Here is an excellent article with graphics showing how various countries ranked in education, broken down into the categories of reading, math and science.
Month: March 2013
Counting Stars
On a clear night, in a dark place, out in the desert, we can see the brilliant night sky. We estimate that we can see about 6,000 stars in the night sky with the naked eye. The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is about four light years away. This means its light took four years to get here. Whatever we see now happened four years ago.
There are about 100 billion stars in the average galaxy. It is estimated that there are about 200 billion stars and 50 billion planets in our own Milky Way galaxy.
How much is 200 billion? The average life expectancy of Americans is 78.2 years. That means there are about 2.5 billion seconds in a life. If you spent your entire life counting to 200 billion, you’d have to count to 80 every second of your life.
The next significant galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, is about 2 million light years away from us.
There are about 100 billion galaxies in the universe.
I won’t try to count them.
Keystone Pipeline – Yes or No?
The debate about whether to build the Keystone Pipeline has been raging for several years now.
The project would mean building a 1,700 mile pipeline from Alberta, Canada to the refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. 98% of Canada’s known oil reserves are located in Alberta, and 99% of those reserves are in oil sands. Canada will harvest that oil, whether we buy it and move it to the Gulf by pipeline or not.
If we don’t move it by pipeline, American buyers will still buy it, but it will be hauled by rail cars. Estimates are that it will take 15 trains of 100 tanker cars a day to move the same amount of crude oil that the Keystone Pipeline would transport. Moving oil by train would create much higher emissions of CO2 from the diesel locomotives, than the pipeline would.
If for any reason American buyers were not to purchase the Canadian crude, the Canadians would ship the oil to the hungry markets of Asia (I can’t help but think of Palin when I write “hungry markets”). It does not really matter who burns the oil. It will release CO2 into our atmosphere, whether it’s done in Asia or in the United States.
Boehner spouted last July that Obama’s decision to deny the pipeline would “destroy tens of thousands of American jobs.” However, the U.S. State Department calculated that the underground pipeline would add 5,000 to 6,000 U.S. jobs. In an independent review the Cornell University Global Labor Institute found that the pipeline would add only 500 to 1,400 temporary construction jobs in the U.S.
The way I see it, Obama should allow the Keystone Pipeline to be built. American jobs would be created, albeit nowhere near as many as the pundits would have us believe. The oil lobby would be pacified. The oil would not flow to China. It would contribute to keeping our supply up and prices down.
In the meantime, the administration – and the world – should continue its efforts to reduce dependence on oil altogether. That is the real solution to the problem. Building the Keystone Pipeline, or not, is only a band-aid and has little real impact.
Do Guns Protect Women?
Myth: Guns protect women and make them safer.
Fact: Six times more women were shot by husbands and partners than were shot by strangers. The number of women killed by abusers increased 10 times if the abuser had a gun.
Solution: Let’s have armed guards in every house with an abuser so the good guy with a gun can defend against the bad guy with a gun.
Book Review: Treasure Box – by Orson Scott Card
We think of Orson Scott Card as a science fiction writer, the most famous of his books being Ender’s Game.
Treasure Box, in contrast, is a witch and magic mystery novel. It plays in the early Internet days of about 1996 (the book was published in 1997). The hero is Quentin Fears (rhymes with pierce) who is a software mogul fashioned after Bill Gates (since in 1996, we didn’t know the Google guys yet, Yahoo! was just a startup, and Zuckerberg was just 12 years old).
Quentin loses his sister, five years his senior, when she was a teenager. He never quite gets over it. He grows up to be a computer programmer and through luck and circumstance becomes immensely successful. Like a lot of nerds, however, he is socially inept. Eventually he finds Madeleine, apparently by chance, and falls deeply in love with her. She is the perfect woman. Beautiful, extremely smart, superb in bed, a star on the social scene. They get married quickly and plan their lives together. Life is perfect for Quentin.
Whenever something is too good to be true, maybe it’s not true. When Madeleine takes Quentin to meet his her family in a small town along the Hudson north of New York City, odd things start happening.
Turn on the magic. Evil magic that is….
I read Treasure Box when it first came out and I remembered liking it. But I had completely forgotten everything about it. I just knew it was not a science fiction book. So I picked it up again now.
It starts slowly. The first 100 pages seem stilted, staged, perhaps not very interesting. Only later do all the events in the first part of the book become important and things get wrapped up nicely. Treasure Box is pure entertainment. Orson Scott Card plays with witchcraft, dark magic, illusion, and what those concepts would do in a modern world of cell phones, computers, air travel and modern lifestyles. It’s a quick read and a good page turner to wile away the hours perhaps during a long flight or sitting by the beach on vacation.
Assault Rifles and Kinder Eggs
The producer of the German brand Kinder Schokolade (chocolate for children) also makes Kinder Überraschungseier (surprise eggs). Those are chocolate eggs with little toys inside them that children enjoy and collect.
While legal in all countries in the world, they are banned in America, and the US customs confiscates them as a choking hazard if you try to bring them into the country. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act at Section 402(d)(1) says that a confectionery product with a non-nutritive object, partially or totally imbedded within it, cannot be sold within the United States, unless the FDA issues a regulation that the non-nutritive object has functional value and is non-injurious to health.
In 2011, border agents seized more than 60,000 Kinder Eggs from travelers’
baggage and from international mail shipments. This was more than twice the
number seized in fiscal year 2010. Fines can be as much as $2,500 for trying to smuggle them into the U.S.
