Quote of the Day

I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can be careless. But not men.

Don Corleone, instructing his son Michael in the movie The Godfather.

Ross and I watched this last night. What a fine movie. Last Sunday there was an ad in the paper for hearing aids (when is there ever a Sunday paper without ads for hearing aids?). They quoted some old guy saying "I can hear, but I just can't understand". I have the same problem. My wife and kids complained about it so much I went to see the doctor and he ran a hearing test on me and my hearing is fine. A little high frequency loss in the right ear, but nothing to worry about. Probably from shooting without ear plugs. I have this one Eastern European automatic that shoots a pretty hot cartridge. It makes a distinctive crack when fired and I really liked that sound. So that may be the source of the damage. But like the doc said, it's not significant. So I ask him what's going on and he tells me it's a common problem with men. It's not a problem with their ears, it's something in the part of the brain that processes sound.

So now we come back to The Godfather. Women and children are no more careless than men, it's just that they are careful about different things. What people say, how they say it, and the tone they use when saying these things, this is what's important to women and children. This is one of those things that makes society function. Some men tend to have different interests and different concerns. To them, the nuances of conversation are just meaningless fluff. If you have something to say, say it, don't give me all this jibber-jabber. Individual sounds become more important. Doors opening and closing. Wind and rain. Cars, gunshots, screams. Footsteps.

Groan

I can't drink cold water anymore. Actually, I can drink it, I just can't hold it in my mouth. If it comes in contact with my upper left teeth the pain is forthright. I thought it was a sinus infection getting ready to make my life miserable (there are sinuses in your cheekbones, well, in my cheekbones anyway), but then my wife pointed out that my dentist has been telling me that one of these days I am going to need a crown. Oh great, just what I want. I'm not sure if that is better or worse than a sinus infection. But it's only November, so my sinuses still have plenty of time to make my life miserable before the end of the year. Not that you care, it is, after all, a personal problem. I'll just go crawl in a corner now and curl up with my blankie.

The image is from the WebMD website, which has a pretty good slide show as well.

Rant of the Hour

The first time I saw this poem, I thought it was stupid. (It was probably in the movie G.I. Jane. That's were I get my literary edukatin'.) I saw a bunch of birds sitting on a wire on the way home this afternoon, and it popped into my head, so I decided I would tell you just how I felt about it. I still think it's stupid.

Self-pity

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

DH Lawrence

I mean, how does he know whether a wild thing is feeling sorry for itself or not? He can read their little animal minds? I don't think so. He is equating their lack of verbal communication with lack of feeling. Ignorant fool. Complete lack of imagination. I can imagine every one of those miserable critters feeling sorry for themselves, matter of fact, I think that's probably all they ever do. Wish I was warmer, wish I had more to eat, wish Mary liked me better, yada, yada, yada.

Hey, hold my beer and watch this!

I got a chuckle out of it.

Quote of the Day

"It is largely because of this similarity of diameter that the elements of the Isthmus can mingle to produce the materials we call alloys. Just as a grocer could, if artistry required, quite easily stack apples and oranges in the same pile but would find it difficult to stack oranges and melons together, so a metallurgist can mingle the atoms of the regions of the Isthmus, mixing chromium, manganese, nickel, or cobalt into iron to form the designer metals of the current age."

The Periodic Kingdom by P. W. Atkins, page 128. The Isthmus refers to the central section of the periodic table.

Lost In The Ozone Again

Every now and again I stop and clean out the drafts folder in my G-mail account. I tend to save bits of useless information there, you know, just in case I ever need to know the number of ball bearings produced in Uzbekistan in 1931. But just run of the mill web surfing seems to generate a few blank messages that never got sent. I mean, you have to draw the line somewhere, so every now and again I will go in and clear out the trash. So I'm going through my drafts folder and I come across this message:

I have probably spent a million hours playing computer games (2 hours a day times infinity). I got started playing Windows Solitaire at Intel. Graduated to playing Minesweeper, and when the new version of Windows came out, Spider Solitaire (2 decks). These last two I "win" fairly often, somewhere between one out of two and one out of ten. The original Solitaire, like the card version, almost never runs to completion. You get blocked somewhere along the way.

Recently I have been playing some of the games that Google offers for their home page. Some of the ones I enjoy are:
- Flood It
- Deduction Game
- Series of Tubes
- Linez

The main criteria for selection seems to be that it is easy to play: just use the mouse, no keys. Also, no finesse required, click or no click, no clicking on moving objects or other variable situations. And a definite solution.

Linez does not really have a definite solution, the game will "beat" you every time, all you can do is try to hold out as long as you can. Still, it is mildly entertaining.

For a while I would come home and play Spider Solitaire and listen to the "Kill Bill" sound track for an hour or so. That lasted for about a year, more or less. Currently I don't play just one game over and over, I play a variety, and I don't spend as long at it as I used to.

There was an episode on Star Trek once where a fellow is addicted to playing a "game". The game is embodied in a ball, slightly bigger that a softball, with a button and some lights. You press the button, the lights flash, and the game indicates whether you have won, or lost. Evidently this guy had made a fortune gambling on this device, and then his luck had changed and he had lost his fortune, but by now he is hooked and can't quit "playing" even though he continues to almost always loose.

I remember writing it like years ago, and I thought I posted it to my blog, but here it is showing up in my drafts folder and saying I accessed it nine days ago. No, I didn't. I haven't seen this message for eons. What the devil is going on? On the other hand, the Search function in Blogger seems to be working again. I'm wondering if Google's hashing algorithm has reached it's limit and we are now seeing the effects of wrap around, i.e. some items are getting assigned duplicate hash codes and so sometimes you get the wrong block of text back. Or maybe it's the North Koreans, though given this story, I am beginning to doubt their abilities, no matter what their fearless leader says.

Anyway, all this gives me an excuse to embed yet another YouTube un-video.

The song isn't much, and the singer is nothing special, but I really like the sound of the steel guitar and almost screechy sound made by the violin. You only hear the violin for a few seconds just before the one minute mark and then again towards the end.

Microfine

My wife was peeling an orange the other day, and every now and then a cloud of tiny particles would erupt from where she was working. It would only hang in the air for a second or so and then it would disappear. It didn't happen every time she tore a piece of peel, just on the bigger tears. I don't know whether it was particles of peel or juice. I tried taking a picture, but I was too late, and the camera was too slow.

I picked up a coffee mug to make myself a cup of tea and I noticed a line in the stain on the inside of the cup that could have been a hair. I knew it wasn't, it was too thin and it was the same color as all the other tea stain on the inside of the cup, but I couldn't restrain myself, so I wiped it with my thumb, and surprise, surprise! A big bunch of the "stain" got wiped away. This cup had just come out of the dishwasher. I got a paper towel and tried wiping away more of the stain and almost all of it came off. Not much of a stain, more like a film of superfine tea dust. I wanted some pictures, so I tried the same thing on a couple of other badly stained tea mugs, but no luck. Something about the micro structure of the surface perhaps.

My friend Marc and I were poking around in a pile of stuff he had acquired from an old tool & die shop. I found a large envelope marked as containing sandpaper with one micron grit. One micron?!?! You got to be kidding, so I open it up and pull out a sheet. It looks like paper, it even feels like paper. Well, I supposed it could be one micron grit, I mean how would you tell? There was a mold for making a curved plastic mirror there as well, and it was very smooth and shiny, just like a mirror. Is that how you get there? Cut, grind, file, and then sand, sand, sand with progressively finer sandpaper until you can't tell the difference?