Long Burn

Bike errand

2009-02-15T09:42:00.008+01:00

My mission yesterday morning was to bike across town to the auto parts store and pick up a new battery for the car. Overall I use my bike to help my car a lot more than the other way around, and it feels good. Like, I don't drive somewhere to go biking, I just go for a ride. And I fix my bike myself but sometimes I bike in connection with taking the car to the garage.

My friend Tara wanted me to take a picture of myself while biking. This was after coming up the big hill.

The sun came out, finally, and dried off the paths. I got to take my touring bike out instead of my city bike with studded tire. It felt good to stretch my legs on my all time favorite bike.

There were lots of kids out sledding and in the afternoon I went back to this hill with Anders and he practiced going over the jump.

Car battery in the 'manbasket'.

Mouse finger

2009-01-31T11:52:00.002+01:00

My right index finger has been complaining for two or three weeks. What it is is 'tennis elbow' in my mouse clicking finger.

So I have spent the last three days training myself to mouse left-handed.

It is not natural, but neither is it supernatural.

Letters from Charles Darwin

2009-01-25T11:32:00.003+01:00

February 12, 2009 is the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth. My wife is making an exhibit in his honor for the Natural History Museum in Lund Sweden. She found some letters that he had sent in the library and I helped her read and transcribe them. His handwriting is neat but hurried, he wrote with a quill and he used some abbreviations, like 'cd' for 'could' and 'wd' for 'would'.

Here are the letters:
_____

Down Bromley

Kent Aug 19 1868

My dear Hooker,

I dare say you could find some naturalist who could obtain for me from Professor Nillson a little piece of information. It is whether with the Reindeer in which both Sexes are horned, are the horns first developed (or are they developed in a greater degree) at an earlier or later age, or at nearly the same period of life as with all other deer, in which the males alone have horns? The comparison would be fairest with species of nearly the same size and inhabiting the same climate.

If Prof. Nillson does not know, would it be possible to interest him enough to obtain for me in his own country this piece of information about which I am very curious.

Believe me,
Yours very sincerely
Charles Darwin
_____

Down.
Bromley.
Kent. S. C.

Oct 31st

Dear and Honored Sir,

I am very much obliged for your great kindness in sending me the reference about the Reindeer through Dr. Hooker. When next in London I will consult the work, and should be grateful for any further information from you. You will easily perceive that what I wish to ascertain is whether there is any relation whatever between the period of development of a character and its transmission to one sex alone or to both sexes.

I have much pleasure in enclosing my photograph, and if it would not cause you too much trouble I should very much like to possess one of you, as I have a collection of the photographs of eminent naturalists.

With the most sincere respect
I remain yours sincerely and obliged
Charles Darwin

Swedish public school

2009-01-10T08:59:00.003+01:00

Here's a picture of the wood shop in F's old grade school. He was 8 at the time and made a cutting board in the shape of a fish. A year later in sewing he made a cool sea monster stuffed animal for his little brother.

Flat pack nation

2009-01-09T21:59:00.000+01:00

Children in Sweden are expected to assemble furniture.

Botalit High Voltage Driver

2009-01-09T21:52:00.003+01:00

I was going to throw out this scrappy old screwdriver and then I saw that it is rated for 12,000 V, so I decided to keep it. You never know.

Dog stories

2009-01-03T14:27:00.002+01:00

Our five-year old son has been hard to put to sleep lately. He talks and asks questions and fidgets and wants to go to the bathroom or drink some milk. The last couple of nights though we tried something new. After stories and a snack and brushing teeth he lies in his bed and I tell him three dog stories, and then he doesn't have to sleep, he just has to rest quietly and think. After 10 minutes of thinking he is fast asleep. The key is the dog stories. Here are plot summaries of the stores so far.

1. St. Bernard. Strong faithful dog with keen sense of smell digs out avalanche victims and gives them rum.

2. Snoopy. Five sons (my Karkula cousins) and a black and white spotted dog who likes to jump in the boat and go fishing, watch when the fish are cleaned and eat fish cubes straight from the frying pan.

3. Chow chow with black tongue is out for a walk with his master and they discover an American Indian camp and watch them clean a buffalo and use the fur for a blanket and make buffalo stew and use a tiny buffalo bone as a sewing needle and make a drinking cup out of a horn. The dog gets a big buffalo bone to chew on.

4. Loosely based on Jack London's White Fang/Call of the Wild. Nice family dog discovers his roots in the wilderness and becomes a wolf.

5. Huskie goes out in a kayak with his master who harpoons a whale. Whale gets mad and breaks the kayak in two. The master is knocked out and the huskie swims him into shore and drags him onto a sled and pulls him back to the igloo, saving his life. The husky is rewarded with his favorite food: frozen chunks of fish.

6. Police dog captures bad guys and sniffs out stolen goods.

7. My brother's black lab Nico likes going for walks with kids, fetching and digging holes in the back yard.

8. My family's spaniel Goggles is out grouse hunting with Dad and my brothers and he runs off and doesn't come back. They call to Goggles and finally must drive home. Dad goes back after a few days and ties one of his T-shirts onto a tree in the woods where they had parked the car. Dad goes back yet again and there is Goggles by the shirt with his master's scent. Goggles never runs off again.

9. The younger brother whippet begs his parents to let him go to the dog races to show that he is faster than any other dog. He eats his food, sleeps at night and goes running every day, and wins the race.

10. The pirate dog's crew is lost at sea and thinks of eating him. The pirate dog climbs to the top of the mast and stands guard for three days. Finally he sees land and guides his crew to safety.

11. Seeing eye dog helps his blind master get through life.

12. Firehouse dalmation rides on the fire truck and saves a fireman from a burning building.

That was four night's worth of dog stories. Got any ideas??

Happy New Year

2009-01-02T17:08:00.007+01:00

I'd like to congratulate everyone on completing a full orbit around the sun during 2008, and I hope that our ride in 2009 will be at least that much fun again, and hopefully more so.

The Holidays were kind to me, including a new digital camera and bike seat. I got out of the house for a while this afternoon and used them both.

They put a pair of bulls on the top of a hill near our house to welcome people driving down from the North. It's the highest point for miles around.

They put up three windmills earlier this year, the first of many. You can see we haven't gotten any snow yet, only frost. Temperatures in the teens today. Chance of snow tomorrow - ??

Then I rode to a wildlife area north of town. All the ducks were collected in a small patch of open water where the stream enters.

We had a good hard freeze last night and a few people were out skating.

Just north of the pond are these Viking burial mounds, for someone named 'Sten'.

Pre-dawn rumbler

2008-12-16T10:25:00.002+01:00

We were shaken awake this morning by an earthquake. My body reacted very strongly, I flew out of bed and up the stairs to see the kids. I had been deep asleep and when the 'fight or flight' response wore off I broke out in a cold sweat, took the porcelain bus out for a spin and almost fainted. Things are pretty much back to normal now. I hadn't screwed the side panel back onto the PC after installing a DVD burner, and it fell off, but that's the only effect we've seen. It was unexpected and at 4.7 not that large of a quake, Sweden is not an earthquake zone. The whole thing was deja vu all over again. We were living in Pasadena when the 1994 Northridge earthquake hit, also a couple of hours before dawn.

Hat Trick

2008-12-09T10:23:00.002+01:00

Last night I scored the cyclist's hat trick: fix three flats in the same day. It was good too because I had to fold up the laundry and move it out of the workroom before I could start in on the bikes. My wife's tire had a thorn, my son a shard of glass and my bike a sharp peice of metal.

Our five year old has the chicken pox so I am at home taking care of him today. He is covered in red spots from top to toe but so far full of vim and not itchy.

Mountain Men

2008-12-06T13:37:00.003+01:00

There were several years when I thought the greatest thing you could be was a mountain man. This was mostly inspired by our Scout leaders who were real mountain men in their spare time. 'Tiny' was the largest of these men. He walked me through the process of making mocassins -- where to measure the foot and how make a pattern, how to hide the stitches so you don't walk on them. As everybody knows the best mountain man thread is waxed dental floss. He shared leather, deerskin for the tops and buffalo soles. Us Scouts made leather pouches, the mountain man's 'possibles bag', because it held the things that made life possible that you'd need even if you lose track of your birchbark canoe and Duluth packs while shooting rapids: Flint, steel and char cloth for starting a fire, needle and thread to sew yourself back up and mosquito repellent, maybe some water purification pills or a snakebite kit. Our ideal was that everything should be 'old timey'. Our leaders made tipi poles and we'd tie them to the top of Tiny's microbus and go camping, like characters out of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Tiny was a blacksmith. He made a set of throwing tomahawks and we got to practice throwing them in his backyard. The trick is to judge the spin correctly for the distance. After some practice we were able to throw a double loop and drive the blade into the face of an oak log out back of Tiny's house.

Anthropomorphic rant

2008-12-03T09:37:00.001+01:00

Thanks to Papa Twister for inspiring this.

First we stabbed the pumpkin with our long knives and then we cut a hole in the top of its head and disembowled it. We cut the flesh into cubes which were boiled, mashed and frozen. We proudly displayed the corpse on our front step with a flame inside.

Drive a green car

2008-11-30T09:47:00.004+01:00

In money terms, emitting carbon dioxide gives you a lot of bang for the buck. But why not turn this around, and not emit some large mass of carbon dioxide for only a little bit of buck? This is the idea behind carbon offsets.

Here's a place where you can buy a carbon offset that will turn your car into a carbon neutral vehicle. To quote the late great Chef Tell, Very simple, very easy. These people achieve the carbon offsets through clean energy, landfill gas capture and farm power.

Makes a great Christmas gift!

Biking update

2008-11-30T09:04:00.006+01:00

My New Year's Promise for 2008 was to ride my bikes farther than I drive our car.

Mileage totals, 30 November:
Biking, 4608 km, 2864 miles
Driving, 6080 km, 3779 miles

This doesn't look so good. In order to reach my goal I'd need to bike 50 km a day every day up to the end of the year and not use the car at all -- to pick up a Christmas tree or buy food or bring a carload of equipment to the electron storage ring for a study.

Even so, its been an interesting year. I started taking bike maintenance seriously -- it's a lot more fun to ride when your bike's in shape. I discovered that you can do without a car pretty well most of the time. The kids bike to school and we bike to work, and most of the trips to get groceries are by bike.

There are times when it is hard to do without a car though. We visit my wife's Aunt a few times a year, she's in her 80s and lives alone. We drove up to Stockholm to see my wife's parents this summer, and that one trip was 25% of our annual use. And sometimes I can't avoid driving to work -- doing this once is worth two weeks of biking, since most of the distance of the commute is by train.

In fact, most of the time when I drive I am not alone in the car. Like we were four to Stockholm, so I should subtract 1500 km * (1 - 0.25) = 1125 km. Similar trips to see Aunt give credit of 500 km. If I wanted to I could add some bike miles since I've noticed that most of the time I am biking into the wind, not to mention bonus kilometers for heavy driving mist, frozen slush and full body splashes from light duty trucks.

Adjusted mileage totals, 30 November:
Biking, 4608 km, 2864 miles
Driving, 4455 km, 2769 miles

Not half bad?

