Coffee Klatch

Last night was the annual SciFest at St. John Lutheran School. It was an engineering-styled competition where the kids were given 25 pieces of raw spaghetti and 60 mini-marshmallows and were told to make a bridge. They had a gap that they had to span, it had to allow a matchbox car to cross it, and then they had to put a little cup in the center and see how many pennies it would hold. They built them in class on Friday, and then last night was the contest, giving the marshmallows a little time to firm up.

The grades 1-8 were grouped into four divisions and the top eight people from each division were invited to another competition at the Lutheran high school in March. As the kids get older, the bridge has to be longer, going from 9 inches, to 11, 13, and 15 inches that they have to span without getting any additional materials. The most pennies any bridge could hold reached over 400, and that was over a 13-inch span. I talked to their parents and when they had tested that design at home, it had held FOUR SOUP CANS! Wow!

Two well-known actors died this weekend. Don Knotts died Friday night, age 82, and Darren McGavin died on Saturday at the age of 84.

Don Knotts did the voice of Mayor Turkey Lurkey in the popular and still-in-theaters Chicken Little. Here’s a select list of some of his most famous movies/shows.
The Apple Dumpling Gang
Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Hot Lead and Cold Feet
The Shakiest Gun in the West
The Incredible Mr. Limpet
The Ghost and Mr. Chicken
Pleasantville
and, of course, The Andy Griffith Show and its spinoffs

He also played an increasing role in animated and family-friendly movies as he got older. Visit the Internet Movie Database for the complete list of his tv- and movie-related activities.

Darren McGavin played guest roles for single episodes of many shows throughout his life, and had 173 total roles to his credit. His most famous roles were the dad in The Christmas Story and Carl Kolchak in The Night Stalker and its related movies. Some other movies and shows were:
Billy Madison
Raw Deal
The Martian Chronicles
Airport ‘77
Hot Lead and Cold Feet
No Deposit, No Return
Mission Mars
Mike Hammer
The Man with the Golden Arm

You’ve probably seen versions of the “Easy Button” commercial that Staples has produced. My favorite was the guy using a coworker’s Easy Button to find his own Easy Button. The concern was that it might rip a hole in the space/time continuum. It ends up working, but Steve gets zapped into a cabinet.

Anyway, I saw a new one this morning that was really good. You’ve got some Asian horsemen on a field with a Mongol Horde charging toward them. They just sit there while the army comes rushing down on them. Then one of them who looks like a priest or something opens a fancy box and takes out an Easy Button. The leader smiles at him and nods. He pushes the button–the ground starts cracking and then a Great Wall rises up out of the ground between them and the charging army. The catch? The leader is in FRONT of the wall while the army charges at him. He says something in his own language, which translated with the subtitle: “Dang.”

The final saying was something like: “The world may not come with an Easy Button, but your business does” and then there was a little promo for Staples. That’s a good commercial. Funny, relevant, and memorable. And you even remember what company it was that made it!

Discovery Channel News reports that for the first time a robot has been moved by signals from a living cell. A team of scientists from Japan and the U.K. have reported that they have gotten a six-legged robot to respond to signals generated by a living cell from a slime mold.

This is the first step in the development of cyborg-type machines, as this snippet from the article indicates:

In the long run, the coupling of cells and machines could lead to hybrid robots with the flexibility to adapt to unforeseen situations that arise in complex environments — a quality that is extremely difficult to program into a computer but is demonstrated in every living organism.

Be sure to read the complete article to get all the details on this interesting story.

In this week’s issue of the Patriot Post digest, we read:

In an odd case of the Left’s cannibalizing of one of its own, Harvard President Larry Summers, a former Clinton Treasury Secretary, has announced his resignation, effective 30 June. Five years ago, Summers privately reprimanded a black-studies professor for poor scholarship and grade inflation. The professor, Cornel West, made the issue public by charging racism, at which point Summers apologized. Last January, Summers again made waves by suggesting some possible explanations for the disproportionately low number of women in the field of science. A handful of women claiming to be scientists reacted hysterically, charging sexism. Again, Summers apologized. Now, facing a second no-confidence vote by College of Arts and Science faculty members, Summers has raised the white flag once and for all. By calling it quits after only five years, Summers posts the shortest tenure for a Harvard president since 1862. Apparently, Summers’ penchant for speaking an occasional truth was too much for the ever-tolerant Left at this once-proud institution.

Regardless of your opinion of whether Summers was speaking out of line or not, you have to admit that the push for PC-Speak (that’s politically correct, not personal computer) has gotten way out of hand when people can’t speak the truth or even OFFER opinions without people being reactionary and jumping all over them. I thought academia was supposed to be a place for freedom of inquiry, expression, and information!

This is another example of people hearing only a partial description or assessment and immediately jumping to the wrong conclusions, avoiding a well-reasoned evaluation of the situation. So many reactionary people have heard something about the ports and an Arab nation and have assumed the worst. That’s bad enough, but when they then open their mouths in large public venues, that’s a case of proving your idiocy instead of keeping your mouth shut and just letting everyone THINK you’re an idiot.

