Older blog entries for tonyyarusso (starting at number 26)

While I was on my way to work today (approximately 9:40 AM), I noticed an unusual clustering of vehicles on County Road F, where the railroad crossing is, in Vadnais Heights. There were about seven company trucks from the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and maybe nine or so police vehicles, including the large Mobile Incident Command RV. I couldn’t see anything obvious to explain it as I went by, but clearly something big was going on. There were still a few folks around when I went home (6:30 PM), partway up the tracks from the road, possibly working on something. Did anyone see on the local news what happened? I’d be almost inclined to guess that there may have been a derailment, but I didn’t actually see a train anywhere, and I doubt it could have been taken care of all that quickly and the last train before this morning should have been at about 11 last night, which seems too long. Hints or speculations anyone?

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While in an earlier post I discussed misconceptions about things that aren’t actually covered under First Amendment protections, that’s not to say there aren’t things that are actually covered. Imagine that. That said, while IANAL, I’m pretty sure this is the sort of thing that’s not supposed to happen still.

More info from Google, and Google News.

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In addition to the bike posted about previously, I now have some of the other things to go with it. Here’s the list of other things for me to try out!

• Decibel multiple-impact helmet (White/Silver) - picture
• Body Geometry Gel gloves (Black/Silver) - picture
• Turbo Elite two-sensor cyclocomputer - picture
• Body Geometry Pro Road Carbon shoes (Black) - picture
• Speedplay Zero CSC Edition Stainless pedals (Red) - picture

Also on the way is a Burley Nomad cargo trailer for when I need to take some gear with me. - picture

They all feel great so far; looking forward to riding on them.

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So when I got into work this morning, I had an e-mail saying my bike had arrived at the warehouse, so after doing a couple of repairs I left for a few hours and picked it up. Towards the end of the day I had a chance to start unpacking it from the box and building it up, so now it’s sitting in the stand mostly done, just finishing up the cables and such. Tomorrow Matt and Doug are going to help me get it adjusted to my fit right too. Only the bike came, so I’m still waiting on some accessories and such, and I’ll have to borrow Adam’s pedals until some are available, but that’s not too bad. It looks just like this one; hopefully I’ll be able to get pictures of mine later on, preferably with the full package.

Note: I’m still looking for people to go riding with me…c’mon guys, you know you want to get outside this summer (I’ll got slow with you - I can get my fast rides in with the other nuts from work).

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Now, most people know that I’m not a huge fan of standardized testing. The main reason for that is because schools/districts start obsessing over the <u>results</u> of the tests for their school, rather than just using them as a useful check of actual learning. This leads to the inevitable situation of “teaching to the test”, where curricula become tailored specifically towards artificially inflating the school’s score distribution. Of course, the tests were never designed to actually be the curriculum for any student, but rather as a rather piecemeal check on what was being covered and what was being absorbed by normal means. Additionally, students pick up on this, and feel even less inclined to put any effort into their own work during elementary and/or high school since they don’t see a particular value to it, removing what little may have been left — and that’s for the good students.

Now, on to the funny part! Students in Fort Worth, Texas who failed the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills will not be allowed to graduate. Not only will they not receive a diploma, but they can’t participate in graduation ceremonies. Now while that makes perfect sense, it seems the students are upset, and would like to be able to walk across the stage even though they can’t pass the test. Now, you can read the actual article from WFAA, or, for a far more entertaining experience, just look at this picture of the protesting students/parents. Maybe whatever school you went to somehow thought you were deserving of a 3.5 GPA, but something tells me there’s a reason they won’t let you graduate, hmm?

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Well, from our perspective anyway. It seems that someone has done calculations recently to show that not only is the universe expanding, but it’s accelerating its expansion such that portions will gradually become beyond our visual and radio reach by moving at or beyond the speed of light as seen from Earth, leaving us cosmically isolated with only our immediate neighbors within a few billion years.

Unfortunately, it seems this study has not yet reached the printing presses of publication, so I wasn’t able to look at the math (it’s a subscription-only journal until the article is a few months old anyway), and don’t have the time to work through it myself at the moment. Consider that a challenge to work out some provisional numbers to see how/what/when things could be expanding beyond the speed of light as seen from earth. Is it just things on the opposite side of the universe, our side, or all of it? Which things will we lose first? Are any of the more notable stars/clusters/constellations/objects on the list for the (cosmically) near future?

