Are we still here?

The end of the Mayan calendar, and we're still here. The end was supposed to be December 21, 2012... or December 23, 2012... some scholarly debate was held on that one. But we continue.

It's not so much a matter of apocalypse or not, but the sheer silly English wording that gets me.

I've always found the question "Are we here?" to be a stunningly silly one. If you can ask the question, you still exist, and you are undoubtably somewhere, in English it's known quite simply as "here". So of course, you are "here".

I may watch too much science fiction movies and shows. That is where someone always says "Are we here?" That's how you know it's a good time to give up on the less interesting ones and stop the program, so "No, you're not here because you were too dull to continue with."

Netflix has made giving up on shows simple and cost-free when they fail to entertain... it's lovely to be able to end the program at "Are we here?". Click. No you're not.

Can we deflect an asteroid with junk mail?

A very creative MIT grad student has won an award in the Move An Asteroid 2012 Competition with his proposal to hit the asteroid with paintballs. 

At first, this sounded like a report from a pseudo-scientific humorous newspaper, but it's a real competition and the plan is stunningly sensible. The idea is to paint the asteroid white, changing how the rays from the sun affect it - changing it's trajectory - so it doesn't hit us. (Yes, they are doing this for a reason - there is an asteroid headed our way, it will be close to Earth in 2029 and again in 2036.)

I've just been battling piles of paper. There is always more paper. More junk mail. More things you printed in error, and have to shred. More requests from charities, so you have to shred the mail because it has your address on it. More junk mail. And every once in a while a very important piece of paper. 

It's that one very important piece of paper that is the main problem. You can't just get rid of all of the mail at quick swoop. You have to see if that important piece is inside the mountain of junk.

It's quite demoralizing, because you know you've lost at least one important piece of mail in the past and you don't want to do it again. So you pile the paper up to do something with it later. And then you start another pile because the first one is in danger of toppling. 

But this goes on for way too long. 

Finally, you have to spend a day covered in paper, sorting it, and searching for that all important piece.

So why can't we hit the asteroid with paper? Send it mountains of mail. It's mostly white, so that could deflect the sun like the paintball plan, and it's bloody depressing to boot. It should be depressing enough to be a cosmic downer. We can demoralize the asteroid into stopping and giving up by covering it with paper.

I think it's a good plan.

Why is danger so pretty?

Mount Vesuvius in Italy is a volcano that blew it's top in 79 AD, burying Pompei and Herculaeum, and has erupted many times since then. But people still live at it's base, and apparently, from what I've seen on TV Specials online, more people are moving there all the time. Why? Because it is a fabulously beautiful place to live.

I live in Vancouver, BC. It's in the Ring of Fire which surrounds the Pacific Ocean and is known for earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. And yes, we know, we're due for a big earthquake. So why do we live here? Because it is a fabulously beautiful place to live.

So what about the more physically "stable" areas in Canada? Well, there was an earthquake near Montreal yesterday - a place not in the Ring of Fire. And yes, you guessed it, it's a beautiful place as well!

The sun had a hiccup last weekend sending a coronal mass ejection (CME) our way. This image from NASA of what it looked like when it hit the earth in eastern Canada and the US is also stunningly beautiful! Sure, GPS tools everywhere had a hard time giving accurate distances for the past few days, leading to some dangerous situations, but people who see the Northern Lights far further south than usual still went "ooh, aah".

So why is danger so pretty?

Maybe it's a coping mechanism of evolution. We are attracted to dangerous places because the whole planet is a dangerous place to live, and if we didn't enjoy the scenery... we'd be a depressed bunch of monkeys on the verge of extinction. Not that we aren't in danger of extinction... but we can at least enjoy it. Because it looks so pretty.

How about Sasquatch hunting as a retirement project?

I've just read about a man in his 70s who has a PhD in wildlife biology, and is searching for Sasquatch evidence.

What a wonderful project for retirement... and he has the credentials to be taken seriously if he finds more evidence. Unfortunately, as the article says, no one believes in the evidence that has been gathered so far. Actual DNA evidence is what scientists are looking for before they believe the Sasquatch is real.

