Monthly Archives: March 2011

Nukuler Science

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Okay, so I actually do know how to spell “nuclear.” I’ve also spent a bit of time reading about Chernobyl and other nuclear accidents (yes, there have been many accidents involving nuclear materials of various types), and I’ve reached a conclusion. Nuclear science is hard.

BoingBoing.net has had some of the best commentary and coverage of what’s going on in Japan on a scientific level, relating much of it in an actual understandable fashion. I’m not going to link all their posts, but here are a few of the most interesting:

  • Diagram of the cooling system for a nuclear reactor. This will show you how it’s supposed to work.
  • Old scale diagrams of nuclear reactors of the world. Vintage stuff, but very interesting.
  • If you read “Lord of the Flies,” you might believe people go to pieces in and immediately following a crisis, immediately turning into feral children and trying to eat each other. Not so!
  • I’m honestly not sure if this picture of the reactor shows normal Japanese soil, but for good reason or no reason at all, it reminded me a bit of Chernobyl’s Red Forest.
  • People are crowdsourcing radiation levels. Oh, the power of the internet!

BoingBoing! also linked this amazing graph from xkcd that compares levels of radiation from all sorts of sources, from traveling in an airplane to medical X-rays to the release at Chernobyl and the radiation given off by your own body. This will really help you envision the comparative radiation amounts in all these activities and I highly recommend taking a gander at it.

Rainy Days and Storms

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I’ve never been so glad to hear a rainstorm and see lightning flashing.

By the time March comes around, we’re all eager for spring.

We crow gleefully about any robins who happen to hop by, even if they’re shivering with a rime of frost on their beaks. We look at the piles of snirt (snow dirt) on our lawns and make private bets with ourselves as to when the last nubbin of ice will finally die.

We await the day when we will be able to complain about the muddy glop our front yard has become, and how our children or family members track mud in everywhere. We try to figure out how to keep our basements dry, which is kind of like trying to figure out perpetual motion or cold fusion, only less likely to actually occur.

Of course, spring doesn’t spring up everywhere equally. Our unfortunate brethren to the north are supposed to get a whopping 19 inches of snow today, and we have a 30 percent chance of precipitation here in Worthington, though our precipitation is supposed to be “rain and snow.” I’m holding out hope for the rain.

At the same time, there are communities around who aren’t so glad the snow is melting, and they’re probably more than a little worried about the rain, too. Floods have struck a few communities already, and Valentine’s Day kicked off sandbagging season in Fargo, N.D.

Closer to home, the Des Moines River is expected to crest at 15.4 feet in Jackson, well into the moderate flood stage, early Thursday morning.

There are plenty of other trouble spots, too, according to the National Weather Service, where streams and rivers are either already at flood stages or nearing them — Pipestone Creek in Pipestone, Split Rock Creek below Jasper, the Rock River at Luverne and at Rock Rapids, Iowa, the Des Moines River at Windom and the Little Sioux River near Milford, Iowa.

Suddenly a damp basement doesn’t seem so bad, does it?

Norway Needs a Holiday Like St. Patrick’s Day

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Norwegian Flag

I have always regretted not being born Irish. It seems to have been a sad oversight on my parents’ part.

I like the color green. I love Irish music, and if I could get the Chieftains to visit Worthington I would probably spontaneously combust with happiness. I own an Irish wedding band, despite being neither Irish nor married.  I know what a banshee is, and I even know it really ought to be spelled “bean sidhe.” Though I have never tasted corned beef and cabbage, I have actually seen it with my own eyes without suffering any noticeable trauma.

I really should have been born Irish.

I don’t understand why Norwegians don’t have a holiday as cool as St. Patrick’s Day, either. I mean, what does it take to get a holiday?

First, we’d need a date. Since Ireland’s holiday is named after a saint, I think we might borrow the idea for Norway and celebrate the country’s patron saint, St. Olaf. He apparently has a few different feast days, but I’d go with Aug. 3, based on the lack of existing holidays that month.

We’d need a symbol of some kind, like the shamrock. I’d suggest a snowflake, or maybe a rock (symbolizing the fjords). The real Olaf was King of Norway, so maybe a crown would be better. We should probably have a color, too. Most of the Norwegian flag is red, but personally I always think of Norway as blue, or maybe a frosty white.

The food would probably have to be traditional Norwegian cuisine. This wouldn’t include lutefisk, because one holiday that includes lutefisk is, in my opinion, one too many, and we already have the darn stuff at Thanksgiving and Christmas. So maybe the traditional St. Olaf’s Day cuisine would be limited to lefse and rice pudding.

St. Olaf’s Day would also need to include some fun activities. St. Patrick’s claim to fame was chasing the snakes out of Ireland. St. Olaf, on the other hand, was known for slaying a sea serpent and tossing it onto a mountain. Granted, that’s only one serpent, but it was really big, so I’d say Olaf wins out over Patrick any day.

Maybe the Norwegian festival could include snake-tossing as a competitive event. We shouldn’t use real serpents, though, because that would really tick off the RSPCCSS (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Creepy Sea Serpents).

Think St. Olaf’s Day has a chance of getting off the ground in America?

