Recycling?

So, I was limping (more on that later) to my classroom from my lame-o meeting when I noticed a bright orange square in the alcove outside my room.

If I didn't get that little prophylactic out of there, it was going to be wrapped around my door handle. But I wasn't about to pick it up. I mean, gross! So I kicked it down to this other alcove for an unused lab.

Fast forward 1.5 hours to the end of day. I had go bathroom (much like Corky in the one episode of Life Goes On I watched), so I walked past that alcove. The Cheetos wrapper was still there. But the condom was gone.

All I could think was... someone decided to use it.

Just the thought makes me skeeved.


The school district, in response to Pres. Obama's OH MY GOD ITS A FLU EMERGENCY NO ONE PANIC!! has upped their dedication to increasing the strength and determination of all bacteria. They've installed hand sanitation stations in all classrooms. I have one installed next to my sink, so the lazy ass kids will forgo washing their hands, and instead will haphazardly and incorrectly apply Listeria-infested hand sanitizer to their nasty hands. Ah, well, we're due for a good plague, anyhow. Bring. It. On.


Speaking of plagues, I took the kids to the Renaissance Faire. Sean wanted to go in costume - as a monk! I could work with that! I made myself a plague victim and I made Tim lame.



I was asked what plague I had, and I said "Swine flu!" That sure scared some folks!

We are doing well, in general. Ups and downs of life are fine. My foot is STILL hurt, after a year, so I guess it's permanent. I've noticed when I wear my orthopedic shoes (ugly but comfy), I can walk a lot better. So, I guess it's off to the shoe store! Darn!

Hope anyone that reads this is well!

(*)>

Lab Accident!!

A few weeks ago, I had an incident in my lab. No radioactive spiders, unfortunately, or gamma rays. Just a jagged piece of glass covered with dust and rusty iron filings.

Bled like a stuck pig, it did.

So, I go down to the nurse. Stitches! she proclaims. So they take me to the hospital.

A little under 2 hours later, I'm done. Some saline, super glue (well, they call it derma bond, but whatever), a tetanus shot, and a hit of antibiotics with a paper for more, and I was outta there. Didn't even see a doc - just a physician's assistant.

The bill just came. $1318. 

No wonder people freak out over insurance!

(*)>

Sunday Funnies

So the paper comes early in our parts. Most of the Sunday paper comes on Saturday, including my favorite part, the funnies.

This week, the funnies were in a different section, though.

In the category of "OK, so I can't carry a 100lb backpack up Everest anymore. That doesn't mean my service is done!", I present:

Sherpa lined? Excuse me, but EEEEWWWWWW! 


And in the category of "That heinous beyotch finally got someone who can appreciate her culinary talents":

I have always hated Rachel Ray since the $40 a day show. She just gives me the heebie jeebies. She smiles too much, and behind that smile lies a hatchet-wielding kind of madness. I swear it.

Besides, I could cook the crap she comes up with. I thought, though, that I was alone in this hatred. Apparently not. She has detractors all the way up to foodie Anthony Bourdain. Nice to know I'm in good company. 

And no, Titus will not be eating Nutrish. What a stupid name. Nutrish. OK, stopping rant here.

(*)>

Bureaucratic Nightmares!

(date changed to make it a lower post.)

OK, so as most of you know, I attempt to teach science to a hoard of kids in an inner-city school. Because most of our schools are a little bit challenged in keeping up to what the kids need to know (you know, no child left behind and all that), we have very specific and detailed instruction on what we must be teaching and when. This exists for most major courses.

Well, this year we have a new overlord of the schools and she has been informed (? does she have snitches?) that many? some? of the math and english teachers aren't sticking to the program. So now they all have to give a quiz EVERY FRIDAY (which takes a good portion of the period) to see if the teachers are far behind... so they're losing one in five (on a good week) days of instruction because they're not going fast enough... does anyone else see that this might be a dog-chases-tail kind of problem?

