jfiore | July 10, 2008The Utica Boilermaker 15k goes off once again this Sunday, July 13. Currently there are over 11,000 entries, including for the first time, the governor of New York State. The Boilermaker is known for many things, including an elite international field, huge community involvement, and perhaps one of (if not the) best post-race parties around, held at the Matt Brewery (one of the founding sponsors and brewers of Saranac). Another attribute of the Boilermaker is the weather. It tends to be hot. But no matter how hot it gets this Sunday, it's not going to match this. Yep, it's the "Boilermaker in…
jfiore | July 8, 2008The raspberry cane borer, Oberea bimaculata, is a particularly nasty garden pest and for some reason there seems to be an unusually large infestation of them this year. Our property contains all manner of cane berries including a large patch of local wild black raspberries (my favorite), wild blackberries, wild raspberries (usually too small to bother with) and various cultivars of red raspberry, yellow raspberry, and blackberry. Cane borer damage occurs pretty much every year but it tends to be isolated and infrequent. Several days ago I noticed that one or two of the red cultivars had…
jfiore | June 30, 2008This past weekend was high school graduation weekend for most of the schools in our area. At times like these, I sometimes hear folks waxing nostalgic about certain teachers who made an impact on them. I never had a chance to thank a couple of teachers who taught me extremely valuable lessons that served me well over the years, so here goes.
First, there was my fourth grade teacher. She introduced to me to an idea which has always stuck with me, and which has served me well in my many years as a college professor: Adults, and teachers in particular, can be wrong. Up until this time I had…
jfiore | June 23, 2008Two things that seem to be in the headlines of late: oil prices and overweight Americans. How do these things go together? Time for a fun "back of the envelope" calculation.
According to the CDC about two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese (a BMI over 25 tags you as overweight while a BMI over 30 defines obese). Currently, nearly a third of US adults are obese. If we ignore the obese children for a moment (and that's getting harder and harder to do), that means there's somewhere around 165 million Americans who are at least overweight. Let's be really generous (kind of like…
jfiore | June 19, 2008As part of my continuing adventures in drumming symmetry, I have been working on a dual electronic hi-hat pedal. The idea is to have a single hi-hat pad respond equally well to either a left or a right foot pedal. It is similar to having both left and right kick drum pedals. For the hi-hat, this effect is sometimes realized through the use of a switch, but that requires some extra motion and it's not possible to use both pedals at the same time. These pedals (both an FD-7 and an FD-8) are used with a Roland TD20 drum controller. The hi-hat pedal uses a resistive position sensor to indicate…
jfiore | June 18, 2008If you happened to be watching C-SPAN last night you got to see a parade of conservative Republicans prattling on about House Resolution 284 (AKA National Year of the Bible) and related concerns. It's gotten to the point that a showing of middle-aged and older conservative white guys from Texas, in all their doughy glory, has become a caricature of itself. You know what they're going to say and you know it's usually full-tilt crazy. But Texas isn't alone and folks sometimes forget that. Take Ohio. Last night, representative Jim Jordan had the floor for a few minutes and spoke about his…
jfiore | June 17, 2008The Freedom From Religion Foundation will hold its 31st annual convention in Chicago, October 10-12. Speakers include journalist Eleanor Clift and Daniel Dennett. Clift has been a contributing editor at Newsweek for a number of years and appears regularly on some of the "political pundits" shows. Professor Dennett is well known for his books, including Breaking the Spell and Darwin's Dangerous Idea. He will receive the Foundation's Emperor Has No Clothes Award.
Check out the FFRF website and be sure to take their Bible quiz. It's an absolute hoot!
bushwells | June 13, 2008Speaking of procrastination, from LOLtheorists:
See more funny videos at CollegeHumor
bushwells | June 13, 2008Even though my e-mail address in buried amongst the piles of banana peels and dried bonobo scat that litter the Refuge, I receive various "you might want to blog about this" tips from the media and commercial interests. Don't interpret this as self-importance on my part since all of my dear, dear sweet SciBlings receive these.
One (via MSN) in particular caught my attention before I jettisoned it from the Inbox:
Great Moments in Procrastination
The site "encourages you to take a break and watch posted videos of people doing what many of them do best: procrastinating. The site just launched…
bushwells | June 6, 2008So AfterElton: News, Reviews and Commentary on Gay and Bisexual Men in Entertainment and the Media just released their choices for the Hot 100 Men List. Granted, this may smack of exploitation a la Maxim's list of "hot women," but it prompts me to offer a short list of Guys Who Hang Out (Figuratively) at the Refuge Whom I Appreciate:
The Right Reverend Big Dumb Chimp. Sheer animal magnetism.
The incomparable Warren of The Indigestible. More than a delicious mouthful!
Saint Gasoline. Hot. Inflammatory. Don't pull his finger.
