John Timmer in Ars Technica:

The light weight of a helium atom, which makes it perfect for party balloons and blimps, is also the key to its scarcity. The Earth simply doesn’t exert enough gravitational force to keep it on the planet. Once in the atmosphere, helium will migrate to the stratosphere and be lost to space. All the primordial helium in the Earth’s vicinity when it formed is long since gone, and only flukes of geology have given us the opportunity to study it on Earth

2. Flickr Blog: Photos of Military Decay

My friend Marc has three sets of photos, too, of the former Mather AFB in Sacramento, Calif., where my father was stationed a long time ago.

3. Swap Idea Emerged Early in Case of Russia Agents

Peter Baker, Charlie Savage and Benjamin Weiser in the New York Times

On a Friday afternoon in mid-June, President Obama sat down with advisers in the Oval Office and learned that the F.B.I. planned to round up the largest ring of Russian sleeper agents since the cold war. After discussion about what the agents had done, the conversation turned to the fallout: what to do after the arrests?

In that moment was born a back-to-the-future plan that would play out four weeks later, a prisoner exchange with surreal and even cinematic overtones as Russian and American airplanes met on a sunny tarmac in the heart of Europe on Friday to trade agents and spies much as had been done during a more hostile era.

4. Ride the Trans Siberian, via YouTube

It’s a map and video of the Trans Siberian from Moscow to Vladivostok. I watched the first seven minute segment leaving Moscow. One of the audio options is listening to War and Peace, in Russian, in it’s entirety. Pretty neat. (via Hacker News)

Signs include:

• Chronic Internet users may be found walking aimlessly in circles. They will look a lot like zombies, so be careful not to cut off their heads. Drive the infected to the nearest coffee shop with free wifi. Recovery is typically quick; however reports show, adding a cup of coffee results in immediate recovery in most cases.
• A large number of dead messenger pigeons will be found in the area. Packets flooding out of severed cable and trying to re-route, soak into the messenger pigeon’s feathers, causing them to plummet to their deaths due to overload.
• Affected children and adults may be noted to have a small piece of information, but believe they know everything related to the topic or they are unable to assemble all the information properly. This odd side-effect affects teenagers more than any other age group.
• Watch for an influx of gophers into basements and roadways, as packet flooding causes them to lose their ability to communicate and find direction.
• You might hear odd sounds or voices. Along with packets, you’ll want to watch out for escaped VoIPs. Their population has been growing, making them quite eager to escape when cable is severed. They are typically identified by their repetitive sound, “I can’t hear you!”, although they have been observed to make other sounds as well.

If you experience any of these problems or suspect there is a problem, please contact your local cable provider.

1. Start with a positive attitude. Organic chemistry can be easy. Like math, you need to learn the rules and apply them.
2. You are completely capable of getting an “A” in organic chemistry. To do so, you have to decide to make it priority and dedicate the time to learn it.
3. Make yourself a priority. Getting enough sleep and eating healthy keeps your body and brain functioning top notch. Your brain needs glucose to function. If you are hungry or ate a lot of junk food, your brain is not getting the consistent amount of quality fuel it needs. (For more information read “Nourish – Carbohydrates Fuel Your Brain” http://www.fi.edu/learn/brain/carbs.html)
4. Repetition is your friend. There are a number of functional groups to remember. These need to be memorized and spit back like you do with multiplication tables. If you have difficulties memorizing them, carry a print out of the functional groups in your back pocket. When you have brief moments to spare, like standing in a line at the grocery store, pull out the chart and focus on 1-3 of the function groups at a time. Limit yourself to 1-3 at a time, allowing yourself to concentrate on each one fully. Say the name (Not out loud, but inside your head. You wouldn’t want people thinking you are crazy.) Describe the structure. Think about any attributes that make it unique to the others. Picture drawing the structure. Make up useful mnemonics, if needed. Before you know it, you’ll know the functional groups like the back of your hand and it was a pain free experience.
5. Learning the basic concepts makes learning the new concepts easier. A lot of things in organic chemistry build upon one another. By having a solid grasp on the basics, you already have the foundation for many additional concepts.
6. If you get stuck, ask the teacher or a tutor to explain it a different way. A little bit of clarification will often wipe the confused look off you face and put an “Ah ha!” smile in its place.

Simply fascinating.

Via Daring Fireball

Each stop, on Walk of the Planets, tells interesting facts about the planet.

In the small city of Escanaba, MI, Pluto is thankfully still the 9th planet. Park your car at the end of Ludington Street, in downtown Escanaba and enjoy the light house and view of Little Bay de Noc. Then walk up to the corner of Ludington Street and 4th where you will find the Escanaba Library and the beginning of Walk of the Planets. The planets are spaced according to their distance from one another. Expect to walk the full length of downtown, if you want to go from Mercury through the astroid belt and finsish at Voyager.

