Nerd Books

I'm a terrible nerd. That fact was really brought to my attention when I looked at the books I got for Christmas. 6 books in all (a rather large haul for me) which I will list below for you.

• Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
• The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero
• Galileo's Pendulum: From the Rhythm of Time to the Making of Matter
• "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" Adventures of a Curious Character
• The Calculus Wars: Newton, Leibniz, and the Greatest Mathematical Clash of All Time
• e: The Story of a Number

That's about the biggest collection of nerd books possible I think. I've already read the Galileo book. The first 2/3 about the history of time keeping was excellent. The last 1/3 about physics and harmonic oscillators was a bit iffy.

Merry Christmas. But really, the whole point of this post is to alert the world of the utterly unique shower head to be found in the Anderson's basement. It's not terribly new, but it's still news worthy. The shower head, rather than producing any sort of streams of water creates a windy mist of pelting droplets. I guess it's supposed to save water and stuff, perhaps by pelting you hard enough with this crazy mist that you just shower quicker. It's not bad or anything, but it sure is unique in the world of shower heads that I've experienced. If you're ever in the neighborhood, maybe you should stop in and take a look.

First off, I'll be out of town for the Christmas Break, so posting will be a bit more sporadic. But I'll try to keep you abreast of our many adventures. Secondly, I have decided that my blog needs to be a bit more colorful and include more pictures. Any month now I'm going to put up pictures of Bishops Castle, but until then, you'll get a colorful pie chart.

West Texas A&M

Speaking of West Texas A&M, I looked it up to see where it is. (Canyon, TX) Then I looked up Canyon, TX to see where that is. (12 miles south of Amarillo. Luckily I know where that is.) Their website is the best college site I've seen since North Carolina A&T. Their first two points which they make sure to point out when you read about their school are:

1) "[T]he northernmost senior institution of higher learning in Texas." They get this point out in the very first sentence. Good, because I'd hate to go to school and find out that I was only in the second or third northernmost senior institution of higher learning in Texas.

2) "[T]he only bachelor's and master's degree-granting state university within a 100-mile radius." This is their big point of the second sentence. Just to make sure you know that not only are they far north, but they are the only school anywhere near Amarillo. Apparently the further away you are from any other school, the better. I think they're putting in a satellite campus in White Horse, Canada.

(My apologies to White Horse.)

"Rocky II" / Jerry Tarkanian / Washed Up Quarterback / Las Vegas Bowl

Yes, this is a rant. Maybe some of you didn't get to watch the thing that ESPN decided to broadcast during the Las Vegas Bowl between BYU and Oregon. Among topics that were covered:

• Brent Musburger's part in "Rocky II"
• Brent Musburger's "Rocky II" action figure
• Brent Musburger's "Rocky II" action figure's physique and pants.
• Jerry Tarkanian's opinion of Bobby Knight
• Jerry Tarkanian's opinion of Texas A&M (not playing in this game, by the way)
• A former NFL quarterback becoming the golf coach at West Texas A&M because they couldn't even pay him to be their quarterbacks coach.
  

Among topics that were not covered:

• The Las Vegas Bowl
• Plays
• Stats
• Penalties
• Anything having to do with BYU or Oregon

Major gaffe of the game: Brent Musburger confusing Oregon QB Brady Leaf with Notre Lame QB Brady Quinn. Strongly worded emails have already been sent to ESPN, but feel free to add your own. I put up with CSTV and Versus coverage during the season which was bad, but at least it was on topic. At least they tried. Tonight, ESPN didn't even care. They didn't even try to convince me that they took the game seriously at all. But I am glad that they cleared up the confused I had about the golf coach at West Texas A&M

401k'd Up

As of right now, I am offically 401k'd up. It was a fairly easy process. Click here, answer this yes/no question, choose how much money to put in, click 'ok', and then choose what percentage of your money (1%-100%) you want to put in each of these 19 different funds. I suppose I'm supposed to be happy to have all those options, but I mean, come on! Should I pick the Franklin High Yield Growth and Income S, or the SSGa Diversity 17Ga Fund, or the YT Oppenheimer R Investment Fund, or the GTYFFWX Unicorn and Burrito Fund? Lucky for me, each one comes with a prospectus. I sampled one, which was 54 pages long. Needless to say, I didn't read it. But we're signed up now, and hopefully we'll be rolling in the dough soon.

I depend on these people?

