The Fry Side

Happy Vernal Equinox, everyone! As always, I’m please to celebrate a legitimate astronomical event because, well, it actually happens. Plus, up here in Minnesota, the first day of Spring is most definitely a cause for celebration, even if there is still snow on the ground and a storm is sure to dump more sometime in April.

Here are some fun tidbits about the Equinox. Gotta dig any holiday or event that includes history, math, and astronomy, right?

The length of day and night may not be equal on the vernal equinox, but that doesn’t make the first day of spring any less special.

The fall and spring equinoxes, for starters, are the only two times during the year when the sun rises due east and sets due west, according to Alan MacRobert, a senior editor with Sky & Telescope magazine.

The equinoxes are also the only days of the year when a person standing on the Equator can see the sun passing directly overhead.

On the Northern Hemisphere’s vernal equinox day, a person at the North Pole would see the sun skimming across the horizon, beginning six months of uninterrupted daylight.

A person at the South Pole would also see the sun skim the horizon, but it would signal the start of six months of darkness.

(Found via mental_floss Blog.)

How cool is this?

Really cool. Almost as cool as it is in Minnesota right now.

And no, they didn’t cancel school, even though it’s twenty below without the wind chill.

Two Years Ago, I wrote this:

I have gone through my entire house and cut the electrical cost of lighting my home by seventy-five percent. While there may have been a bit of initial investment in these small, spiraling compact fluorescent bulbs, they will last me for years and each one uses less than one quarter of the energy of the equivalent light output from an incandescent bulb. Believe it or not, the initial investment wasn’t much at all. If bought in some bulk, they come out to around two dollars a bulb for the basic wattages that one would expect. Take into account that they last over five times longer and use one-fourth of the energy, and you’ll find they save tons of money over the rather long haul. If you keep your eyes peeled, you can find them for even less. We went to Lowes recently and they were offering rebates making packs of four bulbs free! The cost of lighting my entire house dropped seventy-five percent, and we have barely spent a dime. Please folks, do yourselves and the rest of the world a huge favor. Make your homes more energy efficient. You’ll save tons of money, our rather old electrical grids won’t be as strained, and in the end we’ll decrease our need for so much fuel in general.

In two years, I have changed zero compact fluorescents. None at all. And there are two or three that are burning almost permanently. The only bulbs I’ve changed? The one in the garage door opener. Our garage is not heated and incandescent bulbs work better in the cold.

Well, after having changed about half a dozen bulbs in three weeks (I used the leftovers from the house) I finally caved and put a CFL in there. It still works, though is a little dim when starting up. But you know what? I’m not going to think about it anymore now. And I’m all about not thinking.

I still have no idea how much energy I’ve saved. At least my conscience is clear.

Thanks, free will. I’m always happy you’re there.

The Magic of Metric

Conversion within a unit system.    Know how many inches in a foot?  Of course you do.  How many ounces in a pint?  Probably.  How about in a gallon?  Uh.  How many feet in a mile?  How about a nautical mile?  If you know all those, you have a better memory than I do.  Know how many meters in a kilometer?  Yep, 1000.  How many mm in a meter?  Yep, 1000.  Know how many grams in a kg?  1000 again.  See no memory required.   So, how many mm in 5.876 m?  5876.  So, how many feet in 756 inches?  How many nautical miles in 19, 6758 feet?  How easy is it to check to see if your answer is right in metric?  And English units?  Admit it, you’re going to have to use the calculator twice, assuming you get the same answer both times.

 You want to know why European and Asian kids are kicking our children’s butts in math and science?  I guarantee this is part of the reason.

Conversion to a different system of units.  You know, whenever there’s an issue with metrication, it’s almost always because of conversion.  Someone does their calculations in one system of units and then converts it, but makes a mistake along the way.  Or someone does calculations in one system of units and doesn’t notice it needs to be converted.  We’ve lost spacecraft that way.  So, why does that argue for one system over the other.  Well everyone but us uses the smart system.  If we stop using English units, conversion issues become a thing of the past because, hey, we don’t have to convert any more.

There are, of course, also reasons associated with making us compatible with the rest of the world, improving the appeal of our products overseas.  And that it’s the law that we change (which has been there for decades).  Tool simplification, drastically reducing long term production costs because of reduced spares and tooling requirements. Lower error rates across the board because it’s so much simpler. There’s the fact that many aspects of life are already effectively 100% metric even in this country, like medicine and real science.

