Old Friends

An old friend (who is sure to comment and point out that he isn't as old as I am) is getting rid of a car that he has had for 11 years. Despite the fact that it's an old and junky car, I guess he's become attached to it over the years, and he mentioned that he'd spent more time with it than nearly anything he owns.

I've now been thinking about this for two days and making a list of what objects I've spent the most time with over the years. The list has a few parameters that could be adjusted: objects that I currently own? Things from only the last 11 years? (his arbitrary initial set point because of the car) Things from my whole life? Another question that has come up is the quality of the interaction, so to speak. Driving a car is a more interactive experience than simply sitting on a chair at work. (Which brings up another question: is this limited only to objects that I own?) Anyway, I thought I'd share my list, which you'll find below. (And you can see if I've forgotten anything obvious.)

Excellent Comment

My blog got a new comment today, but it was on an old post, so I was afraid that everyone would miss it, unless I brought some attention to it.  And some things are worth bringing attention to.  The commenter chose to remain anonymous, but here are his important thoughts:

So you're worried striped respect ugly without snow to ear smile, and it is the responsibility of human beings, to hear Te me? " 

In retrospect, it has supported the following, the entire contents of the bag, can I ? "Clause smiled lights to the top of the sink, I made a bee that?" 
The doubt how you can think again I ", find the places, She is probably 

"Well," You'll deal with the landlord that she, but it is not even true this?" 

" is angry silent? police. 

"Ngrn Sasagawa wall has 確呼 Barre. pickup also has a receiver has to tell. " 

day very good mood, what the right Re] If you can not be, her body, "I am this but who. then you'll regardless of the bell"

So there you have it.

(I deleted the incorrectly formatted links selling Prada handbags (legit, I'm sure) that were scattered about the . . um . . story?  Oh, and I translated it out of Japanese, too.  I know my blog can lead people to believe I have a large Japanese following, and you'll be surprised when I tell you that I don't.)

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.

Awesome Hair

Today at work, we discovered this picture:

This guy's got it all going. The scarf, the scruff, and, most importantly, the hair. This is a guy who would be popular with the ladies. Maybe next time I go get my hair cut, I'll take this picture in so the hair dresser knows what I need.

But the real question is, who is this person? The picture is pretty old, as the image quality and clothing suggests, and subject is famous enough that I know everyone out there would know who he is if I told you. But telling you wouldn't be as much fun. So, time to guess: Who do you think this young rogue is?

I've competed in a tractor pull. I hadn't thought about this in years, but about 15 years ago, I drove a little tractor in the competition. I didn't win, nor really have any clue what was going on, but I did it. And how many people do you know who have competed in a tractor pull? I bet you wouldn't have thought I was the one, huh?

(The tractor was much smaller than anything I was able to find on youtube.)

Beam Me Up

About a decade ago, while coming home to visit my family, I was stopped as I got out of the car by an older man who lived a few doors down the street from my parents. (He might still be there, I'm not sure.) He came up to me and said something like "Scott, how is your brother Clark doing? I remember when he was just a little kid . . . blah blah blah . . ." Basically, he invented an older brother for me, figured I was that brother and that my name was Scott. Weird.

Fast forward a decade. There is an older guy in our new ward who keeps calling me Scott. I was well introduced correctly when we first me, and he's called me Clark successfully multiple times. But he keeps reverting back to Scott, even after being corrected a few times. And he doesn't even notice when he does it.

So, I guess I must look like a Scott or something.

