Schierer Space

Have you ever said “there will come a day when…” or “one of these days…” something similar? I have and yesterday was that day.

First some background. We live in the Central New York snow belt and at medium elevation. By medium, I mean higher than the city of Syracuse and the Mohawk valley, but lower than the Tug Hill plateau and the Adirondacks. Our village sits near the top of one of those long hilly ridges that Central New York is so famous for (our house is roughly 1350′ of elevation). Unfortunately that mean my commute climbs the roughly 1000′ of elevation gain on the way home. About half of that occurs in a short stretch right at the border of Onondaga and Madison counties. Certain times of year, particularly towards the beginning of the snow season, this stretch of road can be treacherous for several reasons:

1. Afternoon snow: Obviously our winter weather can make any driving hazardous, but when it falls heavily late in the afternoon, it seems to not get cleared as effectively as other times of day.
2. Elevation gain: As I said, there’s about 500 feet of rise in a mile or two.
3. Traffic: A fair number of commuters use this roadway to return from their Syracuse metro jobs to their Madison county homes.
4. Road width: The uphill run on this road is two lanes to allow for slow hill-climbing traffic. This causes some inconsistency in where the ‘optimal line’ gets carved in the accumulating snow. The net result is a hodgepodge of crossing tracks and chunked up snowy slush.

All of this combines at 6PM, late in the commuting cycle, to a very polished slick roadway covered in freezing slushy ruts and snow.

Combine that with the fact that my car is small, light and has some heavily worn semi-performance tires… and… Yesterday was that day when I was unable to make it up the hill.

I was making good progress at first, but as each slushy rut caused a slip, I had to back out of the gas to maintain traction. A few downshifts later and I was crawling up the hill at the edge of stall. A few seconds later I was slipping forwards with my wheel turned about 90 degrees to the right to keep from sliding into opposing traffic. A few seconds later and I was smelling hot rubber. This, as they say, is a bad thing.

I managed to turn around and make my way safely back down the hill to a gas station. I called K to let her know I was going to be a while and took stock of my options.

My left front tire had essentially no tread left on the outer edge, but was fine in the middle and inner edge. These tires actually come with less tread on the edges for cornering, but that is far from ideal for snow. The right side was fine which explained somewhat the wanting to spin on the left… and the spinning didn’t help the left tire any I’m sure. So I filled up the gas tank, which was nearly empty anyhow, adding weight to the car. Then I rotated the left side tires (they’re directional) in the parking lot of the Rite-Aid next to the gas station. Remind me not to rotate the tires in a wet snow-storm in a parking lot again. Finally, I opted to take a different route home. Obviously just as much elevation needed to be climbed, but I was banking on LESS traffic being better for the road conditions (snow being less slippery than packed/slushy snow).

This also took me home past The Manlius Formation in case things went horribly wrong on the climb. On multiple occasions I had to make two runs at hills that followed stop signs or right angle turns, but I crawled my way up the hill and on to the home stretch. Of course, I was not out of the woods yet, because a half mile from home, I hit a tree.

Really. It was lying in the middle of the road and I was pointed at the thin branchy end. Doing some quick calculations in my head (there would be no steering around it while staying on the road) I decided that the branches would not wreck my car. WHACK! as the branches slapped off the windshield and I was through. One small dent on the hood (to add to the collection) and a nice bend in my (long since non-automatic) antenna, but I can live with that.

By 9:30PM we lost power at home and went to bed.

Welcome to old man winter.

I’ve posted some pictures of some of the fall butterflies over the last month or so, but finally got a chance to identify them. Thanks again to Butterflies & Moths of North America. So here goes…

	Nymphalis antiopa, Mourning Cloak Valley Falls, NY
	Polygonia comma, Eastern Comma[1] Valley Falls, NY
	Pieris rapae, Cabbage White Valley Falls, NY
	Colias philodice, Clouded (Common) Suplhur Cazenovia, NY
	Danaus plexippus, Monarch (of course!) Cazenovia, NY

1. I’m amused to learn that there is also a “Question Mark” variety, Polygonia Interrogationis [↩]

That didn’t take long. Remember that spending freeze I just wrote about… and how NASA is squarely in the group of programs subject to the freeze?