Yesterday I was trained in CPR, and the course is taught, in part, by a DVD. It shows all the steps and gives little scenarios and you can practice along with the tape, etc. The video emphasised various important points, such as pushing hard and fast, but my personal favorite is how we were repeatedly told to start CPR "ammediately". I listened carefully, and each time we were told to take "ammediate" action. So when your life is on the line, be glad that your emergency responders are taking action "ammediately" to save your life.

Happy Birthday Tim

Yesterday was my nephew Timothy's birthday. He is now four years old, and apparently spent the whole day telling everyone that it was his birthday. We called him up to say happy birthday, and Melissa put him on the phone. When I asked him what day it was, the answer surprised me. "Tuesday" Even more weird is that when I got his brother Benjamin on the phone (5 years old) and ask him what day it was, he said, "Tuesday". Apparently the kids are real big on the days of the week down there in Texas.

Welcome to .. .. ..

This is just a reminder for anyone who doesn't know or may have forgotten that the prison down here in southern Utah is named Purgatory. Isn't that a perfect name for a prison?

Apple Carts

An image that will forever stick in my mind is that of peasants overturning an apple cart in the narrow streets of Paris during a riot or revolution and blocking the street off entirely. Ms. Brinton made the reference so that students who had grown up in SLC, with its famously wide straight streets could appreciate the narrow roads of Europe. If only we had all been in St. George, we would already have known what she was taking about.

This morning, snow fell in St. George (second time this year) and a small bridge over the Fort Pierce Wash was slick enough that a car slid off into the guard rail or something like that. So we had dozens of flashing lights on the scene and River Road was closed off. I was forced to turn into a neighborhood, about 1 mile short of work. There is no way to get to work when that 100 feet of River Road is closed. No neighborhood to by pass it, no alternate road, no scenic route. The only option I could think of would be to turn around and drive the 3 miles back into St. George, drive all the way across town, get on the freeway, take the next exit and get back to River Road. That's about an 8 mile drive to bypass half a mile of River Road. Stuart has indicated that there are two other routes I could have taken, one by way of a sod farm that isn't really a public road, and another that goes through Arizona.

Next time I have any Parisian pals in town, I think we should turn over an apple cart and barricade off this part of town, then wait to see how long it would take anyone to get to us to shut down our revolution.

Couches: Final Report

I hope that you are all as obsessed with our couches as we are. But it seems to finally be over. The "couch technician" came over on Saturday (I wasn't there, so maybe Shannon will give a more detailed report) and fixed the couch up. I guess he sprayed some stuff on our small little tear and it should be ok, and we're just happy to have couches to sit on and watch TV and read.

A Call for Websites

Ok folks, sometimes we all find ourselves sitting in front of a computer with very little to do. So we surf the internet. But if you're like me, you surf for about 10 minutes, and then, once you've verified about 7 times that no one has commented on your blog, there is no where left to surf to. So what are some of your best websites for providing a good time or a small giggle? If we all share, then we'll all be better off.

Things that keep Clark interested:
These may not be for everyone, but I generally check:
espn.go.com - Self-explanatory
www.ornery.org - Message board of people arguing. Heavy on politics, but not always.
cloark.blogspot.com - Obviously you know where this one is.
any blog linked to my blog
www.hatrack.com - Just to see what weird thing Orson is ranting about this week.
improveverywhere.com - Hilarious, but once you've read them all, you're kinda done.

Ok, Go

We went to Panda Express last night, and it was tasty. My fortune says: "People are waiting for cues from you." So, for all of you out there (and you are plural at least) whatever it is, you can go ahead and do it now. You have my permission. You may proceed.

Profiles

I don't have a profile filled out on this this, and I went through the effort to remove the profile link on the blog that appears by default. No one who reads this thing needs a profile for me anyway. But the other night, Shannon accidentally clicked on her own name in a comment field and it took her to her profile. 50 views! I just checked mine. 5 views! And one of those was me just checking. We don't have anyway of checking traffic, so we don't know how many people are looking at our blogs, but if we assume traffic to be equal, apparently the public is 12 times more interested in knowing about Shannon than they are about me. Or she's getting 4 times the traffic and they're 3 times more interested in knowing more. Or she's getting 12 times the traffic and the populous is equally uninterested in both of us. Or they're 4 times as interested in me, but she gets 50 times the traffic. I just can't find a way where this comes out good for me.

Couch Timeline

The folks down at SofaMart are certainly no Service Champions. Here's a basic rundown of our couching adventures. The dates are a bit sketchy, because when this all started, I never figured I'd be doing this.

