Raining Clones

Normally we would be about halfway thru the season on Orphan Black by now, but we are still 24 days away from Episode 1 of the 5th and final season. Wish I had thought about it 16 days ago so I could have watched on episode a night, starting at the first episode of season one and finishing up with episode 10 of the 4th. I guess my next option is to watch all forty in a row, ending just before the premier on that Saturday night, starting at 6:00 AM on the Friday before (I’ll have to take a vacation day.) With the average length of each episode being 44 minutes, that’ll leave 16 minutes between episodes for bathroom breaks, microwaving popcorn and cat naps.

Or I could just play Orphan Black: The Game and hope to complete/solve it in time for 10:00 PM on June 10th. When it first came out on March 24th it was only available for iOS, but just a couple days ago it became available for Android users. I burned up a little over 1/10 of my data for the month downloading the massive game. And I think that is really just the free demo, if I do decide to pay for the whole game I’ll be where I have WiFi access that is for sure.

Another Exciting Day at Work

Two of the Valve Store’s engineers were standing outside my cubical discussing a housefly problem. The engineer with the problem had tried a couple things with little success, so the other says, “Have you heard about air-power gun that shoots salt that kills them.” “Nooo..”, came the reply. “It is sort of like a shotgun water pistol that fires table salt.”

I hadn’t either, so I looked it up. It’s called Bug-A-Salt, cute, huh? So, the housefly host says, why don’t you get a couple of them and bring the boys over (non-fly guy has 5-year old twins) and they can hunt the flies down. I’ll offer up a bounty. At this point I jump in with, “Hey, I want in on this bounty. How much is it?” The answer is $50 a ton. This is a perfect answer because the kids will jump at the size of the bounty and not really have a sense of how much a ton is.

I on the other hand know how big a ton is and how big a fly is, so I’m no longer interested in hunting houseflies. But I am now curious as to just how many flies it would take to get a ton of them. A quick search turns up these figures in a couple places, so they are going to be accurate enough for our little math problem.

Typical housefly: Adult size: 5-7 mm = 0.005-0.007 m Adult mass: 12 mg = 0.000 012 kg

1 Imperial Ton = 1016.05 kilograms, so we divide 1016.05 by .000012 = 84670833.333, or just a mere 84.7 million flies in a ton. Not nearly as many as I originally thought, I would have guessed some number followed by about 10 or 12 zeroes.

Next I guess we will also need to figure out how big a bucket we are going to need to hold ton of flies. I couldn’t find a volume for a house fly, so I’m going to take a SWAG and say if the fly is 6 mm long and it is roughly cylindrical shape of about 2.5 mm in diameter. This gives me, fudging for wings and legs, let’s call it 30 cu/mm per fly. So the 84670833.3333 x 30 = 2540125000 cu/mm. Converting to cubic feet gives us 88.90437499965 or a slightly overfilled 3-yard dumpster from California Waste Services.

53,000 ng/dL of Testosterone

Better late than never. This post was supposed to written last weekend, but somehow I got on the write-about-bicycle kick and forgot it my drafts folder. Not that you are missing much as all it was was a CTBNL mileage update.

Last Saturday we drove up to Kershaw, SC to meet up with some other MMC members at the Carolina Motorsports Park. Club member John Haff is big in the NASA racing thing and he arranged for us fellow Miata owners to take some “parade” laps of the track during the lunch break. We of course turned that into a Motoring Challenge themed event as we needed a photo of a parade…

Somewhere, quite literally in the boondocks, the odometer clicked1 passed the 53,000 mark. I say literally, because we had just passed an intersection with a small country store on one corner that had “Boon Docks Store” painted on its outside wall.

Karma, Fate or Random Chance?

This is not the first time that the Bob Jackson bicycle has been supplanted by a Bianchi.

When Donna and I came to Aiken in 1989 we each had our touring bikes originally purchased somewhere around 1980. Donna’s was the original Takara 970 and mine was the Takara 990, except for the replacement Bob Jackson frame. After we joined the Aiken Bicycle Club we both got to riding a lot more and greater distances. The Takara/Bob Jacksons were just fine. Besides the Saturday & Sunday club rides we were also commuting back and forth to work 3 or 4 times a week. Me being a glutton for punishment used to try to also ride in the Tuesday & Thursday evening bike store rides.

