Another day spent in idleness.

[silveradept]

Well, not quite. There was Hare and Guu, there was noticing that a bill had come for me and that I was already four days late on it (nobody at the house mentioned it, and I never noticed it - absentmindedness for the loss, and an addition 2% late fee, but it's okay as this was a cheap bill - still I'm mildly annoyed that such happened. Just means I need to check religiously to see what mail I have, and I'll think about asking fellow bill-payers to let me know when bill mail arrives. Oh, well, no harm done and no collection agencies at my doorstep. Wonder if my credit rating or my relationship with the company took a hit though - I'm late on the first bill in my name because I didn't even notice it was there. That's sad and embarrassing.

I get tossed around two different workplaces, starting Monday. Should be interesting being able to compare between the two and see the differences. This does mean that I will be working eight hour or more days from here on out to the end of the summer. Less time for gaming and such, but that's okay. Credit is still credit.

Feeling a little on the frazzed and annoyed side because of the late bill and because I was told I needed to CC someone on an e-mail that I didn't really think needed to be, as I was asking a clarifying question between what was on the schedule and what had been discussed. After that was done, if things were different, I would have said something about it to the scheduler. Ah, well. Still learning procedure, I guess.

It rained today - I heard a couple thunder-booms. Although, it's been nearly a week now and this strange sinus-y thingy hasn't gone away. I'm pretty convinced now that it's allergies or something. I'll go get the proper medicine for it tomorrow. Much of my day, however, minus the frantic trip to the post office, was spent running a wrecking crew on the last bits of Sora's Mode in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories

You knew this would happen. You had to. Snake on a plane. Yep. Snake on a motherf--king plane. *sigh*

In slightly perkier news, if you're feeling a little flat or small, try on The perfect female breast bra and be the envy of all the size-obsessed people. Well, at least until the illusion comes off. But we're not responsible for those consequences.

Smoke detectors explode when Duracell batteries are used. Corporations have probably been trying to figure out how to do that for years. Be careful, now - if it says "made for X batteries", it might really be true and you could be endangering yourself if you try to use something else.

The Striaght Dope crushes one of my hopes: getting rid of facial hair permanently is neither easy nor cheap. It would have been nice to not have a beard appear when I'm not looking. Oh, well, guess we keep shaving.

A good joke to play at a Dr. Who gathering. Or on people who might actually believe it. Or anybody who could use a little shock out of their drudgery.

In the "government going in the wrong direction again" department, scientific supply store couple gets federal visit. The reason? They sell stuff that can possibly be used to make illegal fireworks. Yep, that's right. Science experimentation at home is being scrapped because of the fear that someone will take that science fun and turn it to terror purposes. By legislating this out, you might defeat some young would-be terrorists, but you also probably rub out many more would-be scientists who could find ways of combating those terrorists, or possibly helping in other chemical areas. It's unfortunate, but at some point there has to be a willingness to say "Okay, fine. We might get one terrorist who wants to blow up a federal building, but the ninety-nine-thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine other scientists will do enough good (many times over - ed) that we can accept having one and just hope that law enforcement will catch that one terrorist before any damage is done." Not to mention a nation without scientists is likely to be caught by surprise, either when one of the artifacts of a scientific time goes "Yoink!" and catches them with their collective pants down, or some other country's scientists develop something that will make it so that the citizens of your country become the slaves of theirs.

I wonder, though, if this is a "natural" extension of the ant-intellectual trend (or perceived trend - much of the stupidity I see is achieved by groups... see the Power of Stupidity, I suppose) of the United States. Rein the eggheads in and stop them from doing things that the average American doesn't understand. Drag them away from their pursuits because John Q. American thinks everyone smarter than him is gloating about it? Or is plotting to take over the country/world? Someone, please explain this trend to me - I don't really understand it well enough to mock it, nor to combat it.

Comments

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

You should be Ok on the bill front. Most companies have a 10 day or so grace period, especially on the first bill. If you're REALLY concerned, you could probly call them and ask them, but really, I'm sure you're fine.

