Name Popularity

Have you ever noticed that some names seem to be very popular and some names seem just downright old and dated. Well, recently I found a tool that lets you chart just how crusty and cobwebbed your name actually is. It's called Wolfram Alpha. Now that's not what the tool is intended to be, but, so far, that's all I can figure out to do with it. Wolfram Alpha is a web site/search engine that was created by Stephen Wolfram, the guy who also developed the mathematical tool "Mathematica". You have to be a freakin' genius to understand how to use any of his tools and Mathematica is kind of expensive if all you want to do is play. Wolfram is a certified genius, having won one of those MacArthur genius awards. But for now, back to names.

One of the things that Alpha can do is look up statistical data on names, real fast. For example, if you type "Philip" into the search engine, you get a lot of stuff on the name "Philip", more than you really wanted to know. Like it's currently 378th in popularity, that 1 in 2681 (0.037%) or 802 people born in the US in 2008, were named "Philip". Also, the average age of a "Philip" is 56. You even get a graph that shows you just how dated your name is.

Pretty bad, huh? But if you feel outdated, you can always try two names for comparison.

"Donna", which used to be a really popular name, no doubt because of Donna Reed, has really fallen out of favor. Lets try another. Here's a graph of me, my wife and two of my many blog followers. As you can see, we're all has-beens. Albert is a real 19th century kind of guy.

For one last example, a friend of mine has a daughter, "Sophia", who turned five yesterday.

And just to see how she compares with the old fogeys.

What's really freaky is just how susceptible to popular culture we are when we name our kids. Try out a few yourself and see what I mean. Till next time.....

Merry Christmas!

Neat things in North Carolina

I grew up in North Carolina and I'm over 50 so I, of course, watched the Andy Griffith show a lot when I was younger. It's part of who I am. One of the things that made the show more special was that occasionally, some specific part of North Carolina was mentioned. Few nationally shown TV shows seemed to be aware that the south even existed and for us to hear about somewhere we'd actually been was a treat.

Every once in a while Andy went to Raleigh. I'd been to Raleigh. I connected. Of course, they also talked about Mt. Pilot. But growing up on the other side of the state, I never had an opportunity to go there or to it's real equivalent, Pilot Mountain, until I was much older. What I didn't realize, and they never mentioned it on the show, is that Pilot Mountain is a weird beast. It's not a huge mountain, but it sort of sticks out of a relative flat area and on the top it has this lovely carbuncle. It's just really odd looking.




Pilot Mountain is a state park and you can go visit and walk around on some of the trails. Unfortunately, you can't go up on top of the carbuncle. I think you could a long time ago but I suspect that expense, liability concerns, nature preservation and all those other things of that nature have put a stop to it. That's really too bad. If I had a ton of money, I'd approach the State about figuring out how to make it accessible. Maybe drill a tunnel into the side that led to an elevator or set of steps that took you up to the top. That would be cool.

If you haven't done it you should take out an afternoon or day and visit the park sometime. Especially if you're a North Carolinian.

More Organ and Piano Music

As I mentioned in a recent post, I've been helping my friend Tom get some music loaded up on his web site. It's now in place and can be found here. Hit the listen link to hear some of his music.

Getting Dissed

So basically, Taylor Swift isn't gonna have all the fun. Anybody can get dissed by Kayne West. Even my web site. Click here.

Organ and Piano Music

Over the last few months I've been trying to help our church organist get some of his recorded music up on his personal web site. This mostly included converting a lot of CD music into .mp3's, editing out some of the noise and coughs and adding extensive applause to the ends of all the tracks. Just kidding. I work a lot faster on these things than he does, so I got it all ready while waiting for him to figure out how he wants to lay it out. The titles are a bit cryptic but sort of name the piece and the composer. Have a listen if you like. If you don't listen to anything else, try the Vierne_Naiades.

Here's a few pieces recorded on our church organ.

Sonata_I_FirstMovMend

Sonata_I_SecondMovMend

Sonata_I_ThirdMovMend

Sonata_I_FourthMovMend

Naiades_Vierne

O_Gott_du_frommer_Gott

WenWir_Bach

In_dulci_jubilo_Bach

And here are a few recorded around the world.