Fun fact

2008-11-25T20:25:00.002+01:00

In Holland we were told that chocolate is more nutritious than cheese. It is an accepted fact among the Dutch.

Bushisms

2008-11-23T17:08:00.000+01:00

The Complete Bushisms on Slate.

"How can you possibly have an international agreement that's effective unless countries like China and India are not full participants?"—Camp David, April 19, 2008

"A lot of times in politics you have people look you in the eye and tell you what's not on their mind."—Sochi, Russia, April 6, 2008

"And so, General, I want to thank you for your service. And I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us in Iraq."—meeting with Army Gen. Ray Odierno, Washington, D.C., March 3, 2008

"More than two decades later, it is hard to imagine the Revolutionary War coming out any other way."—Martinsburg, W. Va., July 4, 2007

The Election.

2008-11-22T21:00:00.002+01:00

Fresca asks, what do folks say about the election?

I am pleased to say that what I am hearing now is a stunned silence, because 53% of the US electorate has just removed the favorite topic of conversation for a certain sort around here. Those who were secretly hoping the Bradley effect would confirm their judgement of Americans. What will they do now?

1. Last week my wife went to a dinner for all the moms at A's pre-school. A girls'/moms' night out. A mom from the Netherlands (she is a sex therapist) explains how she could never live in the U.S. because she has serious concerns about our legal system. Around the table, heads nod in agreement. My wife thinks carefully and explains, Well, we lived in Los Angeles for five years and I never once thought about that.

2. First son comes home from fifth grade with a homework assignment where he should answer questions about a Swedish newspaper article about the new U.S. President. The article says that some of Obama's policies would not be accepted in Sweden, for example that he is in favor of the death penalty. (I didn't know that and a with a little research I learned that he is for the death penalty for heinous crimes but he is also in favor of being able to establish guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt).

So. I explain to Swedes that the Unites States is a Federal system (it's like Germany, I say). States make their own laws and Minnesota for example banned the death penalty in 1906, something that did not occur in Sweden until 1921. (Until then, conviction for crimes such as murder, witchcraft, adultery, incest, fraud, abuse, sodomy and bestiality could and did result in capital punishment.) But these people will not let themselves be sidetracked by detail or fact: As everybody knows, the U.S. represents the worst of human nature: unfettered capitalism, rape of the ecosystem, ignorance and the perversion of all that civilization has to be proud of. (Another example is that the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote in the U.S. before Swedish women were granted the same right.) Yet, year after year there is one argument that always wins, We wouldn't want it to be like it is in the U.S.!

Last week at lunch in Copenhagen a group of students told me that they read that Scandinavia is held up as a negative example by the right in the U.S. What do they think about us, they asked? I explained how some in the U.S. think Socialism is the first, second and third step on the road to hell, and how some people believe taxes pervert morals, turn people into liars and legitimize businesses hiding their income. I got a pretty good laugh out of a German guy when I told about Ronald Reagan's Nine Scariest Words in the English Language: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. What the students couldn't accept is that many (most?) Americans seriously believe our country is better than theirs. If you asked the students would earnestly explain about differences in child mortality, life expectancy, access to education, crime, divorce rates, death penalty and so on. And it is well known around here that Danes are the happiest people on the planet.

What makes me proud to be an American. First off, if you want to test your patriotism, try living outside the US. I took a taxi a few years ago and the driver told me he was from Iran. Oh, I knew someone from Iran when I went to college I said, now he is a chiropractor and makes a lot of money. That could only happen in the U.S., he said. I'm a civil engineer, but in Sweden all I'll ever be is a taxi driver. The unemployment rate among Somalian refugees in Minnesota is 15 to 20%; in Sweden it is 80%. Nobody assimilates immigrants like the U.S., and Europe has a much larger problem with homegrown terrorists than the U.S. does, and I think its because immigrants in the U.S. are too busy working to make payments on credit card debt. But don't try telling that to people around here, because they know that the U.S. invented racial discrimination. (It would take too long to explain that the very civil rights movement they support is an American invention, or that we fought a bloody civil war over the issue, and so on.)

Just as Swedes should take the beam out of their own eye, so ought Americans demote. I hate to indulge in schadenfreude but after 8 years of being on the shit list, a new day has dawned my friends when we can turn the page and begin a new chapter of history.

Finally, the short answer to Fresca is that I have been congratulated on the election by many people of good nature: Danes, Swedes, Germans, Dutch, two Norwegians and a Canadian.

The kid

2008-11-10T19:29:00.004+01:00

Our 5-year-old 'A' told everybody at day care that it was his Mom's birthday. They let him cut out pictures and make a really nice card and we all told him how nice it was even though his mom's birthday is not for another 6 months.

Another time A told everyone at day care that his mom's bike tire blew up in a huge explosion so they had to walk to school. Nothing of the sort had happened.

Wife: Were you talking on your cell phone when you took A to the park yesterday?
Me: No.
Wife: Because A told me that you didn't play with him at all because you were talking on the phone.
Me: No, I didn't take my phone with me anywhere over the weekend. I left it at home on purpose so I could get away.

I am really proud of this little guy for his creativity and self confidence and ability to tell entertaining stories -- but when he tries to get his old man in trouble, then he has crossed the line!

Family photos are best shared

2008-11-02T20:04:00.005+01:00

Recently I posted a photo of the homesteading Johanson family. Paraphrasing Rigtenzin's comment, This really nice..family photos are best shared.

And so here's another family photo:

Standing from left are my brothers Lowell Mark and Daniel Peter, front row from left sisters Beryl Allison and Andrea Susan, and Dad and Mom. The first thing to notice is that everyone looks so happy to be there. The photo was taken during my family's golden days in Crookston. Next, I'm not there; I wouldn't be born for a couple of years yet. Then there are the insider's secrets. Allison liked her stockings and wanted to show them off. That's my all-time favorite lamp on the left side. I grew up with that lamp and those philodendrons, they are my favorite kind of houseplant. Dan and Lowell have cool hairdo's and spectacles. And so forth.

Trip to Holland

2008-11-02T15:36:00.015+01:00

Our family took a vacation in Holland last week. Some of us vacationed anyway as the Swedish schools were having fall break. I was officially on duty and gave some lectures at the University of Utrecht, and spent what time I could with my family. We stayed at a youth hostel in the countryside and rented bikes to get around. My camera went on strike so all I have to show you is these fuzzy cell phone photos.

Here's one of the University buildings. Colors are popular in Holland. The plastic trays they used at the airport to X-Ray your pocket change used this same combination.

Holland is a cyclist's paradise. Every road has a bike lane. The Dutch favor an upright cycling posture, as I imagine the handlebar-moustached Sturmey Archer himself rode.

Here is a canal in Utrecht, a beautiful city. Back in the day merchants would load their goods out of barges through these doors, and then sell them through the shop at street level.

Utrecht has one of the best post offices I have seen in a long time. Public buildings like this (train stations also catch my eye) are a high water mark of civilization. We don't seem to be building things like this anymore?

We hung out in the countryside, biked into Utrecht and one day took the train in to Amsterdam. After our walk through central Amsterdam I can only conclude that the favorite native sons are not Rembrandt, Escher or Vermeer but Marley and Guevara. I carried our younger son on my shoulders and we sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star at the tops of our lungs through the streets of the red light district on our way from Rembrandt's house (worth the trip) to the train station. Yes they have women in the windows. You can smell wacky weed and the shops sell hash lollipops. I don't think much of what was going on registered with either of our sons, I imagine their innocence protects them. When we sing Twinkle Twinkle, in the last line, 'How I wonder what you are', you have to say the 'are' like a pirate would, 'Arrrgh'.

These stands selling french fries are popular. They are named after a famous statue of a little boy relieving himself. The fries are really good -- served hot in a paper cone with mayo.

I don't know if you can see this so well but it is a triple-decker bicycle parking ramp, located outside the central station in Amsterdam.

At no time did I see any land that was more than two feet above the waterline. The waterline is easy to find because there are ditches, canals and rivers everywhere. Somebody explained that they have discovered how to make a watertight lining so some new houses are built with basements, but the problem is that these houses can float up out of the ground. The countryside is lousy with mallards.

The Johansons

2008-10-18T20:10:00.002+02:00

Let me introduce Peter and Christine Johanson who homesteaded outside of Wheaton Minnesota in the 1880s, and 7 of their 16 kids. Back row from left Algot, Helmer and Oscar. Front row, Clarence, Peter, Alvin, Arthur, Christine and Chester. Clarence was my grandpa. He fought with the Ohio Signal Corps in Belgium in WWI and then returned to Traverse County. Worked as an accountant at a creamery and eventually testified against the owner who was put away for skimming. True story. I inherited his typewriter, an Underwood No. 5. He took over the farm and that's where my mom grew up. My uncle farms it today and one of my cousins farms nearby. I knew my grandpa of course and his brother Chester, but not so much of the others; I think some of them ran off out west.

Long Burn is Dead. Long Live Long Burn!

2008-10-17T18:40:00.003+02:00

Well its been quite a week here in post-Long Burn land. I have not had a chance to think two thoughts in a row since returning from Tokyo. Short version is I thought up a crazy energy saving device back in 2007 and some characters from the U.S. are investing in it through a Swedish company, and they've had a falling out. Counter accusations flying back and forth across the Atlantic. What I think really is that I had better get my butt moving in lab to find out just how this invention may work or else nobody is going to have to be worrying about making any kind of money off it anytime soon, and if everyone would just stop calling me on the phone asking me to be on their side then I could be getting some real work done. And just a couple of weeks ago we were all getting along so nicely!?

And they turned off the institute to change a transformer and when they powered it up again the voltage surge fried a bunch of my delicate electronics. Spent the day sorting that out, and pulling hot oily vacuum pumps out of the crawl space under the lab floor. Thank you Lord for giving us Axel the Electrical Engineer who solves problems like Reagan eating jelly beans.

And then yesterday a wayward train ripped down the power line over the tracks between Lund and Malmø bringing train traffic to a standstill, causing Godzillian chaos and greatly complicating my trip home not to mention delaying my appointment with dinner.

Can anyone remember the name of a short story they made us read in 7th grade, maybe 'Flowers for Agamemnon'? It was about a rat who is really smart and can run any kind of maze and even read in the middle of its life thanks to a potion or something, and then the rat and the author become a thankfully oblivious stupid child again at the end of the story/day/life. I think I am in that middle stage right now because everyone seems to think I can do everything they ask. Students. Investors. Spouse and kids. And many times I can even do all these things, it just surprises me that the people around me seem to have faith in me because they never used to give me the time of day. Is that what turning 40 means?

Tokyo

2008-10-11T19:59:00.012+02:00

The blog muse kicked my butt for using that old line about not feeling inspired to blog anymore. If you're a blogger you post, resistance is futile.

I just returned from a trip to Tokyo. It was great. I love Japan, the food, the gardens, the people, even sometimes the music which is either bebop or classical music's greatest hits. Japan is a blend of 1950s Americana, Godzillan sprawl and post-modern metropol. I packed in a rush and arrived without my camera but with cell phone that didn't work on the network but I could still take pictures.

Here's the view of Tokyo bay from the hotel window at 5 AM. I'd been up since 2 with jet lag.

