Leftovers

Shannon made waffles for dinner. Pumpkin waffles, with apple syrup. They're very tasty. And that's a good thing, because these are the leftovers. Yes, this is after three of us ate all we could.

Planning our family vacations

The video is long, but I wanted to show off Julia's talent.

Make photo slide shows at www.OneTrueMedia.com

For the record she can locate (to the best of our knowledge) the following countries: Canada, USA, Greenland (we know this isn't really a country, but she doesn't), Mexico, Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Madagascar, Cote d'Ivoire, Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sri Lanka, India (sometimes), Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, Russia, Japan, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.

Gizmo

I think my sisters (at least the older ones) will see a resemblance. (I sure think it is there.)

Change

When I was a kid, every so often (annually, biannually?) my dad would pull out his big piggy bank full of change and set all us kids to work rolling all the coins. He always seemed to have tons of change, and we'd roll up 30 or 40 bucks worth. Similarly, I had my tootsie roll bank and I'd pull the change out of there occasionally to trade in for "real money". A bit later in life, my friend Spencer and I would refer to change as "free money". If we wanted to go ride our bikes somewhere to get a slurpee or something, even if we "didn't have any money" we knew we could go find a little pile of dimes and go get something. The point is, piggy banks always seemed to be full.

That is not the case anymore. Shannon and I have but one change receptacle, which basically just sits there. (Unless she's moving stuff in and out when I'm not home.) In years it's never filled up, and its very rare that we go take anything out of it.

November

It's November. I may not own a snow shovel, but I did just mow my lawn.

Hair Removal

I've always been a procrastinator. For weeks I've been meaning to get a haircut. It got to the point that I looked like this:

Or, with a little bit of froofing out of the beard, I looked like this:

Yes, I know it would have been tempting to turn all that into a nice Halloween costume of either a caveman or Brother Brigham or something. But instead, we finally chopped most of it off:

TROGDOR!!!!!

Burninating the countryside. Burninating the peasants.

And the Trogdor comes in the NIIIIIIIIIIGGGGHHHHTTTT!

Things that must go

Websites that charge ridiculous fees on ticket sales. It's particularly bad when they do it per ticket. I've seen movie theaters that sell tickets for 6 bucks each that want to tack on 1 or 2 dollars more per ticket for letting you buy them online. Or, as was the case tonight, a site I saw that had a flat fee of $5 on $30 worth of tickets. It's one of those hidden costs that really ought to go.

(I listen to NPR in the car now. Too bad they don't have "things that must go".)

Elements

I saw an interesting blog today where someone (an organic chemist) had counted how many different elements he had worked with. Now, a lot of the ensuing discussion can depend on how you define "working" with an element. I'm having trouble putting a specific definition into words, but let's just say that I know it when I see it. In general, the element in question needs to have been a deliberate and important part of what was going on. So, here's what I've used, and, if I feel like it, what I've done.

1: Hydrogen - I've collected H2 gas off of a reaction using HCl, and also ignited H2-filled soap bubbles.
2: Helium - Does inhaling it from balloons count? Even if it didn't, I've put it through a diffraction grating and looked at it spectral lines. That one experiment from physics 107/150 is going to get me a whole handful of these.
3: Carbon - A whole semester of organic chemistry lab. Ewwww.
4: Nitrogen - Liquid nitrogen, for everything from shattering pennies, to making ice cream, to hammering rubber hoses into a 2x4, to actual productive purposes.
5: Oxygen - I've collected it out of the atmosphere as a liquid. Liquid O2 is very exciting. (And potentially very dangerous. I've never had more than a few mL of it.)
6: Fluorine - I use HF at work all the time. The first on this list that I haven't encountered in elemental form.
7: Sodium - It burns yellow. (Like the sun.) I've only burned it in solution though. Elemental sodium is quite dangerous.
8: Magnesium - Burns extremely bright white. It's what they use in fireworks, and it's fun to play around with strips of it. As a side note, water catalyzes it's oxidation, so be very careful how you fight a magnesium fire.
9: Aluminum - Drinking a can of Coke does not fill this requirement. But writing a senior thesis about microscopy of aluminum oxide does.
10: Silicon - More microscopy. And hours spent wedging it down until it is 0.000004 inches thick.
11: Phosphorus, 12: Sulfur, 13: Chlorine: As it turns out, a mixture of these 3 elements (as H3PO4, H2SO4 and HCl) will put holes in your pants quite nicely. Not quite the experiment that I was supposed to be doing, but it's the one that I remember.
14: Argon - this is what we use for an inert atmosphere at work.
15: Calcium - I've dissolved calcium carbonate in acid. Sounds exciting, but it's just limestone.
16: Iron - Well, who hasn't done something with iron?
17: Cobalt - The aluminum oxide I mentioned earlier, well, it was covered in cobalt.
18: Copper - Pennies aren't just for spending, they're also good to turn into brass.
19: Zinc - You take the old penny, disolve some zinc in acid, and, um . . . I forget the rest of the lab, but it ends up with a brass penny.
20: Gallium - it melts near room temperature, so it makes a nice phase transition lab for pre-med students. It also super cools pretty well, unless the surface of your sample is too oxidized, then it just won't re-solidify. And I use it at work all the time.
21: Germanium - I know thee well.
22: Zirconium - Used a strip of it as a heating element once upon a time. It had just the right resistivity.
23: Molybdenum - Hard to spell, and boring to measure the resistivity of a wire made of it! By this point in the periodic table, I'm now skipping the majority of the elements.
24: Indium - I've soldered with it to make electrical contacts.
25: Tin - Also used in soldering.
26: Cesium - I've measured the half-life of a radio active isotope.
27: Tungsten - My wedding ring is made of tungsten carbide. It doesn't scratch. I've tried. Yeah, it's a bit weak, but I'm counting this one.
28: Silver - I have deposited a film of silver onto glass to make my own mirror, which was then used in an experiment to measure the speed of light through different mediums. The experiement was a big failure, but it wasn't the mirror's fault.
29: Mercury - I've studied the spectral lines.
30: Lead - I've measured the half-thickness for stopping the radiation from the aforementioned Cesium isotope.

And, from here on out, pretty much everything is radioactive. There is one other radioactive isotope that I have worked with, but I can't remember what it was. Possibly it was a repeat, but I don't think it was. So, at this point, I can point to 30 elements I've used. There's probably another 1-3 that I have used, but I'm not remembering it at the moment.

Prognostications

I've never claimed to be the "prognosticator of prognosticators" or anything, but I did have a dream last night that the moon blew up. So, you should all be on the lookout.