The thing I always liked best there were the sopaipillas.
(Wow. They’re still in business.)
But I digress. (Thanks to the Atomic Nerds for the pointer on that.)
Anyway, speaking of SOPA and PIPA, I’ve seen a lot of people today asking the musical question: “If you were opposed to the Citizen’s United decision, then why were you not also opposed to Google changing their logo to signify opposition to SOPA/PIPA?”
WCD did not go on strike yesterday because of SOPA and PIPA (though we did call our Congress slime and make our views known).
(By the way, we think the “Congress” app for Android is pretty spiffy.)
Basically, there just wasn’t much going on yesterday.
Today, we note the NYT‘s article on discussions of doing away with the leap second.
Also noteworthy: Penn State trustees discuss the decision to fire Paterno.
We have no joke here, we ust like saying “feral burros”.
On my way to breakfast with some friends, we got into a discussion of whether you could get butter from goat’s milk. (I had thought that I’d read elsewhere that goat milk was too low in fat to get butter from. It turns out that not only was I mistaken, but you can purchase goat butter
This led me to the Wikipedia article on goats, which notes:
Somehow, I am less than shocked by this.
I wanted to throw up a link to Zander Robin’s “Kodachrome 2010” documentary on Vimeo, but I felt like I should watch it first.
After watching it…well, there’s some interesting stuff in it about the chemistry involved in processing Kodachrome, and quite a few lovely images, but I really wish there was more to it. At less than 10 minutes, it seems like it is just the beginning of the story of Dwayne’s Photo and the final days of Kodachrome. I know it might have been a tough sell on the festival circuit, but I, for one, would have paid money to see a 90 minute version of this, or to download it from iTunes.
In any case, here’s “Kodachrome 2010” if you want to watch for yourself.
KODACHROME 2010 from Xander Robin on Vimeo.
(Hattip: PetaPixel.)
Today’s NYT has an interesting article about an attempt to unearth and recreate the tunnel system used in Stalag Luft III.
It turns out that the team was unable to excavate “Harry”, but they did manage to dig down to “George”. They also constructed a new tunnel called “Roger”, “but in a trench just beneath the surface; anything deeper was deemed too dangerous”. (The original tunnels ran 30 feet below the surface.)
I am looking forward to this documentary showing up on PBS. (At least, I’m hoping it will show up on PBS instead of The Hitler History Channel.) I think this is a review of it from the Telegraph. Here’s a link to an older NOVA documentary. For any of my younger readers who are unfamiliar with the story, here’s the Wikipedia entry to use as a starting point. The Great Escape
More specifically, I guess I should have been a hand surgeon.
For those of you previously unfamiliar with the saga of Dr. Michael Brown, you can find a good introduction here.
The latest development? According to the HouChron, Dr. Brown was spending $60,000 a month on strippers (between, at least, December 2010 and August 2011).
Now, that sounds bad, but let’s think this through. An average month has 30 days, so that’s really just $2,000 a day. And according to the article, he was paying four strippers, so that’s really $500/day/stripper, which doesn’t sound too bad. (I guess, like everything else, strippers are cheaper when you buy in bulk.)
(Please forgive me for not linking to anything related to “Stacy Shey”, but, once again, my journalistic obligations have to take a back seat to the limitations imposed by writing these posts at work.)
Edited to add: Let’s give this some thought. Assume a construct called a “stripper-day” (similar to a “man-month
So working on the $500/stripper-day figure and the assumptions above, we’re looking at an hourly rate of $62.50. Which doesn’t sound like bad money. Of course, we can assume the strippers are independent contractors, so their health insurance/retirement/work expenses (such as high heels) have to come out of that $62.50/hour. On the other hand, we can figure that the strippers are young and in good health, so their health insurance rates are probably low.
Question: would $62.50/hour be pretty much the standard going rate everywhere? I suspect that in NYC and LA the rate might be much higher; then again, in larger cities there may be more competition, which would tend to drive down rates.