But we science teachers are not immune. Beyond our bi-monthly "are you teaching the right stuff" test, the state administered a standardized science test last year. Every district (in the state?) apparently scored below proficient. Much of the test, wisely, as it is governed by politicians, is geared toward environmental science. Which is not a course required in most schools. Also, there was a great deal tested on the life-cycle of stars which is taught in 7th grade. The test is administered in 11th grade. Yes, this all makes a great deal of sense.

So, the knee-jerk reaction is to "teach to the test". I now have a lesson I have to teach every week to help my students prepare for the PSSA.
Problem 1: most of the stuff in the review is biology/environmental. I last had biology in 1985. I do not remember it, and I do not care to.
Problem 2: I have 150 students. 10 of them are juniors. The other 140 are not required to take the PSSA until next year.
Problem 3: I have my own schedule that I must follow. I am just a little bit behind now, but stealing a day a week? Please see the second paragraph of this post.

Sigh.

Speaking of teaching outside my "expertise," in celebration of the coronation on Tuesday, the school is doing a whole host of presidency-related stuff. I have to teach about the Gettysburg Address, I have to teach about the I Have A Dream speech, I have to teach about the Declaration and the Constitution and all this civics history and other schtuff. And I have absolutely no clue. So I got out Schoolhouse Rock. Isn't that the best way to learn it? Heck, I can still sing the preamble.

All of this makes me very confused. But hey, keeps me on my toes!

(*)>

Better Living Through Chemistry

So, I put my whiteboard from my old job in the boys' room (see pics below). Of course, as anyone who has used a whiteboard knows, the erasers only work so well. If you really want it white, you have to use that whiteboard cleaner stuff.

NOT.

I went to staples to see the primary ingredients. Isopropyl alcohol, some t-butanol, I think. Well, rubbing alcohol works just dandy. So does non-acetone nail polish remover. But rubbing alcohol is cheaper.

(And, as far as the boards themselves go, you can buy this wall covering at any home despot and cut it into whatever size you want: just buy melamine or white tileboard. It IS whiteboard. Only it costs like $15 for a 4x8 sheet. That's a teacher trick, btw.)

(*)>

Grading the last tests

Did you know that the left side of Africa has the same cricket ness as the right side of South America? (sound it out.... cricketness... crickedness... crookedness...)

And that climax is the average of weather? (I have no idea how climate became climax. I teach adolescents, though, so sometimes the hormones take over.)

I have had a lot of fun this year, but nothing is better than grading the papers. One of my favorites is the time the cherubs did the matching pre-test on energy. I wanted to see what they could figure out, you know, with logic. Several of them decided that England is powered mainly by burning glow-worms.

Cricket-ness. That's classic.

(*)>

Most Puzzling!

With the new job being as crazy as it is, there are some nice fringe benefits. Though I am away from home 6:30 - 7:30 M-F, the weekends are (until sunday afternoon homework) MINE. I can't be called in the middle of the night or bothered in the afternoon. So, I've been taking advantage. On Saturdays, we've been doing Jigsaw puzzles like this one from Ambo (at least that's who Mom thinks gave her this nutty puzzle.)




Also, I have been reading books Books BOOKS!! on the train (I'm on the train for about 2.5 hours a day right now). My amazon review list is going through the roof. This week, my non-fiction pick was Thunderstruck by Erik Larson. This is the dual story of the invention of the wireless radio and an icky murder in London (and the neat connection between the two). If you like science, you'll probably like this book, though I found Devil in White City and Isaac's Storm better. Anyhow, I bring this up because I never knew Marconi's first name before. It's Guglielmo. GUGLIELMO. Is that pronounced "googly elmo?" Did his parents hate him from birth? Jeez, Louise.



The whole puzzle thing has caught on in the house. Stinky, who likes to build things and admire them (it's an Aunt Mary trait) has taken to doing this on my living room floor:






At least they're easy to clean up!

