Tourists Blow Off the Sahara
January 30, 2013

The al-Qaida attack on an Algerian natural gas complex that killed 37 hostages has reduced tourism to the Sahara.

In the 1980s, twenty thousand tourists hit the sands annually. In 2011, 1,807 tourists visited. In 2012, the tourists numbered only 643. "And those were the really crazy people," one Algerian official said.

Time to unpack.

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Music Association: Dido - Sand In My Shoes








History's Mysteries
Who Burned the Library at Alexandria?
January 29, 2013

Yesterday's news about the burning of the Timbuktu library was reminiscent of the more famous burning of a Sahara-doorstep library -- the burning of the Library at Alexandria. The Library at Alexandria was the largest library of the ancient world. They were the Amazon of papyrus scrolls. It was a place of learning. At the Library, Archimedes invented the screw-shaped water pump. At the Library, Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth as 252,000 stadiums end-to-end. At the Library, Euclid discovered the rules of geometry, and Ptolemy wrote the Almagest.


Pencils down. Hand in your answer sheet. The correct answer is everyone did it... all of the above... that place had more fires than the Sun.

In 48 BC during the Roman Civil War, Julius Caesar ordered the Egyptian fleet burnt. Following Caesar's orders, the Roman soldiers set fire to the fleet and part of Alexandria as well. That part of Alexandria that burnt included the Library.

In 391 AD, Theophilus turned part of the library into a Christian church, destroying part of the Library.  Riots in 415 AD caused the death of Greek mathematician Hypatia and may have burned the Library.

In 640 AD, Caliph Omar conquered Alexandria. When asked about the great Library's holdings, the Caliph said the scrolls "will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous."The papyrus scrolls were used as firewood for six months.


So there you go. The correct answer was E, not that burning books is ever a correct answer.

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Music Association: Talking Heads - Burning Down The House






Timbuktu Libricide
January 28, 2013

When I think remote, I picture Timbuktu -- the crossroads of western Africa on the southern doorstep of the Sahara Desert. Not many people know that it is the doorstep, because the doorstep keeps getting buried in the sand. They sweep the doorstep on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

The ancient-ish library of Timbuktu is in the news today because the radical Islamists torched it before they left.

The library contained manuscripts as old as the early 1200s and has long been considered an archive of Islamic writings with over 20,000 documents.

Poof... up in smoke.

Libricide.  

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Music Association: Blue Öyster Cult - Burnin' For You







J.J. Abrams to Direct Star Wars VII
January 27, 2013

It was recently announced that Star Trek director J.J. Abrams will direct Star Wars VII for Disney.

	Star Trek	Star Wars
year created	1966	1977
creator	Gene Roddenberry	George Lucas
genre	science fiction	space fantasy
medium	TV to movies	movies to TV
original characters	Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy	Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo
other characters	Captain Picard, Captain Sisko, Captain Janeway, Captain Archer	Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Padmé Amidala
artificial life	Data	R2D2, C3PO
key spaceship	U.S.S. Enterprise	Millennium Falcon
space flight	warp drive	hyper drive
hand weapons	phaser	light saber, blaster
enemies	Klingons, Romulans, Borg	the Empire
like magic	transporter	the force

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Music Association:  Nena - 99 Luftballons "Everyone's a Captain Kirk"






Fluffy Friday
Cats and Bears
January 25, 2013

Today's installment of fluffy Friday attempts to unravel the mystery of cats and bears. Do cats like bears? Do bears like cats? It's a puzzler.

Here's the visual evidence:

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Music Association: Elvis Presley - Teddy Bear & Phil Harris and Bruce Reitherman - Bare Necessities










How To Keep Warm
Myths of Dress In Layers and Head Heat Loss
January 23, 2013

People ask, "How do you stay warm?"

Here's some answers. Shivering. Dress in layers. Stay inside. Think warm thoughts.

Those answers are not good answers. I really don't follow them, except for the last one. It's more complicated and more simple than all that.