50th_Chopin_Scherzo

Bach_Concerto_1st_mvt

Bach_Concerto_2nd_mvt

Bach_Concerto_3rd_mvt

Bach_Fugue

Bach_Trio

Bovet

Brahms_1

Brahms_Rhapsodie

Couperin_1&_Fugue

Couperin_Offertoire

Couperin_TenTaille

Debussy_L'Isle

Dupre_Finale

Durufle_Scherzo

Durufle_Toccata

Gigout2

Griffes

Lex_Chopin_Scherzo

Mendelssohn_Songs

Rachmaninoff_Prelude

Reger

Saint-Saens_Chorale

Saint-Saens_Scherzo

Vierne_Naiades

Widor

willan

New Lawnmower Not too long ago I wrote about my lawnmower. I wrote about how, even though it was largely abused, mostly through neglect, that it kept on running for 19 or so years. Well, on Monday I cranked her up and started mowing the yard. After a couple of spins around the yard, it stopped running. It just died. I tried restarting the thing but I got nothing. It was like there was no spark at the plug. So I went ot the garage and found a pack of 4 spark plugs that I bought 100 years or so ago for something and never used them. I pulled one out and replaced the badly fouled one in the lawnmower with the shiny, never used old one. I pulled the cord and nothing happened. So I decided, after consulting with the wife, that it was time for a new lawnmower. Having bought a cheap lawnmower from Sears that lasted for 19 years, I decided that it wouldn't hurt to try that route again. I looked on the web and saw that they had one that was about the same for $149.99. So I went off to Sears and came back with a big box containing my new lawnmower. Today, Wednesday, I pulled it out of the box and set it up. All I needed to do was raise the handlebars, pour in the bottle of oil that came with it and fill it with gas. After a few pulls on the cord, it came to life and I was able to finish mowing the front dirt, I mean, yard. To prepare the old mower for the junk yard, I removed the gas and turned it upside down to drain the oil. Funny, after an hour standing upside down, no oil drained out of the mower. Here's a side by side of the old mower and the new one before I got it dirty. Ain't it cute?

Interesting

As you may or may not know, Google owns the company (blogspot) that runs the blogging service that I use. Google also has an email service called "gmail", which came along after the blogging service. The first "gmail" accounts were offered to users of other Google services before they were offered to the general public. In fact, "gmail" may still be available by invitation only.

Anyhow, being early to the table allowed me to get an unfettered email address. So instead of "jsmith30437@gmail.com", I got the equivalent of "jsmith@gmail.com." That's pretty cool. The problem is that every Paul, Phyllis, Patricia, Peter, Padma, Pamela and a few Phils and Philips, who share my last name, will, on occasion, give out my email address as theirs, forgetting to add in that extra stuff that makes their email unique and different from mine.

So I get a lot of real email intended for other people. I often write back to straighten them out, which is usually appreciated.

The other interesting thing that happens is that I share a name with a famous NY Yankees pitcher. I get some email intended for him. Here's an example from a fan.



About a year ago another fan noticed that "I" was on injured reserve, and wondered if I could show up at his son's Bar Mitzvah, since I wasn't playing at the time. I told him I was a chemist. He said that if I could pull it off, he'd hire me. He was sure I'd be cheaper.

So that's all for now. Bye

Cheaper Ways to Do It

Recently, some moron in the US Air Force thought it would be kind of cute to get a picture or two of Air Force One, the president's plane, flying past the Statue of Liberty with a jet escort. So they fueled up Air Force Two, which looks a lot like Air Force One and flew it low past the Statue of Liberty and New York City. Not surprising, the people of New York City completely freaked out and evacuated buildings and went running in the streets and the Mayor was ticked off in a big way. Word is the whole thing probably cost us around half a million, not counting the lost wages in NYC. The White House, sensing a PR disaster, apologized and expressed ignorance of and outrage over the whole affair. This kind of spending looks really bad during a recession.

The problem I have with the whole thing is that with today's modern computer graphics technology, they could have left the planes on the ground and still worked up some nice images.


Here's a picture of me at the Wright Brother's Memorial with Air Force One flying over behind me.

Something that Bothered Me, that got Fixed

One of the big problems of being a nit-picker like myself is that, on occasion, I see an error so glaring that I squirm in my seat and rant at the wife and kids but I can't do a damn thing about it. This is such a story.

