Schierer Space

K & I spotted these signs on a local walk some time ago. I had forgotten about it until today.

So if you work for National Grid and you’re wondering what to put in the Orange Collection Containers:

Hmm.

I was trying to take a picture of something reflective, but instead ended up with a rather funky self-portrait.

Can you guess what I was taking a picture of?
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I see in dots. Like a Seurat painting where the points keep moving… or the noise on a badly tuned television set. Turn your camera to the highest ISO setting and take a bunch of pictures in a row, flip between them at a hundred frames per second. Swirling eddies of random colored input.

No loss of clarity… ignoring my long diagnosed near-sightedness… no obvious increase in ‘floaters’ or patterns of any kind, just dots. Noise. Sparkling microscopic lights. and darks. but mostly both.

I can’t recall if they just appeared one day, or if they were always there and I simply started to observe them. You know, in that way you can look at something and it seems perfectly normal, but you never really see it, because you didn’t see the gorilla juggling in the background? Like when you take the perfect portrait and when you look at the image later, suddenly notice the signpost sticking out of their head. It’s perception and that’s trickier than sight.

It’s most obvious in low light, (more…)

Phrase of the day:

That’s about as productive as 4-person tic-tac-toe.

Thanks to Joe and James.

No, this is not the recipe for an exotic (and very large) magical potion or a reference to a new play called the Merchant of Ft. Lauderdale. I am referring to two entirely unrelated random events that occurred today.

First, I heard on the breaking news section of NPR’s All Things Considered that there was a ship collision reported today involving a tanker carrying orange juice. “Huh?” my brain said. I immediately began pondering the environmental disaster scenarios involving a giant orange juice spill a la Exxon Valdez. I’m sure that would be a pretty rough pH change for the local sea creatures, but I can’t imagine it would be terribly catastrophic over the long term. In case you’re curious, ShipTechnology.com (yes there is such a site) has a nice description of the Carlos Fischer, a tanker capable of carrying 37,000t* of orange juice.

Second, today was Red Cross Bloodmobile day at work so I donated my pint of A+ as usual. However, as a publicity promotion, Dunkin Donuts is giving ever donor a coupon for a pound of Dunkin Donuts coffee. As is explained by the old English expression “A pint’s a pound the world around” a pint of water (or essentially, blood) weighs about a pound**. So in one sense this is a pretty fair trade. Of course, several of you readers probably consider coffee more precious than blood, but I don’t generally drink it. It also occurred to me that this is sort-of a reverse divine transformation (apologies to the Roman Catholics in the audience) that my blood, freely given, is transformed into an equivalent quantity of an addictive drink. Or something like that.

So in a not-so-typical free moment, I was talking with one of my coworkers (Hi Jeremy) about the now famous internet/email message about the supposed impossibility of Santa’s magical Christmas Eve trip.

You know, the one that you can read here, or here*… and umptien bazillion other variants.

It occurred to us though that in the modern era, Santa is far more likely to make use of the services of hundreds of thousands of delivery workers distributed throughout the globe as part of his multinational corporation (think FedEx). Here’s how it works… (more…)

So I’ve observed a trend in my peer group (and probably quite a few of the folks who read this blog) towards increasingly severe acts* of vigorous exercise. I have begun pondering whether this is a Generation X response to midlife crisis in our own married-late, parent-late way. Or perhaps do we have better things to spend our DINK** incomes on than flashy cars to attract younger mates, so instead we invest in our own attempt at youthful immortality?

In any case, my pondering in this direction was further reinforced by a single sheet of paper posted in the restrooms at my employer (the local sponsored gym puts them up to remind us computer geeks to get healthy). I cannot quote the “Factoid” directly, but a paraphrase will do:

For every hour of vigorous exercise, life expectancy increases by two hours.

Huh. So of course I was forced to find some online reference to verify this claim. The closest to a real attribution came from this wellness presentation from Weber State University. This presentation says:

Dr. Paffenbarger conducted a study on 16,000 Harvard alumni. His research showed that the alumni who exercised regularly had only half the death rate from heart disease compared to those who never exercised. He also determined that, on the average, for every hour you exercise, life expectancy was increased by two hours. Exercise is certainly a good investment in time and health!

A further search revealed this citation: Hsieh Cc (1986) Physical activity, all-cause mortality, and longevity of college alumni, RS Paffenberger Jr, RT Hyde, AL Wing - N Engl J Med

Ok, so we’ll assumer the claim is at least based by research, but what I don’t get is why this should encourage me to exercise. “What!?” you say, “Why wouldn’t you want to live longer?” Let’s think about this for a moment…

So if I spend an hour of my current good health exercising (vigorously!), some great actuarial table in the sky will add two statistical hours to the end of my existence. Nice, one hour makes up for the hour I spent exercising so we break even, and then I get an hour to do with as I please. But wait… if I would have just spent that middle-aged hour doing something I wanted to do… I pretty much break even, right!? Only NOW I get to spend that hour in the prime of my life (or shortly thereafter) rather than having an extra hour of old age. Hmmm… makes you think doesn’t it. I suppose to be fair, if vigorous exercise is actually FUN to you… then maybe this is a different story. Of course, if it IS, then you don’t really need the extra hour incentive, because your FUN past time would be the (vigorous!) exercise.

My friend Bill is creating a new website. I’ve never seen it. In fact I’m not even sure what it’s going to be about, although considering the trend of the current site I suspect traffic or some other road-geek related field. I could be wrong, but I think I’m right. Why? Because I had a vision of Bill’s new website in my dreams last night. Yes. Really.

So to Bill if you think my website vision is cool, feel free to use it, that way I get to say I foresaw it in a dream. Self-fulfilling prophecy and all. If anybody else wants to use it, well it’s going to cost you.

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My 1997 Acura Integra LS rolled over 100,000 miles today. Being the geek that I am, I synchronized my driving such that the odometer would roll over exactly as I pulled in the driveway. Now for a Honda based product, this mileage only marks reaching middle age even though the car is 10 years old.

I have always liked watching various milestone mileages roll over, and the big 6-digit rollover is the granddaddy of them all. I’ve never known a car to make the million mile mark. It’s sad in a way, because this is quite possibly the last car I’ll ever own with a mechanical odometer.

I drove home tonight in the dark.
I drove home tonight in the dark and the rain with the headlights on high.
I drove fast.
The rain sparkled on the asphalt as each drop hit.
And shattered.
To flash briefly and disappear.

Some bounced.
Not hail, but rain.
The strange physics of water bouncing on water.
And asphalt.
And flashing light.
Arcing briefly.
So fast as to not be seen.
Except they are.
And then gone.

The splashes revealed.
Always there.
Only seen by the passing car.
The moving car.
The fast car.
Thousands of fans doing the wave.