OK, so it's Groundhog Day. I always hear "If the groundhog sees his shadow, there will be 6 more weeks of winter", but the prediction stops there. What if he doesn't see his shadow? Does that mean winter will only last for another month and a half? [1] Having lived in Michigan all my life, I was never quite sure whether 6 more weeks of winter was good or bad - it seemed like getting the snow all melted off by April 1 would be an improvement over normal.

And, today is also Candlemas, which as near as I can tell was a time when people would go to a church and light every candle they could lay hands on. This sounds to me like a desperate attempt to get enough light to compensate for not having seen the sun for a couple of months, and keep from going mad from the continual darkness. So, maybe an appropriate celebration on Feb. 2 would be to, say, light a big bonfire out in the back yard. Pity I didn't think to protect a supply of burnables from getting buried in the snow last fall, but maybe we can just go out and torch a couple of cardboard boxes and paper bags.


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[1] "The common cold will, untreated, usually make you sick for seven days. With appropriate treatment, this can be reduced to only a week."

Hardly any kids come trick-or-treating at our house, but the ones who make it to us get pretty good stuff - usually full-size chocolate bars. So, when I took Sam out on Friday, we ran down Old Mill Hill Road and into Atlantic Mine, and I was looking to see if it was typical for rural houses to have better candy.

It was. The further we were from town, and the fewer kids were out, the better the candy was (and the happier the people were to see us). They had full-size candy bars, or juice boxes, or the really BIG tootsie pops, and would coo over how cute she was in her dinosaur suit, and insist, "No, no, one piece isn't enough. Take another. Don't you want some of these?". In most cases, Sam would actually say, "I think I have enough" before they were done giving her candy.

As we got into town, the candy got smaller and less attractive (halloween pretzels? are you joking?), the people handing it out were progressively more harried-looking, and they were much more sparing about doling it out.

All in all, I think she got about 80% of her candy from the six widely-spread houses we hit along our road, and only a fraction as much from the five houses we hit in Atlantic Mine proper. I think in the future, we will probably stick more with the rural folks.

Our second daughter was born this morning at 6:07. In this picture, she was about 30 minutes old. She's 8 lb 6 oz, and has a pretty healthy set of lungs. Her mother is doing about as well as can be expected.

Current Mood: relieved

Lately, Sam has been having me read her "The Little Red Hen". You know, the one where the hen finds a grain of wheat, nobody will help her plant it, harvest it, make it into flour, or make bread out of it, but they *all* want to help eat it. And she tells them "no", and eats it herself. This story has always bugged me, that just isn't the way I see people behaving. I'm picturing it actually coming out something like this:

Little Red Hen: Hey, I've found a grain of wheat. I'll plant it.
Duck: Hey, cool. Need any help?
LRH: Of course not. It's just a grain of wheat, it will only take a second to plant. There, it's done!
Duck: OK, see you around, then. (wanders off, thinking that maybe starting some sort of garden sounds like fun)

[later]
Goose: Hey, your wheat looks ready to harvest. Need any help?
LRH: What, are you nuts? It's just one stalk of wheat. There, it's done. Well, I'm off to the miller to have it ground into flour.
Cat: Need any help?
LRH: What did I just say? No, I don't need any help! It's just one stalk of wheat! Geeze!
(LRH heads off to mill, Goose suddenly remembers that the berries are getting ripe right about now, Cat heads off to go fishing)

[still later]
Pig: Hey, LRH, whatcha doing?
LRH: Making bread. AND NO, I DON'T NEED ANY HELP!
Pig: (a bit taken aback) Okay, okay. Got anything to eat with it?
LRH: Now that you mention it, no. Hey, why don't you tell Duck, Goose, and Cat that, if they *really* want to be helpful, they could round up some stuff that's good with fresh bread, and we can all have a nice dinner?
Pig: Sure thing!

[later on, Duck shows up with a nice salad from her garden, Goose brings some berry jam, Cat brings a fresh-caught fish, and Pig rounds up something to drink with it all. They have a good dinner.]

(Of course, I won't even go into the fact that one stalk of wheat is going to make a mighty tiny loaf of bread.)

