Right to be forgotten...

Google Must Censor Results about Results about Results AD INFINITUM.

THIS IS NOT A PIPE!!!!!

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT OUT OF SEARCH RESULTS.

snpachat. stuff on my cat dot head

The Word Hurricane

First it was SANDY!

Then we got wacked by Winter Storm Athena!!!

She's a real cold bitch here in coastal New England!!!

MAYAN END OF DAYS, WE APPROACH THEE!

It's getting better though. Nope. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. Potato chips will cost more than five dollars a bag. Cheap fuel is gone the way of the dodo.

Let's all be friends! Run like an antelope out of control. Whip that llama with a chain on stage.

One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.

May you live in interesting times

The world composed of just a few simple ingredients, combining in such an elucidating array of sporadic phenomena.

The Prophet was Right?

Read some of these new articles and you will be somewhat appalled.

Oil Spill to kill Louisiana Economy

WIPEOUT

Plan number 15234234: LMRP another fricking joke idea.

The operation will be carried out at 5000-ft deep with the use of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and equipment. The approach may result in a temporary increase in the release of oil but if successful could capture most of the oil and gas leaking from the riser.

GREAT. Another low probability fix that is likely to result in HIGHER increased rate in oil pollution.

UPDATE 6/2/10 1pm EST: The diamond saw is stuck in the pipe. Another failure. Better keep a close eye on the barometer. "You don't know a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.... just below the surface.....



The bureaucracy and cowardice in this country is killing us! Where have all the cowboys gone? At least with Katrina you had the general coming down and getting some stuff done. Now we just have a bunch of corporate Dudley Doo-rights filing reports and making assessments of the situation. Where is the world class engineering? We've gotten soft!


It's stimulating the economy though by hiring these armies of idiot workers instead of taking bold strides to destroy the freaking well. Why? BP wants that oil! They could give a rat's ass about the environment and the people of Grand Isle, LA! There has to be a way to kill the well other than just top-kill or bottom-kill. The collection dome has 2 components. Keep the oil contained in a dome and COLLECT IT. They aren't simply trying to stop the leak.


EVERY METHOD PROPOSED AND ATTEMPTED TO DATE BY BP HAS HAD A COMPONENT OF COLLECTION TO IT. THAT IS THE BOTTOM LINE FOR THIS GLOBAL CORPORATE HEGEMONY WE ARE SLAVES TO IN 2010.

"Come with us to the field, or go with our brothers to the sea and cast your net;

For the land and the sea shall be bountiful to you even as to us."

And if there come the singers and the dancers and the flute players, - buy of their gifts also.

For they too are gatherers of fruit and frankincense, and that which they bring, though fashioned of dreams, is raiment and food for your soul.

And before you leave the marketplace, see that no one has gone his way with empty hands.

For the master spirit of the earth shall not sleep peacefully upon the wind till the needs of the least of you are satisfied.

After the Fall

The Rhode Island Floods of 2010

Hardest hit:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

How bad was the flooding?

It killed the Easter bunnies.  Four of them.  And hundreds of other pets.  But no people died, thank goodness.

We experienced some problems with our septic already this month due to the excessive rainfall.  Several hours with a wet vac and cleaning supplies in the basement addressed the leak on our 6 day old, newly installed carpets.  That was barely a week ago.   

Monday night we went to bed around 11am and it rained again.  But we prepared for it. It was dry as a bone.  I had a large bucket ready for any leaks coming out of the septic drain if the worst case (predicted 2-5 inches of rain in this storm) happened.   I had set up extra pipes for all the downspouts to channel the water away from the house.

The 5 inches would have been bad.  We would have had some water leaks.  At 3am my wife woke up smelling the septic backup from upstairs.  This was not a good sign. 

This was the part of the storm that sent us into the 200 year record marks.   We got something around 8 inches of rain on top of totally saturated grounds and full swimming pools and backed up septic system.   I had ran the pool pump at a slow trickle for 2 days previous and it filled back up in minutes.   

On top of the septic backup we found 2 hugely shocking discoveries that placed us from "flood mitigation" into full scale emergency.

• Pools of water forming on the opposite side of the basement where the waterfalls we had not seen yet were accumulating into the opposite end of the house from where the runoff was entering.
• The sump pump had been overcome.   In horror we pulled back the furnace room doors to find several inches of water building behind the sump pump well and soaking unhung picture frames and boxes of books that had yet to be unpacked since we bought the house at the end of last summer.

We started getting shocked by the wet vac as we operated it in standing water in nothing but our PJ's and bare feet at 3:30am.  At that point we started calling all the emergency phone numbers on our fridge we could.   Luckily we were up before most anyone so we got a plumber to come help us bolster the sump pump.   He also confirmed that our pool was overflowing and we had to pump it out or the waterfalls would continue into the basement.  At first they would not pump it because of environmental issues with the pool chemicals.  Thankfully the guy said to hell with the laws and pumped out our pool into the street for us or we'd have been buried by water.

