Randy’s Blog

• Shape-shifting UFO spotted over Bogota: A distinguished journalist reports seeing a shape-shifting UFO over Bogota, Columbia. It's a good report with some intriguing pictures. I just find it disappointing he feels the need to apologize for what he saw.
• Theories about a strange roar over southern Wisconsin: Closer to home, last month a strange roar was heard over parts of southern Wisconsin. It lasted several minutes, and was heard in several counties simultaneously. Planes, thunder, meteorites, and earthquakes were ruled out. We're not that far away from the cities that reported the sound.
• What the Deer are Telling Us: Apparently deer, like humans, are very good at wiping out biodiversity. A biologist claims that deer have eradicated 80 percent of native Wisconsin plant species. Another example:
• "On Anticosti Island, in Quebec, deer feasted so remorselessly on currants, gooseberries, and wild fruits that the native bear population, dependent on the fruits for survival, died out within 50 years of deer introduction. This was astonishing. A prey species, by stealing away plant resources, had extirpated its predator."
• A quest for pain-free fishing: The author discovers that Egoscue exercises allow him to continue fishing in retirement. I don't fish, but I have been doing Egoscue for the past 5 years. It helps to counteract the total lack of movement I get from sitting at the computer. My favorite part of the article: the author writes that his daughter worked with yoga instructors who had chronic pain, and much to their chagrin, yoga didn't help alleviate that pain. But Egoscue exercises did.
• Leonora Carrington's 98th Birthday: This is one of the best Google doodles I've ever seen. Leonora Carrington was a Mexican surrealist painter. The doodle is inspired from her painting "How Doth the Little Crocodile". I looked up that painting, and I discovered it's even better than the Google doodle. Here it is.

Finally, the weather has warmed up! Saturday's high was in the mid-70s, so we took the bikes out for another trail ride. This time we went to the Des Plaines River Trail, which is one of my favorites. Somehow I never rode on it last year, so I made a point of getting to it first thing this season. It's a bit of a drive, about 35 minutes, but it has some of the best scenery of the trails I've been on. 

It starts near the Wisconsin-Illinois border and follows the Des Plaines River for 30 miles south, almost to Chicago. I've only ever ridden along the northern half. A really nice feature of the trail is that even though it crosses several major roads, it has lots of underpasses so you never have to fight traffic to get across. The only downside is that those underpasses are right next to the river, so when we've gotten a lot of rain, they are sometimes closed due to flooding. Fortunately, you can check the status of each underpass online.

We haven't had much rain this spring (which is about to change this week, and was another reason I wanted to ride this trail now), so all the underpasses on our ride were open. The pictures above are pretty good, but don't quite do the trail justice. Once everything has fully bloomed, it's beautiful.

It was a fun 10-mile ride. On our way back we stopped to watch a huge bird, which we later decided was a turkey vulture.

As an encore, today I mowed the lawn for the first time this year. And now I am exhausted.

Distance: 10.03 miles

Riding Time: 1 hour, 6 minutes

Season Total: 20.7 miles

A few days ago I got an email from Google about a new ratings system they're implementing for Android apps. I had to fill out a questionnaire about my app so it could be assigned a rating. I did, and now in North America my app will be rated E for Everyone. I even got a "Rating Certificate" email from the IARC. But who is the IARC, I wondered? I've never heard of them. So I did a quick search for "IARC", and discovered that wow, there are a lot of IARCs! After the first few pages of results, I'd discovered:

• International Agency for Research on Cancer
• International Assisted Reproduction Center
• International Arctic Research Center
• International Aerial Robotics Competition
• International Accreditation and Recognition Council
• Indiana Association of Regional Councils
• Israeli Amateur Radio Club

At this point I gave up. None of them seemed like the one I was looking for. I went back to my "Rating Certificate" email and clicked on links until I discovered that this IARC is the International Age Rating Coalition. Mystery solved.

During my investigation, I came across the Acronym Attic site, which lists over 100 possible definitions of IARC. The two that piqued my interest the most were

• International Acid Rock Conference -- about environmental effects of mining in South America
• Illicit Antiquities Research Centre -- about the theft and traffic of archaeological items

The second one actually sounds really interesting (check out their newsletters here), but sadly the organization closed down in 2007.

After 7 months, 10 days, and 15 hours, I finally got back on the bike trail. Weather was sunny and low 60s. The ride was mostly pleasant, except for the smoke from a nearby controlled burn.

6.81 miles, north on the Prairie Trail

Riding time: 49 minutes

Including a few rides around the neighborhood, my season total is 10.6 miles.