For a long time Exxon ran a bunch of ads that talked about what a wonderful company Exxon is, especially with respect to the environment. When I looked up Exxon ads in Google, there were a whole lot of people screaming about how hypocritical the ads were. But for me there was a bigger problem. The ads featured this lovely glass molecule rotating in space with science sounding music playing in the background and a narrator talking about Exxon's work saving the environment. The problem is, the structure of the glass molecule is all wrong. The molecule is cyclohexane. Now if you're an organic chemist or even if you were slightly exposed to organic chemistry, you know that cyclohexane is a ring of six carbon atoms with two hydrogens attached to each carbon. The other thing that you know is that the carbon ring has a distinct pucker to it. It's called a chair conformation and cyclohexane's shape even has it's own wikipedia page. Here's a screen shot from one of the ads.



You can see the ring flatness even better if you watch the ad itself. This flat abomination showed up in a lot of places including the front cover of their 2008 annual report to stockholders.

My wife used to work at Exxon Research a long time ago and I got to know a few of the organic chemists who worked there, some who are still there. This had to be driving them crazy, too. Well guess what? They fixed it. The newer ads actually have the structure of the molecule correct. Here is a screen shot,



and you can view the ad to get a better sense of the pucker. At first I thought that they had to get their glass blower to go back and make another pretty glass molecule with all the right angles but I suspect the whole thing was done with computer graphics. I did write Exxon and ask if they would tell me how they came to find out about the error and fix it. I'm haven't heard back from them yet.

Anyhow, that's one less thing in the world that I have to worry about.

Forty Years Ago

The local high school drama class at East Chapel Hill High put on the play, "Once Upon a Mattress" this spring. My daughter and I went to see the show. It brought back memories of when our high school chorus put on the same play my freshman year at Tabor City High School. I was in the chorus and so I had a minor role, standing around in crowds and singing the occasional choral backup. I was also part of the stage crew and recently someone sent me a copy of a picture of the stage crew from the local paper. It was in one of those, "Do you remember and can you name the participants?" features that you often find in local papers. Here it is. Give it a try if you are from those parts in that era.



Oh, I'm the skinny guy on the far right.

The Nature of Spam


I just noticed an interesting phenomena. I'm wondering if one could use this phenomena as a measure of the health of the economy. Here it is:

I use Google's "Gmail" for my email reading. I use it to capture emails from lots of sources. Gmail, of course, grabs my Gmail account, but it also captures the email from my ISP based email as well as my little company's email. So I get all of my email accounts in one place that I can get to anywhere. As you might guess, I also capture a lot of spam. Gmail is very good about recognizing the spam for what it is and putting it in a folder called "Spam", much to Hormel's dismay. I get maybe 100 to 200 spam a day. I usually look in the spam folder once or twice a day and empty out the contents. I've never found anything valuable in there though I've never looked for more than 3 -5 seconds.

So here's what I've noticed. If you looked into my spam folder a year ago, you would have seen lots of ads for male enhancement products, a decent sampling of weight loss schemes, a good dose of porn offerings and, of course, ads for cheap replica watches. There were also a lot of online pharmacies, but they were primarily hawking Viagra, so I'd put them in the male enhancement catagory.

When I looked at the spam this morning, there was almost none of the usual stuff. The spam was almost entirely focused on "How to Make Money, Easy and Quick", or some variant thereof. Out of the first 50, there was only one spam related to something sexual. The rest were all about making or saving money the quick and easy way. I think this is a sign of the times. Here's an example.


I'll continue to monitor this phenomena and try to see if I can ascertain some insight as to when to get back into the stock market. When I do, well, maybe I'll have something to help you learn "How to Make Money, Easy and Quick". Unfortunately, I suspect that all this is a trailing rather than a leading indicator.

If you're bored, try strolling through your spam folder and see if you notice the same thing.

Bye for now.

Triangle Problem - The Solution and More than You Ever Cared to Know

This is for those who worked on the puzzle that I posted two weeks ago.

