Dump

I've been meaning to post various things the last few days, but have simply been too busy to do it. So rather than long rants, you'll be limited to short ones:

- Everyone in Provo is all worked up about the VP speaking at commencement. The complaint is "we don't like him. He doesn't represent BYU. His values don't live up to the university's." My response: so what? You're right he doesn't represent BYU. That's why they're not hiring him to teach there, just to give one speech. You don't like him? Boo hoo. We all know that just because he's there doesn't mean 100% of people affiliated with the university like him. If we thought that, we'd also believe that UVSC is the most liberal school in the world for bringing in Michael Moore. Besides, he's there for a commencement speech, which will be the usual sort of "Yay. Rah. You can change the world." This is not a republican party fund raiser. These days the world feels that it is in appropriate to do anything that anyone might disagree with. So apparently the commencement speaker should give the most bland speech possible, and should not be any sort of public figure that anyone could have anything to dislike.

- "NeverEnding Story" is a pretty weird movie. But on the upside, Deep Roy plays the Teeney Weeney with the racing snail.

- Sanjaya wasn't even in the bottom 3. This still boggles my mind. And Hailey by any other name would still be just as bad a singer.

Idolotry

I didn't vote for anyone last night, but if I had, I would have voted for Sanjaya. Now, I would have had to vote for about 5 other people more times, to counter act my single vote for Sanjaya a bit, but at the very least, I can say this: I want Sanjaya back next week.

The last two weeks have proven that Sanjaya isn't doomed to boring, soft, unmotivated performances. He's finally proven he can be memorable. In a weird, creepy, bizarre way. He's reached new levels of weird, and I want to see how far it will go. In short, he's turned into the AI side show.

• Chris R still sings with a pinched voice. That's not going to change, and I don't like it.
• Hailey. Sucks. The number of people I know personally that could have pulled off the exact same performance last night probably fills up both my hands. I'm not just counting people I've met, but actual friends of mine.
• Everyone seems to like Blake, but he just doesn't quite do it for me. I realize that's a very Randy-ish statement, so I'll just explain it like this: For me, there's just no "Yo".
• Chris Sligh just can't quite find the beat. It's chronic. Too white I guess.

6 AM

Yesterday I learned what happens when you get ready for work at 6 AM. You find yourself at work, hours later, with no belt on, and no lunch to eat. My dad has gone to work at 6 AM for pretty much my entire life. He always has a belt on, but never takes a lunch. Maybe if you just aim for 1/2.

Today I got ready for work at 3:45. It's only 5:25 right now, which means I haven't even figured out what I forgot yet.

There's no feeling quite like looking at your watch at 8:30 pm and realizing that you've got to be to work in 7 1/2 hours.

On the up side, we finished season 2 of The Office last night, and Jim finally kissed Pam. If you're upset for ruining the ending of a season of a tv show that is so old that it's been out of DVD for a while now, you're dumb.

High Point

This weekend we went north to see Adie's blessing, run the Rex Lee Run, and see my family. But, as always, our trip had one high point. You can experience it, too. The high point of any one's trip from St. George to SLC/Provo is on I-15 between mile marker 124 and 125. It's 6,600 feet.

• My Rex Lee Run time this year was 24:21. My slowest yet! I knew I wouldn't be too fast, as I don't even walk to school anymore. My slow time is at least partly the result of the race being longer this year. "But it's a 5K!" you say. You're right, but it was longer this year than it was last year. It will remain to be seen if this year was a 5.1K, or last year was a 4.9K. So that accounts for 30 seconds or so. The other 2 or 3 minutes extra are just my fault. The shirts were pink and brown. They'll be hearing from me about this.
  
• The baby blessing went well. No one soiled any fancy white dresses, and Adie was very well behaved all through church. Lots of people were there, a few more than their apartment could hold for the after-blessing party.
• It was nice to see Brian & Emilie, Matt & Becky, (Brett & Sabrina, of course), the many Phippenses, my family, Brett's family and Sabrina's family. Now we'll just have to wait and see if anything happens with the 400 offers to stay at our house that we extended.
  

Famous Email!

