Bats!

Screech! Bats are cool! Alright lame intro. We were camping in Arkansas this weekend at a place called Devil's Den. It's a state park with a nice big cave one can crawl around in called . . . well, Devil's Den. Get it? Uh, anyway there are bats in that cave! Here's a picture of the cute little guys sleeping away on the wall of the cave.
And I know that when the average person thinks of a bat, they imagine this big ol' black body about the size of your hand, and that's not including the wingspan. I know this because a guy we met sitting outside of the cave waiting for his 12 year old daughter to get back laughed when my dad held his fingers a couple of inches apart while talking about the bats in the cave. "How big, now?" he says . . . This from the guy whose 12-year old daughter braved the cave while he . . . chilled outside.

Most bats aren't as big as you think, though some are that big. There's no scale in these pictures, but these squeeky varmits are pretty small. I'd say they were about 1.5 inches by 3 inches all curled up like that on the wall. You could fit one in the palm of your hand! Though you really wouldn't want to grab one while spelunking, if you wake that sucker up, he'll be pissed! and he'll probably yell and wake up everyone else, and then all the spelunkers with have guano in their hair!
Hey, that one at the top of the picture is looking right at you! Well, he's snoozing, so his eyes are closed, but you can be sure that if you poked him (which is actually really tempting to do, because they look so nice and fuzzy), he'd see you pretty quick. Oh wait. That's right; bat's are pretty much blind.

So hey! Bats are small, cute, fuzzy, and they don't jump in your hair and fly around (much), which is in direct opposition to the scary-halloween-mascot version of the bat! Also, those are usually made out of rubber.

Don't clean your recycling!

I was reading this blog (sorry guys that blog is kind of aimed at women, but this post is estrogen free!), and I decided that's a really good topic, because I love recycling and it sort of goes along with the polymer theme. Plus now I can explain something I mentioned I would say before, that is, why some environmentalists are to blame for the fact that we can't recycle styrofoam in this country! (I'm excited, because I know you really wanted to hear that story!) Well, if you read the blog I linked to, she's right, and so is ideal bite--you do not have to wash out your bottles and cans before recycling.

In fact, you don't even have to peel the labels off of the bottles/cans/whatever. I really have know idea why your 4th grade school teacher decided it was important to teach you to wash/unpeel everything! It seems like a great big deterrent to me! We're trying to encourage recycling, not make it so difficult no one will participate. Plus, it's kind of a stupid idea if you think about it. If every recycling plant were set up to only take nice clean, peel-free bottles and cans, one bad bottle in the mix could majorly mess up the whole process!

So here's how it works: You take your stuff to a collection center run by folks who probably don't know how the actual plant is run, but that's ok (they mean well, just don't ask them questions about how it all works, or you may get the crazy-plastics-girl stare). They take everything, and remove caps and such, because the caps are made out of stuff that's generally not recycled. Then they send them off to the plant where everything is shredded. So if there was a label on your can/bottle, it is now labelless. Then, they wash all the little shreds to make sure there's no left over mountain dew or bush's baked beans stuck to the side of anything, because that would make for a not so polymerized batch of polyethylene terephthalate. Anyway, after they wash everything, they sort it all out to keep the paper wrappers out of the PETE out of the aluminum cans out of the glass bottles. There are many ways of doing this: there's the float/sink method, which is used for some plastics. They can use magnets to make certain types of metal 'jump' into a proper bin. There's even some very high-tech work going on in the area. Some plants even use 'on-the-fly' spectroscopy and other forms of detection to pick alloys out of other alloys hurtling down a conveyor belt, while using precise air blowers to blow the scraps into the correct bin.

All in all, recycling is pretty darn cool, and I love it! And now I think I owe you a story about what kind of impact McDonald's has on the recycling industry, and why we can't recycle styrofoam. I should start by givin away my source. I heard this story in a polymer processing class at MIT. David Spencer, who was then CEO of wTe Corporation, was giving a guest lecture, and this is where I received most of my knowledge of the recycling industry. Anyway he told us that away back when, McDonald's food containers were made mostly of styrofoam. Apparently some environmentalists were a little upset that McDonald's was using this awful, awful material, and demanded that they switch to something more environmentally friendly. Mickey D's gave in after a while and switched to a plastic coated paper, which it turns out, is completely non-recyclable, thus, just looks environmentally friendly. "So where did the environmentalists go wrong?" you ask. Well, I'll tell you. What they perhaps didn't know or look into was that all the waste created from many happy American children and families eating at McDonald's all the time, was enough styrofoam to keep many styrofoam recycling plants open and doing well. When the massive fast food company switched to plastic coated paper, all these styrofoam plants pretty much went out of business . . . good job, friends . . .