Oct 1: Initial shopping
Oct 3: Order couch, love seat, and tables. We are told that it will take about 3 weeks.
Oct 30ish: Shannon calls them, to find out where our couches are. They tell us it will be a few more weeks. Thanks for telling us, guys.
Nov 20ish: More phone calls. Still no couch. They pledge to make things better.
Next Day: We go into the store. They say it will still be a few weeks until our couches come, perhaps into January. We elect to trade up to a different couch at no cost to us. We should have our stuff within a week.
Dec 2: After calling them, and finding out that the love seat has not arrived, we basically tell them that we need somewhere to sit, and they deliver our couch and tables. It's now just shy of 2 months since we bought our couch.
Dec 13: Love seat finally arrives. All is good, until the deliverers find that one of the legs doesn't screw into the couch. It's functional but the leg will fall off if you try to move the couch. They will send couch technician to fix it in a few days. All is ok, until I discover some dirt and a 3/4" tear in the arm of the love seat. Couch technician will also fix that, or they can order us a whole new love seat, but I am loath to think of how long that would take us.

Summary: 2 months, 11 days and we've got a couch, coffee table, 2 end tables and a somewhat damaged love seat. The set is already 60% paid off. I feel that if we order a new love seat, it could be another month before it comes. I regularly think of asking them: What good is 6 months same as cash if it takes you 6 months to give it to me? Isn't that really just a 6 month lay-away program?

Scientific Instruments

At work, I deal with molten metal. It's hot stuff. Incidentally, I'll remind everyone out there that we're all very familiar with water as a solid, liquid and gas. We're all used to terms like, freezing, melting, boiling, etc. It's no different for metal, or liquid nitrogen. All the elements still do the same things, just not at 0° and 100°. (The whole expanding when freezing thing is fairly unique to water though. If you want to know half a dozen more unique things about water, ask Suzanne.)

Anyway, because our molten metal is really hot 1000°C, give or take, we have fancy thermometers to measure the temperature. The only down side is that when you're spending your evening letting the things cool down, the thermometers quit working. They've got some lower limit why the don't work (I'd explain why, but that would require the Stefan-Boltzmann law and you simply don't care) so as they cool, once they're somewhere below 800°C (roughly) the thermometer doesn't say anything more specific than "cold". (Remember, cold is just a relative meaning. "Colder than what?" is the important question.) But that leaves me curious as to what the temperature is like in there. The metal glows red when it's hot, so color and brightness is an indication of temperature (whoops, that's pretty much the Stefan-Boltzmann law, sorry) but that gives out not long after my thermometers. So our official technique: stick your hand in front of it and feel how much heat is coming out the little window. But if you want a more precise measurement? Easy. I use my face. (It's much more sensitive to heat.)

Gabriel Mann

I don't know where he comes from, but our computer came with 3 songs on it from a guy named Gabriel Mann. (I assume that's his name, not a band.) Anyway, I rather like the music. It's catchy. And it's nearly 2 in the morning, I'm in a noisy room with lots of equipment, and I haven't seen another person for 8 hours. So I've got my mp3 player stuck in my ears and I'm singing along to music. I'm sure I sound ridiculous, but provided Jason doesn't show up 3 hours early, no one is going to hear it (including myself) so I'll just go back to enjoying myself.

Something to throw the book at

Shannon and I have know for a little while now about a glaring error in the St. George phone book. It has a vendetta against Home Depot. When we moved here, we thought there wasn't a Home Depot around, because it isn't in the phone book. It turns out that it is. But the other night, we found further phone book anomalies.

We wanted to rent a movie from Blockbuster, so we checked our phone book and found 2 near by. One in St. George, another in Washington. We don't live too far from Washington, so were uncertain as to which is closer. We figured that if it was closer than the DI in Washington, that would be a good bet, so we looked up DI in the phone book. But DI isn't in the phone book. It must have sided with Home Depot in an argument once or something. So we went to the Blockbuster in St. George. But there isn't a Blockbuster in St. G. Only the remains of one. Good job again, mr. phone book. So off we went to Washington, passing the non-existent DI and Home Depot to arrive at Blockbuster. But there isn't a Blockbuster in Washington either! So apparently, here in St. G, if you want to find something, you'd better hope it isn't in the book.

