Jeff's Lunchbreak

For Christmas, here's a poem my great uncle wrote and sent to a few of us last year. In case you're wondering on the choice of aircraft in the poem, he was writing it for all the guys based out of the same airfield as he is. If you want the full effect, you can read a scan of the original. (BTW, if you like the picture for this entry, click on it and support the AOPA's Air Safety Foundation by buying a Christmas card with that as the front, or pick one of their many other aviation themed cards.)

A Plane Christmas Greeting
by Bud Eichel

T'was the night before Xmas,
At Finleyville "Airdrome".
Not a creature was stirring,
Human, elf, or gnome.

All Aircraft secured,
In their Hangar "stalls".
The Xmas shoppers,
Home from the Malls.

From atop the Hangar,
The wind-sock hung low.
And bathed in moon-light,
The runway was aglow.

The rest of the field,
Was snowy and white.
This flyer's home-base,
Was a beautiful sight.

Then quick as a wink,
Dark shadows appeared.
Following moon-beams,
As they all neared.

Big ones and small,
These shadows all grew.
Twisting and turning
As by me they flew.

They made a "formation",
The shape of a "V".
Now as they pass,
They are plain to see.

Stearmans and Wacos,
A Stinson went by.
T-Crafts and Luscombes,
All on the fly!

Home-builts, a Mooney,
A new Carter-copter.
A Cessna amphibian,
An L-2 Grasshopper.

PT's and BT's,
From World War Two.
And old-style craft,
Like the Wright Bros. flew.

A "Cub" and a Grumman,
A sleek Monocoupe.
Can you believe this?
A pretty, '47 Ercoupe!

Aeroncas and Cessnas,
A Beech Musketeer.
Of all these Planes,
Not one, could I hear!

Are they "ghosts" of the past?
Am I tired and weary?
Wait, just a minute,
I have a theory!

That Angels exist,
I have no doubt.
And on Christmas Eve,
I'm sure they're about.

Did they take the form,
Of things that I love?
Is this my "gift",
From Heaven above?

If this was a gift,
I'd sure like to share.
Merry Christmas, to All,
I wish you were there!

Happy Holiday's, and Happy Landing's, to all my Pilot friends, & families.

No matter how you celebrate this time of year (or even if you don't celebrate at all), I still hope you have a good time.

Posted by Jeff on Thursday, Dec 22 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

It's that time of year when you can't go shopping without hearing the familiar ringing of bells being rung by the person standing next to the hanging red kettle, wishing you a Merry Christmas, grateful for any change you might have. I'd always given to the Salvation Army, usually more than just a bit of spare change, but now that I've begun paying attention to some of the criticisms of the organization, I wonder whether I want to support them.

First things first, the Salvation Army does a lot of good. Their thrift stores are well known, as well as their help to the needy. Perhaps slightly less well known are their disaster relief, rehabilitation centers, and homeless shelters, as well as a few programs I'm sure I've forgotten. And let me also dispel a prominent rumor. The bell ringers don't take a cut from the red kettle (see Snopes).

But, they're not without controversy. Keep in mind, the Salvation isn't just a charity. They're a church. They take positions on issues that would otherwise have nothing to do with their charity work. Take a look at this page on their site:

Salvation Army USA - Position Statements

They have positions on:

• Abortion
• Alcohol and Drugs
• Economic Justice
• Euthanasia
• Gambling
• Homosexuality
• Human Equality
• Human Trafficking
• Marriage
• Pornography
• Religious Persecution
• Suicide

Their positions are exactly what you'd expect from the religious right. For example, here's part of what they have to say about gambling.

The Salvation Army believes that gambling engages its participants and promoters in an exercise of greed contrary to biblical moral teaching. Gambling at best wastes personal resources, and at worst afflicts millions through a lifestyle of compulsive behaviors and destructive influences.

And just to show what they consider so bad:

Some examples of gambling include casino games, state lotteries, and betting on sports.

Moving on to something that's more of an active political discussion right now, here's part of their statement on homosexuality.

Scripture forbids sexual intimacy between members of the same sex. The Salvation Army believes, therefore, that Christians whose sexual orientation is primarily or exclusively same-sex are called upon to embrace celibacy as a way of life. There is no scriptural support for same-sex unions as equal to, or as an alternative to, heterosexual marriage.

And here's the beginning of their statement on marriage.

The Salvation Army affirms the New Testament standard of marriage, which is the loving union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others. Marriage is the first institution ordained by God (Genesis 2:24), and His Word establishes its significance (Matthew 19:4-6).

Now, if they just had position statements, as bad as they are, that would be one thing. But the Salvation Army actively works to support their positions. The most famous example from this country was when New York City passed the Equal Benefits Bill, requiring all organizations receiving public funds to provide the same benefits to "domestic partners" as they do to spouses. The Salvation Army threatened to quit receiving public funding rather than abide by the law, which would have in effect shut down the majority of their operations in the city.

Then, there are numerous local incidents - none which are officially supported by Salvation Army headquarters, but which are still rather widespread. Someone else has already covered this pretty well, so here's a link to their article on the issue:

ARISE - Do not donate to the Salvation Army

Here's just a sampling of some of those local incidents:

• Refusing to help a gay homeless couple
• Disposing of Harry Potter and Twilight toys because they were against Christian principles
• Destroying books they disagree with
• Turning away a transgender woman who subsequently died from the cold
• Turning away children of illegal immigrants

Aside from how their positions affect their own charitable donations, here's an example of them trying to 'steal' money from another charity. When H. Guy Di Stefano died, he wanted his estate to be split evenly between 8 charities. One of them, Greenpeace International, was absorbed by the Greenpeace Fund between the writing of the will and Di Stefano's death. The money that was to go to Greenpeace International was going to go to the Greenpeace Fund, and none of the other charities had a problem with that, except for the Salvation Army. They argued that because it wasn't the same charity named in the will, that the money should be split evenly between the 7 remaining charities. An agreement was reached, and The Army's lawsuit was dropped.

More Info:
Seattle Times - Salvation Army settles its dispute over Issaquah man's $33 million bequest

And then, there's their cult like treatment of officers in their church. They can only marry other officers in the church. And it's not an empty threat. A few years ago, they did terminate an officer when he became engaged to someone from outside the organization.

More Info:
Christian Post - Salvation Army Leader to Lose Job for Violating Marriage Policy

So, what's a person to do? I think it's up to the person and how they're realistically going to respond. It's not as if the Salvation Army is the only game in town. There are plenty of worthwhile charities that don't have such horrible positions. My wife and I already donate to several charities, but I've decided to donate just a little more to make up for what I used to put into the red kettles.

But, I do think the Salvation Army does much more good than harm. So, if the only way you would donate would be to drop your change into one of their kettles, then don't hold back! Most of your money will go to helping people, and it's better than doing nothing at all. So in that case, go ahead and give the Salvation Army your spare change.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Dec 7 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently wrote about the Oklahoma earthquake we felt here in Wichita Falls last Saturday night. Of course, there are people claiming it's a sign of the end times, which is a little silly, but this is the Bible Belt, after all.

The quake's been a topic of quite a few conversations here in Wichita Falls. Earlier this week, I had a dentist appointment. My dentist is pretty friendly, and we usually talk a bit about non-teeth related topics. He's never brought up religion with me before since that would be unprofessional, and given my views and the region I live in, I never make it a point to bring up religion myself. However, when we got to talking about the quake, he told me about the mental checklist he went through trying to figure out what was happening.

I can't remember his exact words, but he said that at first he thought it might have been the Rapture. Now, he wasn't exactly sure if was going to be taken, but he was pretty sure his wife was going to make the cut. So, when he looked over and saw her still sitting there, he knew that that couldn't have been it.

Anyway, I have no commentary. I just thought it was funny.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Nov 11 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

My wife & daughter and I were watching a movie on Netflix Saturday night, when I felt the couch start shaking a bit. At the same time, I noticed the TV shaking, and then looking around, saw the blinds shaking and a light flickering. There was also a lot of noise and some creaking, and I could hear the glasses rattling in our wine cabinet. My first thought was that a storm had just hit, since really powerful straight line winds that shake things up a bit aren't uncommon here. But this was a lot more shaking than that, especially on the ground floor since our house is built on a slab. I considered and immediately dismissed a tornado, since the sirens weren't going off. I even wondered if there had been a nearby explosion. By the time the shaking was done in about 5 seconds, though, I'd figured out what was going on.

It turns out, the largest earthquake to hit Oklahoma in recorded history happened on Saturday night, and we were close enough to feel it. The quake was centered near Sparks, which is about 150 miles from Wichita Falls, as the crow flies. According to Times Record News, "The USGS says the quake was shallow, about 3 miles deep. It was initially registered as 5.2 magnitude, but later upgraded to 5.6. It was the latest in a trio of tremors that struck Oklahoma Saturday."

The girl staying with us was up in her room studying at the time, and came running downstairs scared. I guess the shaking was worse on the second story. She said the ceiling fan was shaking pretty bad. But really, there wasn't any major damage - just a few slight cracks that maybe were already there and I just hadn't noticed before.

The quake did cause some more substantial damage to buildings in Oklahoma, but nothing I've seen that's truly catastrophic, and it doesn't look like anybody was seriously injured.

Earthquakes aren't unprecedented in Oklahoma. The Meers fault line runs through the state, causing on the order of 50 quakes a year. They're just not normally this strong.

So now I can check off an earthquake as something I've experienced. I realize that it was pretty minor, and people from California or other areas might not think much of it, but feeling a quake at all in Wichita Falls is something pretty out of the ordinary.

More Info:

• Times Record News - Quake rattles Wichita Falls
• NY Daily News - Oklahoma earthquake: 10 aftershocks follow 5.6 magnitude quake - strongest ever to hit state

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Nov 7 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are two great comics for Halloween. The first one, I'm pretty sure, is the original. Even with my left leaning tendencies, I've always found it pretty funny. The second is updated to turn the tables.

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Oct 31 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

A guy I work with was looking to buy a plane. He saw a few promising ads on craigslist, but his e-mail was down at the time, so he asked me to send a couple e-mails for him. About a month later, I finally got a response from one guy:

Sorry for the late response but I work in the US Air Force and it's very hard for me to reply faster. I wanted to let you know that the 1963 Cessna 172 Skyhawk is still available, i had a buyer but his loan did not get approved. The final price is $18,000 ,so if you are still interested please let me know ASAP.

Here is a link with more photos: mike-seamon.site40.net/Aircraft.Pictures

The plane was left to me by my father after he passed away last year. At this time the plane is in Olympia, WA in hangar on a private residence ,where my father lived. If you're not able to come pick this up, we can use Amazon Payments service to handle this deal. Let me know if you have any questions, for some reasons your previous email did not load on my screen.

Thank you,
Mike Seamon ,TSgt, USAF
375rd TRS/Det. 11
DSN 251-3397

My friend had already bought his plane by then, but I've been dreaming of owning a plane for years, and $18,000 for a 172 seemed like a hell of a deal. Of course, there's the old saying that if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is, but I still thought I'd look into it, even if just for curiosity. So, I sent the guy an e-mail asking for more info and a number to call him at. Here's the response I got.

Hi Jeff, this 1963 Cessna 172 Skyhawk is in excellent condition, never been involved in any kind of accidents, clean and clear title, no mechanical problems, no rust, no leaks, power options all functional and it will need nothing in the near future. I'm the owner of the aircraft but i don't really know the technical details, i'm not a pilot and i never used it, I inherited it from my father who took great care of this aircraft. It is a IFR certified ,constant speed propeller. All the details that i have from the Cessna you can find here: mike-seamon.site40.net/Aircraft.Pictures/Aircraft_description

I want to sell it because I don't have use for it and I could use some quick cash right now, rather than waiting for a better offer (selling takes a lot of time too... and time is money). So I'm willing to let it go for $18,000 , First come, First served.

We are in a dgt training mission here in Montana until 10th of November and i can't meet you to do the deal in person, but I have some great news for you.The shipping will take 7-10 days thru uShip and it will be free anywhere in USA, my previous buyer already paid for it and uShip didn't want to refund him so I have the aircraft sealed at a local shipping company that work with uShip, ready to be shipped out. If we cannot meet face2face I would like to use Amazon Payments purchase protection to take care of this deal, smooth and safe.

Let me know if you have any other questions, hope i didn't miss anything, if we use Amazon Payments program this is not a sight unseen deal anymore.


Thank you,
Mike Seamon ,TSgt, USAF
375rd TRS/Det. 11
DSN 251-3397

Wait. What? An airplane, sealed in a container ready to ship? Who in their right mind would buy an airplane without first performing a full inspection? I mean, I wouldn't even buy a car without looking it over first, and maintenance on an airplane is far more important.

Well, my wife thought the whole thing sounded fishy, too, so she did some digging, and found this page on a forum:
So they scam in planes too

Turns out that the whole thing's a scam. Oh well, it's like I wrote above - if an offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Oct 21 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Summer's over, and the 10 day forecast has reasonable temperatures out till October 20th, so I think it's safe to assume that there aren't going to be any more heat wave records set this year, which makes now a good time to recap what records were set this year. In short, this was the hottest summer on record for Wichita Falls, combined with one of the worst droughts on record (with the potential to become the worst). Here are a few of the stats for this past summer and some of the records. All temps are Fahrenheit.

Stats:

• The average temperature for June, July, and August was 91.9º, compared to 88.5º for the previous record, the summer of 1980.
• Between June, July, and August, there were only 4 days where the temperature didn't reach at least 100º.

Records:

• Most consecutive days over 100º - 52
• Most total days over 100º - 100
• 2nd, 3rd, and 6th most consecutive days over 105º - 16, 11, & 9
• Most total days over 105º - 66
• 2nd most consecutive days over 110º - 4
• Most total days over 110º - 12
• Most consecutive days over 95º - 73
• Most total days over 95º - 115
• Most consecutive days over 90º - 100
• 4th most total days over 90º - 137

Temperature Data Source (with a lot more info):
National Weather Service

The drought has been bad. According to Weather Underground, in June, July, and August, we got a total of 0.47" of rain, with absolutely no rain in July. We got just over half an inch in September, and just this past weekend we finally got 2.83". But there's still a lot more rain to go to get us back up to where we should be.

The heat wave and drought have been statewide, and have led to some pretty bad fires. The worst was the Bastrop County Complex fire. It burned from September 4th through the 30th, killed two people, destroyed 1600 homes and 34,000 acres of land, and caused around $250 million of insured property damage. A little closer to home for me was the fire I blogged about in August, where from my front door I watched the helicopter dropping water. Luckily, that fire caused minimal property damage, unlike so many of the other fires Texas has experienced this year.

