The days are long and the years are short

Long summer days. With children.

Mrmoosie's family is visiting, so we are having a lot of fun, but getting totally off schedule.

I spent three hours today on a practice test for chemistry. I actually did quite well, so I am feeling more confident. It was long and exhausting, however.

Not really sure how to take logarithms without a table of them or a calculator. Is this something I learned in math, or never learned? I do remember using the tables of logarithms.

We went to Balticon over the long weekend. We hung with starstraf and her sweetie and others that she had invited.

Emily liked the con, but we all noticed that the "Children's track" was very poorly labeled. I went to a workshop, that I thought was on the science track, that was really a children's event with craft.

The science track had a BioScience element that kept me very interested. If this is a consistent theme, I may go every year.

This must be seen to be believed. Music video.

It is time to plot my return to science. The seminar in Pittsburgh gave me a taste for it all (again). Figuring out difficult problems, next experiments to try and how to explain the whole thing. Now to figure out how to do it.

We're exploring the Maryland Science Center today in Baltimore. Unfortunately, we didn't check the expiration date on our passes, and they expired 10/31/09.

We're going anyway, of course. :).

We checked the expiration dates on the other passes we have, and none of them actually have expiration dates. This should mean that we won't have any trouble using them.

Are pretty large this morning, and especially last night. I was reading this blog about spaced repetition systems and how useful they are for learning and memorizing. I was imagining using them for all that organic chemistry that I used to know, all that biology that I know but need to memorize better, and my previously learned foreign languages as well as the language that I am attempting to learn now (Spanish).

So I am going to go hunting on the Web for a system that is iPhone-compatible, uses the sync feature of the iPhone to transfer information, and *doesn't* use text-messages to transfer information.

It is possible that Anki does all this, but not in the default settings.

During past pandemics, a third or more of the entire population has got flu, and the risks of flu killing you or causing nasty problems such as Guillain-Barré syndrome are far greater than those of the vaccines.

Fears from the 1970s

The 1976 vaccine caused around 10 cases per million vaccinated. Even ordinary flu vaccines, however, are thought to cause one extra case of Guillain-Barré per million, in addition to the 10 to 20 per million who get Guillain-Barré some other way every year.

Does this mean it is safer not getting vaccinated? Absolutely not. First, there is the risk of swine flu killing you. Second, what few people know is that flu itself is far more likely to cause Guillain-Barré than any flu vaccine.

A 2009 study found that out of every million people who get flu, between 40 and 70 develop Guillain-Barré. So your best chance of avoiding Guillain-Barré is to get vaccinated, a conclusion backed by a 2007 study.

The vaccine risk is also diminishing. Cases of Guillain-Barré in the US have fallen 20 per cent since 1996, and cases reported after flu vaccination have fallen by 60 per cent. Intriguingly, this coincides with a fall in infections by the food poisoning bacterium Campylobacter, thanks to improved meat hygiene. Guillain-Barré usually follows infections, and Campylobacter is the main cause. It is also endemic among chickens, and flu vaccines are grown in chicken eggs. So the occasional contamination of flu vaccines with Campylobacter proteins might explain the link with Guillain-Barré, according to a 2004 study.

(From the New Scientist)

I'm going through four styling products, frantically looking for the one my sister recommended. "It has dimethicone in it; that's the one".

And it frustrates me.

America is not experiencing a shortage of scientists or engineers, yet we hear calls to educate more people in science and engineering. We don't have jobs for all the scientists and engineers that we do educate, and we aren't willing to retrain them in general. So the mismatch between trained scientists and engineers and the job market in their logical fields is huge, even in the boom times. In the bust times, the mismatch is just ridiculous.

I noticed a group of young folks doing the Mentos-Coke experiment at the pool on Sunday.
I had to go over and investigate. The students doing the experiment were in 6th grade at our local middle school. The "reaction" was slightly, but observably endothermic (the can was colder at the end than at the beginning). We discussed the 6th grade science curriculum. They have had the kingdoms of life, a long section on the environment, and physics (force, acceleration and waves) this year.
The reaction is an acceleration of the bubbling process, driving dissolved CO2 from the solution. This reduces the entropy of the water a bit which reduces the temperature of the solution.

Monday, I sat with the new PTA president (my neighbor behind the fence). She discussed her plans for the next school year and ways to make the committees/responsibilities less work and more organized. It was a bit like a mini-PTA meeting. I learned that our school has a simultaneous translation system (the headsets and microphones) and the county will provide an interpreter for PTA meetings.