Bad Astronomer discusses a Wall Street Journal article where McCain has promised $2 Billion to support NASA.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE NASA. I think NASA should be funded in much larger proportion to the current budget. Currently the non-military space program gets about 0.6% of the current budget, or $56 per American. I think I spend more than that per month on my cable bill.

What gets me going is how somebody can talk about increasing $17B by $2B and call it a spending freeze. I would love a nice 11% salary freeze right about now too.

Some might call it lying.

So in the final Presidential debate, Senator McCain said “And I recommend a spending freeze that — except for defense, Veterans Affairs, and some other vital programs, we’ll just have to have across-the-board freeze.”^[1].

On October 20th, while campaigning in Missouri, he said “I will freeze government spending on all but the most important programs like defense, veterans care, Social Security and health care until we scrub every single government program and get rid of the ones that aren’t working for the American people.”^[2]

So let’s break this down a bit:

• “Freeze government spending…” Ok, that seems meaningful, I won’t say “good”, but at least meaningful.
• “… on all but …” Uh oh… here it comes.
• “… defense, veterans care, Social Security and health care.” Woah. Could we have picked any LARGER programs to except from the ’spending freeze’? I guess “vital programs” really means “expensive programs”.

So how much of the government budget is McCain really looking to control with this approach?
According to the US Government Budget Office historical data for Fiscal Year 2009, in 2007 total government receipts were $2,568 Billion (thousand-million for the Brits) as follows: $1,163B in personal income tax, $370B in corporate taxes, $870B in social security taxes and $46B from other sources.
Outlays were $2,655 Billion (I’m fairly certain this does not include “Supplemental Funding” like the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or bailouts) as follows: Defense $522B, Human resources $1,672B, Physical resources $165B, Interest $227B, Other functions $138B^[3] and Offsetting receipts -$68B. We need to break down the Human resources further to get to the Senator’s other line items as follows: $119B is Education, $253B is Health, $330B is Medicare, $549B is Social Security and $70B is Veteran’s benefits and services.
I’m guessing that “Health and Medicare” are wrapped up in the “health care” subject.

So out of a $2,655B Federal outlay (not including the wars which undoubtedly fall under the “defense” bucket), $522B + $253B + $330B + $549B + $70B = $1,724B (65%) is completely free to grow. The remaining $931B (35%) gets frozen.

The items which will be capped include (in order of decreasing size): Education, Transportation, Community Development, Justice, Natural Resources & Environment, International Affairs, Agriculture, Science and others.

So strong talk, but if he said it like this “I’m going to freeze spending on 1/3 of the budget and let the rest grow as needed” would it sound like it meant anything? No? Well, that’s really what he’s saying.

Is that what you want? You decide. Vote.

1. Quote from CNN.com transcript [↩]
2. Remarks by Senator McCain in Belton, MO, JohnMcCain.com [↩]
3. General science, space and technology gets a mere $23.6B of this pie. NASA gets about $17B of that, but the DoD space program gets more: on the order of $20B. [↩]

Apologies to those friendly readers who noticed that the comment area was missing from the blog!

This has been repaired. If you didn’t notice, you should comment more… this is intended as an interactive media. If you did notice, but didn’t mention it, well, I guess I don’t need your comments anyways.

As seen on digg:

I’m not sure that “Elitist” is really the argument I would be making with this image, but it’s hard to argue which set of statistics is more typical of the average US citizen. I suppose if the economy really tanks he can always sell his jet. Are you prepared to give up your jet?

First, I have to shamelessly (re)link to this fantastic video that the Bad Astronomer mentioned on his blog a week or so. If you haven’t already taken the time to watch, it is truly a beautiful thing: high-speed video of a Saturn V launch set to some nice spacey environmental music.