Of course, in August 2012, scientists announced evidence for the discovery of 2 new pre-human species so it's not a matter of "we've found all there is to find" in terms of us monkeys who walk upright. There were many species that led up to us, maybe even more than we know about now.

In September 2012, scientists announced a new monkey species had been found living in the Congo. So there are new living monkey species to be found, even now.

I think it may be possible that there is another species of us monkeys that lives in the forests of B.C. They're just not sociable enough to want to make contact with us. Can't blame them really, we're apparently a lot shorter than them, and we likely smell funny to them - apparently they smell funny to us, so the same is probably true on their side. And they may "whoop" to each other to communicate, but some of us babble incessantly, talking to each other without ever "communicating" anything. So much noise, so little communication. So I'm not surprised they haven't popped round for tea. But maybe this retired PhD can find them! He's probably pretty good at that whole "communication" thing.

Is it "woman of a certain age" time already?

My spouse and I went to see Jerry Seinfeld doing stand-up comedy at the Orpheum Theatre last night. He was great to see again. At the end he took questions from the audience - one question was "Are you going to do another TV show?" his answer was "No. I'm old. I'm rich. And I'm tired!" Fair enough. It was fun to see him on stage.

Before the show started, and again at the end they had Frank Sinatra recordings playing.

I knew most of the Frank Sinatra songs. I have most of the Frank Sinatra songs. Oh dear, this may mean I'm now a "woman of a certain age". The rather obtuse way of saying "she's an old broad" or "middle aged" or "past it"... overall, not very complimentary.

But as Jerry's warm up act says "you're getting older - live with it" (the warm up guy, whose name I cannot find online - annoying - was good...) (even though I did find an interesting link to Jerry's new web project Comedians Getting Coffee. Go see - it's fun.)

As we were waiting for the show to start we realized that my spouse's mother was the age I am now when my spouse and I got married. OK, "woman of a certain age" sinks in as the appropriate moniker now. She liked Frank Sinatra too.

And once again I have to ask "I'm middle aged? When did that happen?" It just creeps up on you. Time is sneaky.

Who's eating the locals?

The local farmers' market is a wonderful thing to go to on a sunny Saturday morning. Most everyone brings their own bags. Many of the bags have advertising - usually for local organic or natural foods places.

This morning I saw a bag I haven't seen before it said: Eat Locals

I'm thinking the Vancouver Zombie Walk is over now... I got some interesting photos like this one from it, but eating the locals just seems downright unsociable.

Oh, the tyranny of the misplaced s.

But is he parking cars?

Archeologist think they've found where Richard III, King of England until he died in 1485, is buried. They think his body is Leicester, near a social services building, in the car park.

So my head has been ringing with the obvious question from a Douglas Adams devotee... has he been parking cars?

In the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Marvin is discovered in the car park of the restaurant after eons have passed since he saw the other characters in the novel.

After Marvin washes his head at Zaphod over the phone, Zaphod asks him: "Will you please tell us where you are!" Marvin's response: "I’m in the car park." Zaphod: "In the car park!? What are you doing there?" Marvin: "Parking cars what else do you do in the car park?"

Richard has been in the car park for only hundreds of years, not eons like Marvin... but what else would he do in the car park?

And why did I find a website with the full script so easily by googling "parking cars what else do you do in the car park?" I read this book years, if not decades, ago, but I still remember the words. They seem to be imbedded in my brain.

I think I'll go and stick my head in a bucket of water.

What took UFO spotters so long?

Oh goody! UFOs spotted on Mars!

So what took them so long? I expect UFO followers to scour any photos published by government agencies as soon as they come out. Curiosity landed on Mars on August 6, and has been sending photos back to earth from even before it landed, and no one saw any UFOs until now?

Of course, UFO means unidentified flying object. I'm sure even a speck of dust flying around Mars is unidentified. Isn't that why the rover is on Mars, to find unidentified things and examine them?

So what is Mars dust made from... does the planet have dust bunnies? There doesn't seem to be any furniture from the photos I've seen, so they wouldn't be hiding in the usual spots you find them on this planet. And wouldn't there still be dust flying around after the Curiosity landing? It didn't exactly land like a feather drifting down to the planet, it hit rather hard.