So, it's been one hell of a hot summer here in Wichita Falls. Maybe one day I'll be able to tell my grand kids about the summer of 2011. Or maybe with global warming, this could be the start of a trend.

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Oct 11 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This was the view from my front yard yesterday afternoon*:

(Click to embiggen)

There was a pretty big fire right on the edge of our development. According to police spokesman, Sgt. Joe Snyder, the fire threatened 100 houses at its worst, but thankfully in the end only caused minor damage to the siding of two houses. Around 25 acres were charred when it was all over. 20 residents were evacuated, but none were injured. Four firefighters were treated for heat exhaustion, after which they jumped right back into the thick of it fighting the fire.

We heard about the fire while we were out shopping, so we almost immediately returned back home to see what was going on. At that point, there were plumes of black smoke that we could see from a few miles away, and right near the entrance to the development, there were flames 20-30 feet high (by my estimate - my wife thinks they were higher, but it's also possible we could both be overestimating due to our excitement). The main entrance was closed, so we had to take the back way in. The picture above shows how close the fire was to our house - close enough to be a bit concerned, but not anywhere near as concerned as the people living in the houses that were evacuated. At one point, when the wind shifted, it got a little hazy around our house from the smoke, but most of the time the wind was blowing the smoke just north of us.

The helicopter showed up a little while after we got home, and by that point, the smoke wasn't nearly as bad. The helicpter stayed for around an hour or so making several dumps. Here are a couple more photos of it:

(Click to embiggen)

(Click to embiggen)

From what I've heard, the best guess is that the fire started when an electrical transformer exploded. With as dry as it's been here, those sparks were enough to start the fire. Whether the transformer did actually start the fire or not, we were without power for several hours. With the heat wave here, it was starting to get pretty stuffy.

Thankfully, the firefighters were able to get the fire under control and prevent any major damage or injuries. And the power company was able to restore power within a couple hours of being allowed on site.

So, to the firefighters and utility workers who worked in the 106º heat to save our houses and give us our power back, I want to express my sincere and deepest gratitude.

More Info:

• News Channel 6 - Firefighters Battle Flames at Tanglewood Drive
• Times Record News - Times Record News - 100 homes threatened by Tanglewood fire

*Okay, technically, that was the view from my next door neighbor's yard - the tree in the bottom right of the photo blocked the view from our yard.

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Aug 22 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, the record setting streak had to come to an end some time. The high temperature in Wichita Falls this past Saturday was only 93ºF, breaking a string of 52 consecutive days where the temperature had exceeded 100ºF. The previous record, set back in 1980, was 42 days. The summer's not over, yet, though, and we're probably still in for some more scorchers, so there are still a few more heat related records to be had, such as most total days over 100º in one year (we'll probably break that one today).

More Info: NOAA - Heat Wave and Summer Temperature Data for Wichita Falls

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Aug 15 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day, just after I had gotten home and gotten out of the car, I heard a rustling in the bushes in front of our house. My first thought was that it was the cats, but I realized that our cats aren't clumsy enough to make that much noise. So, I took a step back, and waited to see what would come out.

It's a bit hard to tell from the grainy photo from my cell phone, but that's an armadillo. I've seen a few dozen armadillos, but what makes that one unique, after my having lived in Texas for nearly ten years, is that it's alive. Honestly, every single armadillo I've seen before this one (not counting zoos), has been roadkill. It probably has something to do with me living and working inside the city limits, but I've seen living bobcats, coyotes, skunks, possums, rabbits, beavers, foxes, raccoons, deer, bats, and plenty of other animals, but never a live armadillo.

I followed this one around the neighborhood for about 10 or 15 minutes before it finally went through a neighbor's backyard into a strip of trees. My daughter just missed seeing it, but at least heard it rustling in the woods.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, May 6 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Growing up, I had two friends that I met in kindergarten, and we remained very close throughout elementary and middle school. When I moved to Maryland at the start of high school, we stayed in touch for a while, making several back and forth visits, but we began drifting apart, until eventually we lost contact. A little over a year ago, I joined Facebook, and discovered that one of them, Alex Uba, was also a member. So, we contacted each other then, but after so many years, there wasn't much to say, and our friendship went back to silence.

A little while ago, I found out that Alex died just a few months after our latest contact. I was shocked. After so little contact over the years, you'd think it would have lessened the impact, but it still hit me hard. I guess I'd always maintained some hope that the next time I made it up to my hometown, I'd give him a call and get together for a few beers. Hell, I still have his old phone number memorized, which I thought might still be his parents' number, so I envisioned giving them a surprise call out of the blue. I'd even occasionally have dreams where our old group met up. Now, I guess I can go look for his grave to pay my respects.

I was flooded with childhood memories of all the things we'd done together. We went through Cub Scouts together, then Boy Scouts. We went camping together nearly every month, shared tents, had the same cabin at summer camp. One year, at the end of the week pool competition, he, the other kindergarten friend, and I won the three person human raft swim race. I helped him on his Eagle Scout project. I went to his birthday party every year, and he always came to mine. I slept over at his house more nights than I could count. In elementary school, we made fun of his name calling him Uba the Tuba, and they made fun of me calling me deaf Jeff. His family took me along to Sunnybrook pool for years when they had a membership, and then we swam at his house once they got their own pool (Sunnybrook Pool has since been filled in). I rode my bike over to his house. We rode around in the go kart that his dad built for him. We towed each other on sleds behind the old used snow mobile his dad fixed up. We flew kites in the field behind his house. We played backyard football and kill the carrier. We even invented our own game that we called Spanish football. I remember the time we bought little balsa wood airplanes and flew them in the field across the street from his house, mixing and matching parts to customize our planes. He loved golf, and took me to a real golf course for one of only two times in my life I've ever played 18 holes. We went to Waltz for miniature golf, the driving range, and the par 3 course. I even caddied for him for a tournament one time. We bowled at Jay Lanes. He played baseball. I didn't, but I'd still be the catcher for him so he could practice his pitching when we played catch. He didn't like his one neighbor, so one night, along with another friend, we toilet papered their trees, threw crabapples into their pool, and tied toilet paper bows around their cars. We fessed up the next morning and had to clean it all up. He found his dad's girlie magazine stash in the attic, and we used to thumb through those every chance we got. We played Hardball and 4th and Inches on our Commodore 64s until our thumbs hurt. They took me to Dorney Park a few times every summer. We went trick or treating together, saving the Huff's house for last, where we always went in for cookies and hot apple cider. He built models, and had his best on display up on his dresser. We were both in the band - I played trombone and he played clarinet. We played tennis together the year one of the middle school teachers tried to start a tennis clinic. We went to the same church, and were in the same CCD class. We went through First Reconciliation, First Communion and Confirmation together. We were both altar boys, and served together a few times, though he usually served on Saturday night, and I usually served Sunday morning. There was one time when a new altar boy combined the two collections into one sack, and me and Alex tried to split it back up again, only to get caught by the deacon just as we were finishing and scolded not to mix up the money between the two (we never told him it was all screwed up to begin with). We'd even snack on the non-consecrated wafers. I remember the time we used a Ouija board, and we were amazed at how well it worked, until we asked it which one of us was the coolest. Most of all, I remember a good friend, and I can't believe he's gone.

Knowing how I feel after not having seen Alex for 15 years, my heart goes out to his parents, his sister, and his wife that I never met. Alex, you will be missed terribly.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Apr 13 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Fastnacht Day is once again upon us. I'll be busy making fastnachts tomorrow morning in celebration. Since I don't have anything new to say from last year, or the year before, I'll just quote that entry one more time.

Depending on where you are in the world, you may call tomorrow something else, like Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day. But from where I'm from in Pennsylvania, it's called Fastnacht Day. Traditionally, you make potato based donuts, called fastnachts, supposedly as a way to empty your larder of all the fatty, sugary foods in preparation for the Lenten fast. My elementary school even used to give out donuts with the lunches on this day. So, in celebration of Fastnachts, here's a recipe on my main site on how to make fastnachts, and a link to the (not so thorough) Wikipedia article.

You're supposed to wake up early to make the fastnachts on Tuesday morning (they're freshest that way), but I usually make them the night before. They keep pretty well in a brown paper lunch bag. I also like to put a little bit of powdered sugar into a ziploc bag, and a mix of granulated sugar and cinnamon into another one, to coat the fastnachts just before eating them.

Doughnut Picture from Wikimedia Commons

Added 2011-03-08 - I brought my fastnachts in to share at work today. The people who were here last year remember them from then, but almost all of the new people hadn't heard of them. Anyway, to see just how popular they are back up in Pennsylvania, go read this article. Look at those pictures, and just how many fastnachts they're making. And according to this article, bakers in Hagerstown started baking on Sunday night to meet today's demand.

A guy from Chicago mentioned a similar tradition up there - paczkis, from the Polish immigrants. But instead of a hole in the middle like my family's fastnachts (not all fastnachts have the hole), they have a filling, usually jelly or creme. I guess lots of groups have invented traditions to allow indulgence before a 40 day fast.

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Mar 7 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is National Margarita Day (it's also National Cook a Sweet Potato Day, but that's not as much fun to celebrate). The origin of the margarita isn't exactly known. There are many stories, but most place it some time in the '30s or '40s in Mexico or the southwestern U.S., particularly Texas (more info 1, more info 2). It's currently the most popular mixed drink in the U.S.

If you want a way to celebrate at home, my wife has two very good variants.
Irmarita
Beer Margarita

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Feb 22 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day talking to my daughter, she asked me about something I didn't know the answer to. So, I told her I was going to look it up on Wikipedia. She instantly told me I shouldn't do that, because you can't trust Wikipedia. Her teachers had told her so. So, after a little back and forth, I told her I'd give her some information she could take to her teachers to show them that Wikipedia wasn't so bad. What I wrote was largely recycling of a comment I left in the entry, Origin of Arabic Numerals - Was It Really for Counting Angles?, but cleaned up a bit. I figured that I'd repost that cleaned up version here in its own entry.

Wikipedia, for anyone unfamiliar with it, is an online encyclopedia. Its unique characteristic is that it’s open to be edited by anybody. This open policy certainly raises suspicions about its quality. However, in practice, it ends up being fairly reliable.

There was a study conducted by Nature in 2005, comparing Wikipedia to Encyclopædia Britannica Online. While Wikipedia was a little less accurate, it wasn't even by an order of magnitude. You have to have a subscription to Nature or pay $32 to read the original article, but cnet has a summary. Nature chose several topics at random, and asked experts to review the Britannica and Nature articles on those topics. Here's how cnet summarized the findings.

In the end, the journal found just eight serious errors, such as general misunderstandings of vital concepts, in the articles. Of those, four came from each site. They did, however, discover a series of factual errors, omissions or misleading statements. All told, Wikipedia had 162 such problems, while Britannica had 123.

That averages out to 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia.

Not surprisingly, considering that Britannica makes money by selling encyclopedias, they contested the study. Nature, for its part, has responded to Britannica's criticisms. You can read Britannica's criticisms and Nature's response by going to Nature's page for the article (unlike the original article, those portions are free).

One common complaint I’ve heard regarding Wikipedia is the problem of referencing it as a source when it's constantly changing. In fact, you can reference static versions of pages that will never change. You simply go to the ‘Toolbox’ section in the left hand column of an article, and choose ‘Permanent Link’. This allows one to see exactly what version of a page someone was using as a source. Here’s an example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Archaeopteryx&oldid=414360746

Wikipedia is also much better about referencing and citations than it was in its early days. You can scroll to the bottom of an article and go to the original sources yourself, if so inclined. If you're planning on doing in depth analysis of a topic, Wikipedia can be a good starting point for this reason.

Wikipedia does share one problem with information sources in general – they all contain mistakes. There's no simple way to get 100% accurate information. It's up to every individual to evaluate information from any given source, and compare it to other sources. In fact, this is one of the reasons why I like Wikipedia. Conventional print encyclopedias have a hidden editorial process. Wikipedia puts it out there in the open, making it easier to evaluate information on the more controversial topics.

In my own personal experience, I've found Wikipedia to be pretty reliable, especially on non-controversial or apolitical topics. The revision history and links to sources make it easier to evaluate the reliability of the content. Wikipedia is usually the first place I go to when researching a topic I’m not already familiar with.

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Feb 21 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This isn't the type of story I usually tell on this blog, but it was too good to pass up. It happened to a couple of friends of mine. I've changed the names of those involved, but everything else happened just like I've told it (or, as accurately as I comprehended and retold it).

Bob and Mary have been having a lot of problems recently - burglaries, harassing phone calls, identity theft, having utilities shut off, etc. They couldn't figure out who they might have pissed off to harass them so much. They've finally figured out who was doing it.

Mary's last name is Smith. There just happens to be a Marianne Smith living nearby who also goes by Mary. Bob and Mary owned a green Windstar minivan. Marianne had been dating some guy who had a green Windstar minivan. This guy left Marianne for Angela Jackson for a while, and then left Angela to go back to Marianne. Angela was none too happy about losing this guy, so she started harassing Marianne. It was bad enough that Marianne moved twice trying to get away from this lady. Well, I guess that after Marianne's latest move, Angela found a house with a green Windstar minivan in the driveway that belonged to Mary Smith, and figured she'd found Marianne, and that's when all the trouble started for Bob and Mary.

They finally got it all figured out when Mary learned that someone at the casino was winning jackpots in her name. After the casino looked into it, they realized that their system was confusing her with Marianne Smith, probably because Marianne hadn't given them her SSN. Anyway, once they realized the mixup and talked to Marianne, Bob and Mary got the full story. Apparently, Marianne even got a phone call asking her if she was going to miss her laptop, right after Bob and Mary's had been stolen. It also looks like Angela was the one responsible for their identity theft, thinking she was stealing from Marianne.

So, this Angela finally got caught going too far. It seems she went to a bar looking for Marianne, and was arrested and charged with aggravated assault. She's looking at 20 years. Even with parole, she won't be able to bother anyone for a while.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Feb 4 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, I finally upgraded my phone. I was extremely happy with my old phone when I first got it, but technology has advanced quite a bit in that time. So, my wife and I decided to get each other early Christmas presents. We'd already pretty much decided to stick with AT&T (I won't get into the details of that decision). So, my debate was over the iPhone 4 (which I've blogged about previously) or one of the Android phones. I played around with all of them at the store, and they seemed really close in capabilities, so I decided to just go with the one that most of my friends already had so that I could ask them how to use it - the iPhone.