The article also talks about a “frozen” ghost image left as things blip out, but I couldn’t tell if this means we just see an unchanging image for a brief time before nothingness, or if the ghost images remain somehow, but are just never updated. I don’t have quite enough grasp of the things involved to work that portion out - anybody have some insight?

Regardless, it’s all some pretty weird stuff - the idea that portions of the universe that we can see now and have used to prove very fundamental portions of the physics governing things will no longer be within reach later is a bit disconcerting. Some portions are already beyond the event horizon, and who knows what information we may have missed by not having those data points? So, SETI@Home contributors, you may want to fire up a few more dual-cores, because your time is (sort of) limited. :P

Read the full story on Space.com, and a related article with some extra details.

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So today I had the opportunity of experiencing that weird phenomenon common in places were parts are stripped from bicycles and replaced with new, working ones - that of the “shop bike”.

In case you can’t guess already, what this means is something resembling a bicycle, constructed out of mismatched parts of all kinds that had something wrong with them to begin with, and then were coerced together in ways that sort of work. In our case, this means a Cannondale cyclocross frame, mountain bike disc brakes, a seatpost rack with a lock not worth using, who knows wheels, and a stem off a kids’ bike. The front brake almost works. The rear one is 100% useless. It’s pretty funny all around.

But it saved me a minute and a half to run to Panera for lunch. And isn’t that what it’s all about? ;)

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So I was thinking, fingernails are much easier to cut when they’ve been wet, right? While I know they’re not exactly the same, I figured in some ways bones are pretty similar to nails. Now, considering our bodies are mostly water, that could potentially be important. Thankfully it’s not often that we’re subjected to cutting-type forces like nail clippers, but more often bones are subject to impacts and misconfiguration. Given the increased pliability of a wet nail, I wonder if that sort of effect actually makes our skeletal structure hold up to those kinds of things better than it would otherwise. If that’s true, it’s a pretty cool adaptation, imo. Now, given that water content in organisms came before skeletons, how do you suppose something like that would evolve? Just by chance that it happens to work well, various types of materials and keeping the one that held up, or something else? Anybody know more about bone makeup to know if they are in fact affected by water saturation? I know a fully dry bone will crack easily, but that could be from other factors as well, or a similar, but ultimately unrelated process.

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So we had someone come into the store today, just doing your usual browsing around and such, and it was pretty slow at the time. For a while, everything was normal, until:

I should probably buy a lock for my bike too. There are a lot of Hispanics in my neighborhood. They steal stuff a lot.

She then went on (and on….) to talk about how she can’t even concentrate in the grocery store because there are so many of them around and she’s worried about losing stuff, etc. Wow lady, just wow.

So now we as store employees are all faced with a dilemma. Do we:

1. Collapse laughing because it’s been totally quiet until then and now she’s utterly ridiculous
2. Make a snide comment about why she doesn’t just move, to entertain ourselves further
3. Hit her with a wrench for the betterment of society because she’s a moron, or
4. Just ring her up for the lock to please the corporate image, but then mock her for the rest of the day

?

We ended up opting for d), sadly, but made full use of the latter portion. One of the points that came up - why call them Hispanics? If you’re going to be a racist idiot, why bother using the politically correct term in your blatant stereotyping, rather that something either more generic, or offensive, while you’re at it? All the funnier that she was trying to cover up her skewed little mind. Oh, and we did some of a) and b) after she left too, but just by ourselves.

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So I recently found out that there is a ridiculously easy way to circumvent MySpace’s privacy “protections”. You know how normally folks can mark their profile as “private”, or allow viewing their profile, but not their friends or comments? Well, apparently MySpace is pretty lazy about it, and just uses some CSS tricks to hide parts of the page. If you use Firefox, all you have to do is view the page without interpreting the CSS, which can be done by clicking <u>V</u>iew > Page St<u>y</u>le > <u>N</u>o Style in the menu, then visit the “hidden” page you want to see. When you’re done, you can just turn the formatting back on.

Note: You can also accomplish the same thing by using a browser that doesn’t interpret CSS ever, such as links2.

Yet another reason I’m not missing the MySpace account, eh?

[Edit: It appears the hole has been patched now, actually - perhaps from a spike of attention? Let us know if you discover any new open ones!]

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