A fun story over at Slate.com discusses the "short cappuccino", a drink not on the menu at any Starbucks but available for anyone who asks. It is, arguably, a better cappuccino, and it's cheaper. All the more reason Starbucks may not want everyone to know about it.
Hey there. It's raining in Southern California as I write this, though nothing like it has been in Northern California. The wind last night blew down our deer-with-lights holiday decorations on the front lawn. Mother Nature's way of reminding us it's time to take them down, now, anyway.
We've had a great holiday, spending a week in Colorado with family and then having New Year's here with family. Now it's time to focus on the new year. I'm off to MacWorld next week, which should be fun, I think. Dana has some new dog training classes that should get started in the next week or two.
Here's hoping you all have a great start to the New Year.
I am guilty as charged. It's an awful, and all too common, truth; I haven't posted anything here in about two months.
It's all my fault. It's not that we haven't had anything exciting going on. Dana's been training away, and sat for an exam administered by the Certification Council for Pet Dog Trainers. She's now "Dana Zinn, CPDT" (Certified Pet Dog Trainer). There are certainly good dog trainers who aren't certified, and there are probably some not-so-good (and definitely not as experienced) trainers who are certified, but now Dana has one more credential to back her up.
We'll be in Colorado late next week for the holiday. Then I'm heading up to San Francisco early in January to attend the MacWorld Expo. Fun stuff coming up.
And next year I'll redouble my efforts to post regularly. Consider it a resolution.
You may have already heard that Don Adams passed away this week. He was, of course, best known for playing Maxwell Smart, of "Get Smart". I know I watched a number of Get Smart episodes in syndication (for some reason I associate the memory with being home sick from school). Liked them. Always thought the opening sequence was clever.
However, Adams' passing hits me more, believe it or not, because he was the voice of Inspector Gadget. The show was really kind of awful in a lot of ways, but it must have been kind of fun, because I'm pretty sure I watched it all the time for a good stretch. Maybe it was just on at exactly the right time; right as I was ready to leave for school, or right when I got back. Anyway, I, the Chief, Penny, Brain, and even Dr. Claw, will all miss you, Gadget.
This weekend I listened to the podcast of NPR's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. It included an interview with James Kakalios, a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. Professor Kakalios has a new book coming out called "The Physics of Superheroes".
I can say from experience that he's not the first to use a superhero to try and make the application of introductory physics a little more interesting than most textbook examples. After all, Spiderman is just easier to picture than an "idealized free body". I don't know that I've seen anyone take it as far as it seems Professor Kakalios has.
Here is my favorite line of reasoning from the interview (I'm skipping over the math and ballparking the numbers, so forgive the generalizations).
Superman is able, we're told, to leap tall buildings in a single bound. The original Superman story says that Superman has powers far beyond those of mortal men due to his race coming from Krypton, a planet with greater gravity than earth, and not, as later explained, due to the yellow sun of Earth versus the red sun of Krypton. Early comics specified he could leap 1/8th of a mile into the air. An often-used introductory physics equation asks how fast he needs to leave the surface of the earth in order to leap that high. The answer is something like 140 mph.
An application of Newton's second law (along with a couple of other assumptions) tells us that his legs must be able to apply about 6000 lbs of force on the ground in order to launch him at that speed. Assuming, then, that if his legs are able to supply that force, they are probably genetically coded to support about half of that weight in normal standing weight. In other words, his weight on Krypton was probably around 3000 lbs. Since we know his weight on earth is about 220 lbs, we can determine that the gravitational force on Krypton is about 15 times that of earth.
Knowing the gravitational force of Krypton, it's possible to imagine a model of how the planet of Krypton is constructed. In order to get that much gravity at the surface, you pretty much have to have a planet with a neutron star at its core. And thus (this is my favorite part), it becomes apparent why the planet Krypton exploded. The forces and stresses caused by such a core would make an planet unstable, at best.
Sounds like it might be a fun read.
For more, try the NPR Science Friday audio (download and podcast) and the book on Amazon.
For about 3 years, the website for Great Expawtations Dog Training, Dana's company, looked like this. I think that "k" was from a test we did once when moving the site from one server to another.