So far, I really like it. It does a lot of things really well. I browse the web a lot more than I ever did on my old phone, and the games are more fun, too. But it's definitely not perfect. And, since this is my blog, it's my duty to gripe about it here. Granted, I knew about some of these issues before getting the phone, and some I would have realized if I'd given it a bit of thought, but they're things Apple could change to make the phone even better.

Hardware Issues

1. No Keyboard I really hate typing on the iPhone. Touch screen keyboards don't have any tactile feedback, so you have to go really slowly to make sure you position your fingers just right before pressing the screen (and the autocorrect is no help – it changes things I meant to type more often than it fixes mistakes). I don't know how easy it would be to make an iPhone available with a keyboard, but I'd definitely have bought that one if they'd offered it as an option.
2. No Stylus It's nice that Apple made the iPhone to be able to do so much with just your fingers, but every once in a while, fingers are just too bulky. Even if you're not going to include an actual stylus with the phone, at least make the screen sensitive to where I can use my own stylus (which was usually the back of my mechanical pencil with the Tilt).
3. No Phone Button This is a phone. Give me a button that I can press that takes me directly to the phone function without having to go through all the menus to get there, and that I can just tap again to call the last number dialed. Every phone I had before the iPhone did that. It's such a simple thing, and lets me dial my wife while I'm driving without having to take my eyes off the road. Another button to cycle through a quick-dial would be nice, too. For a cell phone that people will use while driving, you really should be able to dial common numbers by feel without having to look at the phone.
4. #*&! Proprietary Plug The universal serial bus was designed more than a decade ago. Practically every device I buy for my computer now hooks up through one of the standard USB plugs. Except the iPhone. Apparently, Apple thinks they're too good to follow industry standards. So if I ever lose the damn cable to hook up the phone to my computer, I have to go buy a new one from Apple, instead of just grabbing one of the regular USB cables I have lying around.

Software Issues

1. iTunes Practically every other device I own, I can just plug into my computer, and Windows treats it like a removeable drive, from camcorders to other phones to the Kindle. I use the standard Windows interface to just drag and drop files between the device and the computer. Apple forces me to use a bloated media player (that I don't use for anything else except occasionally buying music, then immediately burning it to a CD that I can rip with Media Player), that doesn't even run properly on my work computer because they don't support XP 64.
2. No Real WMA Support I have a pretty sizeable music collection - around 10 GB worth. I'm sure other people have more, but that's still a decent chunk out of my hard drive. Most of that is in wma format, from when I ripped my CD collection onto my computer. But the iPhone doesn't play wma files. iTunes can convert wma files to a format the phone can use, but that basically doubles the size of my music library on my hard drive. Plus, it means a second round of compression, resulting in a loss of quality. It shouldn’t be hard to play wma files – the CD player I got for my RX-7 seven years ago could do it.
3. No Auto-Complete when Dialing This is such a simple thing to do. My three year old Tilt did it. When I start dialing a number, the phone should give me a list of numbers that could be the one I'm dialing, sorted by how often I call them. It's so much quicker to just type in a couple numbers and then pick the autocomplete, than to go to the contacts folder and search for the person I want to call.
4. No Arrow Keys It's bad enough typing without a real keyboard, but Apple doesn't even provide arrow keys on the soft keyboard. Just imagine that you're well into a text message, when you notice a mistake back towards the beginning. Remember my complaint about not having a stylus? It's a pain to try to 'click' onto the right spot with a fingertip to put the cursor where you want to make the change (the magnifying glass makes it a little better, but it's still cumbersome). Four little arrow keys would make revising text so much easier.

Social Issues

1. Apple's just really not all that nice of a company. From their lack of charitable contributions, to their overreaction to leaks, to their censorship of apps, to their sneaky installation of software, Apple's a pretty sleazy company. Now, I know that a lot of companies are sleazy to some level - it just goes along with capitalism - but Apple seems particularly bad. Here are a few articles to give you an idea of just how bad.
   • 5 Reasons You Should Be Scared of Apple
   • Is Apple evil?
   • 5 Things Apple Must Do to Look Less Evil
   • Is Apple more evil than Microsoft?

So, after a few weeks with the phone, those are my biggest complaints. Maybe I'll find work-arounds for some of these issues as I use the phone more, and maybe I'll get more accustomed to things like the touch screen keyboard. On the other hand, I may find more things to complain about.

Remember, though, that this was a one sided review. I really do like the phone, and I use it a lot. However, when it comes time to upgrade again in another few years, I'm sure there will be a phone that fixes all these problems (well, at least the hardware and software issues), and that's the one I'll probably buy. If they're smart, Apple will make sure it's their's.

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Jan 4 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Today marks the 5th anniversary of this blog. It's hard to believe I've been doing it this long, and writing something new most those many weeks. So, I think I'll take a moment and reflect on the last half decade.

The blog has definitely grown to more than what I'd thought it was going to be. I'd originally intended for it to be a place where I could post short entries without doing any real research on what I was writing about, a place to rant and rave without soiling my main site, which I'd intended to keep updating regularly. It hasn't really worked out that way. The blog has pretty much taken over the site. My entries range from the short rants I'd originally intended, to multi-page, well researched articles. Now I'm doing good if I update the old static portion of this site once per year. (It's official - my blog is more important than my static pages. The Google PageRank for the home page of the static site is 3, while the PageRank for the blog home page is 4.)

If there's one overarching theme that I think I've focused on the most, I'd have to say that it's skepticism. Whether discussing religion, politics, or debunking urban legends, my main focus has been trying to determine the truth about those issues. I haven't been entirely dispassionate, but I haven't really ranted and raved as much as I'd expected I was going to (maybe that's why my blog isn't as popular as certain other sites, or, at least, that's what I'll keep telling myself).

If I may say so, I think the weekly practice has improved my writing somewhat. I'm still a little rushed posting some entries, so there are still plenty of typos and places where my wording could have been better. But looking back over some of my older entries, I see a lot of places where I'd change them if I were to post them today.

Actually, looking over the past entries, I'm a little surprised at the quantity of output. I thought it might be kind of neat to throw together a compendium of all my entries and publish it through Lulu (even if noone else wanted to buy it, at least I'd have a nice printed and bound copy). So, I started copying and pasting all of my entries into a book, and it ended up being over 800 pages long (10 point Times New Roman on 5.5" x 8.5" pages with 0.5" margins). Granted, some of that is comments left by others, but I hadn't realized I'd written so much.

So, let's do some quick tallies. My total number of blog entries (excluding this one) is 332. As of today, I've received 351 legitimate comments and 1 legitimate trackback (assuming I haven't missed deleting any spam). Someone like PZ Myers may post more entries than that in a single month, and get more comments than that for a single entry, but I'm pretty happy with it. I still get excited every time I get an e-mail telling me that a new comment's been posted (though with the amount of spam comments, I don't get super excited until I can tell the comment's legitimate). I even have at least one semi-regular reader who's not my mom.

I suppose I ought to list a few highlights from the past five years worth of entries. So, in chronological order, here are a few posts that either I like quite a bit myself, or that have gotten quite a bit of traffic (or both).

• A Meandering Tale About Fundamentalism This is the entry that started it all. Technically, I had two entries before this, but they were basically just announcements that I was starting a blog.
• Probability Disproves Evolution, or Bees Can't Fly This isn't a very long entry, and it doesn't get a whole lot of traffic, but I like it.
• Physical Comparison of Humans to Other Animals I used to have the impression that us humans were physically pathetic compared to other animals, and it was our ingenuity that was responsible for our success. But really, we're fairly average, and even excel at some things.
• Knowledge for Knowledge's Sake Very short, but I really like it.
• Creation Museum/Creationist Rule of Thumb with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics Although it doesn't get much traffic now, this was one of my first entries that brought in a lot of readers (mainly because I advertised it on a blog carnival).
• My Hundredth Blog Entry & An Announcement It took me a little while to get the courage to post this one - this was the entry where I came out with my atheism.
• A Skeptical Look at Masai Barefoot Technology Shoes This is far and away my most popular blog entry.
• Review of the Lucy's Legacy Exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science This was pretty popular for a while when the exhibit was still in Houston.
• When Will There Be an Aircraft in Every Garage? An entry where I brought to of my passions together - aviation and skepticism.
• How to Spot an E-mail Hoax Everyone should read this.
• The Universe Is Big Go to this entry and click on the picture. It's worth it.
• War on Christmas Actually, I'm proud of the little graphic on that one - I stole the Santa, but did the cross hairs myself.
• Review of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed A review of a truly horrible 'documentary'. It's the only topic on this blog that's gotten me angry enough to drop the F-bomb (and after reading that entry again, it was entirely deserved).
• Origin of Arabic Numerals - Was It Really for Counting Angles? This one gets a lot of visitors every month.
• Ray Comfort - Still Ignorant on Evolution Out of all the times I wrote about Ray Comfort, I think this is the best.
• Interstellar Potatoes Because I really, really like potatoes.
• Response to Anti-Liberal Article by Gary Hubbell This is probably the most popular of my political entries.
• The Texas Republican Platform, or Why I'm Not a Republican combined with The 2010 Texas Republican Platform I don't think people realize just how wacky the Texas Republican Party is.

As to where the blog's going in the future, I think I've pretty much found my rhythm, so I don't expect there to be much change. I'll keep on looking skeptically at religion, debunking urban legends, and spending more time than I should on the creation/evolution controversy. Hopefully I'll come up with some new posts that can educate some people, and maybe if I'm lucky, I'll even pick up a few more regulars.

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Dec 7 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I hate Black Friday. It ruins a good holiday, and contributes to the crass commercialization of another.

Thanksgiving Day should be a day to pause and reflect on all that's good in your life, to take a day to appreciate what you have. It's a day to be with your family. You should be able to stay up to the wee hours of the morning talking and reminiscing.

Thanksgiving Day should not be the eve of a shopping spree. We shouldn't worry about cutting Thanksgiving short so that we can wake up early enough to go buy that new plasma TV, or spend Thanksgiving night waiting in line. Or even worse, as happened to us this year, we shouldn't skip visiting family because the stores in their town don't have as good of sales as the stores in another town.

I don't foresee there being any change to Black Friday anytime soon, but damn I wish it would just go away.

Oh well, enough complaining. I'll spend some time reflecting tomorrow, and I will enjoy the time I'll spend with my family and friends.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Nov 24 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

It seems to be a common perception that America right now is a litigious society. Just google the term, and the first two pages (I didn't go any further) bring up all types of pages confirming this view.

How true is it, really? I'm in aviation, so I know how much liability lawsuits have hurt general aviation. And my wife is in the medical field, so I know how much malpractice insurance costs doctors. (On the flip side, since she works on an Air Force base, where the military culture makes it very, very difficult for patients to sue, I've heard all types of stories of malpractice that go unpunished.)

It seems that what most people base their view on are anecdotes of the most frivolous cases that have gone to court, and even then, sometimes the anecdotes are oversimplifications of the real event. Consider the lady who spilled hot coffee in her lap and sued McDonald's. As usually told in urban legend form, the story says the lady spilled her coffee while driving. In reality, she was the passenger, and the car was stopped when she spilled it while trying to add cream and sugar. The coffee was hot enough that she received 3rd degree burns, and was hospitalized for over a week. Additionally, McDonald's had already received over 700 complaints from others who had received 3rd degree burns from the coffee, and had covered hospital expenses totaling over $500,000 for other burn victims. The lady only sued McDonald's after they refused to cover her $11,000 hospital bill. And, what looked to be the final punitive damages before she and McDonald's settled out of court was only $480,000, not $2.7 million as often cited. I'm not arguing for one side or the other here, just showing that there's more to the case than is usually told.

Additionally, because it's the frivolous cases that have the most emotional appeal, they're the stories that get repeated. You don't often here about the cases that show the system working like it should. I'll give an example. The girlfriend of a friend of mine was recently sued. The background is that she had a verbal agreement with a company to create some spreadsheets for them, which she did. Another guy was contracted by the company to network their computers, which he did. However, right after all this computer work, the employee for the company who had basically given them the jobs skipped out of town with money stolen from the company. Around the same time, the company's computers became infected with viruses. The company owner suspected my friend's girlfriend and the networking guy of being in cahoots with the crook, so they refused to pay them and got the police to investigate. The police did investigate, and found no evidence of any wrongdoing on their part. Additionally, they found that the company's computers didn't have antivirus software, so they were at huge risk of infection. Well, the company owner wasn't happy with the results of the police investigation, so she sued my friend's girlfriend and the networking guy. When all the facts came out and it was clear that neither defendant was at fault, the judge not only ruled in their favor, but forced the company owner to pay each of them the money she'd withheld before, along with gas money to get them to the courthouse (it was an hour away), and lost revenue for the day of work they were missing.

A Snopes article dealing with a list of supposed frivolous lawsuits gives examples of several real frivolous lawsuits. In all the real lawsuits that Snopes listed, the plaintiffs all lost, and in one case, was forced to pay 75% of the legal fees associated with that case.

So, as to whether we live in a litigious society, it all depends on how you want to look at it. It seems pretty easy to sue for whatever you want to sue for, and it seems easy to find a lawyer willing to take your case. But, it's not as easy to actually win lawsuits, and you may end up being the one who has to pay if your lawsuit is too frivolous.

Added 2010-07-22 Okay, after thinking about this a bit, I realize I haven't done enough research to say how many people are actually winning frivolous lawsuits. It may be a problem. However, I still feel pretty confident that most people are biased by hearing anecdotes of the worst cases, and particularly by urban legends of cases that never happened, or exaggerations or over simplifications of actual cases.

Posted by Jeff on Thursday, Jul 15 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, I don't have anything really substantive for this week. I did leave two decent comments, though, in response to visitors. First is a discussion of why humans should be considered apes. Second is a bit of politics in response to a guy who didn't like my response to Gary Hubbell's anti-liberal article.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Jul 9 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I like potatoes. A lot. I half jokingly tell people that I'm glad I was born after Europeans discovered the New World, or else I wouldn't get to eat potatoes. But, if I'd been born a thousand years ago, I wouldn't have known what I was missing. And that got me to thinking - what foods might we discover in the future that I'm missing out on, now. Most of the surface of Earth has been explored (if not by Europeans, at least by other cultures), so most of the good foods on this planet have probably already been discovered. But what about if we ever start exploring other planets? What might we find then? And that got me thinking some more - would we even be able to eat what we found on other planets. Of course, we'd probably be able to chew it and pass it through our digestive tracts, but how nutritious would it be? I don't know enough about biology to know the answer, but how flexible are our digestive systems? Are they tuned to the molecules created by the DNA based life here on Earth? I know that we need to consume certain molecules, such as vitamin C for example, because our bodies can't synthesize them on their own (so we'd probably need Earthly supplements for those). But for the molecules that we can synthesize, can we just use matter in any form, or does it already need to be assembled in a form that we can use?