But calling the UFOs dust takes all the fun out of it. Many people think humans never went back to the moon because they didn't find any aliens to talk to on the moon. Maybe the chance of aliens on Mars will spur on more missions! That's the fun of it.

See this news article for more on the UFOs.

But what colour should it be?

In the world of Douglas Adams' writing, people on the planet Earth are actually descendants from the "B Ark"... phone sanitizers, hair dressers, marketing boffins, etc. from another planet that got rid of it's "B" team of people. In one scene, Arthur Dent is trying to convince this "B" group to use fire, it being our logical first step as a species out of the caves, but the problem is the marketing boffins don't know what colour it should be... and do people want it fitted nasally?...

The remarkable achievements at CERN announced today - yes, they found the Higgs boson molecule! - have reportedly been undercut by some boffins who object to the font used in the announcement.

They used "Comic sans" as their font.

Some people love the "Comic sans" font. Some people hate the "Comic sans" font. Others never even notice font, as long as they can read what is written. Some people don't know what the term "font" means, and likely wouldn't care if they did.

But some boffins are criticizing this remarkable achievement because of the font used to officially announce it with. This is why Douglas Adams' writing is still so relevant to life as we know it. We have our own "B" team on this planet, and some of us think an Ark would be a reasonable idea........

(See this news article... the article is not complaining about the font, just pointing out the absurdity of the complaint.)

Do we have to worry about Ninja Asteroids now?

That was a close one! Well, not really.

On June 10, 2012 people at an observatory found a new asteroid. According to some news alarmists, it came very close to Earth. Well, according to scientists, not too close. And since then it's been calculated to not get close enough for harm Earth for at least 750 years.

But the fun thing is, according to the observatory that saw it and did the calculations, it only reflects 2 to 4% of the light that hits it.

Stealthy.

So it's a ninja asteroid. Covered in black. You won't see it unless you have some pretty powerful equipment.

So are there more of these out there? I think it's safe to say no one knows for sure... but if there's one, why wouldn't there be more?

So do we need to worry about Ninja Asteroids? I think there may be more pressing dangers to the planet, but it may be a fun distraction hitting a science fiction movie coming to a theatre near you soon! And it's a whole new toy for the news alarmists. Who said there was nothing new in the heavens and earth?

What's after zettabyte?

Cisco is predicting that global net traffic will be over 1 zettabyte in 2016 according  to this PCWorld article. That's a new word for me, that's the first time I've seen the word zettabyte. From a quick search in Wikipedia, zettabyte is a 1 with 21 zeros after it...

So getting your head around that is a pretty daunting task, and the news article makes many comparisons to help the reader cope.

But what is next? Is there a number after that? Have enough people gotten their minds around that number to think of the next one? The whole beginning a word with a "z" in the English alphabet does suggest it's the last of its kind.

The result from searching in Wikipedia is yes, there is one more: yottabyte a 1 with 24 zeros after it. But that's the end of the list... for now.

Of course, that's a word beginning with "y" coming after a word beginning with "z", so are we going backwards now? Will there be that many more really big numbers coming? The news article does go to some great lengths trying to help the reader get their head around the number zettabyte, I'm sure when we get to yottabyte there will be more efforts made to understand the enormity being described... but is the thought of going backwards for 26 letters of the alphabet just too much? Is this just a bit too stressful?

Well, relax, the list of numbers is not in alphabetical order. There is no pressure to go to the next letter up. The order of the one list does not dictate the order of the other list. Whew. So you can relax and just work on getting your head around a 1 with 21 zeros after it... does that make it easier?

And what else can you do with handcuffs?

I reported a while back that I saw an interesting use for handcuffs... motorcycle police use them to handcuff their helmets to their motorcycles when they go on walkabout.

One of the people who was organizing the running clinics that my spouse was leading earlier this year is a bicycle cop... so I had to ask... and yes! they also have an inventive use for handcuffs... they use them to lock up their bikes when they go on walkabout!

So if you see a bicycle that seems to be nicked, under arrest, handcuffed so it doesn't flee... it is probably the bike of a bicycle cop!

