 9 and 11.
It’s really kind of an interesting beach; there are nice views of Kingsborough Community College (behind the sailboat)
Sic transit gloria urbi.
Back in June of 2004, we received from my son's school a guinea pig from the science department to care for the summer. We were trying out the whole "pet with kids" thing; Elana and I had had a guinea pig before who needed to be euthanized back in 1995, right before son #1 was born, and we weren't sure if kids and pets were going to work for us, so we gave it a try. "Buffie" came to us, and sons #1 through #3 were instantly enamored of Buffie. She learned quickly to squeak and beg for food every time the refrigerator door opened; she had us trained in no time.
In the fall of 2004, right before we moved to our new house, the school science department was being repainted, and we were told not to bring Buffie back in, so as not to expose her to construction dust, mess, and paint fumes, etc. One month led to the next ("Don't bring her back now, it's the holiday season." "Um, do you really still have her, we got another one.") We held on to Buffie throughout the 2004-2005 school year.
Come May of 2005, the original provider of Buffie felt that she should be returned to the school, or at least to the original provider. A short custody battle ensued, during which time the school gave the original donator a new guinea pig to replace Buffie, as we had become quite attached (read: "We'd rather fight than switch!") to our little critter.
When we inherited a bunny in June of 2006, Buffie was even accepting of the new interloper, in her own way.
Now, it's 3 years out, we didn't know how old Buffie was when we got her but she was at least 4 years old by our reckoning, and probably closer to 5 or 6, which is pretty old for a guinea pig. We had noticed lately that she had been slowing down, and not quite as hippity-hoppity as her next-cage neighbor.
This afternoon, after returning home from services at our synagogue, the boys found Buffie barely breathing, out in her cage the sun and fresh air. (As a special treat, we had put her out in the shade on our deck this morning, also to make room for lunch guests.) We brought her inside, where she looked up at all of us once, and then expired peacefully among her doting and adoring family. (It was somewhat uncomfortable explaining this to our 10 or so lunch guests. As you can imagine, it cast a pall upon the meal. Were the kids not among half-a-dozen of their friends, it would have been much harder.)
We buried her this evening, amidst a river of tears and good-byes from all of us.
Being a somewhat lapsed amateur radio operator (KE3ML), I was interested to find out that the FCC, in a long-overdue change, has removed the Morse Code testing requirement for all classes of amateur radio licenses.
When I got my license, back in 1994 or so, I passed all the written elements and but the 20 WPM code exam (and went straight from nothing to what was then “advanced class”. (Thus came my group B callsign.) A few months later I took the 20 WPM exam and passed it handily, and upgraded to “amateur extra”, the highest available class.
Now the same thing is available to anyone who passes all the written elements.
Am I bitter that future amateur radio operators won’t have to jump the hurdles that I did? Not in the slightest. Since passing the tests in 1994, and listening to the various noise and nonsense on local repeaters and the 40-meter amateur band, I have long ago decided that the code exam represented nothing other than an initiation ritual, and that it provided no actual value to the amateur radio service.
Enjoy using CW, if that is what you want. I am glad my children can enter the amateur radio service without having to go through hazing.
(For what it’s worth, the old newsgroup rec.radio.amateur.policy has descended into almost an entire cesspool of nonsense. I looked at it today for the first time in 10 years. There’s almost no amateur radio discussed there, just trolls discussing ... heaven alone only knows what. I still see a few of the same players from a decade ago, but mostly just total garbage. Sic transit gloria mundi.)
Of course, without the obligatory New Year’s posting, I just wouldn’t be a geek, right?
Well, here it is: I know now I’m getting older. How? My wife and I no longer go to New Year’s Eve parties. Instead, we’re sponsoring one for our older two sons.
After an evening of some dinner, a rousing replay of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, some cupcakes, the boys have mostly adjourned to play a few parallel games of Yugioh cards...and now we’re waiting for the ball to drop (literally) over Times Square.
Happy 2007!
So an interesting article on procrastination as linked to from (of all places!) Slashdot talks about some research at MIT about how we tend to impose artificial deadlines on ourselves to combat our own known propensity to procrastinate. It discusses the idea of “hyperboilc time discounting”, where people over-weight the value of their own time now versus time later. (If you think about it, this can also be the source of the well-known self-destructiveness of teenagers: “who cares about tomorrow, I’m not going to be getting old”, or “I’ll be old for a lot less time than I’m going to be young”, etc.)
The interesting point the study made is that self-imposing deadlines is not an “optimal” method of assigning deadlines: students in the self-imposed deadlines section did not perform as well as those who had deadlines imposed for them.
I know that, for me, real deadlines always give me a burst of adrenaline and productivity; I’m seldom more productive than Friday afternoon about one hour before sundown...there the deadline is a religious one, and not really “self-imposed” in any meaningful sense.
I haven’t done a google search for this yet, so I don’t know if this is a popular characterization or not, but I cannot believe that I am the first one to come up with this...
Yesterday I took my two older boys (and some of their friends) to a showing of the new Eragon movie, which they all found enjoyable. And, of course, the ride home was a prolonged discussion on the divergences between the movie and the book. The movie had good special effects, and the acting wasn’t too bad, although I thought it was a waste of John Malkovich's acting talents—he could have been much more evil.
But that isn’t what interests me.
What interests me is the idea that Paolini has written Star Wars into LOTR. We have elves, and dwarves, each with their own pseudo-proto-English tongue, and instead of orcs we have “urgals” (I suppose so we aren’t so blatant.) The elves, as they always seem to be,are a
Continue reading "Eragon -- Star Wars meets Lord of the Rings" »
Sigh...