And as a closing to this veritable smorgasbord of recycling information, I'll leave you with one more anecdote from David Spencer's guest lecture. He told another fun story about hippies . . . I mean . . . He also told another fun story. This one's about hippies and also shorter. Back in the 60s, we were discovering that the chlorine in PVC is not so good for the environment, so naturally the hippies started protesting that as well. Until, he says, they were informed that their 'vinyl' records were actually made with PVC . . . there were no more protests after that.

Happy Recycling!

The Joys of living in small town Oklahoma

Maybe Norman isn't an especially small town, but this sign really just cracked me up. It has to be about 50 years old. Or maybe just made by someone who wishes he was going to the ice cream shop with the varsity cheerleader 50 years ago.

I am really entertained when driving through Norman, because, for the most part, it seems like any normal modern town with Targets and strip malls, but then I drive past the Hiland Dairy Plant with the dancing cow out front, or I drive the wrong way down 24th street and end up in nowheresville, OK. Oh look, cows!

Driving around Norman, you'll find that they've got lots of neat little shops here; they've got a few really nice consignment stores, and the cutest little 'food market' with (I'm not joking) around 200 different kinds of cheese. But then there's the 'tobacco and beer' store . . . There's also a nice little 'earth foods' store with organic and environmentally friendly/fair trade stuff. Though it is a bit expensive and a little way-out-there-hippie for me (you know, being a republican and all) in a way that makes me really miss Trader Joe's.

Oh Trader Joe's! How I miss your chocolate covered pretzels and frozen Chinese dumplings! (except the ones in the black plastic trays . . . those were gross)

There's a pretty yummy Thai restaurant, and also apparently a nice sushi place which I will check out as soon as I can figure out how to say "yes, please show me the sushi place, but it is not, nor will it ever be, a date." And of course, there's a few Starbucks as well as a Panera Bread, but there's one of those everywhere now, so that's not really impressive. And then there's cows . . .

I suppose the point is that even though I'm sure many of my friends from the East or West Coasts loathe to think of visiting me here, it's nice here, plus I can go visit livestock whenever I want!

Buttons

I was reading GQ again the other day, and came across the best shirt ad I have ever seen. It will be a happy day when I find a shirt ad more entertaining than this one. You are probably thinking, "Kendall, how is it that you have happened to post twice already about something in a magazine that you say you 'don't usually read'? Statistically speaking it isn't likely that the only 2 times you have ever read GQ are the 2 times you have written about it."

Well, friends, as I do trust your knowledge of statistics . . . I was in the doctor's office again, and again was fending off the baby magazines and Better Homes and Garden. The only choices left after these two were People and GQ. That's a bit of a toss up for me, but a near favorite joke of a few of my friends came from GQ (It involved a new-born baby, a pair of nostrils, and some hot water), so I went with that one.

I was reading about Peter O'Toole, and learning that guys seem to idolize the smooth talkers in old black and whites. Personally I don't get it and am fairly certain Gene Kelly and Peter O'Toole were probably just like the jackasses I meet today. Though, I might go for a spaghetti western Clint Eastwood. While I was learning about how amazingly cool Peter O'Toole apparently is, I happened upon the aforementioned ad, and here it is:

And just for your further entertainment, here's most of what was written in what was also the most verbose shirt ad I've ever seen--I left out the parts where they actually tried to sell you the shirt. And for the effect of the first line, you should probably go back and read the 'kick your dog' line again.

"It's happened to us too. And we know all too well that when a button breaks, it's like a slap across your face. But why? It's just a button, right? Wrong. When a button breaks, you might as well just chuck your relationship with the whole brand. Just flush it straight down the toilet. Because the button is more than a button. It's something you trust. Something that's supposed to do its job. Never let you down. It's an ambassador for the entire garment, is what it is. Representing the integrity of the whole shootin' match ... And when you look down at your Haggar shirt front after pressing yourself against an airplane seat to let a passenger off who's about to miss her connection, you'll find all your buttons still in place, still in one piece. No little half-buttons laughing back up at you, saying 'you know you're never gonna replace this button, man. You're no grandma with a button jar on your windowsill. The shirt's about as worthless as a rubber crutch. Ha ha ha!'..."