OK, so you gave it a shot and finally figured it out. Good for you. Let's see, did you do it the same way that I did? When I tried to solve this problem, one thing that I did was draw a lot of lines on this triangle. I drew bisectors and perpendiculars and arcs and lots of other stuff and looked for a thousand relationships that would give me the answer. Finally, for reasons I can't remember, I constructed a equilateral triangle on one of the lines from the corner to the middle. Then I drew a line from the tip of the new equilateral triangle to the tip of the old equilateral triangle and formed some new triangles. It looked like this:



It was then that I noticed that angle α, cut out the same piece of the little equilateral triangle (aaa) as it did the big equilateral triangle (xxx). In both cases, it leaves the angle 60 - α. The magnitude isn't so important as the fact that they are the same. Now we go back to 10th grade geometry and remember that two triangles are congruent (identical) if they have the same side-angle-side (SAS) pattern. So we see that the external triangle (a,60-α,x) is the same as the internal triangle (a,60-α,x). And that means that the last line that I drew in the new construction is going to be the same length as "c". So now we're done. All we have to do now is fill in the math.

When I first did this, I didn't have the internet and I didn't know the "Law of Cosines". But I did know that if you have a triangle and you know all the sides, there must be a way to figure out the angles. By doing a bunch of construction, I spent a day coming up with the law on my own only to find out that any real math nerd knew it already and it was clearly laid out in my own CRC Handbook of Standard Math Tables. Anyhow, if you have a triangle with sides a, b and c, then the angle (γ) opposite c is given by:

So now the internal triangle axc can now be described. The angle opposite x in triangle abx is γ + 60 and by the law of cosines again:

And now we plug in for γ:

OK, the formula for the area of an equilateral triangle is:

And then swapping out the X squared we get finally:


So I haven't even bothered to calculate the answer with a, b and c equal to 200, 300 and 400 ft., respectively. But maybe I will someday.

I will mention that I have always been bothered by that arccos and cos stuff in the answer. You have to have a calculator or some tables to arrive at the answer and I never liked that. Recently, while I was drawing up these pictures, I came across another solution. Of course, it's related to the construction above. It uses Heron's formula. You might have seen it on the wikipedia page on triangles. Heron's formula gives the area of a scalene triangle with sides a, b and c and one form is:


OK, here goes. As you did in the first step, construct two more equilateral triangles using the b line and the c line. What you will end up with looks like this:



The greens are the constructed equilateral triangles and the pink are 3 identical abc triangles. Now you can calculate the total area of this hexagonal blob as being equal to the three different equilateral triangles and three times the area of the abc triangle. Now look at it a different way:



In this view, you see that in the process you have managed to reproduce all the internal triangles on the outside and therefore the area of the triangle xxx is half the area of the hexagonal blob. So the area of triangle xxx, which was the original question, can also be given as:


And that's enough of that. If you're wondering how I made the equations, go to CodeCogs and open up the LaTex Equation Editor

Triangle Problem - A Hint

OK, here's a hint to the triangle problem if you want one.

Triangle Problem

A number of years (about 31) ago, when I used to work at RTI in the Research Triangle Park, there was an organization called the Triangle Universities Computational Center. They used to put out a newsletter and, on the last page, they often had a nerdy little math problem. I'd often work through the problem because, well, I was a nerdy kind of guy.

One problem proved to be particularly difficult and, oddly enough, it was about triangles. Just for kicks, I'll give it to you.

Farmer Jones had a big field that had the shape of an equilateral triangle. When it came time to spread fertilizer, he needed to know how big his field was so that he would know how much to buy. Problem was, he didn't know the dimensions of his field. All he knew was that there was a natural spring inside the field and that it was 200, 300 and 400 ft from the corners of his field. So how big was Farmer Jones' field? Help him out so he won't waste money buying too much fertilizer.

Or, if you like, given an equilateral triangle with sides x, and internal distances a, b and c, what is the area of the triangle in terms of a, b and c?

I figured out the answer pretty quick using an iterative approach, where I assumed a value for x and calculated the internal angles, which have to add up to 360 degrees. You just vary x until the sum is 360. I even wrote a computer program to do the calculations for me. But I wasn't real happy with that. I wanted an analytical solution. It took me about two weeks of intensive work in the evening and on a couple of weekends before I came up with a pretty solution.

I've shown this problem to a lot of people and only one other person has figured it out. Maybe he was the only one to try. He was a guy I worked with who handled shipping and receiving but had formerly worked in surveying. Actually, one other person figured it out using the iterative approach. I told him that it wasn't a very elegant solution. He disagreed.