Maybe this doesn't really matter for my culinary question. Since we're talking about the future here, by the time that humans have the technology to travel to other planets, we'll probably have the technology to engineer gut microbes to digest that food for us. Maybe I should go crygenically freeze myself, and get thawed out every thousand years or so to see what new and delicious foods are in humanity's pantry.

Added 2010-03-09 After I wrote this entry, I sent off the same question to a friend of mine who happens to be a biologist. Here was his response.

Good question. Actually its funny that you asked me this now because my lecture on Monday is on digestion. My short and unsatisifying answer is it depends. First, it would depend on whether alien life is carbon based. If it is, I think that there is a very good chance we could digest it unless it is in forms that our digestive enzymes cannot break down, like cellulose. In order to use the nutrients that are in the food we eat, we must break them down into molecules that are small enough that they can be absorbed. In other words, we can't directly use proteins, lipids, and complex carbohydrates, but if we break them down we can reassemble their components into the forms that we need. The enzymes we use to break down what we eat (like amylase that breaks down starch and glycogen) ARE tuned in, as you put it, to the types of food that we eat. So if alien life had some sort of complex chemistry that we do not have the enzymes to process then we would not be able to digest it. The second issue is whether it was somehow toxic, which seems to me to be reasonably likely. If alien life had a different balance of elements, which I assume it would (unless it is derived from the same origin as life on earth, which is possible) I think the chances are good that some of them would be toxic to our systems.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Mar 5 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, it's that time of year again - Fastnacht Day is tomorrow. Since I don't have anything new to say from last year, I'll just quote last year's blog entry.

Depending on where you are in the world, you may call tomorrow something else, like Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day. But from where I'm from in Pennsylvania, it's called Fastnacht Day. Traditionally, you make potato based donuts, called fastnachts, supposedly as a way to empty your larder of all the fatty, sugary foods in preparation for the Lenten fast. My elementary school even used to give out donuts with the lunches on this day. So, in celebration of Fastnachts, here's a recipe on my main site on how to make fastnachts, and a link to the (not so thorough) Wikipedia article.

You're supposed to wake up early to make the fastnachts on Tuesday morning (they're freshest that way), but I usually make them the night before. They keep pretty well in a brown paper lunch bag. I also like to put a little bit of powdered sugar into a ziploc bag, and a mix of granulated sugar and cinammon into another one, to coat the fastnachts just before eating them.

Doughnut Picture from Wikimedia Commons

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Feb 15 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Boy, have I been I busy for the past month and a half. With the new contract at work, we had a ton of work to do to get ready for a big meeting. I was so busy I didn't even get a chance to do Christmas shopping, let alone keep up with this blog. Then, with Christmas and traveling, and then another big project when I got back to work, I just didn't have time to write any blog entries in December and the first couple weeks of January. Well, I'm pretty much caught up, now, so it's hopefully back to blogging as usual.

I mentioned that I did some traveling for Christmas. We flew up to Maryland/Pennsylvania to visit with my family for a few days before Christmas. We got there just in time for a big snow storm that dumped over a foot and a half of snow. Living in Texas, I thought that that was exciting enough, and that even though we wouldn't be up north for Christmas Day, at least we'd gotten to see snow during the Christmas season. When we flew back to Texas, it was 70º when we got off the plane, and we had a bit of a laugh at how different the weather was. That was before Christmas Eve. We had a freak snow storm hit us - a lot of snow. I know the official reports were for 4 to 6 inches, but it sure seemed like more. Maybe some of that had to do with snow drifts, or the ice that was already on the ground from a previous ice storm. The roads were horrible. A lot of people say the drivers down here aren't used to the snow, but I think it's much worse because the counties just don't have the equipment to handle the snow. The drive from Ft. Worth to Wichita Falls, which usually takes us a little less than two hours, took 9 hours that Christmas Eve. And we were lucky. Some people got stuck in a huge traffic jam that kept them in their cars for over 24 hours.

Here are a few pictures from my holidays - the first is from Pennsylvania, and the second two are from Texas. I had a white Christmas all the way around.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Jan 15 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I grew up in the country. Halloween for me was getting in the car, and driving around to friends' houses. A few friends lived on streets with enough houses that we could go up and down a bit, but not very much. This also meant that we were never visited by many trick or treaters, nor were the houses I knocked at, so I always got an entire handful of candy at every place I visited, and we always had plenty of left over candy at our house.

As I've gotten older, I've moved into progressively more urban environments, so I've gotten used to the more traditional Halloween. However, nothing prepared me for what to expect in the neighborhood I live in now. Somehow, the neighborhood has acquired a reputation as the place to go for trick or treaters. Our first year in the neighborhood, we were completely unprepared, and ran out of candy very early on. Last year, we did a bit better, but still ran out before the crowds had died down. This year, we were prepared. We started stocking up on candy about two months ago, so that we'd have enough to go around.

We still rationed our candy. For most of the night, we gave out between 2 and 3 pieces per kid. Only after 9:00 did we start to give out a bit more, around half a dozen pieces per kid. We ran out around 9:30.

Anyway, I weighed the candy at the start of the night, to have an idea of how much candy we gave away - 40 lbs. That's a bit of a rough estimate. I didn't subtract the weight of the plastic container, and a few kids we had over divied up the last dregs before we had a chance to give them away, but we also had a few people over who dumped in a few bags of candy after I did the initial weigh in. Anyway, it was a lot of sugar and chocolate.

I have no idea how many kids actually came by, but a family in another house on our street who had bought 1600 pieces of candy (rationed at 2 pieces per kid, i.e. 800 kids worth), ran out at 8:30. So, I'd guess that we had somewhere around a thousand kids come trick or treating at our house.

For the most part, it was fun. We decorated the house up pretty good, hung a plastic monster from a tree branch so that we could drop it on unsuspecting passers-by, and I dressed up like the grim reaper, scaring quite a few older kids and adults.

We did get a few teenagers in less than creative costumes, and around 10:30, when I went to see some friends out to their car and turned the porch light back on, a car immediately pulled up to our house hoping for candy. But, like I said, everything was fun for the most part.

Anyway, in addition to the jack o'lantern picture up above, here are a few more pictures of how we decorated the house. We didn't think to take any the night before in the dark, so these are all from the next morning. They're not quite as spooky, but at least they give a sense of what the house looked like.

Updated 2009-11-05: Two new pictures added

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Nov 3 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently, the United Way has changed the requirements for organizations receiving funding. This has resulted in several local non-profits having to decline funding from the United Way (see here or here for more info). In an effort to make up the budget shortfalls, a new fundraising organization has been set up, the Hands to Hands Community Fund. If you live in the Wichita Falls area and would like support any of the following organizations, please follow that link.

• The Arc of Wichita County
• Camp Fire USA, North Texas Council
• Child Advocates (CASA)
• Children’s Aid Society (CAS)
• Friendly Door Senior Center, Iowa Park
• Girl Scouts USA of Texas Oklahoma Plains, Inc.
• Boy Scouts of America, Northwest Texas Council

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Nov 3 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sorry for no posts last week - I was on vacation (I didn't announce it beforehand because, well, even though this blog isn't very widely read, there's no sense in advertising that my house will be empty for a week). Anyway, we went to D.C. Yeah, I lived inside the beltway for a few years, so I've already seen most of the touristy stuff, but my wife had only ever been there once for an afternoon, and my daughter had never been there. So, we looked at all the monuments, went to the museums, and even got to see my family one day. I'll post photos when I get a chance to review them (my wife took over 1300 photos with her new digital camera). Anyway, back to regular posting.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Jul 24 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was looking up business letters to double check the formatting for a letter I was getting ready to send, when I was reminded of a thought I often have, that it seems really weird to use 'dear' at the start of a formal letter. I realize that 'dear' can mean valuable or precious (as in, 'you'll pay dearly'), but really, how often in spoken language do we refer to people as 'dear' unless it's, pardon the expression, a term of endearment? I would never dream of addressing another engineer as 'dear' when talking to them on the phone. In fact, I have a feeling they'd be a bit offended at the assumed familiarity. I know I'd be taken aback if someone other that a really, really close friend or relative called me 'dear.' So why does everyone do it at the start of letters?

Apparently, I'm not the first person to wonder this same thing.

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Jun 16 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I just wanted to make a short post to advertise a new website, Carter Wind Energy. If the name sounds familiar to anybody who knows me, it should. The Carter family has been involved in wind turbines for quite a while, now. Jay Carter, Sr. has been making turbines for decades, and still has his company, Wind Eagle Turbines. Jay Carter, Jr. struck out on his own to make larger turbines with Carter Wind Systems in the 70s, which he later sold before starting Carter Aviation Technologies. Now, Matt Carter is trying to get into the business with Carter Wind Energy (he's targeting a different niche than Wind Eagle Turbines, so he's not competing with Jay Carter, Sr.) He's been working on the project for a while, now, but just recently asked me to create the website. (I've done a little analysis for him, as well, but haven't had the time to work on the project as much as I've wanted to.) Anyway, go take a look at the website. There are bound to be several small changes in the coming weeks as we tweak the layout. Constructive criticism is definitely welcome.

Posted by Jeff on Thursday, May 7 | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

I've once again put way too much effort into responding to a comment. In the entry, Ray Comfort: Quote Miner Extraordinaire, someone left a short comment about there being no evidence for evolution, and about me being a "secular version of Ray Comfort." So, I left a lengthy comment disagreeing.

On another note, if anyone tried to access the blog earlier this week, you may have discovered a blank page. Apparently, my hosting company decided to set my disk space quota to 100 MB (well below what my site actually uses, and well, well below what the limit had been in the past), which kept the blog from rebuilding correctly. I don't know how long it had been down before I noticed, but hopefully it wasn't too long. Once I contacted the hosting company, they were pretty quick to correct the problem, and I now have plenty of disk space for the time being.

Between the time I spent resolving the hosting issue, and the time I spent writing that comment, I doubt I'll have time to make a real post this week.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Mar 25 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

We recently purchased a Casio EX-F1 where I work. This is a pretty high end digital camera, mostly intended for still photography, but we basically bought it for a single reason - to record high speed video. You see, we do a fair amount of testing on new propeller and rotor designs. These spin pretty fast, and if there's a problem, things can happen too quickly for a conventional camcorder to capture much. We've always wanted to use a high speed video system, but traditional options are expensive and a bit out of our budget. The cheapest traditional system I found was $5000, with prices more typically in the 5 figures, and going up into 6 figures for high end systems. So, when the Casio EX-F1 came out, offering high speed video at under $1000, I researched it, and decided that it would be a good option for us.

I took the camera home with me for a weekend to figure out the settings, and we've started using it at work, so I've had a chance to see how it works. I haven't exhaustively put it through its paces, but I figured that my first impression might still be valuable to some people. And even if you aren't considering purchasing this camera, high speed videos are still cool to watch.

Continue reading "Casio EX-F1 - First Impression of the High Speed Video" »

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Mar 6 | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Once again, it's time for the TAKS Test - a single test that elementary school students must pass (within 3 attempts) in order to move on to the next grade. No pressure or anything.

I didn't grow up here in Texas, so these tests were a foreign concept to me when my daughter started taking them, and didn't seem like such a bad thing. Sure, I'd taken standardized tests in elementary school, but they were never so important. But with these tests carrying so much weight for the students themselves, bonuses the teachers will receive, and funding the schools will receive, teachers end up training students specifically to take these tests, rather than giving them a better well rounded education. Since 3rd grade is when students have to pass the reading TAKS, for months part of my daughter's homework last year was to read a minimum amount every week. I actually thought the reading was a good idea. But as soon as the students took the TAKS, that homework disappeared. The students were not being made to read to broaden their vocabulary, improve their comprehension, or foster any type of love for reading. No, as I later found out, they were just being trained to improve their reading endurance, so that they'd be able to get through the test. In fourth grade, it's the writing TAKS. A couple weeks ago I was asking my daughter what she'd learned in each subject that week. When I asked her about science, she said that they weren't doing science anymore, they were just using that time to practice for the TAKS.

Man, the sooner Texas gets away from this type of testing, the better.

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Mar 3 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Depending on where you are in the world, you may call tomorrow something else, like Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day. But from where I'm from in Pennsylvania, it's called Fastnacht Day. Traditionally, you make potato based donuts, called fastnachts, supposedly as a way to empty your larder of all the fatty, sugary foods in preparation for the Lenten fast. My elementary school even used to give out donuts with the lunches on this day. So, in celebration of Fastnachts, here's a recipe on my main site on how to make fastnachts, and a link to the (not so thorough) Wikipedia article.

You're supposed to wake up early to make the fastnachts on Tuesday morning (they're freshest that way), but I usually make them the night before. They keep pretty well in a brown paper lunch bag. I also like to put a little bit of powdered sugar into a ziploc bag, and a mix of granulated sugar and cinammon into another one, to coat the fastnachts just before eating them.

Doughnut Picture from Wikimedia Commons

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Feb 23 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

However you decide to celebrate the winter solstice, I wish you a happy holiday. And if you don't celebrate anything, just have a good time, anyway.

BTW, with this being a short work week, and with my parents coming in to town next week, I won't have too many lunch breaks to work on this blog. So, I'm taking a brief hiatus. Don't expect any new posts from me until next year.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Dec 24 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Woohoo! My first patent:

Rotor Collective Pitch vs. Mu to Control Flapping and Mast/Rotor Tilt to Control Rotor RPM

I guess I'm now officially an inventor. However, when a kid can patent his swinging method, I question just how much confirmation a patent actually is.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Dec 5 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's a good thing I'm not superstitious, or I'd think I was cursed.

I live in Wichita Falls. Our local airport (SPS) has a few flights a day to and from DFW airport. Flying the connecting flight from Wichita Falls makes trips so much more convenient - I can spend my time reading instead of concentrating on all the cars around me. It might cost a little more, but if I'm going to be traveling by myself, once you factor in gas for a round trip to Dallas along with the cost of parking, getting the connecting flight isn't such a bad option pricewise.

There's one problem, though. DFW gets hit by a lot of thunderstorms. It seems like every time I try to fly out of Wichita Falls, on the way back home, my first flight gets delayed by weather, and I end up missing the flight from DFW back to Wichita Falls. Thinking back, I'd say that it's worked only once out of the five times I've tried it. I usually end up renting a car and driving back home. So, not only did I spend more for my airplane tickets to begin with, but I get stuck paying the rental car fee and gas on top of that.