I got an email the other day from James Coburn. For everyone but Suzanne, James Coburn is a movie star who was in Maverick, The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and about 172 other movie credits according to IMDb. I've included a picture of the young James Coburn (who doesn't really look like the old James Coburn). Of course, it wasn't that James Coburn. It was the James Coburn who is a physics professor at USU. And I've never heard of him either. But it was still fun to see an email from James Coburn in my in box.

Vacation Planning

We're going to be in Provo/SLC this weekend. You should all feel free to visit St. George. In the six months we've lived in St. George, we've made about six trips up north. That's out of about 28 weeks that we've been here. In the 22 weeks that we've stayed at home, we've had visits from:

• Andersons (2)
• Blockburgers
• Millars (2)
• Larrie
  

That's 0.2 visits per weekend that we're in town. In the 6 weekends that we've been gone, the following people have visited St. George:

• Karen (2)
• Jon
  
• Al
  
• Shannon Howell

That's 0.8 visits per weekend that we're out of town. For some reason, us leaving St. George makes it about 4 times as likely that friends or family will come visit. We hope it's just coincidence.

Visitors

You can always tell when we're having visitors here at work the moment you walk in the door. You can smell it in the air. Well, really, it's the coffee you smell. No one here drinks coffee. The majority of us don't even know how to make coffee. But every time we're having visitors, we make coffee, in case any of them want it. So far, no one ever has.

Tradition

One of the down sides of having a real job is that I have to wear "real" shirts to work. Shirts with buttons. So this has made carrying on my spring time tradition of wearing all my Rex Lee Run shirts in order leading up to the day of the race a bit more difficult. Couple that with the fact that I don't really see people other than my half dozen co-workers (and Shannon, of course), and I'm forced to use my blogging audience to continue on said tradition. I meant to post one picture each day to get you all excited for the run, but alas, I have fallen behind. Maybe I'll do better for the second half of the week. Enjoy the countdown!

Where Clean Energy Begins

Sometime in the last week or so, my company got a website! The the last year it has said "Under construction, come back soon" or something like that. It often made me wonder what they meant by "soon". But I discovered it by chance today. I don't know if there are any further plans for it or anything, but there is something there at least. So you can go to www.sylarus.com and check us out.

E-mail Adventures

My email at work hasn't been working for a few days. It hasn't been a huge priority because I don't get huge amounts of stuff. I left a phone message for the IT guy (who works in Ohio) a few days ago, but didn't hear back until today. He got me fixed up in just a few minutes. In the 6 total days that it was broken, I got 5 emails. 3 are junk, 1 is real and 1 is from the IT guy. Basically, it says: "I'll be out of town for a few days, so-and-so will take care of any problems while I'm gone." It seems like there might be a flaw in the system somewhere.

Iterate: v. to do (something) over again or repeatedly.

Reiterate: v. to say or do again or repeatedly.

Anyone care to explain why someone invented the word "reiterate" when iterate seems to mean reiterate already?

You can take the nerd out of the physics class . . .

We went hiking on Saturday (I'm sure Shannon will provide the details you're interested in) but my favorite part of the hike was the water skeeters. You've probably all seen them scoot across the surface of the water, and you've possibly also heard the physics lecture about surface tension, but that isn't the neat part. The tiny weight of the bug doesn't break the surface of the water, but it does depress it, making tiny little depressions in the surface of the otherwise smooth water. But now there is a curved air/water interface, and it acts like a lens! The light from the sun is bent away by the curved water surface and as a result, each leg casts a huge shadow on the bottom of the pool.In the picture, you can see the eight shadows from the eight legs. The long small legs are the ones it uses to paddle around. Most of it's weight is on the legs that bend the water the most, which cast the largest shadow.

But where does the light go then? Well, a tiny amount of it hits the water at just the right angle to be reflected back, which you can see in the picture. But most of the light is sent to the edge of the dark shadow which is noticeably brighter in the picture. Hooray physics!

Wacky Weekend

Yesterday Shannon wanted go out, and I was being a bit lethargic, so she went to go get ready. This is how she came back:
Yes, that's Shannon wearing a lei, my church shoes, a hiking pack, a purple purse (containing a swimming suit and racquetballs), my GPS, and racquetball goggles. I did take her out for a night on the town, but only after she changed.