The bit about the batteries is disturbing. I thought that batteries were batteries and they were all made from the same stuff. A bit scary. I wonder what else can't take Duracell's?

On the beard front - Erin's said that's going to be the most expensive part, getting the beard lasered off. Ouch. My suggestion to her (and to you, now that I thikn about it) is to change shaving creame. Noxema makes a shave minimizer shaving creame (For men). I've no clue if it works, but I can vouch for the ladie's version keeping my leg hair at a a minimum. I realize that male facial hair grows faster than women's leg hair, but I can go about 2 weeks between shaving using the noxema shave gel, wheras regular stuff only works for about 5 days. Worth a try, eh?

I have no comment on the perky breast bra....just...*shakes head and mumbles*

...so science is now bad? *shakes head*

Also, did you notice the 3rd top story on the battery site? teen kills over spilled beer (http://www.local6.com/news/9317244/detail.html) oi.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

Oh, and if you read the beer article, please note that the persons in the bar were 19 and 18. the 18 yr old did the spilling....do you see anything in the article about investigating why an 18 yr old even HAD a beer in a pub?!

[silveradept]

In order: No idea how long the bill was actually sitting on the table...

We'll find out soon enough. Too bad for Duracell that it's their batteries - but maybe the next time it'll be someone else's.

Maybe. Got more than enough shave gel, though, so no need to go buy more for a very long time.

Science used to not be bad, it used to be encouraged. But at some point, the idea of "smart=bad, arrogant, smug egghead" got transplated from the schoolyards of its birth into an active part of the American consciousness, and now, it's the official unofficial attitude. What should have stayed as an elementary school phase, at the very worst a mechanism for insecure high school jerks to push other people around with, somehow became a badge of distinction.

And so, our math and science scores spiral downward, our funding for science and scientific agencies like NASA plummet, because lots of sciences don't produce widgets that you can take to your funders and say "this is what your money built" - that's mostly engineering's prvince. Plus, your funder has to understand what you're doing, or they're not likely to fund you again. It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy - as scientific interest, the capacity to understand it, and the attitude that science should dumb itself down to John Q. American, rather than John Q. American raising himself to understand science keep getting entrenched, then we're going to have to keep importing our science and exporting our scientific work to countries that so understand the value of science.

Being proud of being ignorant is a recipe for disaster.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

I think we had a battery explode years ago inside a flashlight, but I couldn't tell you what kind of battery or flashlight it was.

At the same time that this whole attitude against science and math is being spread around, you've got groups lke the AAUW concentrating on encouraging girls to stay in math and science. i always used to profess to hate science and math when I was in high school, except for physics. I loved physics. I have no idea why. and Statistics? My exact cup of tea. I don't know if I would have concentrated on the statistical side of human development if I hadn't been encouraged my senior year of high school by a female math teacher.

I think funding fo reaearch is way down because for the most part, there is no physical result unless it's an experiment, butthen you get all the folks who are against whatever the experiment is.

If science "dumbs itself down", then what will people ever learn? Even in school with the separation of "smart kids" from "average" kids and "learning impared" -- try putting one of those "smart" kids in the "average" or "imapired" class and see what happens. The student gets bored and stops caring. Likewise if you put one of the "Average" or "impaired" kids in a "smart kids" class. It seems more and more that the trend is to take those smart kids and shove them into average classes becauce no one wants to encourage those smart kids to actually do something with the smarts they have. People thikn being smart is a dangerous thing, and I wish i wasn't so.

[przxqgl.livejournal.com]

guess we keep shaving.

Grow A Beard!

