Lilly has gone 2 days without any indoor excremental excitations.
And the beaded dragon took the biggest crap you have ever seen. All by himself.
It truly is a blessed day.
7 years ago
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
State of Disrepair
Our new dog, Lilly, is a fine dog. She is happy and playful and loves to jump up and down and have fun with you. She fetches and acts like a dog. Heidi, our older, more mature dog, wants nothing to do with that crap. She is frumpy.
The problem, you see, is that Lilly pees and poops on the floor. That is hard to put up with. For example, this evening, we got home, and immediately took Lilly out. She peed. Crab-Girl played with her for a while outside, where she peed again. She came inside and played for a little while in the house, where she peed again. We cleaned that up. Then an hour later, she she peed inside again. She has never actually peed twice in an hour, so having her pee 4 times in 4 hours was quite shocking. Well, now we know.
NASA launched a $300M satellite the other day. It crashed. Oops. I can't imagine being on that team. You think that you have 2-5 years of steady funding coming in, with lots of great science to do, then wham, the satellite blows up and you have no more funding and no more science to do. Crap-burgers.
I am in a sh*t mood. Once again. I have a bunch of reports to read and/or do and I have no motivation to do them.
I am going to Boulder on Friday to have a meeting. The people who are hosting told me today that we can't use Macs. We have to use the Windows machine provided. "Test your powerpoint on a Windows machine!" the person tells me. F*ck that. I don't do Windows. I don't have a Windows machine to test my powerpoint on. Why would I? Why would anyone?
I am going to go to bed before I start swearing more.
Ok. One more. F*ck.
The problem, you see, is that Lilly pees and poops on the floor. That is hard to put up with. For example, this evening, we got home, and immediately took Lilly out. She peed. Crab-Girl played with her for a while outside, where she peed again. She came inside and played for a little while in the house, where she peed again. We cleaned that up. Then an hour later, she she peed inside again. She has never actually peed twice in an hour, so having her pee 4 times in 4 hours was quite shocking. Well, now we know.
NASA launched a $300M satellite the other day. It crashed. Oops. I can't imagine being on that team. You think that you have 2-5 years of steady funding coming in, with lots of great science to do, then wham, the satellite blows up and you have no more funding and no more science to do. Crap-burgers.
I am in a sh*t mood. Once again. I have a bunch of reports to read and/or do and I have no motivation to do them.
I am going to Boulder on Friday to have a meeting. The people who are hosting told me today that we can't use Macs. We have to use the Windows machine provided. "Test your powerpoint on a Windows machine!" the person tells me. F*ck that. I don't do Windows. I don't have a Windows machine to test my powerpoint on. Why would I? Why would anyone?
I am going to go to bed before I start swearing more.
Ok. One more. F*ck.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Berated
I am being berated by my brother right now about how I didn't wear sunscreen and got burned. I did wear it, but not on my chest. Therefore I got burned on my chest. Now I am being yelled at. Literally. By my brother. On the phone. For the last five minutes. Nice.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
More Horrible Times in Hawaii
Yesterday during lunch we took a drive out to this place that has "Dragon's Teeth":
We saw something stirring in the ocean:
And saw the ocean with bluffs and surfers:
We saw something stirring in the ocean:
And saw the ocean with bluffs and surfers:
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Bumming in Hawaii
Yeah, being in Hawaii sucks.
Here is are a couple of views outside of my window at sunrise.
I haven't actually taken any pictures at the beach. I will try to do that today.
Don't tell Crab-Mama that Hawaii is not horrible.
Here is are a couple of views outside of my window at sunrise.
I haven't actually taken any pictures at the beach. I will try to do that today.
Don't tell Crab-Mama that Hawaii is not horrible.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Thoughts on big numbers
I thought that I should write something interesting, instead of random rants....
My daughter’s favorite number is a google, which is 10 to the power 100. I tried to explain to her how big a google is, but was somewhat stumped. Let me explain.
Take the sun. The sun is about 100 times bigger than the Earth. Since we are only dealing with orders of magnitude here, let’s call it 1,000,000 km in radius, which is 10^6 km, or 10^9 m. The volume of the sun would therefore be 4/3 pi r^3, which is about 4x10^18 m3. Now, there are roughly 10^23 atoms in a cubic cm of water (I think…). This is 10^29 atoms in a m3. If we assume that the sun is 100 times more dense than water, we get something on the order of 10^31 atoms in m3 in the sun, so the number of atoms on the sun is something like (4x10^18 * 10^31) 4x10^49. Let’s round it off and say that there are 10^50 atoms in our solar system (i.e. add all the atoms of the planets together – the largest of which is 10 times smaller than the sun – and add it to the sun’s number of atoms).