Shampoo

Is anyone else out there as weird as me? In my lifetime I have read the label on shampoo bottles thousands of times. I exaggerate not. Taking a shower is, in my opinion, a fabulous way to pass the time, and I'm generally not in much of a hurry in there. So, while relaxing, I have a tendency to read anything that is at eye level, which is mostly shampoo bottles. (Shannon, on the other hand, who usually showers without her contacts in, has probably never read a shampoo bottle in her life.) So, all totaled up, I've passed an untold number of hours reading the directions (lather, rinse, repeat) the flower descriptions ("Ocean Breeze soap: it's just like an ocean cruise except there's no boat and you don't actually go anywhere") and the fun trivia questions (Q: 60% of women admit to throwing what at their significant other? A: Their shoe. [But you need the matching conditioner bottle to get the answer]). And then there is the list of ingredients. dichloro-phenol-benzoate this and isoberylpolycarbozome that. The ingredients don't change much from brand to brand, just those secret "natural oils and extracts". But sadly, since moving to St. George we don't have a shower with anything to read at eye level, so I'm a bit more bored during my shower relaxation time.

Christmas list addition: waterproof books!

We have found proof that Julia is truly a Blockburger. While we have tried to feed her all manner of foods, she utterly refuses to touch most of them. But there is exactly one food that we can get her to eat for dinner: A bowl of Cheerios. Further proof that a bowl of cereal is a perfectly acceptable dinner option.

Shannon was reading Parents magazine which had an article on the Obamas (as well as the McCains). (I assume the magazine predates the election.) As we don't have TV (I think our TV situation needs to be it's own blog post) I haven't seen Michelle Obama much. When Shannon showed me the picture of the Obama family, I immediately thought that she looked a lot like Kimberly Elise, who played Denzel Washington's wife in John Q. You should really use that link, not so much to look at her picture and think to yourself "Clark is nuts, they don't look anything alike," but so you can scroll down to what her first credit is on imbd. Back in 1995 she appeared on a single episode of "Newtons Apple" (a fine show). Specifically it was the "Jungle Survival/Liver/Emus" episode in which she got the coveted role of "Bile duct supervisor". If only I'd known that was a career option!

Vibrate

I just realized that my cell phone was on vibrate. I put it there on Tuesday when I was at Shannon's choir performance. You know, in the extremely, super unlikely event that someone would call me during the performance. 3 days later, I realized it was still on vibrate. And I missed zero calls because of it. Why? Because, as it turns out, my phone has not sent or received a call or text message in 3 days.

But I do use it every day as both an alarm clock and calculator.

Funny thing is that 15 years ago, that's what I used my watch for . . .

Not that any of you will know . . .

This question has been rolling around my brain for months. There is a beer commercial, for Michelob Ultra as it turns out, which indicates that "Your life has more than one dimension, so should your beer." I understand that my life has "more than one dimension". It has 3 physical dimensions (or 4 depending on how you want to count them) but really it's a metaphor in that my life has various, somewhat independent aspects.

[Aside: now I am currently considering whether or not different activities in my life could truly be considered orthogonal, and thereby constitute different dimensions. It seems to me that orthogonality should be a requirement of multi-dimensionality, though perhaps they need only be linearly independent. This is going to require more thought.]

Anyway, what I can't figure out is what it could possibly mean for a beverage to have "more than on dimension." I've never had any beer, let alone Michelob Ultra, and I realize that most, if not all, of my readers can't intelligently comment on beer, but still: what could this possibly mean?

How many dimensions does milk have? Kool-Aid? Could orange juice possibly be multi-dimensional, one for the liquid and one for the pulp?

And now, as a first for my blog, I present you with a beer commercial:

Bad Blogger

I've been a bad blogger lately. There's no good excuse other than being busy, and unable to remember what it was I wanted to blog once I finally get to a computer.

I've wanted to blog this from home (and you'll see why) but my birthday was 2 weeks ago, and I got some nerd books. A left-hander one from Suzanne, Mormon Scientist (?) which is a book about Henry Eyring, written by Henry J Eyring, and a book of Richard Feynman's letters. I've started reading the book on lefties. Obviously I'll provide a more thorough review, as well as the actual title of the books once I've finished them.