When you reach Neptune, you’ll want to relax with a delicious cup of coffee and enjoy the beautiful interior of Stones Coffee Shop. While we did not try out the attached deli shop, it appeared to be a favorite of many locals.

For those that enjoy photography, you will want to bring your camera. This walk has lots of interesting scenery and architecture. For the walk back, try out some side streets and meander back to the bay. You’re likely to see a house or two with bathtubs turned verically and half burried in the yard. I’ll let you discover the reason for what seems like madness for yourself.

Be sure to eat a pasty for me while you are there. Tasty!

Negative: Grocery shopping. First you have to drive through traffic filled with idiots, then you have to navigate through a store where people park their carts in the dead center of the isle and older adults brutally push your cart out of the way with theirs, no matter where you put it. (On the more positive days, grandpa likes to get flirty and tell me about his heart troubles.)

Negative: Exercising. Growing up, there was nothing I’d rather do than play outside or jog around the pond thirty laps, just because. Now, getting me off the computer and outside to blow the stink off can be a challenge. There are always responsibilities that take a priority over exercise, despite that exercise and eating properly should be my top priority.

Combined Negatives: Walk to the grocery store to pick up small items. The two miles I spend walking there and back is great exercise and I don’t buy enough to need a cart, so shopping is more enjoyable only having to navigate myself and the hand basket. I wish I could tell you I enjoy this combination, because I save gas, but the truth is, I have no idea why I *love* walking to the grocery store!

Negative: Homework. While cell biology and nutrition 101 lectures are indeed very interesting, reviewing notes, writing reports and focusing long enough to study, drive me nuts.

Negative: House cleaning. You name the task, fill the dishwasher, empty the dishwasher, clean the kitchen counter, wash the laundry, fold the laundry, sweep, mop, vaccuume, toilets! Why can’t houses clean themselves?

Combined Negatives: Find articles to use as references for the report, empty the dishwasher and make a cup of coffee while you’re up, review the reference articles and create a very rough outline for the report, fill the dishwasher, start filling in the report taking cleaning breaks when your mind needs a break. Cleaning is physical and studying is mental. Swapping back and forth between the two  improves my focus and productivity by giving me the mental and physical breaks as needed. For some people, swapping between subject matters will also helps to cram more in. If these techniques don’t work for you, force a positive and take a 30 minute gaming break or something else that you love.

Embrace your nasty self.

Have you ever had that one event in your day that simply pushed you too far? Perhaps, it had something to do with your boss or a co-worker. Perhaps, it was that really bad driver on the road who cut you off.  From that point, on your mood is grim. Often these moods carry into the rest of your day and suddenly the whole world is FUBAR and nothing seems to go right.

What if, as soon as you recognize your mood has turned for the worst, you decide to stop festering on what pissed you off? What if you let it go by laughing at the insanity of the issue, writing it down, shouting your frustrations to the world or simply making the concious decision to grab control of your mood and move on?

The rest of the day isn’t so ugly anymore, is it?

Practice acknowledging your moods, take a few moments for yourself to kick the mood to the curb and repeat as often as necessary until it becomes natural.

Sometimes pinpointing the cause of your foul mood can help you eleviate it; however some foul moods are hormonally based or simply impossible to figure out.  In these cases, accept that you feel like a piss ant. Form an agreement with yourself  that  you will not take your attitude out on others who are forced to interact with you during the day. Figure out the best way to soak in it, accept it and let it pass.  I like to sit in front of the TV eating pizza and ice cream until my stomach is upset. No, it is not the healthiest of options, but getting angry at one’s self for eating like crap only serves to snowball the bad mood. Sit in it, soak in your ugly self and love yourself none-the-less.

How do you pull yourself out of a funk or deal with your ugly self?

After giving up caffeine, migraine headaches became a far and few between part of my life.  I would have 2-3 a year versus the caffeine fed 2-3 a week, some of them lasting for multiple days.  What an unpleasant surprise to have the migraines show up again in the last month and be at an increasingly high frequency.  I always knew when the pain portion of these new headaches was about to begin, because my vision would get flaky right before the pain started to creep out from behind my eyes and across my forehead.

What differed about these current migraines, was the fact that my vision typically did not suffer greatly before or during an episode.  I would experience pain behind my eyes and a slight “haze”, but never a measurable vision impairment.

As if a headache is not enough to handle on its own, I had to stop by two DMV offices today.  In North Carolina there are different offices for handling license plates versus driver licenses. The first office did not help or hinder the migraine, despite they needed a second notarization on the car title requiring cash from their conveniently placed ATM with a $3 service charge.