At least it's Friday

Wednesday was Pi day. Yesterday was the Ides of March. Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. I guess today is just boring ol' Friday.

Idol De-motivator

In the past week or so, I've heard quite a bit about www.votefortheworst.com which is a site devoted to encouraging people to vote for the most terrible person left on American Idol, which they have decided is Sanjaya. (I'd have to agree.) But the question we should be asking is: do they actually make a difference? I've looked, but I can't find anyone willing to make a guess as to how many votes VFTW thinks they're influencing. I believe Ryan mentioned that there were 28,000,000 votes last week. That is, on average, 2.3 million votes per contestant. If you can get more than 2.3 million votes, you have to be safe, because you are above average. Obviously the good ones are going to hog most of those votes, leaving the median lower than 2.3 million, and moving the cut off lower yet.

Just to throw some numbers out there, assume the vote totals from last week (in millions) were: 5, 4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 0.6, 0.4. If I've done my math right, that does sum to 28. The median is 2 and obviously you need to get about 0.5 to not be eliminated. If VFTW.com is able to influence a few hundred thousand votes, they may very well be able to save someone (Sanjaya) from elimination.

But the only overall effect this will have is to save Sanjaya from elimination for a few weeks. Why? Because each week, VFTW.com would need to influence more and more votes in order to make an effect. Let's assume that voting totals don't decline, but raise slightly as the season goes on. (Once the truly terrible people are gone, people [like me] start to get worried that they're favorite needs the help and start voting more.) So if we fast forward to when there are 6 remaining contestants, and 35 million votes, the average number of votes has risen to nearly 6 million. Let's say the voting breakdown at that point is something like: 11, 9, 6, 4, 3, 2. Now that last place singer needs on the order of a million 'extra' votes to make an effect. In order to have that effect, we'd have to assume that roughly 3% of all votes placed come from VFTW, which I think is highly unlikely.

Conclusion: The American people are numerous enough that it's hard to effect the AI voting process for long. Sanjaya might stick around for another few weeks, but that's what the mute button is for.

Come back in 10 weeks

Most of the time on American Idol this year will be spent on the 10 week competition for 3rd place. As we were watching last night, there were several times that someone came on screen and I seriously asked Shannon, "Who is that? Why have I never seen them before?" Other contestants are actually being deleted from my consciousness. (Brandon, Chris R., Jordin, Stephanie) Other Idol comments:

• I'm officially on the "Sanjaya needs to go, NOW" bandwagon. I've never seen someone with that good a voice be that bad on stage. Repeatedly. He lacks all attributes to be a singer, except singing talent.
  
• In my opinion, Chris Sligh and Gina (Rocker Girl) are in the lead for the 3rd place trophy. Mostly because I can still remember who they are. The judges (i.e. Simon) tried real hard to make the show interesting be declaring that the final singer (I think it was Stephanie?) had made it a three way race. He was lying.
  
• I think the producers of Idol have to be running around like trying trying to figure out how to make the next 10 weeks interesting, before we have the big Lakisha/Melinda show down.
  
• I didn't realize how many Diana Ross songs there are, and how good she is. Even the Land Before Time song!
  

Amberexic No More!

I can't believe I'm getting to this before Shannon, but Rob and Amber were eliminated from the Amazing Race last night! We were ecstatic. After finishing 1st in each of the first three legs, they managed to get lost, not know how to spell Philippines (hint: It's not "Phillipeans"), lose a 20 minute lead at the road block looking through mail and then couldn't run down a 3 foot tall person to finish last. We were so thankful that it wasn't a non-elimination leg. I had commented to Shannon that it was ok that they already had 3 first place finishes, because we were saving up all their bad luck for one leg. And that was last night.

Now if we could just get Mirna and Shmirna to go away . . .

(In case you were wondering, the first time Rob and Amber were on the show Lynn and Alex started calling her "Amberexia" because she was skinny and they never saw her eating. Why couldn't they get those two back instead of stupid Rob?)

Voltaire, Candide and Leibniz

Back in high school, I was forced to read Candide, by Voltaire for my European History class. I don't recall a whole lot of it (I think I finished it) but I do remember my dear Dr. Pangloss. In the book, terrible things constantly befall Candide and his friends, among whom is Dr. Pangloss. However, Pangloss remains always optimistic, and continually assures Candide that they are in the "best of all possible worlds" even as they are being sold into slavery, burned, drowned, and separated from their loved ones.

