Make Sure You Are Absolutely Positronium

Let me come out and admit that one of my passions is comic books. I have run the emotional gambit on this subject for years, from early teen ecstasy at the multicolorworlds unfolding, to mid-teen speculator greed where I grasped for every first crappy issue I could seal into a bag, to late teen shame and complete avoidance, to college year snobbery where I recognized the format but rejected most of the mainstream riff-raff, to finally full circle acceptance of the inherent geekiness of both the medium and myself. Over the years the one comic that I have collected through thick and thin was the Incredible Hulk. I think I identify with the nerdy Bruce Banner and experience some sort of masculine catharsis with each transformation into the raw Id that is the Jade Goliath: power incarnate and unshackled by any of the rules of society. Not even the laws of physics.

As a quick primer to the comic book impaired (i.e., those of you with lives), Bruce Banner was transformed into the Incredible Hulk when he was caught in the blast wave of a gamma-ray bomb explosion. These gamma rays are what make him green as well as all of his various gamma-ray powered rivals, like The Abomination or The Leader. Great and good, except it doesn't take much physics to know that gamma radiation is merely the highest energy type of light, not some exotic ray or particle. Any atomic bomb produces gamma radiation and as the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki know, you do not get super powers from gamma-rays. You get sick and dead. Still, even if we grant that in the comic book world radiation will give you super powers a good 50% of the time, what exactly is a Gamma Bomb?

By the time the first Gamma Bomb had gone off (May 1962), the H-bomb had already been in existence vaporizing South Pacific islands for a decade, and as far as I know, those are about the most gamma-ray intensive sources ever created. Was Dr. Banner working on some sort of low-heat explosion, i.e. a bomb that would put out almost all of its energy in the form of gamma-rays? Such a bomb would be similar in concept to a Neutron Bomb, which sacrifices total energy yield to put out a higher dose of initial radiation (in the form of neutrons). This sort of weapon will cause less infrastructure destruction, but be more deadly to things vulnerable to radiation. Like people. Oh, Bruce... the pursuit of science does not mean leave your soul at the door.

What brought all this to mind was a recent scientific discovery that might be used to one day make gamma-ray lasers (also known as Grasers or to the Dr. Evils of the world, Gamma Ray Annihilation Lasers). Laser is actually an acronym meaning Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. The key to that is the "Stimulated Emission" which means that when light of the right wavelength hits the inner parts of the laser it stimulates the production of more light of the same wavelength, which then moves "coherently", i.e. all the light waves move together, not interfering with each other. Your basic laser works by "pumping" up a medium (a ruby in the very first laser) to an excited state. Once in the excited state every photon of light it emits makes more photons which all run together, bouncing around the medium until you get a cascade of light that comes out in the laser beam, across the theatre, and onto Kevin Bacon's chin. Would you cut that out, I am trying to watch a movie here!

Gamma-ray lasers would in principle work the same way, only the energy of a gamma ray is roughly 5000 times greater than your typical optical light. This kind of energy requires quite a special excited medium, which up until now has eluded physicists. Your typical atom can't give you much more than ultraviolet light energy, as any more energy just blows electrons off atoms -- not so great for making a laser.



The hot discovery this week is the creation of di-positronium. Positronium (without the "di") has been around for a long time. Well the typical piece of positronium only lasts a picosecond, but the ability to make them has been around a long time. A positron is the anti-matter, mirror-world version of an electron. Every piece of matter has an anti-matter opposite. If you combine a positron and an electron, they generally annihilate each other, producing a lot of energy. However, sometimes they combine for a short while in a weird element known as positronium. It is just like Hydrogen, an electron orbiting a single positive bit, except it is much less heavy and about to explode. Since at best positronium only exists for a microsecond it has been tricky to make any molecules out of it, but researchers in Riverside, CA managed to get two to stick together into di-positronium (using this pictured apparatus), the bizarro world version of common Hydrogen gas. Apparently it is this stuff that scientists think could potentially be used as the medium for a gamma-ray laser.

"The difference in the power available from a gamma-ray laser compared to a normal laser is the same as the difference between a nuclear explosion and a chemical explosion." - Dr. David Cassidy^

Yikes. Still, one needs to be careful making such strong claims. If things don't work out you might end up looking like a bit of an ass:

Once we get out of the '80s, the '90s are going to make the '60s look like the '50s!" - Dennis Hopper, Flashback (1990)

Yeahhhh... Not so much.



One thing I know for sure, with the Hulk around drywallers must have been in constant demand. Hulk smash puny wall! Now gaping hole makes hulk laugh. Hmmm, Hulk feels chill breeze and no longer have place to hang Hulk pictures. Plus aesthetically displeasing. Hulk angry again! Must call contractor to fix wall! Smash! Two walls need fixing?! How hulk gonna pay for all this? Smash...

And so on.



Barring the unexpected appearance of the Hulk, or maybe just an angry teen or two, our walls should be in good shape, with drywall now up everywhere. Again, I am a bit behind in my house remodel updates, so these walls went up three weeks or so ago. These are the first, raw photos before the taping and plastering. Drywall is on the list of things that require inspections from the city, I guess so walls and ceilings won't collapse on you in your sleep. The city requires a nail every so many inches or the drywall does not pass inspection. Only after this inspection do you tape up all the gaps/cracks and start slapping plaster on to produce one smooth surface (see next week's blog entry).