Given my past luck, I'd pretty much decided on giving up trying to fly out of Wichita Falls. However, my brother got tickets to the Steelers game for this past weekend, and thought it would be fun for the three of us brothers and our dad to go watch it. So, this was a trip for just me, where my wife and daughter were going to stay behind in Texas. And it was in November. How many thunderstorms hit in November? So I decided to take my chances and fly out of Wichita Falls.

I think you can guess what happened. On the way home, I was supposed to land in DFW at 7:15, and then catch an 8:00 flight to Wichita Falls. I knew it was a little close, but I figured I'd be okay. Well, with a thunderstorm that just sat right over the area, we had to divert to Shreveport to get more fuel where we sat for a while waiting for the weather to clear, and we didn't get to DFW until after midnight. Just a little bit too late to catch my 7:15 flight. Anyway, I was too drowsy at that point to try to drive home, so I spent the night in DFW and flew back the next morning.

I'm not going to say that I'll never again try to fly out of Wichita Falls. However, I'll be sure that I never again schedule the last flight of the day from DFW to Wichita Falls, and to give myself a little more time between flights.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Nov 12 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Now any of you that haven't voted yet, go out and do it.

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Nov 4 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With all this talk of civic duty going on right now, I can't help thinking of a certain line over and over (not safe for kids, and probably NSFW)

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Nov 4 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've spent my lunch breaks this week playing around with a VB program I wrote. Well, technically, I borrowed some of the code from the Brightness Demo ©2005 by Tanner "DemonSpectre" Helland as the method to display the pixels on screen, but the actual image generation was something I developed. Go look at the Circle Gradient Pattern Generator on my Programming page if you're more interested. Initially, I made the program to generate a bunch of still images, like in the collection I have on my Artwork page. I'd always wanted to make animations with it, and that's what I finally got around to this week. Click on either of the two thumbnails below to see what the animations look like (Quicktime files, ~1.3 MB each). If you set Quicktime to loop the video, it should do so seamlessly.

I haven't quite gotten the program to where I'm ready to share it, yet, but I hope to next week. So, consider this a preview of an upcoming website update.

Update I've uploaded both videos to YouTube, if you don't feel like downloading a Quicktime movie. The quality isn't near as good, but at least it gives you an idea of what the animations look like. Both are available below the fold.

Continue reading "Random Videos" »

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Oct 24 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've never been much of a 'dog' guy. It's not that I don't like them, but, as I like to say, that I like other people's dogs. I like wrestling with them, playing tug of war, fetch - all the fun stuff. But I never wanted the responsibility of having to take care of one myself.

Ever since my parents found a box of kittens abandoned in a gutter, I've had cats. Cats are easy to take care of - give 'em food and water and a way to get outside, and they'll be fine. They like human affection, but as long as they have another cat to keep them company, they seem to do just fine when no people are around. Dogs are different - you have to groom them, pick up their crap, take them for walks, actually play with them every day. In a lot of ways, they're like kids, except that they'll never grow up to be able to take care of themselves. Hence, my preference for playing with other people's dogs.

Well, the other day while we were putting up Halloween decorations, a dog roaming around the neighborhood ran into our yard chasing one of the cats. I chased after them to make sure the dog didn't eat the cat, and all it took was a stern word to get the dog to leave the cat alone. Then it decided to stick around in our yard for a while. It was pretty friendly, and my daughter, as she would put it, 'loved on it' quite a bit. Well, a few hours after we'd finished with the decorations and gone back inside, the dog was still on our front door step. That's when we made our biggest mistake - we gave it a bowl of water and a small dish of cat food. It didn't leave after that, and was still out front the next morning.

So, we did the responsible thing. We put up signs around the neighborhood, called the Humane Society, ran an ad in the paper, but we never heard from anybody looking for the dog. I suppose we could have taken her to the pound, but could you do that to a face like this?

So, we decided to keep her, and named her Maddie. She's doing okay so far, but it's still tense with the cats. Right now, the dog gets the back yard, while the cats get the front yard and the house. Hopefully, they'll figure out how to get along. Here's another picture of Maddie to show how big she is:

BTW, my daughter took both of those pictures.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Oct 22 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The whole issue with the economy and the "Wall Street Bailout" has got me to thinking. First, let me share a related personal account.

I'm an engineer. But, the company I work for is small, so we all wear several hats. One of mine is being the webmaster. That means that my e-mail address is the one used for feedback from our website. I get lots and lots of suggestions from people about how to improve our aircraft - stopping the rotor, using two co-axial rotors, folding the rotor to stow it in flight, I've even gotten a few e-mails proposing perpetual motion machines. Most of these suggestions aren't stupid, just uninformed*. I didn't spend 5 years at the University of Maryland just to learn how to play beer pong and do keg stands. The professors actually taught me the specialized information I'd need to understand aerospace engineering. And the years I've spent on the job have taught me even more. 'Expertise' isn't any empty word, it means something.

So, how does this relate back to the economy? Well, those same people who think they know enough about aeronautics to know better than trained aerospace engineers are the same people who are now making a lot of noise about the economy, thinking they know more than trained economists. When I hear about polls and surveys that try to gauge the public's support for the bailout plan, my fist thought is to wonder how qualified most people are to have a valid opinion on the matter at all.

Personally, I can see the argument from both sides. I don't like bailing out the people that screwed us in the first place, but if the long term effect of not helping them is that I lose my retirement, well, to use a cliché, I don't want to cut off my nose to spite my face. Is the long term effect going to be that bad? I don't know. I know how to design planes, not run an economy. And if the problem's as urgent as some people are saying, I don't have the time to learn enough before a decision has to be made. That's why we're a republic and not a democracy - we do rely on our elected officials to know more about running a country than we do ourselves. So for this case, I'm just going to have to trust the experts, and hope they make the right decision.

Added 2008-10-03 I thought of one more thing to add, and it's important enough to add it here in the main entry so it doesn't get ignored in the comments. One other worry I have with Congress passing this bailout is that they're doing it merely to show that they're doing something, and not necessarily because they understand the bill enough to think that it will work. It's the same theme I've harped on about the TSA and security after the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Just because politicians are making a show of taking action doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be effective.

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Sep 30 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A very good friend had a stroke earlier this week. The doctors brought him out of the induced coma this morning, and so far everything's looking hopeful, but it's still so early that it's impossible to tell exactly what the outcome's going to be. So, don't expect any new blog entries for a while.

Posted by Jeff on Thursday, Sep 18 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I try not to vote for candidates based on single issues. I realize that most of the problems we face are complex, and can be viewed many different ways. I understand that smart people can look at the same problems as me, and come up with different solutions. So, just because I may disagree with a particular candidate on any one particular issue, it's not usually enough to make me automatically against them.

However, there are two issues that I use as a kind of litmus test. I won't necessarily support a candidate just because I agree with them on these issues, but it would be very, very hard for me to support a candidate with whom I disagreed - their opponent would have to be pretty darn bad. Those two issues are teaching evolution in school, and accepting that global warming is anthropogenic.

Why those two issues? Well, they're both well supported by evidence, and overwhelmingly supported by experts in the respective fields, so neither one should be controversial. However, they are controversial, which means that practically everybody has been exposed to them. Nobody can say they don't know anything about them because they've never heard of them before.

Let's look at evolution. First of all, evolution is something that everybody should learn about in high school biology. I mean, we're not talking about a cutting edge theory, here - Darwin and Wallace first proposed natural selection to the world almost 150 years ago, and the modern evolutionary synthesis occured over 50 years ago. Second, as I've discussed on this blog before, the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. Seriously. I'm as certain that a chimp, a blue whale, a carrot, and I all evolved from the same eukaryotic ancestor as I am that the Earth's a big hunk of rock in orbit around the Sun. But more important than me being that sure, is that the vast majority of biologists who actually study it are quite sure. So, to doubt evolution requires that someone isn't educated enough, is willing to ignore the consensus of experts, and is willing to ignore evidence in favor of their ideology. All three of those things are very bad for an elected official. Given the overwhelming evidence for evolution, if a candidate accepts it, but still promotes teaching "alternative theories" in science classes, then they're simply pandering. They're trading their principals for votes, when they should be ensuring a sound education for our country's youth.

Global warming may not have as long of a history as evolutionary study, nor the huge, overwhelming evidence to support it, but it still has enough that we can be quite certain that it's real, and that human activity is causing it. (I've written about this before, too.) Well, the actual fact of global warming does have huge, overwhelming evidence to support it. It's only whether or not it's anthropogenic where the evidence is just huge, but maybe not quite overwhelming. Still, when there's as much certainty about something with as big of a potential impact as there is for global warming, policy makers shouldn't be quibbling over minutiae. How to deal with climate change, is something different, since there are so many possible avenues. But to reject anthropogenic global climate change altogether requires, as with evolution, that someone lacks knowledge of the issue, is willing to ignore the consensus of experts, and is willing to ignore evidence in favor of their ideology.

I realize that candidates that don't accept reality on these two subjects tend to be right wing. But left wing politicians need to be careful, too, as it seems that some on the left have a tendency to support alternative medicine, or buy into myths like vaccines causing autism. I don't think those make for quite as strong of a litmus test, since they're not issues that people have heard as much about, so people can have an excuse for being ignorant about them. But still, policy makers should be making informed decisions. So, while supporting alternative medicines might not turn me off from supporting a candidate quite as fast as the two issues above, they better hope that their opponent is worse, because I'm sure not going to be excited about voting for them.

I guess what it comes down to is that I want the politicians representing me to be well educated, informed about current issues, to be able to think rationally about issues, and not ignore evidence because it contradicts their ideology. Is that too much to ask?

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Sep 5 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, I was pretty busy this week, so I didn't have time to write a real entry. I did want to point out something, though. Browsing around some other blogs reading about Obama and McCain and their vice presidential candidate choices, I noticed something that really irritates me. If you're one of those people who likes to use words like Rethuglicans, Republicons, Dimmycrat, Dumbocrat, John McSame, Barack Osama bin Laden, or any of those other plays on words, STOP IT! It's not funny. It makes you sound stupid.

As I had to get across to my daughter when she was even younger than she is now, a joke's only funny once. Repeating a joke ad nauseum just makes it look like you're unoriginal.

Please, just use the real terms for these things. Politics is bad enough as it is without resorting to childish name calling.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Aug 29 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, to start easing back into blogging after my vacation, I'll start off with a short little rant, that actually is relevant to trip I just took. In short, I really, really dislike the TSA. (I know the title of this post says that I hate the TSA, but that's a little stronger feeling that I actually have. However, "I Really, Really Dislike the TSA" just doesn't have the same ring to it as a headline.) I have written a bit about this before, but that article was more about the restrictions on general aviation.

It's not that the TSA did anything uniquely annoying during this trip. It's just that every time I have to go through the security checkpoints and jump through hoops that do practically nothing to actually increase security, I get just a little more pissed off. This trip, I was so busy unpacking the laptop, loading up all our bags onto the belt (we had more carry-ons this time now that the airlines are charging for checked luggage), and taking off my shoes, that I forget to empty out my pockets and take off my belt. That's probably enough metal that it would have set off the metal detector even back in the good old days, but when you're already irritated with an organization, it makes you that much more irritated. Plus, thanks to actually doing good on my diet the past few weeks, taking off my belt meant holding my pants up the whole time. I started grumbling once I got through the checkpoint and was getting dressed again, when my wife told me to just be quiet so that we could enjoy our vacation.

I recall hearing a joke one time, and I can't remember where I first heard it now, but this blog has a similar joke in the comments.

First the terrorsits tried to sneak bomb onto a plane using their shoes, so they made us take off our shoes.

Then the terrorists tried to use liquid explosives, so they made us give up our drinks and toothpaste.

The day they realize that a terrorist could try to smuggle a bomb up his ass is the day I quit flying.

But when you stop to think, how much indignity are we willing to take in the name of safety (assuming, of course, that the TSA is increasing safety, which I'll get to in a minute)? We already have to go barefoot through the metal detectors, and take off our belts and hold up our pants. If you take a carry on, you see the inspectors rifling through all your personal belongings. A few years ago when my wife, my daughter and I flew up north to visit the rest of my family for Christmas, presents already wrapped, the TSA didn't just take them out of the wrapping paper - they unpacked everything completely, down to removing the toys from the plastic and twist ties that held them in place (I guess I could be thanking them, since everyone knows what a pain it can be to get toys out of their packaging sometimes).

To point out just one more pet peeve - why can't people that aren't flying wait with you at the gate anymore, or come meet you at the gate when you arrive? I know the current policy does nothing to keep out anybody determined enough to sneak in. The fact that all it takes is a computer printout of your itinerary or tickets to get it, means that anybody with a computer and any type of ingenuity can print out counterfeit tickets or itineraries. They probably wouldn't work to get them on the plane, but they'd certainly get the people into the gate area. Perhaps the point is to reduce the number of people in the gate area, to make observation and surveillance easier. I still don't like it.

Okay, you get it - I think the TSA's annoying. But have they actually done anything to increase security? In anticipation of anybody that's going to say that we haven't had a terrorist attack since 9/11, therefore the TSA must be working, I have a tiger repelling rock I'd like to sell you. I've had this rock for years, and haven't seen a tiger the entire time, so it must work, right?. (Realizing that Simpsons episode was from way back in 1996, it's eerie how well it predicted the country's reaction to 9/11 - do anything, even if there's no evidence it works, just so it seems like we're doing something.)

I've got a little experience "smuggling" things past the TSA myself. As I mentioned in the essay I linked to up top, I've forgotten about one of my pocket knives a few times. It's a small little knife that looks like a key, and goes on my key ring. The blade's only about 2", but that's exactly the type of thing the TSA was supposed to be keeping off planes. And I managed to get by security with it once during the highest threat level. (The knife actually has some sentimental value to me, so I've since taken it off my key ring, just to make sure I don't ever forget about it when flying and find that one TSA agent who notices it.)

What about more serious threats, besides pocket knives that probably aren't going to be worth much of anything, anymore? Well, there's this case where, "Investigators with bomb-making components in their luggage and on their person were able to pass through security checkpoints at 19 U.S. airports without detection." And what about the student who smuggled bleach, matches, box cutters, and clay that resembled plasic explosives, onto multiple airplanes, told the TSA about it, and some of the items still weren't found for over a month.

Or, just read these articles, from the column, Ask the Pilot on Salon.com. It's written by an airline pilot, Patrick Smith, who doesn't like the TSA all that much, either. He describes all types of silly regulations the TSA follows, including not letting him get through security because he was carrying the exact same knife that the airline gives out to passengers aboard the plane, not to mention that most airport personnel who aren't seen by passengers have very lax security regulations. He also has a good article on the N.Y. Times site.

