e pur si muove

Treading water in the week after Thanksgiving is WAY too hard. Oh, and if it wasn’t obvious by now, I’ve given up on NaNoWriMo this year. The gripping tale of Charlene Hartwell’s MPD will simply have to linger on in the files. Too bad.

Discovered that travel to the Caribbean islands is dirt cheap in the summer. Apparently, peak tourist season is in the winter and spring break (late March). I wonder if there’s any weather-related reasons why, or whether the Western world simply places higher value on cultural thingybobs in the summer c. f. bohemian sand, sun and sea paradises.

The island of St. Kitts has a real amusing selling point: Mountains, Monkeys and Beaches. Wow, what a package deal! And only $371 on Travelocity from Chicago. *rubs hands gleefully*

Daydreaming about tourist havens while my workload is still piling up. There is no hope for me.

Oh wait, back to the point. NOLA mayor Ray Nagin is boasting about how the Katrina-ravaged city will be featuring citywide wifi access, particularly in the French Quarter. All this hi-tech stuff, while mold counts in the city soar 500 times above safe levels, giving rise to what is rapidly becoming known as the Katrina Cough. Do returning New Orleans denizens really need high-speed internet access more than a collective need to rip out all the dank carpets and dump the soaked furniture and let the mold dust settle out of hundreds of thousands of wet houses? Geez.

The Chinese government has apparently only admitted earlier today that a chemical spill in Jilin province had dumped tons of benzene into the Songhua river. An explosion in a PetroChina chemical plant spilled a 80-km long toxic plume of water containing carcinogens such as benzene (30 times above the safe level) and nitrobenzene is making its way downstream to the city of Harbin in neighboring Heilongjiang province, causing widespread alarm as temperatures plunge below -20°C.

The city’s water supply, which taps the Songhua river, will be cut off shortly until the last of the plume passes over on Sunday. Ironically, the Anhauser-Busch brewery in the city is issuing statements that the beer is still safe for consumption since the brewery obtains its water from wells into underground aquifers.

Citizens are understandably in a mad scramble to flee the city after the authorities broke the news a full ten days after the chemical spill occurred. The local government had attempted to cover it up by announcing the shutting down of the water supply for “routine maintenance”. Those who chose to wait it out are stockpiling bottled water and soft drinks.

Happy Turkey Day to the readers who are celebrating it tomorrow. Back on Friday.

The origins of the famous spherical cow approximation has still eluded me, although John Harte’s 1988 book entitled Consider a Spherical Cow: A Course in Environmental Problem Solving seems to be a promising origin.

But enough of that old stuff. Seed Magazine reports that University of British Columbia (UBC) Tracy Boechler recently wrote a term paper with calculations showing that cow tipping is an impossible feat for four people, let alone a single drunken rural teenager.

From the article:

Limited by a dearth of observable cows in the greater Vancouver area, she modeled the cow as a 1,500-pound rigid rectangular prism, excluding mass from the head, tail and legs, and used Newton’s laws to calculate the necessary force.

So, how many people should you invite to your next cow-tipping party? If you can bind the cows legs together, you’ll need a mere three people, assuming each person can push with a force of 150 pounds. For an unsuspecting cow standing normally, you’ll need 4.4 people and for a cow smartly bracing herself, you’ll need to muster 5.75 willing tippers.

And that’s just for the ideal rigid cows that graze in the green pastures of physics-land. In reality, they’re even harder to tip.

[...]

These results matched the experience of at least one attempted tipper.

“Cows are heavy, man!” said Peter Park, a college student who tried to cow-tip on a trip to central Illinois. “There were four of us, but we had to run at the cow from 30 feet away and push as hard as we could to get it to even notice us. It woke up and looked at us like we were a bunch of flies, and walked away.”

Beef. Mmm…