Anyhow, give it a try and let me know if you find a cool solution. I'll post an answer someday.

Snow

We haven't had much in the way of snow in about nine years. The last big snow was in 2000 and it was a doozy. At about 14 inches, it set an all time record. And we've been in a snow drought ever since. Well, its snowing right now and we've got about an inch and a half. That may be the most we've had since 2000. It's supposed to snow all morning, though it's not coming down real heavy.

I went out to take a walk this morning, but the driveway and roads were a bit slick so I decided against it. But I did move one of our cars down to the bottom of the neighborhood cul-de-sac so we could get out if we needed to. It was a bit of a struggle getting back up the hill.

I think we were all beginning to take this global warming stuff a bit more seriously. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Although global warming might be a problem, I worry a lot more about the nasty political and economic implications of our energy economy. Although no one seems to be mentioning it, I suspect that the freakish rise in gas prices this summer was instrumental in tossing us into this recession. But enough of that.

Here's an early morning picture of our house in the snow.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Greetings to all. Welcome to our genericized Christmas letter. We're hoping the end of 2008 finds you happy and healthy, if not wealthy. So, let's see what's happening in our Family. The real dilemma in this sort of letter is whether to relate the last year's events chronologically or by family member. We'll try a mixture.

Daughter is now a junior in high school. She's taking the standard college prep classes and continues to play the French horn in the school band and the orchestra. She's singing in the school Treble Ensemble and the youth choir at church, and also takes private singing lessons. She traveled to Boston with the Treble Ensemble last spring to do a little singing. We're starting to think about college a little but not too much. Daughter continues to like to draw, has discovered Facebook and is still fighting getting her driver's license. Go figure.

Son is a senior at Earlham College. After three years, he's decided that maybe he doesn't want to be an economist after all and has decided to double major in math and economics. I think he liked math better all along. He was thinking about graduate school but lately, he's been thinking about working for a while first. He continues to sing in the Concert Choir at Earlham. He also traded off his old girlfriend for a new one, so you can cut out the picture in last year's Christmas letter. This past summer, he worked for local property manager and in the process took over his dad's old Volvo S70, which he took back to college.

Wife continues to use the skill set she obtained in graduate school. She started the year sewing costumes for the church's youth choir spring musical. Then she helped do taxes for her sister-in-law's CPA firm. After April 15, it was back to sewing - this time it was costumes for a Professional Salsa Dance Troupe. Besides getting paid, she and hubby were given VIP treatment at the Salsa Dancing Extravaganza in Durham. In the meantime, she's on the PTA Board, has taken up knitting, vacation planning (see below), and is tutoring math to a Burmese high schooler whose family our church helped relocate from a refugee camp. She does all this and also tries to keep her husband in line. No small feat!

Husband is enjoying another bit of time off. In January we learned that there was a good chance that the small biotech (Serenex) where he worked, might be acquired. Sure enough, in April they were acquired by Pfizer. Pfizer took the intellectual property and dismissed the whole lot of them with some nice parting gifts. We used some of the funds to buy a new car to replace the one that Son took. That was a milestone in our lives since, for the first time in many years, our primary family car is not a minivan. Husband helped with the shutdown at Serenex and left work for good in September. He's enjoying the break but needs to go back to work before too long. He has a few nibbles in a pretty bad job market but nothing for sure yet. He continues to enjoy singing in the church choir and will soon finish his term as a church elder.

To celebrate losing his job, the impending recession and 25 years of marital bliss, husband and wife took off to Europe for two weeks. Wife planned the trip which included BudaPest in Hungary, Vienna, Melk, Salzburg and Zel-am-see in Austria and Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany. We had a great time and enjoyed a nice mix of history, art, architecture and nature. We also enjoyed our annual summer and Thanksgiving trips down to Sunset Beach.

Finally, as we close out another year, we thank God for Life, Health and the Joys of friends and family. We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Very Merry New Year.