Dude. I can't believe I just read a 200 word shirt button ad. And I totally have a shirt with half a button on it! I wear it anyway, but every time I use that shirt, that button irks me. I love the ad, but it would never run in a magazine for women. Which leaves me thinking--there are so many magazines out there, and yet I find myself reading magazines aimed at guys: Popular science/mechanics, GQ aparently when I want a good joke, and I'm fairly certain Rolling Stone is aimed at guys. There's got to be a magazine out there for people like me. I'm sure I'm not alone because I know at least two other girls who think like me, and they're just the 2 with whom I've discussed it. I could go with Women's Guns and Ammo, but I don't think that covers everything for me. I want my unbreakable button ad! I'll keep looking, but until I find a slick techy/engineering women's magazine, I'm stuck with what I've got. Which I suppose isn't that bad . . . I'll just skip over the pictures of half-naked Rachel Bilson.

The Impending Polymer Post

In an earlier post, I started going off on a tangent and talking about my hobby of trying to determine which polymer something is made of. I deleted it from that post, because my goal in this blog is to be slightly entertaining and also to improve my writing skills . . . you can attest to how that goes. Anyway, here is that tangent:

It's actually not that hard to figure out which polymer you've got, and it's super easy on the 'recyclable' types, because you can check if you're right! There's a little recycle symbol on the bottom, and it'll have a number in the middle that will tell you exactly what you're working with. Sometimes it even has an abbreviation of the polymer name. After guessing a few times on those, you can get pretty good at it. As for the non-recyclable types, I pretty much just guess.

It also helps to know what a few polymers tend to look and feel like and what a few companies tend to use. For instance, Rubbermaid uses polyurethane and polyethylene. Plus you could probably make a good guess from this list of fairly common polymers that you've probably seen at some point: polyvinyl chloride (PVC), ABS, Lexan polycarbonate resin (the nalgene polymer--the bottle part, not the strap), acrylic, epoxy, polyester, nylon, as well as all the 'recyclable' polymers on the list--polypropylene, high density, low density, and regular polyethylene, polystyrene, and polyethylene terephthalate--check that one out. It's a weird name, but I bet you've used that today. Boy oh boy, that was fun, but I'll tell you the story of why it's the environmentalists' faults that we can't recycle Styrofoam in this country later--also probably why I use quotes when I say 'recyclable.'

Anyway, the reason I decided to write the polymer post is that I continued trying to fix my nalgene today. I had already cut the broken part off, and recut the strap further down to fit it on the notch. It was a pretty soft material, so this was not hard.
I decided to try to make it stronger, though I was pretty sure that was a lost cause. When you make metals stronger, you heat them up so the atoms align in their crystalline structure, and then you quench the metal so the atoms stay where they are when the metal comes back to room temperature. Polymers don't really work like this. They either can be made crystalline, or they can't, and the more complicated they are, the less chance you have of having a material that will crystallize. Anyway, I was fairly certain I was not going to get the polymer above the crystallization temperature or the melting temperature safely in my kitchen, and I was even more certain that this was not going to make it stronger in any way, so really I was just playing around. I stuck it in boiling water, and quenched it, and guess what? It didn't work! I boiled it again, and simply worked the plastic together so it might stay together more. I had stretched it out a bit when I forced in onto the little nubbin on the top of the cap. That seems to have actually helped with the strength some, because now it feels slightly stronger than before, but I really have no way of measuring that.I suppose it's always good to know that if you have something made of polymer, some types become workable around 100 C. They don't melt at 100 C, so you can't mend cracks or holes, but you can reshape them sometimes. A butane lighter can be hot enough to actually melt the polymer, but it would be difficult to use unless it was used on fibers (eg. nylon and polyester). Boiling , of course, is only useful if you ever run into a problem where you'd need to reshape something. If anything melts in your attic over the summer, chances are spectacular that it'll shape right up if you stick it in boiling water and reshape it.

That's my polymer post! Hope you enjoyed it!