(*)>

Don't Drink the Water

As I leave Spaceley's tommorow, I'm heading back to the city I love to teach a subject I love (mostly): Chemistry. So here's a little chemistry.

Back in the day, when I was a chemistry student / teacher's assistant, I remember studying the colligative properties. Boiling Point elevation, freezing point lowering, osmotic pressure change, and vapor pressure lowering.

I always remember that we taught that in the beginning of the spring semester. It was a particularly good time of year for examples. You see, the more junk that goes into water, the lower its freezing point is.

Philadelpha puddles don't freeze.

It doesn't matter how cold it gets, the daggone things don't freeze.

I guess that's why folks in these parts don't call it wah'-ter, they call it wuh'-dder. It's not water.

Did I say I love this city? Truly, I do. Despite its dirty wudder.

(*)>

Views from the Dusty Aviary

So, I had to stop for petrol the other morning. As I’m dutifully holding the nozzle at low speed (to minimize fumes and maximize liquid throughput), I note an addition to the pump.

They’ve put in TELEVISION screens on top of the pump. Like I need to be inundated with more television the 5 minutes I’m there getting gas. But whatever.

As you can imagine, it was mostly ads. But interspersed were a weather forecast, traffic report, and some news items. One news item particularly caught my eye. It seems that airports are looking to different technology to screen passengers and their carry-on luggage. According to the news report, they’re going to use electromagnetic waves instead of radiation to search for bad objects.

(if you don’t get the absurdity of this, please go here.)

~~~~~

Speaking of commercials and gas pumps, though, I saw a new ad (to me, and it’s not on youtube yet, sorry). It was for the Saturn hybrid SUV. Very clever ad, for the most part. It starts out saying how we all like to indulge – showing people in a Sam’s Club type place; a kid putting too much ketchup on his burger; a person who bought a flat screen tv bigger than his wall. Then it shows someone filling up her SUV at the pump and looking miserable. The camera pans to a couple in a hybrid Saturn Vue looking at that poor, suffering woman with a smile. Then, the voice-over talks about how the Vue gives you good gas mileage and the size vehicle you want.

It’s a brilliant commercial, until the closing line, which was something like this: “Instead of super-sizing, try super-right-sizing.”

I don’t know about most of you, but to me, and to most who have been tinged with the auto industry, right-sizing is the latest fancy word for downsizing which was the 5-minutes-ago word for layoffs. You’d think a GM company would be more sensitive than that.