I played hookey from the conference for a half day and went looking for gifts and souveniers. Ran into this sign on the Zojoji temple grounds:

Outside the temple were these Jizo statues which are dedicated to lost babies. Beautiful and spooky.

I happened across a pet store for stag beetles. Enthusiasts arrange tournaments between the beetles.

There was a technology museum on the ground floor of the building where we had our meeting. The museum had a globe hanging from the ceiling that was like 30 feet in diameter and covered in TV screens. They showed films of the earth on these screens, for example how hot it is going to get by the end of the century or satellite pictures of cloud cover. This was a film of the ozone hole.

The subway was always crowded, even at 11.30 on a Tuesday night. In Japan I am extra-tall.

There was a small earthquake mid-week but I didn't feel it because I was riding a bumpy monorail. The final night we stayed at a traditional guest house with tatami mats that smelled like alfalfa pellets, thin futons and a pillow filled with dried beans. I know that may not sound so great but it was actually a lot of fun; also there was a bath and hot tub in the basement.

My only friend, the end?

2008-10-10T19:27:00.002+02:00

It may be the end of Long Burn.

The beginning of the end was an obsession with election coverage which blended nicely into reading about global deleveraging. The CGS may now be the GS.

I noticed it was nice not to be thinking about what to blog next.

And I started hanging out on Facebook, and got kind of busy at work.

Its been a great run and thanks to everyone for showing up through the years! It has meant a lot to me. Stay tuned, I may be back, or not.

Issues vs. What we're getting right now

2008-09-09T11:11:00.001+02:00

Sarah Palin: A Trojan Moose Concealing Four More Years of George Bush

By Arianna Huffington

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/sarah_palin_a_trojan_moose_con.html

Wordspinning

2008-09-07T09:09:00.002+02:00

Just found this cool blog wordspinning. It starts with this quote:

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown aside with great force.

-Dorothy Parker

A walk on the wild side

2008-09-02T22:17:00.002+02:00

I've been at a conference the last couple of days, helping man a booth, presenting our research, talking with different companies and whoever stops by. The University made a postcard with a picture of my photochemical reactor on it, and I get to hand out pens and memory sticks. The first few hours of this are quite fun and then the brain checks out and the mouth goes on autopilot. And then I needed a break so I cut out to shake the weasel. I went into a stall that I had visited the day before, and it seemed unusually fresh, and then I noticed there weren't any poems or diagrams on the walls. That's funny, and I waited for someone else to finish before I exited my stall. I looked around, and the urinals were missing. I could've sworn they were right over there...Oh, I sure hope I didn't....and then I made a quick exit, head down, and two women walked in as I walked out. Eeeyikes!

Recycling

2008-08-24T21:10:00.009+02:00

Here's part of a newspaper article from last week:

After having spent several summers in Sweden together with his Swedish wife and two sons, Will Ferrell knows what his favorite thing is to do in Sweden. 'It's going to sound crazy, but my favorite thing is going to the recycling station. Swedes have the best recycling I've ever seen. Like, 'Old shoes, please place them here.' I love to fill the car and empty it at the recycling station.'

Will I am with you 100% and in fact just today I filled the car and emptied it at a Swedish recycling station. Here is my photo-essay:

The main goal was to get rid of this ratty old couch. It was tossed into the 'burnable waste' container. It will go to the incinerator and be turned into electricity.

The recycling center takes folks yard waste and composts it, turning it into topsoil that they sell:

All of the 'white goods' are arranged carefully in the corner-- fridges mostly, and some water heaters

They accept all kinds of hazardous waste. The labels on these bins say 'cleaning agents', 'acids', 'bases', 'insecticides', 'mercury thermometers' and so on.

They also have a place for home mechanics to put used motor oil. This is great. It reminds me of a college housemate who changed the oil in his station wagon and dumped it in the middle of my vegetable garden in the backyard.

This friendly gent is there to help you find the right resting place for your junk. He told me that last week he got his picture taken by a busload of Chinese tourists.

High tech bikes

2008-08-23T16:43:00.007+02:00

All these Minneapolis cycling types are twittering about the Xtracycle, a device that mounts into the rear of the frame and lengthens an ordinary bike, allowing you to carry things like lumber or four bags of groceries.

I also have a high tech device that allows me to carry four bags of groceries using an ordinary bicycle; it's called a bungee cord. It works like this. Put a big bag of groceries in the manbasket (this bag had four large milk cartons, yoghurt, potatoes). Pass the bungee through the handles of the three other bags twice and tie in a square knot. Finally, set these bags on top of the first bag. Ready to ride.

The most-hated man in Toronto

2008-08-23T10:03:00.006+02:00

Igor Kenk, owner of The Bicycle Clinic, was arrested for bike theft and was eventually found to have 2,396 stolen bicycles. Kenk had stashed the bikes in 10 garages he rented around town, and in his house. The police also found cocaine, crack cocaine and about 15 pounds of marijuana.

There are different theories about what Kenk planned to do with the bikes. Some say he was hoarding bikes to prepare for a severe oil shortage. Kenk had a scrap metal dealer's license, so he may have been waiting for another spike in metals prices before melting down the bikes.

Kenk lived in a rented house in Yorkville, a nice suburb of Toronto, with his partner Jeanie Chung, a concert pianist. Chung faces charges for possession of stolen goods and drugs, and turned herself in after returning from performances in Banff.

You see, my dear wife complains sometimes about all the bikes I have been collecting (I am up to 3, but one of them is in a different country), and now she is afraid I will end up like this. I said, If I'm going to end up like that you'd better start practicing, it's a long way to Banff.

MN is in good hands

2008-08-19T21:25:00.004+02:00

Thanks to everyone involved for a great trip to Minnesota!

It was so great to see friends and family. Highlights of the trip:

1. Seeing my nephew Brett's week-old daughter Elanor Zeforah* Dregge

2. Seeing what wonderful young adults my neices Kristina, Amy and Cathy and nephew Brett have become.

3. Minnesota wildlife turned out in force. Well done! Highlights:
Bald Eagles on the Mississippi, Lake Chisago and Rice Lake State Park
Wild Turkeys in the hills of SE MN
Red Squirrels at Owatonna's Central Park and grey squirrels at Lincoln School
Pileated Woodpeckers, racoon, 13-lined ground squirrels, humming birds at the River Bend Nature Center near Faribault
Deer every evening just north of Owatonna
Buffalo, otter, wolves and bear at Oxbow Park in Olmsted County
Walking stick and huge wasp at Rice Lake
Cicada

*Zeforah (Zipporah) was a wife to Moses. From the King James Version, Exodus 2,
21And Moses was content to dwell with the man: and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter.
22And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.
23And it came to pass in process of time, that the king of Egypt died: and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage.

Moronitude doesn't sleep

2008-08-19T21:18:00.003+02:00

Fresca asks me to flesh out my proposal for using some of a fictitious billion dollars to help everyone stop being morons.

I find it is not going to take nearly that much money.

Here's my point-by-point guide to halt the ongoing march of moronity.

1. You find yourself watching Cops. Solution: Turn off the TV, eat some nuts, drink a glass of water and load the dishwasher.

2. You think that government is the problem. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy that will keep you from living in a safe, decent society. Solution: Become a lobbyist and make money getting the government to chase its tail.

3. You buy a big vehicle in order to get in touch with the wilderness. This is costing you a fortune in gas, not to mention the payments and insurance. Solution: Bike to work, feel the wind and sun, and learn the true meaning of force and momentum.

4. You think everyone is a moron. Solution: You probably have seasonal affective disorder and need more sunlight. Take a vacation and remember that your nation's future is in their hands.

Show business

2008-08-19T21:06:00.001+02:00

The breakdown from a national survey of 'Most Admired News Figures'
Couric, 5%
O'Reilly, 4%
Gibson, 3%
Rather, Brokaw, Williams, Cooper and Stewart, 2%
14 people including Lehrer, Woodruff, Jennings, Cronkite, Limbaugh and Walters, 1% each
No Favorite Journalist, 44%

Note that Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's The Daily Show, tied for fourth, is a comedian.

Day of fluorine

2008-08-19T20:43:00.003+02:00

I had a big meeting today to sign a commercial R & D contract and so I put on the new wrinkle-free, stain-free shirt I bought at the outlet mall in Medford. It smelled funny, like pesticides, and made my skin crawl and muscles ache, and so I put on a T-shirt underneath and that made the day tolerable. My wife said it was a good looking shirt.

Then I went to an 8 AM appointment at the dental hygeinist and she ran that devilishly sharp buzzing device around my gumline and painted my teeth with fluorine.

Then I went to work and on the train I discovered I had left my pass at home, so I got off the train in Malmø and bought a ticket. Earlier I would have chanced it but today I felt like being an honorable citizen. Got to work, and the big meeting was rescheduled so we can work out some details. I had ordered food for the meeting and instead of feeding lawyers I was able to give some students a free lunch-- one of my students just got a job at the new Danish Ministry for Climate and Energy, his dream, so he was psyched. He will be helping organise the next international 'Kyoto' climate summit, to be held in Copenhagen in 2009.

Back home again I got to take off that funky shirt. I read the label and found out it had been treated with teflon, a fluoropolymer. It was the day of fluorine. I'm going to wash the shirt and see if that helps-- has anyone else had this kind of negative reaction to a wrinkle-free shirt??

Back in the saddle again

2008-08-17T16:38:00.003+02:00

We got back yesterday from a two week trip to MN. There's an old Swedish saying, 'Away is good but home is best'. It was a great trip thanks to family and friends and Minnesota is in good hands. We weren't able to spend nearly enough time with Tim & Kate, Mark Woodrich or my sister Andrea and will have to rectify this.

Went for a bike ride today and it was nice to be back in the saddle after two weeks of daily automobiling in the land of sky blue waters. Makes me think of Gene Autry, the singing cowboy:

I'm back in the saddle again
Out where a friend is a friend
Where the longhorn cattle feed
On the lowly Jimson weed
Back in the saddle again

Ridin' the range once more
Totin' my old .44
Where you sleep out every night
And the only law is right
Back in the saddle again

Whoopi-ty-aye-oh
Rockin' to and fro
Back in the saddle again
Whoopi-ty-aye-yay
I go my way
Back in the saddle again

My attempt to update these lyrics:

My chain is glidin' just fine
Ridin' my new 29"
Sharing roads with cars
and jumping broken jars
Back in the saddle again

Five things from 08/08/08

2008-08-09T05:02:00.005+02:00

Tagged with fives by Tim:

What was I doing 5 years ago?
On August 8 2003 I sent 28 emails, to students, family, colleagues. Pithy.