The luscious SDC a.k.a. mistaSteve of Words of Advice for Young…
jfiore | June 6, 2008Congressman Rohrabacher (R-California) gave a presentation yesterday concerning global warming which was carried live on C-SPAN. I have not been able to find either video or a transcript but here's the gist of it: Rohrabacher resides firmly in the lunatic fringe. He's a global warming denier and a conspiracy theorist. He plays fast and loose with the facts and apparently has no problem with misrepresenting them. In layman's terms, he's bat-shit crazy.
Rohrabacher denies the existence of global warming outright and obviously, any link that humans might have to its cause. It should be pointed…
bushwells | June 6, 2008Courtesy of S.T., intrepid Chimp Refuge photographer on assignment, I offer a cast member of the V Monologues for your consideration.
That would be a macrolicious close-up of a common vetch flower.
Ms. Vetch has also posed as a model for Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party.
jfiore | June 5, 2008What could've been the national symbol of the USA if Ben Franklin had his way, the wild turkey (meleagris gallopavo) is having a bit of a resurgence as of late. In our neck of the woods (central New York state) they have become a common sight and small bands of them are often seen crossing the country roads during the day.
But we had a lovely surprise these past few weeks. Recently, I had begun clearing some trails through the woods behind our house. This project included building three bridges across a couple of small creeks (the construction of which may be the topic of a future blog post…
bushwells | June 3, 2008""The Great Wall of China's attractive, but he's too thick - my husband is sexier."
So says Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, whose surname translates to English as "Berlin Wall."
The Telegraph resurrected Frau Berliner-Mauer's fascinating case of objectum-sexual in a news of the weird article: Woman "married" to Berlin Wall for 29 years. Overall, this is an article worthy of The Onion, but apparently the Wall's spouse widow occasionally makes the rounds discussing her fetish.
Having recently polished off Mary Roach's Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (I'll review this marvelous book…
bushwells | June 2, 2008From one of my favorite "Oh, my! Isn't that quirky?" sites, technovelgy, comes Useful Body Modifications (submitted by Bill Christensen). Here we find a dude who has a ruler tattooed on the underside of his forearm...
...others who have small magnets implanted under the skin to attain a "sixth sense" (WTF?) and finally, pierced glasses. The latter take the Pince-nez to the twenty-first century.
And here are the instructions from James Sooy and Oliver Gibson who have come up with this innovation:
Get pierced - an internally-threaded barbell that goes through the skin above the bridge of…
bushwells | May 30, 2008Bill O'Reilly's meltdown thanks to a hapless teleprompter is making the rounds again; I saw it on The Colbert Report. Thanks to the wonders of technology, someone has constructed a dance remix of Bill blowing a gasket. Pant-hoot to Bill from Dover for passing this along. Word has it that he found it on the Daily Kos. It's also resides on boing boing.
Warning: Language is NSFW. Well, maybe it depends on where you work.
jfiore | May 28, 2008You gotta love Glenn Beck. This guy knows how to bring the crazy. On last night's show he had a segment on hydrogen-powered cars. You can find a transcript here, about 2/3rds in (you'll probably want to avoid the first section featuring Ben Stein unless you have vomit buckets handy). So Glenn checks out the car and we come to...
BECK: Yeah, it's a great car. However, I saw the filling station, and there is giant power grid, you know, sitting there. You're using all this electricity. How are you going to -- how are you not just using electricity, and how are you not going to have…
bushwells | May 16, 2008I have been known to display my love-hate relationship with spiders here on the Refuge. Knowing my ambivalent feelings toward arachnids, on-line droogs have shared photos of a couple of cool orb weavers, the type of spider I like, versus the lycosids which freak me out.
Spider porn below the fold...
First, Spacebee of Texas shares these pictures of a fine Gasteracantha cancriformis (Crab-like orb weaver) specimen. This spider resides in her backyard, having strung up the web between a starfruit and guava tree.
Now why am I reminded of a Dalkon shield?
And the rear-view:
ST of the UK…
jfiore | May 13, 2008And now for something completely different, the tongue drum:
The tongue drum is also known as the slit drum or xylo-slit drum. It is the modern descendant of the ancient log drum. This is a large 14 key unit tuned to a pentatonic scale in G. It can be played with mallets or your fingers (with somewhat of a quick, snapping-back style). The sound is very mellow and pleasing. Organic might be a good term. This particular item came from here.
Besides the tone, what I find interesting about the drum is that unlike most musical instruments, it doesn't have a "normal" orientation. That is, the…
jfiore | May 13, 2008Humans have an ability to recognize patterns, even if they're not really there, like the face of Jesus in a pizza or Elvis on the side of a Holstein. Apparently, a local lumberjack recognized something in a certain tree trunk and decided to flip it upside down and paint it blue in order to help passersby see the illusion. This little bit of "found art" is located less than two miles from my house and I had a good laugh when I first saw it:
Jesus on a pizza it ain't, but it sure is entertaining nonetheless.