Category Archives: Humor

Stupid Tricks with LN2

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One of my favorite tricks with liquid nitrogen (LN2) was to pour some onto a chalk tray at the bottom of a chalk board. The skittering, madly boiling liquid would entrain the chalk dust from the tray and transport it to the end where it would plummet to the floor making that wonderful muffled popping sound. The chalk dust would be splatted onto the floor where it would lie as a thin, mysterious white cake. I suspect the janitors were rather less delighted by this than I was.

Today’s youthful chemists, these tender shoots, probably think that dry erase white boards have been around since the time of the pilgrims. That’s OK.  I’ll not speak of squealing chalk, long leatherbound erasers, and chalk dessicated hands. The use of blackboards and chalk will remain our little secret.

A most unlikely question

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Saw Apollo 18 at the cineplex last night. It is filmed in a rough documentary style with “recovered” footage. My recommendation? It’s worth seeing on a big screen. Probably not a good date flick, though.  But that depends on your date.

While at a brew pub in Denver Friday night, I was summoned to a table of 20-something ladies who were obviously celebrating a girls-night-out before a wedding.  The bride-to-be, decorated with a pink faux veil, gestured for me to come answer a question. I walked over and bent down to hear her. It was then that she looked me in the eye and asked a question that most fellows rarely ever hear: “Can I pat your booty?” she said.  I looked at the table of a dozen well coiffed lovelies watching me for some sign of a reaction.  The guest of honor had a list of items in her hand that she needed to check off.  Seeing this, and noting the urgency with which she needed to complete the task, I grinned and “relented”.  At least she asked first. So I stood up, turned around and bent over a few degrees in supplication, and received the pat. With my brief role completed, I turned back around and bid them a farewell. Moments later I found my dinner party and sat down with them, satisfied that I had just participated in an important cultural rite of passage.  Hours later the wife unit assured me that this happened only because I appeared harmless. So it goes.

The Onion Wins Pulitzer Prize

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The Pulitzer Board today announced that Bob Loblaw, associate editor at The Onion, has been awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Faux News. Loblaw was recognized for his groundbreaking 300 word essay on faux journalistic integrity in virtual political news reporting. Loblaw’s knack for news aggregation from the internets has encouraged editors throughout the web to extract and publish virtual news.

The Publisher, Editorial Board, and staff of Lamentations on Chemistry wish to congratulate Bob Loblaw and The Onion on this prestigious award.

The Vowels

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Here is a film by Ken Burns. I had failed to appreciate the role of vowels in American History. Better start paying attention, I guess. And who knew about Abigail Adams?

Outlier

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Gaussling’s kid, GK, made an interesting point. Last night we were assembling my father’s day gift in the living room. It is a battery powered electric lawn mower. Somewhere in the repartee that always accompanies such activities, my 15-year old pointed out that I was an … outlier.  GK understood what this meant qualitatively and used the term properly. This was very amusing. With kids, sometimes you’ll get a glimpse of yourself that no mirror could ever show. For better or worse, GK’s right.

DARPA Investigating On-Board Wii-Based Flight Control System

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April 2, 2011, Guapo, Arizona–  Investigators working under a DARPA grant are experimenting with an advanced flight control system using Wii technology.  Professor Laurentz Fine, titular director of Pultroon University’s Ornithopter Institute (PUOI), disclosed results to the public today on recent aerospace advances at PUOI. 

Professor Fine disclosed that important breakthroughs have been made in a new type of flight control system design that may influence how aircraft of the future are flown.  The prototype devised at PUOI uses motion and position sensors placed on various locations on the arms, hands, and head of the flight crew.  Vibration sensors on the throat are fitted to to the pilots detect the low frequencey growling sounds used for powerplant control input.

According to Professor Fine, the crew members may be placed in a prone position or may be seated in an upright position while operating the aircraft.  Additional sensors may be placed on the legs and feet of the pilots and weapons officers for more channels of control input.