Now, we also have police on horses around here - they patrol the paths inside Stanley Park... what do They do with the handcuffs? Hmmm?

Do you have your towel?

Really a question for yesterday, it was Towel Day - May 25, a day to celebrate the life of Douglas Adams. There were events all over the world - see the Towel Day organization website for a list of what was happening where (the one in Greece with home made Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters sounded like fun).

So did I make a special effort to bring a towel with me? No. Actually I didn't have to... I always carry around a towel... and I didn't realize I was doing it until I thought about it yesterday!

I use a power wheelchair to get around outside, and I have a backpack that always hangs on it. So I always have a coffee mug (yes, I live in Vancouver), a dog-mit to clean my wheels before I go inside (yes, it is fun to see people's reactions when I get Out of the chair to clean my wheels... I can still walk a little, and I don't like the dirt inside my home!), and... a towel. Using a public washroom with air dryers for the hands is a bit annoying when I have to get the chair wet to get it over to the air dryers on the walls to dry my hands... so I always have my wonderful towel.


I would never want to go anywhere without my wonderful towel... these words of wisdom are as true for me as they were for Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent. It's awesome when life imitates art.

Do paper cuts swarm?

It's the one that cuts deep and bleeds that hurts enough for you to notice it... but have you ever noticed that when you look at the one paper cut that hurts, you will always find more paper cuts? And then those paper cuts hurt too!

It's like I've put my hand in a mouth with sharp bits of paper for teeth.

I don't remember getting the ones that didn't hurt enough to notice... but there are many of them.

I don't often get paper cuts... but when I do there are many of them.

So, do paper cuts swarm? Are they a force of nature like a swam of locusts? Not seen too much, but huge when they do happen.

It's not the middle of the winter, when skin is dry and needs a lot of moisturizer to stay comfortable, so it's not just dry skin.

It's probably not from aliens... I do remember how the one that hurt happened: magazine, not aliens.

Maybe it was a swirly, windy, tiny storm of paper dust that swarmed over my hand and then disappeared. I think that must have been it. Just like the little swirly, windy storms that leave crop circles.

... Or maybe it was aliens.

Can I use this eagle as a sundial?

Spent a day scanning stuff in for a friend to put on his website. It was a repetitive, slow, dull day.

But I had my distraction. I was listening to, and occasionally watching a webcam on an Eagle's nest.

The eagle was having a long dull day too. She occasionally got up and turned a bit, and then sat back down on the eggs. She occasionally called out - I thought she was asking for a break from her mate, so I watched when she was calling out, but no other eagle ever came.

So I noticed that the eagle had a favourite sitting position, and I wondered if it was possible to use the eagle as a sundial, so I took screen shots at noon, 3pm, and 5pm. And her shadow did move in quite the time keeping manner! Not that accurate... but probably about as good as a sundial wristwatch with a compass to align it properly.

So who won the dull day contest - her or me?

Do you smell something?

I've managed to avoid it since 2009, but now I had to do it. My spouse and I had to go to a... shopping mall on the weekend.

We are replacing the doors on our laundry cupboard with curtains because it was difficult for me and my walker to get around the wooden doors while doing laundry. So we needed fabric and something to hang it on. We managed to avoid the inevitable trip to the mall for a few months... but the prominent place of the laundry machines in the hallway in the middle of our condo was getting too unsightly. So we ventured out...

We buy most stuff online. Recently we got a whole pile of turtlenecks and t-shirts from an end of season sale. While I was unpacking them I read the country of origin on all the packages: Jordan, China, Indonesia, and one other more exotic country. The unsettling part about it was that all of the clothes smelt the same.

Different areas of the planet. Same scent.

I washed all of the clothes before we wore any of them. I don't know what was on all of them to make them smell the same... but, yeesh.

When we were in the shopping mall on the weekend... there was no scent there either. The fabric store is next to the food court. There was no scent there.

The stale air being forced around everyone in the shopping mall had no scent.

The noise that makes your shoulders tense was there. The bad lighting that makes it painful when you walk outside into the sunlight afterwards was there. The surfaces that look like you could wash them with a fire hose without damaging them, even though they don't look like they've ever been washed, were there.

