When Chemists Attack

It looks like GM is planning to roll out a plug-in hybrid vehicle within the next three years.

GM is designing the highly-anticipated Volt to run 40 miles on battery power alone, reducing or even eliminating the need for drivers to fuel up an on-board gasoline-powered engine provided as a backup power source.

I’ve said before (but probably not here on the blog) that if I’m going to start making car payments again anytime soon, I want a car that I can use to do my daily driving entirely from batteries, since I don’t see PEM fuel cells being ready for prime time anytime soon.

40 miles would probably do it, unless there were lots of errands to run. (One problem with the town I live in is that nothing is located conveniently next to anything else!)

Toyota (if they can extend the range of their plug-in Prius using modern battery technology) may still beat them to the punch, but it’s nice to see GM figuring out that maybe – just maybe –  giant SUVs are not the way of the future!

Those of you who aren’t in education are probably not aware of the sheer volume of paper educators have to push around. I’ve been cleaning up the office a bit in preparation for the fall semester, and look what I discovered!

I have a white desktop!

I hadn’t seen it on so long, I’d forgotten what color it was. But at least I will always have this picture to remind me if I ever lose my desktop again…

My wife loves orange juice. I drink it less often than I should, but we both agree that orange juice made from concentrate doesn’t taste good. So we make it a point to always buy the not-from-concentrate juice.

We don’t usually shop at Wal-Mart – for many reasons. Our car, however, was so full of baby stuff before our week at the beach that we decided to buy some of our groceries after we’d unloaded all of our stuff at the place we were staying. Since the traffic over the fourth of July holiday was horrible, we went to the most easily accessible place to buy food. That place, unfortunately, turned out to be Wal-Mart

We were in a hurry, and I picked up some orange juice. Here’s the carton.

The brand’s not familiar, but the label states clearly that the juice is not-from-concentrate, so it shouldn’t be too bad.  (More below the fold.)

(more…)

This looks odd.

That’s the screen of our gas chromatograph. I’m attempting to set up this instrument for my summer students to use, and I’ve just turned on the instrument. This is the temperature reported by the instrument for one of the injection ports. These ports are heated during operation of the instrument, but:

• I had just turned the instrument on, and hadn’t yet turned on the heater – so the temperature should be about 22 or so degrees C.
• Even if I had used the instrument, this injection port wouldn’t be 520 degrees C.

I pondered this for a minute, and the instrument decided to tell me something else, instead.

If you’ve ever seen the movie Office Space, you know what my exact thought was at that moment.

“PRT NOT FOUND? What the f–k does that mean?”

So I looked the message up in the manual. It’s actually in there. It means “Call your Perkin-Elmer Service Representative”.

Somehow, I get the feeling that I should have known that.

Sigh. When it rains …

Got South Carolina on your mind? Get South Carolina on your desktop, too! Here’s a sunset from Myrtle Beach, SC suitable for using as your desktop wallpaper.

Click on the thumbnail to access the full-size image.

This is a companion to the picture we posted yesterday.

Got South Carolina on your mind? Get South Carolina on your desktop, too! Here’s a sunrise from Myrtle Beach, SC suitable for using as your desktop wallpaper.

Sunrise at Myrtle Beach, 1024x768 JPEG

Click on the thumbnail to access the full-size image.

My bandwidth usage has spiked over the past couple of weeks. Has my little corner of the web suddenly gotten really popular?

…

I can dream, can’t it? 🙂

What’s going on is that some sites have started to hotlink my images. To hotlink an image is to use an <IMG> tag to make an image on another site appear on your site, while actually loading the image from the other site. It’s bad for two reasons:

1. It doesn’t give the original site/author credit for the image.
2. The original site/author actually has to pay for the bandwidth used by the image every time someone looks at the hotlinking site.

So, who’s stealing?

Here’s a small time thief at LiveJournal. Not such a big deal, since this thief’s page doesn’t get very many hits.

Here’s a much more annoying thief: Free Republic.^*** They’re more annoying because they suck up much more bandwidth than the small-timer from LiveJournal, and because all of this bandwidth is sucked from my site in the name of right-wing back-slapping over Sean Hannity’s radio show.

The biggest offenders by far, though, are myspace.com and offtopic.com. If you’re visiting from those places, please enjoy this site … but stop hotlinking my images! If you want to show someone else something from my site, then just link to the page where the image is, ‘kay? Thanks.

Because of all the hotlinking, I’ve had to modify the site a bit. A link directly to one of my images will show this:

(If all the images on this site look like that, then there might be a problem with your web browser’s security settings. Let me know if you’re having trouble with the images on the site and I’ll try to help.)

^***Just think of what sort of image I could have put up on that Free Republic thread! 🙂

The news yesterday was dominated – as you’d expect – by the Virginia Tech shootings. News sources provided continuous “coverage”. They speculated endlessly about the causes of the shooting and the motivations of the shooter. As I arrived home yesterday, CNN Headline News was running some woman who was convinced that the shooting was caused bythe “degeneration” of American culture and the prevalence of violent video games. Of course, no one yet knew a thing about the shooter except that he may have been “Asian”. Other news outlets were – more or less – doing the same thing.

Now we know that the shooter was a South Korean English major. So much for the whole “degeneration of American culture” argument. But I’m sure there will be equally pointless avenues of speculation available to today’s news shows.

As a college educator, I feel like I ought to say something about the whole affair. A day later, I’m still at a loss as to exactly what I should say. This was a terrible tragedy. More that thirty people were killed. What can I possibly say about that?

Was it preventable? At this point, it’s difficult to say. We don’t know why the shooter did what he did, or if there were any obvious signs that he was about to go on a rampage. And how do we protect students from someone who is determined to take his own life and as many others as he possibly can – while maintaining an environment where students can learn?

Could the school have handled the situation any better? Perhaps, but it’s entirely too easy to armchair-quarterback what the school “should” have done after the events have already happened. About all I can say on that matter is that I’m surprised the administration didn’t cancel classes after the first shooting. But … I work at a small school with no on-campus housing. At my school, canceling classes would have cleared nearly everyone from the campus. That’s not going to be the case at Virginia Tech.

I might have more to say on this later. Right now, I’m still … stunned.

This is the second time in about a month than I’ve been infected by one of these annoying noroviruses.

The symptoms of norovirus illness usually include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and some stomach cramping. Sometimes people additionally have a low-grade fever, chills, headache, muscle aches, and a general sense of tiredness. The illness often begins suddenly, and the infected person may feel very sick.

No kidding … I get up to get ready for my morning classes, and … blam! Instant illness.

Anyone can become infected with these viruses. There are many different strains of norovirus, which makes it difficult for a person’s body to develop long-lasting immunity.

Curse you, evolution, for making so many different strains of this bug!