Anywhere you might expect water could leak or drip or spray, we have put in green board drywall, a Hulk favorite. In theory this drywall is more resistant to water damage, as it covers the gypsum drywall base with a tasty wax coating, as opposed to just paper. In practice it is not supposed to do much that 2 or 3 coats of paint won't do for you, but builders use it to play it safe. If a leak rotted out a wall behind a sink and it was not green board there would be hell to pay. You can see the green board in the bathroom and in the next frame in our kitchen.

For the curious: you do not want to use green board in showers or behind bathtub tile, i.e. places that seriously get wet. You use a water proof cement board, which will not crumble into dust if it gets wet. I may or may not show photos of cement board in a later tile installation entry. Probably not, as it looks a lot like a cement board. Let your imagination frolic, if it will.



Still, getting the drywall up was one of the big "Oh Wow" moments in the house remodel. Where before there were frames, after there were walls again. It is like the difference between a skeleton and a person with skin. Except putting the skin on and off is decidedly less unpleasant. I mean, I assume. Our serial killer readership can chime in with their own opinions.

It looks like we can't have it both ways. I am only one man with only so much time available for procrastination. If I work to get more remodel stuff in the blog, there is just no room for babies. I can't please everyone and it is tearing me apart!

Actually, I just ran out of photos on my laptop, both house remodel and babies. Too lazy to get the more recent ones Candice has taken, I leave you with the last picture I have from our San Diego vacation. I call it "Get a Haircut!" or alternatively, "Maybe a Little More Exercise Is in Order, Mmmm?" Nope, no one likes pictures of themselves. Well, maybe Brad Pitt does. Damn you Angelina, why can't you share him with the world?



^PS - When exactly did David Cassidy get so involved with high energy physics? I mean we are talking about the man who sang The Puppy Song, for goodness sakes.

If only I could have a puppy
I'd call myself so very lucky
Just to have some company
To share a cup of tea with me
I'd take my puppy everywhere
La la la la I wouldn't care

Everlasting Flight

Of all the hard lessons one learns along the highways and byways of life, one is essential and unavoidable: Gravity Always Wins. Also known more colloquially as the "What Goes Up, Must Come Down" rule. Whether it be a baseball, a bullet, or a baby, if it heads upwards you know eventually it will return to the ground, often with a resounding thump. A thump which will sound particularly loud if what fell happens to be your very own noggin. That's right, every time you fall down it is just another example of a force acting on you proportional to the square of the distance to the center of mass we like to call Earth. You can climb a tree or a mountain, hop in a hot air balloon or helicopter, or board the back of the mighty, if mythological, Roc, and it will all end up the same: In the end gravity will claim its own. No exceptions.

Mankind, however, has never been big on absolute and uncompromising restrictions. No one can circumnavigate the globe? Magellan's crew had other ideas (but not poor Ferdinand, of course). You can't split the atom? Tell that to the Eniwotak atoll. Only universities and major research laboratories will ever be able contain the giant, room-sized computers of the future? I think Steve Jobs' bank account might indicate otherwise. In a similar vein, teams of engineers are working toward Everlasting Flight. That's right. You put the plane "Up" and it does not, in fact, "Come Down."

The idea is to build a plane that not only powers itself using energy from the sun, but which can store enough energy to make it through the night as well. Send these planes up to 60,000 feet, well above any weather, and they can circle forever, or at least until their batteries give out from the constant charge/discharge cycle. So the laws of physics will eventually have the last laugh, but a gravitational stay of execution that could conceivably last years is nothing to sneeze at. And while sending planes up that will be able to fly beyond one's own brief lifetime would be a reward in itself, there are significant financial reasons for getting these Forever Planes working. They could serve the same function as a communications satellite for a fraction of the cost, particularly if you are only interested in a single large market, like New York or Los Angeles. Plus, string a few of them across the country or across the ocean and you can make satellite-style calls without the delay induced by having to bounce a signal all the way up to geosynchronous orbit (120 million feet is a bit more than 60,000). Imagine CNN interviews where people don't start to answer questions, then stop when they hear the interviewer tell them to start, then starting again, only to stop again when the interviewer tells them to continue.

Everlasting flight is not true perpetual motion, as it requires the constant input of energy from the sun. Even if the batteries lasted forever, the sun will give out in five or so billion years. Stupid fusion.



No, the only perpetual motion machine is that of remodeling one's home, which truly never ends. I have fallen way behind in my remodel updates, with the earliest photos in today's blog taken nearly a month ago. I will do my best to pick up the pace, but it still may take a few blog entries to get us fully back up to speed. See what happens when you go to the zoo?



When last we left our home-remodeling heroes they were just about to get an entirely new Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning system (HVAC). Silver snakes of insulated ducting were everywhere, threatening the townspeople of fair Homeownersville. Only through the valiant efforts of good men like Pedro^ here were we able to get the crafty ducts stuffed back into the roof. This little bit of roof was actually created so that the ducts could go from the old house (below Pedro) to the new house (where the camera is located). The next picture shows the ductwork coming into the loft space. The central vent is the return vent, which may actually end up raised up to the ceiling in the final configuration for efficiency, as hot air has been known to rise.

This is our new behemoth air conditioner, sitting proudly on its new rooftop dais. I actually find it rather pretty, a sort of avant garde industrial cube. Your art appreciation mileage may vary. The more astute reader may also notice the roof has been tarpapered since we last saw it. This actually makes our home relatively water resistant. Not water-proof, mind you, just resistant. As much as SoCal needs a great anti-drought deluge, I would appreciate if the monsoons held off for another month.

