To the normal, casual, bicyclist, the weight matters in one respect only: How hard is it to get my bike across/up/down something I can’t ride? Personally, I think this question explains why BMX became so popular. Haven’t you ever looked at a short flight of stairs and, as you got off you bike to haul it down, thought “That would have been faster to ride.” Even for professionals, the lightest bike doesn’t give you much of an advantage, since the basic bicycle idea is the most efficient man-powered vehicle out there.

Even if it’s just the placebo effect, lighter=better, there is some benefit to a lighter bike, and those 40+ pound steel wonders aren’t the norm for ‘professional’ bicyclists (of which I am not). The pros have bikes of 15 to 17 lbs, although I’ve heard that at 15, the steering is a bit touchy. As for people who like to bike and are slightly fanatic about it, 19lbs is common. So why is it, if you look up bicycles on Amazon, you see they average 40lbs? Because those lightweight ones are road bikes, built for speed. The rest of us, who just enjoy a bit of a ride, we don’t care as much about lap time, speed, etc etc.

At 24 pounds, my bike is heavier than a racing bike, but a lot lighter than a mountain bike or (help me) a Schwinn beach cruiser which is now 43lbs, but when I was 11, was … well, a lot more. The lightest hybrid I’ve found out there is the ‘perfect’ 19lbs. With the help of the bicycle weight index, you can determine that the average is not actually the 40lbs Amazon purports, but somewhere closer to 30. I was using Amazon, since they tend to true-up the weight so you know how much you get ganked for shipping, but even so, my bike is less than that.

So why do people ask me why my bike is so heavy?

Mostly it’s because it’s supposed to be carried. And if you’re going to pick up a bike and carry it, it should be light. And 24lbs isn’t light. I lug my bike up and down three flights of stairs a day (I work and live on the third floor, go figure), so I do often wish it weighed less. The other reason people think my bike is heavy is it’s shaped funny. Conventional bicycle geometry is about the dimensions and angles of the bike frame, as well as the forks.

On a conventional bike (see above) you get the straight bar across the top. Most modern bikes actually have a bit of a downslope on that top-bar, which was a marriage between the low step-through of a lady bike (skirts, y’know) and the ball-crunching men’s bike. You’d think the men would like to spare their boys, but the bike with the low step-through is actually weaker, physically, than the other sort, and requires more effort to pedal. On my Dahon, there’s no triangle to provide internal support. There’s no top tube, just the one low tube. So naturally the shape of the bike couldn’t just be circular tubes, as it had to spread the weight out differently. Physics alone couldn’t defeat this peril, however, and the Dahon has to be made out of lightweight, but not the lightest weight, material out there.

So yes, my bike is heavy for it’s size. But that’s because of science.

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving”
Albert Einstein

President Pitzer, Mr. Vice President, Governor, Congressman Thomas, Senator Wiley, and Congressman Miller, Mr. Webb, Mr. Bell, scientists, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen:

I appreciate your president having made me an honorary visiting professor, and I will assure you that my first lecture will be very brief.

I am delighted to be here and I’m particularly delighted to be here on this occasion.

We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a State noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.

Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this Nation¹s own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.

No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man¹s recorded history in a time span of but a half a century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power.

Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America¹s new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.

This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.

So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward–and so will space.

William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.

If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it–we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.

In the last 24 hours we have seen facilities now being created for the greatest and most complex exploration in man’s history. We have felt the ground shake and the air shattered by the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn, generating power equivalent to 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators on the floor. We have seen the site where five F-1 rocket engines, each one as powerful as all eight engines of the Saturn combined, will be clustered together to make the advanced Saturn missile, assembled in a new building to be built at Cape Canaveral as tall as a 48 story structure, as wide as a city block, and as long as two lengths of this field.

Within these last 19 months at least 45 satellites have circled the earth. Some 40 of them were “made in the United States of America” and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than those of the Soviet Union.

The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium between the the 40-yard lines.

Transit satellites are helping our ships at sea to steer a safer course. Tiros satellites have given us unprecedented warnings of hurricanes and storms, and will do the same for forest fires and icebergs.

We have had our failures, but so have others, even if they do not admit them. And they may be less public.

To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead.

The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school. Technical institutions, such as Rice, will reap the harvest of these gains.

