The pope.... with a small p

So the pope has decided that its ok for male prostitutes to use condoms. Tell me; why in the name of all that is right, decent, sane and logical, does this ridiculous announcement rate national news.  Considering all the lives that have been lost and degraded by this man, I wonder how he is able to sleep nights. However, the blame is not totally his. A great deal of the blame has to be shouldered by those who believe it necessary to follow the vaticans' ridiculous edicts. Isn't it time the human race grew up and put this nonsense behind us??

More intresting trivia

Some interesting scientific and historical items I picked up in recent readings:

1. CHARLIE CHAPLIN:  Apparently Charlie once came in third in a Charlie Chaplin Look-alike contest in Monte Carlo.

2. WHO REALLY FLEW FIRST?  Contrary to popular opinion, the Wright Brothers were not the first to achieve powered flight. The first was, apparently, a Frenchman, Clement Adler, who flew a powered craft some 50m. (Some 13 years before the Wright Brothers).  The Wright Brothers were the first to achieve controlled powered flight. (true to form, whatever an American invents is, naturally, the more important than anything anyone else may invent).
   However, the Wright Brothers were apparently, (and I haven’t confirmed this), the first to realize that the propeller is in fact a rotating wing, and as such it generates “lift” just as a wing does.  Therefore since the tips move faster than the inner part of the propeller blade, the pitch can vary throughout the length to even out the “lift” over the length of the blade.

 

3. THE FIRST VOICE BROADCAST:  The first voice modulated radio broadcast was made by a Canadian. Tom Edison had hired a Canadian physicist named Reginald Fessenden who, in 1897, wanted to experiment with broadcasting the human voice. Edison, however, discouraged him, saying that such a thing was less likely than man’s chances of jumping over the moon. Nevertheless, Fessenden made the first voice radio broadcast on Dec 23, 1900.

4. Lord Kelvin, while president of the Royal Society, proclaimed that “X-Rays will prove to be a hoax” and also that “Radio has no future”.

5. SCRATCHES ON CD's:  found out an interesting fact about CD’s.  I’ve always wondered why scratches don’t come through as pops or dropouts in the audio. The way it works is the two audio tracks are sampled 44,100 times per second each and the samples are turned into digital codes representing the amplitude of the sample. You would therefore expect that a scratch would ruin enough of the coded samples to cause either a dropout or a pop in the audio. It doesn’t.
   
   The reason why it doesn't is that the crafty buggers who designed it, realized that the samples don’t have to be put on the track sequentially….. they can, instead, be “interlaced” out of order so that a scratch that is wide enough to interfere with several codes in succession will in fact be spread out over several waveforms and will not be detectable.  They also, of course, included three error correcting bits in each sample which allow the reader to detect and sometimes to actually correct, an error. By the way, the track on a CD, starting from the inside, is actually about 3 ½ miles long and the speed of the disc changes from about 500 rpm to about 350 rpm at the outer edge so that the bits/second is constant.

6. COMPUTER CHIP LIFE:  Modern computer chips apparently have an expected life-span of about 5 years continual service.  There are three mechanisms responsible:
   ELECTROMIGRATION: which causes atoms in the metal to be swept along like pebbles in a stream to be deposited where they shouldn’t be.
   OXIDE BREAKDOWN: weak spots developing in the insulating oxide layer and causing shorts.
   HOT-CARRIER INTERACTION: where overenthusiastic electrons may punch through the oxide layer.
   Older chips with larger internal components can apparently last many decades.

7. SPAM:  The word “spam” representing junk e-mails, comes from a skit performed at the final Monty Python Flying Circus show of 1970 wherein they insert the word “spam” throughout the skit.

8. BALL POINT PENS: Do you know why ball point pens leak when they get wet?  Did you know that they do? Well, the reason is that when you finish writing the ink left on the ball immediately dries, form-ing a seal. If, however, the pen gets wet, the seal is broken and the ink leaks out.