This shot comes from back inside the house. You will see more of those slippery, silver ducting snakes running across the rafters. You may also notice a giant metal monstrosity (I already used behemoth. Please send in your own suggestions for words that mean "big monster" to I Need More Monster Metaphors, PO Box 1313, Mockingbird, IL, Esq.) to the left of the chimney. That is my new furnace and air blower which has been located up in the attic. While making it more difficult to kick if it gets out of line, it frees up an entire closet worth of space down in the living quarters.

Changing gears, here are some shots of my new trellis which comes off of the new addition and wraps around a sprawling redwood tree. You can just see my beautiful new AC unit from this angle, although from most viewpoints it will be hidden. The trellis was actually the center of a small point of controversy. The wood for the trellis arrived in late June and sat by the side of the house, doing little but slowly sweating out the last of any excess glue or sap it might have.

I had taken all painting away from my contractor, because he wanted a gianormous amount of money to do it and even back then I knew we needed to find things I could do to save money. To punish me for taking out a nice profit-heavy part of the project, I was told that sanding and staining the trellis would be something I was in charge of. Fair enough. This would be best accomplished while the wood was still sitting on the ground, especially the sanding. I was told the trellis would be going up in September.

I made plans to come and sand all day on the third week of August. Seriously, I had planned on this date for weeks. I told my contractor more than a week in advance I was going to do it that weekend. Guess when he put up the trellis?

That's right. The Friday before I was going to sand all the pieces, our contractor decided they had to go up. Now he had his reasons. Order of operations, making sure his guys had work, etc. All I know is that instead of sanding something on the ground, I would now be doing it 10 feet in the air.



I now know that it takes 3 times longer to sand things while balancing on a ladder. I have so far dedicated two mornings to sanding the damn thing and gotten about 2/3 of it done, so one more morning ought to do it. On the great list of screw-ups it still ranks fairly low, however. And I got to purchase a new vibrational sander, which does in fact seem to be superior to the rotational sander I already have, although a side-by-side comparison has yet to be undertaken. Also, the trellis does look damn funky cool...





You know who else looks funky cool? My lady and her babies. These photos were taken at the Ellen Scripps Browning Park in La Jolla, California, the day after our trip to the San Diego Zoo (see Diatribe comma Panda). This beautiful spot overlooking the ocean is just north of the Children's Pool, which is deceptively named, as it is actually completely overrun by Harbor seals and it is the last place you would send a child, unless of course you wanted said child to be mauled by blubbery sea mammals. Anyway, there are no seals or other hostile sea life up in the park, unless you want to include the occasional garbage picking sea hobo.

One reason we went to the beach was to meet up with my buddy from college Joe Bray, formerly known as "Crazy" Joe Bray. He is no longer called that because he expressed a strong desire to not be addressed as such. He is still crazy. There are no photos of him, mostly because it was so sunny that my camera melted into a puddle in my pocket.

Kayla is in blue while Rylie is wearing white and pink. You can also tell Rylie because she is the one grinning like a crazy baby while her mother hides her face in shame. After the first picture I think Kayla rolled her eyes in exasperation and then crawled off to catch a cab. Good thing that kind sea hobo brought her back to us unharmed.

I like this last photo. I think both these girls are pretty. No getting jealous, Kayla. There is a price for running off with strange beach people: You miss out on excellent photo opportunities.



^ Sadly I have to admit I don't really remember the name of this good fellow, who basically acts as an assistant/everyman for our contractor. If something needs getting done, like packing fiberglass insulation into a hole in the roof, he is the man. His name might be Pedro. I'd swear it was something like Pedro.

Dammit, I am the man.

Tricera Topsi Sleeps With the Fishes

As a working astronomer, the two things I get asked about most are whether I believe in extraterrestrial life and whether I think an asteroid is going to hit the Earth any time soon. My field of expertise is galaxy formation, which mostly happened billions of year before the Earth was even formed and studies objects so large that our entire solar system would be a mere drop of water in the sea of trillions of other drops that the typical galaxy holds. I have no formal biology training above high school and the study of the solar system is almost a different branch of science altogether, more often thrown in with the "Planetary Sciences" rather than traditional astronomers. Still, apparently I am the the man to ask these Earth shattering (literally) questions, because if the government was hiding something I clearly have to be on the inside track, because, well, I regularly use telescopes. Or maybe because I get NASA money? It is not like my funding comes with a conspiracy mailing list or anything...

For future reference, my stock answers are:
A) No one has any idea whether there is any other intelligent life out there. You can't make an extrapolation from a single data point, by which I mean us. If smart aliens were so rare as to be only created once per galaxy... then that would have to be us, wouldn't it? Aesthetically I find the notion of us being the only ones displeasing, but I have no scientific reason to say otherwise. I do not buy into the notion that if they existed they would have visited us by now (I do not believe they have. The bright light you saw was probably just Venus). The galaxy is a big place and making any assumptions about a lifeform which might not even breath the same air we do seems a bit audacious.

B) Killer asteroids do hit the Earth. However, these dinosaur-killers only come once ever 50-100 million years or so. I would not put it at the top of my list of things to worry about, but I would spend a modest amount of time and money tracking asteroids. Whatever particular asteroid that you recently heard about striking the Earth is almost certainly NOT going to strike the Earth. Measuring the orbits of tiny celestial bodies is exceedingly difficult. Virtually every "this asteroid will hit the Earth in 2163" story you have ever read was based on the initial measurement of its future path. This measurement has a gigantic error associated with it. If the Earth fits inside the error, that is usually good enough for a press release and associated hoopla. Later measurements shrink the error bars. Odds are strongly in favor of the Earth falling outside those recalculated error bars.