Credit Card Surprise

Thought you should know!

I got a bit of a surprise today when I discovered that my credit card finance charges were not calculated the way I thought they were. I suppose it makes sense for the credit card companies to come up with a charging system that ends up costing you more than an intuitive system would. Just in case you may have to run up a credit card bill in the near future, here's my story:

I started school in January, but I apparently just missed the pay deadline for the end of January, so I wasn't going to get paid until February. On top of that, I had some deposits to put down on my apartment, as well as some tuition and fees I had to pay in order to register for classes. In other words, I ran up some credit card bills. So I tried to pay it all off while smartly using my credit card.

This is how I thought the credit card worked: I run up bill, I get a statement. I pay most of statement off. Bank charges me interest on what I didn't pay off. Nice, simple, straightforward.

But I paid $900 of my $1300 statement before the due date--leaving $400. At my 9.9APR I figured that would give me about $3.30 in finance charges, which I could totally handle, so I was surprised to find a finance charge of $18 on my account (not bad, but considerably more than I expected). So of course I called my bank this morning to sort stuff out. After talking to a representative for a little while, I realized that I was definitely wrong, but I still wasn't sure how it all worked, so I asked to talk to someone who could explain it to me.

And here for posterity's sake is how it actually works:
If you pay your bill off completely, there's no charges (but you already knew that). If you don't pay all of your bill, they base your finance charge on an average daily balance of your bill. They just magically make your average daily balance zero if you have no balance at the end of the month. So in the end, if you pay all of your bill off except one penny, you will be charged nearly the same amount as if you paid nothing!

That is pretty much unbelievable to me, and I'd be pretty mad, but I do understand that the company is basically letting me use their money for free. This is how they pay for it. I just didn't realize it was so unbalanced between people who pay off their bills and people who don't.

So the moral of the story is: don't wait until the due date to pay! Unless you're going to pay it all off, in which case, you should wait until the very last moment to pay and take the credit card companies for all they're worth!!

In the Nano-age of nano-news and nano-buzzwords.

I figure, if I put nano 3 times in the title, it'll find more hits on google. Which is ridiculous, but so is research these days.

I went to a conference today in Oklahoma City. I was attending the nanotechnology section of the conference, which was run by the Oklahoma chapter of EPSCoR, that is Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. Which, first of all, was founded by the DOE in 1991 (after another program from the NSF by the same name which was founded in 1979), and apparently gives out a bunch of money every year, so I'd say that it's hardly experimental anymore . . . unless they're just being redundant. It's the Joyous Bovine institute for happy cows . . . in California

Anyway, I was pretty excited about this, because I'd never been to a conference before, and I was looking forward to seeing the different areas of research in the state, and let me tell you, there was some pretty cool research.

But I was struck about half-way through the day with the realization that the overuse of the word nano really annoys me. It doesn't mean anything specific. And everyone uses it all the time, because it sounds techy. The introductory speaker today explained to us that if we signed up for a drawing, we could win an ipod nano. Cool, right? Well, the lady sitting next to me leaned over and said, "Does that mean it's this small?" putting her forefinger and thumb together to emulate something quite small. I laughed. She was not only the funniest scientist I had met in my first 30 minutes at the conference, but she was also making a nice little commentary on what I would be experiencing for most of the rest of the day. All nano means is 10^-9 (which most of you reading probably already know . . .). And I don't mind so much when the media use it when they are talking about some new tiny something that the researchers out at U of X came up with. I get that the general public probably doesn't understand how to make a quantum dot, so that's fine. My parents hear nano, and they think 'really small.' Perfect. And I also understand that because the media and the public recognize it as a 'really cool' scientific word, sometimes it's just much easier to get noticed--aka funding-- when you use this buzz word. For example, I was actually disappointed when it turned out that the particles I used in my undergraduate thesis were 1 micron instead of 500 nanometers--we had to change the name from nano to microparticles . . .