But there was nothing to smell. All those people, all that "food", and no scent. This is artificial, it has to be. And really, really creepy.

Humans are predators. We are the apex predators on the planet, nothing can live if we want to kill it. A very important sense for predators is smell. It subconsciously helps us move around in our world when we can use all of our senses. Deadening our ability to smell our environment is just creepy.

We spent a couple of hours in Stanley Park after our trip into the creepy shopping mall. We had some coffee. We reunited with our sense of smell.

So now we are recovered from our journey to the shopping mall... maybe we can wait 5 years before the next visit. We hope.

Why am I flinching?

I do love a good webcam. Some of my favourites are:
Eagle nests from around southern BC
Bruichladdich scotch distiller in Scotland
Tofino webcam from a wonderful resort on Vancouver Island

It's nice to see people making great scotch - some of my favourite scotch is made at Bruichladdich. And it's great to watch eagles in their nests feeding baby eagles... although it can get nerve racking at the end of the season when you just want that last young bird to leave the nest and fly already!

My most frequent view is the Tofino webcam - a fabulous beach in the most relaxed place in Canada. But yesterday I was alarmed by what I saw. It was black and covered the picture... was it apocalypse? was the camera in jeopardy? No, it was a bird. A bird tail actually. A big black bird tail that looked frightening on my computer screen! It may have been from a crow, or a raven (known as the trickster bird so a likely candidate) but I think it was a bit small for an eagle (I've been close to one in flight by the water's edge - they are bigger than me).

I can giggle at it now... but it made me flinch when I first saw it. A link to an outside reality that felt a bit too close to home for a second!

I may need to get out more.

Where was this screw supposed to be?

Why is it that every time you take something apart, and then put it back together again, there is always an extra piece?

Frequently a washer, often a screw, sometimes a piece of metal or plastic that honestly doesn't look like it was part of the thing you just took apart. There is always something left over.

But the most confusing thing is that the item that was was taken apart, and then put back together, works again. So did it really need the left over bit? Was that left over part really necessary? Did it really come from the item in the first place?

If there are parallel dimensions, is there one where something is lost every time an item is taken apart and then put back together? Is this left over screw from that dimension?

Is this the key to traveling to another dimension? Become an integral part of a mechanism, wait for it to break down, and then escape to a new world when someone takes it apart to fix it? Actually, no, that would only be from the other dimension to ours. It's our dimension where the extra pieces appear. So is this where aliens come from? Did someone in a parallel dimension already have this idea, and they managed to jump to ours using this scheme?

Is this an alien screw from another dimension?

Do mattresses have a herding instinct?

You aren't supposed to do it. It's littering. It's illegal. But most people don't know how to get rid of old mattresses, so they go out in the middle of the night, find an alley, and dump them.

But that's not the end of it. When you have one mattress... there will be more very soon.

The empty lot beside our home now has 3 mattresses dumped in it.

We saw the same thing happen in the alley behind our old appartment building.

The empty lot beside our home contained dilapidated old buildings for about a year until we made enough noise to have the city force the owner to tear the buildings down. The chances of the owner of the empty lot doing anything about the mattresses are slim to none.

So now we have a look each morning to see if there are more mattresses. It's like they have a herding instinct. Stray mattresses will find each other.

Update March 15: How much do soaking wet mattresses weigh?

They are gone! Hooray! There was a very loud truck outside yesterday. It was out there for quite a while making quite the noise. When it was gone.... so were the mattresses!

It's been raining here for... um... months. Yep, not exaggerating... too much. So the mattresses that were sitting outside for days had to have been soaking wet. That would be heavy. No wonder the truck was making so much noise.

So the rubble from the dilapidated buildings has been removed, the herd of mattresses has left the watering hole and moved on to greener pastures... if an archaeologist dug up the site in a hundred years, would they find the remains of bed bugs and deduce that the shops were actually a human dwelling?

This vacant lot is getting interesting. I wonder what's going to be out there next.

Will your reputation follow you for 100 years?