Still, scientists love fame and media attention as much as the next guy, so I would not expect an end to these stories about Earth killing asteroids. Apparently a lot of them can be blamed on a single asteroid-asteroid collision 160 million years ago, possibly even the asteroid that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. This mega-crackup out in the asteroid belt created a whole mess of giant asteroids, now referred to as the Baptistina family, making the killing of the dinosaurs the most spectacular mob hit of all time.

The astute among you might note that the creation of the 120 mile diameter Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan that is now closely associated with what Tyrannosaurs of the time thought of as a "real bummer of a day", was created 65 million years ago, not the 160 million BC date that the Baptistina rock crash occurred. The overachievers among you would go on to point out that 160 million years is actually the middle of the Jurassic period, while the K-T boundry isn't until the end of Cretacious, which means we are talking Allosaurs not T-rex!

Yeah, well you poindexters can spend an extra hour in study hall pushing your glasses back on your noses and snorting milk out your nose....



Whoah, where did that come from? I must have some repressed rage against paleontologists. Or maybe it was just those those lame Jurassic Park movies. Anyway, the point was there was a doubling in the number of rogue asteroids (which is determined from cratering rates) in the time period of 50-150 million years ago, which the authors of the study trace to this Baptistina incident. So if half of all Earth-crossing asteroids at the time of dinosaurs still came from this ugly little asteroid billiards break, that would make a 50% chance it was one of them that did in the dinosaurs. Looking at the type of asteroid that made the Chicxulub crater the authors determined that it matched the Baptistina family (Dammit Louie, you got to make sure you whipe your gun before dropping it!), making the odds more like 90%. For good measure the authors throw in the Tycho Crater on the moon, which was also formed around the same time. I need only point out that this is also the location of the Monolith discovered in 2001: A Space Oddysey to bring this whole intro full circle.



No house updates this entry. House remodels are exhausting and I just want to have some fun and go to the zoo. The San Diego Zoo to be precise. Here we are on a sunny August day at the zoo's entrance, where I believe I have just had my hat impaled by a topiary elephant. A young hooligan asked me for change, so I grabbed him and would have given him a proper thrashing if his parents hadn't been the ones taking this photo.

OK, in actuality the boy is Ian, the son of our friends Kris and Jenny whom we stayed with in San Diego. Other clear fallacies: there are no hooligans in San Diego and the boy asked not for a bit of change, but for my entire wallet. The only thrashing received was me from the damn topiary, which refused to move out of my way no matter how much I beat at it and screamed "Move Bush!" at the top of my lungs. Did I mention it was hot? That I suffered from some mild heat-related hallucinations? That the topiary elephant later apologized and joined me in the gazebo for a crumpet and a spot of tea?

Smashing.



This slightly dark and blurry photo was taken from the security camera in the reptile house, where this miscreant was discovered try to feed a baby to a giant Monitor lizard. Fortunately I caught him in the act and kept the poor child from being lizard chow.

The reptile house was our first stop on the zoo tour, at the insistence of young Ian. Kayla was deep asleep at the time, so Rylie got the Daddy shoulder tour. Unfortunately most reptiles are not big movers, so even impressive monsters like this monitor lizard did not get a lot of interest from the baby. One exception was a giant 20+ foot python, who came up and licked the glass right next to Rylie's head. The two of them just sort of stared at each other. I am proud to say that it was the python that eventually gave way. Beware staring into the eyes of a baby. They can mesmerize you.



By the end of the day it was Rylie who was konked out in the stroller and Kayla who got the front row seat. Her absolute favorite were the elephants. The San Diego Zoo has three, two African and one Indian. I assume there is a joke there, but I am sure it is in bad taste. Here is one of the African elephants giving himself a shower with its trunk.



This is Kayla going nuts at the sight of the elephant. You can't quite see her eyes, but I think her mouth expresses it all. I can only imagine she was thinking that she had never seen such a big dog before. The elephant then picked up a magic feather and flew away by flapping its giant ears. Crows could be heard laughing and soon after we saw a peanut stand, a rubber band, and a needle that winked its eye.



The San Diego Zoo is famous for its Panda denizens and they had in fact recently given birth to another tiny, rat-looking baby, so the exhibit was packed. Pandas seem to me to be the clearest evidence of God, as no way could any creature have evolved into such a precarious state. For starters, Pandas eat nothing but a certain type of bamboo. However, the digestive tract of the Panda is not well designed to actually absorb nutrients from bamboo, requiring the Panda to spend every waking moment eating so that it might glean just enough calories to stay alive.



Pandas also are not big fans of mating, even in the wild. Panda bears are generally solitary creatures, who mark out gigantic bamboo forest territories for themselves, which they have to do, if you recall, because of the insane amounts of bamboo they must eat just to survive. This makes male/female encounters rare in the first place. If they do find each other, it is very common that the female spurns the male's advances. Fine and good -- who wants three hundred pounds of horny bear on top of them -- but the species is dying out for crissakes. The females are not being picky, they are comitting species suicide. Finally, if a female does get pregnant, the baby it gives birth is so ridiculously small and helpless that the mother will occasionally just roll on top of it by accident, crushing it to death.

Seriously, should such a maladapted creature really continue to live? I guess they do fill that valuable cuddly/cute niche. Where people are concerned, that is definitely a survival trait.