The next 4 hours went by in a blur.   We continued monitoring the septic overflow and tried to contact the water damage companies at 8am to get help with clean up and drying out the new carpets which are still sitting on my wife's credit card unpaid - but completely ruined at this point today.

 Shortly after this the rain came down hard again.  And the thousands of gallons of water that had been pumped out came flooding right back into the backyard, the pool, and again into our basement and garage.   After a quick, futile search at the local hardware stores for any kind of backup pump, I returned with the only option available to us.  We had to break open the pool pump from the garage and break the winterization and run out the pump into the street manually.  In retrospect we should have done this long before this storm, but with everything going on I never thought that I would have to open up the pool like that.




Cleanup will take time



This is a video from a week before this recent flood.
I used to work with the guy in the green hoody in this video:

"I feel like I was run over by a truck right now"

I said the same thing to my wife more than once the last few days. Almost the exact same words, because my body really felt like I'd been run over.


We stayed on top of the cleanup all day long.  We couldn't shower, use the toilet, clean any of the 10 pairs of clothes that we soaked, or the 25 towels drenched.   So we just did clean up and kept emptying the buckets.  Then around 7pm a septic pumping truck came by to bail us out.  They pumped out our entire septic tank nearly with 1,000 gallons - the most the little port-a-potty truck could carry.  Within 30 minutes the septic tank filled back up again.

Exhausted and sick with stress, my wife went to bed around 9pm.   She didn't sleep long.  I tried to stay up to monitor and mitigate the floods as heavy rain continued.  But even during the exciting URI vs UNC men's NCAA basketball NIT tournament game I drifted to sleep around 11pm.  3hours of sleep just wasn't enough to pull an all-nighter.

We had alarms going off every 30 minutes to change out the buckets however.  In the first round I miscalculated and the septic bucket had overflowed and in my haste I spilled large amounts on the carpet as I scrambled to pull it out from behind the washing machine.  This continued until around 6am when we finally slept a solid hour without getting up.  The bucket finally stopped getting water.

It was a horrible nightmare that wouldn't end.  We had two nights with hardly 5 hours of continuous sleep and still waiting for a cleanup service.  The service never came.  They were too busy helping people pump out water.   Our wet basement wasn't nearly as devastating as those having standing water.   So it looks like the $3,000 new carpets are goners.  The other $1k spent on mitigation hopefully gets covered by insurance.  But we'll have to wait and see what the insurance adjuster dude says.

/http://www2.turnto10.com/jar/news/local/historic_flooding/article/video_warwick_mall_aerials/34187

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Admireal Ackbar assaults Whale Trainer

The importance of stupidity in science

Martin A. Schwartz

Department of Microbiology, UVA Health System, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22908, USA
The importance of stupidity in scientific research -- Schwartz 121 (11): 1771 -- Journal of Cell Science



Finally they are getting on my level!



More Science Facts!

sounds much like my time at university:

The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.

I enjoyed my college where everyone failed the exams, but thanks to the curve some passed anyways. (Jim Greenlee's cs2130 class especially) It is absolutely true and humbling, "The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions." Thomas Henry Huxley

Fireball over Edmonton

from Astronomy photo of the day let's call it video of the day.



WOW!

in space no one can pull pencil lead out of your eye

According to an urban legend, NASA spent millions of dollars designing pens to fly in space, while the Soviet Union simply equipped their cosmonauts with pencils. Like so many urban legends, though, this one is false. NASA did not spend any money at all developing the pens.

Astroprof's Space Pens article.

the professor who called snowflake

Currently I am on a work-instigated training trip in North-Central Massachusetts. We are located in a purgatory realm of over-burgeoned suburbia, with all the congestion frustrations of the big city and none of the benefits of readily available entertainment and sustenance. However, there is a Whole Foods nearby and the hotel I'd been staying previously had a bar 15 feet from my the entrance to my room.

The snow started falling hard at 1pm here btwn Bellerica and Bedford, MA at the ICS training center. It has let up slightly 7 hours later at 8pm. But so many of us are stranded. I've heard stories on TV of 2.5 hour delays for traveling a distance of 5 miles in Boston.



I've had to take shelter in a hotel across the street rather than try to journey the meager 10 miles down the road to the original hotel, where my clothes and other assorted accouterments lie waiting in an empty room.

"Hand to hand combat there for milk and bread - what's wrong with these idiots."


Essentially everyone was worried about the snowfall, hit the streets right as the storm peaked, and then people just flooded the roads in mindless succession. Our teacher decided to hold the class until mid-afternoon rather than breaking at lunch to elude the ensuing clusterfuck. I've heard the interstates are closed in Southern New England and the ones that are open are the veritable parking lot. If I am in a parking lot I don't want my motor running though.

discuss your commute

I'm glad we are sitting here without a car or our clothes. We don't need it tonight. You just dig in. It's hard to say how this can be prevented. There's just too many people on the roads to begin with. When we all descend on them simultaneously the system breaks down. Add an army of severe storm vehicles to reach apotheosis.

And now let's hear from our viewers:

Heavy snow brings traffic to halt

wearing my shades at night

Noctilucent Clouds – keep the light shining down, shining down on me!

Walk among us?