[I wonder if the agents get to eat them after they seize them?]
Apparently the product violates both Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. As the U.S. government’s law-enforcement agency at the border, CBP is charged with enforcing the regulations of both agencies to keep safety hazards away from American consumers.
Obviously, American kids must be more stupid than kids all over the world, and our government must protect them from the evil eggs.
Here is my suggestion: Let’s make the eggs big enough so that you can hide an assault rifle inside of them. Nobody at the border will touch you then. The NRA will have your back. After all, we may be too stupid to know we’re not supposed to eat plastic toys, but we have constitutional protection to have assault rifles, whether they come wrapped in chocolate or not.
Movie Review: Being Flynn
Robert De Niro does an excellent job playing a down-and-out writer turned homeless by an unfortunate sequence of events.
There really are only two significant characters in this story, Jonathan Flynn (Robert De Niro) and his son, Nick Flynn (Paul Dano). Nick is shocked when his eccentric father, a writer, who abandoned Nick and his mother when he was young, suddenly reaches out to him seemingly out of the blue – of all things, to help him move.
We see Jon descend into homelessness. Nick, burdened by the loss of his mother to suicide, trying to find himself, and getting a relationship going, is not much interested in his father.
But he can’t quite avoid him, either.
Being Flynn is absolutely carried by the two main actors. It’s a slow, plodding, somewhat boring story that really is depressing and demoralizing. There is very little in this movie that is uplifting, even though the end has hints of it. I watched all the way through, but it took an effort. The excellent acting of De Niro – as always – helped. He carried this movie.
Rating: **
Hiking North Clevenger
After hiking the South Clevenger Trail last year on July 6, it was time for North Clevenger yesterday afternoon. I hiked alone.
Here is the map posted at the trailhead:
Here is the actual trail I hiked:
First I might note that you can see the South Clevenger hike of July 6 on the bottom of the map (red arrow). The trailhead for the north section is off Highway 78, just a quarter-mile past the well-marked turnout by the south trailhead. There is good, safe parking for about 8 to 10 vehicles with plenty of overflow parking along the highway.
When comparing the map posted (top image) and my own trail, you can see that I didn’t go all the way. When I got to the end of my trail, I took a waypoint to make sure I’d find my way back, because the trail was lost to me at that point. It has completely fizzled out. The map shows it going on for another mile or two, but if it was there, I didn’t find it.
Going off trail was somewhat hazardous, because I noticed ticks. Sure enough, there was one crawling on my leg already. I decided to call it a hike and turn around at that point. But before I did, I took off boots and socks and examined my legs all the way up and down to make sure I had no nasty stow-aways.
As you can see from the chart, the trail starts at an elevation of about 700 feet and descends steeply into the bed of the Santa Ysabel Creek, before rising on the other side. The picture below shows a section of trail right next to the creek at about 500 feet elevation.
From there, the climb is steady and consistent, with steep switchbacks at times, up to the top of the ridge seen in the picture below.
Once I crossed over the ridge I hiked on the level for a while before the trail fizzled out at about 1880 feet elevation.
Above is a typical view of the trail. Highway 78 is visible in the far distance below. The peak just left of the center of the picture is Cuyamaca, the (almost) highest peak in San Diego County.
Massive boulders spot the hillside, waiting for that inevitable earthquake to shake them loose and give them a few frantic seconds of tumbling before another rest of millennia.
Here is a look from a little ways up, down to the parking lot from where I came. The red arrow points to my car.
The whole round trip took two hours and 45 minutes. It was sunny but not too hot, with a great cool breeze coming in from the distant ocean.
As the Crow Flies
Hiking yesterday in the hills of Southern California, I saw murders of crows (see below for definition of term) surfing the updrafts and thought about the term “as the crow flies.” Why do we use that term? The crows I saw were circling like hawks. But I remembered seeing crows, hundreds, thousands of them, flying in straight lines over our house, every evening in winter and early spring, always in the same direction, straight as arrows, seemingly from one point to another, as if commuting to work.
American crows commonly sleep overnight in a tree in large dense flocks (they are called murders for some reason) during winter. Sometimes there are thousands of crows packed into just a few trees. This is called communal roosting. Crows fly to the roosts at nightfall. Most large cities have just a few large communal roost sites. Since they have to get to the roost site before dark, crows all across the city all fly in the same direction with their classic steady, purposeful straight-line flight that gave rise to the phrase “as the crow flies.”
There is speculation that hungry crows notice who ate well that day, and the next morning the hungry crows follow the well-fed crows to try to find better feeding sites.
Learning to Read – by 23Thorns
I love how we are connected nowadays. Here some thoughts from a friend in Africa. Talking about sleeping in the bush – something I have never experienced.
What is a California Widow?
Just like we are creating new words in the English language all the time, like googling, there are many obsolete words, too. Here are some examples:
California widow: A married woman whose husband is away from her for any extended period
-John Farmer’s “Americanisms Old and New”, 1889
Pussyvan: A flurry, temper
“The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten” by Jeffrey Kacirk
Queerplungers: Cheats who throw themselves into the water in order that they may be taken up by their accomplices, who carry them to one of the houses appointed by the Humane Society for the recovery of drowned persons, where they are rewarded by the society with a guinea each, and the supposed drowned person, pretending he was driven to that extremity by great necessity, is also frequently sent away with a contribution in his pocket.
— “The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten” by Jeffrey Kacirk
When You Have to Go
Of course, an Indian might say: Look at all those wasted, empty spaces! There is room for a hundred more.