Finally, here are a couple of meerkats. One is an actual African meerkat, famous for their Manors and close friendships with warthogs. The other is a spokesmeerkat for the park and should in no way be associated with or be compared to the Disney character Timon for the Lion King. Totally different and non-litigatable. I will leave it to you to tell which is which, but I will drop you the hint that real meerkats are not big on tickling babies.

Or polyester blends that smell suspicously of stale sweat.

Mudville

Some of you might recall that I blew out my knee playing softball, back in late June. Well, it turned out to have been merely sprained and after a 6 week hiatus I was back in business. I never quite regained my sweet swing from the beginning of the year (I went 3 for 4 with a home run), but hit some nice line drives and by the final game was starting to feel comfortable in the field again. Our team, Ether Binge^, had made the playoffs, although that is less impressive when you know the top four teams make the playoffs and there were only four teams total. I am standing far right, holding a mitt that was holding a hidden can of Tecate beer. Worry not, it was a post-game beverage. I play clean.

Still, we were two games away from a championship and playing the dreaded Steamers, the very team I had injured my leg against two months earlier. It was a great game, back and forth each inning. We must have exchanged leads several times before finally getting into the final set of at bats, down 2 runs. We strike quickly and score a run and have men at 1st and 2nd, but then we make two outs. Our manager, batting right in front of me, takes a walk, loading the bases. So there I am, season on the line, bases juiced, any decent hit probably wins the game.

I take a ball. Then I take a strike. Then I make the second-worst swing of my shortened season, fouling the ball roughly three feet. I swing the bat once, trying to get a feel for it. There is some good-natured taunting as I am wearing a Superman logo shirt. I am warned not to break the windows in the buildings over 1000 feet away. I bear down. Another pitch, another ball, but only barely. It is now a 2-2 count. One long exhalation of breath. Then a pitch that looks hittable.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land
the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere,
and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing,
and little children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville--
Great Casey has struck out.

Alas, this was the worst swing of my season. I fouled the ball maybe 1 foot. I actually threw the bat down in front of the ball to knock it back fair. Not because I had any expectation that it would work, but because there was nothing else I could do. In slow pitch softball, you can foul out. I could make an excuse that I had picked up a heavier and unfamiliar bat, but the truth is I choked under the additional pressure and did not make good swings. And like mighty Casey, I will have to move on and hope for revenge some other day...

Now, in proper DaColbert Code style: Revenge is a dish best served cold. Cold hands mean a warm heart. Hart-to-Hart starred the incomparable Robert Wagner. Wagner co-starred in the made for television fiasco, "There Must Be a Pony" with Elizabeth Taylor. Of the two, Taylor's career has clearly plunged farther from the heights of such classics as "National Velvet" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." A tin roof is cheaper than a shake roof, but both are better than no roof, which is what my house presently has!



Eerie, no? Yes, after much hand-wringing, fretting, and general groaning we finally pulled the trigger and ripped the old shake roof off of the house. This was not the original plan. Our architect loved the old roof and wanted to keep it. I felt it had become a bit of an eyesore, that it just looked dilapidated and unsound (You can decide for yourself, although it should be noted this picture was taken after they tore up the roof to attach the new addition). Still, we were already so far in over our heads on this project that we were willing to listen to the honeyed words of our advisors and were going to live with the old roof a while longer.

Well, you know what they say about "The best-laid plans of mice and men". They go awry. Let me let you in on the big secret about home renovation. Every part of your house is in some way connected to every other part of your house. Pipes, ducts, and wires go everywhere. Walls touch ceilings, rafters meet walls. The most well intentioned contractor will run into obstacle after obstacle where the old house intrudes on the new. Not to mention the city, which continually terrorizes from a distance through its permitting and inspection process, doesn't like old houses much and loves to take every opportunity to dissolve them bit by bit. So time and time again compromises have to be made to move the project forward. Take out that plaster, remove that insulation, replace that wiring, shore up that wall, tear out that duct. This is the reason all remodel budgets balloon.


Or half of it anyway. The other half is that you never want to half-ass something at this stage. You could replace only the effected areas, but it seems absurd to spend 1/2 the money it would to replace everything to replace only 1/3 the stuff. I mean, if the walls are already ripped open and we got to replace some insulation anyway, why not do it all? A thousand here, a thousand there... pretty soon we are talking real money.

What was I talking about? Oh yes, my roof. As we were installing entirely new plumbing (original plan) and an entirely new HVAC system (one of our first "savings"), we were riddling the roof with new holes. To make the shake roof water tight again was just out of the question. Getting to the roof boards was like digging through crumbling foam-board. It wasn't going to go back like we had it and so much of it had to come up we had to replace it. Now we had the option of just replacing the back roof (no new holes in the front), but that just seemed silly. Why not just do it all? You see? That's how they get ya.



So here are pictures of the first two phases of my re-roofing. Phase one is the tearing off of my roof, right down to the frame. From a distance you can almost imagine there is nothing wrong, but the closer up shot from above makes it clear that my home's weather proofing is sadly lacking. My favorite is the shot from inside the house, looking up into the pale, blue sky. You can see my chimney there on the right, both inside and outside my roof.

Next comes the plywood roof. Still not exactly water-tight, at least it keeps out bird droppings and the morning dew. You can see my contractor up there talking with the roofer about exactly where they are going to dislodge money from me next. The close-up shows us the platform the new AC unit will be resting on. You can also see the makings of a little rooflet that they refer to as a "cricket". It serves the very important purpose of allowing water to run off your roof to either side instead of piling up against the new addition (where I took the photo from). It also served an additional valuable purpose as a place the HVAC guy could run air ducts to the new part of the house. Previously we had been talking about dropping down ceilings to accommodate those pesky pipes.