And finally, the space effort itself, while still in its infancy, has already created a great number of new companies, and tens of thousands of new jobs. Space and related industries are generating new demands in investment and skilled personnel, and this city and this State, and this region, will share greatly in this growth. What was once the furthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space. Houston, your City of Houston, with its Manned Spacecraft Center, will become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community. During the next 5 years the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects to double the number of scientists and engineers in this area, to increase its outlays for salaries and expenses to $60 million a year; to invest some $200 million in plant and laboratory facilities; and to direct or contract for new space efforts over $1 billion from this Center in this City.

To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year¹s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at $5,400 million a year–a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year. Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United Stated, for we have given this program a high national priority–even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us. But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun–almost as hot as it is here today–and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out–then we must be bold.

I’m the one who is doing all the work, so we just want you to stay cool for a minute. [laughter]

However, I think we’re going to do it, and I think that we must pay what needs to be paid. I don’t think we ought to waste any money, but I think we ought to do the job. And this will be done in the decade of the sixties. It may be done while some of you are still here at school at this college and university. It will be done during the term of office of some of the people who sit here on this platform. But it will be done. And it will be done before the end of this decade.

I am delighted that this university is playing a part in putting a man on the moon as part of a great national effort of the United States of America.

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”

Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

Thank you.

-Address at Rice University on the Nation’s Space Effort
-President John F. Kennedy
-Houston, Texas
-September 12, 1962

Elysium Skating is cotillion on ice. Or at least it was when my gran was young. Today it’s a dying breed of skaters who like to skate to live music and in pairs. The style was popular in Detroit and Cleveland, but I don’t know of anywhere else. In point of fact, if you can skate Elysium and live in Chicago, email me and let’s hook up! It’s hard to find anyone who can couples skate that way except Ipstenit, and her foot is still iffy.

There was no Elysium Skating on Monday. Father-in-Gay and I had been too long from the ice, and as I mentioned in the excerpt, I had my ass handed to me. I fell once, hard, and I have a nice bruise where I landed on my keys. But I did skate for about 45 minutes without wanting to die. In fact, I wanted to get home to my own skates (and not crappy rentals) and get some time on the ice (which is at Millennium Park, now that Skate-On-State is gone).

But after skating, and the obligatory ‘I’m too old for this shit!’ kvetching (though I’m in better shape than Father-in-Gay), we watched the Zamboni cut the ice. Mrs-In-Gay is from Japan, so we had to explain what was happening. Father-in-Gay translated it into French for her, but I suspect there was much lost in the translation.

Then Father-in-Gay says “… and they use hot water. Boiling water. And Ipstenu, can you tell her why?”

I glance at Ipstenit, willing her to keep her mouth shut at this moment (she’s very smart, and hates when people talk about idiot science), but she says “No it doesn’t!” before I can reply. I silently plead and say ‘Hot water has faster molecules and freezes faster.” Which is the answer Father-in-Gay wanted.

This leads to a short argument about if this does or doesn’t work, and I whisper to Ipstenit to let it go and let my father be wrong. She grumbles, not one to like white-lying to family, but we walk off to return my crappy, dull, rental skates and look at the Hockey Foosball machine that’s been at Thornton since Mark Alexrod and I were kids and got the long licorice ropes. I explain that yes, I know she’s right, but perhaps a freezer and the ice at a rink are different, and that you’d have to use hot water anyway to smooth out the ice.

So now, as you know gentle readers, this brings us to research time.

Does hot water turn to ice faster?

First stop is Google, where I find a web page with Interesting thing of the Day, and April 15th’s page is about just this! While, yes, I found a lot of pages where people say hot water freezes faster, this site explains it all out in a pretty easy to understand way.

Logic tells me that the activity of the molecules, which is the general basis for the ‘Hot water freezes faster’ urban myth, can not overcome the heat of the water which needs to be cooled. Now, I will say that room temperature water should freeze faster than cold water, but that would be a very close race.

This fellow cites the Mpemba Effect, and explains that when applied, it can cause hot water to cool faster than cold. A googling on that name will give you a lot of points where it is true, however it’s an ‘effect’ and not a theory, which is important.

Theory: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; “theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses”; “true in fact and theory”
 
Effect: a phenomenon that follows and is caused by some previous phenomenon

Not the same, as you can see.

