Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

As a Platinum Elite frequent flyer on an airline whose mechanics are likely to strike the night before I have to get on one of its planes, this story about the Cypriot airliner that suddenly lost cabin pressure gives me a bit of a chill.  What a bizarre tale this is turning out to be.  Can you imagine yourself as the only conscious passenger lurching into the cockpit, lugging the co-pilot’s body off the controls, sitting down in the left seat and trying to figure out what to do next?

Not a pilot myself, I’d have to wrack my brain for ideas.  My only relevant prior experience would be the old DOS-based Microsoft Flight Simulator, which I never managed to land successfully at Chicago’s old Meigs Field.  Even on the tiny green screen of my old Compaq “sewing machine” luggable, the cracks spider-webbing through the windshield on impact were unsettling.

And why would the left seat be empty in the first place?  Where was the captain (whose body has yet to be found)?  In the lavatory with a flight attendant?  Could a flailing stiletto heel have punctured the skin of the aircraft, causing the depressurization?  If a “black box” recorded that activity, I’ll be landing with an awfully full bladder from now on.

I find this picture of the tail particularly haunting, with its combination of resurrected antiquity and fallen modernity:

It turns out that the nifty (and not exactly cheap) waterproof camera case that I use when kayaking or snorkeling only fits the S300 that I left at a trailhead last weekend, so I can’t merely upgrade to a nicer camera, I’d have to buy a new case as well.  Since I wasn’t really unhappy with the S300 (not exactly true - I was just sort of starting to want more), I looked on eBay for a replacement.  I was thrilled at first to see two listed for around $50, and threw in a bid, thinking I was going to get out of my stupidity pretty cheap.

Bidding on both cameras exceeded $100 a day later, however, so I found a third listing with a “buyitnow” price of $125, and nailed it.  It ships Monday, and with any luck I’ll have it Thursday or Friday, and the eye candy will return to Perils of Caffeine.

Meg’s running sort of a blogger’s hootenanny this week, and go take a look, it’s a lot of fun.   She asked for a subject for today’s entry, and, being the helpful fellow I am, I remembered a caption to a picture in my wife’s college alumni magazine (Carnegie Mellon).  The picture accompanied an article about the chemical engineering department, and showed a shiny contraption with many hoses and valves.  The caption read, “The ultra-high vacuum surface analysis chamber is used to study the enantioselective adsorption of chiral molecules on chiral metal surfaces.”  So I suggested that the subject of Meg’s blog entry be “The enantioselective adsorption…etc.”  In retrospect, it was sorta cruel.  I rock!

By way of contrast, my own recent alumni magazine (Ohio State) featured an article of several pages detailing what an alum can and can’t do for student-athletes and recruits.  A former Heisman trophy winner is our alumni director.  Several incidents over the last year made the article germane and essential, including a head basketball coach who paid a recruit’s family $5,000 and a booster who left an envelope of cash at his business’ reception desk for the starting quarterback (who actually showed up and took it).  These things lead one to believe that the university community’s understanding of the nuanced definition of the term “student-athlete” has eroded somewhat, and perhaps a review of some major points is necessary.

Kind of dispirited here, blogwise.  After the euphoria of finding my camera after thinking I’d lost it on a hike a couple of weeks ago, you’d think I would conduct my affairs a bit differently.  But, no, there I was turning my pack and my car inside out on Sunday after returning from a day of hiking and watching my wife and kid climb sheer rock faces, and taking a slew of terrific photographs of it all, looking for my Canon S300 again, and knowing in my gut I’d left it on a rock where I had watched my kid’s last climb of the day.

I’ve gotten so I carry it everywhere, because I’ve taken a delight in capturing the gorgeous and the oddball stuff I run across and posting it here.  I feel sort of naked, or handicapped, (or naked and handicapped - that’ll get me some Google action!) without it.  And you have to deal with the mundane black-and-white of my words as a consequence.  Collateral damage.

I don’t think it’s coming back this time, and I’ll reluctantly start looking on eBay tomorrow for a replacement that will fit into my cool waterproof case.

The Secret Summer Weather festival continues here, highs around 80, lows around 60.  My son & I took kayaks down to Lake Union last night just to cool off a bit, but I forgot my camera, so no accompanying pics.  One thing I really wish I’d had it for was the spectacle - I’m not kidding here - of a guy on roller blades pulling a kayak on wheels along Meridian Avenue.  I actually felt guilty for a second for piling our boats on top of the car just to roll a half mile down the hill to launch.  (It passed.)

In yo FACE, kayaker boy!  I actually can’t work up much envy for this sort of watercraft, but then a wet dream for me these days is more likely to involve a sweaty t-shirt than anything else, so maybe I’m just out of the game.