Husband, Wife, Son and Daughter

Daughter in her Prom Dress


























Sunset at Thanksgiving
















Hiking near Zell Am See with strangers from Isreal



















Our Inn in Garmisch-Partenkirchen

















Some Links:

Ladies in Wife's outfits

Pfizer buys Serenex

Deer Eating Shrubberies

This morning I was upstairs "working" on the computer when I noticed that my coffee cup was empty. So I ran downstairs to the kitchen to get a cup. And what do I see? Four deer directly behind the house, maybe ten feet away, happily munching down on my shrubberies. I ran upstairs and got the camera, took a few pictures, then went outside and shot at them with the BB gun as they were scurrying away. Here's a couple chewing up an azalea. The other two were even closer to the house dining on a camellia.

Something Not Seen in a While

My wife and I jumped in the car today and rode over to visit my sister in Raleigh at her work place. We bought my sister some chocolates in Garmish-Partenkirchen when we were in Europe a few weeks ago as a token of our appreciation for taking care of our daughter for a night while we were gone and it was past time to deliver them. As we left our house, I noticed that the gas was low. My wife said let's wait till Raleigh and see if their gas prices are better than Chapel Hill (ave. 2.0899/gal.). Soon after we got off I-540 and headed into Raleigh on Fall of the Neuse Road, we saw prices a bit lower and then we saw this place with gas for 1.9699/gal. We turned in and I filled up (and took a picture) while my wife went in and bought some chicken salad at Tookies.


After that we went by my sister's place of work and visited for a while. Then we left and went by Costco on the way home. And guess what. Costco had regular for 1.8599/gal. Crap!

Mormon Coke

A few weeks ago a case of cokes in the can showed up in the kitchen on the floor over in a corner. It just sat there. I looked at it and maybe noticed that it had a different color than normal cokes, but I mostly just ignored it. I guess I figured that my wife bought them for some school or church function.

After a number of weeks, the case was still there so I asked my wife where they were going. "Oh, I bought the wrong thing. I guess it's been too long to take it back," she said. So it looks like the case of cokes is ours. It was then that I actually looked at the case. They were regular cokes without the caffeine. "What's the point?" I wondered. Then it hit me. They're cokes for Mormons. So I call it "Mormon Coke." Given that they contain sugar and not an artificial sweetener means that I have to drink them and not my wife. I've been working on them slowly for a couple of weeks and they're about gone. They're not bad, about the same as regular, or should I say, Classic coke.


I wonder if the Mormons are aware of these things.

ps As it turns out, the Mormon view on coffee is not universally held to be about caffeine. Type "Mormon Coke" into Google and have a read (or just hit the link).

Uber Fans

My church is located in downtown Chapel Hill, right across from campus. The pitiful amount of parking that we have, is very valuable. This is especially true on UNC Football Game Days. Being prudent Presbyterians, we sell parking spaces to those out-of-towners who come to the game. The proceeds go to the youth program for various activities. Parents and youth are asked to volunteer to manage the parking and collect money on game days.

I signed up to do the game last Saturday. We were playing Virginia Tech. The youth leader told me that people start showing up as early as 8:30, even for a 3:30 game. Early Saturday morning, I spared my daughter and left her sleeping and headed off for the church. I got there about 8:15. When I arrived, I noticed four cars already in the parking lot. I went into the church and got the signs, which say there is parking at the church and that it's for the youth program and that it cost $15. The $15 dollar part is clearly a sheet of paper with $15 on it taped over the old $10. I also picked up the money bag with change and found some sheets of paper and a marker. I wrote "Tow This Car" in big letters on the sheets of paper and placed one on each of the cars in the parking lot. Then I set up the signs, and sat down and went to work.

Around 8:45, the first customer showed up. A big black Ford Expedition drove up with a bit of Hokie paraphernalia (flags, decals, etc.) attached to the outside and a man and his wife hopped out followed by their daughter. They were dressed in the required glaring burgundy and orange clothing required of Virginia Tech fans. I took their money and sent them off to Franklin street in search of breakfast and shopping.

Next came the first of a regular crowd of Carolina fans. They've been driving from the mountains and setting up shop in the church parking lot for many years. The first ones there buy one parking space and put out chairs to reserve a bunch of spaces for their friends coming later.

Then, as I was going to check on the signs which kept blowing over in the wind, the Uber fans showed up. I think it was a big black GMC Yukon Denali. And it was pulling a big trailer that can only be called a party machine, a big folded up Sports Bar. Before they park, a guy hops out of the SUV and says he needs four spots. He gives me $20 each. "Keep the change, give it to the Church," he says. So they pull in and a bunch of people (six men and four women) hop out and start setting up. Some may have been in another car.