Ok, I am reading this book that says that there are something like a billion (10^9 stars in our galaxy). That means, if the average star is about the same size as ours, there are 10^59 atoms in our galaxy. Now we really stretch things – if you take one of the pictures of a dark section of the sky from the Hubble telescope, it shows that there are thousands of galaxies in each little section of the sky (roughly about 1 million sections of the sky). Let’s then assume that there are 10,000 x 1,000,000 (or 10^10) galaxies out there, each of which is roughly the same size as ours. This means that there are a total of about 10^69 atoms on all of the galaxies out there. Even if we are off by a factor of a million somewhere, we still something like 10^75.
So, to get a google atoms, you need a billion, billion, billion universes.
A google is a BIG number.
BTW, if you assume that the universe is 20 billion years old, the universe is 6x10^17 seconds old. Compared to a google, the universe is a very, very, very young puppy.
Along the same lines, while walking on the beach in Chile, some friends of mine and I tried to figure out whether, in your life time, you breath in the whole atmosphere. Let’s assume that you take 1 breath per second and that you breath in 1 liter of air (which is 10^3 cm3, or 1^-3 m3). This means that it would take 1000 seconds (about 16 minutes) to breath in 1 m3. Assuming that you live to the rip age of 100 (3x10^9 seconds), you would breath in 3x10^6 m3 of air in your life time – 3 million cubic meters of air. Wow!
But, how big is the atmosphere? The surface of the Earth is 5x10^14 m2, while the atmosphere can be approximated to be a layer 10 km high (with uniform density instead of exponentially decreasing density!), which makes the atmosphere 5x10^18 m3 in volume. That means that you breathe in 0.00000000005% of the atmosphere in your lifetime. Yikes!
My daughter’s favorite number is a google, which is 10 to the power 100. I tried to explain to her how big a google is, but was somewhat stumped. Let me explain.
Take the sun. The sun is about 100 times bigger than the Earth. Since we are only dealing with orders of magnitude here, let’s call it 1,000,000 km in radius, which is 10^6 km, or 10^9 m. The volume of the sun would therefore be 4/3 pi r^3, which is about 4x10^18 m3. Now, there are roughly 10^23 atoms in a cubic cm of water (I think…). This is 10^29 atoms in a m3. If we assume that the sun is 100 times more dense than water, we get something on the order of 10^31 atoms in m3 in the sun, so the number of atoms on the sun is something like (4x10^18 * 10^31) 4x10^49. Let’s round it off and say that there are 10^50 atoms in our solar system (i.e. add all the atoms of the planets together – the largest of which is 10 times smaller than the sun – and add it to the sun’s number of atoms).
Ok, I am reading this book that says that there are something like a billion (10^9 stars in our galaxy). That means, if the average star is about the same size as ours, there are 10^59 atoms in our galaxy. Now we really stretch things – if you take one of the pictures of a dark section of the sky from the Hubble telescope, it shows that there are thousands of galaxies in each little section of the sky (roughly about 1 million sections of the sky). Let’s then assume that there are 10,000 x 1,000,000 (or 10^10) galaxies out there, each of which is roughly the same size as ours. This means that there are a total of about 10^69 atoms on all of the galaxies out there. Even if we are off by a factor of a million somewhere, we still something like 10^75.
So, to get a google atoms, you need a billion, billion, billion universes.
A google is a BIG number.
BTW, if you assume that the universe is 20 billion years old, the universe is 6x10^17 seconds old. Compared to a google, the universe is a very, very, very young puppy.
Along the same lines, while walking on the beach in Chile, some friends of mine and I tried to figure out whether, in your life time, you breath in the whole atmosphere. Let’s assume that you take 1 breath per second and that you breath in 1 liter of air (which is 10^3 cm3, or 1^-3 m3). This means that it would take 1000 seconds (about 16 minutes) to breath in 1 m3. Assuming that you live to the rip age of 100 (3x10^9 seconds), you would breath in 3x10^6 m3 of air in your life time – 3 million cubic meters of air. Wow!
But, how big is the atmosphere? The surface of the Earth is 5x10^14 m2, while the atmosphere can be approximated to be a layer 10 km high (with uniform density instead of exponentially decreasing density!), which makes the atmosphere 5x10^18 m3 in volume. That means that you breathe in 0.00000000005% of the atmosphere in your lifetime. Yikes!
Saturday, February 21, 2009
In Memory of Paul
He was a good bunny. He will be sadly missed. We hope that his back legs work better where ever he is now.
I wasn't able to break the news to my own daughter, since I had to get on an airplane this morning, and we felt that it would be better to tell her after I left, since it was 7 AM. I have no idea how she is doing. Hopefully not too bad.
I wasn't able to break the news to my own daughter, since I had to get on an airplane this morning, and we felt that it would be better to tell her after I left, since it was 7 AM. I have no idea how she is doing. Hopefully not too bad.
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