I've always been a big fan of Little Debbie snack cakes, especially Swiss Cake Rolls and Nutty Bars. Some months ago, the vending machine at work started carrying a Nutty-Bar-knockoff called Buddy Bars, which I'd never heard of. Today I came across this link:

http://secondratesnacks.com/buddy-bars-vs-nutty-bars

It's a blog dedicated to comparing snacks with their second-rate versions. I totally agree with their assessment, Nutty Bars are much better than Buddy Bars. For the most part, Buddy Bars aren't bad. They're a lot less sweet and more peanut-buttery, but the second time I tried them, there was a burned taste that was terrible and disgusting and totally turned me off of them. Someone in the comments on that article says "The “burnt” taste comes from recycling damaged and partial parts into the peanut butter filler." I have no idea if that's true. If it weren't for that, Buddy Bars would be a nice change of pace to the sugary Nutty Bars.

The premise of Second Rate Snacks is completely ridiculous, but I love it. It's fun to scan through past posts to see what second rate snacks they taste test. The About page mentions they got the idea for the blog when they noticed a package of "Animal Snackers" in a vending machine.

Here are a few notes from our recent trip to Saint Augustine, FL:

• Midway is my least favorite airport ever. We try our best to avoid it, but this time it was the only place we could get a direct flight to Jacksonville.
• We parked in the economy parking lot, which, we discovered, isn't even paved. It's just a gravel lot. And costs $15/day.
• It took 40 minutes to check our bags in the "Express" bag-check lane.
• When we arrived at our rental house in Florida, there was a black cat sitting in the driveway. I took it as an auspicious sign. Any superstitions I had about black cats are long gone, thanks to Gordon.
• A lot of houses near our rental house had rooftop porches, so they could have a good view of the ocean. The house right next to ours also had a personal weather station on their roof. Now I'm starting to think I should get another weather station. I had one for a few years, but it eventually stopped working.
• One night during our visit, there were a bunch of reports of a fireball and a loud, window-rattling boom over North Florida. Some people in Saint Augustine saw it, but unfortunately we did not see or hear it. A security camera captured a video of it.
• We had two days of perfect weather: sunny and mid-70s. It cooled off after that.
• The view from our rental house was fantastic.
• The sound of the ocean was also fantastic.
• The corn cakes at Mango Mango's were delicious.
• The Mexican UFOs at the Burrito Works Taco Shop were delicious.
• The ice cream at Coneheads was delicious.
• We bought some girl scout cookies when we stopped at a Walgreens. Tagalongs and samoas are my fave.
• I enjoyed the Alligator Farm much more than I thought I would. There were so many crocodiles and alligators. The albino alligator was really cool, but Maximo was the main attraction. He is a 15-foot 1,250-pound crocodile.
  
• We walked up 219 steps (14 stories) to the top of a lighthouse. The views were great, but my calves were sore the next day.
  
• We went to Fort Castillo de San Marcos. It was built in the late 1600's out of coquina, which is a type of rock made up entirely of sea shells. Apparently it is strong enough to build a fort out of it, but soft enough that cannon balls would sink into the stone rather than shatter it.
  
• Our flight home was delayed almost 4 hours due to congestion at Midway.
• Driving home from Midway was a mess because we hit rush hour traffic. Our phone's GPS navigated us through a labyrinthine route of side roads to avoid the standstill traffic on the highway.
  
• When we got home, Gordon poked his head out of the upstairs bathroom, meowed twice, and then came down to greet us. Later we noticed there was a big pile of cat hair on our bed, right below my pillow, where he must have slept. I took it as a sign he missed me.
  
• The temp got down to -6 the first night we were home, and -10 the second night, which set a new record low for that day (the previous record was 0).
  

There's a lot more I could come up with, but I'll stop there.

I'm working my way through season 5 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. They must have gotten a major upgrade in the special effects department prior to this season, because for the first time the computer graphics look really good.

I hadn't watched any episodes for a few weeks, because next up was a two-part story called "Unification", and I wanted enough time to watch them back to back. Last night, as I was flipping through the TV guide for something to watch, it hit me that this was the perfect time to watch those episodes. The plot of "Unification" features Ambassador Spock trying to forge an alliance between Vulcans and Romulans. They were the only episodes in which Spock ever appeared in The Next Generation. And earlier in the day I learned that Leonard Nimoy had passed away.

So I watched both episodes in honor of Spock. I had forgotten what a great voice he had. And I discovered, oddly enough, that Gene Roddenberry had passed away shortly before these two episodes first aired in 1991. There was a message at the beginning dedicating both episodes to him. That was an odd coincidence.

