Dating a Chemist

Keywords that link to my blog:

The list of stats blogger coughs up changes over time. The one thing that seems to be constant is a stream of people coming for advice on dating a chemist.

Which, I find odd, since I have not written much of substance about dating or relationships here. Check my old blog for that.

Or, this post.

Dating a Chemist

If you are going to date a chemist, I first recommend consulting the chemists personal affects. Many chemists carry some from of identification that they use when they are in bars to obtain the large amounts of ethanol laced beverages they are known to consume. Baring that, it is possible to use carbon dating to certain the age of a chemist. Great caution should be used when attempting to take core samples, however, as chemists are notoriously picky about having large holes introduced into their mortal vessel. Their are rumors of alchemical procedures and magic circles that may also be used to date a chemist. In particular, circles inscribed with a modern language or a direct precursor (say, Shakespearean english) would denote a relatively young chemist, while a circle in an ancient tongue corresponds to an older specimen.

More Black and White Experiments

Luray Caverns

Caves are so much easier to get around in when someone has installed stairs, paved walkways, handrails, and already carefully lit everything to aide in photography. Teenaged tour guides in polo shirts to point out interesting formations were an added bonus. I learned several interesting things. Chief among them, the light in luray caverns is so bright that moss is growing on many of the formations. It looks extremely unattractive and is very hard to remove.

I wonder if they used germicidal UV lamps if the moss would die back. If they employed fans and unshielded lamps, the ozone from the lamps would likely make it to places where the light wouldn't reach. If the lamps were on a timer, the could turn off a few hours before the caverns opened, allowing the ozone to either react away or be blown out. Does ozone bleach limestone?

For those of a technical bent, I note that I would not have been able to so easily take these pictures with my old  Sony DSC-P73, a camera that I lugged through many caves over the years. I kept it in a pelican case, and used it's 30 second exposure setting, a manual flash, and Packrats collection of extremely bright lamps to illuminate. Out of 20 or 30 photos, one or two would come out. It was tough, but what I had. Even in well lit rooms (lots of lanterns and lights), the low ISO and small aperture ensured blurry photos. It was just how I had to do things.

So I was quite surprised when these came out so well. Large sensors, high ISO, image stabilization, and f/2 can really work in your favor. The battery died about half way through the tour. A good things, in retrospect. Otherwise, I'd have too many techinically fine cave photos to sort. I'm pretty sure the s90/s95 are the least obtrusive pocket camera in existence. If the image looks bad, it's genuinely the photographers fault.

Black and White Experiments

The forests in Virginia are boring and brown in the winter, but they have a lot of texture. This is manifest in dry leaves, exposed bark and branches, rocks, dry grasses, and the cracks in the sky made by the forest canopy. I've been trying to find the beauty in this. Or, I was when I took the pictures in February.

Ways to Torture Your Dog

Dogs are relatively color blind, and therefore don't know why tie-dye is cool.

Dogs can't read, so you can put a kick me sign anywhere and they still don't get it.

Nice Badges

When I first saw this, I though it was a sticker or a magnet. My old dorm fridge was decorated by bullet hole magnets. A tribute to my roots, you might say.

But then, I looked a little closer. It was a busy parking lot. Maybe I was missing something?

Yes.

That is not a sticker.

The Pain

This is what I have to deal with on a daily basis.

The Royal Screw

I found that the Swedish Bricks tire was loosing air to the tune of 10 PSI per week. Fast enough that I threw the tire pump in the back of the car, though not fast enough to cause a panic trip to the auto shop.

I finally got around to inflating the donut and pulling the tire. A process that is somewhat laborious as my floor jack lives in the basement, and hauling 60 lbs of iron up the stairs is miserable and dangerous, and but otherwise quick, now that I can attach sockets to the cordless drill to spin off loose nuts.

Inspection of the tire yielded some camber wear, but an otherwise very new looking tire.

Then, I found this.

An Ice Pick and a Hammer, Please.

Massive mystery headache attacks man's head at a frequency of approximately 0.02 hertz.

Somehow, he survives.

Lame Burnout

The NAS is on the fritz again.

Could it be the ATA controller is gone?

Maybe the end of the road for this box.

Unexpected

I didn't expect the debt deal to go well. It really couldn't have had a positive outcome, the more I think about it.

I have been expecting the stock market to correct from some time.

I am expecting that government works are about to face an ocean of pink slips.

I am expecting the house market to continue to crumble.

I am expecting an ongoing troubles with national debt in many nations.

I was totally not expecting NASA to find photographic evidence suggesting the possibility of liquid water on Mars. That's totally amazing and unexpected. While I think this bears further study before calling it water for sure, it's an extremely interesting and exciting find. Suddenly, I find my feelings about human spaceflight have shifted a bit into a more permissive mode.

Totally fascinating.

Internal Combustion

Or, the death of a Seagate Momentus ST94011A from a combination of old age and heat death.

Given that the NAS was not really a critical system, I've had all kinds of time to attempt to figure out what is going on.

Using mprime to attempt to overheat the laptop (while booted from a xubuntu livecd) proved that the motherboard itself was fine. Factoring primes for days simply showed that the system could, when pressed, drive up the electric bill and heat the room even further that the 100°C heat days were.

Examining the SMART logs from FreeNAS, the boot drive has far exceeded it's spinup/spindown count. Something I feared would happen since the NAS tended to wake the drive up frequently to write log data to it. However, it still seemed to boot and read/write data well enough. Just now and then, it would kernel panic, crash, and reboot.

Returning to linux, I've been fiddling with badblocks as a tool to test the drive. Curiously, badblocks would write to the entire disk, but then crash when verifying with a cryptic "%killed" message.

Very odd. I can find little information on what a badblocks crash actually means: the program provides very little in debugging information. Some experimenting has revealed that badblocks can be made to crash by testing too many blocks simultaneously (%badblocks -b 4096 -c 999999999999999), causing it to exhaust available system memory. My original tests used 256 megs of ram with the -c flag. When I scaled down to ~32 megs, the crashing stopped. Possibly the available memory of a virtual memory free livecd boot was the culprit.

Running successive passes did turn up failures after a few hours
(% badblocks -b 4096 -c 32000 -w -v -p 10 /dev/sda )
leaving interesting messages in /var/kern.log and barfing a exhaustive list of bad sectors. I interpret this to mean the controller on the disk is fried.

I picked up another old PATA drive out of the pile and assembled it into the machine. Another day of stress testing, then we should be back in business.

Let the Yeast do the Work -Breve

Look really close:

Do you see it?

We made beer.

Real beer.

And it came out great on our first try.

Freaking amazing.