In a typical mission profile the pilot would don a pressure suit fitted with Wii sensors that report the position and acceleration of the limbs. The pilot would buckle into a specially designed ejection seat that would allow for the desired freedom of motion.  The pilot would extend his arms horizontally to either side and issue engine commands by producing gutteral sounds on the throat sensors.

The system has only seen use in simulators at this time, but Professor Fine anticipates applications with remotely piloted vehicles and manned surveillance vehicles by 2016.  Fine suggested that a model for helicopter applications was in the works, but declined to comment further.  He did admit that uncommanded input caused by turbulence was a difficult problem, but progress has been made to control this issue.

Inverse Midas Touch

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I seem to have contracted a case of the inverse Midas touch. Everything I touch turns to crap. I mean everything. Chemistry, friendships, a pot of chili, volunteer work, you name it.  What gets me is that it seems statistically unlikely that I would uncover so many large magnitude failure modes (??) in such a tight temporal cluster.  A flock of black swans landed in my back yard.  A monkey sat at my typewriter and typed “screw you” 500 times.  A simple reaction making a simple product  is fraught with unforseen complications. Son of a …

Okay, the monkey thing didn’t happen.

One thing I’ll get out of this is to be more reticent to volunteer for projects that seem simple in concept. Nothing is simple. Every single thing has degrees of freedom you can’t see and local minima to sink into on the way to the prize. It’s a dangerous world out there and in ways you can’t imagine.

UN to Convene Special Pronunciation Session

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United Nations, New York, USA.  The United Nations has scheduled a special session on pronunciation aimed at the ultimate goal of harmonizing the pronunciation of Roman alphabet characters around the world.  Sir Angus MacGuiness, MP and Adjunct Undersecretary to Her Majesty’s Standing Council on Inflections and Pronunciation, has requested and required the British Delegation to the UN, via unanimous consent of Parliament, to petition for a special session on the subject of the pronunciation of the Roman alphabet.

Speaking for the office of the Adjunct Undersecretary, assistant Duncan Hiney Peebles disclosed to members of the press that the issue of how to pronounce words written in the Roman alphabet has gotten completely out of hand. “Between Polish, Welsh, and Icelandic, we have no idea even how to sound out these words” Peebles flatly stated. “We believe that the situation has gone completely bonkers and that an international body needs to convene on the matter.” 

When pressed on the matter of standarization, Peebles replied “naturally, we believe that British English should be the standard for pronunciation.  Minimally,” Peebles said, “words should be phonetically translated when printed in English speaking media.”

Peebles then went on to cite examples of words that should be phonetically translated even though they use Roman characters. “Take the case of the Islandic Volcano ‘Eyjafjallajökull’ ” Peebles pleaded. “For Christ’s sake!  It is pronounced eh eeya fyatla yokutla. How is anybody supposed to know to pronounce a double ‘ll’ as a ‘t’ sound? And then there is Polish and Welsh. This is insane and we have stop pretending that it is not a problem, ” Peebles pleaded.

A resolution been proposed and will come before the General Assembly in June of 2012, but is not expected to pass.

The tell-off

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One of the tricks screen writers and playwrights use to pull you into the finale of a story is the tell-off.  You know what I’m talking about. It is the monolog or the heavily one-sided dialog where one party reads the riot act to the other.  The best tell-offs are dispensed with some verbal whup-ass and topped with liberal dollup of comeuppance on a big honkin’ slice of just deserts. My Gawd, it’s some kinda good!

In the play I was in recently, my character was told off or shouted down by three other characters. The tell-off and a chase scene are the staples of American theatre and cinema.

Here is a link to an editorial addressed to the president of SUNY Albany, found in the journal Genome Biology. So, president Gerrge M. Philip has been told-off in no uncertain terms.  Now, somebody in a red Fez has to chase him through a seedy bazaar in Marrakech with goats and chickens scattering everywhere for the total dramatic effect.  It’s the natural order of things.