Ge Smuggler

Yesterday I found a new way to smuggle expensive Ge out of the plant: in my thumb. I got a sliver of Ge stuck in my thumb in the morning and didn't manage to get it out until after I got home. It kinda hurt (and still kinda hurts). But, the stuff is valuable! If I keep giving myself slivers every single day, I figure I could get ten or twenty bucks after a year.

Fortune Cookie Wisdom

In the working world, everyone seems to have automatic secrecy warnings put at the end of their emails. They're long, and no one reads them. To prove that no one reads them, I started putting different ones at the ends of all my emails to Jason, and he didn't notice until I pointed them out to him. Some of my favorites are:

**********************************
This message is super secret. Don't
even think about telling anyone about
it. Or I'll break your knees.
**********************************
********************
Tell anyone about this
and you're dead meat.
********************

But now after going out for Chinese today, I found the perfect message that I think I'll be using from now on. From my fortune cookie:

You think that is a secret, but it never has been one.

Continuing Christmas Ranting

The next topic of Christmas tripe is Christmas songs that aren't about Christmas. These fall into two categories:

Wintertime non-Christmas Songs
If you pay close attention, a lot of Christmas songs aren't about Christmas. "Let it Snow" ought to be good anytime it's snowing. The all-time classic "Jingle Bells" is likewise not about Christmas. It's just that Christmas seems to be our all-around wintertime celebration. If you pay close attention, you'll notice that probably 1/3 of "Christmas" songs fit in this category.

Songs that have nothing to do with Christmas or winter
The top winner in this category is easily "My Favorite Things" from the Sound of Music. Really, why is this in my big book of Christmas songs? Why it is on Shannon's Christmas CD? Who thought this one up? Why "My Favorite Things" and not "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" or "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" if we're just picking random songs to sing for Christmas time. Another one that has confused me for years is "Hymne". It's a fine song, but how exactly can a song with no words be a Christmas song? Does it have a particularly yuletide melody?

Christmas Tripe

This was supposed to be the last post, but apparently my feelings about notepad were just too strong and worked their way to the surface. (That post is doomed to zero instances of lavish praise.) But this one is all about Christmas quality. I've often commented to Shannon the following American culture truth:

People will accept a startling level of crappiness from products and still love them, just because it's Christmas.

Exhibit A: 98% of all Christmas music. Some crummy vocalist can get his family steel drum band together and go record "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" and suddenly you're listening to it on the radio. There's such a demand for this stuff that they start playing Christmas music November 1st. What if crummy-steel-drum-band-man went and recorded his own version of "Video Killed the Radio Star"? Would that get air time? If it did, would you listen to it? Most Christmas music is done by poor to average vocalists with formulaic music. If you really look at it, the tunes and lyrics themselves are usually pretty awful. "Jingle Bell Rock" "Feliz Navidad" "Upon the Housetop"? If these songs were about anything other than Christmas they never even would have been written.

Exhibit B: Christmas Movies and TV shows. The Charlie Brown Christmas is a classic. And that's about it. Many will defend the original Rudolph TV production, but really, if that wasn't somehow entrenched as the greatest Christmas time TV show ever, would anyone still like it? (We all like it and watch it because we've been told that everyone likes it.) Frosty the Snowman isn't bad, but would take a big hit without the "Happy Birthday!" line every time he's brought back to life. The movie "The Christmas Story" is a good flick and then we've just about exhausted Christmas films. Yet every year someone has to star in a terrible Christmas movie where people learn to have the Christmas spirit and old enemies become friends. Any don't try to punch holes in this argument with pseudo-Christmas movies like "Home Alone". It takes place at Christmas time, but really, there's no reason it couldn't have been done over spring break. The scary guy next door would just have to be fertilizing his lawn rather than salting the walks. The heartwarming "we made it back for Christmas" scene would have been weakened a bit, but really, the film is about being home alone, not Christmas.

Exhibit C: Handy-Nerd stocking stuffers. (If you don't know what this is, ask. Maybe it'll have to be it's own post.)

My pledge this Christmas season is not to endure any low quality tripe just because it's Christmas tripe. Enjoy the good quality stuff out there, but don't settle for things you'd never endure the other 11 months of the year.

