distractionLab blog

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Since I haven’t written in awhile, I thought that I’d advertise my brother’s blog. He’s really creative so much of his blog posts involve art or music. His description of the blog sums up what you’ll find:

This blog has no real purpose and it is doubtful that a real purpose will ever be stumbled upon. Un-arguably the greatest achievement of this blog is existing— and its second greatest achievement is containing a post detailing its purpose (none, as stated previously). Further, in the case that a purpose is ever found, it is likely to be a poor one characterized by a focus on celebrity gossip, cute purse-sized dogs, and an almost suspicious obsession with the price of crude oil.

I’m disappointed about his blogging effort in that I have yet to see a reference or at least an allusion to the Britney Spears VMA fiasco (celebrity gossip), a review of the GiGi Olivia Purse Style Small Dog Carrier (thanks Google!) (cute purse-sized dogs), or any commentary about how oil has peaked over $80 a barrel (obsession with the price of crude oil). And since he doesn’t own any oil-related stocks I don’t see what is holding him back…it’s not as if he is scared to disclose any financial ties.

A positive thing is that he does link to my frequently updated blog at the top of his links section. For those of you wondering why entries mysteriously appeared overnight from throughout the summer, are you sure you have been reading my blog carefully? Granted, it does appear as if I added entries retrospectively via clever post timestamp changing. However, I have a feeling that if you go to my blog in that tab you always have open and click “refresh,” the old posts that you missed will load right up. They must have been there all the time!

Nova Scotia

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Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia

After I had finished my summer research project and Ross finished his summer classes in Madison, we were fortunate enough to have another great family vacation. This time we went to Nova Scotia, Canada. Passports are required to travel into Canada now. We all remembered ours, but Ross’ had expired. Fortunately, they allowed him on the plane, into Canada, and, after the week long trip, back into the United States. I bet if we had been going anywhere but Canada, the airline/customs people would not have let him board the plane.

Photos of the trip to Nova Scotia.

The End of Peak Oil?

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Can Royal Dutch Shell’s Shale Extraction Technique End ‘Peak Oil’ Paranoia?
Royal Dutch Shell is patenting a technique to convert shale to petroleum at a cost of only about $30/barrel. If it works, the world’s single largest source of oil would be… the United States:

By Jack Brynaur

Over the past few years, more and more apocalyptic stories have been popping up about a supposed phenomenon known as “peak oil.” The theory is that we’re running out of oil, the big powers are keeping it quiet, and as supplies dwindle, world-wide economic chaos will ensue.

This is hardly a new theory. According to the Chicken Littles of the world, we’ve been “about to run out of oil” for over thirty years. Obviously it hasn’t happened yet. With the recent upswing in strife in the Middle East, however, the notion has gained in popularity.

The thing is, this theory is utterly false, and can be laid to rest with a single well-established fact: there is more oil in the Colorado shale fields than the entire Middle East had at its peak. The only reason we’re still importing oil is that, at present, it is cheaper to do so than to extract it from shale. Until recently, getting oil out of shale has been a nasty and expensive business.

That’s about to change, though, as engineers at Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A) have applied for a patent on a new method of extracting shale oil cheaply and cleanly. (As an interesting side note, it is the largest patent application in U.S. history.)

Amazingly, this method:

* Is cleaner than conventional drilling
* Generates the highest grade of light-sweet crude oil, which burns cleaner than other varieties
*Becomes profitable with oil just north of $30 a barrel (which we’ve already blown past)
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Trek 100: Show your support for pediatric cancer research

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On Saturday, June 2nd, I will be riding the Trek 100 on the ‘100 Miles of Smiles’ team. This is a 100 mile bike ride that will raise money to support childhood cancer research. Collectively, the Trek 100 has contributed more than $6 million in support. My goal is to raise $250. To find out more about the Trek 100 and to donate, please visit the link below. Any little bit will help. Thanks for your support.

If you know any friends or family that may be able to help, please let them know.

Scott’s Donation Page

Lance Armstrong will be appearing at the start of the bike ride too!

Me during the 2004 Ironman.

Only in Wisconsin…

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This is funny, but I absolutely do not condone drinking and driving!
(Oh yeah, I stole this from Jennifer’s Facebook note. It is not original.)

Only a person in WISCONSIN could think of this!
From the county where drunk driving used to be considered a sport,
Comes this story.

Recently a routine police patrol parked outside a bar in GREENBAY WISCONSIN. After last call the officer noticed a man leaving the bar so intoxicated that he could barely walk. The man stumbled around the parking lot for a few minutes, with the officer quietly observing. After what seemed an eternity in which he tried his keys on five different vehicles, the man managed to find his car and fall into it. He sat there for a few minutes as a number of other patrons left the bar and drove off.