However, it is quite tiring to hear countless companies talk about how they are developing 'nanotechnology' for the 'nanoindustry' with their nano-bio-electo-yadda. But it's no wonder they do when the conference is labeled so very specifically as the 'nanotechnology conference.' Nanotechnology is a wide range of areas. There's nanoparticles, nanosensor, nanoprisms, nanotweezers, and nanotubes . . . Can the nanoprisms girl talk to the nanotubes guy? Well, yeah, but the specifics of her project might be lost on him. Most of the company presentations were so vague I wondered why I was even there. Some of them seemed so thrown off by the vast topic they just said things like "nanotechnology is the future!" and "we should continue to research in this area." I'm thinking "which one??" and that I don't even know what it is exactly the company works with.

Oh well, I guess that's not really something one can avoid at an academic conference. And the individual research projects were pretty cool to learn about. I am also much looking forward to other conferences in the area. Maybe they will allow for more size variation in different areas of research ;-).

Good evening fellow necromaniacs: A Hulu Review

"Good evening fellow necromaniacs. I'm glad so many of you could come. I should explain that the word has nothing to do with the neck. I'm awfully sorry I haven't the time to explain it now. You'll just have to look it up in the dictionary."

So, hopefully by now you have heard of a new website called hulu.com. I read about in in GQ and the Rolling Stone. Why was a lovely girl like me reading GQ, you may ask? well, I was in the doctor's office and the only magazines they had either had babies on the cover or a skantily clad Rachel Bilson, and i was not in a baby mood . . .

Anyway, I'm glad I found it in two separate magazines, because with a weird name like that, I definitely did not remember after reading about it for the first time. After I noticed it for the second time, I decided to check into it since it seemed like everyone was pretty excited about it. After waiting for a username and password for 5 days, which wouldn't be terrible except that most of the rest of the internet is pretty instantaneous, I found that the website was a really good idea, but a bit disappointing.

It's a great idea to put all these shows in one place, and they have a pretty good variety of shows. I was especially impressed with the number of networks they got in on the action, but the number of episodes they have per show was quite disappointing. While they have whole seasons of old TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doogie Howser M.D., they only keep a couple of episodes from current shows. Since most networks already play their last 4 or so episodes online for free, it just seems a little redundant. The whole first season of Buffy and Doogie is cool, but they had *only* the first season. So I say, "what's the point?" The did have some pretty cool collections of old television like the 'Dana Carvey Show,' 'Lost in Space,' and 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents,' which was actually the first thing I stumbled upon, and what the post is named after.



That is pretty hilarious. They don't make TV like this anymore. Which is good and bad. Since each story is confined to one episode, putting only one season or so of a show like this on hulu makes some sense. Shows like this are interesting, but TV has evolved into longer more involving stories that require you to be at the TV every week at a certain time in order to catch the whole thing (I hear that's how they make the dough). Shows like Buffy are lengthy sagas that span 7 seasons for a reason, and if Buffy was your favorite TV show or even if you just thought it was interesting and wanted to see more, you would not be satisfied with one season.

It seems that networks still don't understand the allure that sites like the infamous www.tv-links.co.uk used to have, and that some places still do. For instance, what if all your friends are watching Heros, and you never started watching that when it came out. It's sorta difficult to jump into the middle and catch up on all the back story. Or maybe (like me) you had volleyball practice in high school and missed one of the season finales of Buffy. Now you can most likely find it, but not on Hulu . . . Or what if you're just really bored, and a friend of yours told you that it's too bad you never watched the Gilmore Girls, because you would have really liked it. Even if the CW had a contract with Hulu, you'd probably only get the first season, and then you'd never find out if Lorelei and Luke ever got together in the end.

These are reasons people flock to illegal sites like tv-links used to be, and the benefits of legality are just not large enough for people to be willing to miss out on key moments like when Dr. House and Dr. Cameron went on that extraordinarily awkward, one and only date, when certain website make it so easy not to. What I *would* sacrifice for legality are the 4 or so 30-second commercial spots to support the website and programming on hulu. I think that's great, and I bet other people do too.

The design of the website and the versatility of the integrated player are also terrific, and I can only hope that A) they are working on increasing their selection and B) they are getting agreements with ABC, comedy central, and the CW. Granted: it still needs to be monetarily worth it for the networks to give away their television shows. Maybe we're not there yet?

I'll probably still use the site for newer TV that I just happened to miss last week, and maybe if I ever get bored and want to see the first season of Buffy or try to remember Doogie Howser. They also have Firefly! It's a nice site, but it won't keep people from downloading or using stuff that is illegal.

Good Luck Hulu.com! You're on the right track.