The short answer is that hot water can freeze faster than cool water, but it doesn’t always.

Does this matter for the ice skating rink? Possibly. It appears that the method of conduction and evaporation in an ice skating rink is such that hot water will cool and freeze faster than cooler water. Perhaps more importantly, the ice on an ice skating rink is below 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Supercooling in action.

Still, the answer here is a great big maybe.

Brushing the tan beasty’s teeth twice to three times a week is worse than trimming her nails every three weeks. Her face, and the fangs, are RIGHT THERE and she’s rarely happy about it. Trimming I can wrap her in a towel. Brushing is just hard. And yet I do it. Two to three times a week.

And then I found Science Diet’s Tartar Control Cat Food.

I wondered what was in it. i wondered what magic chemical they found that cats ate and yet they were safe with, that ate the enzymes of tartar. I wondered why it didn’t exist for humans!

Naturally I bought it and brought it home and learned it’s secret.

The kibble bits are the size of marbles.

Normally cat food is about the size of the erasers on your pencil. This was the size of dog food.

And, the logic of it was brilliant. The cat can’t swallow it whole, and thus she must chew the god damn food, breaking up the tartar!

Can you believe how easy it is?

Oh, yes, and it works.

The rough number for you is that 4% to 5% of all astronauts/cosmonauts etc will die in some sort of space related business. When you get down to it, that’s phenomenal, considered that the death of test pilots is probably higher. I’m counting, in case you wondered, SubOrbital vehicles as a training accident, since NASA gives you astronaut wings for flying it, even though it doesn’t meet the international definition. I’m a US citizen, but I have to agree with the international ruling here.

Astronaut death statistics for you:

Something to note here, the number of shuttles into space that later (or sooner) cause death is exactly the same for the US and the Russians. Two shuttles each. Now, the Soyez ‘capsules’ are tiny and hold two people, so the number is always going to be lower there. Also, there have only been 100 manned Soyez capsules to the 113 flights for the US shuttle program. Technically? We’re doing ‘better’ but we just have more people per problem, screwing up ratios.

This rather begs the question ‘why are we using Soyez if it’s just as safe, if not infinitesimally less so, than our own shuttle program?’

Answer 1: Money

That’s really sad, but that’s the truth. The shuttle NASA uses is fucking expensive. The STS program was supposed to cut costs by having a reusable shuttle. This hasn’t panned out so well, due to a number of problems, one of which was trickle down economics and the 70s. Anyone who was alive then is probably nodding their head going ‘Yeah.’ Inflation in the 70s drove up costs by a total of 200% by 1980! Of course, there are a lot of design changes from the original plans, suggested by various people like the Air Force, that cost money and time, and in the end weren’t used. Damn it. That said, there really is no good explanation for why the hell the STS program costs so bloody much! The average launch is $1.3 billion. Want to fuck your head up more? Compare that to the initial projected cost per launch: $10 to $20 million.

Answer 2: Politics

Since Walter Mondale tried to kill the space program after Apollo 1 (and probably before, but I’m going to pick on Mondale), NASA has been seen as a blight on the budget. Putting men and women into space is costly, which means taxes, and dangerous, which means deaths. Therefore from a politicians view, it’s a bad idea. If you’re a scientist (or a geek in my case) you grouse and bitch. But the thing is, failures look bad, and if you look bad as a politician, you don’t get re-elected. If you don’t get re-elected, you can’t ‘change the world and make it better.’ This means a politician, a good one who means well, is often in direct opposition between what he wants to do and what he has to do. You want to make the world better, feed the hungry, stop wars, cure diseases and expand scientific frontiers to do all that? Well, you need the space program. Problem is, people don’t always like it, and you have to sell a bit of your soul, or of NASA, to do what you can. It’s compromises.

Additionally, NASA has to put a good face up. It’s a government agency and without funding, it is nothing.

Deaths in flight aren’t the only way we should measure the dangers of space exploration. There are also deaths by training.

