Michaela Sue

Low clouds kept anything from actually flying in the Milwaukee Air And Water Show on Saturday. I spent yesterday wandering around by the lakeshore (and eating). Today the weather was better, we saw a few things from the distance, and had a good spot for the big act, the Navy's Blue Angels:

( a photo )

These songs probably only appeal to a limited audience, but the videos are something to see. The locations! The wardrobe!

50 Ways To Save A Millirem From a power plant.

The Rad Police - Don't Stand So Close Appears to be a facility making ¹⁸F-FDG for positron emission tomography.

We drove from Milwaukee Wisconsin to Joliet Illinois and back yesterday. So I thought of a few Illinois tollway related things. One is the Captain Tollway character. That would be one of the more pathetic super heroes out there. His super power, I guess, is the ability to tell you if there is traffic congestion on the tollway in Chicago. Answer: Yes. Simple answers to simple questions.

Also, they have eliminated the paper towerstowels in the Oasis restrooms and installed some high-powered hot-air hand driers. The really powerful, really loud kind. Really loud. They do indeed dry your hands quickly. Similarly, and only slightly more noisily, the exhaust of a KC-10's auxiliary power unit will also dry you off. (This photo is from a hot day, but when it's cold and rainy it's actually a surprisingly comfortable warm place to stand if you don't mind the shrieking roaring gas turbine noise and the jet exhaust smell.)

"Venting any significant amount of natural gas into a workplace is an open invitation to disaster," said Chemical Safety Board Chairman John Bresland.

You might imagine that the Chemical Safety Board has some serious excess of spare time if they are warning us of this hazard. But no! This is in response to the Kleen Energy explosion in February:

The practice of using flammable natural gas to clean power plant piping, which led to the fatal explosion at Connecticut-based Kleen Energy on February 7, has been commonly used across the gas-fired power generating industry, CSB investigators said today.

The explosion, which killed six workers and injured at least 50 others, occurred during a "gas blow" – a planned effort to clean out new fuel-gas piping leading to combustion turbines by directing high-pressure natural gas through the pipes and out of vents located near ground level, adjacent to the power generation building. The gas accumulated above the lower explosive limit and ignited, causing massive damage to the new billion-dollar facility, which was nearing completion.

More details here.

Check all that apply:

[Poll #1563381]

I try not to waste too much of my life watching sports on TV, but I watch the occasional race in one sport or another. Frequently the difference between gold, silver, bronze, and being forgotten about is just tens of milliseconds. A few milliseconds separate the "champion" from the "first looser," or are the difference between starting on the pole position and being over on the dirty side of the track.

For some reason I just can't understand, the people paid to spend an hour or more constantly throwing out numbers for us on TV, continuous updates on just how many hundredths of a second one competitor is ahead of or behind another, shouting with excitement at each new fast time set, will never, ever, say the word "millisecond." One would imagine it would be a very useful word in the vocabularies of the people who spend hours talking about tiny time differences. It's a perfectly ordinary word, but no matter how many times they trip over their own tongues shouting about the two-hundredths-of-a-second gap or the eleven-thousandths-of-a-second faster time, no matter how many ways they try rewording what they say to avoid sounding too repetitive, no matter that they've just gone into a long discussion about grip wax or blade sharpening or camber or the FIA legality plank or the f-duct, the word "millisecond" is forbidden to TV commentators. I'm mystified.

Joyce and I spent the weekend in Champaign, Illinois. It was a great time, it was fun seeing everyone, filkertom was great, and it was fun going back to Champaign. I went to school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, way back in what's increasingly seeming like the mists of time. I liked the place. I don't visit very often (it's 250 miles/ 400km away from Milwaukee) but it's always fun to wander around the campus a bit. It's always different. New buildings everywhere. There is a bell tower at the south end of campus now. A bell tower. Someone with a lot of money wanted something tall with his name on it. And I guess the south end of campus needed it's own bell tower, to match the tower with chimes that's been toward the north for the last hundred years. I'm telling you, if I ever end up with a fortune to donate, I am going to endow the Beige Fund For Routine Maintenance And Dull But Important Minor Renovation. At first, no one will notice. After twenty years, every single thing on campus will have a tiny little (beige) plaque saying something like "Roof repair paid for by Beige Fund For Routine Maintenance" or "New floor paid for by..." or "working toilet paid for by..." or "office renovated such that both a desk and a chair will fit at the same time paid for by..." and so on.

Back in the day, I made the drive between Chicago and Champaign many times. It's fun to do it again, and pass by all the tiny towns I've never actually been in with the familiar names on the signs on the Interstate exits. Central Illinois is flat. It is what Ostfriesland reminds me of, for those of you who know that part of the world. I joke about the highway overpasses being high ground from which you can see a great distance, but in fact it is true. It's pretty in a way that maybe you only appreciate if you spend some years there. I love southeastern Wisconsin, the big lake, the glacial hills to ski on, but I really did like central Illinois. (And, indeed, can't get over how oddly like 'home' Ostfriesland feels.)

lisande gave me beige for the color meme. Wikipedia tells us that beige "originates from beige cloth, a cotton fabric left in its natural color." That's appropriate since I'm rather fond of undyed cotton. I have some quite nice "organic" cotton towels, beige cotton rugs in the bathroom, and a very nice soft fuzzy beige cotton blanket on my bed.

I've had a lot of beige computers over the years, though at the moment I seem to be all black, with my big computer in a black box with black-bezel LCD and an all black keyboard (no labels on the keys!). I had a white EEE-PC, now stolen, and now a mostly-black (with silver at the front of the keyboard) Dell mini-10v. Darn near everything in the lab is in a big beige box, though. Protein sequencing, DNA sequencing, time-of-flight mass spectrometry, ion trap, high pressure liquid chromatography, you name it, it's a big beige box.

Also, the universe is beige.

It might possibly still be slightly early to reflect on winter, but it is looking like spring.

Winter was good for me. The winter itself here was good, lots of time for skiing and snow shoeing. I was on the snow shoes at the beginning of December, skiing at -15°C in early December, did some very nice walking in the winter darkness at -18°C.

I got out to Pike Lake to ski, which is a pretty place though not the most fun skiing around. That day the trees were covered with very pretty ice crystals from some sort of freezing fog effect. I got out to the Nordic Trail in the Southern Kettle Moraine, another pretty place on a pretty snowy day. I made some nice fast runs down the hills at Lapham Peak, and did some laps around the lighted loop at my fastest speeds ever.

Running isn't exactly a winter-specific activity, but in fall once the weather got worse and I did less cycling I started running more, and signed up for the indoor half marathon held at the end of January, and did a lot of running in December and January indoors at the Pettit Center. The indoor running turned out to be more fun than I expected. It's much more social in there. Outdoors I'm alone and maybe sometimes see someone out doing yard work or walking a dog, but indoors on the running track I'm surrounded by the other runners, and it's just more fun.

Hanging around the Pettit a lot finally motivated me to take the speed skating class, and I've been enjoying that sport a lot. I've always liked going fast on the ice and it's great to really go fast properly. I find myself drawn to that sport in part because it's hard. One can work endlessly on the technique, and it is huge exercise.

I've only had 8km on the bike now this season, but I felt very strong. I've had much more winter exercise than ever before, which should help. Looking at the weather forecast, the bicycle commuting season is beginning now. I'll be looking at those times with interest this week.

Well, mostly it did.  There are still some big chunks of ice here and there, but mostly the Milwaukee River downtown is liquid on the surface.  That must be a sign that spring is beginning to nearly start to arrive!  We'll probably be out in the kayaks in just a few months.