Russian Nurses

Credit: East2west News

A Russian nurse (in her 20's) claimed that wearing ordinary clothing beneath her PPE made her "hot." So she opted for lingerie or possibly a bikini swimsuit, it's hard to tell which it is from the photo. The news article where I saw this noted that none of the patients on the all-male ward objected to her attire.

My opinion is: she failed. She's still hot.

In her defense, she said she didn't know her protective suit was transparent. Sounds reasonable to me.

All I know for sure is that I've been in the hospital a few times and none of the nurses wore transparent clothes or bikinis. Those Russian nurses! You gotta love 'em.

Frankly, I don't have a problem with hot nurses wearing lingerie or swimwear in my hospital room. But in America, it never happens. We're so Victorian. In some ways, the Russians are well ahead of us.

Spam and Sausage Gravy

As I threatened in yesterday’s post, today I added a slice of grilled Spam to my mid-afternoon snack of toasted burger bun and pork sausage gravy. (Click image for mouth-watering larger image. Don’t blame me if you drool on your viewing device.)

“How was it?” I hear you asking. Are you kidding? There is fat in the gravy and more fat in the Spam. Both contain cholesterol. I can feel my arteries harden as I sit at my pc. My father would be proud. His doctor told me that he (my father) had the worst case of hardening of the arteries that he (the doctor) had ever seen. Wow.

And the meal contains those healthy saturated fats we hear so much about. Not to mention sodium. I guess what I’m hinting at is: you might want to reconsider eating this meal every day. But I give you permission to eat it on occasion. Unless you’re old, in which case you can eat it every day. It’s good for you. I can’t say that unless it’s true. 

Meal Dilemma

Breakfast: 1 slaw dog + 1 “regular” dog with mustard, ketchup, onion.

Lunch: Caesar salad

Mid-afternoon snack: Hamburger bun, opened and toasted under the broiler and topped with sausage gravy. Next time, I’ll grill a slice of Spam to go with it. My taste buds are already excited.

Supper: I don’t know yet. I never know until suppertime. I have frozen spaghetti with meat sauce. I have frozen chicken fried rice. On the Healthy Choice website, the fried rice rates a solid 3 out of 5 from 79 reviews. That’s close to average, and average is as much as I dare hope for.

The Stouffer’s spaghetti is rated 4.5 from 184 reviews. That’s quite good, but it is, after all, just spaghetti.

This isn’t fine dining. It’s a frozen dinner from a frozen dinner factory. Yes, frozen dinners come from factories. A long time ago, I toured a frozen dinner factory—my neighbor was the Plant Manager. I sampled some of the fried chicken that went into the dinners and it was really good. But something happens in the freezing-and-reheating process. The food is just not as tasty, IMHO. Maybe I’m heating it wrong. Maybe I’m eating it wrong.

Hours pass. What did I end up eating for supper?

A peanut butter and banana sandwich. Meh.

James Webb Space Telescope

NASA is building a telescope to be the successor to Hubble. It’s called the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). There’s one little problem: the telescope’s mirror is too big to fit into any existing rocket, so to make it more compact, the mirror is formed of 18 small, hexagonal mirrors and is folded up like origami. When the telescope gets to space, it will unfold itself into the correct shape. The telescope will have a sunshield that is also folded up. It too will unfold once it gets to space.

In theory.

This folding/unfolding process is very complicated and has caused delays and cost overruns. If only those telescope scientists had come to me for advice. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m good at many things, and especially at telling people how to do stuff. They could have sent me an email:

Dear VirtualWayne, we have a problem. Our new telescope is too big for the rocket’s nose cone, so we’ve designed it to fold up. Then when it gets into space, it unfolds itself. The problem is: that’s really hard to do! What is your advice? —Your friend, NASA

I would’ve tossed out the folding telescope design. Who came up with that? I would’ve advised NASA to send the telescope mirror up into space in pieces. Have it dock with the International Space Station. The astronauts there, who are probably bored to tears, can go outside the Space Station and assemble the mirror, attach it to the rest of the telescope, attach a rocket motor, and off it goes to the Earth-Sun L₂ LaGrange Point, where it will be parked and begin operating. No folding/unfolding in space by itself—just assembly and testing by humans. And if something doesn’t work, we don’t lose a multi-billion dollar telescope and years of work. Rather, we fix it in orbit.

Just saying: that’s what I would’ve done. But I’m a civilian, so what do I know?

Prepping the Jeep

I wanted to prepare my Jeep for the summer driving season, so I checked the tire pressure, the oil level, and the transmission fluid level.

First the tires: I wanted to inflate them to correct tire pressure. Being an American I like to use pounds per square inch—the way God meant pressure to be measured. I like to keep tire pressure at 30 psi. I got out the air pump I keep in the Jeep’s rear cargo area. The dial pressure gauge on the inflator is calibrated in Kg/cm² (Kilograms per square centimeter). Dang it, metric units. I pulled out my stick pressure gauge. It’s calibrated in kPa (kiloPascals). I looked at the dial gauge. I looked at the stick gauge. Then I made the only rational decision. I hooked the compressor to each tire and pumped in 5 minutes worth of air. Kidding! I put in 30 psi. Tires: check.

Next I checked the oil. The level was a half quart below the Add mark. It so happened I had two half-full quart containers of 10W30. I also had a funnel but I didn’t feel like walking around the Jeep to the shelf where it was stored. I removed the bottle cap and poured the oil into the filler hole in the right valve cover. I figured I might spill a little at first but counted on the fact I could quickly adjust the pour to go into the hole in the valve cover. To my dismay, the stream of oil was not a nice, steady stream. It wiggled and wavered, hitting the valve cover on one side of the filler hole, then a split second later hitting on the opposite side of the filler hole. Back and forth the oily stream went without hitting the filler hole. Finally I got the flow rate adjusted so that oil flowed more or less in a straight pour into the filler hole. That brought the oil level up to halfway between Add and Full. Oil: check.