Five things on my to-do list
Modify figures for book chapter on atmospheric chemistry
Call Tim and Mark Woodrich
Get a fishing license from Cabela's
Buy shoes
Read manuscript for Vibeke

Five snacks I enjoy
Cashew nuts, roasted, no salt
Beer sausages
Carrots, organic
Chocolate, dark
Blueberries

Five things I'd do if I were a billionaire
-Buy a cabin on a lake with a dock, canoe, stone fireplace and a separate building for my workshop (boatbuilding, bike building..)
-Invest in technologies: algae to fuel, algae to plastic, wave power
-Invest in society: how to take 10 years off your age by eating right and getting moderate exercise, and how to stop being a moron
-Organise 'Inventor's Club' meetings for my son and his friends every week. Topics: electrical motors, building bridges out of raw spaghetti, soldering irons, blowing glass, lathes and mills, mallets and chisels
-I would make music every day

What are five of your bad habits?
Brooding
Not listening
Bitching and moaning
Too suspicious and too trusting
I should cut back at work and spend more time with my family

What are five places you have lived
Crookston MN
Owatonna MN
St. Paul MN
Pasadena CA
Lund Sweden

What are five jobs you've had
Mowing lawns
Soda jerk
Camp staff at Crow Wing Scout Reservation for 3 summers
Programmer
Research Engineer

I tag:
3-speed
astronave
Bick
Wood Row
Charlie

Minnesota

2008-08-06T05:35:00.008+02:00

Here's some highlights of our first few days in Minnesota.

This is the newest member of the family, Elanor. I'm a Great Uncle!

Here is a feisty Badger we saw at Oxbow Park, outside of Rochester.

We went fishing on a float below lock and dam number five, near Wabasha where they filmed the Grumpy Old Men movies. Younger son caught his first fish ever, a sheephead.

We saw a lot of animals during this trip: wild turkeys, deer, bald eagles, soft shelled turtles, racoons.

He is learning to play with cats, here at my brother's house.

My sister's husband got a buffalo statue from his job at the Salvation Army, took it home, put it in the backyard and painted it. Here's our younger checking out the buffalo, backed by his cousins.

Here on the monkey bars at Lincoln Elementary.

Owatonna

2008-08-06T04:59:00.004+02:00

I am from Owatonna Minnesota. It used to be that if you told someone you came from Owatonna they might say, Oh, isn't that where they have Louis Sullivan's National Farmer's Bank, the premier piece of Architecture's Prairie School, built in 1908? Yes, it is. I took this picture today from in front of The Little Professor book store:

But these days when you say you are from Owatonna people will most likely say, Oh, isn't that where they have Cabela's, the World's Foremost Outfitter and Minnesota's second largest tourist attraction, after the Mall of America? Yep, that's it. Our hotel is just behind Cabela's and the bountiful parking lots are full of utility vehicles. So, the first morning we got up around 4 because of the time difference and went for a walk in Kaplan's Woods. Beautiful nature-- big trees, woodpeckers, deer, and there isn't a single footprint on any of the trails. We're the first people in there since the big storm on Thursday that may have been involved in the plane going down at the Owatonna airport. You see, if you like nature, go to nature, not the store. You don't need a thing really, maybe just a cap to swat bugs with.

Authentication

2008-07-29T13:31:00.004+02:00

I am writing an application together with some Germans which involves making the same kinds of corrections again and again. They don't trust English verb tenses and use 'also' a lot. The Germans asked me, should we really write 'authentification' instead of 'authentication' and I thought, yep, but I checked some dictionaries just to be sure. Found out that 'authentification' isn't a word. One dictionary redirects to 'authentication'. Is it just me or has anyone else run across this? I have been saying and writing authentification for decades, only to find myself corrected. (You wouldn't say 'varicate', or 'verificate' but 'verify', leading to 'authentify'...)

Bike v. car distances

2008-07-27T14:06:00.002+02:00

Distances travelled from 1 Jan to 27 July, 2008:

By car, 2767 miles, 4427 km
By bike, 3234 miles, 5175 km

I thought driving the family to Stockholm for vacation was going to rack up so many car miles I wouldn't be able to bike my way out of it. I had even planned to divide that distance among the four of us.

Cellar Door

2008-07-25T21:34:00.005+02:00

I took a day off and we went to my wife's Aunt's house on the East Coast of Skåne. She's older, lives alone and needs help with some things. For example the door covering the cellar entrance was growing mushrooms and leaking. My wife used to walk up and down this door when she was little but now someone doing so would fall through. My wife and the kids hit the beach and I took measures for the new door. The old door was easy to remove due to rot but it was heavy with tar paper sandwiched between two layers of wood, on a wooden frame. I decided to make something lighter but still strong enough to walk on.

Here's the result, modeled by our boy, back from the beach.

Energy use to rival greenhouse gases

2008-07-21T11:48:00.010+02:00

Energy allows organized systems to exist.

Stars and galaxies use 0.0001 to 0.01 Watts per kilogram of energy to maintain their form. Plants like grass and sugarcane require 0.05 W/kg to live. Hunter-gatherers use about 1 W/kg and primitive farmers, 10 W/kg. An organized society requires energy. On average, humans in the world today use 50W/kg, and in the US, 250 W/kg. The average 40 year old American white man weighs 183 lb, which corresponds to a power consumption of 20 kilowatts. Putting this in everyday terms, on an energy basis today's American society represents either one pre-1967 VW bug running at full power, or about 20 toasters, waffle irons and/or Makita cut-off saws, running full on all the time, for each one of us.

Here's the energy flow through the U. S. today.

Civilization needs energy, and energy use worldwide is compounding at 2% annually (1% per year in the developed world, 5% per year in the developing). There is a point where the climate will change simply because of the amount of energy we are using. Already now the streets of Tokyo are 4 F warmer than they would be otherwise due to energy use. By the end of the century the use of non-solar energy will compete with sunlight to the degree that it will noticeably warm the average surface temperature of the planet -- on top of whatever warming greenhouse gases may be giving. Compounding energy at 2% per year, the IPCC climate 'tipping point' of a 3.5 F increase will be reached by use of non-solar energy alone in about 280 years.

Moving first is the key to getting others to follow

2008-07-18T16:15:00.002+02:00

Here are my favorite passages from Al Gore's speech A Generational Challenge to Repower America:

We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change.

When demand for oil and coal increases, their price goes up. When demand for solar cells increases, the price often comes down.

I for one do not believe our country can withstand 10 more years of the status quo. Our families cannot stand 10 more years of gas price increases. Our workers cannot stand 10 more years of job losses and outsourcing of factories. Our economy cannot stand 10 more years of sending $2 billion every 24 hours to foreign countries for oil. And our soldiers and their families cannot take another 10 years of repeated troop deployments to dangerous regions that just happen to have large oil supplies.

In order to foster international cooperation, it is also essential that the United States rejoin the global community and lead efforts to secure an international treaty at Copenhagen in December of next year that includes a cap on CO2 emissions and a global partnership that recognizes the necessity of addressing the threats of extreme poverty and disease as part of the world's agenda for solving the climate crisis.

In recent years, our politics has tended toward incremental proposals made up of small policies designed to avoid offending special interests, alternating with occasional baby steps in the right direction.

It is a great error to say that the United States must wait for others to join us in this matter. In fact, we must move first, because that is the key to getting others to follow; and because moving first is in our own national interest.

Garbage

2008-07-12T22:34:00.006+02:00

When I was a kid our Scout troop would work at the city recycling center a few times a year and earn money for summer camp. Those were the days-- unloading cars, climbing up into the newspaper truck, building forts and having paper fights, running the can smasher and the glass smasher, walking over to the golden arches for lunch. Ever since I've liked recycling.

So, I like the way they handle garbage in Sweden. Recently we got a letter from the city explaining how they were going to start turning our food waste into biofuel. We got these special paper bags and were instructed to fill them with egg shells, coffee grounds, pasta, meat and bones, vegetables and so on, even paper towels.

Our normal garbage bins had 7 compartments and they split the 'garbage' compartment into two, creating a space for the food waste.

The four compartments on the left are cardboard, newspaper, clear glass and metal. These they empty every six weeks. On the right is food waste, regular garbage, colored glass and hard plastic. This gets emptied every other week.

You might think its not much space and you'd be right. We'd be in trouble if any of the kids were still wearing diapers.

The recycling bins are next to our wild roses, they are having a good year this year.

If you have more trash than can fit in the bins then you get to drive it yourself to one of the city's recycling centers. They have shipping containers for things that burn, things that don't burn, paper, metal, garden waste, chemical waste, batteries, electronics, stoves, paint cans and oil. It's therapeutic to launch the broken wheelbarrow that came with the house into a huge pile of scrap metal. They sell potting soil there made from people's garden waste, kind of like Soylent Green.

Summer

2008-07-11T15:33:00.006+02:00

I know everyone is waiting to hear me talk about the bike I rebuilt. I love it! Couldn't be happier. OK, I will be happier when the Campagnolo chain rings I ordered arrive. The middle chain ring is so worn that the chain jumps free of the teeth when the slightest force is applied. But otherwise, ooh, the feeling of seamlessly converting will into speed.

Here's a picture from our summer vacation when we drove through the Swedish village of Ytterby. The name translates as 'outer town', it is on the coast northeast of Stockholm. Chemists will recognize the name in the element Ytterbium which was found in a rock from Ytterby.

American culture's global reach

2008-07-08T07:12:00.005+02:00

I ate lunch yesterday with an Argentinian, an Italian and a Dane. We were making small talk and I talked about the pain that owners of large vehicles must be feeling. The Italian said you might need such a car to get around if you lived in West Virginia and I thought about it, and then the Argentinian said, Just look at the Dukes of Hazzard. And they got around just fine didn't they, in a smallish car with two-wheel drive. The Italian said, they had a car like that on Starsky and Hutch, and then we started talking 70s TV shows. The Waltons. Columbo. Addams Family. Happy Days, The Jeffersons even, they grew up watching them. The only hole I have found in foreigner's knowledge of American culture is The Three Stooges. For some reason those guys don't travel.

I told them how I wanted my son to know something about American culture so I bought him music by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Clash. It took them a minute.

How to use soap and water

2008-07-06T17:03:00.003+02:00

Bike dirt used to really bother me, especially oily chain dirt. I thought it was the dirtiest substance known to man-- impossible to wash our of your hands or your jeans. But chains and bike grease don't bother me any more since I discovered this handy trick.

1) Go ahead and get your hands greasy, oily and dirty working on your bike, even under your nails, it's OK.
2) When it comes time to clean up, rub a healthy squeeze of dish soap into your hands, like it was skin lotion. Work it in. Don't use water!
3) Rinse off the soap with water. Presto, clean hands!

The reason this works is simple chemistry, 'like dissolves like'. Soap molecules are long hydrocarbon chains with a polar group on the end. They dissolve oil using their oily side and bring it into water using the polar end. If you put the water on your hands first, the dirty oil prefers your skin and stays where it is, but if you just use soap with no water the dirty oil dissolves in the soap directly. Think of dry dish soap as thick turpentine.

The flip

2008-06-20T16:59:00.004+02:00

By popular demand, our son doing a diving roll off the arm of a chair.

Some people talk big about selling their kids to the circus. But what price will the little'uns fetch without job skills?

Tagged.

2008-06-20T09:22:00.003+02:00

I just got tagged by the Primate Brow. Pick up your nearest book and go to page 123. Find the fifth sentence, and post on your blog the next three sentences. Acknowledge who tagged you, and then tag five more people.

The nearest book is Philip Pullman's Bärnstenskikaren. You have probably heard the English title The Amber Spyglass. Our 11 year old is reading this book in Swedish. A translation of the text on page 123:

'The knife is also from here?'
'From Torre degli Angeli,' said the girl and pointed at the square stone tower that raised itself above the red tile roofs. It glimmered in the evening light.

