Grey Cup Today

Well, since the Bengals are on their bye week, maybe I'll watch some of the Grey Cup game:

The Saskatchewan Roughriders will attempt to become the third consecutive Canadian Football League team to capture a championship on their home field when they face the Hamilton Tiger-Cats at the 101st Grey Cup at Mosaic Stadium in Regina.
TSN's pre-game coverage gets underway at 1pm et/10am pt, with kickoff at 6pm et/3pm pt. You can also follow TSN's digital platforms throughout the game with in-game highlights and TSN.ca's GameTracker.
To follow in the footsteps of the 99th Grey Cup Champion B.C. Lions and 100th Grey Cup Champion Toronto Argonauts, the Roughriders are going to have to beat a team that took an almost identical route to the title game as them in the Tiger-Cats.
Both teams finished second in their respective division and after earning home semi-final victories, were forced to go on the road as underdogs to book their places in the final.
In the West title game, the Roughriders knocked off the Calgary Stampeders 35-13, leading from the mid-point of the opening quarter right to the final whistle.
After opening the regular season by winning eight of their first nine games, the Roughriders struggled through the second half of the campaign before getting things back on track heading into the playoffs.
The Tiger-Cats, meanwhile, overturned a halftime deficit in the East Final to knock off the defending champion Argonauts and get to the Grey Cup.

In the States, the game will be on NBC Sports Network at 6 o'clock.  I'll pull for the home team, playing at Mosaic Stadium.  How many NFL stadiums are named for potash mining companies? I think zero.

Economists and Comedians

Via naked capitalism, The Irish Times highlights a gathering of economists and comedians at Kilkenomics Festival.  My favorite part:

The highflying economists found at Kilkenomics already have a maverick disposition. This is clear at Friday’s SAS Young Economist of the Year competition where the aforementioned Black, one of the judges, refers to a “drug-crazed roommate” in an anecdote and Nobel-tipped behavioural economist Dan Ariely explains the concept of scarcity with reference to overweight elephant seals who “sometimes kill the females when they copulate.”

“I really hope there’s a point to this,” says worried compere Colm O’Regan, before fine-tuning the story for the school-going audience: “When a male seal and female seal like each other very much…”

WTF?  The use of the word copulation brings up a couple of memories.  First, looking up copulation in our thesaurus was the most popular use for the book at our parochial grade school.  Second, when we were doing public speaking in drama class, one of the guys commented on a presentation by writing, "good oral copulation."  When the teacher read it, she burst into tears and left the room.  That wasn't expected.

Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Well, I really fucked up today.  Last night, the head which connects the sickle bar to the wobble box broke.  So this morning, I got the replacement part put on and fired up the machine.  As I headed across the field to get started, there was a huge boom and really bad sounds started coming out.  I shut it down and went to investigate.  There were chunks of cast iron on the ground behind the combine.  Here I had left the four pound hammer on the platform, and it didn't feed through the machine well.  I found some ground up pieces of handle in the grass waterway beside the field, but I still haven't found the head.  It really worked over the rasp bars on the rotor and took out a couple of chopper knives.  Then, we found some other things that were screwed up previously, so we got absolutely nothing done.

I hadn't heard this song until these guys came to our county seat, but the chorus made me chuckle a bit because I can relate.  I'll send this out to my combine:

The End Is Near

In Geologic Time:

Earth will be able to host life for just another 1.75 billion years or so, according to a study published on 18 September in Astrobiology. The method used to make the calculation can also identify planets outside the Solar System with long ‘habitable periods’, which might be the best places to look for life.
The habitable zone around a star is the area in which an orbiting planet can support liquid water, the perfect solvent for the chemical reactions at the heart of life. Too far from a star and a planet’s water turns to permanent ice and its carbon dioxide condenses; too close, and the heat turns water into vapor that escapes into space.
Habitable zones are not static. The luminosity of a typical star increases as its composition and chemical reactions evolve over billions of years, pushing the habitable zone outward. Researchers reported in March that Earth is closer to the inner edge of the Sun’s habitable zone than previously thought.
The inner edge of the Sun’s habitable zone is moving outwards at a rate of about 1 meter per year. The latest model predicts a total habitable zone lifetime for Earth of 6.3 billion–7.8 billion years, suggesting that life on the planet is already about 70% of the way through its run. Other planets — especially those that form near the outer boundary of a star’s habitable zone or orbit long-lived, low-mass stars — may have habitable-zone lifetimes of 42 billion years or longer.

