Sadie Hawkins Day

Today, friends, is Sadie Hawkins Day.  The actual date is taken from the first day when the notion occurred in the Li'l Abner comic strip, though some celebrate a date a few days later.  I expect that most of you are too young to know about this venerated tradition of the hills, but I come from the Ozarks where single young men stay indoors on that day.  So if you're single, this is a good day to watch your back...

Adventure boot camp?

We stopped at several viewpoints as we were driving around Crater Lake last week. At one of them we found this vehicle from an "Adventure Boot Camp for Women." I'm sure the participants were out hiking around the rim, but apparently they left the driver behind to take care of the van...

Jet trails

Today was mostly clear with a few clouds, but there must have been some unstable air at flight altitudes because the sky was filled with jet contrails, probably from flights from Chicago to the west coast. The effect was very interesting and I thought I'd share it with you all, though this composite of two photos is pretty crude. Enjoy!

Green jobs

Interesting piece in today's Cedar Rapids Gazette. A new company in Newton has opened a wind turbine blade factory that will employ 500 people. This is the fifth wind energy company in Iowa (two in Newton, one in Cedar Rapids, one in West Branch, and one in Ft. Madison) and is an indication that once we can wean ourselves off oil and the resource-extraction "Drill, baby, drill" mentality, there is an enormous economic potential in new energy sources and other green jobs. If we look at the models of the computing and communications industries, once this starts it's going to grow really quickly, so if I were looking to invest in the future, I'd look at things like algae-based fuels and flexible thin-film solar panels.

Years of experience?

As we hear politicians talking about years of experience, let's think about the Geiko gecko. You ask whether a humble (or not...) lizard can have years of experience? It's known that the gecko has a long and ancient lineage, but scientists from Oregon State University and the Natural History Museum of London have just found a 100-million-year old gecko, almost doubling the known history of the species. But nobody knows if a gecko were ever the mayor of a small town...

Being studied

In the EdBiz (as Tom Lehrer once put it) we get used to studies as something we do or something we assign others to do. But now that we're retired persons in a city with a major university and medical school, we find that there are opportunities to be the object of study. Sounds grim, I guess, but not really.

Judy and I are now in a study of ageing and memory that looks at memory processes and, at the same time, will give us a longitudinal look at our own memories. We certainly experience enough "what IS that word?" moments to make us wonder sometimes, and this is a simple study that just requires us to take a few memory tests.

I'm also in a study of vascular function and cognition, looking at relations between how the functioning of our vascular system and our cognitive systems are related. This is a more complex study and will involve some blood and MRI studies as well as cognitive testing.

There are three reasons we like to do this sort of thing. One is that we believe it contributes to knowledge and science. A second is that we always learn something from them. And a third is that there is generally a modest stipend for contributing (though not always; a study I did a year ago paid almost exactly enough for parking and gasoline).

And, of course, it gives me something to write about in the blog when the days are slow...

Iowa wildlife

In yesterday's Cedar Rapids Gazette there was a small news report about an unusual traffic accident on I-380. While a semi carrying bananas was passing a car, the truck hit a buffalo while the car sideswiped a second one on the shoulder of the road. Not the usual kind of wildlife we would find in our back yard!

Shampoo bottle instructions

Anybody in computer science is familiar with the shampoo bottle instruction

Lather - Rinse - Repeat

that many of us use as an example of an infinite loop. On a hotel shampoo bottle recently I came across an example of another interesting instruction:

If seal is broken do not use

Of course, if the seal is not broken you cannot use the shampoo, so I guess this is an example of an always-negative logic statement...