I's gonna tag:
3-speed blog
chaz
gugeo
church of the sweet ride
Andrea

Too much

2008-06-20T08:52:00.003+02:00

Too much work lately has left me feeling numb. Luckily I have a week's vacation coming up which will give me a chance to figure out the new phone I bought with my tax refund.

Here's a picture I took of my feet with the phone. That's Anikin Skywalker on the tube.

I work with a guy from Poland. On the train home he was telling me stories about the communist days. His grandpa worked for the state railroad and even after he retired he had a free rail pass. His grandpa knew where to get things. My friend's town only had one kind of bread but his grandpa could get better bread by taking the train two towns away. One time my friend needed a new bike tire so he asked grandpa, who thought about it, and then knew just the town that would have a store with a tire in stock.

I got home from work yesterday, tired after giving a presentation to investors, and our four year old said 'look Dad!'. And before I could open my mouth he stood up on the arm of a chair and jumped off it onto an air mattress. After the bounce he leapt into a summersault and landed perfectly at the end of the air mattress. I was speechless. Perfect execution and a high danger factor. Praise or scorn?? I told our little circus flea that it was really impressive but that he couldn't do it again.

Music

2008-06-11T10:43:00.003+02:00

If at least 90% of this music doesn't kick your butt there is something wrong with you:

1. Nashville Skyline by Bob Dylan w/Johnny Cash
2. Al Green, Greatest Hits
3. Hank Williams, The Hit Collection
4. hôtel costes quatre mixed by stéphane pompougnac
5. The Essential Fripp and Eno

Hank, Al, Bob and Johnny'll set you straight. Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and the right honorable stéphane will expand your horizon.

Music, classic vs. classical

2008-06-10T07:14:00.005+02:00

Once one of my brothers went on a campaign around the house to find some music for me. I was 7 or 8 and my brothers and sisters were in their teens. He scraped together my first record collection:

The Monster Mash (45)
Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (45)
Let It Bleed and Goat's Head Soup by the Stones
Inna Godda da Vida by Iron Butterfly (45)
Meet the Beatles

Now's my chance to return the favor-- I just ordered some music for my son, for summer listening, to celebrate the last day of school:

Let it Bleed
Revolver
London Calling

I told my wife I had bought some classic music for our son, but what she heard was classical music.

Some quotes.

2008-06-01T22:00:00.002+02:00

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. -Albert Einstein

Don't buy upgrades; ride up grades. - Eddy Merckx

The bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon. -Bill Strickland

Cycling is like church. Many attend, but few understand. -Jim Burlant

Fossil Reserves

2008-06-01T08:16:00.004+02:00

Here is the figure of fossil fuel reserves we were shown Friday. The units are 'bnboe', billions of barrels of oil equivalent. Taking oil for example, if you divide how much we know we have (reserves) by the current rate of use (production), we will run out of oil in 41 years. Unless we find some more. Econophiles will point out that the price will go up before we run out slowing the rate of use and leading us to look for unconventional oil and shifting consumption to other alternatives. Nobody knows how much oil and gas there is that has not been found, but the rate of discovery has been declining since around 1970. Nobody has ever had to look for coal, and so nobody knows really how much more might be out there.This figure shows how much oil there is from different sources (x-axis) against the price of production (y-axis). As the price of oil goes up it becomes profitable to produce it in unconventional ways. The length of the red box ('cumulative needs to 2030') shows what the world requires for the next 22 years.

....we have plenty of energy, plenty of energy, take all you want....there's not that much we can do about greenhouse gases anyway...your eyes are getting heavy...

Bike Basket

2008-05-31T21:14:00.004+02:00

I rode my restored racing bike to the store this afternoon. When I came out with the groceries a distinguished man wearing spectacles said that he had been admiring my bike. He particularly liked the basket and asked me where I bought it. Now I know some of you think real men don't put baskets on their bikes but I'd take a basket over a pannier any day-- backpack and groceries fit, and it doesn't get ripped, frayed, faded or dirty. I take three big bags of groceries back with me-- one in the basket and two tied together with twine, hanging one on each side of the basket like saddle bags. Just listen to that word pannier, French for basket! Foof.

'I live in a world of infinite money'

2008-05-31T08:34:00.004+02:00

This figure shows that as countries get richer, they almost always use more energy.

I invited a speaker for the institute seminar series to give a talk about energy; yesterday was the big day. The speaker is the chief scientist at the world's second largest independent oil company and is responsible for their research programs, and advises their executives. He started his lecture by saying that he wasn't going to talk about the world they way he would like it to be but rather how it is and where it is going. It was sobering.

--Oil production is tremendously profitable. In the middle east it costs $5 to $7 per barrel to pump out of the ground, and can be sold for around $125. There is lots of oil out there, including deep ocean deposits, tar sands and so on. He pointed out that 'as the ice cap thins for whatever reason', it will become possible to drill for oil in the Arctic ocean.

--He discussed controlling atmospheric CO2 levels, 'an enormous, complex challenge', in part because energy is at the heart of economic activity (unlike the CFCs).

--There will be a doubling in the demand for energy by the end of the century and at the same time we must have a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions to stabilize the atmospheric concentration, requiring an improvement in efficiency by a factor of four.

--CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time, roughly a thousand years, which is an infinite time from our perspective. The atmosphere integrates all emissions. This means that if you would like to say pump CO2 into old oil fields or salt domes you have to monitor it and keep it out of the atmosphere for at least a thousand years. Who is going to be responsible? The companies and political institutions we have today most likely won't be around that long. The only global institution with that kind of lifetime is the Vatican.

--The developing world is developing, rapidly, and a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions in the industrialised world is counteracted by 4 years of growth in the developing world.

--It should be possible to produce 10 to 15% of electricity worldwide using windmills, but this represents only a 4 year delay in reaching the CO2 concentration in a world without wind power.

--It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuels is equivalent to a diminished consumption. -William Stanley Jevons, 1865. Jevons was concerned that the world might run out of coal. There are many examples where improving efficiency increases consumption. 1) Refrigerators today use about 1/4 the energy they did in 1970. People have responded by buying more and larger refrigerators. Many homes in the U.S. have several. 2) Cars today produce more power using less fuel, a 23% improvement from 1990 to 2000. People responded by buying really big powerful vehicles.

--History has shown that the surest way to induce conservation is through price or policy; both are politically difficult.

--If car ownership in China went from today's 1% to 10%, this would be about the same number of cars as America has.

--In the US there are 250 million cars, and about half a million hybrids. It will take time to change the vehicle fleet to more efficient models.

--Liquid hydrocarbons can't be beat as fuels for transportation because they carry a lot of energy using a small mass. The best batteries today have only 2% of the energy density of liquid hydrocarbon fuel.

--He recommended that the world make a concerted effort to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations using a combination of conservation and decarbonation of the energy supply, but even so, 'safe' levels may be exceeded, and the CO2 will remain in the atmosphere for centuries. Therefore we need a plan B, a response beyond conservation and decarbonization. There are two parts to the response, the first is adaptation: Hardening of infrastructure (insulation, dams, seawalls, aqueducts), shifts in agriculture and population, etc. The second is geoengineering. If the planet's reflectivity could be changed from 30% to 31%, it would counteract the greenhouse gases. This change could be affected in space (orbiting nanomirrors), in the atmosphere (stratospheric aerosol shield) or at the surface (paint buildings white).

--It is rare that I have heard a talk this good.

--I said the university would be happy to pay for any expenses, his flights, taxi, food and so on and he politely declined. It is my job to talk to people, he said, and I live in a world of infinite money.

--During lunch he told a story. 'I went to dinner at Buckingham Palace last Tuesday and Prince Philip asked me a question. The Prince likes gardening, and he said, if I increase the thinkness of the glass in my greenhouse, it doesn't get any warmer. How can it be that more CO2 in the atmosphere makes the planet warmer?'

Mother's Day

2008-05-25T21:32:00.003+02:00

Today was Mother's Day in Sweden. Kid #1 helped me make dinner, and I helped kid #2 made his Mom a card. This morning we took Mom to the open house at the agricultural university to look at the plants.

It's dry here which is good cuz we can dry laundry on the line but bad because the lawn is turning brown.

Finished! (Almost)

2008-05-25T21:20:00.006+02:00

This afternoon I got the chain rings reassembled and the crank arms remounted, and this evening I cleaned the front deraillleur, oiled the cables and put the wheels on.

Here are some 'before' pictures. I just got back from the first ride, and a very good ride it was. The bike is light and fast, straight and silent, everything I was hoping it would be.

I need to adjust the rear brake and replace the chain-- the new gears are arguing with the old stretched chain. And finish touch up paint. And true the rear wheel a tad-- need to read up on that.

Meetings

2008-05-24T17:57:00.006+02:00

I take the train to work and usually I use the time to read or write on my computer, and one or two days a week I sit with my buddy Anders. He thought this photo of the new freewheel/gear cluster looked like an Escher drawing.

So I was griping about all the things I have to do and Anders says, you should really just schedule a meeting with yourself, then you could get some work done. And if someone asks to meet you, you can wisely check your calendar and say you have a meeting, or you can say, well, I'll have to move this other meeting. So I booked a meeting with myself Friday morning and actually got a lot done.

The cycle rebuild is going pretty well-- maybe it'll be done inside of a week. I managed to scrub the chain rings in the kitchen sink this morning without getting caught.

The pedal crank arms are held in place by 15 mm bolts recessed inside a threaded hole with a 21 mm diameter. Normal 15 mm socket wrench heads have an outer diameter of 22 mm, so they won't fit, and you can't get enough purchase on the bolt trying to squeeze in a crescent wrench straight on. I asked in a bike shop and they said they could special order a tool for me for a small fortune. No thanks I said. So this morning I took a millimeter off the outside diameter of the socket head with a grinding wheel, took it into the workshop and got the crank arms off in no time.

Left to do: Clean and repack pedal bearings and headset, finish touch up painting, remount wheels, clean chain, rewrap handlebars, road test.

Bike rebuild update

2008-05-18T14:04:00.007+02:00

Rebuilding this bike gives me 100% relaxation.

Upon inspection, everything looks to be in terrible condition. I am amazed the bike worked. It will be equally amazing if it works when I am finished rebuilding because I haven't done this sort of thing before. I am learning as I go. Your advice is welcome.

Something gnarly happened to the hub. A section of the inner freewheel seems to have cracked off in an apocalyptic event leaving deep craters in the axle spacer. If you look at the picture you'll see that the inner wheel where the pin spanner should mount is cracked. I didn't see any future for this freewheel and decided to simply cut it off. A hacksaw got me nowhere so I got out the angle grinder. If you're using an angle grinder and not having fun then you have stepped off the golden path, my friend.

I could look at old parts like this all day. If I fixed bikes for a living I probably wouldn't feel like this.

The old grease was a mixture of Mississippi mud, grit and goose crap. Cleaned it out. Here are the bearings sitting in new grease, like plums in a Christmas pudding.