I should be unjust to the age were I to omit the mention of a special point of "physical culture" which has long been neglected. You find as you come into man's estate, that hair has a tendency to grow upon your face. It is the mark by which God meant that men and women should be distinguished from each other in the crowd. That hair was placed there in infinite wisdom, but your fathers have been cutting it off from their chins in small crops for thirty to fifty years, thus impugning Nature's policy, wasting precious time, drawing a great deal of good blood, creating a great deal of bad, and trying to erase from their faces the difference which was intended to be maintained between them and those of women. If you are a man and have a beard, wear it. You know it was made to wear. It is enough to make a man with a decent complement of information and a common degree of sensibility (and a handsome beard) deny his kind, to see these smooth-faced men around the streets, and actually showing themselves in female society! Let us have one generation of beards.

-- Timothy Titcomb, Esq. 1858
Titcomb's Letters to Young People

[silveradept]

Hehe. It would be easier, but I don't even grow a full beard, just some mustache and chin fuzz, and a couple stripes of stuff on either side. Nothing particularly exviting about that. Would still have to groom it regularly anyway.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

I think with your field of work you ought to be clean shaven, since some kids are afraid of beards :-P (And i mean, you've already got that "OMG he's a scary giant" going on for you. :-P)....we're kidding, we're kidding.

[przxqgl.livejournal.com]

santa claus has a beard... jesus has a beard...

the reason some kids are afraid of beards is because they have been brainwashed to believe that a clean shaven face is natural on men... and it isn't!

[2dlife.livejournal.com]

That science article scares me. I did very few home-science experiments but all through secondary school (GCSE and A-level) chemistry we had experiments galore. In retrospect, most of them used hazardous chemicals (the worst chemical accident I suffered in high school was when I took the fuming HCl out of the fume hood and ended up with acidic spit for a week.) We did the lithium + water, sodium + water, potassium + water series of experiments (with blast screens). We made nylon, acetyl alicylic acid, magnesium oxide, iron via thermite, silvered glass via silver nitrate, silver halides (which we then watched change color when exposed to light), mercury (in a fume hood). We used geiger counters, liquid nitrogen, those big spark generating things, lasers, microscopes... we bred fruit flies to study genetics and did surprisingly few dissections (the focus was on theoretical biology, not anatomy). And those are the only experiments I remember.

Yeah, I think I'm sending my kids abroad for high school.

[2dlife.livejournal.com]

s/the only/only the/

[the-entity.livejournal.com]

Might not be any better abroad, or at least not for long. In the UK, you can still get chemistry sets for kids, but there's also (I believe) a law restricting the right of private individuals to distil stuff - I forget if it's a general anti-distillation law, or just when booze is involved. I remember being outraged when I heard of that. I suspect many of the chemical experiments you describe would be demonstration-only in the UK these days, also (and even then, I wish we'd had more experiments like that...)

I don't think this arises directly from anti-intellectualism, to address Silver's point. On the government/corporate side you have government paranoia and nanny-statism and fear of litigation, which are entirely distinct evils. On the public side, this all needs public acceptance or apathy to progress, and gets it in spades, but I don't think anti-intellectualism factors into that. When I was a kid, the anti-intellectualism of the kids who didn't like the class brainbox (me) never stopped them from liking chemistry, especially when explosions were involved. (All chemistry teachers should be trained in how to make stuff blow up, I feel.)

I assume the trend is driven by risk-aversion and by the TV- and computer-driven leisure lives of kids nowadays. There's so many other things kids can be doing (99% of them involving a cathode-ray tube - or plasma screen, these days) and the people who really care that much about the death of the chemistry set are too few in number.

[silveradept]

Yeah - I admit, that my most favorite experiment in high school chem class was extracting hydrogen using magnesium and hydrochloric acid, mixing it with some air up to a certain volume in the bottle, then lighting it up to see which had the biggest bang. Lots of (relatively harmless) fun.

[the-entity.livejournal.com]

Indeed. We sometimes used to do that outside class too - passing electricity through salt solution gives you hydrogen off one end, and chlorinates the water at the other. Needs nothing more than a battery and salt water.

[2dlife.livejournal.com]

Get a good battery and you can electroplate. I had a collection of copper quarters.