Speaking of pesky pipes... Those two girls of mine can really wail. Why just this morning Kayla had some unexplained discomfort (I am going with tummy-ache) and her screaming would have put a banshee to shame. Fortunately most days things are bit more mellow, with a much higher giggle-to-scream ratio.

Here are a couple of really nice shots that I have yet to squeeze into the blog. The quality is high, so you know I didn't take them. The lovely bride has not only a superior camera (a Canon D10), but a superior photographic eye. Unfortunately it is not always convenient to haul around a single-lens reflex camera and all its accompanying attachments and lenses. Nor is it always convenient to carry around my wife either... although she is as light as a feather. (Phew! Good save.) Still, when you can get both, I recommend it.



The first photo is the girls in their full Dodger outfits, probably getting ready to go to a game. Note the adorable baseball on their butts. The recent Dodger unpleasantness started after we last went to a game, so I think there is a clear correlation between our NOT going to games and Dodger losing streaks. Clearly they can not do without my babies for more than a week.

Finally, we have another album cover shot. Some may have seen a similar picture sent out around the 4th of July, but from a different angle. In this one our favorite duo, The 2nd Dimension, are acting like they didn't know we were there.

But they knew.



^I begged off explaining this team name in an earlier post. I am still not sure exactly how it specifically came to be the team name, but the Ether Binge name came from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson: "There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge."

But This One Goes To Eleven...

10 years today.

How about that?

Happy Anniversary to Mrs. C, who has made the years fly by.

I am now putting the vote to the Bundestag...

We have to wait a moment, as there is some concern over language. Something about a celebrity clause and a garbage lifting addendum

It's ok now. They have ironed it all out. Quorum has been reached. Yes! The Ayes have it. We have been renewed for another 10 years. Alert the media.



Also, please check out my new poll on the sidebar. I am trying to get some feedback on what people do or do not like about the blog. This poll should be next to useless for this purpose, but will at least let me test the new blog poll widget.

Let the Sunshine, Let the Sun Shine In, The Sunshine In

The title comes from the 1969 hit single by the Fifth Dimension, often erroneously called the Age of Aquarius. It was actually a medley of two songs from the musical Hair, "Aquarius" and "The Flesh Failures (Let The Sunshine In)". The Age of Aquarius is an astrological concept, referring to the shifting of the stars in the sky as the Earth continues through its 26,000 year precession, i.e the slow turning of where in the stars the north pole of the Earth points. Once every 3000 years this slow precession shifts which zodiacal signs are associated with which months by one. These are called Ages. Before 500 BC was the Age of Aries, The Age of War and Fire, which was followed by the Age of Pisces, an era dominated by Monotheism and Spirituality (whether that was that predicted or post-dicted, I think you can guess). The Age of Aquarius should start in roughly 2654, and should supposedly be a time of Freedom and Peace. While it is nice that Astrologers noted the precession, it doesn't seem to bother them that it means that the sun is not actually in the sign it was 2000 or so years ago, when much of Astrology was codified. A Taurus does not have the sun in Taurus at their birth. It is actually in Aries. Still, if I decide to freeze myself I think I will set the alarm to defrost me in 2654 when universal harmony will abound and all haircuts will be banned.

When planning to freeze oneself for centuries, you might want to keep track of how much Solar Irradiance is striking your potential cryogenic site, perhaps using a handy map like the one above. To put it another way, this map shows the average amount of solar energy -- sunshine -- that strikes each region of the Earth, including nights and periods of cloudy weather. This is also the sort of map you would want to consult when trying to decide on the best places to build Solar Energy collectors. The entire Earth is being constantly bombarded by roughly 150 PetaWatts (150 billion MegaWatts) which can be compared to the entire energy use of the human race, around 15 TeraWatts (15 million MegaWatts), roughly a factor of 10,000. The little black circles on the map show how much area one would need to cover with photovoltaic cells if they operate at 8% efficiency (light to electricity): roughly 910,000 square km. If that area were collapsed into one circle, it would be roughly 600 miles in diameter.



While not outside the realm of possibility -- the human race has already built structures and paved over even greater areas -- it is still a bit daunting. What would really help is if we could up that light-to-energy efficiency. Say, to at least
42.8% efficiency? This new solar cell record is not only impressive because it beat the old one by over 2% in a field where 0.1-0.2% has been the norm, but because they did it using a relatively simple system that should be much more easily placed in something thin, portable, and easily manufactured. Now don't get me wrong, cells of this efficiency are still clearly at the prototype stage, but a path to a mass-produced, reasonably priced 50% efficiency photovoltaic cell suddenly seem a bit closer today than yesterday. See how happy it made these scientists? Oddly enough, one of the team members appears to be a 14-year old girl... or a scientist that continually gets crap about her youthful appearance, anyway.

And what would a 50% efficiency do for us? Well, for starters that 600-mile diameter collecting area now only needs to be 250 miles across to power the whole Earth. For the United States (which uses roughly 1/5 of the world's energy) that circle only needs to be over a hundred miles across, or about 30,000 square kilometers. The U.S. has a lot of empty desert, people. For those panicked about Global Warming, solar energy seems like a fairly workable answer.^

One might rightly say, ok Bigshot, put your money where your mouth is. Put some panels up on your own damn house. Sigh. While that was in our original plans, the cost of everything skyrocketed to a point where we just could not afford it, at least not at this stage. Rest be assured it is in our long term plan to put them on the roof of our addition, once we figure out how to pay for stuff like electrical wiring and plumbing. Plus, I may want to wait for some fancy-dancy, high-efficiency panels that I heard rumors may be just around the corner...