But, the bottom line is that the only reason we’re still doing things the stupid way is because we’re too proud to do otherwise.  And our children are paying for it.

*Skipped the math did you?

How’s this for a reason?  If you weighed 190 pounds, you’ll mass 86 kg.  That’s right, a double digit mass.

(Found via 3quarksdaily.)

The Aluminum MacBook under an x-ray:

(Found via Digg.)

Addition: This makes for a sweet desktop background image (when you download the high resolution version).

Incredible:

a Science Channel documentary in which scientists pour 10 tons of cement down a massive anthill, let it harden for a month, then carefully excavate it to demonstrate the internal structure of the colony. It took three days of pumping to fill the colony with cement.

I’m suddenly feeling a strange mix of being inspired for a D&D dungeon and looking back societal analysis through Star Trek.

Without really noticing it, it’s been a month since I quit drinking caffeine and soda. With it being a rough month of teething for my now eight month old (holy cow!) daughter, it probably was a poor time to do it. But since it started almost by accident, I think it was easier to keep up with.

I do get up easier and don’t get headaches anymore. That’s got to be the best part. I no longer feel like garbage for having not had a Dew by 8:30. This is especially noticeable on weekends when I did not regularly get a caffeine intake to start my days.

Part of me thinks I have this licked and that I can occasionally have a fountain drink with lunch. But I think I prefer the idea of cutting out high-fructose corn syrup in general. And though it is a false association, this article I found via McArdle, got me thinking:

You can observe this sort of thing in lab rats – if you infuse extra glucose into their brains, they stop eating, even under conditions when they otherwise would keep going. A few years ago, an odd result was found when this experiment was tried with fructose: instead of lowering food intake, infusing fructose into the central nervous system made the animals actually eat more. That’s not what you’d expect, since in the end, fructose ends up metabolized to the same thing as glucose does (pyruvate), and used to make ATP.

Now, to be fair, my change in food intake probably has more to do with me being a bit more conscious ofit since cutting out a part of it, than it does to the difference between glucose and fructose. However, I have honestly noticed more when I’m full and am more susceptible to feeling sick after eating too much. More than one plate of food and I’m heading for the strange tasting, generic Tums and an early bedtime.

The only really hard part is keeping myself alert while working at my desk. I do my best to get up and walk (as well as keep my eyes from the screens 100% of the time). But there are still those times when I’m doing my best not to keel over and wind up with a case of keyboard face.

Yesterday, my lawn was mowed for the first time since May. Through many tests, it has been determined nearly beyond a doubt that my well dried up at the beginning of the watering season. And with a new baby and my lack of funding, time, and expertise, just let it be.

For most of the summer, it remained dormant. Just dried and brown, but mostly perfectly fine. We lacked much rain this season, even though the poor people to the south of us in Iowa got unfortunate amounts.

As of the past month, we have finally gotten rain and really the loveliest weather possible. Much of my lawn greened up again with big patches getting nice and tall and falling over themselves. Alongside those were some amazingly tall weeds with atrocious flowers for the lad to pick for his mommy.

So with my son’s assistance in the garage, I managed to fire up my amusingly worn riding mower. It took a couple hours to recharge the battery enough for it to start, and once it did, it spewed out more grey oil smoke than it did when first fired up after being stored all winter. It freaked out the lad at first, but through the smoke I gave him a grin and he was reassured with grubby fingers jammed into his ears.

He rode with me for the first going over to knock out the taller patches. He liked it very much, especially grabbing at low branches as we drove underneath. I had him sit out on the second round of mowing for the simple sake of all the crud and dust I would be kicking up. (I had forgotten how rough it can be; I blew my nose when I was done and it was black as tar.)

Going over the lawn the second time, listing to Billy Joel all the while (along with wondering if I was the only person who does that), I couldn’t help but feel I was destroying a whole ecosystem. Before I embarked on this journey of ruination, crickets and grasshoppers thrived, chirping all day long. Now, underneath an evened green and brown patched lawn, is quiet. I have driven them from their homes, sent them out into the world with nothing for them.

I guess they’ll just go back to living in my shrubbery and woodpiles that have remained untouched for two years.