It’s DST, so, more on those tulips

Daylight Savings Time started yesterday. That says “Spring” to me, and the weather is complying in my corner of the world. Lots of sun and 12c days (that’s warm) are lovely. Those tulips from February 24? Here they are today:

For comparison, with my hand:

Nice sight for a Monday. I’m working on a manuscript revision (I got a positive “revise and resubmit” on this one but am having a tough time getting started- it’s hard to write when classes are in session) but did make it to Bumpy’s for lunch; I hadn’t got “food” from there in forever, which is a shame because the tuna melt panino I got there today was superb and at $6.95 with chips and a pickle spear a great deal. I also got what I now declare the best macchiato in the city (another shout-out to Ben)… but ask me again next week.

Off to SF

My consulting project takes me to San Francisco this weekend, from tomorrow until Wednesday, Feb 6. I have a love-hate attitude towards SF, the “hate” part owing to what I think is the worst and most evident urban poverty (especially homelessness) I’ve ever seen, all in a city where rich hipsters flock to pay $2500/mo for a studio apartment because they “can’t imagine living anywhere else.” Last time I was there was August 2004. Are things better or worse now? We’ll see.

I think that getting older means measuring time in years and in minutes.

January 2: A great day! It’s great, because today is the first day that we, located as we are at 51 degrees north, make it back up to 8 hours of daylight. Today, the sun rose at 8:39 and will set at 4:39. The darkest morning was yesterday; the darkest evening was actually back on December 14. These are the days with the latest sunrise and earliest sunset, respectively; the shortest day per se is, of course, the day on which the solstice occurs. The further south one travels, the further separated the darkest evening and morning are. In Hawaii, one is in early November; the second is in early February. We’re pretty far north here, so of course the two extremes are only a couple of weeks apart. I know all this from scouring websites on the matter, and one my faves is sunrisesunset.com.

So, this time of year I glory in reading the tables and seeing the return of light speeding up: We get one extra minute tomorrow, but FOUR on Friday! Hurray! I’m seriously like a little kid about this and it’s one reason why January is one of my favourite months, all full of hope and happy expectations, with a new year and the return of the sun.

January is also the month in which I was born, January 21, 1964, and getting older really does make time seem to go faster. I’ve been reflecting on this a bit lately, not obsessively, but what seems to be happening to me are two things that seem contradictory. I do reckon time in ever-increasing chunks; for example, I am now officially off sabbatical (in fact I wrote up my course syllabi today, and nothing says “new semester” like that), but I am already thinking in terms of getting through six semesters and doing it again in three years. It’s amazing to me that I can even conceive of planning three years ahead, but here I am. On the other hand, I’m also becoming increasingly focussed on minutiae, on how those minutes add up, and especially in doing a better job of recording my life, in its details, in several formats, including this blog. One thing that I just mentioned in our “annual update” that we send to our families and friends was how angry (sort of) I am at my 17-year-old self for doing such a terrible job of documenting the life-changing summer I spent in Germany in 1981. I want to remember everything now…

…like how we spent New Year’s Eve!  We went to Jaro Blue, which was a great choice as it’s just a five-minute (or less) walk from our house so we could imbibe as we saw fit, and even better was that the dinner and the whole experience was just perfect. We had four courses with three choices of small (but not minuscule) plates per course. I’d say that the best among everything was the smoked duck ravioli that they serve there; pasta with a texture that sumptuous is a rare thing, just perfect. They also do a killer sweet potato frites. Oh, and martinis. Very, very nice martinis.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Carbon monoxide is extra yucky

I’m a little under the weather–hopefully just a little, feelin’ that cloudy head-cold feeling and had a bit of a sort throat yesterday–and given our really, really cold weather over the last days AND all the work I have to get through by the end of the month, I’ve been stuck inside for what seems like days now. I did take a long walk downtown yesterday to check out as much development as I could and had lunch at the beautiful new Good Earth in the NW corner of the now-refurbished Lougheed Building:

And it was not bad, one of the few spots downtown that was not completely clotted with downtown lunch-ers.

But as I say I started to feel a little off on my return home, so here I am, inside all day, and being stuck inside during the winter invariably makes me worry a bit about carbon monoxide poisoning. Part of the issue for us in this old house is that we have an old boiler. Yes, a boiler, not a furnace, and our old cast-iron radiators really do heat the house (and don’t do a terrible job of it). This is what a 84-year-old boiler looks like:

Yep, the doors are for loading coal. Ours has been retrofitted for gas, of course, but aside from that and some patching, it’s the same as it always was. It costs more to heat with it than would a high-efficiency furnace, but not as much as you’d think, especially at a time like this when natural gas is not too expensive.

BUT having this old appliance and having gas in general does make me think about carbon monoxide, especially when an elderly couple died of CO poisoning in their home in Calgary yesterday. The levels were so high that four EMT workers and two police officers were taken to hospital too. Apparently a car was running in the attached garage. Yeah, I don’t get it either. Very scary thing.

So I checked our CO detector–it’s hard-wired, one of the renos we did when we bought this place–and all’s well there. This site from the EPA is clear and helpful. I’d also suggest you not leave cars running in your attached garages but that’s pretty obvious, or so I’d thought.

Yes, Virginia, there is a[nother re-post of that Spy Magazine piece about] Santa Claus

I had a very busy week last week- polished off what I hope is the last thing I’ll ever write about security guards (this one is on how they perceive the usefulness of training in making decisions, and yes it’s a masterpiece of scholarship, but gah I am over this project) and got piles of data for my consulting gig, so I’m taking the cheap way out and reposting this gem from Spy, January 1990:

Consider the following:

1) No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 1 in the world. BUT since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.

3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical).

This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.

On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that ‘flying reindeer’ (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine.

We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each.

In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.

Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.