Turns out our contractor was a bit late from returning from his trip. I believe there was a funeral involved, so I can't be too grumpy about it. The upshot of that is that there has not been much done on the Colbert estate this past week. To tide you over here are a series of pictures of the rough plumbing that has been-oft mentioned, but little displayed.

We start with a typical section of plumbing from our bathroom. The big black pipes are waste pipes out, the thin copper pipes the water lines in. You will also notice that the big black pipes go both up and down. Turns out you have to ventilate your waste pipes, otherwise nasty gases can build up. You don't want a methane explosion in your house, do you? I didn't think so.



Here is a close-up of that rough copper plumbing from the home of my future shower stall. The big white doohickey in the center is the main valve that controls all the water flow. It not only mixes the hot and cold water coming up from below, but it has a diverter valve that can send water to either the main shower head or a hand sprayer. The actual shower head, hand sprayer, and knob handle are all what is called "finished plumbing". Rough plumbing is what goes on inside your walls, while finished plumbing is what happens once the walls have been put on. Needless to say, rough is the tough part and where you actually spend most of your money.



Which brings us to our bathtubs. We will have two full bathrooms in the final house. A minimal guest/kids bathroom and our ultra-posh master bathroom. The first photo is the new kids tub, which is a very standard cast iron tub. So standard we literally pulled it off the shelf at Home Depot.




This beauty is our fancy-schmancy jacuzzi tub in the master bath. If you look underneath you can see all the various tubes that will carry air and water to the jacuzzi nozzles inside the tub. The tub is presently covered by several layers of tarp and cardboard to protect the tub interior. Not only is this a good idea generally, but it became essential after the tub was one of the early victims of our vandals (see the Space Toilet entry). Our poor contractor had to spend two hours gently rubbing off spray paint with a damp towel, so there was no way he was going to risk it again.



One of the great things about having twins is that each baby has a built-in playmate. I am sure when they get older they will be able to interact with cildren of all ages, but they are developing so rapidly right now that only a baby very close in age is really going to be on the same wavelength. Growling is fun this week, eating books is fun next week, wrestling in the crib is fun the week after that. These two monsters regularly crack each other up and that is really a hell of a lot of fun.






This series of photos all take place in one of the two cribs. For over three months now the babies have been sleeping in separate cribs as they have just gotten too big and too rambunctious to try and sleep together anymore. On our rare trips out of town they have slept in the same crib and no one got a lot of sleep. Being in separate cribs has hardly impeded their socializing. It is a rare morning when I don't walk into the nursery and find them both standing on the end of their repsective cribs, like two neighborhood ladies chatting over a fence.



Still, getting to be in the same crib for any length of time is a treat. If Rylie and Kayla don't have something more important on their agenda (i.e. food), they love nothing better than to crawl all over the same crib, climbing up the sides, and then falling all over each other in the center of the crib. They can build themselves into such a frenzy that they race each other to get back up onto their feet again so they can fall down and produce one more solid bounce on the firm crib mattress. I must admit I encourage this behavior, which I really shouldn't, as it more often than not ends in tears as one of the girls bumps her noggin or gets pinned to the sheets. But then again, they are usually squealing with delight again moments later, so I can't be too bad of a father.

Finally here are the twins in one of their more serious moments. I think they are posing for an album cover for their group, The Two Dimensions. I hear they are thinking of calling the album The Age of Gemini once they work out a few minor copyright issues.





^Caution: If it seemed like too many numbers or too much solar talk at the top you won't like this end note one bit. The situation is even better than described. First of all, roughly 10% of all the world's energy is already being produced by non-greenhouse producing methods. 3% Hydroelectric, 6% Nuclear, 1% solar + wind. Second, electricity production represents only about a third of that energy usage. While it is true that how the energy is being used does nothing to stop Greenhouse gases, it has a big effect on the practicality of solutions. For all our electricity needs we only require 10,000 square km. A big hunk of that we could generate locally, right on our own roofs, which helps further as 27% of electricity is lost in the transmission from the power plants to people's homes. If solar panels can get cheap and efficient enough we could see individual citizens driving the conversion from the bottom, rather than government struggling to impose it from the top. None of this takes into account increases in energy efficiency, which have been marching along nicely. Unfortunately the population has also been growing... which is another nice thing about the solar roof idea. More people, more roofs, more power. It scales.

Kiss Your Sassafrass

The main barrier to exploration and utilization of space is the cost of escaping the gravity well of the Earth. If it costs you $10,000 dollars per pound to put something into geosynchronous orbit then that is 1-2 million dollars for every person, and that doesn't include anything else that person might like to bring with him, like say air or some sort of barrier between them and the icy cold grip of space. When you total up all the stuff you are going to need, we are talking 20 million dollars a person minimum. Throw in the fact that every trip into space basically involves a controlled explosion and you can see why most of us remain fairly Earth-bound. One approach to this problem is to make rocketry more efficient. Many right-headed people think they may be able to get the costs down as low as $1000 per pound. At 2 million bucks a trip some sort of space tourism might occur, but it still seems likely that Space will be Terra Incognita for most of us.

Isn't there a better way?

In fact, there may be. If one were to suspend a cable from geosynchronous orbit to the ground, about 25,000 miles, you could run cargo up and down it for a fraction of the cost of rocketry. This concept is most often referred to as a Space Elevator, for which I have posted some futuristic concept art.