But I always like Pangloss, because I interpreted his catch phrase to mean that while the world isn't perfect, and bad things happen to us, we are in the best possible world, i.e. a more prefect world would be un-creatable. This like for Pangloss made me like Voltaire.

However, a few years later, I was disappointed to learn that Voltaire didn't like Pangloss. Voltaire was a cynical, sarcastic man who included Pangloss in his book in order to make fun of him, and those who thought like him. Voltaire thought it was dumb to call this world "the best of all possible" when it was clearly terrible in so many ways. Not surprisingly, the characters in the book represent various people. And it turns out that Pangloss is Leibniz who indeed was famous (and famously mocked) for believing that we lived in "the best of all possible worlds".

In learning more about Leibniz, it turns out that it wasn't that Leibniz was trying to say that nothing bad happens in life, but that there isn't a possible world without problems, and that our world must have fewer problems than any other conceivable one. It was a theological statement for him, which happens to be exactly what I had interpreted it to mean in the first place.

So, in the end, I was right, but for the wrong reasons. Or, I managed to see through several layers of symbolism, caricature and satire with ease. All depends on how you look at it.

Book Review: The Calculus Wars

The Calculus Wars, by Jason Socrates Bardi
Grade: B

I'm going to start reviewing books I read here. In fact, I've already started! I finished The Calculus Wars last night. There was one phrase brought to mind by the book: I was told there would be no math. Despite being a book about Calculus, there really is no math. That's great for some, but a bit disappointing for me. Bardi tells us that Leibniz has superior notation to Newton, but I'd like to know why it's superior.

When first picking up the book, I was a bit wary about reading a 250 page story of a argument between Newton and Leibniz about who made calculus first. How can you write that much about one argument? You can't. And Bardi doesn't really try. Instead, the book is a history of both men, particularly Leibniz, being the less well known of the two. He covers their education, their independent invention of calculus, and their other accomplishments, as well as their debate over calculus. So it's a history book. It was very interesting learn more about Leibniz, who was considered one of the great minds of his time, but is rarely mentioned today.

In case you're just wanting to know who invented calculus: Newton did it first, Leibniz did it independently, but second. During most of their lives, Leibniz got the credit and fame. But by the end, Newton took the honor and glory, and Leibniz was forgotten. So Newton is remembered as the great creator of Calculus, even though we use Leibniz's name for it ("Calculus" as opposed to Newton's "Fluxions") and Leibniz's notation. (Which as I understand it refers, at least in part, to our use of dy/dx as opposed to x-dot.)

Basketball Final

Well, our basketball team won it's last game of the season. We finish with a 4-3 record and two overtime losses. I think it's the best 4-3 basketball team I've ever been on. I also realized after the game last night that it's the first basketball team I've been on in 8 years. That really surprises me, that in the last 8 years I've never found myself on a basketball team. Anyway, the game was closer than it should have been for most of it, but we finally pulled away in the 4th quarter. Of note, Jade got a dunk on a fast break last night. As he got the ball, Phil was on the bench next to me yelling out "Dunk it! Dunk it!" and I was next to him yelling, "Don't dunk it! Don't dunk it!" Thankfully neither ref seemed to know what I know: dunking is illegal in church ball. The dunk was in the 3rd quarter while we were still hanging on to a lead of 3 or 4 points, and I didn't want to give away an easy 2 and give the other team a technical free throw.

But, another 14 points for me, and I went 4/4 from the charity stripe. 10 more months until next season . . .

The Cathetometer

Despite having a name that is a little too close to 'catheter', the cathetometer is a valuable tool here at work. When we're pulling a crystal, we use it to measure it's diameter from afar. It's kinda like a little telescope on a track that slides back and forth that measures how far it's moved. You look through the eye-piece and line it up with one side of the crystal, then slide it over and line it up with the other side. It tells you how far you slid it, and you've measured your crystal.