It’s here that NASA suddenly looks much worse than the Russian program. Two Russian Cosmonauts died in training. That we know of. Not to get all conspiracy theory on you, but frankly, if I didn’t have to publicize a death in training, I wouldn’t either. I’m also counting deaths in the T-38s, which weren’t really training, but they weren’t anything else. Elliot See and Charlie Bassett, for example, were flying to check out their new spacecraft and ultimately ended up crashing right into the hanger where it was being built. There’s a lot of levels of irony working there, and while the event is pretty much glossed over in From the Earth to the Moon (a miniseries that was on HBO in 1997), it’s actually mentioned in two ‘chapters’ which underlines its importance for me. They were working for NASA, doing NASA things, and they died. It counts.

But NASA was pretty open about this, more than I would have thought. They’d been pretty much ass-kicked into the spotlight by Kennedy, though, so I don’t think it was a choice on their part. Think about it. On May 5, 1961, we get a guy up there and it’s great. Alan B. Shepard, first man in space. But all we really did was sling him up out of the Earth’s atmosphere, 116 miles above ground. And then he fell back down. I believe it was a total of 6 seconds in space.

20 days later, Kennedy says it’s time to go land on the Moon by the end of the decade.

That’s 8.5 years away, and all we’ve done is get a damn guy up there. Oh, and the original plan for the Apollo program was to get to the Moon, not land on it.

It starts to look like a bloody miracle so few people died, doesn’t it?

As much as I love the Moon, people being on it, and all that, I know that the Moon was a totally political game. Kennedy needed something to give all a big old feel good, and that was the Moon. Lyndon Johnson, his VP and successor, was as keen on the Moon as Kennedy, and I suspect Nixon was as well. Still, the Apollo program was good for the economy (pumped money into the private sectors), re-election (pumped money into key states), the cold war (missiles and rockets are really the same thing, one just has people instead of a freaking bomb), and science (do I need to explain this one?).

Looking at Apollo, one starts to wonder why Russia didn’t get there first. After all, they’d gotten the checklist down so far. First satellite? Sputnik, by the Russians. First man in space? Yuri Gagarin, Russian. First woman in space? Valentina Vladimirovna, Russian. First man to ‘walk’ in space? Alexi Leonov, Russian. First to send a satellite to the Moon? Russia. First to send a manned spacecraft to circle the Moon? The US. First to land on the Moon? The US.

So we caught up, and many people cried out “At what cost, science!?” Well, probably not in those words, btu you get the idea. Other people asked “Where the hell are the Russians!?”

I’ll answer backwards. The Russians wanted to send Leonov to the Moon, but (a) got a late start by not committing to the Moon until 1964, (b) had successive launch failures with their rockets and (c) didn’t have good funding. As late as 1963, the Russians were still saying they didn’t want to go to the Moon. Khrushchev said he didn’t want to be ‘defeated,’ but he also didn’t want the power of being the nation to get to the Moon. I suspect he meant the responsibility, but there’s a lot lacking in Russian/English translations from that time, if my high school Asst. Headmaster is to be believed. And I do believe him.

Part of the responsibility comes from sticking your flag in the Moon and owning it (see Eddie Izzard for details). I’m glad to say the US explicitly disclaimed the right to ownership of any part of the Moon.

As for the cost (see? I didn’t forget ya!), great strides in science can not be measured in money spent or lives lost. Budgets are designed around people doing similar tasks, so they know how much the new task will cost. Innovation, like the Moon but also like mapping the DNA helix or making a hybrid car, has no precedent by which it can be monetarily matched. As for lives lost, this is a balancing act. We lose lives now in order to save more later. I can’t say if this is right or wrong, in the long run, but the cost of the lives of volunteers who know the risk is no more or less than the cost of a policeman who dies at a routine traffic stop, because some coke head caps him. It’s a grey area, always will be. You have to make your own call there.

Before we go, let us not forget the near misses.

I was going to count all the people, but then names showed up twice and I decided not to. The split here is, again, exactly the same between US and Russia, and I know that we know more about us than them. That said, Brezhnev was in charge of the USSR at the time, and it was his policy to categorcially not disclose anything about failures. One glastnost later, we learned some of the truth. I suspect quite a lot more, on both sides of the curtain, was hushed up.

After all, no one wants a dead astronaut.

I was reading up on a lot of the astronauts, doing ‘research’ for this, and quite a lot died of cancer. More seem to die of old age, though, so don’t start any theories on me!