Why doesn't the cable fall? For the same reason that if you swing a yo-yo around your head the string stays taut, if you swing a space elevator cable around the Earth (and the Earth is doing the swinging just by turning around once every 24 hours) it will also remain taut. As you might guess there is a big problem with making a space elevator as none exist as of yet. As you swing your yo-yo around you have to keep tension on the string, i.e. you are pulling on it. Now imagine making the string longer and longer. You are going to have to swing the yo-yo faster, pulling on the string harder. At some point the yo-yo is going to be going so fast that the tension on it will be stronger than the string which will then break and you lose your yo-yo. The problem with the space elevator is finding a "string" strong enough to resist how fast we are going to have to swing it. And you can't just make a thicker cable. The thicker you make your cable, the heavier the cable will be, requiring even more tension to hold it in place. No presently available cable material (i.e. steel or nylon) has a high enough tensile strength compared to its weight to allow the production of a space elevator. They would all break.

That is, no material except for a substance called carbon nanotubes, which have the potential to put previous materials to shame, achieving factors of 100 times more strength for the same weight. Now all we need to do is manufacture it in quantities great enough to make a 50,000 km cable! Yeah, that is a small problem. Presently there is difficulty manufacturing enough of it to make a millimeter long cable. Still, from a theoretical standpoint there does not seem to be any reason this engineering problem can't be solved. Will it take 5 years or 25, I don't know. Such industrial quantities of nanotube material will have significant technological repercussions far beyond space travel, so believe me a lot of people are working on it.



In the meantime the Space Elevator fanatics are not sitting still. They have put together a yearly Space Elevator contest to help develop ideas and generate interest in the topic. A major secondary hurdle for the Space Elevator is powering the cargo up the 25,000 km to the top. No matter how you cut it, that is a long way to haul 20 tons of cargo. Traditional methods -- internal combustion engine, batteries, rockets -- all require bringing the fuel along for the ride, which is heavy, requiring more fuel, which makes it heavier... you get the idea. The simple solution is not to bring the energy producing stuff with you, but to beam it up to the elevator. No Scottie, not that kind of beam. A laser beam, which can hit a solar-type panel and power an electric motor. Build your giant lasers below your elevator and up it goes. It is true the laser will start to diverge/be absorbed as it goes upwards, but fortunately the higher you go on the cable, the lighter the elevator.



So every year there is a contest to build just such a ground powered space elevator. Well, since it only goes to the top of a 200-foot crane, maybe it should be called a crane elevator. Here are some examples of real life space elevator proto-types from the 2006 event. The first one is MClimber, the University of Michigan entry. You can see where light is being focused on the underside of the solar panels. This next one is the entry from the Kansas City Space Pirates -- surprise, surprise space elevator builders are geeky -- who use that snow shovel looking mirror to focus the light beamed from the ground onto a single solar bar. Finally we have the contest winner, from the University of Saskatchewon Space Design Team (USST) who climbed to the top of that 180 foot (55 m) cable in 57 seconds, just missing the cash prize for a 1 meter per second climber.



So, they have a ways to go. At 1 meter/sec it would take 289 days to reach geosynchronous orbit. The hope is something more like 200 miles/hour (90 m/s), which still takes over 3 days. Bring a book.

Speaking of books it feels like I just wrote one. These little intros are supposed to be teasers, not treatises. I blame slashdot for not having a quirky story this week for me to riff on, forcing me to pull out something requiring a lot of explanation. I promise next week to either have more healing plastic/rubber duck flotilla material or to abandon the "format" that I have presently slipped into altogether.



The house construction moves ever onwards and upwards. The past week has been all electrical all the time. Combined with the rough plumbing, my walls finally have the majority of their "guts". In this human body metaphor the framing is the bones, insulation is the fatty tissue, and the drywall the skin. And the HVAC would be the lungs and the flooring would be... the lymphatic system? Hrm. I really should think these metaphors all the way through before starting them.



Here are a series of photos showing exactly what all this electrical mumbo-jumbo involves. The first photo is a fairly typical example. The little blue boxes are the future homes of sockets connected by yellow wiring that has been strung inside the walls. The next photo shows a major switching station placed on the tiny piece of remaining wall between my den and kitchen. From there I will be able to control a ridiculous number of lights and possibly both the Hollywood sign and LAX airline traffic. You will notice white wiring coming up from the switches. You may also notice a couple of ceiling can lights up and behind.




This photo in the series shows more of these lights which will all be recessed into the future ceiling. This particular set of these lights is up in the loft, which just seems to get cooler as we proceed.



Here is our new electrical panel. I know I will miss the old one which required wedging the door against the water heater to access, but I suppose this one will be fine. Yes, it won't swing shut with a crash or contain an extended black widow spider family (who I think have all moved into my garage... but that is another story), but it will just have to do. No, I will not be able to enjoy running out to flip the breaker every time a vacuum cleaner is used for more than five minutes, but sacrifices will have to be made. Seriously, I will miss that old piece of crap electrical panel.

No, not seriously.



Now before I continue, I must know if you are prepared. Because below is awaiting the cutest damn thing ever.

I know, I know. I have put some fairly cute stuff on this blog before. The recent Potter stuff was nice. Babies at the beach is a classic. And then there was our valiant fight against Cranial Panis Mica (please give). And who could forget That's Show Biz..., a classic of its time.

But this is some grade A, uncut, pure and unadulterated cute.

Make sure you have fastened your seatbelts and put your trays in their full upright and locked positions.

'Cause it is go time.

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