First, they open it up and reveal two large LCD screens, one on either side. Then out come the speakers and associated sound equipment. A long coffin sized stainless steel grill slides out from the middle of the trailer and is wheeled over and set up on one side. Two small LCD screens are bolted from the ceiling on the back above the bright orange bar that folds out from the inside. This is followed by an assortment of flags, tables, chairs, awnings and cabanas, all in that dark burgundy or bright orange color. In the meantime, one guy, who I think is the owner comes over and buys two more parking slots, again for $20 each. Finally, they set up the satellite dish and we're watching ESPN on all four LCD screens.

I walk over to the Carolina crowd, who used to think they had an impressive setup, and tell them they need to up their game. They have a pretty nice functional setup including a little motorized scooter but, well, just look for yourself.



And they do. A lot of Carolina Blue roams over to the Virginia Tech party machine/sports bar. They ask a lot of questions, take a few pictures, and shoot the breeze.


By around 12:30, all the spots are sold out and there's a pretty serious party going on in the church parking lot. The Carolina fans and the Virginia Tech fans are blasting music at each other. One young lady has turned ESPN off one of the LCD's and is playing a game of Wii bowling. It's a pretty festive atmosphere. A lot of people are enjoying a beer and watching the NC State - ECU game on one of the LCDs.



The first family to arrive came back from shopping and set up their station. They said that they met Alexander Julian in his store. They offer me a beer. Since I'm done with parking, I say sure and they give me a beer in burgandy beer jacket with orange dots and fuzzy orange stuff around the bottom. I enjoy the beer, shoot the breeze for a while, watch the State-ECU game and relax for a bit. After a while, I decide it's time to head home. I tell everyone it's last call on the church bathrooms, pick up the signs and the traffic cones, hide the money in the church, then lock up the church and head out. Not a bad job for a Saturday morning.

Lemonade for Obama

Today, I took my daughter to a little party on campus. On the way home, I noticed a group of people gathered at a corner near our house. I thought it was a bunch of kids selling lemonade to make a buck for who knows what. Then I saw the sign:

Lemonade
for
Obama

I drove on home but an hour later, on the way back to pick up my daughter, I stopped. There were a number of mothers and kids. They had run out of lemonade but a new batch arrived just after I did. I asked a few of the kids involved if I could take a picture and they quickly posed for me. I also bought a cup of lemonade and a brownie. I gave them $5 for the cause.


I hope similar things are happening in your neighborhood.

Slow Drying Out

Well it's been about a month since we made the solid balls of g00. As I said, it may take a while for all the acetone to dry out. I began to wonder just how long it would take, so I took a hacksaw and went at the big ball. I cut out a little wedge to get a little cross section of the drying process. As you can see in the picture, the big blob has dried out about 3/8 of an inch from the surface.



Considering that the rate of evaporation will probably slow down, I estimate that it will take about 7o years for this process to finish. That's a real seat-of-the-pants estimate. After that, I took the hacksaw to one of the smaller blobs. I sawed that sucker in half. It's interesting cutting this stuff. When you're cutting through the hard stuff, it cuts well. As you get into the center, it's more like cutting through a squid. It's arduous. Anyhow, just like the big blob, the smaller blob was still pretty acetone rich in the center. In other words, it still reeked of acetone.



So this got me to thinking about mailing off the plastic challa bread to it's maker. I hope the trace of leaking acetone fumes won't set off some alarms and send the Homeland Security guys down on my ass.

By the way, that white bucket with the red lid in the first picture has a fresh batch of melted polystyrene foam for my entertainment.

Bye for now.

Making Blobs

One of the things you do when you lose your job but you haven't quite lost it yet is try to find things to fill your time. You're getting paid but after a while you get tired of sitting on your butt, surfing the web.

One of the neatest things one can do, which fills time and has little or no value, is melt styrofoam with acetone. Actually, it isn't really styrofoam but is instead "expanded polystyrene foam", which everyone who doesn't respect Dow Chemical's trademark, calls styrofoam anyhow. You know it as that white stuff used in coolers and packing material and coffee cups. What it is, is a little polystyrene and a lot of air. By adding acetone, you start to partially dissolve the polystyrene and release a lot of air. It's not really dissolution so much as solvation. No chemisty takes place in the process.