It has one down side (well, two, if you count the unfortunate name). It builds up a static charge. It might actually be the pullers that build up the small charge, but the cathetometer is connected electrically, so it doesn't really matter which. It's a relatively minor little shock you get, but the problem is the location. If you don't remember to touch the puller before sighting the cathetometer, the first thing that gets close to the equipment is your eyeball. As a result, I've received several little shocks just below my lower eyelid. Not the best place to be blasting yourself with electrons.

P.S. Blogspot doesn't think that 'cathetometer' is a word. It's best guesses as to what word I'm trying to spell? Costumed, Glutamate, or Guesstimate. Have some madlibs fun by replacing cathetometer each time in the text above with one of those three words.

I'm Famous

Shannon already mentioned it, and our readership is nearly 100% identical (on-to, but probably not 1-to-1) but I'll say it here, too. I had a letter to the editor published in the Deseret News today. There was an article in Sunday's paper about minorities applying to medical school. Someone from the U made the statement that minorities have an advantage because of their deeper background. I objected to the statement, on the grounds that it's wrong to assume that as a non-minority, I somehow don't have a deep background. Anyway, I guess by now you don't have to read it to know what it says, but if you want to, you can.

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,660200823,00.html

THIS is young?

On Sunday, an older man (83 years young) mentioned that when they moved into the ward 9 years ago there were a lot more old people. MORE OLD PEOPLE?!?!? How? That's a scary thing to even imagine. Our ward is pretty antiquated, but we like 'em anyway. The biggest demographic we're missing is the 30-60 year old.

Kiwi!

By chance, I discovered this video of a cute little Kiwi on youtube. It's really quite good.

Nerd Dump

For some reason, I've just got a ton of things to say today. (And since I never get around to posting on the weekends . . .)

I never knew they were so nerdy, but apparently Conan O'Brien and Jim Carrey like to get together to discuss quantum physics. Because I know you're concerned about it, they do seem to be discussing good physics, though I question the phrasing used by Mr. Carrey in one part. He says that the phase of the electron can "either have the two values separated by π". I don't think you even have to be a physicist to wonder about that one.

Also, I got a most excellent email from Ben full of things that people have put on math/physics tests when they're frustrated, or have simply given up. Two selections are placed below for your viewing pleasure.

Don't worry folks, your weekly basketball updates will be over soon enough.

Our young men played again last week, against the only undefeated team in the stake. We did improve over our worst outing, by only letting them put up 21 points before we scored. I called zero fouls in the first half. They didn't need to foul to stop us, and we couldn't stop them even if we did, so I didn't see the point. In the second quarter, the other team made a rule that they would pass the ball 5 times before taking a shot. At least it kept the scoring down. But we came up with a way to make the second half more interesting. The score was reset and one player was inserted into our wards line up. He's 6 feet tall, has a beard and is just a touch too old to normally be allowed to play. (It's me, in case you couldn't tell.) I only scored 4 points, but I collected about 50 rebounds, mostly on the offensive end. It made it so our team would get 5 shots each time down the floor, and the other team would only get 1. We won the second half 21-18.

Not that you care, but . . .

Two quick items, which you probably don't really want to hear about.

First, I have made it through the entire week without showering between the hours of 6 and 9 am once. I've showered in the afternoon, evening, and at 3 am. You can thank sleeping in late, weird work hours and basketball games for that.

Second, everyone needs to know of my Balderdash adventures from last weekend. We were playing and I was doing terribly. I was in a tie for last place and about a light year behind Shannon who was in the lead. I then proceeded to get the right answer and pick up three votes on one turn (for 5 spaces) and nail the question on the next turn, while on a double bonus. The topic was a dumb law. In Apple Valley, CA it is illegal for a duck . . . . . My response was "to quack after 10pm" which was exactly the correct answer. I covered half of the board in two turns. Shannon ended up winning, but it was a glorious day for the Blockburgers.

Church Basketbrawl Update

Last night our church basketball team did something that's never happened to me in any game of basketball before. We scored 0 points in the 4th quarter. And won. How you ask? Because the 4th quarter never happened. The 3rd quarter had a bunch of complaining, a flagrant foul, a near ejection, a player trying to walk off the other team (who only had 5 players) and finally the ref just called the game. All this while our bishop is ready to take the game out to the parking lot.