Question: are strippers fungible? I suspect so, at least within a certain general subset of physical characteristics (some of which are under the stripper’s control, such as hair color and bust size).
This sounds like a subject for the Freakonomics guys.
I suspect this is also going to be in “win the lottery” territory, but wouldn’t you like to be able to tell people, “Yes, my Swiss Army Knife has one terabyte of storage.“?
I know I would.
Unless I win the lottery sometime soon (and that would require buying a ticket) I won’t be purchasing a Nikon D4.
However, the idea of a camera with built-in wired Ethernet boggles my mind. (The WiFi add-on seems kind of nifty too, especially for the automation it offers. But at $6,000 for the camera, it seems to me to be something that should have been included rather than an extra cost option.)
(Hattip: Les Jones.)
Here are my total lack of qualifications for reviewing this movie:
“, but haven’t seen anything since. I missed “Zodiac
” when it was in the theater (I really should get the DVD), and I have “Fight Club
” on (the extra-special) DVD, but haven’t watched it yet. I had no interest in “The Social Network
“, and I heard strongly negative things about “Benjamin Button
“.All that aside, I thought “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” was a solid 3 – 3 1/2 star movie. I didn’t feel like I spent my $7 in vain, and the actual movie going experience was pleasant enough. (Of course, not everyone is lucky enough to have the Alamo Drafthouse.)
I did have a few quibbles and problems with the movie. I’m going to put those after a jump, even though I’m going to try to avoid major spoilers (there may be some minor ones).
My sister’s latest post is up at the Park City Snowmamas site:
Dealing with altitude sickness.
(I know she was looking for old photos of us as kids visiting Pikes Peak. The thing that stands out most vividly for me from that trip was the g-dd–n splitting headache. Granted, I was only 8 or 9 years old, but that was the worst headache I’d ever had in my life to that point.)
List of fatal cougar attacks in North America.
(You know, I have categories for reptiles, horses, primates, and spiders. Do I need a “cat” category? If so, should I have a “dog” category too? Perhaps “mammals” and make horses, cats, dogs, and primates subsets of that?)
(Explained.)
The University of California and Dr. Patrick Harran, a chemistry professor at UCLA, have been charged with three felony counts of “willfully violating occupational health and safety standards”. Yes, you read that right: the University itself is being charged with felonies.
The charges stem from the death of Sheri Sangji in December of 2008. Ms. Sangji was employed in Dr. Harran’s lab:
She died 18 days after the incident.
I’m kind of hoping Derek Lowe will have some comment on this, and I’m willing to listen to arguments on the subject. My gut feeling is that the felony indictments are appropriate: Ms. Sangji should not have been working without a flame-resistant lab coat, and it isn’t clear to me that she was provided with appropriate equipment, training, or supervision. This is what trials are for, of course, and details may come out during the trial that will change my mind. But:
But the required corrective actions were not taken before the fatal fire, the records showed.
Edited to add: Many thanks to Chemjobber both for pointing us to Derek Lowe’s commentary, and for providing a link to an article from Chemical and Engineering News summarizing the incident in more detail.
Also, thanks to Lawrence for a somewhat related link, which we had missed: the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board report on the Texas Tech lab explosion in January of 2010. I swear that I covered the explosion at the time, or shortly afterwards, but I can’t find the link now. In any case, the report is pretty much what you’d expect: “the physical hazard risks inherent in the research were not effectively assessed, planned for, or mitigated; the university lacked safety management accountability and oversight; and previous incidents with preventative lessons were not documented, tracked, and formally communicated”.
(Short summary: the lab was working on a government project involving detection of explosives. Part of their work involved making something called nickel hydrazine perchlorate, which goes bang rather easily. The lab had been making small amounts (100 milligrams) but the students involved in the production of NHP that day decided, for various reasons, to scale things up and produce about 10 grams. The NHP went bang while one of the students was trying to break up “clumps” in a mortar and pestle.)