I’m so far behind, I think I’ve come full circle around and am now ahead.
Or not.
It’s crazy busy, but it’s the good kind of crazy busy.
I've been so busy lately, I haven’t had the opportunity to get around to saying much of anything. A short, egotistical list:
Phew! I've spent the entire week playing catch-up.
For the first time since August 2003, I took a short vacation with my family. Just a short trip to Connecticut to see Mystic Seaport, with a short trip up to Touro Synagogue in Newport, RI,
Digression: it really is a cool synagogue; it isn’t terribly large—our synagogue here in Brooklyn is about the same size (maybe a little larger) but it wasn't built in the 1700’s, and doesn’t have its balcony finished yet. Plus, they have a 500+ year old Torah scroll given to them as a gift from the Jewish community of Amsterdam that is displayed quite nicely in a glass case....and a trip back on a ferry from New London, CT to Orient Point, NY.
On Sunday night, I got a frantic call from a client who just converted over to using CommuniGate Pro for their mail server. It appears that the stock spam filters that they provide just don't cut the mustard. Luckily, one of my cohorts found a spamassassin conduit for CGP that appears to have stemmed the onslaught of unsolicited mail. Of course, once that was working, it uncovered yet another problem, having to do with the fact that some email from one machine wasn't making it from a qmail install on one branch of a firewall arm to another, exacerbated by the fact that I have not yet set up separate bind views , and that there is NATing going on to allow external hosts to reach the CGP machine. (The solution to that is to use qmail’s smtproutes function to point to an internal address for the CGP machine.)
Now I have to find the time to begin the architecture work for my most recent project, LTR.com, a new-and-improved dating website being started up by my acquaintance David Siegel, which I’ve put off all week...
whine whine whine
Well, I took my two older sons to see Zoom last night.
I can see why it was so universally panned at Rotten Tomatoes. On the plus side, both of the kids loved it. They’re into the whole superheroes thing—saw all 3 X-Men movies this summer (one on the big screen, two on DVD) so this was something good and wholesome for them.
I can say, without going into spoilers, that by and large the acting is flat, the premise is as bad as they say it is, but if you’re under the age of 12, these things probably don’t matter much.
Plus: the obvious product placements for Wendy’s restaurant and for Firefly phones got to be a bit much.
SPOILERS:
So this afternoon, after getting a haircut for me and the two older boys, we pull into our driveway, and son #2 asks me “Why is Buffy [our pet guinea pig] out on the porch?”
“Huh? What are you talking about?”
I get out of the car, look up onto our porch, and lo! and behold! there is a bunny rabbit in a cage. It's 90° F outside, I look into the cage and find a bunny, his water bottle (! on the floor of the cage!), and some food, sitting on our front porch.
What to do?
Well, it turns out that the day before, when walking home from synagogue, we happened to see this very bunny sitting on the front step of the house at the corner of our block—my children and wife remember this—and so after getting everyone inside, my oldest son and I trot on down to the neighbors’ house to find out why their bunny is on our front step...
Well, I posted yet another ad today for a “generalist”, and therein I had, once again, a few litmus tests to help me weed out the total clowns.
I wrote, inter alia:
You must be able to think on your feet, and you must be able to read and follow directions.
Please provide a cover letter explaining how you feel you fulfill the requirements and a résumé in plain text or HTML format only. We will not open PDFs or MS Word/OpenOffice documents.
I also wrote, within the top two lines of the ad:
in-office, during the regular work week (please no offshore or outsourcing companies)
Confidentiality Notice:
We respect your Online Privacy. This is not an unsolicited mail and
cannot be considered Spam as long as we include Contact information
and a method to be removed from our mailing list. If you are not
interested in receiving our e-mails then please reply with a "remove"
in the subject line. We sincerely regret any inconvenience.
1441Z showed another clown with no cover letter and a .doc attachment. I had to wait until 1546Z until I got someone who could follow directions.
I have to give props to the guy at 1754Z sent me his résumé in .doc format, then 3 minutes later sent back an “oops! sorry” and sent it in plain text. (I give him props since I've done the same klutzy thing too.)
So far the score is 3 contenders, 5 clowns, and 1 contender-clown.
Yes, yes, it's a shameless plug, but www.veotag.com -- allows you to annotate videos online on the fly. Very very cool. It's a service run in part by my martial arts instructor Arkady Dudko. It's very cool; he's shown me some video clips of martial arts forms that he's taken and annotated (they're copyrighted, so I can't re-share them).
Browse through it at http://www.veotag.com/browse/.
I wish him and Scott Rhodes the best of luck with the service, it looks pretty cool.
"I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines. "
This is a line I stole from a guy I knew at Columbia (Nick Christopher) who used it and left it...and I picked it up and ran with it after he left in 1988. So no, I can't claim it as originally mine, but it's mine now.
If you must know, it is a play on the Dr. Seuss book The Lorax, where a little green critter who speaks out against the deforestation of his home declares:
I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees,
I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues...
You must remember that a VAX was a product of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). They had a whole line of vaxen; at Columbia we had several: the machine columbia.edu was a VAX 750, in the computer center we used an 8700. When I started graduate school at City College of New York, the main machine available for student use was a VAX 780 -- even in 1990 considered old, and jokingly referred to as "measured in BTUs rather than MIPS".