Finally, he started the car, switched the wipers on and off–it was a fine, dry summer night–, flicked the blinkers on and off a couple of times, honked
the horn and then switched on the lights. He moved the vehicle forward a few
inches, reversed a little and then remained still for a few more minutes as some more of the other patrons’ vehicles left. At last, when his was the only car left in the parking lot, he pulled out and drove slowly down the road.

The police officer, having waited patiently all this time, now started up his patrol car, put on the flashing lights, promptly pulled the man over and
administered a Breathalyzer test. To his amazement, the Breathalyzer
indicated no evidence that the man had consumed any alcohol at all!
Dumbfounded, the officer said, “I’ll have to ask you to accompany me to the
Police station. This Breathalyzer equipment must be broken.”

“I doubt it,” said the truly proud WISCONSINITE.

“Tonight I’m the designated decoy.”

Wisconsin Beats Texas A&M-CC

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I’m a big Badger fan. I’ve lived in Wisconsin my entire life and graduated from Wisconsin in 2006. I was extremely relieved to see the Badgers finally start playing at the end of the first half and part way into the second half. If we had shot as poorly as we did in the first half against ANY Big Ten team, we would not be walking away with a victory. Overall, I feel that we played remarkably well to hold Texas A&M-CC to significantly under its season average. Fortunately, we shot very well the second half. If the real Badgers had showed up in the first half, this game would have been a blow out.

Here’s a funny comment that I found on espn.com:

tstote (3/16/2007 at 6:15 PM)
In case you missed the game, here’s what happened. The hotel the Badgers stayed at last night hadn’t gotten the memo about daylights savings and their clocks were all an hour behind and therefore the team got to the arena an hour late. However instead of forfieting the game some quick thinking Badger fans in Badger attire, some of whom bore a passing resemblance to actual players on the team, took to the floor and took on the Corpus Christie Islanders. Unfortunately since none of these Badger fans had any actual basketball experience they quickly fell behind, eventually by the score of 25-7. Fortunately with about 5 minutes left in the half the real Badgers straggled in. They quickly assessed the situation, took over and started climbing back into the game. Kamron Taylor was running real late having missed the team bus and didn’t get to the arena until about 10 minutes left in the 2nd half; however once he got into the game he calmly scored 24 points in 10 minutes, leading the Badgers past the Islanders 76-63. Bring on UNLV!

5 Hours to Install Windows XP!!

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Yesterday it took me about 5 hours to install Windows XP! The basis of the story is that I have an old (but still pretty fast) Toshiba laptop (5105-S607 for those interested). I had been running Linux on it until the hard drive crashed about a year and a half ago. I upgraded to a Powerbook G4, which I still have and love. Though the hard drive did not work, I had a roommate that used it via a Linux LiveCD. He just had to remember to email himself his documents often because if it crashed he lost all his documents.

Anyway, I’ll tell more of the details later, but there is an organization that I’m donating the laptop to. I found a pretty cheap hard drive on Ebay, put it in the computer, and began reinstalling Windows. The actual installation only took about 40 minutes and required minimal human input and only restarted twice I believe (once to copy the install files and a second time upon completing the install). The other 4+ hours were spent running Windows Update. The version of Windows XP Pro that I was installing was dated to August of 2002. I had over four years of security updates to install!
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Interstellar Ark

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“There are three strategies to travel 10.5 light-years from Earth to Epsilon Eridani and bring humanity into a new stellar system : 1) Wait for future discovery of Star Trek physics and go there almost instantaneously, 2) Build a relativistic rocket powered by antimatter and go there in 22 years by accelerating constantly at 1g, provided that you master stellar amounts of energy (so, nothing realistic until now), but what about 3): go there by classical means, by building a gigantic Ark of several miles in radius, propulsed by nuclear fusion and featuring artificial gravity, oceans and cities, for a travel of seven centuries — where many generations of men and women would live ? This new speculation uses some actual physics and math to figure out how far are our fantasies of space travel from their actual implementation.”

Interstellar Ark :: Strange Paths

I saw this on Slashdot. It was a very intriguing read. In fact, the whole Strange Paths blog is going to be fun to read through. I, like many people, wonder if building an ark and spending over 700 years traveling to a destination is a good use of money. (However, I forgot the technical economic term, but this scale of government spending would probably give an absolutely huge stimulus to the economy!) With how far science and physics have advanced in the past 300 years, one would think that our future selves could build a machine that would beat the “old” design ark to Epsilon Eridani even with a 300 year late start. All in all, I think that technologically, we could build this ark now or at least once we establish a permanent base on the Moon or Mars. Psychosocial aspects would likely be the ark’s downfall. It sort of reminds me of the movie and book Contact. It is interesting to think about, nonetheless.
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