Sound Check It Out

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One of the great things about playing percussion in my high school band was that you got to play all kinds of odd instruments – not just the wide variety of drums, shakers, bells and wind chimes that made up the “usual” percussion instruments, but other stuff, too. One song included a brake drum, I remember. We also did all the special sound effects.

I had a special role on a few songs, too.

I was the designated screamer.

Now you’d think that wouldn’t come up too often, and it didn’t, but while I was at Jackson County Central there were at least two different songs we played that required a scream. One of them was a horror flick medley. I can’t remember what the other one was.

For both songs, though, there would be a moment of sudden silence or near-silence, and I would at that point take a very deep breath and produce an ear-splitting shriek that lasted for several seconds. By the end of the scream, the audience was always dead quiet, which allowed me to end the thing with a satisfying (and probably somewhat disturbing) half-gurgle.

Screaming doesn’t require a lot of expertise, but it is an awful lot of fun. Creating the sounds you hear in the movies requires a lot more training and work, but it also looks like fun.

Check out this video of a Foley artist recording the sounds of a galloping horse. I bet you thought they’d just go out and put a microphone on a horse to get the sounds, huh? Nope. It’s all done in the studio.

I’ve also listened to a tune played using nothing but paper bags. While that was righteously awesome (and ended, I think, with the bags being exploded), it never occurred to me to try to play a tree. This is definitely worth a listen.

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone! Take This!

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Link Visits MaSo.

I hear Link, of the very first Legend of Zelda game – you know, the best game ever – went to visit his mom recently.

Apparently she’s a pretty strong-willed old lady, and just like the old man at the beginning of the Zelda game, she has a few things she’d like to give her son in order to help him succeed in his quest.

Still waiting for the sword, mom. I’m 30, I think I can handle some adventuring right about now!

I Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive

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Sorry about that.

I didn’t mean to drop off the radar like that for so long.

I’ve been a little busy. Or rather, I haven’t been busy at all. I’ve had bronchitis and have been occupying my parents’ couch, arraying my Kleenex, vitamin water, inhaler and drugs against all invaders. Most of the past few days have been spent in sort of a bleary-eyed stupor, punctuated by coughing fits and frequent naps.

Mom fed me chicken noodle soup and took me to the doctor. My brother and dad both wandered in and out of the living room to keep me company. My online friends put up with me suddenly being half-there, all the time, instead of all the way there, half the time. People brought me food and then retreated to a safely germ-free distance.

It was nice. Well, it wasn’t nice, but it was about as nice as it could be when you feel like the floor of a taxicab… on fire.

I’ve gone through at least two full boxes of Kleenex and at least 12 bottles of vitamin water, most of which I couldn’t actually taste. The doctor gave me antibiotics, which probably haven’t done anything except prevent secondary infection (which is still good), and an inhaler full of albuterol, which has opened up my airways a bit. It has been genuinely unpleasant, and I’m grateful to my parents for feeding me and letting me take over the couch for five days.

The whole thing reminds me of an episode of Star Trek featuring aliens that called humans “ugly bags of mostly water.”

I may still be an ugly bag of mostly goo, but at least I have good folks around me.

Dungeons, Dragons and Charlie Sheen

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As many of you already know, I’m a big geek, and I like to play role-playing games, including Dungeons and Dragons.

In these games, you play a hero who destroys evil by hitting it repeatedly with a big stick, a sharp object or spells. Sometimes, however, your hero meets an untimely end and perishes when the evil is too big or the stick, object or spell is not big enough.

Last night, I told my friends I have already decided what I’m going to do when my next character dies:

Me: If I die in any of our games, I am going to make a Vatican assassin warlock.
Friend: … You’re playing Zork?
Friend: … Ooh, Assassin Warlock.
Me: No, I’m playing Charlie Sheen. Watch out for my fire-breathing fists.

The great thing is, this is actually possible in D&D. Assassins have to be evil, and warlocks have to be either evil or chaotic, so it’s a great class combo as long as you don’t mind, say, threatening to cut off your wife’s head and send it to her mom, causing people’s faces to melt off or loving people violently.

A Sheen character would be awesome. When I get some spare time this week, I’m gonna try to get the numbers for this figured out, but here are some class features:

  • Character cannot die: “Dying’s for fools, dying’s for amateurs.”
  • Character has “fire-breathing fists.”
  • Character is part rakshasa, or some other cat-human hybrid: “I got tiger blood, man.”
  • +2 to Constitution stat, but probably a -2 to Wisdom: “I have a different constitution, I have a different brain, I have a different heart.”
  • Character can cast spells: “I’m sorry, man, but I’ve got magic. I’ve got poetry in my fingertips.”
  • Character can apparently fly: “And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.”
  • And for flavor text: “We work for the Pope, we murder people. We’re Vatican assassins. How complicated can it be? What they’re not ready for is guys like you and I and Nails and all the other gnarly gnarlingtons in my life, that we are high priests, Vatican assassin warlocks. Boom.”

For more ideas: Try here. Or here. Or there. Or… nearly anywhere, really.

Will this character be overpowered, or will the insanity drawback balance it all out? Any ideas for more class features or flavor text?