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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If a beard were all, the goat would be the winner.
Fortuna favet fatuis
About Me
Name: Matt_J
Location: Lund, Scania, Sweden
I'm from Minnesota and moved to Lund Sweden a few years ago. I teach chemistry at a University in Denmark and get to work by bike and train. We have two kids.
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.