I haven't disappeared from the internet, though. Ben has been asking questions about nuclear fission and fusion, which I've been attempting to answer. Not that you probably care, but there it is. Of course, if you've recently taken a class on nuclear engineering, you're likely to find an error in my comments, but I believe them to be generally accurate, and I was trying to keep things relatively short.

Finally, it's always amusing to see what little kids are saying.

Weekend Highlights

Shannon and I made the trip SLC this weekend to see my sister who was in town from Colorado, and to go to Shannon's sister's wedding shower. Some highlights:

• My 87-year-old grandmother explaining that she doesn't watch much TV because so many of the show are "crappy".
• Guitar Hero
• BYU football
• Chex Mix
• 36 mpg from our Civic
• Getting out of St. George for the first time in 3 months.
• Seeing my niece Lauren

- We have cylinders of liquid nitrogen here at work that are the brand name "dura-cyl". Cute.

- Bean counters are . . . so much fun to work with. I have to do a limited amount of bean counting here at work, and it's always a bit of a trial. It's not that bean counters are necessary or are deliberately difficult or something, it's that we speak such different languages. They view their bean counting as super important, while I don't. Deep down I know it is important, but I have such a hard time caring. Mostly, it's not too bad, once we've spent half an hour trying to figure out what the other person is even talking about.

- Yesterday I got to teach a Ph.D. from the U of U how to lock and unlock the front door here at work. Yes, I'll be using this for material for months to come.

Bailey Cereal

This week, in my continuing effort to feed myself, I've returned to an old Brazilian favorite: Bailey Cereal. It's Brazilian in as much as it was invented in Brazil and it's ingredients are available in Brazil. It is not Brazilian in as much as it was invented by an American (Elder Bailey) and, to the best of my knowledge, no Brazilian has ever eaten it. Anyway, I'll provide the recipe.

1 cup oats (approximate) (The instant kind that require little to no cooking.)
2-3 heaping teaspoons chocolate milk mix. (You know, Nestle Quick, or reasonable facsimile.)
1 banana, sliced.
8-12 milk crackers. (for alternate, see below)
1 cup milk (approximate)

Directions: Put oats in a bowl (or, if you want to be more authentic to it's creation, in a pot, because there are no cereal bowls in Brazil). Add chocolate milk mix. Mix. Add banana slices, mixing to cover bananas with oats, to keep the slices from sticking together. Add milk, as much as is required for cereal-like consistency. Break up milk crackers with hands, or drop them into the bowl and smash them a few times with your spoon. Don't add the crackers before you're ready to eat, or they'll get too soggy.

Note: In America, there are no milk crackers. Remember, this is a foreign dish. Acceptable alternates include Nilla Wafers, or some plain cookies that Mother's makes which I am unable to identify more completely at this time. Anyway, they're more like cookies than crackers, and they're there to supply a little bit of crunch.

So that's what I've been eating lately. A kickback to my breakfasts in Brazil that I had every day for about a year.

I'm a college graduate!

A letter I received over the weekend.

Dear Graduate:

Congratulations on your graduation! Since we did not see you at convocation, we wanted to send you a copy of the April 2007 Convocation program, and a copy of the Dean's remarks. You can expect to receive your diploma in about six to eight weeks. In the meantime, if you need a transcript with your degree posted, contact the Records Office and they will be happy to send you one.


We wish you the very best with your post-graduate plans. Feel free to contact our office at [phone number] if you need assistance in the future.

I'm listed in the convocation program (for the second year in a row!) and am waiting anxiously to see if they'll mail me another diploma. (Who knew they were this easy to get!)

Random Bits

You know you're moving up in life when you get to sit right next to Mark Eubank in sacrament meeting.

I like St. George radio traffic reports. Today they alerted us to some cops on patrol out by Ivins.

Having finished off the bag of malt-o-meal imitation Captain Crunch, I can now begin to heal from my bout of Cap'n Crunch Mouth.

Nothing quite as amusing as watching 14 grown men try to participate in a baby blessing. Good thing some of them had long arms.

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?

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.