 

9. SUPERGLUE: Apparently scientists are not really sure how superglue works. One theory is that it is because of “van der Waals” forces, which are forces between molecules resulting from the interaction of their polarities.  What they do know is that the cyanoacrylate (superglue) reacts with water to form long chains that coil around each other and bond together to form a hard resin. That’s why it sticks to skin so well and why it is used to detect fingerprints.

Now thats a spider

I have been digitizing a huge box of slides for an old friend (old meaning that he's 85) who spent a lot of time in the middle east in the sixties, and I ran across this slide:




Now if you look closely, it looks like a spider with ten legs and a pair of really wicked looking fangs.  Notice that the hand is keeping its distance.

Feeling that this warranted further investigation, I searched the web for desert spiders, thinking that if this thing really is a spider, then I have found absolute proof that God doesn't exist, since no rational being (I assume a god would be rational) would create such a thing.

It is (was) a spider. A Camel Spider to be exact (probably named that because they eat camels). I also found a site devoted to the little beasties:  camelspiders.net 

Furthermore, the one in the slide above IS A SMALL ONE, they can get to be 10 inches long.  Below is a more modern picture (from the site mentioned).  Now I know for sure there is no God.

By the way, they don't have ten legs. The two long things out front that look like legs are feelers of some kind.  They tell me (and I don't believe it for one minit) that they are relatively harmless.  However its rumoured that they can inject an anesthetic so that you don't feel them taking chunks of flesh out of you while you sleep. 

I'm never going to the Middle East.

The isolation of white phosphorus

Here's a little story that may appeal to those with a more twisted sense of humour.

Back in the summer of 1669 an alchemist named Henning Brandt, tried to make gold by heating a concoction of sixty buckets of human urine mixed with charcoal (do you know how long it takes to save up sixty buckets of piss?, I bet his wife could have told you).

Needless to say, the gold didn't materialize, but he did succeed in producing an entirely new material; white phosphorus. In fact this was one of the first elements to be isolated by chemical means.

Now white phosphorus reacts quite readily with oxygen and for that reason it is normally stored in water. As soon as it is removed from water, it begins to glow. If you remove enough from the water it bursts into flame. You can actually put some on your fingers and write with it.... it will glow for quite awhile. However, just increase the quantity slightly and you have fire. To quote Mr Brandt “'twill burn the place most dreadfully”.

Now Brandt was keen to find a use for this remarkable new material, and it's glow suggested medial applications to him, (I guess medications were different in those days) and it occurred to him that it just might be a handy cure for some sexually transmitted diseases. Whether he was so afflicted we don't know, but we do know that he tested his theory, and to quote him (and this is the punch line) : “If the privy parts be therewith rubb'd, they will be inflamed and burn for a good while after”.

That may well have been the forerunner of dispassionate understatement in scientific reportage.

Season Over

Well, the houseboating season is over.  The boat is over at the marina awaiting pull-out for its winter rest.  We had a good weekend trip. the weather report for next week looked pretty bad so we thought we'd better get this last trip in and get it over to the marina.  I haven't got the pictures off the camera yet, but will post some tomorrow.

A cautionary Tale

We got a fire call last night at about 10 pm.
Someone in a boat on a lake south of here saw a fire on shore and called it in on his cell phone as a cottage on fire.  We got the call from the dispatcher as a "structural fire" which means; get everything you have there as soon as possible. Which was no easy job. Four guys from Station 2  got there first with three units, a pumper truck, a tanker, and a van. As we drove out from Station 1 we listened to them on the radio as they tried road after road to find this fire. (the dispatcher didn`t have an address of course)

They found it before we got there with our four units, the chief``s 1/2 ton, a pumper, a rapid attack truck and the wild fire truck (the one I was driving). All together, seven vehicles and 13 firemen converged on this poor guy. Of course, we had to inch through two miles of very narrow, twisting access road to get there.

Turns out that the guy was only burning brush, which was wet and caused a lot of smoke. But, and here's the cautionary part, he didn't have a fire permit.
The chief, advised him that that little fact could cost him some money... in fact, $350 for each unit plus $45 for each fireman.  I think it totals up to around $2800.  enough to put a real damper on your weekend (a fire permit costs $10 and everyone is advised with their tax bill that they need one to burn).

