The Real Father Is ...

I'll probably get sued by all the media companies who are making a mint off this whole "whose the daddy" bizness with Anna Nicole Smith's baby, but the truth must come out (and it will make you free) even if it means that the media frenzy must come to an end.

The sad part is that I only figured it out this morning while I was lying in bed and fondly recalling the wild activities that took place last night (Valentine's Day). But context is often the key to recognizing relationships between things — or people — so I shouldn't be too hard on myself.

Anyway, I have a friend who is not only a big ANS fan, but is also a spy with the NSA. You remember them? When you're talking on the phone and think you hear someone else on the extension but you know it can't be true because neither you nor the person you're calling has an extension (i.e. you're both on cell phones) — that's the NSA.

Anyway, when it came time to tap the phone of Ms. Smith, I have no doubt that my friend would have been shouldering his way to the front of the line. And once he was on the job he'd want to make sure it was done right so he'd put in multiple taps, including some inside her house / condo / hotel room. Then, being the international man of mystery that he is, Ms. Smith would be overcome with desire and would end up in the sack with him.

Yes, this would happen even though my friend would be wearing some clever disguise. There's just something about the aura of international men of mystery that shines through any disguise and makes almost all women (and some men) lose all inhibitions.

So there you have it. My friend is, in all likelihood, the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby! The sad thing is that I cannot reveal the identity of my friend without being thrown in jail, tagged forever by all the president's men as an evil-doer. So poor little Danilynne will never meet her real father and he will never know the joy of raising a trust fund baby.

Ah, well, "'tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all". Surely those words will be comfort to many this day after Valentine's Day. On the other hand, for many others the phrase "yes, we have the morning after pill" will be more comforting.

Pine Wood Derby - Video!

Back on Candlemas I blogged about my kids' first experience with the Pine Wood Derby.

I actually took video using my in-laws' digital camera and wanted to post that video in my blog. But it turned out that neither Windows Movie Maker nor the version of Muvee bundled with our HP computers could read the .mov formatted videos produced by the camera. Muvee did offer me a special price to upgrade to a full-featured version that could grok the format, but I am a miser these days.

Then I read a news item in a tech rag about free on-line movie editing sites and decided to try it out. So what you see below is thanks to eyespot.com.



Hope you like it.

Deal or No Deal?

Me:    "Hi, my name is William-Bob and I drive a
        gas guzzler."
Crowd: "Hi, William-Bob."

I bought my gas guzzler in the days of cheap gasoline and telecommuting. It is rapidly approaching 7 years of age and just passed 192,000 furlongs on the odometer (24,000 miles to you Philistines). It is actually classified by the feds as an LEV (Low Emission Vehicle) and the Republic of Texas came this close to passing a law at the turn of the millennium that would have given me a rebate for purchasing an LEV!

It is a crew cab three-quarter ton pickup truck that averages 80 furlongs per gallon in mixed city and highway driving. Since I've measured it getting 136 furlongs per gallon on the interstate (at 560 fph) I shudder to think what the city figure is.

All this comes to mind because my next job will most likely include a commute. One possible employer is 352 furlongs from my house, so you can imagine my new-found concern about fuel efficiency.

The problem is two-fold: first, my truck is paid for; and second, I would probably be lucky to get $10,000 for it. Actually, my problems go deeper than that. Whatever I buy now will probably become 1 of 2's car when he starts to drive a few years from now, so I don't want to skimp on safety features like stability control and air-bags all the way around. That severely limits the used car selection and results in higher prices, which also means financing. A $250 car payment would be low for a decent new vehicle.

So how much money could I save on gasoline if I trade the Fuel-ossiraptor in for something a little less thirsty?

According to the napkin spreadsheet, my F-250 would use about 8.8 gallons per day if I got stuck in enough traffic each way each day. By contrast, a Toyota Corolla might use as little as 2.2 gallons each day if I managed to avoid rush hour. That's a very extreme comparison, but it serves to show the limits of savings potential.

That 6.6 gallon per day differential equates to $19.80 per day if gasoline is $3/gal. If there are 4.33 weeks per month and 5 commute days per week that comes to $428.67 per month savings by trading in. Not bad. But if gas sells in the neighborhood of $2, as it has recently, then the savings is only $285.78, which doesn't leave much wiggle room for the car payment.

And, of course, that was an awfully unfair comparison. If I assume the same commuting environment for the truck as for the car, then the fuel use of the truck drops to 5.17 gallons and the $3 gas savings goes down to $192.90 per month, with the $2 gas savings coming in at a paltry $128.60 per month.

In fact, the true comparison has to factor in that I don't really want something as small as a Corolla. Substitute a Camry (33 mpg) or a RAV4 (30 mpg) and the gasoline savings continue to drop.

Those savings would still be okay if I could trade vehicles straight up. But when you add in car payments there's a really good chance that trading in the battle tank will end up costing me more money than keeping it — maybe to the tune of a couple hundred per month.

So do I buy a new vehicle or not?

Gravitational Drive

I know I've been slow, but trust me, I have a really lame reason! The issue at hand is my procrastination in posting about my kids' first Pine Wood Derby race.