2008 distance totals:
Bike: 2180 km
Car: 1979 km

Vocabulary

2008-05-18T13:50:00.002+02:00

Here's some of older son's schoolwork that he left lying on the counter. It's an English vocabulary list, 4th grade, Swedish public school. He has it easy in that class since he speaks English at home every day, but he does need to work on his spelling.

Siamese Pike

2008-05-14T16:28:00.003+02:00

Eric Holland sent me this photo of a siamese pike caught at Cooney Dam, 30 miles SW of Billings.

'Japanese Racer'

2008-05-13T21:41:00.008+02:00

So, I decided that I needed a bike to fix up, to go along with my Glenn's New Complete Bicycle Manual. Nothing against internal gears, I use them every day, but my new bike needed to have derailleur gears (and fenders, and drop handlebars and a package rack). I found an add on the internet advertising a 'Japanese Racer', went to have a look and ended up with this bike:

The story is that one of Sweden's leading decathalonists rode the bike from Italy to Stockholm. Shortly thereafter he went to a competition in Brazil and passed away. Then the bike sat in a garage for 30 years. Do you believe it? I did.

The bike has a Sun Tour alpha 3000 derailleur. I just finished cleaning the dirt out of the pulleys-- this dirt took me back to my childhood, except back then I didn't clean it out.

It's an 18-speed.

I removed the 70s-era generator and lamps since I believe in batteries. The full renovation will include new tubes and tires, a new seat and handlebar tape, and a full tune-up and lube.

Bike repairs

2008-05-11T09:48:00.004+02:00

My commuting bike has hard gears. The bike has a 4-speed Shimano hub, fenders, straight handlebars, rack and basket on the back. I would always be in first gear, and only sometimes make it to second. Never third or fourth. And then I read Sheldon Brown's essay on gear shifting. I couldn't write it better than he does, so I won't try. This article inspired me to change the gear on the rear wheel from an 18 tooth to a 20 tooth gear. This change turned out to be pretty simple and it makes all the difference-- I am now using all four speeds and zipping up hills and against the wind, basket filled with books, papers and a computer. The twenty tooth gear cost less than a gallon of gas.

Buoyed by this experience I decided to take on the three speed hub (Shimano Inter 3) on F's bike. He's been complaining about the resistance, and the coasting click sound was really loud. He said it felt like the brake was always on-- poor guy bikes 2.5 km to school every morning. If you lifted the rear of the bike and spun the wheel it would go around once, maybe twice. So, I took the hub apart, laying the nuts and retaining rings on a paper towel in sequential order, and rinsed out everything I could find using chain cleaner. The grease in the hub was amazingly dirty. Re-greased everything inside and out and put it together again. It is a minor miracle that the hub still worked after this, and better than before.

Today I will take apart the headset on my Copenhagen bike.

Beak Pike

2008-05-04T08:57:00.010+02:00

Yesterday we fished for the wiley beak pike Belone belone and the beaks did not disappoint.

These fish were called 'gar' by the British, based on an Old English word for 'spear'. When they got to North America they used the same word for the North American freshwater gars, but those are different fish. In Swedish they are called beak pike, in Danish horn fish and in south Swedish, horn pike.

There was a handful of guys out on the breakwater fishing, some dads, some young guys drinking beer. One kid didn't seem attached to anyone and he started asking me how to cast. I gave him a quick lesson and then after a minute he was in the middle of a huge tangle of string. I cut him loose and retied his leader.

These fish live in the North Atlantic and swim up the coast and into the Baltic in the spring. They spear their prey with their beaks which makes for fun fishing. They are fast, they fight, and they jump out of the water and dance on their tails, flashing silver in the sun.

Here is F holding one of the fish, in front of a WWII bunker guarding the coast. We caught 4 of them in about an hour, 2 apiece.

They have beautiful skin.

Here you can see an amazing thing about these fish: they have green bones. Note the vertebrae. The meat is like pikes', white with a few black nerves, and tastes just a shade richer.

Heavens they're tasty.

Rain and taxes

2008-05-01T17:11:00.003+02:00

Today worked out to be a double holiday in Sweden-- Ascension Day and International Worker's Day. Something for all tastes and something perhaps uniquely Swedish, having a publicly sanctioned combination religious/socialist day. We celebrated by doing the laundry and dishes and buying food, and I worked out my taxes. In Sweden it works like this: the state sends you a form with all the information filled in, like your salary, interest and mortgage information, taxes paid and so on. Everything on my form was correct, so I sent a text message back to the state. About 5 seconds later I got a message back acknowledging receipt of my tax return and stating that they will transfer my refund into my bank account. It's been raining today and after taxes I went for a nice half-hour bike ride in the rain and saw lots of trees blooming and some rabbits and hares.

Blogger

2008-04-30T09:05:00.001+02:00

If you have had problems loading Long Burn from the Blogger server please leave a comment.

Fish

2008-04-27T21:41:00.006+02:00

We went fishing last weekend. Didn't catch anything but the place was covered in frogs laying eggs.

Next weekend we will be out after needlefish which will be migrating up the coast any day now.

Spring photos

2008-04-27T20:29:00.004+02:00

It was an unusually tough winter this year where we ended up catching a chain of big storms from the North Atlantic. Thank God spring is here.

My wife is really happy about all the blossoms on the magnolia.

She found a whole tray of mini-daffodils on sale for $4. Now they are all over the yard. The house is surrounded.

These red tulips come up every year. They came with the house.

The Cheap Energy Mind

2008-04-21T18:34:00.002+02:00

Our neighbors! There are always 4 spotless Euro sedans outside their house (2 Mercs, 2 Audis), and now they have bought a big old American conversion van. The van has a powerful engine. I know this because they spent quite some time Sunday afternoon revving the engine-- that tin box is ready for the drag strip. In one day these guys throw out more CO2 than I can save in a month. What does it matter the small things I do? Sure I know that riding my bike is fun and good exercise, and when I insulated the house it was just as much about saving money as conserving energy, but the enormous size of the problem of doing something about climate change is a challenge.

And so I thank the NYT article for this article, 'Why Bother'.

Back in the 70s (Think of the scale of the environmental problems back then, and the attention they received. Those were the days!) Wendell Berry, Kentucky farmer and writer, was impatient with people who gave money to environmental causes but wasted energy in their everyday lives. He said that nothing would change until we heal the split between what we think and what we do. 'Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.'

Here’s the point: Cheap energy, which gives us climate change, fosters precisely the mentality that makes dealing with climate change in our own lives seem impossibly difficult. Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

The “cheap-energy mind,” as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that asks, “Why bother?” because it is helpless to imagine — much less attempt — a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant. Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy, it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions — carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for.

Tacoma Narrows Newsreel

2008-04-21T18:25:00.003+02:00

This newsreel footage of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse is classic. Much better than I had remembered from High School physics because the version we saw was missing the breathless orchestration and newsreel announcer: 'No structure of steel and concrete can stand such a strain. Steel girders buckle and giant cables snap like puny threads. There it goes!'

The Scientist's Dress Code

2008-04-19T08:32:00.003+02:00

Dick asks, 'What is the scientist's dress code?' Here's a line from the Science pages of the New York Times: 'He preferred the scientist's anarchic dress code of well-worn slacks and a faintly wrinkled shirt over the administrator's buttoned-up Brooks Brothers.'

'Anarchy' is a good word but just as much 'utility'. If you can't go for a hike, eat Weinerschnitzel and solve partial differential equations in a given piece of clothing, it's got to go. I saw a young scientist at the meeting in Vienna with an air of forensic pathology and rasta locks in a short skirt, nylons and hiking boots. Outdoor clothing always fits in, like just about anything you could buy at REI. There were a handful of professors in crumpled suits and running shoes. Plaid is OK, so are Converse All-Stars. And there were a few conferees wearing hats indoors, like they had just gotten in from the big dinosaur nesting site outside of Bozeman. I was wearing REI travel pants and a shirt from The North Face one day, and crumpled Dockers and blue dress shirt another day.

Vienna

2008-04-18T11:28:00.009+02:00

I went to Vienna earlier this week to give a talk at a conference. The meeting was like a scientific High School reunion-- there's a certain set of old friends who I just meet at meetings every few years. There's a nice feeling to entering a building filled with 10,000 scientists, all carrying laptops, all obeying the scientist's dress code, all talking science. Vienna is a nice town but I didn't have that much time to look around. Here is the street outside my hotel, including a classic Viennese cafe with dark wood interior and smoky booths. Seeing roadsigns pointing to Budapest and Graz gives me a thrill.

Everyone at the meeting got a free pass for public transportation which was good because it took three subway lines to get from the hotel to the conference center. My stop was 'Burggasse-Stadthalle'.

While in Vienna one must eat a Wiener schnitzel the size of an elephant ear.

Energy

2008-04-12T15:28:00.004+02:00

One thing I like about biking is that it puts you right in the middle of energy efficiency. I just put a speedometer on my bike and you can see it right there on the display. On a little hill I might reach 20 mph, and on a good hill, 25 or more. Against the wind on my way home uphill I am fighting to keep my speed at 8 mph. Sometimes when the light turns green I will sprint out ahead of a car and see how long I can hold it. If things go well, maybe about half a block, but the cars always win. Me, on a featherweight cycle held up on 1/16" spokes, gets beat by a superheavyweight automobile belching yards and sections of exhaust. There's a lot of talk about environmentally friendly cars, and about how you can change your driving style to save fuel, but the basic fact is that the fuel economy of vehicles is dirt-poor. Today's Ford F150 pickup truck gets the same mileage as a Model T, and if you drive green (avoid jackrabbit starts!), it doesn't change the fact that it takes a lot of fuel to roll around in that huge metal box.

Just ran across this graph showing the price of coal.

The biking news

2008-04-08T07:13:00.004+02:00

Milk carton joke. Why does the cow have a bell? The horns don't work.

As you may know my New Year's resolution was to bike farther than I drive a car this year. Over the weekend I twirled my pencil and figured out that up to now I have biked slightly farther than I have driven, 1254 km for the bike and 1240 km for the car. Then I had to drive to work yesterday to move some equipment and go to a meeting, and ended up with an additional 200 km on the odometer. Its going to take a few weeks of pushing pedals to make up for this one day. Cars just go so far you know, and so easily. As usual my wife and kids are way ahead of me-- they take their bikes everywhere. I think I should get a mileage discount for the times I am driving them.

Copenhagen Cycle Chic notes that women in Copenhagen with a certain brand of Italian shoe always ride old Rayleigh 3-speeds. I can report seeing many of these bikes on the road being ridden by fashionable women on their way to work.