We've got a new version up now. There are still some additions and edits to be made, and tinkering to be done, but it's a nice step forward from the old placeholder. http://www.greatexpawtations.com
On a sort-of related note, I was pleased to discover recently that if you do a Google search for "east coast mineral", at the moment the first search result is for Martin Zinn Expos. Very cool.
I've been trying to learn a bit about using Google Maps for your own purposes. Since it's helpful to have a project to try out new tricks, I went ahead and made a sort of travelogue of our Road Trip.
It's mainly a lab I've used to experiment with Google Maps and layering data onto them. It's not the fanciest implementation I've seen, by any means, but it's been fun to work on.
If you haven't spent any time with Google Maps, yet, then you should definitely play around a bit. Drag, zoom, look at Satellite and Hybrid.
(FYI - Most browsers are supported, but Opera and IE 5.0 are not.)
I've posted photos from our roadtrip.
This web photo album format is a new one for us, so please let us know how you like it! All thumbnails are displayed on the first page. You can click on the first one, then click "Next" to move through the album, or pick and choose from the thumbnails.
A link to the album has also been added to the "Photos" list in the left-hand column of this page.
Thanks for looking.
2,997 miles later, we're back where we started.
This was really a nice trip. We got to see a lot of "the West" that we hadn't seen before (or in a very long time), spend some time with family in Colorado and New Mexico, and the dogs got a lot of new experiences. This kind of road trip is especially good for Kudos, as a puppy. Both dogs are very happy to be home. The last two days were long days in the car for them (about 350 and 500 miles).
We should have photos up sometime this weekend. Many thanks to everyone who helped us along our way. Time now for post-vacation catch-up.
Still going strong, more than a week after we began.
Leaving Durango, we drove through a couple of old Colorado mining towns: Silverton and Ouray. Then we made it in to Montrose in time to check in and head up to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. Beautiful. The four of us hiked along the rim for a little ways. Sierra and Kudos, who are always perking up when they notice a bird or a lizard along the path, somehow failed to notice the deer just 60 feet off the path. To make up for it later, Sierra went after a snake. She's a huntress.
The next day brought us to Gunnison, CO. We drove on up to Crested Butte for lunch. It's a small ski town; very cute. Stayed the night in a cabin by a river (not to be confused with a "van down by the river").
Yesterday we drove through Buena Vista and Leadville up to Breckenridge. Got to stop on Monarch Pass along the Continental Divide and take the dogs up to the top of the mountain in a gondola. Pretty fun. Today we went back to Leadville and rode a train up the valley holding the head of the Arkansas river (toward Mt. Arkansas, as it turns out). Also beautiful. The dogs' first train ride, that we know of.
That's all for now. Lots of great pictures; I'll be posting an album's worth at some point, but for now just teasers.
Let's see. The day we hiked in Zion, we enjoyed a beautiful drive to Bryce Canyon, where we stayed the night. The drive on Saturday was especially amazing. Drove through Grand Staircase - Escelante National Monument and beyond. Eventually made it to Moab, and stayed at a BEAUTIFUL little place right on the Colorado River, about 14 miles up a big red canyon (right next to Arches National Park).
Sunday had us drive the rest of the way into Colorado. Stopped at a little Anasazi museum near Delores, CO, for the short hike up a hill to some ruins. Sierra and Kudos were hot, again. It was somewhere on this hike that Kudos looked up and said "Mom, Dad, what exactly is supposed to be fun about going to all the hottest places on earth?" (It hasn't actually been all that hot, but compared to anything he's experienced in his 6 1/2 month life, these last few days are way up there.) Then Dana put a toy in his mouth and he happily carried it the rest of the way, completely forgetting his question.
Tonight is our second night in Durango, CO. We hiked a ways along the Animas River today; it winds through Durango. It's very nice here; a not-too-small little Colorado town. Tomorrow we head north, through Silverton to Montrose, then we'll head east and north to Breckenridge by Thursday night. As I write this, Sierra is sleeping and Kudos is panting while on his way to sleep. And all is well.
A beautiful day in Zion. Kudos and Sierra went for a hike today. Not that long, but they have never experienced anything quite this hot. Whew! This was so hot that Sierra overcame her usual aversion to getting wet long enough to walk a bit in the river, and even lay down in it a few times.