Knowing left from right should be left up to grown-ups.

The second DMV was extremely helpful.  The cheerful DMV lady, glad to have Saturday right around the corner, asked me to smash my head into the visual testing machine 50 other people smashed their sweaty heads into previously. The machine functioned like binoculars, splitting the eyes.  The left column was blurry.  So blurry in-fact, I could barely make out the letter shapes to guess at what they were. The middle column was less blurry and the right column was very clear, but made my right eye feel strained.  How odd.

As I started up my car, renewed license exam complete, it dawned on me, “Dumb ass, you have your contact lenses switched.” I am now the proud owner of a contact lens case with the letters “L” and “R”.

[Dilbert creator Scott] Adams lists four examples of simple things that have been made unusable for him by our modern world’s complexity: service fees on his business checking account, a home video switcher/splitter system, a cellphone upgrade, and consolidating all his insurance policies.

With all due respect to Scott Adams, none of those things is something simple that’s been made complicated. They’re all just complicated.

I’m not arguing that his bank shouldn’t provide frictionless, reasonable service for his business transactions, or that he shouldn’t be able to change his insurance policy; I’m saying that there’s nothing simple about those.

It’s hard enough to keep simple things simple. It’s several orders of magnitude more difficult to keep a difficult thing as easy as possible.

Separately, The Infrastructurist looks at the two recent massive earthquakes in Haiti and Chile and considers why the death tolls were so different:

After a massive 9.5 earthquake hit the country in 1960 (the strongest ever recorded), the Chilean government developed a seismic design code for all new buildings, shown in the image above. According to AIR Worldwide, the country’s building codes were revised again in 1993 to include significant advances over previous versions. And they were wise to do so, given the frequency with which Chile experiences quakes: the country gets hit with a magnitude 7 or higher quake at least once every five years, meaning that the earthquake awareness, both in engineering and building codes, is superior.

There is debate in the comments whether or not the regulations themselves or market interest are the saving grace. One points out that it’s not strictly a black-and-white proposition. There are also geographic differences in the quakes to consider.

Woodford Reserve and Jefferson's Bourbon

While this was not an official experiment and no control groups were used, this was one of the most fun, opinionated, and tasty experiments we’ve conducted @crazylikethat.

For this “experiment” we decided to compare two quality bourbon and then see what kind of foods pair well with them. The bourbons in question, Woodford Reserve and Jefferson’s.

Woodford Reserve, Distiller’s Select by Labrot & Graham is a small batch bourbon full of flavor and a deep butterscotch scent. It has a nice oaky flavor and comes with the burning alcohol (45.2%) zing you’d expect from a whiskey. Fabulous to say the least.

Jefferson’s is a very small batch whisky. So small in fact, we had to head out on a bourbon seeking adventure to find it. The ABC Stores in Raleigh, NC stocked it around the holidays, but were unable to get additional orders fulfilled. Thankfully, the ABC Stores are filled with helpful and knowledgeable people who directed us to the last location in Raleigh, NC still carrying a few bottles. When we hit the front counter with the last four bottles in the city, the staff knew who we were. “You’re the folks people were calling around for.” Indeed. We figured, it isn’t going to go bad and if it is as good as we heard, we have plenty of friends who will appreciate it when they come for a visit.

We were delighted when we opened the first bottle. It had a subtle butterscotch scent and an amazingly smooth finish. I can’t put my finger on the flavor, but it is delicious. If you are looking for a whiskey burn, this is not your drink. If you are looking for quality, this is it!

Results:
Which is the best of the two bourbon? We couldn’t decide. Both bourbon were top-notch and excellent in their own way. We wouldn’t turn our noses up at either of these fine beverages and to feign a preferrence would mean we’d miss out on the absolute goodness of the other.

Pairing:
Like fine cigars complement good scotch, we figured something had to go well with bourbon. We started out with Krispy Kreme glazed donuts. The sugary glaze went rather well with the butterscothiness of the bourbons, but we felt there had to be something even better. We tried a very hard cheddar cheese, which was also good, but not the end-all be-all for bourbon pairing. Finally, we moved on to chocolate. Don’t waste your time with dark chocolate Toblerone. The chocolate was not rich or smooth enough to complement the bourbon well. Ritter Sports dark chocolate was an excellent companion, but I would not call it boubon’s soul mate either. If you know something that pairs well with bourbon, besides more bourbon, we’d love to hear about it and give it a try. We suspect a chicken pot pie or other full meal will give these beverages better respect.

We conducted our experiment in the safety of our own home. No driving was involved for at least 12 hours after the testing. A good night sleep was had by all.