You know, I'm getting increasingly annoyed by the "constant-wait" feature of the Internet: no matter how much you increase your connection speed, the people posting content on their web pages keep larding on bandwidth-hogging "features" to keep page downloads consistently slow and flaky. Right at the moment, there is a strong tendency for people to put up audio files and videos to convey information that might just as well be given as straight text. Sure, there is a place for audio files (say for songs), and for videos (things exploding, flying, falling down, or other cases where the actual motion is important), but *news*? What's the point? Our internet connection may not be blindingly fast, but at least it isn't a dialup line, and it can download words and pictures pretty fast. Hit it with a video off of Youtube, though, and it takes upwards of 5 minutes to download a 1 minute video clip. Unless there's something pretty damn visually striking about that video, I'm just not going to bother. Certainly not for a couple of talking heads from some news show. Especially since there's a 50:50 chance of the video hanging halfway through. And even using one of the fast connections at the University, there's the whole issue that somebody sloooowwwwllllyyy reading a script on a video is way slower than just giving me a text and letting me read it myself.

Would it kill people to post transcripts instead of (videos? Won't somebody *please* think of the bandwidth-impaired?

So, "Torchwood" has finally come out on DVD, so we got the first two episodes from Netflix. And in the first episode, they had as kind of a throwaway a "super pheromone" spray where, if you sprayed it on yourself, it made the person next to you immediately want to have sex with you. Regardless of their sex, or normal preferences. And the character used it twice, once in a bar, and once on a fairly busy street.

Leaving aside the moral reprehensibility of using this stuff, I got to wondering: If you did have such a spray, would it really be a good idea to spray it on *yourself*? In a *crowded bar*? And could your intended victim really reliably tell that it came from you? Or would they just get randomly aroused by everybody they see whenever you were nearby(because the nose, after all, isn't very directional)? And for that matter, wouldn't spraying it on yourself just immediately turn you into a raving, mindless sex machine, even more than anybody else who might smell it?

It seems to me that the effect of spraying it on yourself in a crowded bar would be to provoke a wild orgy, focused in your general vicinity, but not necessarily focused on you (but you would be powerless to resist participating in it). Spraying it on your victim, preferably with nobody else nearby, would seem to be a much more useful strategy.

You know, the big problem with being a mad scientist has always been that you have to spend all your time fiddling around trying to actually do the grunt work needed to get everything to work, leaving no time at all for properly scheming, plotting, and carrying out your nerfarious plans.

We need more companies like GenScript, who just sent me an unsolicited email, to take care of all the tedious fiddling around. For example, to construct your mutant army of atomic zombies, they can provide "Mutagenesis – for as little as $295 per mutation", and "The construction of mutant libraries", which I'm sure would be very useful.

It's a pity I'm not a genetic engineer.

I was preparing some samples to send out for chemical analysis to Activation Laboratories, a company that I had not dealt with previously but was recommended to me. So I go to their "contact" web page and see that they have a bunch of locations; in Canada, Mexico, South America, Asia, Greenland . . . wait, what was that last one?

Greenland?!

Yep, Greenland. Issortarfimmut 1A, P.O. Box 790, DK-3900, Nuuk GREENLAND.

At first I was puzzled: why would anyone build an analytical laboratory facility there? But then, thinking about it a bit more, what do people do in Greenland? Why, they are on scientific expeditions collecting ice cores, rock samples, and water samples. And they want them analyzed, right now!. So, instead of hauling them all the way back to North America or Europe to be analyzed, they just send them down to Nuuk and have it done right away.

So, in the lab we have a small muffle furnace (goes up to 1000 deg. C, mainly used to burn small samples to measure the ash content). It doesn't get used a lot, but it is needed from time to time. But, it isn't working right now, the temperature controller has evidently failed. So, I open it up to see if maybe something obvious is wrong -- and there, right in the middle of the controller electronics, is a vacuum tube!

I knew this thing was a bit elderly, but I didn't think it was *that* old. I wonder how many other pieces of occasionally-used equipment are around here that still have vacuum tubes in them?

1. It's not really that good of an idea to let a toddler play with your car keys.

2. It's also not that good of an idea to let her play in the car while carrying said
keys, and you are standing outside.

3. It becomes a pretty bad idea if you don't remember that all of the keys to the car are now inside the car before she closes the door and hits the "lock" button.

She doesn't quite understand language well enough yet to take verbal directions, but fortunately she thought it was all a nice game, and kept poking and pulling at the various buttons and handles on the door in response to me pantomiming pressing the "unlock" button. After about 10 minutes she finally pulled the door handle and opened the door, just about the time S_ finally got hold of the car unlocking people on the phone. So, no ultimate harm done. Luckily, she didn't stick the keys in the ignition and start the car. Wouldn't *that* just have been the icing on the cake . . .