It's the 100th anniversary of the Piltdown Man. The British hoax that claimed a pre-modern human skull and jawbone were 1,000,000 years old, but were later found to be much more recent - and actually a combination of human skull and orangutang jaw.

There is an interesting news article about it here because people are bringing the evidence back out of storage for some more analysis.

Now that's a terrible way to celebrate an anniversary. Dig out the evidence of a fraud you believed in for 50 years, do more analysis to see how it was done, and publicize it again. I guess it's a British thing.

If you read the news article closely, it goes into some very interesting details about the character of many of the men involved in the scam. One of them was described as: "palaeontologist and alleged practical joker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin".

Just how many practical jokes did this man pull in is lifetime to get this reputation? How is it that many years after his death, he is still known as a "practical joker"? What do you have to do, and in what public domain do you have to do it in, to have a reputation that stretches so many years after your death?

It's not a reputation given to all the men involved in the Piltdown Man hoax, so it's not just the one infamous "practical joke" that stuck to his reputation.

"Your reputation precedes you" is often a very great compliment. Is "your reputation has followed you for a century" a compliment? I think it must be. For most people birth and death dates are what's on the gravestone, and how they are remembered 100 years later. Some people do actions which are recorded in history books, they are remembered as long as the history is read. Whether good or bad, if memory of what your personality included survives you for so many years after your death, you made quite the impact. I think it's an extraordinary statement if your personality survived the ravages of time.

So how long will your reputation follow you?

Is this a new Swiss Army Knife tool?

The big space tidy-up has finally begun! The Swiss have put a cleaning tool into orbit to grab old non-functional satellites and push them into orbit to burn up. Watch this video for details.

So how do we get them to make more of these?

Everyone who puts stuff up into orbit should have one. It should be one of the essential Swiss Army Knife tools that space focussed countries should have. It would go really well with the cork-screw and scissors. Something you won't miss until you really miss it, so you should have one with you at all times.

Did the Soviet rocket hit some space debris?

Another one is coming down!

The Soviets launched a space ship meant to go to a Mars moon, gather some dirt, and send it back to Earth.

It never left orbit. Our orbit. The one around the planet we know as Earth.

As a matter of fact, it will actually be leaving orbit sometime in the next 3 days. It will be crashing back down onto the planet Earth. So once again we go on the "where will it hit?" guessing game. Some reports guess the Atlantic Ocean, others are betting on the Indian Ocean. That sounds familiar. It's good we have so much water here... but the oceans are going to get as polluted with space junk as the space above our heads soon.

So what caused the failure? No one is really sure. Could it be that some of the space junk flying around in orbit hit it? Do people planning to launch space ships have to develop a cushion mechanism for their rockets to get them through the space junk field now? Have we fenced ourselves in?

Update: It hit in the Pacific Ocean, to the west of Chile.

Anyone for a round of catch the elevator?

Typically, when you catch the elevator, it's to get in it and have it take you to another floor.

We have a new game in my condominium apartment building. We catch the elevator and lock it off, so it won't go anywhere.

This is due to the recent fire in our elevator room. See my blog entry on that!

We now have one of two elevators kinda working. It takes pressing many buttons, seemingly almost at random, to summon the elevator, and then there may be floor numbers lit up at random inside the elevator... but it will (likely) get you to the floor you want. And we only have a temporary license to operate it, so we are working on replacing the controls as soon as we can. But it beats using the stairs.

One of the functions of an elevator is to return to the ground floor, open the doors and turn itself off whenever the fire alarm goes off. Our elevator will not do this anymore. The fire department is not happy, but the temporary license lets us still use the elevator, and we have a couple of dozen warning signs telling people not to use the elevator if the alarm sounds.

But we're not relying on people to read signs if the alarm sounds, that's where the "catch the elevator" game starts. Each member of the Strata Council has a key that can be used to turn the elevator off if the alarm sounds. We're all on different floors.

So if the alarm goes off, we all try to summon the elevator to catch it and lock it off!

And then we run downstairs, and the one who caught it gets bragging rights.

Actually, the one who caught it then has to tell everyone, including the arriving firemen, where the elevator is.

It sounds like it could be a fun game, but we all still hope we don't have to play it!