Of course, then I started flipping along on VideoSift looking at other high-speed video… which of course is a confusing term since it results in slow-motion footage… but anyway I found this clip which is indescribably awesome.

I’ve heard that lightning bolts actually travel up from the ground after an initial smaller charge traveled down, but I’ve never seen video of this before. Of course, once I found this one, I learned that there are many other similar videos on YouTube. Lightning has always fascinated me. I think I’m going to have to rent this cabin some day.

Inspired by all the new theme building that John has been asking me about, and the work K&I are doing for the church website, I’ve updated our theme again.

The difference is subtle, but significant. The entire page now scales with window size rather than being fixed width, so for the growing number of people with wide-screen displays, they can spread east and west to their heart’s content. I also put the side bar on all pages rather than just some of them. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t change that earlier.

Let me know if you have any viewing issues.

No this is not a reminisce about the days when we thought cold fusion had been achieved… but a comment on the Gillette razor of the same name. I would normally link to Gillette’s website here, but it is so annoying ^[1] that I can’t bring myself to subject you to it.

Anyhow, I received one of these orange, blue and chrome marvels in the mail some many, many months ago as a promotion. Give a guy a razor and he’ll have to buy blades, right!? Wrong. I’m decidedly unimpressed. Here’s why:

First, some context.

1. I regularly use a Gillette Sensor Excel which has a solid metal handle, rubber grippies and a pivoting double-bladed head with a strip of white soapy stuff. I’ve pretty much been using this kind of razor since I started shaving somewhat regularly in college 15 years ago.^[2]
2. I haven’t used shaving cream, gel, lubricant, etc. regularly for probably 10 years. I shave in the shower, and I’m not the hairiest guy in town, so it’s generally not an issue. If I miss shaving for a few days (like a week), I usually wish I had some gel, but most days it’s no big deal.

When I ran out of blades a month or so ago, K suggested I use the FUSION. So I popped the 5 bladed neon monster out of the box and hung it in the shower.

The next day it took me about 3.7 hours to shave. Ok, I exaggerate, only 37 minutes. There are two major problems with this razor:

1. Relative to the Sensor Excel, the blade head is roughly the size of Montana.
2. Relative to the state of Montana, the blade head is roughly the size of Montana.

So I find that I have to press the razor into my face with about 4x the force I used to to get the blades to actually cut anything. It sort-of makes sense, with 5 blades instead of 2, the force per linear distance of blade is reduced by 2.5 times. In addition, the surface area of the surrounding blade head has increased, so the amount of force which actually causes the blades to reach your facial hair is reduced further. On the plus side, this did seem to cause significantly less irritation per pass, since the likelihood of the blades cutting anything, let alone your face, was similarly reduced.
Now we come to the problem which has plagued razors since their inception: human bodies (and especially faces) are very poorly approximated by the planar head of a razor. As such, the side of the razor tends to bump into objects that don’t wish to be shaved off like your lips, nose and ears. So the effective useful area of the Fusion razor was about 4 square inches on each of my cheeks and my neck. It was like trying to get a stretch Hummer down Lombard Street. Good thing they put that little trimmer blade on the back (yes! a sixth blade!) so I could shave the rest of my face.

I didn’t give up though and dutifully used the Fusion for a month or so, even after K had kindly replenished the supply of my standard shaving apparatus. Although I got considerably better at maneuvering the Nimitz class razor around my face, it still seemed to take considerably more passes to get the job done. A week ago, I finally switched back.

I nearly removed my face on the first stroke (high pressure on small surface area=BAD), but quickly recovered to my previous abilities.

Sorry Gillette. No deal.

1. There is an especially high-pitched chirp every time you mouse over a menu item that is overwhelming my audio “bear detector”. [↩]
2. Actually, I used an electric shaver most of the time while I was in college, but in grad school I could no longer afford to replace the little foil screen that wore out every six months and switched to blades. [↩]

What more do I need to say?