Here's to Gene Roddenberry and Leonard Nimoy.

It's winter. Which means much of what I've been doing the past few weeks and months is reading books, shoveling snow, and watching college basketball, with a bit of hockey thrown in. Here's what I've been reading:

The Young Oxford Book of Timewarp Stories

Most of our books are downstairs, on the Billy bookshelves from IKEA. But there are a couple of small shelves upstairs. One day when I was upstairs, I looked over, and happened to see this book. I'd completely forgotten about it. It's an entire book devoted to time-travel short stories. "That sounds awesome!", I thought. "How have I never read this?" So I started reading.

And the first story blew me away. It's called My Object All Sublime by Poul Anderson, and even though it's only 10 pages long, it is dynamite. I loved it. So much so that the next day I was still thinking about it. What a great story to lead off with.

The first half of the book is really strong. It also includes The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, which is where the butterfly-effect idea originated, All the Time in the World by Arthur C. Clarke, and The Love Letter by Jack Finney, which was later made into a movie. (After reading The Love Letter, I realized I owned another time-travel book by Jack Finney, Time and Again, which I started, but never finished, a long time ago. I vaguely wondered where the book was now, and later I noticed it had been on the shelf right next to this book.)

The second half was still good, just not quite as great as the first half. Overall, this book was a lot of fun to read. And it had a page that listed similar books from the same publisher. Here's a sample:

• The Young Oxford Book of Ghost Stories
• The Young Oxford Book of Nasty Endings
• The Young Oxford Book of Aliens
• The Young Oxford Book of Nightmares

Those sound like great fun!

Astronomy and Culture

I'm totally impressed that I read this book. It was a bit too scholarly for my taste, but was just (barely) interesting enough to keep me reading. It's part of a series called the Greenwood Guides to the Universe. Each book costs $70 retail, so I think they're more geared towards libraries than consumers (I got it at a book sale for a quarter). This book details how astronomy has influenced cultures from prehistory to the present. 

A few interesting tidbits:

• When parts of Europe switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, they had to drop 10 days from the calendar. So in 1582, October 4th was immediately followed by October 15th. However, not all countries switched calendars at the same time. Sweden, for example, decided to gradually adopt the new calendar. Their plan was to stop adding leap days for 40 years. So every 4 years they would drop one day, and at the end of 40 years, they'd be in sync with the Gregorian calendar. They started this plan in the year 1700. However, their almanac makers accidentally added leap days in 1704 and 1708, throwing the plan into such disarray that they decided to scrap it entirely. When 1712 rolled around, they added back their normal leap day, plus an extra one to make up for the one they skipped in 1700. Thus, they had the only February 30th in history. What a mess!
• The Copernican revolution wasn't just a scientific revolution, it was a fairly devastating psychological blow as well. Learning that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe really knocked mankind down several rungs. No aspect of life was unaffected. The book even says the feminist movement can be traced back to the Copernican revolution.
• Not everyone bought into Copernicus' ideas. One guy wrote a book arguing against it, and he gave it a doozy of a title: The New Planet no Planet: or, The Earth no wandring Star: Except in the wandring heads of Galileans. Here Out of the Principles of Divinity, Philosophy, Astronomy, Reason, and Sense, the Earth's immobility is asserted; the true sense of Scripture in this point, cleared; the Fathers and Philosophers vindicated; ... and Copernicus his Opinion, as erroneous, ridiculous, and impious, fully refuted.
• The book had lots of old illustrations, many of which were provided by the History of Science Collections at the University of Oklahoma Libraries.

My Friend Dahmer

This is a graphic novel that received tremendous praise and won numerous awards when it came out. Time magazine listed it as one of the Top 5 non-fiction books of 2012. It's written and illustrated by a guy who was friends with Jeffrey Dahmer in junior high and high school. I was a little apprehensive reading it, but fortunately it doesn't go into detail on Dahmer's crimes. It mainly focuses on his school years, and on what the author remembers about a troubled kid that almost no one paid attention to. It deserves the awards and praise it received. It's really good. The art is all black and white, and visually distinctive, with a lot of attention to detail.

One incredible story the author tells is that one year in high school, his class went to Washington D.C. for a week, to see how the government works. The last day there was a free day, and while several of them were walking around trying to figure out what to do, they joked about going to see the vice president. Dahmer suggested they actually try it, and he went to a pay phone, got the vice-president's office on the line, and sweet-talked them into letting a group of high schoolers come in right then for a visit. A few minutes later, Jeffrey Dahmer and his classmates met Walter Mondale and got a tour of his office. It's almost unbelievable.

