Wallace is missing this place and this place is missing Wallace. He’s a little behind schedule arriving, but he’ll make it soon. There is no place like home. I’m cleaning all the carpets and if I have time Friday I’ll run the fresh water hose over his car. Like all parked vehicles, it gets a light dusting of salt from the sea air over time, and it was a dry winter.Compliments to Nokia. Although they have not solved the problem of the silent rings, they give excellent instructions and do not give you the brush-off. Did you get that, Sony? Nokia even responded positively to my explanation of why I didn’t speak up until well after the 30-day trial period. And, if it still malfunctions, they will take the product back. I was able to find an after-market ringtone with promise. The phone did not have any interface cable in the package, but you can download the software (Nokia PC Suite) which I will evaluate soon.
So that you’ll know, I measured the ring of an average telephone at 71 dB, and this Nokia just manages 26 dB. When somebody is talking at 30 dB, you cannot hear this phone ring. You can sleep right through it. Here’s an opportunity to throw in a handful of trivia. Did you know that very few animals can emit sounds beyond a fraction of the range they can perceive sounds? Humans can emit sounds from around 85 Hz up to around 1,100 Hz in the case of a very talented soprano, or a two-year old when she wants something. But humans can hear from around 20 Hz up to 20,000 Hz. The same range differential exists with most mammals with the exception of bats for obvious reasons.
My days are spent job hunting, so unless you want to hear about that, you’ll have to settle for more trivia or very short blogs. Job searches are apparently taking six months these days, and “60 is the new 40”. You’re still Jack Nicholson if you think you’ll find a job at either of those ages. Besides, even if you are in that bracket, nobody is going to listen to excuses about why you can’t work a computer. PCs hit the business market in 1984, so you’ve had 25 years to learn.
The trivia. I read an article some years back about the shipping that goes through the Soo canal. These are the locks in the Great Lakes, I think there are about 6 parallel lanes, four American and two Canadian. Not the St. Laurence. Anyway, I assume the same number of ships go each way, am I right about that? The point is, I was surprised to learn that 90% of the cargo was eastbound, that is, heading out toward the Atlantic. Most of the returning ships were empty. I would be curious to know how that ratio has changed since the entire US economy did the Edmund Fitzgerald.
More trivia. I did not know that first solitaire game everybody learns has a name. That’s the game where you make seven rows of cards in a triangle shape and play the next lowest card of a different color. You can find it in Windows games, called just “Solitaire” as developed for Windows by Wes Cherry. The game where the cards bounce down the screen if you win, which may be Wes’ only innovation. The real game is called “Klondike”, and the original rules allow you to go through the deck once only.
Last trivia for today is outer space. There is a spot where the gravity of the Earth and Moon are equal. You know how a space capsule gradually slows down to the point where the Moon gravity takes over. Then it speeds up again as it “falls” toward the Moon. The ship must never come to a complete stop so the question is what is the slowest speed it reaches during the journey? I know. It is 2,000 mph. What I don’t know is if this is the same for the return leg. If not, why not and what speed? Feel free to help me out here. This is, after all, rocket surgery.
[Author's note: 2014-05-07. That last passage is not clear. What it means is that a space ship cannot come to a complete stop at the point of equal gravitational pull. If it did, it would not reach the moon with enough velocity to maintain lunar orbit at the correct altitude.]
While not inviting political commentary, this is my response to the Florida Legislature deciding to stop funding local libraries: “Dear Mr. Crist: Cutting off funding to public libraries because times are bad? Isn’t that like the mining company who, when times are bad, lays off the prospector?”
Is this not the same Legislature planning to dump billions of dollars of sand on unused beaches for tourists who may never return? Is this not the Legislature that openly allows con-artists to post pyramid schemes on myFlorida.com, condones the licensing of fake employment agencies, sells voter registration lists to spammers, and turns a blind eye to magnificent salaries over at the Lottery office? Some people are beneath contempt.
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