New Blog Post (3)

Well, Gmail seems to be down today. We seem to be having a few internet issues in general, but gmail is particularly defunct today. And the blog is gmail based. (Because Gmail owns everything.) So I'm writing posts ahead of time in notepad. I think I'm about the only person in the whole world who uses notepad regularly, and does so out of personal preference. I could use Word. I could use Wordpad. But when I just want to make myself little notes, I prefer the stark simplicity of notepad. I just right click on the desktop, create a new text document and start typing away. Back when I made dorky little web pages in high school I was proud that I did them all in Notepad, rather than having some program make them for me. The only downside is I can often end up with 'New Text Document' 'New Text Document (2)' and 'New Text Document (3)' all sitting on my desktop if I don't remember to rename them something more sensible. But generally, the files just live long enough to be copied into the blog or some other place before being destroyed. Such is the short life of a text document.

Double Heel

I know Shannon already thinks I'm a huge weirdo for thinking this way, and now all the rest of you can weigh in on this point also. (I know you all think I'm a huge weirdo in general, but that's not the point. This is a question of this specific weirdo nature of this one item.) I pulled out my sandwich today (which Shannon lovingly made for me) and my first thought was, "Alright! A double heel sandwich!" Shannon despises heels, and I like 'em! Of course, the second heel turned out to be a fraud, because there was actually a very thin, mini-heel stuck to it, so I got a half-heel sandwich and a little heel to snack on. What a day!

Truly a Sight to Behold.

First off, the spellcheck and formatting buttons are back. All is once again right in the world.

My car has a tachometer, which has been mostly broken for years now. Mostly broken, meaning that it works about 5 to 10 percent of the time and there's no telling when it will suddenly come to life or when it will revert back to it's preferred dormant state. It happened to be on the other day, functioning as if nothing were ever wrong, but then, moments later, I noticed that it is now semi-permanently pegged at about 8,500 rpm. I think it red lines at 5,500 and the gauge stops at 7,000, but there is my needle, pointing nearly straight down in the neighborhood of where 8,500 would be. My theory is that as I was getting onto the freeway the other day, I got the engine up to at least 3,500 rpm while the tach was working, and it chose that point to poop out on me. 3,500 is an important number, because that is the vertical point on the gauge, and if the needle was beyond 3,500 and it cut out then the needle falls off the high end of the scale, rather than dropping back to zero. So from here on out, I'm apparently driving a race car, even if I'm in the parking lot.

Sub-ward

Shannon and I belong to a somewhat elderly ward. Welcome to St. George. But yesterday we decided to attend the other gospel doctrine class. We walked in, and suddenly, we were in a married student ward. While the majority of the ward was in the cultural hall attending one class, here we were in the Relief Society room with about 25 other people, non of whom was over the age of 30. I guess we're the only ones in our age group that had been going to that other class.

Of course, it's not like the class was any different. But for some reason, the younger people feel better about being with other younger people, rather than mixing with the bulk of the ward. Of course, in my opinion, this is a Bad Thing. The ward is artificially segregated, and the old folks never will mix with the young bucks. This is particularly bad for the men. They don't mix in Sunday School, they don't mix in Priesthood classes. They won't even home teach each other. What's the point of even being in the same ward? No one will learn others names. All activities will turn into either "old people" activities, or "young people" activities, and the ward will be about half as strong as it ought to be. But maybe that's just my opinion.

In other news, where has my formatting and spellchecking button gone? Now this post is sure to be all fouled up.

Reasons for Existance

Some things out there don't seem to have a broad range of uses. Once your pen runs out of ink, you generally throw it out, because really, what else can you use it for? Shoe laces that fray excessively at one of the ends suddenly have almost zero value. I have a growing collection of useless door handles for a Chevy Prism off of which one small piece has broken.

A few weeks ago, I gave a challenge of diagramming a horrid sentence. Suzanne did it and has declared the $1 prize to be rightfully hers. She even says that her solution was checked by her boss, an English major. In my efforts to be a good judge, I decided to bring in two outside opinions, both English majors whom I trust, to make sure Suzanne isn't trying to pull a fast one for some easy dough. Joy's response: "I'm afraid I'm of no help. . . . I've never diagrammed sentences before." Another day later and we had Chelsea's addition: "there's really no chance on this little green earth that I can fidure [sic] it out. " This has left me wondering what exactly English majors do. If they don't diagram sentences, who does? And if diagramming really isn't part of being an English major, why did I spend years being forced to do it in English class? And how is it that I've diagrammed sentences, but neither of them has? Is this why they chose to be English majors, because they were never caused to despise the subject by diagramming? And lastly, if you get a degree in physics, you're a physicist, biology and you're a biologist, but if you have a degree in English, what are you? An Englishist? Englisher?

You can see how this whole thing has turned my world upside down. I suppose I'm officially acknowledging Suzanne as the winner of the dollar.