First I saw a dead guy in a chair, in his shorts, in front of a big screen TV with the phone off the hook and on the ground. Assumption one was that he’d been jerking off and died. Then the CSI (Warrick!) found a weird bruise on the guy’s finger on his right hand. The phone was on that same side, so it was probably safe to assume the phone was in that hand. Aha! Electrocution! The coroner confirmed my guess, adding that it was a shallow, mild, shock that screwed up the heart rhythm and caused a heart attack. Okay, so the phone took a charge and shocked him? Is that even possible?

So I did some legwork. My favorite urban myth site is Snopes, and I searched them for lightning. I also looked for electrocution and phones. That’s a lot of searching. Short answer, there’s nothing on it for electrocution through a phone line. Fact is that phone lines carry a charge. That’s how they ring, people. The phone company’s computers send a ringing signal in AC waveform (about 20 HZ for the US). The voltage at your end depends upon loop length and number of ringers attached to the line; it could be between 40 and 150 Volts. The ringing cadence – the timing of ringing to pause – varies from phone company to company. Understanding Telephones can help you some more.

Now that that’s out of the way, we know that phones can carry a charge and why. So does anyone die from that? Oddly enough, UrbanLegends.com answers that. While their page is poorly formatted, the answer seems to be yes, and it happens more often than you thing. But UrbanLegends, unlike Snopes, doesn’t cite sources well enough for me to take as gospel. Still, it seems logical that if there was a spike in power, a phone could knock you with up to 150 Volts, and that’s enough to fuck you over.

Most electrocution injuries occur at voltages above 50 Volts AC or 100 Volts DC however sometimes the voltage can be much lower. The damage is not actually the Voltage but the amps. An amp is an abbreviated name for an Ampere, which is the unit RATE of electrical current flowing in a conductor. Volt is the unit of force, amp is rate of current. It can take as few as 30 milliamps (a thousandth of an amp) to make an adult have a heart attack. Freaky. Can a phone carry that much current? An on the hook (i.e. hung up) phone carries up to 5 microamps (you really need to learn the metric system). When you use your phone, you’ve got a current going to the phone. This holds true for old ringer phones and cordless. But yes, you can be electrocuted by your phone.

Tangent: A poster on TWoP claims it’s ‘rare’, while Australian research says it’s ‘more common than you think.’ I can find records of upwards of 60 people a year in Ausie getting shocked, so let’s say ‘it can happen, it’s not super common, and the use of cordless phones may cut down on it.’ but I have no proof of that. Moving on.

Fine, you can get shocked by your phone. How did the phone get extra charged enough to do that? It takes a surge on the line. The CSIs said ‘Heat Lightning’ and I replied ‘Boooooogus!’ (tm Car Talk). I’m guilty of calling it heat lightning myself, but it’s not. There’s no such thing as heat causing lightning. I live in Chicago, and I’ve seen lightning with no rain when it’s a gazillion degrees at night, but that ain’t it.

Heat lightning, as I was told as a youth, is caused by hot air expanding until it sparks on hot nights. It’s a sudden glow in the sky that can be silent or not. Many real scientists and the ilk will claim it exists, but they are all wrong. There are really two phenomena that cause heat lightning.

It can be a normal thunderstorm, miles and miles away, so far that you can’t hear the thunder, but near enough that you can see the light. And before you bitch that you can’t see light that far, I’d like you to think about how far away the sun is. Thank you. It’s a horizon thing. So long as it’s not too far away, the curvature of the Earth won’t be enough to hide it from sight.

The other form of ‘heat lightning’ is ‘sheet lightning.’ Sheet lightning is actually a standard lightning bolt whose light is reflected off cumulonimbus cloud towers or is diffused as it passes through the atmosphere and thus loses its distinctive bolt pattern. In other words, the light of the moon refracting off the fog in the swamp made it cloudy and hazy enough that you couldn’t see the bolt.

The CSIs never brought this up, sadly, and used the National Weather Service’s website to map lightning strikes. Don’t bother. It doesn’t really exist. Bastards. There is a map for earthquake location, but since there are so many more lightning strikes (I’ve seen over 20 in a night), I doubt anyone’s anal enough to map it, even if they could.

In the end, the CSI determined that the bag of Blue Ice the dead guy used to cool off leaked and trickled down to the surge suppressor, which sent a jolt up to the guy and zapped him. The burn/bruise on the finger was the electrical exit wound.