~~~~~

Speaking of right-sized companies :), for those who have been following the saga, my days at Spaceley’s are finally finitely numbered. I’ve been offered a job in my new profession of choice and will be saying sayonara 12/15. I’ve managed to reclaim some sanity recently, not that I had much to begin with. But bitterness is completely gone. And after going through the right sizing we had (we cut our workforce, but not our work load, and definitely not our upper management, in half), that’s saying something.

~~~~~

In other news, it seems that Philadelphia has started a feud with Baltimore over who gets Poe’s body (or what’s left of it). It’s getting dirty. I never knew Baltimore was the syphilis capital of the world!

(*)>

A Day of Non-Family Blogging

The other day, I read this article (well, actually, only the first paragraph or so – hey, why should I try to go against the newspaper’s preconceived notions of me?) about corn. Corn. CORN!

Corn is a big deal these days, and not just because it can make it intact through your digestive track, thus enabling you to time your gastro-intestinal-processing! No, it’s fermented corn that’s the big deal. In the last year, the EPA made it so the additive of the day in gasoline is Ethanol (never mind that ethanol is way more corrosive than MTBE), the major source of which is CORN!

The article, though, is a wailing and lamentation piece about farmers. You see, though the corn farmers are laughing all the way to the bank, the hog farmers are crying. People are willing to ante up big bucks for beef, but not so for pork. And because demand for corn is very high, those who control the supply are jacking up the price. (capitalist pigs!)

Now, you might think that a price control on corn is the answer. But I don’t think ADM (the big lobbying group that makes lots of money on corn) would be happy with that. Instead, why don’t we try a new track? How about CANCELLING controls on SUGAR IMPORTS?

See, another huge use of corn is high-fructose corn SYRUP, which we’ve been forced to substitute for sugar in many of our sweeties (like soft drinks). Seems sugar, which grows like a weed in the tropics, is too expensive to use. It’s expense, though, is due to government meddling.

This meddling was done in the name of American sugar farmers – they couldn’t compete with the sugar farmers in the tropical areas of the world – so we put a fake price equalizer in place. The result is not that more US sugar is purchased. It’s that less sugar is used.

New studies show (or, at least that’s what the informercial told me) that high-fructose corn syrup is like, super bad, waaaay worse than sugar (sucrose) for a human. Also, corn is super bad to grow – it leeches all the good stuff out of soil! Note that the Indians planted fish under the corn so as not to harm mother Gaia.

So, let’s help the pig farmer, help the third-world sugar growers, help my Coke taste better, and help mother Earth: Repeal the sugar import tariffs and rate quotas!

(*)>

What Ever Happened to Acid Rain?

All the hoopla about Global Warming, and how it’s to blame for hot summers, cold winters, and the socks missing from the laundry, has made me look back to a more innocent time in my life. The catastrophes weren’t global, they were local, and I totally believed them.

So, in the interest of seeing if I’ve become more savvy or just more jaded, I decided to look up some stuff on Acid Rain. I remember how concerned I was about acid rain back in high school. The science made sense to me, and they had REAL EXAMPLES. I mean, there were lakes where fish could no longer live. There were forests that died completely!

Turns out the forest (in Vermont) died in 1952, or thereabouts, due to extreme weather. Had it been acid rain, the effect would have been more widespread and repeatable. It wasn’t.

Turns out the lake was returning to its natural acid state after the human activity which resulted in pH elevation was curtailed.

Turns out that a lot of the whole Acid Rain thing is farce and hype and outright fraud. It does exist, and there are negative effects. And let’s face it, why would we want to dirty our home any more than necessary? But it’s not an environmental serial killer – it’s not nearly so sexy. Maybe that’s why we don’t hear a lot about it any more.

Meanwhile, about 30 people died while I was writing this, because we won’t let other countries use DDT. And I’ve never seen any outrage over that in the media.

(*)>

I don't think so

I'm watching some processes for Spaceley's tonight (hoping to pre-empt a call at midnight or so) and I came across a quiz on a friend's blog. Now, disclaimer, I've always known I'm a geek. But, hells, this can't be true:

Y'all, I don't even code my own webpage! I use a free blog software! I CANNOT be a nerd. It's not possible.

Did I mention I'm going to see Harry Potter 5 on the 3-D IMAX next week? snert

(*)>

Goat Gotten

So, this morning I was hanging out with a bunch of people for breakfast. I knew most, but a few I didn't know.

One of the guys had just come back from chaperoning a trip to Europe for some high schoolers. I asked how the trip was; apparently it was a doozy. The first night, he informs us all, one of the kids bought a bottle of wine, though he had been counselled that he should watch his behavior. When he was confronted (he was not drunk), he threw a complete hissy fit (of the "you can't tell me what to do" version, I take it), and really did some bad, stupid things.

I listened, agog, and said, "what a moron."