I understand that we probably do need security. I just don't like seeing an organization that does very little good. At best, it's a minor convenience. At worst, it's a false sense of security, and a waste of resources that could be better applied elsewhere.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Jul 25 | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

I have a goal of posting an entry on this blog at least once per week. I missed last week, for which I apologize. We had an issue at work where I spent my lunch breaks working, and didn't much feel like working on this website once I got home. Then, with the 4th of July, and a few get togethers I had to go to, I didn't have time to blog over the weekend. Anyway, I'll try make up for it with at least two entries this week.

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Jul 7 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've stated several times that my goal for this blog is to make at least one good substantive post per week, or to at least make an update to the regular part of this website. Well, I've spent my lunch breaks this week typing up a response to two comments left on one of my older blog entries, Problems With Day-Age Interpretation of Genesis. Basically, I expanded on the original essay with a few more issues. My main problem with a day-age interpretation is that it's still not consistent with the actual history of the universe and our planet. But I pretty much didn't address that in my response, to concentrate on two issues that I thought were most troubling even ignoring actual history - what does the wording in the second day even mean? And how could plants have survived without the sun and without pollinators? If that's the type of thing that interests you, you may want to go check it out.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Jun 13 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, since I'm not making any good original blog posts this week, I figured I'd post this picture just for the hell of it. This is me, sitting in the prototype we're developing where I work.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Apr 11 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a very frivolous post, but...

I grew up in the '80s, when handheld electronic gadgets meant blinking LED lights and dedicated buttons. (Yeah, as I got older, the GameBoy and Lynx were introduced, but those were way out of the price range I could afford with my allowance). So, to get a mini hand-held computer, I had to do this:

Just this week, thanks to a sale on Amazon (prices had already gone back up before it was even delivered), I got this:

And, just to compare them side by side:

My new computer may be a little bulkier than the one I had as a kid, and the index card version could do a heck of a lot more (like spy on the Russians and give me intel on the new kid across the street), but the new one actually works to show to other people, not just in my head.

It took 20 years, but reality has finally caught up to at least one aspect of my childhood imagination. Now, I just need to wait for those Moon bases and terraforming Mars (I read a lot of Odysssey when I was a kid.)

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Apr 4 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I will never again get a loan through Wells Fargo (at least not until all the other banks have similarly pissed me off and I have nowhere else to go).

When my wife divorced her ex-husband, she got full ownership of the house. The divorce papers stated so. She and her ex-husband signed a Special Warranty Deed, stating in detail that the house was hers, along with the loan, and all other monies (escrows, deposits) associated with the house. The deed was signed by a notary, and filed at the county courthouse. Everything was nice and official and legal.

Because of the fees that Wells Fargo would have charged to change the loan to her name, and because her ex-husband was renting and having the loan in his name wasn't doing him any harm, my wife didn't make it a top priority to get the loan in her name. However, when we decided to move last summer and put the house up on the market, we decided that we ought to get it done so that there weren't any problems when it came time to close on the house. Well, my wife talked to one of the loan officers at Wells Fargo, showed him the Special Warranty Deed, and he told her not to worry about it. He said the deed was official enough, and there was no reason to pay the fees since we were just going to to be selling the house, anyway. We thought we were in good shape, and figured everything would go smoothly when we finally sold the house. We were wrong.

Continue reading "!@#%!#$^%!# Wells Fargo" »

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Mar 21 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a short entry for today. I'm probably one of the last people on the Internet to find this, but I thought I'd put it here on my blog for those people I know that don't frequent nerd sites very often (by find, I mean actually going to the site and reading through it - I'd already seen a few of the comics on other blogs before).

To get to the point, there's a very good web comic called xkcd (which apparently doesn't stand for anything in particular), which according to the site itself, is all about "romance, sarcasm, math, and language." He probably should have mentioned science, too. It's pretty funny, with a few random, interesting sketches thrown in, as well. I've put a handful of my favorites below the fold to give a taste of what it has, or you could just head on over there to check it out yourself. Don't forget to let your mouse hover over the images to read his comments.

One note before you click through to below the fold - one comic drops the f-bomb, so you've been warned. Also, before you go to his site, here's the warning he has, "this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)."

Continue reading "XKCD" »

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Mar 14 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A very short entry for today (hopefully I'll get a real entry out later this week). Today is the day for the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test, better known as the TAKS test. These tests are very high stakes for elementary school students - the children must pass this one test today in order to graduate to the next grade level. If they bomb it, they're doomed to repeat their grade, no matter how good they might do in school otherwise. (update 2008-03-05- Actually, the students get 3 chances to pass.) My daughter and one of her cousins are taking the test this year, and they're both fretting over it. 3rd graders, almost as nervous as college students at finals time. There's also the major concern that with the importance of this single test, teachers focus on teaching their students how to do well on it, instead of trying to give them a more general quality education.

Anyway, I found a good blog from a Texas teacher discussing this, Education in Texas. Take a look specifically at this entry,
Time For Some State Sponsored Torture of 8 Year Olds. He also has a few others dealing with this issue.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Mar 5 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Argh. I can't believe I forgot this until now. This year, I was planning on making this post a day early, so people would have some warning and be able to get the recipe to make the fastnachts in time. As it is, with me having been sick, I completely forgot about Fastnacht Day this year, and didn't even make any myself. And actually, even though I'm starting to feel better, I still don't think I'm quite up to eating fried goodies, so I think I might skip making fastnachts this year. Anyay, here's my standard blog entry, explaining what fastnachts are, and what Fastnacht Day is all about.

Depending on where you are in the world, you may call today something else, like Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day. But from where I'm from in Pennsylvania, today's called Fastnacht Day. Traditionally, you make potato based donuts, called fastnachts, supposedly as a way to empty your larder of all the fatty, sugary foods in preparation for the Lenten fast. My elementary school even used to give out donuts with the lunches on this day. So, in celebration of today, here's a recipe on my main site on how to make fastnachts, and a link to the (not so thorough) Wikipedia article.

I know it's a little late, since you should have made them either last night or early this morning, so that you could eat them throughout the day, but better late than never. Oh well, maybe next year I'll remember to do this post on time.

Doughnut Picture from Wikimedia Commons

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Feb 5 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have no energy this week to get worked up over the things I normally write about on this blog. I just got some sad news. A friend of our family has been diagnosed with advanced liver cancer, and has only a few weeks left to live, at the most. He wasn't a super close friend, which is why we didn't find out until now - the last we saw him in person was over the summer, but my wife had been keeping in touch with his wife through e-mail every couple months or so, and we always had fun every time we got together. It was the type of situation where you always said that you needed to get together more often, but somehow never found the time to do so.

He had just retired a few years ago, and his wife was getting ready to retire this year. Their house was paid off and they were getting their back yard all in order for their kids and grand kids to visit; they'd just recently gotten horses for each of them to ride; they'd already planned a Hawaiin cruise this summer that they'd been putting off for years. Now, they don't get to do any of that. I feel so sorry for him and his wife, and their kids.

It's probably a bit cliche at times like this, but never forget how precious life is. You're only here for a time, and then it's all over. Make the most of it. Enjoy yourself, and enjoy the time you have with the ones you love.

Posted by Jeff on Thursday, Jan 10 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, with The Golden Compass movie being released this week, I figured I'd make a little entry for it. I've already posted my review of the books (in short, I liked them, but didn't think they were great), so I won't cover that here. Instead, I'll cover a bit of the hoopla surrounding these books being atheistic, and a bit of the silly rationale I've seen from people trying to claim otherwise.

MILD SPOILERS AHEAD - DON'T READ THIS IF YOU WANT DON'T WANT TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE STORY

To be blunt, yes, the books are based on an atheistic worldview. I don't think this gives away too much of the plot, since it's revealed about midway through the second book, but in this story, God is not the creator of the universe, but instead the first conscious being to have developed. He's neither omnipotent nor omniscient. He's basically tricked much of the universe into thinking that he was the creator.

Now, I've seen in some reviews of the book, and in some blog comments, people who claim that the books aren't atheistic, because they're about a war on this character claiming to be God, but who wasn't really the Creator. I think those people are missing something - the character in this book that claims to be God, is (in the book) the same character that Christians worship. In other words, the books show a world where Yahweh is not a god. Now, I guess that strictly speaking, these books don't deny the possibility of some type of a god/gods, but there aren't any gods in these books, in the sense that most people would define a god, and the only character claiming to be a god, isn't.

But, just because the books are based on an atheistic worldview, does it mean that they promote atheism? If we accept what Pullman himself said in an interview, no.

As for the atheism, it doesn't matter to me whether people believe in God or not, so I'm not promoting anything of that sort. What I do care about is whether people are cruel or whether they're kind, whether they act for democracy or for tyranny, whether they believe in open-minded enquiry or in shutting the freedom of thought and expression. Good things have been done in the name of religion, and so have bad things; and both good things and bad things have been done with no religion at all. What I care about is the good, wherever it comes from.

There's another way to look at it - the books are fantasy. I'm pretty sure that even Pullman doesn't believe in the universe he created, so it seems a bit silly to claim that he's trying to promote it. It would be like trying to claim that J.K. Rowling was promoting magic in her Harry Potter books (I realize a few people did claim this, but there are also still people who think the earth is flat - some people are just a few cards shy of a full deck). Pullman's universe is just a way to get people thinking about one of the main themes of the books, questioning authority and orthodoxy. What better way is there to illustrate that than to question the ultimate authority?

One other topic I wanted to touch on was the hypocrisy of the people denouncing The Golden Compass for indoctrinating children, but who had no problem with The Chronicles of Narnia. What's the difference? Perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to sling around the term, hypocrite - maybe some of those people do recognize Narnia as indoctrinating children into a Christian worldview, and wouldn't have any problems with people of other religions (or no religion) not letting their children read those books or see the movies based on them.

So, to get to the important question, should you let the atheistic worldview of The Golden Compass influence your decision to watch the movie, or to allow your children to watch the movie? Well, I guess if you're the type of person who avoided Clash of the Titans, because it promoted ancient Greek religion, and you didn't let your children watch it because you were afraid they might start worshipping Zeus, well then, The Golden Compass probably isn't for you. But, if you can enjoy it for what it is, and assuming that the movie adaptation turns out okay (and so far, according to IMDB, it appears to be doing pretty well), then it's probably a movie worth seeing.

Note: Wording in closing paragraph has been slightly modified from original posting, but nothing that changes the overall meaning.

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Dec 4 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day, I got an e-mail titled, "Statistics on Military Deaths," claiming to put into perspective the deaths caused by the Iraq War. It examines total military fatalities since 1980, showing that there were actually higher fatalities in the 80's than there are now, during the war. Since the information came in an e-mail forward, I was skeptical right off the bat, and decided to research it a little. The total death statistic is accurate, however, it's misleading in a number of ways - ignoring the causes of deaths, and ignoring the total number of people in the military over that time span. So, for anyone who's gotten this chain e-mail, I'm posting the reply I wrote to clarify it.

Continue reading "Iraq Death Toll - Rebuttal to a Chain E-mail" »

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Nov 20 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If anybody looks around this blog and my main website, they may notice that I've begun putting more links to Amazon. Yes, I will earn a bit of money if you buy something after clicking on those links. I debated putting the links up, because it seemed an awful lot like advertising which would cheapen this site. But, I figured that since I'm only linking to books that I'd normally be writing about, anyway, that it's not so bad. I could look at it as providing a service, offering people a way to buy the books, instead of having to go search through Amazon on their own. It's not like I'm using Google AdSense or something obnoxious like that. So, I feel justified in putting those links on my site.

If anyone's curious, I've always had a small link at the bottom of my Autogyros page. I think in all the years that I've had my website, I've earned enough comission to buy two books from Amazon, so it's not exactly a huge profit making enterprise. I'm hoping that putting more links on my blog might get me a little more, maybe enough to buy a book per year, if I'm lucky. But it's certainly not anywhere near enough to pay the Web Hosting company that serves this site, or the yearly fee for my domain name, so my website's still a net loss, financially (but definitely worth the cost, as a fun hobby).

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Oct 29 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, I had my 9 seconds of fame. Carter Aviation Technologies was featured in a segment of Modern Marvels on the History Channel, and they actually used some of the footage they shot that had me in it. Between one scene talking to my boss, and another looking past the back of my head to see what was on my computer screen, I was on screen for about 9 seconds all together.

So, now that I've been on TV, and my boss has been in several documentaries, I can count my degrees to Kevin Bacon (technically, I was very briefly in another documentary a few years ago, but it was so brief you had to pause the video to make me out). Anyway, here goes:

Jeff Lewis -> Jay Carter, Modern Marvels
Jay Carter -> Bob Simon, 60 Minutes
Bob Simon -> Larry King, Larry King Live
Larry King -> David Hayman, The Jackal
David Hayman -> Kevin Bacon, Where the Truth Lies

So, I've got a Bacon number of 5. (Yeah, I realize documentaries and news aren't exactly the kosher way to do it, but that's the only way I can.)

Added 2007-10-01: Well, I was in a hurry when I wrote this entry originally, and there are two things I'd like to add. First, I wasn't the only one to get some screen time. A few other co-workers who aren't normally in documentaries also got their chance to call up relatives about being on TV. (That shot where they're all walking out of the trailer took 3 takes to get it just right.)

I also wanted to add that we all thought the documentary was very good. Carter Aviation Technologies has been in other documentaries before. Sometimes it's such a short mention that it's hardly worth it, and sometimes the documentary makers just get things wrong. But Modern Marvels did a very good job of explaining our concept.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Sep 26 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, once again I've been so busy responding to comments in previous entries, that I haven't had time to make a new standalone entry this week. But, I think my two responses in those threads are pretty good, so read them if you're interested.

I've decided to slightly modify my update per week goal. I will still try to post an update per week, but if I make a change to my main website, the entry where I describe that will count towards meeting my goal (I used to not count the Website Updates as a real blog entry towards my goal). It's all to do with the limited amount of time I have to work on this - it's mostly during lunch breaks at work, after all. So, if I take the time to modify my main site, I figure that's enough effort put toward the online world for that week. And hey, it's still new content that I've come up with being advertised on the blog. It's better than simply posting links to other people's web pages.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Sep 14 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but plagiarism irks me a little bit. Look at these pages:

aerodynamics of the autogyro
how autogyros work

Now, look at my autogyro page:
Autogyro History and Theory

Notice anything familiar? (Hint, hint: look at the diagrams that somebody must have spent hours creating, and the text that somebody wrote to explain them.)

Why do people do that? I mean, all they have to do is ask. I've never told anybody that they couldn't use any of the information from this site, just that they give me credit for it and a link. It especially irks me that that the second of those pages is copyrighted. Don't go around copyrighting plagiarism!