The bad part of those false alarms is that you could have a real fire while you're all out on some back road. And, we did get another call, just after we started home, a tree on fire back near Station 1, so we high tailed it back home as fast as we could.  It turned out to only be a tree across a hydro line causing arcing and a little fire, but it too was at the end of  mile of winding, twisting bush trail. To get out we had to back the big pumper up all the way out.

One of our biggest problems here is that so many people like the feeling of isolation in their cottages.  But they never think that they might someday need a fire truck.

Anyway, most of us got home at midnight... three stayed at the site waiting for the hydro guys to arrive. And, in the end, the Chief took pity on the poor chap and only fined him $350, and then only because he wasn't entirely truthful in his responses.

A Drowning

We had a very sad drowning here on Saturday night (not that any of them are happy).   We went to bed at 1 a.m. and the call came in on my fire pager at 2:05 a.m. to respond for a water rescue. Three guys had jumped off the Sioux Narrows bridge after an evening of drinking in the pub next to the bridge.  One didn't come up.   We keep the fire boat at a marina 7 miles from the bridge down town, by water.  An interesting trip in the pitch black, (no moon that night), at high speed, well, 33 mph - not quite full throttle. Richard kept his face pressed against the window while another guy watched the GPS map and the radar.  I was with Richard, peering out the window.  Interesting that despite being a gadget junky, Richard still prefers to see it with his own eyes rather than trust the radar and GPS.  But the trip only took us about 12 minutes.  It's also interesting how many firemen show up when the fire boat is involved.... we had 8 of us on the boat and another one drove the fire truck to the scene.  We're lucky to get 4 or 5 to a car accident.   Despite our conviction that the guy had gone straight to the bottom, we searched the shoreline for over 3 hours just in case he got carried away by the current and was passed out somewhere on the shore. Not a pleasant experience, and one that brought back a few unwelcome memories. Besides the fireboat, there were 4 other boats searching, including one with the local cop on board.  At about 5 a.m. the OPP from Kenora arrived with their boat and an underwater search camera.  They found him by about 6:30 a.m., right below the bridge, where he had jumped.  (I'm sure  our fire chief, will be putting an underwater camera into the next budget).   It's a pretty risky thing to do, jump off a bridge like that, especially on a night as black as that was, and when the water temperature is only 17 deg.  The water there is only 32 ft. deep, but I doubt that he would have hit the bottom.  He probably took in air in the initial gasp reflex and then got disoriented in the dark.  He probably panicked as well.  I don't know how high the bridge is off the water, but it could be 30 ft., I suppose.   He was either 22 or 27 or 32, depending on which news report you believe.  He apparently had a wife and a kid.  He was from North Dakota, as was one of the other guys.  I guess his family has been coming up here for years, and staying at The Rod and Reel, at the other end of the bridge. The third guy was a bartender from the pub... he's only been here for two days so may not have been warned off jumping.  He says he'll never do that again.   The guy who died had probably jumped off the bridge before . . . it seems to be the macho thing to do around here, and despite the efforts of the pub staff to stop it, many are still doing it.  In fact a few days earlier, a guy dove off the top of the superstructure,  possibly a 60 ft. dive,  but he apparently knew what he was doing.  Even a lot of young kids do it. One 9 year old we know, broke his leg landing on a rock a few years ago. No one has died doing it before, although there have been more than a few broken bones, sprains and, in one case, an all-over bruise on a native chap, who for a few days could really be called a "red man" after he did a belly flop from the bridge.  Fortunately for him, the pain was dulled by a large infusion of alcohol.   Anyway,  I got home at 7:30 a.m. to find Anne sleeping on the sofa so she could hear the fire radio we have in the living room.  I then went to bed at 8:00 and slept until 1:00 p.m.   They brought a police diving team in from Thunder Bay on Sunday and they retrieved the body late Sunday afternoon.   The photo of the bridge shows the orange float marking the spot where the body is on the bottom, while waiting for the diving team to arrive.