Just not a lot motivating me to comment this week. Not that there aren’t things that get me worked up, or make me thoughtful, just nothing that I feel the need to comment on. Instead I will just jot down some thoughts on random topics…
This morning I discussed with a friend my thoughts on the latest mass murder our society has had to live with and how I had avoided reading the details because that is exactly what the perpetrator wants. These people want attention, by giving them attention we are egging on the ones that are still straddling the fence. Clearly ignoring what happened won’t have any impact on the event that already happened, but I do believe minimizing the attention would have a beneficial impact going forward. Of course, my decision to ignore it won’t change anything, Americans seem to love reading about this sort of stuff, so naturally it will be all over the place.
Does anyone else think Zimmerman is a sociopath? The death of Martin was “God’s will”? I doubt he did himself any favors when this finally gets to trial, but the tiny shreds of sympathy I had for him evaporated with that comment. Everything I have read makes it plain to me that Zimmerman orchestrated the confrontation and based on my reading of the silly-assed stand-your-ground-law, Martin had more right to attack Zimmerman (if that is what happened) than Zimmerman had to shoot Martin. Also, Zimmerman’s conduct regarding the bail money indicates that he is someone who is quite willing to do whatever he pleases, society be damned, further cementing my view that he is a sociopath.
Ann Romney and her ‘you people’ crack cracks me up. Here is someone so totally out of touch with the majority it is comical, yet half the nation supports her husband. I can’t decide if it is an American thing or a Human thing, but Americans sure as hell are dumb. Not that the Democrats haven’t pulled of some whopping lies, but the score is plainly tilted against the GOP and their standard bearers. I am growing convinced that our nation will be worse under Romney (and I expect it to be really bad under Obama, or Bush’s fourth term) and will be motivated to vote _against_ him come this fall.
Poor Cadel Evans, yesterday he lost even more time and while still in the top 10, his chances of a podium slot rest on several people crashing out or having incredible bonks on the time trial tomorrow. Clearly the better man is winning (better men; Froome seems clear that he could be on the top step if that is how the team had been organized), though I had such high hopes for Cadel at the beginning.
How about that Schleck brother? So many people lie about doping and later confess that it is hard to not be cynical, but the idea that he would take something like a diuretic that can’t possibly benefit him and that he knows will be discovered doesn’t make any sense. Just like when Landis was caught regarding testosterone, it just doesn’t make sense that anyone would use something like that to enhance their performance (though testosterone is reputed to help with recovery it is hard to imagine mountain climbers risking putting on additional muscle; only sprinters benefit with the increased muscle mass).
A few days ago I read an interesting report on the WSJ or Fox that the US had seen a net reduction in CO2 emissions, largely due to the switch to natural gas. The article was so clearly out to make political points that I didn’t finish reading it and there was all sorts of Obama bashing (amazing that these people have no cognitive dissonance when they complain about Obama killing coal through the promotion of natural gas while at the same time complaining that he is against fossil fuels (while OK-ing that pipeline from the Canadian tar sands)). However, it seems the combination of the crashed economy and switch to gas (something, btw, which was going to drive coal out of business anyway as the economics of gas clearly favor coal, by a long shot) has done with the Kyoto protocol couldn’t do. Naturally I suspect that as our economy picks up (hopefully sooner rather than later, but if Romney gets elected I am sure it will be later, perhaps way later) our CO2 emissions will pick up as well. I feel confident that my duckweed approach will be successful, but I am in a position where I need to self-fund, and that rate is so slow it might be 5 years or longer before I can have any impact.
I doubt I have enough reader(s) for this plea to have any effect, but I am in the job market. The biggest problem is the ‘golden handcuffs’ of the intelligence community paycheck (except for the finance industry I am pretty much at a 20% premium to the top end of the commercial market). We have, rather foolishly in retrospect, allowed our expenses to grow to match our income, though the original intent of our second house was to be our only house and events overcame, so I am rather inflexible in the pay area. The team I am on now, a year ago last April, was funded at 16 FTEs (full-time equivalents, though we had only 14 on our team at that time), then, when I was on vacation naturally, the powers-that-be announced that they were cutting the team down to two. Suddenly there was a flood of identically skilled people looking for identical jobs and the rats abandoned ship so fast I quickly found myself as one of the two left standing. I wasn’t wild about going from an active team doing development (though most of the work was maintenance, at least there was some refactoring) to basically accepting patches and testing them, but I have been told by several people that the agency does stuff like this a lot and in a couple of years they will very likely ramp the project back up. I felt that it would be a good idea if I stuck with the project to help transition any new team, so settled in the position even though it wasn’t very exciting. However, about a month ago my team lead told me there was talk of cutting our ‘group’ down to just one person. Due to various circumstances I felt it was best not to angle for that remaining position, so am in the job market. If anyone is interested, here is my resume:
http://sol-biotech.com/resume.htm
My LinkedIn page:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/keithoxenrider
and my attempt at giving context to my rather eclectic background:
http://sol-biotech.com/KOITBio.html
The weather looks much cooler this weekend so hopefully we can get some work accomplished on the construction. So painfully slow. I have been working on detailed design for cooling our greenhouse. It sure sounds silly on the surface, but by pumping the waste heat into the pool the energetics seem to be very favorable and the radiation from the pool (about 1/4 the surface area of the building) should help minimize heating at night, so I am hopeful that experience will demonstrate that the idea wasn’t crazy after all. I read an article a while ago that in some northern European country (where the summers are much cooler on average than they are here) researchers were able to show that by eliminating venting (thus keeping humidity and CO2 levels higher) they were able to get yields high enough to justify the expense of the cooling. I don’t recall where I saved that article so can’t be certain they were using water to absorb the waste heat or if they were using that waste heat to warm the houses at night, but I am going to go with the idea because my wife wants a pool environment that is more conductive to people so the cooling is a bit dual purpose.
I wish all my reader(s) a great weekend!