Oh well, I sent them an e-mail. Hopefully my name and a link to my site will show up there pretty soon.

Update 2007-08-30
Well, the problem's been taken care of. There's now a note at the top of each of those pages, giving me credit and linking to my site. In response to my original e-mail, I received a reply from someone named John, telling me that a lot of the work on those sites was done as student projects. The students were warned not to plagiarize, but, alas, this seems to have snuck through. I can't say it's the first time. I've run across websites plagiarizing me before, and it usually turns out to be student projects. I wonder, just what type of software is out there for professors to detect plagiarism. Actually, a quick Google search found TurnItIn.com. I guess the challenge now is getting more professors to use it.

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Aug 28 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've often longed to be able to travel through time. There are so many things I want to know, so many things I want to see. I mean, can you imagine seeing a real live Tyrannosaurus? How about a pterodactyl? But sometimes, I just look around me at the world, and we've got plenty to marvel at now.

I mean, sure, I may never see an allosaurus attacking a brontosaurus (yes, I know, apatosaurs is the proper scientific name, but it'll always be a brontosaurus to me), but I can still watch a group of 7 ton predators attacking 100 ton prey (actually, blue whales can get up to 180 tons, but I'm not sure if orcas will still go after one that big). And I can see various flying animals that spend months, or even years, in the air without ever coming down to land. And how about an animal with a proboscis so well developed that it has around 40,000 individual muscles, sensitive enough to pluck a single blade of grass, but strong enough to rip apart trees.

My longing to visit the past isn't just about natural wonders - there are plenty of human accomplishments I'd like to see, too, like the Hanging Gardens, or to be alive during the golden age of aviation, and to think how exciting it must have been to see that revolutionary technology developing in front of my eyes. But you know what, we have some pretty damned good engineering marvels in the modern world, like the Sydney Opera House, or the Chunnel, or even just about any major sports stadium. I mean, not that I'm a big Dallas fan, but take a look at the new Cowboys Stadium. And you want to talk about living through the emergence of a radical technology - just look at computers and the Internet. When I was a kid, I was shocked to learn that my grandmother grew up without electricity. My grand kids will be just as shocked to learn that I can remember my family's first computer, and that it was years after that before we got Internet (and by modem!). When you look at it that way, these are exciting times we're living in.

And as much as I'd like to travel into the past to learn things, I'd just as much like to go to the future, to learn the answers to the questions I know won't be answered in my lifetime, like if there's any other life out there, and what it might be like. But we know a lot right now. I've read Darwin's Origin of Species, and I'm currently reading The Voyage of the Beagle. And one of the things I think is so fascinating, is to see the questions people had then, the things they would have wanted to travel to the future to learn, and to know that I'm living in the age when they've been answered. Like genetics - Darwin and Mendel knew that there had to be something that passed on traits from organisms to their offspring, but they had no idea what it was. You can tell by reading Origin that Darwin was really groping around in the dark on this. But we've discovered DNA. We know what it is, and the basics of how it works. And every day, we're learning more and more about it. And plate tectonics! That's another one that jumped out at me reading the Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin discussed how he found fossilized sea creatures on land, and how it indicated how the land must have been moving, but he had couldn't have known how it all happened. Now we do.

One of the biggest reasons I'd like to be in the future is space travel. I would absolutely love to be in zero gravity, to see the Earth from that far away, to travel to other planets, but I know it's something that realistically won't happen in my lifetime. But, just 150 years ago, people thought the same thing about flying. I know flying has become so commonplace today, that most people aren't too excited by it, and some people fly so often they even get downright annoyed. But just think about how amazing it is. For thousands of years, probably at least tens of thousands of years, and maybe even hundreds of thousands of thousands of years if earlier hominids were creative enough, we have looked to the skies and dreamt of flying like the birds, to have the freedom to go wherever we wanted. It's been in legends, myths, da Vinci's notebooks, but we'd never been able to accomplish it until just about 100 years ago. And now, I can go to the airport, rent a plane, and for a few hours live out the dreams of all of those ancestors, soar like a bird, and look down at the Earth from above the clouds.

So while I'll keep on wondering about all those things from the past that have been forever lost to time, and dreaming about the future and all the possibilities, I can't help but be awestruck by the world around me in the present, and be happy to be when I am.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Aug 24 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a short entry for today, but it's something I wanted to get off my chest.

I mentioned that we recently moved. Well, we just got an offer on our old house. Being kind of curious, as I'd imagine most sellers are, we asked our real estate agent about the potential buyers. Turns out it's an Iranian couple.

Well, we've told a few people about getting the offer, and they're curious, too, so they've asked us about the potential buyers, so of course we end up telling them that it's an Iranian couple. But I've been shocked by the number of people who have responded negatively, like, "Oh, you're not going to sell to those people, are you," or assuming that they're terrorists. Come on, people, I find your casual racism pretty disturbing. Sure, there are terrorists in the Middle East, but to assume that all MIddle Eastern people are terrorists because of the acts of a handful of people just doesn't make sense. Are all Italians mobsters? Are all Irish and English soccer hooligans? Are all Americans religious cult members? And you know what, there are terrorists right here at home, too. In fact, prior to the September 11th attacks, the "deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil" (Wikipedia) was the Oklahoma City bombing, carried out by a couple of white Americans. They'd even served in the Army. Does that mean I should be distrustful of all veterans?

So people, please stop telling me that the couple that may be buying my house are going to use it as a front to bring in a bomb. If you can't help being a racist, at least keep it to yourselves.

note: a few minor edits were made to this entry on 2007-07-17, but nothing that substantially changed the meaning.

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Jul 16 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, I mentioned in a post a little while ago that I was moving. Now, thanks to all the rain we've been getting, this is what my back yard looks like just two weeks after we moved in. The water's about 4 or 5 feet up the trunk of that tree.

Don't worry too much about me and my family, though. Our backyard has a pretty good slope to it, and that tree's right at the back edge. The water still had a good 5 feet to go before it got to our house. But other people weren't so lucky. Here's the street a few blocks from our house.

And that picture was taken before the water had crested. It got another foot or so higher. Other neighborhoods got hit even worse. Houses in the Wranglers Retreat neighborhood were underwater up to their roofs, and several houses in the downtown area had several inches to several feet of water. There are a few pictures on the City of Wichita Falls website, some more good pictures in some articles written by the local paper, the Times Record News: Rising water forces residents to retreat and Flooding overtakes East Side, forcing evacuations, and many more on a slideshow put together by the paper, but the slideshow isn't as good as the other photos.

So, it looks like this was the highest flood ever recorded for Wichita Falls, the river reaching at least 24.31 ft (the highest reported depth I could find, and probably pretty close to as deep as it got.) That's about 3 3/4" deeper than the previous record of 24 ft set way back in 1941. At least the river's been going down since Saturday. As long as we don't get too much more heavy rain, it looks like this is going to clear up. Hopefully the other parts of the country that got hit harder will start to recover, too.

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Jul 3 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wow, write an essay criticizing a well-known creationist organization, get it included in a blog carnival on a popular science blog, and watch the comments keep flooding in over a month after it was originally posted. Specifically, it was my entry, Creation Museum/Creationist Rule of Thumb with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, written to coincide with the opening of Answers in Genesis's new Creation Science Museum, criticizing AiG's use of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to try to refute evolution. The blog carnival was The Creation Museum and was hosted on Pharyngula. And to be honest, it wasn't exactly a flood of comments, but it is more comments than any other post I've written has generated.

Anyway, I ended up putting a good deal of effort into the response I wrote to the latest comment on there. It's not quite as big as the original entry, but it's certainly more substantial than some of the other stand-alone blog entries I've written. Which means, once again, that I haven't had time to write a good, stand-alone entry for this week. I may post something short later this afternoon, but if you really want to read something I wrote this week, go check out the comments to Creation Museum/Creationist Rule of Thumb with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Jun 29 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, I didn't make any posts last week, and so far this week, I only posted a link to another site. Well, I don't have anything better for today. I've just been so busy recently with personal affairs, that I haven't had much time for working on this blog. (I guess I can go ahead and say what the personal business is - my family's moving to a new house. Still in the same city, just a little roomier with a little more land. But it means we've been busy, staying up late working getting the old house ready to sell, and moving into the new house (now I know how those people on HGTV feel). So, I've been pretty tired and haven't felt much like working on this blog. Plus, I've been having to run errands during my lunch breaks, which completely eats into the time I have to write here.)

Anyway, I have put just about as much effort into responses in the comment thread on my entry on the Creation Museum and the Second Law of Thermodynamics as I normally would into a new post (which is kind of a big deal, since I normally get zero feedback to my entries). So, if you want to read something that I wrote this week, go take a look at the comments to that entry.

I do have a new, real entry in the works, that I just haven't had a chance to finish yet. Hopefully I'll get it done next week.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Jun 15 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I try not to make this blog too personal, but I figured this was definitely worth a post. Jay Frazier, the brother of some friends of mine, recently died. The family has put together a website, jayism.net to help remember and celebrate his life.

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Jun 11 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, I don't think I have any regular readers, but I'm making this apology, anyway. Just a few weeks after I announced that I was going to try to post at least once per week, I didn't make any posts last week. So, to make up for it, I'm going to try to make at least two posts this week, not counting this one (but I'm not promising anthing). I'm going to be lazy on the first post, and just copy verbatim somebody else's e-mail. But I figure, heck, it was an e-mail forum. Putting it on a public web page, even if it's an unpopular one, at least gives it the potential to be seen by more people. Plus, he gave permission for people to publish it. I'll try to think up a more thoughtful post for later in the week.

Posted by Jeff on Monday, May 21 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, it's been a little while since I've done one of these meta posts, but here goes...

Let's see, my first blog post ever was back in December of 2005. Not too long after, towards the end of March 2006, I realized I wasn't keeping up with the blog as much as I'd have liked, but I still liked the idea of having a blog, so I resolved to make a good post at least once per month, and, for the most part, I was able to keep up with it.

Towards the end of this past January, I made a new resolution to make a post at least once per week. I never announced it before, just in case I wasn't able to keep up with it, but I have been doing pretty good at it. I actually got a boost in motivation when PZ Myers of Pharyngula announced a Blogroll Open Enrollment Day. I hesitated to submit my name at first, since I have such a mediocre blog compared to others, but after seeing how many other people were submitting their own personal blogs, I thought, what the hell, the worst that can happen is that I don't get added. He ended up adding everyone that submitted a blog, but with a few warnings, including that many would probably be deleted once he had a chance to review them, and that he would definitely remove blogs that hadn't been updated within the past 30 days. Well, luckily for me, he hasn't gone through and purged the blogs he doesn't read, yet, so I'm still on there (I'm guessing it's only a matter of time, though). And the warning about the 30 day post or purge deadline has kept me motivated to keep my post per week goal.

As long as I'm talking about Pharyngula, I guess I'll point out something else interesting. Way back in February of 2006, I posted a trackback to Pharyngula for an entry about What Is the Value of Algebra. That entry got me a trackback and two comments. On that Blogroll Open Enrollment Day post on Pharyngula, just by having a link to my blog in his comments (and there were over 150 comments in that thread), I got a noticeable increase in traffic, and a comment to one of my posts. Considering that I normally get zero feedback, I think it's interesting that just posting a comment on Pharyngula and feeding on his scraps gets me an infinity percent increase in comments/trackbacks.

Speaking of blogrolls, I recently got added to Matt's blogroll over on Pooflinger's Anonymous (which, by the way, is one of the three blogs I check on a daily basis, the other two being Pharyngula and Confessions of an Anonymous Coward; in other words, it's a good blog and you should check it out if you haven't, yet). It was a similar situation to Pharyngula, where Matt posted that he was getting ready to update his blogroll, and told people to leave a comment if they wanted to be considered. And once again, I shamelessly plugged my own blog, and was lucky enough to be added. And again, it's given me more motivation to try to make good weekly posts.

In both of the above cases, it felt very awkward asking to be added to their blogrolls. I really get kind of self conscious advertising for my blog. I feel that if I've got good content, people will just find me. I mean, I never advertised my French Polynesia Photos page on my main site, but if you Google "bora bora photos," I'm on the first page of results (currently eighth). And if you Google "autogyros" or "autogyro history," my Autogyro History and Theory page is the first or second result (damn you Wikipedia</Charlton Heston voice>). So posting comments on other people's blogs, asking them to add me to their blogrolls, seems a bit pathetic too me; it almost felt like begging. Oh well - I'm on the blogrolls, now, so I might as well just do my best to make good posts.

Something else I felt like talking about in this entry was what I plan on writing about on this blog in the future. I started this blog "pre-Dover," when Intelligent Design was making the "real" news on a regular basis. It was also around the time I first discovered that nearly half of Americans believe humans were specially created. I guess I'd been naive before, believing that it was only the loonies that still doubted evolution. The history of life on this planet has always been a topic I've been really interested in even before I knew there was this controversy, so getting such a wake up call made me start to look at the issue more. It also lead me to take more note of the religious fundamentalism in this society, that I guess I'd been kind of sheltered from before, and realize that it wasn't just a fringe element of society, either. So, when I started this blog, those were the main topics I wrote about. Well, it's been over a couple years now since I started following this controversy, and while creationists certainly haven't gone away, I can sense my interest in the topic waning. It's partly a conscious effort, as well - my wife told me I was becoming too obsessed, so I've been trying to think about other things. So, to get back to the point of this paragraph, I doubt I'll ever stop writing about the science/religion/creationism issue entirely (especially in the narrower field of evolution), and for the time being, the majority of my posts will probably still be about this issue, but I plan on writing more entries on other topics.

One last thing - I had been considering using this post to announce that I was going to disable trackbacks. You wouldn't believe the number of spam trackbacks my filter catches (well, maybe you would if you have your own blog). But, I decided against it. I figure that if something I write inspires somebody else to write something, I'd like to know about it.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Apr 20 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I wanted to write this up on Monday, but at least I'm getting to it before the end of the week...

My daughter had a revelation over the weekend. She realized the Easter Bunny isn't real. It happened on Saturday night. She asked my wife and I if we thought the Easter Bunny was going to come and hide our eggs. My wife's reply was to ask her if she still believed in the Easter Bunny (which maybe wasn't the best response, but oh well). My daughter said yes, but I guess it got her to thinking, and a few minutes later, she asked me if I believed in him. I hate lying to her, so whenever Easter Bunny and Santa Claus questions have come up in the past, I've always evaded the question, or told her she could still believe if she wanted to. She wasn't taking that this time, though, so I just flat out told her that I wasn't going to tell her if I believed or not. And when she pressed about if I hid the eggs, I told her that I didn't know. Well, she's too smart to not realize that I must know whether or not I'm the one hiding the eggs, so she had it pretty much figured out. I guess I was smiling a bit, too, which was the giveaway to her, and she went off crying to my wife who'd left the room by then. And the thing my daughter was most upset about, wasn't that there was no Easter Bunny, but that it meant my wife and I had been lying to her her whole life. We did our best to explain it to her, though, and by Easter morning she was happy looking for eggs that she knew I'd hidden.