I do wish they’d stop with the bunk about urban myths. But it does give me something to write about!

Now many people wonder what’s the big deal? Well, cork is naturally lighter than wood. The lighter a bat, the less effort it takes to swing it, and the faster it moves. The faster a bat moves, the easier it is to hit a ball hard, since your effort goes into the hitting rather than the moving. The easier to hit, the more home runs. Batters have to make their decision to swing in about .04 seconds, so a faster bat means they can think longer. Heavy bats mean hard work and a later swing, so naturally batters try and quicken their bats.

Players have tried to add a little more spring to their swing by filling their bats with fresh cork, and sealing them up cleanly in hopes that no one would notice. The use of cork is because cork is naturally soft and spongy when fresh and well cared for (it can crumble, so you have to pick the right cork that will stay fresher longer). Baseball bats, being solid wood, are very hard, and the theory goes that a ball will rebound more off something springy that something solid.

You’ll notice I didn’t mention spring in that first paragraph, and here’s why. The springy theory? Is a misconception. Physics states that a stiff bat can transfer energy best. The solid wood won’t absorb as much energy as the cork will and will rebound faster. Therefore when you hollow out your bat, the bat is less stiff and can’t transfer the energy fast at all. Basically? Balls hit with corked bats don’t go as far.

There is, of course, that other factor. A lighter bat is easier to swing. That said, physics shows that you can get a near exact lightness of your bat by choking up an inch or so, or cutting about .2 inches off the diameter of the bat. The thinner bat is easier to break, yes, and less inclined to hit a pop-up, but for a hitter, that’s the way to be!

If you know baseball, you know that a shorter bat will hurt your chances to hitting the outside pitches (ones on the far end of the plate). So maybe you don’t want to choke up. That’s okay, there’s a legal way to lighten your bat. Just hollow out the end of the wooden bat. Some bats look like they’ve been carved out with a giant ice-cream scoop, and this has been going on since the dawn of time. The hollowing is more effective, too, since the bat makers will remove more material than you would in corking.

Now don’t forget, the less wood in a bat, the easier it is to break. So with a corked bat, you’re more likely to break it and get caught.

Still, let’s assume that Sosa did this for a lighter bat, to hit more home runs.

And how many homers has Sosa hit in the last 5 years? 292.

I remember in 1994, Albert Belle (then of the Cleveland Indians) was suspected as to having a corked bat, and the Ump confiscated the bat to examine later. The Indians actually knew the bat was corked, and tried to hide this fact. After the bat was confiscated, they had their smallest pitcher wriggle through a crawl space above the umpires’ locker room, drop through an escape hatch, and replace the corked model with a conventional one. But the caper was easily found out–the bat they had put in the Ump’s locker had Paul Sorrento’s name on it. Belle was suspended for seven games.

Sammy Sosa’s case it a little different. There was no attempt made to cover this up. The Cubs manager (Dusty Baker) claims to have not known, and by the way he looked on TV, I’m fairly sure he didn’t. Also, Sammy claimed right away that he only used the bat for batting practice. Finally, unlike there just being a suspicion, the damn bat shattered and spilled cork on the field. That’s hard to mistake.

Then again, the MLB (who will judge this case) only have the handle to base this on. The Tampa Bay catcher gave the First Base Umpire the bat, and there was a piece of cork around the size of a half-dollar stuck halfway down the barrel head. The Umps all checked it out, felt that it was notched in there, and that it was cork, and thus had to eject him. But the barrel head that went flying away from home plate is missing. The batboy took it back to the dugout before the handle was judged to be corked and it mysteriously disappeared.

That was a long way to get back to this: I think Sosa not only knew his bat was corked, but willfully was trying to play with a lighter bat. If he’s really trying to hit more home runs, then he really ought to use a heavier bat in practice so that the regular one feels light and swings faster.

Ah well. Yet another icon tarnished.

For the gun, it looked like a sub compact automatic machine gun. I thought it was an Uzi at first but I’m not sure now. Anyway, since I know Uzi the best, I’ll explain about that. An Uzi takes a 9mm bullet, has a magazine capacity of 20 to 50 rounds (depending on the size of the magazine), and fires at a rate of 600 to 1700 rounds a minute. There is a 300 round magazine, but that’s 5’3″ long!