I guess one could argue that melting it makes the "expanded polystyrene foam" take up less space in the landfills and it does that remarkably well. But the real reason to do this is to have fun.

So I decided to do a little. First I enlisted the help of my humble but able assistant. She's always up for something a little off the wall. We started collecting a lot of the stuff. There was the stuff in the solvent boxes, which cushions the glass bottles during shipment. There were lots of coolers from the bio guys and gals. There was a variety of packaging for syringes and tubes and who know what else. Let's just say there's no shortage of "expanded polystyrene foam" to be found in a lab environment.

We gathered up a lot of this white stuff. Then, to get a nice visual effect, we eviscerated a number of Sharpie pens of different colors and dropped the inky insides of each into acetone squirt bottles. This gave us a variety of colored acetone solutions to shoot at the various "expanded polystyrene foam" products. When acetone hits the "expanded polystyrene foam", it melts to a goo, much like the faces in "Raider of the Lost Ark", when they opened up the Ark. If you use colored acetone, you get colored goo. Cool!!

We got a big plastic (polypropylene) tub and poured in a bit of acetone. We then started stuffing the white stuff into the acetone and watched it disappear into goo. After a while we had a good base and the melting slowed up a bit, so we started spraying down the pieces with the squirt bottles of colored acetone. This elicited squeals of glee from some in attendance. Then we squirted designs in the coolers and as they melted, we stuck pieces together to make a variety of creations. If something didn't look quite right, we shoved it into the acetone vat and reduced it to goo.

This process went on for a few weeks. If you got bored, you went down to the lab and melted more "expanded polystyrene foam" into a growing ball of goo. Eventually, this got to be boring, so we stopped and let a lot of the acetone evaporate while my assistant took a few days off. When she returned we had a nice workable blob. All the colors combined gave a dark green hue to the acetone wet goo.

When I say workable, it's important to remember that you're dealing with a ball of goo that resembles taffy but reeks of acetone. So it's important to wear good solvent resistant gloves and work in a hood. After a while, I decided to try something different. I poured off any excess acetone and added a lot of water. This dramatically lowered the acetone fumes and seemed to semi-seal up the surface so the vapors went down a bit and the surface turned into a greyish green. If you squeezed a bit on the goo, you could expose fresh dark green acetone soaked surface. So we pinched off a few bits of the big goo ball to play with. My assistant took one small blob and fashioned a piece of challah bread. I took a couple of small pieces and mushed them around. Right before I went on vacation (see below), I dropped the two smaller blobs into water and filled the vat with the rest of the big blob with water and left them for ten days. I left the challah bread out on the hood surface. When I came back, the two small pieces that I was playing with had hardened and the smell of acetone was essentially gone. The big blob still reeked of acetone. Here's how they looked (click on the pictures for higher resolution):


Although these things look kinda mushy, they're really quite hard at this stage. And here's a closeup on the big blob:


And here's the challah bread:


The challah bread was interesting because it was sitting on the bench instead of in water. Over the week I was at the beach the top got hard but the acetone couldn't escape from the bottom and so it stayed soft and supple. Here's a picture of the bottom:


It almost looks like one of those geode things. When it dries out, I'm going to send it off to it's maker.

And that's all I have to say for now about melting "expanded polystyrene foam". Maybe one day I'll calculate the volume of material that actually went into the big ball but I'll have to wait for all the acetone to escape. That could take a while.

Beach Pictures

We recently went to Sunset Beach for a week. We took some pictures. Here they are:

Beach August 2008

A New Career

Earlier this year, back in February or March, our church's youth group put on a play called the Cotton Patch Gospel. It's a musical that retells the story of Jesus as if in modern day, rural Georgia. In one scene, Jesus is telling a modern version of the Good Samaritan story. One of the groups that comes upon the man recently beat up by robbers and left on the side of the road is a hot gospel singing group, called the Quintessentials. That's because there's five of em. Anyhow, they drafted 5 of us older gentlemen to play the part. This is what it looked like.



It's not hard to tell which of this group is more comfortable performing.