So, this whole episode got me to thinking - why do we as a society continue to perpetuate the myths about the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and all those other make-believe holiday characters. When I told my parents about it, they told me that I wasn't "lying," I was "pretending." I don't buy that. Pretending is when both parties involved know what's going on. My daughter and I pretend together all the time. One party pretending something so the other party can believe it doesn't seem very honest to me.

My parents also told me, as have many others, that pretending in these things for the kids makes the holidays more fun for them. I don't know about that one. My daughter had plenty of fun looking for eggs knowing that I'm the one that hid them, and I don't think she'll turn her nose up at Christmas presents this year, either. Plus, kids have plenty of fun pretending in things that they know are fake, just for the sake of playing. So, do kids really have that much more fun around the holidays believing in false ideas than they would without them, and is it worth lying to kids to give them that fun?

I also find it interesting the reactions we've gotten from people when we've told them that our daughter figured out about the Easter Bunny. Most people feel bad for her, that she doesn't have the Easter Bunny to believe in any more. One of our friends was even upset with us for letting her figure it out. I don't understand why so many people have those reactions; I'm actually relieved that she figured it out - no more deception, no more tip-toeing around the issue trying to figure out ways to not directly lie to her, plus I always enjoy watching her grow and learn more about the real world.

I never really had a good reason to carry on the myth with my daughter in the first place. I did it just because I went along with everybody else. My parents did it with me; she gets it from school and daycare; our friends with kids do it with their children. I guess I didn't want to seem like a kill-joy. Looking at it now, though, I wish I could go back and tell myself to just be straight with her. She would have had fun around the holidays with or without actually believing in the fairy tales, so why lie to her in the first place.

Posted by Jeff on Thursday, Apr 12 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Depending on where you are in the world, you may call today something else, like Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day. But from where I'm from in Pennsylvania, today's called Fastnacht Day. Traditionally, you make potato based donuts, called fastnachts, supposedly as a way to empty your larder of all the fatty, sugary foods in preparation for the Lenten fast. My elementary school even used to give out donuts with the lunches on this day. So, in celebration of today, here's a recipe on my main site on how to make fastnachts, and a link to the (not so thorough) Wikipedia article. (I know it's a little late, since you should have made them either last night or early this morning, so that you could eat them throughout the day, but better late than never. And yeah, I just cut and pasted this entry from last year's Fastnacht Day entry, but really - what's the point to writing something original for an entry like this? Maybe next year I'll remember to make this post the day before Fastnacht Day.)

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Feb 20 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was watching one of the CSI's the other night with my wife (she had the remote, or it would have been something "educational.") I remember one scene, where they had an eyepiece from some binoculars they'd found at a crime scene (the eyepiece, not the binoculars), threw the eyepiece into their fancy lab machine, and a few mintues later, the machine beeped at them to let it know that it had found DNA on the eyepiece. Not just that, but it had already analyzed the DNA, determined who it belonged to, and had that man's file ready and waiting on the computer screen. That was a little too much, and I voiced my opinion out loud. Well, a few scenes later and after a few more spoken opinions, my wife told me to shut up so that she could enjoy the show.

This is pretty common. I know a thing or two about science and technology, and while I won't recognize every mistake I ever see in a TV show or movie, and many are small enough that it's easy to "suspend my disbelief," many movies have enough glaring mistakes that it actually makes it hard to enjoy what I'm watching. Let me put it in perspective for people that don't know as much about science. Suppose you were watching a movie, and the lead character, out of the blue, walked up to someone on the street and asked to have sex with them, and they agreed - right there in public. And everybody else on the sidewalk just kind of made way for them, and didn't stop and stare, or call the police. Would you "suspend your disbelief" for that? Of course not - it's ludicrous. It goes completely against human nature. That's exactly the way it is when I watch a movie that butchers science - it's so far off from what would be expected to happen in reality, that it's hard to ignore.

Apparently, I'm not alone in this. I recently came across an interesting website - INSULTINGLY STUPID MOVIE PHYSICS. It's a pretty good site, and brings up a lot of the points I gripe about a lot.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Jan 24 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, a couple of my favorite blogs (Pooflingers Anonymous and Pharyngula) have pointed out that it's National Delurking Week - that time of year when people who just read blogs but never leave any comments are supposed to make their presence known by, well, leaving comments. Since I only update this blog every month or so, and I've only ever gotten a handful of non-spam comments, I doubt I have any lurkers, but the server logs tell me that some people visit this blog from time to time. So, if you're one of them, let me know in the comments.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Jan 12 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got an e-mail that kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Actually, that happens a lot with e-mail, and I usually just hit the delete button and that's the end of it. And this one's even meant to be a joke, so I shouldn't take it too seriously, but I think I've received it about half a dozen times, so I figure it's about time to comment on it.

The e-mail's titled, "TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930's 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's!!" It's a kind of electronic version of telling your kids that you had to walk uphill barefoot through the snow, both ways, to get to and from school when you were a kid. Not just that, it brags about all the dangerous things "we" did back in the old days. Here's an example, "when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking," and on and on like that. Then, it moves on to how kids these days do nothing but watch TV and play their video games. Next a little backslapping, "These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever! The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!" And finally the obligatory call to pass the e-mail on to others, while getting in one more jab about how bad things are today, "before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives 'for our own good.'"

Like I said, I realize this isn't meant to be all that serious, but it irritates me just the same. Most of the items the e-mail brags about are unneccesary risks - why let your kids ride a bike without a helmet when you know what the consequences are. Really, the proof is in the pudding, so I went and did a quick Google search on child mortality rates. Here's what I found, "Between 1980 and 2003, death rates dropped by 46 percent for infants, 51 percent for children ages 1 to 4, 44 percent for children ages 5 to 14, and 32 percent for teens ages 15 to 19."

Wow, it seems all that extra precaution isn't just unneccessary intervention, huh? Or maybe we should just let kids take unneccessary risks - it weeds out the gene pool, right? (Actually, there is some bit of serious debate that this could start - the grey area between where kids should be protected from the stupidity of their parents vs. giving parents autonomy over raising their kids, i.e. where's the line between freedom and negligence. Let adults be as stupid as they want to be, but don't let their kids be punished unduly for it.)

And it's not like kids can't have fun these days - there's nothing stopping kids from making go-carts. If a parent really wanted to, they could provide their kids with the fun chemicals (one more link) that don't get included in stock chemistry sets these days. My daughter still likes to play with bugs. And potato guns seem to be pretty popular these days, too (even if it does require parents turning a blind eye to the law in some states).

So, meh. The good old days weren't any better than today. I'd rather my daughter grew up in today's world than the one I grew up in.

[Added after original post] Actually, I think I know why this e-mail gets to me the way it does - its condescending tone. Consider another e-mail I've received, which i've added below the fold, "You Know You're From Pennsylvania When..." It's similar in the sense that it's an "us" vs. "them" mentality, only in geography, not time, but there's nothing condescending about it. It's just a good natured, "Hey, you remember this."

Anyway, that's enough ranting for me for today. I've put the full text of the e-mail that got me started below the fold.

Continue reading "A Little Ranting About the Not So Good Old Days" »

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Oct 24 | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

As most have heard by now, Steve Irwin, aka the Crocodile Hunter, is dead. I first heard it over the radio on my car ride in to work on Monday. It was a very sad day. The world has lost a great animal lover, and his family has lost a father.

I'll be honest. I wasn't a huge fan of his shows. I did enjoy them somewhat, enough to watch them occasionally, especially considering what else is on T.V. But if it came down to a choice between Crocodile Hunter or Wild Kingdom, I'd have chosen Wild Kingdom. That was just my personal taste - I'd rather see just the animals themselves than see the host interacting with the animals. On the other hand, my daughter loved his shows, as did many others, so he definitely got people interested in wild life, which is a good thing.

But the main reason I'm writing this blog entry, is in response to all I've seen and heard since his death about how this wasn't so unexpected. Bah. He was killed in a freak accident by a sting ray. That would be almost like a NASCAR driver getting killed while changing the oil in his car at home after the jack broke and the car crushed him, and saying, "Well, look at all the chances he took driving in NASCAR, it's no surprise a car killed him."

Steve Irwin wasn't dumb. He may have taken a few more chances than some, but he knew a lot about the animals he was interacting with. How many other herpetologists handle dangerous snakes on a regular basis for research or for milking them to make antivenom? Why is it any worse to pick up a few here and there outside of that to educate people? And how many animal control people have to catch and relocate crocodiles or alligators? What was so different about Irwin doing it? Yes, what he did was riskier than laying on your couch watching T.V., but with the knowledge he had, the risks weren't as great as some people would believe. And the fact that he was killed by a sting ray (an animal I've swum with personally and can attest to how docile they are), was just a freak, tragic accident.

Posted by Jeff on Thursday, Sep 7 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Okay, it's come to this. Users now have to register through Type Key to comment on this blog. I didn't want to do it, because I wasn't getting many legitimate comments as it was, and I didn't want to make it any more difficult for people to leave feedback, but the spam was just getting to be too much. But at least Type Key is pretty painless. It's free, it gives you the option to stay signed in for up to two weeks so you won't be having to type in your user name and password very often, and it only requires a one time sign up for any of the thousands of blogs that use it. In other words, if you've already signed up for Type Key to comment on a popular site like Pharyngula, that same account will work to allow you to comment on my not so popular site. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Jul 4 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Time to take stock of what I've done so far with this blog, and decide where it's going to go from here.

My first entry was back on Dec 7th of last year. I did fairly good for a while, putting up new, original posts about once a week, and copying my old Soapbox entries every Monday. Then, the new posts started tapering off, and I'd copied all of my old Soapbox entries. My last original post was on March 2nd, and the last substantive one before that was on Feb. 17th.

It's tough trying to blog on a regular basis. It's given me greater respect for all of those bloggers that do manage it. Where do they find the free time? My lunchbreak is when I try to do most of my website work, but I've also got other things to do then, like reading the News @ Nature site and other science news sites, keeping up with other blogs that I follow, and actually eating my lunch. Trying to do anything on this site any other time during the day is out since my boss wouldn't be too happy about me doing that on company time. By the time I get home, I want to spend time with my family, not to mention eating supper, and then it's late at night and I just want to relax. I've read other bloggers who mention that they write their posts late at night while watching T.V., but I just don't have that type of committment to this blog (I'd rather watch The Daily Show.)

Still, I like having a blog. I especially like the spot for user feedback, even if I've only had a handful of comments. So, I'm going to keep it. I think I'll really try hard to make a good, substantive post at least once a month. But, I still think my main website is more important than this blog, and my goal is to add something to that site at least once a month, too, so it will take priority over making posts here. So, the end of the month is this Friday, and I need to do something for my main page. I have a few ideas in mind, I'll just have to see how much I can get done. Since I posted a blog entry in March already, I may or may not get something done to this blog before then. But I already have several ideas for new entries to this blog if I could just find the time to write them.

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Mar 27 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Depending on where you are in the world, you may call today something else, like Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day. But from where I'm from in Pennsylvania, today's called Fastnacht Day. Traditionally, you make potato based donuts, called fastnachts, supposedly as a way to empty your larder of all the fatty, sugary foods in preparation for the Lenten fast. My elementary school even used to give out donuts with the lunches on this day. So, in celebration of today, here's a recipe on my main site on how to make fastnachts. (I know it's a little late, since you should have made them either last night or early this morning, so that you could eat them throughout the day, but better late than never.)

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Feb 28 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Note: This is a post of an essay that first appeared on my website November 7th, 2005. The original essay can be found here. This is the last entry of an ongoing effort to put all of my soapbox entries onto this blog, to give a space for user feedback.

7 November 2005

I spend enough time complaining on my soapbox, so I figured it was about time that I write something positive. I was originally just going to write about my new laptop, but figured I'd extend it to computers in general.

I was born in 1978. That puts me at the age where I got to witness personal computers becoming common place, initially being little more than souped up Ataris, blossoming into what we have today. My family's first computer was a Commodore 64. Originally, we used a T.V. set for the display, and it wasn't until we'd had it for several years that we finally got a dedicated monitor. I was pretty young when we had it. I remember being completely mystified by how it worked, but having fun playing games on it. We did have a few useful programs, like the word processor, Easy Script, which I hardly ever used, and the graphics program, Print Shop, which I used a bit, but for me that computer was mainly a game machine.

Continue reading "Retroactive Soapbox Entry- Ode to Computers" »

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Feb 14 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I thought about saying "Happy Holidays," just to tick off those people that get so worked up over it (like at my wife's work, one guy caught a bunch of flak from his coworkers for having Christmas cards that said "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," even though the cards had a Bible verse on them), but it's the last work day before Christmas, and I didn't feel like being cantankerous. If you don't celebrate Christmas, well than enjoy whatever holiday it is that you celebrate around this time, and if you don't celebrate anything, then just enjoy yourself.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Dec 23 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I decided to start up a blog on this site. I figured it would be a place where I could write about things that just didn't belong on my main site. So, that brings the total to three sections on my site devoted to essays. There's the My Writings section, which I tend to think of as well researched, well thought out essays (or at least, anything new that get's added to that section will be). Then there's my Soapbox, which is for more opinionated essays. Now that I've got a blog, I figure I'll have the soapbox entries be relatively well thought out and researched, but they may not be as good as the essays going into My Writings. And now, I've got this blog. This will be where I can just write off a quick reaction to things that I read in the news, relate personal experiences, or just go off ranting about whatever I want, without doing any research- basically the types of things bloggers have been doing for years. I figure that I'll also include updates to my main site on this blog, and I'll copy all new soapbox entries in this blog, to give a section for user feedback. Speaking of feedback, I'm initially going to set up this blog to allow anonymous commenting. If it becomes a problem with people abusing it, I'll consider making people have to sign up for accounts.

So far, I'm using pretty much the default user interface that came with Movable Type, with just a few small changes to the .css to make this blog a little more consistent with my main site. I figure I'll concentrate on getting a few entries on here that I have in mind before I start worrying too much about the way the blog looks. After all, content is king, appearance is only secondary.

By the way, the name was picked because I tend to work on my website during my lunchbreak at work - it's about the only time during the day that I get a chance to.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Dec 7 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)