A better rule is the Dick Nixon Rule of winter dressing -- cover up. The colder it gets the more you should cover up. And forget the malarkey about 70% of heat loss is in the head. That's nonsense. The head is not 70% of the body unless you're a tadpole. You can't just put a hat on and be mostly warm.

The head-heat loss nonsense came from a 1956 Canadian pseudo-scientific experiment by Gerd Froese and Alan Burton at the University of Western Ontario which says "the heat loss from the head may amount to half the total resting heat production" as if researchers are 50% head. (The half wits. They were from London, Ontario, which is halfway between Detroit and Toronto, making them about the only Canadian city south of all of Minnesota.)



The problem with dressing in layers is that layers can make a person more cold.

Here's how that works. People follow the dress in layers advice, putting on layers and layers of normal clothes. They put on five pairs of socks and shoehorn their feet into their regular shoes. They are going to freeze.

I've watched several films of Mount Everest climbers who made the layers mistake.

Five problems with the dress in layers mentality are air, moisture, circulation, vision, and mobility.

Give me a good warm shirt and a good winter coat, and I will be much warmer than anyone in ten layers of air squeezing sweaters and sweatshirts. Having fewer clothing layers can keep air pockets between good winter-weather clothes. Fewer clothing layers can help moisture wick-away from the body. And fewer layers can prevent circulation cutoffs.

Tight shoes will cut off circulation. Bunches of material in the armpits will cut off circulation. Tight elastic bands will also cut off circulation. Nothing will make a person colder than a lack of circulation.

One of the keys to Everest climbing is to do the summit quickly. If your mobility or vision are limited by what you are wearing, you'd be better off without it. And by the time you realize that, it's too late.

So cover up as needed, get out there, have fun, and be quick about it.

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Music Association: Foreigner - Hot Blooded







Quadra Pa Helix
January 22, 2013

People ask, "How do you stay warm in such a cold place as Minnesota?"

I don't know how other Minnesotans do it, but for me the answer is simple. I have twice the DNA strands. I have quadra-helix DNA.

Late last year, I was examined by researchers at the Department of Biochemistry of the University of Cambridge on Tennis Court Road in Cambridge CB2 1QW UK. As they first looked at my DNA, they asked me to stop shivering. It was making them see double. I told them I wasn't shivering.

They took turns looking in a high-powered microscope. They called up colleagues and stood in line to look in the microscope. As they started to set up a reel of numbered tickets and velvet-dividing-ropes and unboxing a Jasco J-810 spectropolarimeter, I asked what they were seeing.

"Hrrrmph, yes well, what you seem to have is not your ordinary deoxyribonucleic acid. No. You've gone and doubled it into a sort of four-walled structure as it were.  It's really a four-stranded guanine-quadruplex nucleic acid structure. The only thing missing is a roof."

They all chuckled and flapped their lab coats, dancing on the edge of a ritual that was both innocent and jejune.

I alone remained unfazed, puzzling over whether my DNA or QNA needed a roof to stay warmer.

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Music Association: Taylor Swift - Begin Again










Didn't Mean To Be So Negative
January 21, 2013






“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”  - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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Music Associations: Frank Loesser - Baby It's Cold Outside & Foreigner - Cold As Ice
& Beyoncé - National Anthem (Caity Weaver describes)







Fluffy Friday
January 18, 2013

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Music Association: Manfred Mann - Blinded By The Light     (make sure the cat isn't)





Big News
Largest Structure in Universe Discovered
January 17, 2013

Astronomers have discovered a cluster of quasars so large (Johnny Carson's audience: how large is it?) it would take a vehicle flying at the speed of light four billion years to cross it.



The previous largest structure of the universe? Donald Trump's ego.

Seriously, the large quasar group could be the first lights of the big bang.

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Music Association: Madonna - Lucky Star
Star Association: The Twin Cities Calendar welcomes Prince back to Minneapolis. He's sold out The Dakota through Friday.

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