Now that said, anyone can buy bullets. In Florida you have to be 21 or older (which was fun for my former Miami-Dade cop buddy, who was on the force at I think 18 and had to get his mom to buy bullets). In the ’50s, zip guns were popular because you didn’t need a gun permit to buy bullets. This is still the case in many states. It’s relatively easy, though a little time consuming, to refill a magazine. Provided the magazine stays in shape, it can be reused indefinitely. I looked around on line and I don’t know the age limit on bullets in Nevada. I’d peg it at 18, though.

As for the gun being on … Supposedly they gave the gun a really hard spin and the pressure of the trigger on the pole left it on. Thing is that I don’t think that would have worked. Having fired a sub machine gun once, it requires a healthy bit of pressure to keep the fucker on. That said, you could rig up something to hold the trigger back (a healthy bit of duct tape would do it), but you’d waste a lot of bullets randomly firing off into the distance.

That may account for the fact that there were 109 bullets. That’s a weird number, and given that the most common magazine sizes are usually 20, 25, 30, or 32 round clips (though you can get a 40 or 50 clip if you look for it). None of which math out to 109 bullets. Since there are 109 bullet holes and 109 shells, I’m going to assume that Sara didn’t find any shells outside or on the roof, so all I can reckon is that either they didn’t fill the magazine completely, or they didn’t find a full magazine for the first run. 9mm bullets are popular, used by (among others) the Sig Sauer. A Glock uses a 9×19 up to a solid .45, but is typically known as a 9mm gun. The Uzi also uses a 9x19mm Luger/Para bullet, and you can use the bullets in a Glock or an Uzi.

This is probably more than you all wanted to know about sub machine guns. And I still have no real idea on how they got the gun to stay on, but having only used an Uzi-type gun once, I can’t imagine that a gun was made with a ‘leave on’ function.

I have to throw out the duct tape hypotheisis since I can’t visualize how the hell you could do that, get it on the pole, spin it, still have the same numbers of holes to shells and not kill yourself. I thought about maknig a mock up but I’m at work and my office already thinks I’m weird.

Oh and later I was asked about the bamboo not having gunshot residue on it (GSR) and my suspiscion is that it actually did get trace amounts on it, but since the majority of GSR tends to be sprayed back at the hand level, and gets more on the top of your hand than around the trigger (there’s also a trigger guard there to prevent the hot GSR from getting on you). Factor in the rotation of the gun and I think that there should have been trace amnounts on the gun. Given that the bamboo was left on the roof, the GSR was probably washed off by morning dew. That’s a little stretch but entirely likely.

See, the non-classified version (which happens to be the only one I know) is that a relative of mine was one of the geniuses on the Risk Analysis and Assessment Team (RAAT) for Challenger back in 1986. This meant I knew about the o-rings a hell of a lot sooner than most kids my age, and I got a weird crash course in learning about the space program. Basically, RAAT’s job was to figure out where the failure was, had they been following guidelines and stayed within ‘acceptable’ risk boundaries, and was there anything they could have done differently.

As we all know today, there was a fuck of a lot they should have done differently. For those who don’t know, I can break it down simply.

First, as Richard Feynman (a fellow regarded by Einstein as a genius) pointed out in the hearings, when it gets cold, rubber gets less flexible. Anyone who lives in a cold state knows this. Also, as most people know, if you heat up something cold very fast, it’ll break. This is because objects actually change state when you cool them down or heat them up. It’s simple physics. It’s why your house creaks at night and why a Concord Jet gets longer during flight.

Anyway, look at the pictures of the space shuttles. There’s the airplane-shuttle sitting on a huge orange rocket, and two skinny rockets on each side of the orange rocket. Now, the skinny ones are booster rockets and are filled with rocket fuel, which isn’t a problem. The problem is that the boosters are made of many interlocking ‘rings’ that are bolted together. Given that metal expands when it’s hot, they came up with the idea to fit rubber rings (the o-rings) around the metal where the join is, to prevent leaks. Great idea. Of course, the o-rings had failed once before, but since the back-up o-ring was okay, NASA went with it.

So here we are. It’s a cold day, there’s ice on the launch pad, the o-rings have been known to have problems, and we’re loading up a teacher. The o-rings failed, fuel leaked, and it melted into the orange rocket, causing it to explode.