The most astonishing thing is how none of the adults in Dahmer's life, neither teachers nor parents, had any idea he was so troubled. But the students knew. They saw him come to school at 7:30am completely drunk, and hang around long after school was over, still drunk. It's a sad story, but it's told really well.

Shortly after we got our cat Gordon (which was 3 years ago today!), I decided to put out some bird food, thinking he might find it entertaining to watch the birds. So I got a brick of suet, put it in a little cage, and hung it on the railing of our deck. It sort of worked. Gordon did sit by the patio door and watch the birds, but after a few days, the squirrels discovered it, and the game was over. Whenever I put out a new brick of suet, they devoured it the same day. What I needed was a squirrel-proof bird feeder, but I had a feeling such things existed only in theory.

About a year later, I got some promotional material from the Northern Illinois Food Bank after making a donation to them. There was a story about a guy, who lived in Northern Illinois, that had designed a squirrel-proof bird feeder in his retirement, called SquirrelAway. He partnered with the Food Bank so they got a portion of all sales. You can read about how he makes it squirrel-proof on the Features page.

I was a bit skeptical, but my birthday was coming up, so I added it to my wish list, and Wendy bought it for me. I built a stand for it out of a series of half-inch pipe (there's a diagram of how to build it on the FAQ page) which is fairly cheap and easy to make. I installed it in our backyard, near the large window in the basement. After a bit of trial and error, I discovered that waste-free bird food is the way to go, so that you don't wind up with a pile of shells underneath the feeder.

That was a year and a half ago. Here's a video I recorded last year:

It works! I've been very happy with the feeder (and even happier that I was able to get video of the squirrel falling). The birds love it, too. There was one day last fall where we counted over 20 birds in our backyard, most of them sitting on the fence waiting for their chance at the feeder. It's usually not that busy, though. But it's more than enough to keep Gordon entertained. He likes to sit on the window sill in the basement, crouch down like he's about to pounce, and watch the birds eat. Every so often he'll forget about the glass and try to pounce. We'll hear a thud, and look over to see Gordon with his front paws on the glass, meowing at a bird.

Many of the squirrels have adapted to the feeder, and now collect all the crumbs that the birds drop on the ground. However, a couple Saturdays ago I got to watch a squirrel try five times in a row to get to the feeder, only to fall off each time, just like in the video. His effort was admirable. It was also funny, because after each fall, he stood up on his hind legs and looked straight up at the feeder, like he was already trying to plot his next attempt. I wish I'd had a video camera handy, but I didn't.

And going back a few more weeks, I was stunned and slightly disappointed to see a squirrel had somehow managed to get to the bottom of the feeder. I have no idea how. But, because he had to use all four legs to cling to the bottom, and because his head was too large to fit into the food ports, he still wasn't able to get any food. After a few seconds he gave up, let go, and made a fairly graceful landing on the snow.

So I would say it works as advertised. I recommend it!

• Dave Roman is a graphic novelist whose blog I've been following ever since I read his book Agnes Quill: An Anthology of Mystery. He recently posted about a very strange hobby of his: watching every animated/puppet Christmas special ever produced. He listed a few of the weirdest ones he watched in 2014. One of them was A Cosmic Christmas, which aired in Canada in the late 70's. He recommended it and linked to it on YouTube. I watched it and loved it. It's about 30 minutes long, and is broken up into 3 parts. Links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
• In the winter issue of the JSE, I learned about Hans Berger, the man who invented the EEG. He had a telepathic experience that inspired him to search for the biological source of psychic activity. He thought the brain might be emitting a subtle field of energy, which led him to create the EEG.
• Shawshank Residuals - This article is mainly about how The Shawshank Redemption is still earning money 20 years after its release, but it also has lots of interesting tidbits about how the movie was made.
• AstroBob is my blog of choice for astronomy news. It's run by an amateur astronomer who works for a newspaper in Duluth, MN. I love that when there's something interesting to see in the night sky, he always posts detailed star maps on how to locate it. A few weeks ago he wrote about how to see Comet Q2 Lovejoy. Last week we had four clear nights in a row, so I got a chance to view the comet each night. Using my binoculars, it looks like a fuzzy spot, but it's steadily getting brighter. I was able to see it last night even with the full moon. Over the next few weeks it should become visible to the naked eye. Today he posted about the comet again, and provided updated star maps.