The bike store rides were 25 miles or so out and back from the shop and while there were a few other Aiken Bike Club riders there were also a few of the local triathletes and hammerheads. Needless to say these were very quick rides and while I could hang a while with the pack eventually somewhere around the turn-around point I would find myself spit out the back. One of the real strong riders who was about my size offered to sell me his Giant Cadex carbon fiber machine because he was going to upgrade to something nicer. It looked remarkably like this and served me well for about 3 years before I sold it to help finance a couple of Bridgestone mountain bikes for Donna and I.

The Bob Jackson soldiered on as my ride-to-work and Sunday fun ride mount until I got the bug to get another road bike for the Saturday longer rides. This time I lucked into a nice bike2 for a nice price from a fellow ABC member Big Clint3 who was going to update his machine. Big Clint loved the Bianchi mystique, his next bike was also going to be one too, but he hated the Celeste color as much as I do and he had had the bike painted silver and purple.

This time when I needed another used bike to replace the Bob Jackson, another Bianchi fell into my lap.

Replaced by a Bianchi Brava

Bianchi Brava

Found a replacement for the Bob Jackson touring bike that is suitable for commuting to work with. It was sitting right there for sale on the floor at Cyclesport. I noticed it when I first found out about the broken frame, but initially dismissed it because the price seemed like more than I wanted to spend.

After a search for a new frame on Craigslist turned up nothing within 100 miles, I headed to eBay where I got a couple of close matches. One was a complete 25″ Takara touring frame. This was an emotional favorite because an early 80’s 25″ Takara is the origin of the Bob Jackson touring bike. All the components on Bob came from this bike after I had to buy a new frame because of a crash (an interesting story for another day.) But the $200 frame lacked several key frame braze-ons it required to make it suitable for the task.

The second was a $100 (+$60 for shipping) 63cm Raleigh. It had the bare minimum of correct braze-ons for mounting racks, etc. and it was in Brian’s favorite color – blue. It was lacking a headset though, so that additional cost made it comparable to the Takara. But all Bob’s componentry is set up for a 27″ wheels making brakes and wheel fitment a very real issue on a frame designed for 700C wheels. Plus the pretty blue paint is not original, so has this been repaired for some reason or just painted to freshen it up?

Neither of these options were ideal. Even if I did buy one of them I still had to add the cost of bike shop labor to transfer parts from one frame to the next, plus any modifications needed, to the original eBay cost. The Bianchi sitting on the shop floor, was nearly perfect, its frame was one size smaller than perfect at 61cm, but it had all the correct braze-ons needed for front and rear racks (even the ones on the front forks that Bob didn’t.) So I made a low-ball offer to start the negotiations. Much to my surprise it was accepted.4

Now I kind of wish I had taken a picture of the bike in its as purchased state, because what you see above looks vastly different than that. Do you see the color of the lettering on the frame? That is called Bianchi Green or Italian Sky Blue or just Celeste, and is the traditional color of Bianchi bicycles. The bike was swimming in that color, the clipless pedals, the seat, the handle bar tape and even the sidewall of the tires where that color. I guess if you are a Bianchi purist you would have liked it, but to me it reminded me of the Splash Green color that came on Miatas in 2003 which I despised.

Stephen Hawking is an Optimist

All over the science section of my Google News feed today was the bold prediction by mega-mind theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking that humans have about a century to find another planetary home. Collating all the scientific data I could make up, the following chart proves that Mr. Hawking is an optimist.

Looks like a couple of decades before geneticists figure out how to make humans immortal, the ability of mankind to survive on Earth will diminish to zero.

May the Fourth Be With these Mop Tops

You just had to know that a person who actually bought a DVD off the internet of the Dark Side of the Rainbow would like this. To borrow a phrase from the AV Club, “Good Job Internet!” Just in time for the 40th anniversary of the release of “Episode IV – A New Hope” (AKA Star Wars) the fine folks at Palette-Swap Ninja have created a mash-up of that movie and the Beatles album Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. The above video is just to the first song, here is a link to the playlist so you can watch the whole movie/album/music video. Now we need someone to string them all together removing the filler for real seamless experience.

One other random Star Wars Day link for you: Did Inadequate Women’s Healthcare Destroy Star Wars’ Old Republic?

Until next year,
May the Force be with you.
Bri’us Winew