Dissipation

2008-04-06T10:59:00.001+02:00

Noun dissipation (plural dissipations)
1. The act of dissipating or dispersing; a state of dispersion or separation; dispersion; waste.
2. A dissolute course of life, in which health, money, etc., are squandered in pursuit of pleasure; profuseness in vicious indulgence, as late hours, riotous living, etc.; dissoluteness.
3. A trifle which wastes time or distracts attention.
4. (physics) A loss of energy as heat from a dynamic system

Back to the land

2008-04-05T09:21:00.003+02:00

I keep daydreaming about how I would build the farm if I was a pioneer like my great grandad Peter Johanson. I'd be way ahead of my time:

-I'd put a well in the basement. The water from the well would be 38 degrees, year-round. A windmill would pump this water over a galvanized steel box we'd use as a refrigerator.
-We'd be the only farm in the county with an indoor flush toilet, septic tank and drainage field.
-We'd need good insulation just about a row of straw-bales wide. The siding could be lifted off the house to replace the straw every few years.
-I'd plant windbreaks (OK, Peter did this too) around the farmyard and barn, and around the garden plot. Open to the south to admit sunlight. The windbreaks would be multilevel-- high cottonwoods, medium ash, low level cedars. Also an orchard with apple, pear, plum and cherry trees.
-Sheep would keep the lawn cut and we'd have fresh eggs from the chickens.
-I would make heavy duty leather boots with felt linings and turn them into frontier Sorels by dipping them in molten beeswax.

Letter

2008-04-04T13:47:00.003+02:00

Somebody asked what I thought of Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain. My reply:

The funny story about that book is that I thought it would be cool to get an Emerson quote every day, and so I typed my email address into a website that promised this. What happened next is that that address started to receive enormous quantities of spam, like 100 per day. So much that I was forced to give it up. Somebody thought they would have fun sticking it to the left wingers.

I can tell you that the series doesn't get better than that first book. In the second two he rewrites the scenes and characters from the first and nothing much happens. I had hoped for much more. I didn't learn anything about the climate and it was a long slog. But anyway better than Chrichton's State of Fear.

I am home with the flu today, chills, lethargy, constant urge to cough. Made a great soup for lunch-- diced onion, green beans, diced carrot, chicken bullion, olive oil, ginger sliced thin, crushed garlic, some pepper and cumin. It cleaned out my bronchii & also passages above the windpipe. It was refreshing to not go to work today and find that the world did not end-- students and colleagues can actually manage without me. This thought has helped relieve the congestion in my chest.

Seen this?
81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on the Wrong Track

I am Superman and I know what's happening

2008-04-02T21:31:00.003+02:00

More quiz fun: Find out which superhero you are.
Me? I am Superman and I can do anything. Thanks to bother yam for the link.

A Barrel

2008-04-02T21:07:00.005+02:00

Two sides of the coin

2008-03-30T22:15:00.002+02:00

I just read the latest comments on the first Rebellion entry.

Visual Proof of the Existence of Santa Claus.

With deepest respect to everyone involved, God bless the readers of Long Burn. A sincere thanks that you're all here. Someday we will put our feet up on a big stone fireplace in a cabin up north and talk about the fish we caught and the ones that got away.

Søren Kierkegaard: Doubt is an essential element of faith. To believe or have faith that God exists, without having doubted God's existence or goodness, would not be a faith worth having. To have faith is at the same time to have doubt. The doubt is the rational part of your thoughts, without which faith would have no substance. The leap to faith transcends rationality in favor of something uncanny: faith.

These people who try to prove God's existence have missed the point.

Socially conservative fiscal liberals

2008-03-30T08:17:00.003+02:00

Thanks to Mellow Velo for this figure showing the budget deficit through time.

Snow Photos

2008-03-29T09:22:00.003+01:00

The new bike shelter. We are stockpiling bricks for the CGS.

Biking to work. Not the right kind of snow for tongues.

Rebellion III

2008-03-29T08:54:00.003+01:00

If rebellion means doing things differently, breaking patterns, then sure, I have plenty rebelled.

1. When I was three and a half our family drive from MN to AK, five kids in a Ford station wagon pulling a camper trailer. I refused to eat pink fish. One sister thought I enjoyed hearing her read comic books backwards and I asked her to stop.
2. In High School we got good at climbing things, like buildings and water towers. From the top of the water tower out at West Hills you can see all they way to Medford. Once we found an access hatch through the roof of Owatonna High School where you could drop down into the janitor's tool closet/break room. Simply being there in the dark school hallway at midnight was all that was required. Another time we got into the school around five on the morning of December 8, 1983, and covered the halls with posters wishing Jim Morrison a happy 40th birthday. Principal Souter asked me to take them down by the end of the day. We were not punished and I think Jean Kaplan was impressed.
2a. For years two of my siblings have tried to get me to admit that I glued letters onto a street sign so it would read 'Van Halen Ave.' instead of 'Van Buren Ave.'. Yes, it was me.
3. Once in Stockholm they gathered all the Fulbright scholars to meet the former Prime Minister of Sweden and they told us how to dress-- ties and jackets for the guys. I made a point of just wearing a shirt. Who did that guy think he was anyway, the Prime Minister!?
4. When I started at the University I had a teaching mentor and he and some other brass attended one of my lectures in atmospheric chemistry to evaluate my teaching, and it was related to whether my job would become permanent. I was told in advance to be sure to do a good job. I refused to give a normal lecture and instead had an hour long discussion with the students about the atmospheres of Mars and Venus, driven by student questions. I prepared by reading everything I could find about these planets. I was annoyed that these guys would even think of trying to evaluate my teaching. What was I thinking and couldn't I have just done what they expected?

These days.
1. I live in a far away place among people who have a different word for everything.
2. I drive as little as possible.
3. For a time there Dad was hinting broadly that I could choose to go into the ministry. I did not, but I subvert people to the cause when I get the chance. Keywords: kindness, respect, humility, dignity, listening and being open to opportunities.
4. I am not a regular churchgoer (I did celebrate my 40th birthday by going to Lutheran High Mass) but I don't think that's what counts. How often do Jesus' acts take place in church? Rather, living is where it counts. I am never going to whack anybody over the head with religion like happened to me a few times growing up. (To be clear, Dad never whacked me over the head. OK, he did, physically, but only in jest.)
5. Being the youngest kid by a good stretch (my four siblings had left their teens when I started mine), growing up I was in the minority, the exception, an outsider, powerless against the group will. So I know how power can be abused and avoid it at every turn. I have taken that Question Authority button to heart.
6. I am usually pretty suspicious of things (at least my wife says I am) and like to think them through for myself. For example I was suspicious of this idea of 'trying on different masks' because masks are superficial. I have a feeling that I have always been me, a constant kernel invariant in time, showing up at different places, like whacking a piñata in kindergarten or listening to tapes in the Lincoln Elementary media center or improvising an anchor-- always an oiled slab of decency between two slices of whole grained looking elsewhere. I can't put my finger on a time when I thought, Oh my, that was a useful mask I will have to use again. Rather, it is just me who shows up. Shows up to give lectures, shows up at school meetings, faculty meetings, at the dinner table. That's mostly what I do these days, show up. It's just like Dad told me once, 'Sometimes all you have to do is show up.'
7. Being the youngest kid I always got things explained to me by just about everyone. They say that what you lacked as a kid you can never get enough of as an adult. So I can spend hours and hours explaining things to others.

Rebellion II

2008-03-26T16:05:00.002+01:00

Thanks to MacGyver5 for this comment:

To remain fresh, a person must create constant personal rebellion against things that have become flat or stale in one's life. Growth can slow or stop if this does not happen. I feel that the rebellion of Jesus against the status quo of his day was not conservative, but radical.

My own situation is that in order to rebel in the house I grew up in I would have had to have become a Reaganite and I didn't have that in me. My four older siblings had said and done everything imaginable by the time I was a teen; my folks had seen all the masks. In fifth grade one of my sisters gave me a button, 'Challenge Authority', that I wore proudly on my winter coat. Is it rebellion if you are expected to rebel?

Time travel

2008-03-26T13:42:00.006+01:00

The following is from a New York Times article 'What Created This Monster?' that details how decades of deregulation have brought us back to 1929:

For example, in the old system, savers had federally insured deposits in tightly regulated savings banks, and banks used that money to make home loans. Over time, however, this was partly replaced by a system in which savers put their money in funds that bought asset-backed commercial paper from special investment vehicles that bought collateralized debt obligations created from securitized mortgages — with nary a regulator in sight.

White Easter

2008-03-24T20:37:00.010+01:00

We had a green Christmas this year and a somewhat white Easter. My in-laws were visiting, and I could spend spare moments reading Glenn's New Complete Bicycle Manual. This book has answered all my questions and I give it five stars out of five. Equipped with new and useful facts I set to work on our family's four bicycles. It took three and a half days and many rags to adjust cups and cones, clean chains, replace brake pads and lubricate everything in sight. I remodeled the workroom a few months ago for bikes and can report that I wish I had more space. I finished my weekend bike repair jag by putting new training wheels and a new inner tube on A's bike.

While going through my own bike I found that the grease in the front bearing was so dirty and dry that I could lift it out with tweezers. Glenn's allowed me to disassemble the bearing, clean it, pack with grease, replace bearings and adjust the cones to give a smooth ride. I chickened out and did NOT replace the lubricant in my Shimano Nexus Inter4 internal gear hub, after reading in Glenn's and Sheldon Brown's Most Excellent Bike Mechanics Website that the two main reasons for failure in these otherwise sturdy and dependable hubs are people who take them apart, and people who use the wrong lubricant. I am hoping that by cleaning the filth off the external cable levers and by cleaning the cables that the hub will work better in cold weather, like we'll be having this next week; the winds are in retrograde giving us Arctic air from Siberia.

You can learn a lot about a person by cleaning and adjusting their bike. For example the weekend's project confirmed my suspicions that my wife spends more time riding off-road, through dirt, sand and leaves, than our 11-year old son.

Today is our 18th wedding anniversary. It was an unusually early and warm spring that year, as our best man can attest. Today I gave my wife a miniature orchid (she has so many orchids that there's no space for a normal sized one) and some roses, and she gave me a bicycle computer, which I have always wanted but would never buy for myself.

While talking with my in-laws, I figured out how to build a lego car driven by a battery and motor. I excused myself and built this:

It was an instant hit with the kids. We also got some time to play with the electronics experiment kit and build a telegraph and an electrical motor (see below). My son sent a message in Morse code: 'Can I play computer games?' 'Eat your food' I replied.

Rebellion

2008-03-20T09:25:00.004+01:00

Recently three men were arrested in Denmark for plotting to kill a cartoonist who had drawn pictures of the Prophet. The cartoonist has now gone underground and his wife lost her job at a day care because parents were worried about their children's safety. In order to show their solidarity with the artist, 17 newspapers decided to re-print the cartoons. This has led to a new round of protests against Denmark in the Muslim world. Egypt (which was recently condemned by the European Parliament for its human rights abuses) accused Denmark of violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, essentially of being racist.

A Danish newspaper editor commented, “It was not about mocking a minority but a religious figure, the Prophet, so it was blasphemy, not racism. The idea of challenging religious authority led to liberal democracy, whereas the singling out of minorities, as minorities, led to Nazism and the persecution of the bourgeoisie in Russia. So this distinction is crucial to understand.”

(And religion has had a good healthy life in liberal democracies.)

Hear hear. Challenging authority. My parents have asked a couple of leading questions about rebellion, whether I rebelled, what it may have meant, and I am stumped as to how to reply. The direct answer is that I have never directly challenged my parents, which would have been the honorable way to go about it. Some things I did could be classified as civil disobedience. Most of my choices were deeply influenced by my folks and some were in contrast-- par for the course. I was reminded of what was common knowledge in high school-- that the kids who rebelled the most very quickly settled into conservative lives of kids and jobs. (As they say in Sweden, 'Vovve, Vila och Volvo' meaning 'Dog, House and Volvo'.) I guess I thought I would save my steam for the long haul.

