Schierer Space

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?

Sunday morning found Nate wide awake and K&I not wanting to be. K got up on Saturday, so I got Nate dressed and put him in the car for a road trip.
We didn’t go far, just over to Green Lakes State Park in Fayetteville. This past weekend was as beautiful as a central New York fall can be: Mornings that are crisp and cool with the slow rising sun filtering through the steam which rolls off of every waterway. Afternoons with a golden glow as the sun hangs low in the sky to illuminate the crimson and fire of maples trees in all of their glory. Finally, sunsets that last forever and clear purple dusks that fade into the darkening fog of night.

Sunday was just such a morning, and Nate was decked out in his coat and mittens, while I zipped up my thick fleece jacket, slipped on some glove liners and snapped the 70-200mm lens on the camera. A few clicks of the backpack buckles, and Nate & I were off.

The sun had just risen over the hills at the side of the larger of the two lakes and it was catching the tops of the trees as we descended.

When we reached the lake, it was covered in a thin layer of steam, which was rolling along the surface, pushed by a breeze that couldn’t be felt.

We walked quickly to the end of the lake where there is swimming and other activities in the summer. The beach is closed now, and at this hour in the morning, save for a few morning joggers, empty.

The lifeguards are not needed, the boats are pulled up on shore and the buoys rest in expectation of ice to come.

The benches sit idle more than not, basking in the reflected sunlight to store up warmth for the long nights to come. A few cheerful souls do come to sit and eat, and add another memory to this place, but mostly it is still.

Yes, fall is the time of the inevitable, when the trees don their Sunday best for one last dance before the long winter. The grapes glow golden in the morning sun, and store its warmth deep in their roots.

Amidst all of this, we simply walk and smile.

Shout out to my friend John who is taking on the inter-tubes with his very own blog and photo gallery (sound familiar?) titled The Manlius Formation.

Go click on that there link and show him some love.

Oh and John: You have now been officially added to the link list.

Edit: Just to make this an appropriate welcome to John, I’ve decided to add this photo:

To celebrate Mike and Becki’s engagement, the college crowd staged a photographic scavenger hunt in Albany, NY. Although most of the ‘tag’ pictures were just simply not worth sharing, some were odd or aesthetic enough to post. This wedding shot was certainly a highlight.

I also snagged some shots of central Albany.

The next day K,N & I got up early (or more specifically Nate got up early) and we went for a walk to spare the other ex-revelers a few more moments of rest. This shot taken by Kristin really says it all:

Misty morning in more ways than one.

After another round of Killer Bunnies, we headed out into the Sassatelli woods (not on your map) to enjoy the warm fall day. Eventually, K&N turned back (Nate was walking too slowly to keep up) and I ended up meandering about by myself taking pictures of whatever caught my eye.

Nate (and his parents) are starting to get into quite the bed-time routine these days:

Bathtime (note wet spots on my sleeves):
Change into PJs:
Story time (with hippos!):

Finally, bedtime with bear and sheep:

Let me put this in a language that the Christian fundamentalists might understand:

When Jesus sat down with the sinners and tax collectors did he ask for preconditions? Was he naive and irresponsible to do this?

McCain would say “yes”. What do you think?

¹⁰While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and “sinners” came and ate with him and his disciples. ¹¹When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ’sinners’?”

¹²On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. ¹³But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”^[1]

1. BibleGateway.com, New International Version, Matthew 9 V10:13 [↩]

One of the big news items in the last few days has been modifications to the failed bailout government bailout bill. One item that just floors me that has had quite a bit of discussion in the last few days is increasing the FDIC insurance limit on accounts from $100k to $250k.

Sounds great at the surface, right? Protect folks savings. Very important. Except, who with any real financial sense, has over $100k in savings sitting in an ordinary account at ONE bank? The current FDIC insurance protects retirement accounts (IRAs, not investments) up to $250k already per person, per bank. So if you have $100k in First Bank of Podunk and $100k in Last Bank of Podunk and $250k in your IRA at Podunk Bank, you’re fully insured by the fed already. So unless you have OVER $100lk in a single bank in ordinary bank accounts, this has NO impact on you.

This combined with the fact that the average savings rate in the US has been negative for years and declining prior to that for decades. I’m pretty convinced that only really really REALLY wealthy people have this kind of cash just sitting around liquid in CDs.

I’d like some more time to research this, but this is my gut reaction. How about reducing credit card rates so people can actually pay them off? That might affect most Americans.

So I’m in a training class all week, and today during our lunch break, our instructor used the following as an example for why “doing it the way we always have” is sometimes a bad idea. He said “do you know the leading cause of death in beavers?”
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“Falling trees.”

I laughed, and then said “In all seriousness, do you have a reference for that, because that has serious blog potential.”

So needless to say with a room full of engineers on lunch break with high-speed internet connections…

Apparently this is the subject to a reasonable amount of speculation^[1]. See the following links:

• The Snopes Forum: One writer posits that any beavers who died primarily of tree falls would have been eliminated from the gene pool. Pretty good thought experiment, but hardly conclusive.
• Yahoo Answers has the scoop: Random bad speller claiming to teach wildlife biology thinks it’s true. I’m sold!
• Pop culture: “Did you know the leading cause of death for beavers, is falling trees?” -Silvia Broome, The Interpreter
• Sebbylite ponders this also
• This is connected to Green Building… (isn’t everything?)
• Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife: Falling trees IS mentioned, but if it were the primary source you’d think it would get some sort-of special mention.

Here is my conclusion: No conclusive evidence can be found that this is the LEADING cause of death in beavers, but there is fairly strong evidence that it IS a cause of death in beavers (which pretty much makes the point valid for the instructor in any case).
I give you the following short article from Telemark College, Department of Environmental Sciences, N-3800 Bø, Norway which cites multiple documented cases of beaver death and pinning due to their unique occupational hazards.

So there you go.

1. Translation: Given the billions of pages on the internet, there were many which related to this topic. [↩]