We're off on our road trip today, and by "we" I mean Ken, Dana, Sierra, and Kudos. First day's drive was to Vegas. The dogs decided that 109 degrees is hot. They're pretty smart like that.
Tomorrow we head to Utah, next week we'll be in Colorado, and then New Mexico. The dogs aren't sure what to make of this so far (they don't fuss in the car, but they're pretty ready to get out whenever
we stop).
If all goes well, and depending on available internet access, we'll post other updates along the road.
Jenn came to LA for a few days. We went Astro Blasting. Here's the pic.
Dana Elcar died Monday. He was 77. Most of the stories you see about him talk about his starring role in MacGyver, and about when he started going blind, they wrote the condition in to his character on MacGyver and kept him on for another three years or so.
I didn't watch MacGyver (though I probably would have really liked it at the time). But Dana's face looked familiar. Then I thought of it, and a trip to IMDB.com confirmed it: he was Russ, Harry's CIA boss in Condorman.
"You know, Russ, there's always 'Plan B'."
A couple of sites out there catering to the earthquake-wary.
Earthquake probability forecast from the USGS shows a map of California color-coded with the probability of shaking ("the level of shaking that throws objects off shelves") in the next 24 hours. They fully admit that it's not likely to predict a big quake, but it might predict aftershocks of a significant quake. (Hmmmm. After a big quake, color that area red for the next 24-48 hours. There. I could make this map.)
This US map shows recent seismic events large enough for people to notice. It's one of a quickly growing number of tools built using Google's still-relatively-new Google Maps.
If you haven't tried out Google Maps yet, I recommend it. The map is scrollable without reloading the page, and you can switch between map and satellite photo with one click. But what's got the web buzzing is that the technology they use to insert data points (basically pushpins with information about them) is something web programmers have been able to latch onto and use for their own purposes. Imagine, for example, that I made a web page with a fully realized map (scrollable, zoomable, with satellite photos, etc.), with pushpins at every stop Dana and I plan to make on our road trip this summer. Google essentially provides the really hard part (the map), I just provide the data.
It's interesting: Google does not officially support this kind of re-use of it's data, but they certainly know about it and haven't asked anyone to stop yet. Big question is if they will eventually close it off, or start charging for it, at least. Then again, if they can figure out a way to include their little targeted ads, then it may remain an available tool for developers everywhere.
But I digress. If you're here and reading this, feel free to add a comment via the link below.
DirecTV has Freeview events every month; presumably to whet your appetite for Pay-per-View. Anyway, during weekends in May once of the events is a They Might Be Giants concert at the House of Blues in LA, with plenty of material from Here Come the ABCs. I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but it's pretty dense. They do Dr. Worm early on (Dana's favorite).
Disneyland launched it's 50th Birthday celebration this week. The celebration will last 18 months; the actual 50th anniversary of opening day will be July 17th (hmmm, how do I remember that date?).
Disneyland made podcasts available for the celebration. They also have Podcast software available for free download, with the subscription to the Disneyland celebration podcast already entered. There are three hour-long podcasts. Lots of interesting audio; pieces of presentations, Q&A's with guests-on-the-street, and interviews with some long-time cast members, from trash collectors to presidents. Highlights for me included a tour down Main Street with a Disneyland Publicity exec, and a couple of long talks with Imagineers. Check it out:
http://disneyland.disney.go.com/disneyland/en_US/calendar/specialEvents/detail?name=PodcastingSpecialEventDetailPageGold
Had a fun visit to the Disneyland resort today. Rained a bit, then got crowded, but we still had a good day.
The image below is me getting edged out by my wife during our first ever ride through Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters.
Hello dear visitor. This is the first post on what may become the NEW kenanddana.com. It remains to be seen if this is really what we want to do with our site, but the fact that we haven't updated our old format since a month or two after our wedding is just sad and makes us want to do something more. If you're reading this now, then you probably agree.
If nothing else, this new format can still allow us to offer you links to online photos of Kudos and Sierra, along with their friends. What can I say, it's an experiment. Life should be full of experiments, right?
Here's one right now. If you've read this first post, you're part of it. Hope you'll come back. One exciting feature this new format allows is RSS subscriptions, which means you can quickly discover when a new post has been made. More on that to come. For now, make sure you've got us bookmarked. And enjoy Daylight Savings Time!!!