This woman I did not know looked at me like I was some total beeyotch and said, "kids that age have trouble making decisions." As though that excuses stupidity.

Kid was 17. He blew the trip of a lifetime. (He got sent home the next day.) He was a moron. Sorry.

So, anyway, conversation changes, and eventually she starts lecturing about how scary global warming is. And I say I find the science full of holes, inconsistent, and suspect. She states that we have to DO something, before the southwest dries out. I say I have a hard time saying we should cripple our economy based on computer models which said not so long ago that we were headed for an ice age, and can't predict weather 3 hours ahead of time.

She then starts to lecture me about how the greenhouse gases are eating the ozone. I said ozone depletion was real, but caused by different compounds which we HAD attempted to control. Can't control India or China there, though, and even moreso with global warming.

I asked her what her solution was for an alternative energy resource.

She said solar power. If she had said nuclear power, she might have gotten an agreement from me. But Solar Power. GIVE ME A BREAK. Try explaining how inefficient rare electron-hole laden compounds are to a person who doesn't know the difference between global warming and ozone depletion.

She ended with how maybe we in the USA have "too many freedoms." I shit you not. She said we have too many freedoms.

The same person who thought I was being judgemental for saying a kid who ripped up his friggin passport in a foreign country was a moron thinks she can tell ME how to consume energy.

Boy oh boy, she got my goat. I have been peeved all day. Because after the "too many freedoms" comment, she walked away, as though that was a coup de grace.

My only comfort was thinking that Ogre would be much angrier than I was.

(*)>

An Inconvenient Truth

We had a guest priest at church today. He was talking about prayer, and how we should pray about everything. He gave several examples, one of which was that we should pray for our warming globe. Talking of the Al Gore movie, and how you're supposed to "spread the news" on warming, he said that nothing had ever struck him more of what the early church must have been like. He went on to say that Al Gore was the prophet.

I couldn't believe with him more. Global warming is a religion. Hail Gaia, full of crap.

(*)>

An Ode to Artemis

Last night, there was a program on the National Geographic channel about the Moon (Behind the Mysteries: Moon Mysteries… but I can’t find a link for it…). There’s so much about the Moon that I didn’t know.

I have read that the Moon was the product of a collision between two heavenly bodies – the end results being Earth and Moon. After this “big bump” occurred, the moon was quite close to Earth. It started moving away from the Earth after the bump, and is still moving away from us at about an inch a year or so. Its proximity over the years has been absolutely pivotal in the development of life on Earth.

So, anyway, what are some of the cool things the moon has done for us?

Well, it seems that many… err… moons ago, there was a chance alignment of the gas giants (Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune) which caused a change in the gravitational balance of the solar system. This sent hoardes of objects from the asteroid belt hurtling toward the inner solar system and the tiny planets orbiting there. (I can find no links for this online. Perhaps I misheard the program. However, heavy bombardment of the Moon is documented in several places such as this). Earth, because of its own gravitation, was a target for many of these projectiles. The Moon was so close at that point that it acted as a shield and intercepted most of these objects. The scars from these impacts can be seen to this day on the lunar surface – 80% of which is scarred from this time period.

So the Moon gets pummeled, and the Earth keeps spinning, relatively unharmed. But even the spinning was aided by the presence of the Moon. The Moon acts as a stabilizer, balancing our planet as it spins. Without it, our planet would most likely tilt to the point where the tropics could freeze and the poles could become deserts. The gyroscope action keeps us on a more-or-less stable spin axis.

Just as the earth has its gravitational pull, so does the Moon. Most of us know that this is manifested in the tides. (Some also speculate that volcanic and earthquake activity are also heavily influenced by lunar gravitation.) But, back when she was a much closer neighbor, the lunar gravity had a profound, dual impact on Earth.

First, the gravitational pull when the Moon was very close in proximity caused major torque, which slowed down our spin frequency. It is calculated that Earth’s initial spin was as fast as 6 hours – as opposed to the 24 hours we have now. This slowing of spin allowed the Earth’s atmosphere to stabilize.

Also, the gravitational pull as the Moon started to move away caused huge tides (thousands of feet). This violent soup mixed the right elements to form primordial ooze. Said ooze is thought to have been the origin of terrestrial life.

The Moon is still on the move. As it moves farther away from us, our atmosphere will become less stable. Our world will tilt. Tides will not be based on lunar pull, if they exist at all. Shortly after that, the sun will become so hot that Earth would be inhospitable for life, anyway.

For the duration of when life COULD exist on Earth, Artemis has provided the conditions that made life possible, even comfortable.

One could say it’s all coincidence. I suppose.

(*)>