Stories like that used to freak me out as a kid.  I remember thinking how terrible it was that the Sun would burn out in like 3 billion years, and I wondered what would happen to our farm, and my desccendents.  Now, as I approach middle age and don't have any progeny, I'm not too concerned about anything beyond 50 years from now.  

The Original Dow 12: National Lead

A little history of the National Lead Company:

NL Industries (NYSE: NL), the former National Lead Company is lead smelting company now based in Houston, Texas. National Lead was one of the 12 original stocks included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the time of its creation on May 26, 1896.It began business in Philadelphia in 1772. The name National Lead Company was used since 1891 after a series of mergers. During World War II, National Lead (later NL) entered the consumer market for titanium paints, creating a product line under the name Dutch Boy. Dutch Boy paints competed with other brands that contained mineral products supplied by National Lead. National Lead Company changed its name to NL Industries in 1971. The company headquarters is in Houston, Texas. Dutch Boy was sold off in 1976 to paint company Sherwin-Williams.

A little more information from a much more in-depth history:

The history of NL Industries may be traced to 1891, when 25 lead mining and smelting operations, unable to compete with larger manufacturers by themselves, teamed up to form a general holding company called the National Lead Company. The parent organization ensured that each member company's resources were efficiently employed while effectively eliminating competition between the affiliates.
National Lead was primarily a mining company consisting of several dozen lead pits. The company quickly became one of the country's largest producers of bulk refined white and red lead and lead oxides, which it sold almost exclusively to foundries and paint manufacturers. During this time, white and red leads were commonly used in paint, providing a durable and inexpensive covering considered necessary for preserving wooden structures. When mixed with linseed oil, white lead helped the paint mixture hold other pigments; red leads proved the least expensive paints and became commonly used on barns and railroad structures...
By 1939, National Lead had regained earnings stability. The following year, as the country began a modest armament program to meet the growing threat from Germany, titanium paints were increasingly used in upgrading military installations. At the onset of World War II in 1941, titanium was found valuable in strengthening steel and other metal alloys, and the company's chief product came under government control. Since National Lead remained a supplier rather than a mining operation, sales stalled. Neverthless, at the end of the war, National Lead emerged as the leading dealer in titanium ores. Industrial uses of titanium increased, particularly in equipment for drilling oil wells, die castings, and metal bearings for the railroad and other industries. During this time, National Lead also entered the consumer market for titanium paints, creating a product line under the name Dutch Boy. Dutch Boy paints competed with other brands that contained mineral products supplied by National Lead.
In 1950, in order to strengthen and protect its leading position in the titanium ores market, National Lead entered into a partnership with Allegheny Ludlum Steel. Called the Titanium Metals Corporation of America, this joint venture developed new applications for titanium alloys, produced various grades of the product, and marketed both raw titanium and zinc alloys made with the mineral.
By the 1950s, National Lead supplied roughly 40 percent of the nation's titanium. Alloys made from the metal were used in aircraft, which were produced in tremendous numbers during the Korean War. When aircraft production was scaled back in the late 1950s, sales of titanium were buoyed by demand in the production of missiles and other weapons.

Lead and titanium.  Pretty interesting, at least to me.

Molasses Spill Causes Hawaii Fish Kill

The Atlantic:

Thousands of fish — gasping desperately, then floating lifelessly — surfaced in Honolulu Harbor this week, suffering from oxygen deprivation caused by a massive molasses spill. This strange case of sugary suffocation was brought on by the Matson Shipping Company, which was loading one of its vessels with 1,600 tons of molasses through a pipeline in the harbor early Monday morning when a leak sprung. Matson reported that up to 1,400 tons of the sludgy syrup may have escaped into the harbor and nearby Ke’ehi Lagoon.
There is no way to clean up a molasses spill. “It’s sunk to the bottom of the harbor,” Matson spokesman Jeff Hull told the L.A. Times on Wednesday. There, the molasses has displaced the oxygen-containing seawater that thousands of marine organisms rely on to breathe.
Hawaii News Now reported the devastating ecological impact of the spill with an underwater video recording this afternoon. In the words of Roger White, the scuba diver who shot the video, “It was shocking because the entire bottom is covered with dead fish.”
The Hawaii Department of Health, rather than the U.S. Coast Guard or Environmental Protection Agency, is responding to the accident because it is not an oil or “hazardous material” spill, according to NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration. It doesn’t really matter who gets involved, because there isn’t much mitigating to be done. Officials are currently monitoring water quality in the harbor, collecting dead fish (lest they attract hungry sharks and eels), and urging residents to stay out of the water.
When an oil spill occurs, a large oil slick forms on the water’s surface, and emergency response efforts often focus on dispersing that oil away from the surface and down through the water column, where the oil becomes less concentrated and, consequently, less threatening to marine life. This only works if the water is sufficiently deep, though; the NOAA OR&R website says, “To avoid contaminating the sea floor, most dispersant use to date has been restricted to waters deeper than 10 meters (about 30 feet).” The waters of Honolulu Harbor are just about that deep, but no matter, because molasses behaves very differently from oil. Unlike oil, molasses sinks, and now 1,400 tons of it, highly concentrated, are bearing down on the sea floor off the coast of Oahu.

More on the somewhat unique fluid properties of molasses, and an even bigger molasses disaster here.  Hey, what other personal blog features two different molasses-related stories in a little over a month?

When it Rains...

Actually, it probably ought to say, when it doesn't rain, because we're getting pretty dry right now.  The best year ever is starting to look like the best corn crop with an average bean crop.  But to go back to the title of the post, things have seemed to be falling apart the last few weeks.  Not only with the weather, but with work.  We've lost two folks in our engineering department, in which I do some work.  Then, today was the last day for my immediate boss in the environmental and safety side of things.  He handled all of the safety for three companies while I helped him out with the environmental side of things.  I've tried to let people know that I am not qualified to handle any of his duties, but I haven't really heard how they plan on taking care of things while they work to find a replacement.  Probably some of that work will devolve to me.  And I won't even get into where I really am killing myself.  Anyway, under normal circumstances I'd say that the sun will shine again, but right now, I'm looking for a rain cloud as a positive outcome.  Actually, for the vast swath of humanity, I'm still sitting pretty good.

Ouija Boards and Dowsing Rods

Why do they move?  Because we make them move (h/t nc links):

Ouija board cups and dowsing wands – just two examples of mystical items that seem to move of their own accord, when they are really being moved by the people holding them. The only mystery is not one of a connection to the spirit world, but of why we can make movements and yet not realise that we’re making them.
The phenomenon is called the ideomotor effect and you can witness it yourself if you hang a small weight like a button or a ring from a string (ideally more than a foot long). Hold the end of the string with your arm out in front of you, so the weight hangs down freely. Try to hold your arm completely still. The weight will start to swing clockwise or anticlockwise in small circles. Do not start this motion yourself. Instead, just ask yourself a question – any question – and say that the weight will swing clockwise to answer “Yes” and anticlockwise for “No”. Hold this thought in mind, and soon, even though you are trying not to make any motion, the weight will start to swing in answer to your question.
Magic? Only the ordinary everyday magic of consciousness. There’s no supernatural force at work, just tiny movements you are making without realising. The string allows these movements to be exaggerated, the inertia of the weight allows them to be conserved and built on until they form a regular swinging motion. The effect is known as Chevreul’s Pendulum, after the 19th Century French scientist who investigated it.
What is happening with Chevreul’s Pendulum is that you are witnessing a movement (of the weight) without “owning” that movement as being caused by you. The same basic phenomenon underlies dowsing – where small movements of the hands cause the dowsing wand to swing wildly – or the Ouija board, where multiple people hold a cup and it seems to move of its own accord to answer questions by spelling out letters. The effect also underlies the sad case of “facilitated communication“, a fad whereby carers believed they could help severely disabled children communicate by guiding their fingers around a keyboard. Research showed that the carers – completely innocently – were typing the messages themselves, rather than interpreting movements from their charges.

I've tried using dowsing rods to find tiles, and it never fails that the rods tell me the tiles are in the low areas where I thought they'd be.  But when I dug for them....not so much.  Now, I know a lot of people who know somebody who is fabulous at dowsing, or at least that's what they say.  I'll go with the unconscious mind explanation.