A bit more herky jerky than I hoped but, well, it was 6 in the morning and I was standing astride a hazardous woodpile:
Meanwhile, “Obama strongly supports mosque near Ground Zero.” Maybe it’s finally Morning in America.
Archives for posts with tag: Devin
Last night, as the sun went down on Sam and I’s Perseid perch, I tried guessing where on our eastern skyline the sun was going to rise. I had thought the Perseids would be the astronomical wonder of the night; I had no idea the Stonehenge-like precision I was in for.
After rousing a somnolent Sam, we headed east for an odd view of Interstate 5 near Alger.
On the way down, I stopped the car to check a tall till outcrop for, I don’t know, mammoth teeth. Sam told me she heard a menacing dog nearby; I told her it was a squawking bird in the tree above. She told me it was probably a killdeer and that I was harassing their ground-based nest. I snarked back that it sounded like my bigger threat was a kill-joy. Two big dogs came bounding out of the underbrush fifteen meters distant, teeth bared and snarling. I raised my rock hammer to a defensive position and they retreated back into the bushes while I returned to the car, appropriately cowed.
She found this guy and a friend waiting on our porch at home for us. I think I’m going to name him Odin.
Sam and I have a joke where I start shouting that before any trip over the mountains. I explained what it is to Levin and Rachel just this weekend as we drove I-90 over to Ephrata.
That’s a spectrogram of seismic activity near Hoodsport on the Olympic Peninsula from yesterday. Don’t worry too much about how to read it but do notice there’s a whole lot of shaking going down— hundreds of events in the last few days. Check out this great web gadget from the UW where you can plot realtime tremor data on a Google Maps API. I’ll write up a proper ETS post later this week.
You’ll almost certainly feel none of this shaking… unless the Cascadia Subduction Zone uses the minor oomph imparted from this long rumble to trigger the dread megathrust earthquake. But, hey, at least the Northwest will have had a pretty last few weeks of life.
While I was telling my father about my delicious refried-beans-and-fake-meat dinner, my mother cautioned in the background that fake-meat patties have MSG in them. Knowing full well such a bold claim requires rapid verification, I headed to the kitchen and checked the package. The scariest sounding thing I found was something named methylcellulose (a chemically inert emulsifier, it turns out). I noticed an “autolyzed yeast extract” but chose not to mention it. Sure enough, I soon heard Mom in the background mentioning yeast extracts. I rebuffed it after a quick Google, suggesting that the (to me, scarier sounding) “hydrolyzed” yeast extracts were probably the worser threat.
Mea culpa, Mom. All yeast extracts may contain free glutamic acid, the crystalline solid salt of which would be monosodium glutamate, MSG. Free glutamic acid is prevalent in parmesan cheese, soy sauce and grape juice— parmesan cheese, for example, has 1200 mg per 100 grams. It looks like (from this Wikipedia page) like hydrolyzed yeast extracts have 5000 to 20000 mg per 100 grams, so at least I got the point on the “hydrolyzed sounds worse.” But yes, autolyzed yeast extract appears to contain MSG. I’ll write more about it in the future (it is pretty strang esounding) but, really, the process and product itself don’t seem any worse than anything else in modern industrial food, though. For example— Vegemite is pretty much entirely yeast extract and flavor. Looks like the only way to get by is sticking to a pure Bovril diet.
They changed it to yeast extract for a while but, don’t worry— it’s back to beef.
Update: Just checked my email to see the note my Mom sent at 7:23 pm, blockquoting this Wisegeek article. It even mentions Vegemite. I feel like Principle Skinner.
So I think this might be in the top ten Worst Places On Earth.
It’s a lake in the southern Ural Mountains next to the site of the second-worst inadvertent nuclear disaster in history. Starting in the 1950s, the Soviets used it as an open-air spent nuclear fuel pit— this only after they stopped dumping it into the local river which flowed into the Ob…
They supposedly kept 4.44 exabecquerels— an SI unit measuring radioactivity, I had to look it up— worth of waste in the lake. A meaningless number, I know— Wikipedia suggests the Chernobyl disaster released 5 to 12 of the same unit, and that’s over thousands of kilometers. This would all be disgusting on its own without the 1957 Kyshtym disaster angle. The nearby Mayak facility had a coolant malfunction in a storage tank leading to a non-nuclear explosion and a radioactive cloud hundreds of miles wide. Hundreds of people died agonizing, mysterious deaths while tens of thousands were evacuated from a closed area the Soviets later covered up as a nature preserve. The CIA found out about it early but kept its lips sealed while rumors swirled for decades; they didn’t want to harm the fledgling American nuclear power industry.
Flash forward to poor Russia— specifically, Russia as of 0935 UTC this morning, courtesy of the Terra satellite. Not all of those are clouds. The fires plaguing Russia are advancing on Ozersk, the renamed town next to the old Mayak facility. Russian scientists had already been warning of the fires aerosolizing leftover Chernobyl fallout. I tried finding a good “Kremlin choked in smog” picture but got too disheartened to search after seeing pravda.ru had “Half-isolated Saakashvili harbors aggressive plans against Russia still” as the top story above the fires. I kid you not, this is the picture they used of him:
Welcome to the twenty-first century, everybody.
We engaged in some good natured ribbing of Sam and my mother this evening when they were briefly psychologically unable to differentiate a holiday season depicted in a sitcom and our real world’s actual timetable. Driving home, Sam and I listened to “Some People Don’t Even Know If It’s Christmastime.” I wanted to link it as a punchline to that life vignette but somehow a cursory glance for “Daniel Johnston Christmas” yielded the Battle of Kruger:
.. something I think of as an early example of how omnipresent viral videos can get now. I remember seeing it at my cousin’s home in San Diego and my neighboring cubicle inside a week of eachother back when it was catching fire. Now if only it was the singer-songwriter I wanted. The Internet is a many-splendored thing but it’s also damned fickle.
Go team Human Rights. Sam and I got to pump our fists for a rally downtown. Now everybody cross your fingers for the next two courts…
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