And NASA knew. They did. And they considered it an ‘acceptable risk.’

Same thing with Columbia. They knew something had happened, but even so, there was no way of knowing what the end result would be. Did a piece of foam insulation hit and break a heat shielding tile? Possibly, though I suspect they’d have noticed weird heat readings during the rest of lift off. If the tiles were at fault, could the astronauts have space-walked to fix it? No, there were no repair tools. Could they have gone to the space station and waited there for a pick up? No, they had no way to dock. Could they have been picked up by another shuttle? Maybe.

That last one is the weird bit. It takes about a month to get a shuttle off the ground, and that’s skipping a lot of safety checks. I’m not sure anyone wants to do that.

But the end result of all this is that the shuttles are not safe. They’ve never been safe. You’re sticking 7 to 9 people on top of a hydrogen bomb! What? You didn’t know that the big ass orange rocket is a fuel tank filled with liquid hydrogen and oxygen? 154 feet long, 27.6 feet in diameter, it weighs about 1.7 million pounds when full. It’s used for less than 9 minutes in flight, and is jettisoned to burn up in the atmosphere. That’s why Challenger blew up so big. The hydrogen chamber hit the oxygen chamber and there was a the typical reaction. Boom. Big boom.

NASA predicts a 1 in 400 risk for shuttle accidents. I think that’s exceptionally generous. So far we’re 1 in 50, give or take, and that’s pretty fucking amazing.

Space travel is dangerous. No one’s died ‘in’ space, but it’ll happen. Look at how many people have died in shuttles (I’m not counting training accidents in airplanes). Okay we have Apollo 1 which blew up on the launch pad in a simulation when they filled the compartment with 400% oxygen (enough to make Velcro spontaneously combust) and had the door set to swing the wrong way. Challenger blew up over a minute into lift off. Columbia blew up on landing.

Here’s the thing, though. We’ve been to the moon, and we chose to do it because it’s hard (tm Kennedy’s speechwriter). We’ve sent unmanned probes to Mars. We’ve taken pictures of Saturn and Jupiter with Voyager. There’s more to be done, however. Man is an explorer, constantly pushing boundaries and limits to see what else is out there. I refuse to believe we’re alone in the universe, and there has to be a way to reach out. But first, we need to master escaping the boundaries of our own planet.

The space program needs to keep going. We’ve worked too hard and too long to give up now, and so long as we’re aware of the risks and take every possible precaution, then we’re doing pretty good.

NASA needs to clean up their act, do what’s right instead of what’s political, and then, maybe, we’ll live in the stars.

I know if I was invited today to go on a shuttle mission, to orbit the Earth, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

Don’t let the people who’ve given their life for this project have had their lives wasted in vain. Let their death carry on the meaning of a promise. We can succeed at this, and given time we will.

Rest in peace, crew of the Columbia.

Me? “101, 103, 107, 111, 113, 121, 127…”

Elvis asks about 117, to which I explain the whole ‘if the numbers add up to a number divisible by three, then the number’s divisible by three.’ This is not a huge concept.

See, 18 is 3 times 6. 1 plus 8 is 9. 9 is 3 times 3. This is really only useful when you get to 117 and all (1+1+7=9) and you’re trying to figure out prime numbers or lowest common denominators.

But when Elvis and Sunny eyed me and started throwing out numbers, demanding to know if they were prime or not, and I answered, they wanted to know why I was geeking and not doing theoretical math.

Well.

My Dad’s better at math than I am, I’m just a cheerful hobbyist. I have moments of immaculate clarity, but for the most part I’m a slightly above average mathematician. Also, geeking pays better.

This brings me around to another chat I was having, recently, when a friend of mine argued that it was impossible for the charts we used in a game to be inaccurate as to locations. He said that since the game books stated that the people had been working on these charts for 100 years (give or take), and that since very experienced smart people worked on the charts, they were going to be right.

My argument is that it’s statistically impossible for anyone to be 100% accurate on anything. Just because we have the math to figure out the patterns doesn’t mean that we’re always right. And it also doesn’t mean that we’ve taken into account every variable.

We ended up agreeing to disagree, though privately I think we both feel the other is dead wrong.

The joke I used to tell was that even Einstein was wrong a few times! After all, he did get E=mc^2, but he started out with A and had to work up to E.