If you'll remember, they both decided to join Cub Scouts this year. And if you're in Cub Scouts then you have to enter the Pine Wood Derby. I remember one Pine Wood Derby car from my own youth. I don't remember actually racing it, but I remember the car. Sort of. What I remember may not bear much resemblance to the truth, but I remember it well!

Back then the PWD car kit had a notch already made for the driver's seat. In profile it looked something like this (in ASCII art):

+-----------+   +-------+
|           |   |       |
|           +---+       |
+-+               +-+   |
  +---------------+ +---+

I show a couple of other notches on the bottom. I think that you glued some sort of axle housing into these notches. The idea was that the front of the car was on the left (in my drawing) and the rear was on the right.

PWD racetracks come in various configurations, but I think the most common one is an immediate slope from the starting line going into a long straightaway to the finish. Like so:

\
 \
  \
   \
    \__________________________________________________

Of course, the slope isn't quite that severe and the transition to the straightaway is more fluid.

Way back when, the cars must have been held at the starting line by something the wheels rested on, because my dear old Dad, an engineer, figured out that if we reversed the design of my car, so that the front was on the right of my drawing, then we could get almost a full inch head start on the other cars. Unfortunately, the race organizers were not cowed by the brilliance of my father and they insisted on racing my car backwards, in the traditional orientation.

I mention all this because my experience as a Dad of Pine Wood Derby racers is very different from my childhood recollections. First of all, there is no longer a notch pre-cut for the "driver". It actually makes reference to this in the directions which come with the kit, so I know that this part of my memory is not flawed. But instead of a big notch for some axle assembly, there is merely a pair of cuts for the axles (nails) to be pushed/hammered into. And the cars are held in place at the starting line by a peg in front of each position. So it really doesn't matter where you put your wheels or which end is your front — your car is held in-line with all the other cars.

And the rules specifically forbid you notching your front to allow it to extend forward of the peg!

So my children both entered cars, shown here with the awards they won:

The orange car on the left belongs to 1 of 2 and is the external fuel tank of the Space Shuttle (notice the NASA emblem). The red and white striped car on the right is 2 of 2's and is a stick of Fruit Stripe Gum, complete with Yipes, the gum's zebra mascot.

Actually, the zebra on the car is named Zak and was obtained from Vacation Bible School a couple of summers ago (they had a safari theme and we got a zebra, an elephant, a lion, a giraffe, and a bird of some sort). And Zak/Yipes had a rough first race: when the car hit the foam at the end of the track, Zak was ejected from the vehicle and left for dead on the track. 2 of 2 had to run up and rescue him before they started the second heat.

Speaking of heats, they have a lot! Cub Scouts are divided by grade into dens: Tigers (1st grade), Wolves, Bears, Webelos I, and Webelos II. Each den competes separately and there are 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners in each den. They also have a siblings category for brothers and sisters of Cub Scouts and a parents category for the adults. The siblings raced first, I assume it was to shake out any bugs in the track management system.

It's all computerized, including electronic timing down to thousandths of a second! We have four lanes on our track and each car races on each lane. If only four cars are entered (as was the case for the bears) then there are four heats with each car racing once on each lane. Points are awarded in each heat (1 point for 1st, 2 for 2nd, etc.) and the car with the fewest total points wins. If there are more than 4 cars then there are more heats with cars racing against different mixes of competitors as well as on different lanes. I think most dens had twenty (20!) races before they could declare the winners.

It was a long night.

So about those awards:

• the medal between the cars was given to 2 of 2 for participating in the race (i.e. he didn't place in the top three)
• the trophy behind the rocket fuel tank is the third place trophy won by 1 of 2's car
• the trophy behind the Fruit Stripe Gum is second place for Most Imaginative Design

Next year we plan to actually try to make our cars fast by prepping the axles and wheels better and by making sure we are as close as possible to the 5 ounce weight limit.

Fusion Power Here At Last!

More than 60 years after the first public demonstration of fission power comes Fusion Power, and you can hold it in your hand!

Well, to be completely truthful, what I'm holding in my hand is the un-powered version of Fusion, but it comes with a $1 coupon for the powered one.

Aside #mc²: I wonder if physicists use Fusion.

I am, of course, talking about the Fusion razor by Gilette. They sent me one in the mail along with a selection of coupons for blades, the battery powered version, and shaving creme.

The battery powered one vibrates, which supposedly "enhances" the shaving experience. One can't help but wonder where they're shaving! Do they have a version for women, perhaps with a bigger handle?

Anyway, the Fusion razor is the latest salvo in the shaving arms race. It has no less than six (yes, 6) blades. Five of these blades are lined up to give you an extremely close shave while the 6^th is positioned on the top edge to help you get those "tricky areas". Again one must ask just where they're shaving!

After thinking about it, I'm sort of surprised that Norelco hasn't touted the number of blades in their electric shavers. Each of those round thingees must have 20 or more blades and there are at least two of them (and often three) in each razor. Remington, which uses a different technology, probably has thirty or so blades in their products.

Then again, the knock on 'lectric shavers is that they don't shave as close as a "blade", in spite of their vastly superior number of cutting surfaces. Is there a number of surfaces beyond which the efficacy is reduced?

Note to self: Write up research grant application to investigate limits of increasing number of blades in razor. Should be worth a few million of taxpayer money.