Rebellion is fundamentally conservative. The Danes saved their faith and country by rebelling against the central authority of Rome. Could anyone be more British than Sid Vicious singing 'God Save the Queen'? The British Parliament has 'The Queen's Loyal Opposition' who are not loyal to the government, but to the Queen, Queen as metaphor for country, faith and way of life. The rebel has to work hard to identify what they are rebelling against and an important question is what motivates them-- I would say it is the pain of the love they have for the very thing they are rebelling against, and that the system would collapse without the critics, Vonnegut's canaries in the coal mine, our early warning system for fundamental issues.

The Chemistry of the CGS

2008-03-19T20:50:00.005+01:00

The Primate Brow has linked seven stages of grief and the CGS. Quoting The Brow:

Here are the seven stages and how they relate to the coming global shitstorm:

1. Shock and Disbelief. Most of us visit this stage daily. For instance, I have trouble believing that we are in a decades-long war to secure oil resources, that the comfort all of us enjoy today will soon be attainable only by the super-rich, that the earth’s environment is irrecoverably ruined. The reality in front of our faces can cause frontal lobe lock if taken in large doses...

2. Denial. This is a deeply entrenched and powerful response. Most Americans spend most of their time enjoying this stage right now. Everyone is an armchair climate expert who somehow knows more than the scientists who have spent their careers studying the issue. There is a big gap between the information we have in front of us and the way we behave. Denial can cause behavior that seems to be opposite of the most logical response. Taking part in ecstatic displays of resource consumption can be comforting. This explains NASCAR. “The American Way of Life is a blessed One!”

I heard a speaker today who said that the 21st century is going to be the century of chemistry. He predicted that there will be a defining moment at mid-century when we will start paying back energy to the ecosystem. (Right now we are running an energy deficit, burning through coal, oil, gas and soil, and harvesting every possible ecosystem from the ocean to the rainforest to the amber waves.) This guy is a Professor from the top Chemistry Department in the U.S. and firmly believes that chemistry, 'Low Energy Science' as opposed to High Energy Physics, will discover a way to convert sea water and carbon dioxide into synthesis stock to feed the petrochemical octopus* using only sunlight. My friend the professor said that Bill Clinton had told him once that the 21st century was going to be the century of biology and he said, No Bill, you're wrong, it's going to be the century of chemistry. Give me a decade and I'll show you. He was optimistic because the current crisis in energy and environment is waking up politicians to chemical issues. BASF, said to be the largest company in Europe, has a new slogan: 'BASF, The Chemical Company'. Could it be that we have turned a corner and chemistry is no longer a dirty word?

*Petrochemical octopus coined in an otherwise ho-hum 2002 article in the South Atlantic Quarterly; '... the petrochemical octopus that feeds and clothes us.'

Winter arrives

2008-03-19T13:04:00.003+01:00

We are going to have more snow for Easter than we did for Christmas:

Right now the Pacific is giving the world an anti-Nino (La Nina), resulting in a tough winter in China, Afghanistan, the Midwest and rain in California. If I am not mistaken some rain for Australia too. Northern Europe on the other hand has had the warmest winter ever-- a non-winter. At least for the next week though the tables will turn and that's OK because the freezing temperatures will kill the eggs of the killer slugs that have invaded from Spain that eat the garden in the summer. Maybe it will also drive me to change the lubricating oil in my bike's sealed hub.

The nut doesn't fall far from the tree

2008-03-16T16:24:00.004+01:00

I had to work for a few hours today to prepare for next week. When I got home my wife and sons were hard at work in the yard going at an old stump from an apple tree. There was something seriously wrong with that tree. It made apples but they always rotted on the stem before ripening. Nonetheless the tree left one hell of a stump. My wife's chutzpa amazes me because stumping is the mother of all extreme sports. The gang of three put up a good fight and I was honored to be asked to step in. Took the axe out of the shed and found it was much duller than the shovels, which provided an opportunity to rev up the grinding wheel and let the sparks fly. Axe sharpened I went to work, chopping, digging in the mud, feet slipping. It started raining, and then hailing, no joke, and I kept at it, digging, chopping, shoes caked, periodically staggering away from the hole gasping for air. After a while I could rock the stump from side to side which helped to locate the remaining roots. In the end I lifted the stump free of the hole, victorious.

I got to work when I was a kid and I loved it. Sometimes Dad couldn't wait to get out and cut wood on a Saturday morning. We would return home with a trailer full of oak, or ash, or even cottonwood. After a week of tending to the flock there was no holding back the urge to swing an axe, and bite into a tree trunk with the McCulloch chainsaw. I always thought he was proud to go to work covered in scars and band-aids. It worries me that I may not be passing this work lust on to the next generation.

Winters, it was my job to fill the woodbox and shovel the driveway. Summers I mowed the lawn. One time I saw that the lawnmower was beating the heck out of the grass, leaving battered blades frothy with greenish pulp. I asked Dad if I could sharpen the blade, I was about 11, and it was OK, so I turned on the homemade grinding wheel in our basement which was connected to an electrical motor from the 30s by a sagging fan belt. Sharpened blade, remounted it and gave the lawn a clean buzz cut with a razor sharp edge.

On the radio

2008-03-16T09:48:00.004+01:00

The 80s were forced to carry a wet blanket of 60s and 70s music pumped out by the radio stations. It was fair enough that the boomers were allowed to blossom, and a fine blossom it was, but Gen X'ers needed their day too. It defied the natural order that the boomers did not go to seed. You know what I mean-- growing up on the Beatles and Stones and Doors and later Lou, Niel, Jerry and the Bobs D. and M. In between Sabbath and Floyd, all of it at least a dozen years past due. You couldn't open a car door without hearing Horse with No Name, Bad Company or the Eagles. There were a few cracks in the edifice, punk of course, Van Halen, the Cars, the 'mats. Asked what his career meant, Iggy Pop said, 'I helped kill the 60s.' But punk was not available on the radio. With grunge the long national nightmare started to fade.

There is something unnatural in KQ's 'Classic Rock' format; thanks to the internet, halfway around the world you can take a trip to the leftover music of the 60s and 70s that was played in the 80s and 90s.

Spring

2008-03-09T18:44:00.007+01:00

It was a beautiful day yesterday and we met the first hedge hog, and saw the year's first ladybug.

Crocuses are up.

I tried to tell our four-year-old that this was a space alien but he wouldn't believe me. He wouldn't believe it was rhubarb either. First he said it was a cactus and then sushi.

New Year's Resolution Broken; Yet There Is Hope

2008-03-08T17:22:00.004+01:00

My New Year's resolution for 2008 is to ride bike farther than I drive car. Here's the stats so far:

Car: 625 miles
Bike: 510 miles
(Train: about 3000 miles)

What put me in the red is that I had to drive to work three days with lab equipment, 45 miles each way. But my goal is still within reach, I just have to keep the car in the garage and the bike between my legs. And the weather is looking up.

_____

In May there is a 'Ride your bike to work' competition and we are recruiting velocophiles for our team, The Flying Aerosols. I didn't make the name. My role is to organize a bike-fix rally where a few of us will bring tools and rags and adjust chains and seats and spokes, and then we'll go for a ride. They have a competition to see which team bikes the farthesetand there is a lottery-- last year I won some color pencils.

Things were different then

2008-03-06T16:06:00.007+01:00

So one time us five kids were in the back of the station wagon driving home from up north and the other four start making up Mr. Wizard episodes. My brothers and sisters were having a gay old time talking about the new color and new musical chord Mr. Wizard had invented. I'm younger than they are and I hadn't seen the show; they told me about the 50s TV program Watch Mr. Wizard that taught science to kids. I still didn't think it was funny so I went back to staring out the window.
_____

I was just thinking about Pyrex and read about an experiment Mr. Wizard had done where he put two glass bowls on a block of dry ice. Mr. Wizard pours molten lead into the bowls and the one that isn't made of Pyrex shatters. There is a burst of fog as the lead hits the dry ice.

This experiment wouldn't work today. Starting from when it was first produced by Corning in 1915, Pyrex was made from thermal-shock-resistant borosilicate glass. In 1998 Corning spun off World Kitchen which started making Pyrex from cheaper soda-lime glass and the packaging now states that the Pyrex kitchenware must never be used over a flame, on stove tops, under a broiler, or in a toaster oven. There are reports of the new Pyrex products shattering violently, producing large sharp cutting edges.

I love the classic Pyrex products we got as wedding gifts, like a baking dish and measuring pitchers. So versatile, so durable and now, so collectable.

The Buffets

2008-03-02T08:50:00.003+01:00

You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out -- and what we are witnessing at some of our largest financial institutions is an ugly sight.

-Warren Buffet, the Oracle of Omaha, quoted in the NYT

And who can argue with success? Warren appears to be taking over Alan Greenspan's role as the elder statesman of American finance. His brother Jimmy is moving into haute cuisine with the establishment of the Margaritaville and Cheesburger in Paradise restaurant chains.

More weather

2008-02-26T13:52:00.004+01:00

This winter was the warmest on record, and there have also been an unusual number of storms coming in off the North Sea. There was one last Friday-Saturday with a 9 foot surge on the Danish coast, trees blown down, power out, trains cancelled. There is another storm coming in tomorrow, and then another this weekend. I'm used to short intense storms in Minnesota but these ones are different-- rain and a long steady hard wind. 20 m/s means an average speed of 45 mph, with gusts on top of that. One good thing is that these storms pump lots of oxygen-rich water into the Baltic which will help the cod to survive.

WWI Anti-German Language Changes

2008-02-24T21:44:00.007+01:00

Kaiser Bill

Franz Ferdinand

Sauerkraut was called liberty cabbage, brats liberty sausage, and hamburgers, salisbury steak.

Last day of winter sports vacation

2008-02-24T16:18:00.010+01:00

The Swedish winter sports school vacation week is kind of a misnomer, since it is spring, the earliest spring on record. January temperatures were 10 F above average, and February has also been unusually warm. Flowers are blooming, hedgehogs have come out of hibernation, pollen is in the air and the fish are biting.

First rainbow trout-- first of the day, and first ever.

Second rainbow.

Third rainbow, 3.7 pounds.

Back home.

One for dinner, two for the freezer.

Seasons

2008-02-22T19:33:00.004+01:00

In Sweden they use meteorological definitions of the seasons. Spring has arrived when the temperature is above freezing for 7 days in a row. In fall the average daily temperature is between 32 and 50 F, and it cannot be fall after Feb. 15. It is winter when the temperature stays below freezing for several days.

This map shows when the Swedish winter usually arrives. We're down there at the bottom on the '10 Jan' isotime line. But this year winter never made it. That meant that when fall expired last week we were officially without a season.

The temperature has been below freezing a few times over the last few months, night frosts, a day or two of snow, but that was it. It pains me to tell you this because I believe winter is good for the soul and this year I have not been cleansed. It's too late for me now because spring has arrived.

Here are some cloistered lillies that were blooming in the park today.