Do you ever snap awake from a sound sleep with the certain knowledge that something has just gone “bump” in the cosmos?  I’m not talking about something run-of-the-mill like the earthquakelets that jolt the left-coaster now & then - I’m talking music-of-the-spheres stuff.

It turns out that you may have been awakened every couple of years by an international agency clumsily slipping an extra second under your pillow in an attempt to cover up systemic incompetence of the earth in its assigned task of rotating on its axis:

 Because the moon’s gravity has been slowing down the Earth, it takes slightly longer than 24 hours for the world to rotate completely on its axis. The difference is tiny, but every few years a group that helps regulate global timekeeping, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, tells governments, telecom companies, satellite operators and others to add in an extra second to all clocks to keep them in sync. The adjustment is made on New Year’s Eve or the last day of June.

This is taken from a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Why the US Wants to End the Link Between Time and Sun”  On its face, this sounds like another stunning act of hubris on the part of a runaway US administration and, in fact, that’s what it turns out to be.  The government is proposing to end the practice of using “leap seconds” to synchronize the world’s clocks. 

It’s a sign of the times when I read an article like this and turn it this way and that, trying to glean some underhanded political or theological purpose to something the administration proposes.  Does it benefit oil companies?  Penalize labor unions?  Or is there some biblical proscription to screwing with time that raises the dander of the evangelical base, something that might cause undue delay to the start of the End Times?

It turns out that it’s expensive and disruptive to try to program computers to countenance the existence of a 61-second minute, sort of like the concept of i, the square root of -1.  Think of the conniptions the Cobol crowd went through simply to accommodate something rational like a 4-digit year, and you get the picture.  There would be winners and losers, of course, and it may bear looking into as a political exercise.  Astronomers, whose telescopes need the microadjustments in order to track faraway phenomena, are howling.  One suspects that the timing of the announcement of the discovery of a 10th planet is aimed at swaying public sentiment the astronomers’ way.  No Planet Left Behind would be a catchy slogan for the campaign.

Other constituencies are equally compromised:

 But the U.S. proposal, which an ITU committee will consider in November, has upset some of the most powerful people in timekeeping — including the Earth Rotation Service’s leap-second chief, Daniel Gambis, of the Paris Observatory. “As an astronomer, I think time should follow the Earth,” Dr. Gambis said in an interview. He calls the American effort a “coup de force,” or power play, and an “intrusion on the scientific dialogue.”

Back to Seattle. We’re in the midst of our Secret Summer Weather Festival. I am circumscribed from providing any more detail than the photo below, taken Friday evening at Seward Park, midpoint of a bike ride with my son. 

The Blue Angels will arrive here this week for rehearsals and performances in a sorta cornball summer celebration called SeaFair, culminating in unlimited hydro races next weekend.  Thousands of folks raft up out on Lake Washington, get sunburned and drunk, and watch what is really just a 2-day Budweiser advertisement.  A blimp will buzz Jules-Verne-like over the city all week.  It floated languidly over the house Friday night after dark.  We used to get the haughtily austere Goodyear blimp, but this year it’s a gaudy thing from Ameriquest that looks like a bridge-tagging project that overdosed on BC Bud (not the hydroplane kind).  (Update) It just flew by, so I rushed to the upstairs deck to photograph it.

I spent the middle of the week visiting clients in eastern Washington.   I deal with a winery in Richland that is just putting the finishing touches on a public tasting facility that will include a restaurant, retail sales and classes.  Another is an agribusiness with two locations.

The terrain couldn’t be more removed from the lush growth I was cavorting amongst over the weekend.  It’s basically sagebrush desert east of the Cascades, receiving about 6″ of rainfall a year.  They grow a cornucopia of crops in the region - potatoes, onions, hops, wheat, grapes both for wine and for juice, asparagus, apples, apples, apples - all with water drawn from the Snake and Columbia systems.

The photo shows all of this - sagebrush, an irrigation rig in the middle distance, and, lining the ridge in the background like an unshaven chin, wind turbines.

It was in the mid-100s over there, which made for balmy 80-degree nights perfect for running (it’s dry heat, after all!).   I only suffered on Thursday, when I had to drive in my ac-less car for about 75 miles in midafternoon.  When I reached my client’s, their doorhandle put a serious burn on my palm - the doorknob to Hades, I thought.

Amusing bit: you’ve probably heard the term “sneakernet” - a computer networking method involving copying data to a floppy disk and walking it over to another computer?  Well, the agribusiness client with two locations needs to share data, but the telephone infrastructure at one location only allows for about 8k linespeed, and pokes a lot of holes in that.  So, we deployed a technique called “spudnet” - each week after payroll, a zip disk makes its way between the locations on a truck carrying potatoes.