Case in point: Hillary Clinton. She insists she’s on top of things and not in the back seat on these issues, while at the same time saying something like:

“I take a back seat to nobody when it comes to fighting terrorism and standing up for national homeland security. Our port security is too important to place in the hands of foreign governments. I will be working to introduce legislation that will prohibit the sale of ports to foreign governments.”

The port security is not changing hands. The management of the port is not the same as the security of the port, which is still being U.S.-controlled. And then, “prohibiting the sale of ports to foreign governments??” I haven’t heard of any ports being sold. Maybe she’s speaking metaphorically and from a holier-than-thou perspective, but if it’s just a case of being anti-U.A.E., then her husband probably ought to return the $600,000 he’s gotten from the United Arab Emirates for speaking engagements over the last two years.

Does fat make you fat? Yes and no…. InfoPlease has adapted an article from the Nutrition Action Healthletter and come up with Ten Tips for Staying Lean. Here’s their info on calorie density. Visit their site for the other nine tips.

“Our research shows that it’s calorie density—not fat—that determines how many calories people eat,” says Susan Roberts of the Jean Mayer U.S. Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston. For 18 days, Roberts offered 14 people meals that were either low-fat (20 percent of calories from fat) or high-fat (40 percent fat). But, unlike other studies comparing high-fat and low-fat diets, these two regimens had the same amount of fiber, palatability, and calorie density (that’s a food’s calories divided by its weight). “When we kept calorie density constant, people on the high-fat diet ate no more calories than people on the low-fat diet,” says Roberts. But her research doesn’t let fat off the hook, because it’s so calorie-dense. “Fat is important to watch out for, but low-fat foods that are high in sugar like SnackWell’s cookies and Entenmann’s cakes are also high in calorie density,” says Roberts’s colleague Megan McCrory. The bottom line is that low-fat diets that are loaded with vegetables and fruits and other high-fiber, low-calorie foods may indeed help keep the pounds off. Diets filled with calorie-dense low-fat cakes, cookies, ice cream—and even bread, pasta, and crackers—may not.

Today I discovered something very cool on the official 2006 Winter Olympics site. They’ve got interactive flash-based animations that will show you the routes, the rules, the equipment, scoring, and the details about most of the events.

Do you not understand curling? Click the icon for curling and you’ll see a picture of the course, all the rules, strategies, and animations of the various types of shots.

Do you want to see how the slalom course works? Click on Alpine Skiing and pick Slalom to see how the gates work and get a description of how the scoring is calculated.

How about the luge? Click on it and you can even see an animation of the track and of the various techniques used in the race, like starting and steering.

You can even follow a ski jumper down the ramp and through the air, with pauses explaining what’s going on and what the skiier has to do!

Molto cool! Check it out! There’s only four days left before it’s over.

I‘ve been rather quiet the last couple of days because I’ve been playing a new game that I just picked up: Civilization III. It’s very cool and very much expanded from the first couple of versions of this game.

One of the cool things is that there are over 30 civilizations to choose from now, including such unusual ones as Iroquois, Carthaginian, and Zulu. Each type has its own specializations and emphases, so there are all kinds of dynamics here.

Also, you can win by accomplishing one of many feats. It’s not just military domination. You can win the space race, win a diplomatic triumph by getting elected Secretary-General of the United Nations, win a cultural victory by building a culture that’s the envy of all the other civilizations, eliminating all the other “kings,” elimination (if you lose ANY city, you’re out), capture the princess (flag), and reverse capture the flag (where you have to take things someplace, like throwing an appeasing offering into a volcano). You can choose any or all of these options, along with other features, or you can have everything be random.

The Conquests are part of an expansion pack, which you can easily get when you buy the “Sid Meier’s Civilization III COMPLETE” set. These Conquests are historically based, like the Rise (or Fall) of Rome, cleaning up after Charlemagne’s death, or even a Mesoamerican game where you try to withstand the coming of the Conquistadores.

There are lots of little improvements that make this game better than the previous versions, but you’ll have to check it out for yourself if you’re new to this game.

Very fun, very addictive, lots of variety and replay value! Especially when you include the ability to play with others over the Internet. And with three discs (the original, Play The World, and Conquests), it’s a great deal. You can get Civilization III COMPLETE at Amazon, Best Buy, etc., for under $30. Read the reviews for more information on the game.

Yes, after my post about the Winter Olympics, I began watching some of it on NBC, and have almost (gasp!) begun “following” some of it! It IS interesting and intriguing. Especially as you learn about the histories of rivalries in various races or about the intricacies of performing successfully or the details of how something is judged.

You can learn more about all the Winter Olympics Sports by clicking on any of the icons there.

Be sure to check it out before it’s gone for another four years. (Yes, the Summer Olympics is in only two years, but obviously you won’t be able to watch downhill skiing or the luge or speed skating during the SUMMER Olympics, will you?)