I checked the transmission fluid. The transmission fluid is supposed to be checked with the engine warmed up. My Jeep’s engine was not warmed up. But how far off could the fluid level be just because of engine temperature? I thought the level might be a bit low because I’ve never added transmission fluid. With the engine running and my foot on the brake pedal, I shifted the transmission through its range: Low, Drive, Neutral, Reverse, Park. Then I pulled out the transmission dipstick and examined it. Close to the end of the stick was the Add mark. About an inch and a quarter above that was the Full mark. Above the Full mark was an inscription, “DO NOT OVERFILL”. And about 5 inches above that was the actual transmission fluid level. Hmm. I wondered briefly if someone was sneaking into my garage at night and adding transmission fluid. I resolved to recheck the fluid level after my next trip in the Jeep when the tranny was warm.

Tomorrow, if it’s a warm day, I’ll check the a/c and see if it needs refrigerant. I’ll check the coolant level, the power steering fluid level, the brake fluid level, and the windshield washer fluid level. I’ll pull the Jeep out of the garage into sunlight and check underneath the hood for anything that looks funky. I’ll look for cracks in hoses and in the serpentine belt that drives the water pump and all the accessories (alternator, power steering pump, and a/c compressor).

I might also check the air filter. Though, it’s hard to know if the filter has become too dirty. And if you ask a garage mechanic, he’ll always tell you it’s too dirty. It’s best to just replace your filter every 15,000 to 30,000 miles.

Prepping the vehicle doesn’t eliminate the possibility of a breakdown on the road. But it does lessen the chance of a breakdown that could have been prevented by a simple under-the-hood inspection. Every driver should know the basics of an automobile engine. Every driver should know where the tire jack is located and how to use it to change a tire. In my Jeep it’s in a compartment under the rear bench seat. I think the original purpose of the compartment must have been to smuggle drugs across the border. If you didn’t know that compartment was under the seat, you would never guess by eyeballing the interior of the vehicle.

That’s it. Checking your vehicle isn’t so hard. You might want to think about doing it once in a while.

Outside the Simulation

When my mother was 80-plus years old, I sometimes thought about that and wondered how my mother felt about it. How did she feel knowing that her demise was, figuratively, just around the corner?

I don’t expect to reach my mother’s age. But the obituaries are full of people who died of natural causes long before they reached my age. You see it on the news too frequently.

Probably like a lot of people, I think about death sometimes. I think about the fact that on any given night I could go to bed, go to sleep, and never wake up. For me, time will stop. The Universe will end. I will sleep a dreamless sleep, as unaware of the Universe as I was during the first 13.8 billion years it existed.

But perhaps I won’t be having a dreamless sleep after all. It’s possible that our consciousness continues after our body dies. Lately, a lot of people—including scientists—have been asking the question, “Are we living in a simulation?”

I would answer that question, “Of course we are!”

The Big Bang Theory is the theory that describes the evolution of the universe. The theory doesn’t tell us how the universe was created; it tells us how the universe evolved after it was created. An article on Vox says,

In an influential paper that laid out the theory, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom showed that at least one of three possibilities is true: 1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities; 2) if any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations; or 3) advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and that means there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones.

So maybe the universe was simply…switched on. I think it’s an interesting idea, but one that won’t affect my life at all, whether or not it is true. How do you feel about it? 

genGUI

Written: 4/25/2017. My friend and fellow blogger CyberDave published a post in April titled Kindle-gen. So I looked through my Drafts folder and found my own ebook-related post. And I published it. Not that anyone is going to make heads or tails of either post, but if CD can publish ebook gibberish, so can I. Witnesseth:

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I have an unrealistic expectation that I’m good at many things, even though my entire life stands in stark contrast to that notion. In my most introspective moments I wonder if I’m good at anything. But that’s a whole other topic.

So, being good at many things, I decided to write a book. Specifically, an ebook—an electronic book that you can read on your ebook reader (Kindle, Nook, Fire, iPhone, Android phone, Mac, or PC). Self-publishing an ebook is almost trivial. Step one: write an ebook. Step two: create an account with an online publisher. Step three: upload the ebook to the publisher’s website (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.). You decide what the book will cost. The publisher takes a percentage of your ebook sales. This lets you bypass the gatekeepers—agents, print publishers and, unfortunately for some writers, copy editors—and your book goes straight to the public.

I said self-publishing was easy. Creating your own ebook is another matter. You have to be one half creative artist and one half software egghead. At least, that’s how it seems to me. Example: one day recently I spent the better part of the day writing a computer program to serve as a GUI front-end to Amazon’s Kindlegen command-line tool that converts opf or epub or html or zip files into Amazon’s proprietary mobi format. And just an hour ago I found myself pondering the difference between “huffdic” compression versus standard doc compression. If Aldous Huxley were alive, he would certainly be thinking that it’s a brave new world. Indeed, writing has come a long way from the Woodstock typewriter I used in my youth.

Ebooks begin life as HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language), the language of the Web. But how does one write in HTML? There are HTML editors, of course. They’ve been around for a while and are much used for website design. Some document editors allow a file to be saved in multiple formats including HTML. You can write your own HTML using Notepad, which is how I designed websites back when the internet was new and there weren’t many tools to help website designers.

Nowadays, many ebook writers use a program designed with ebook production in mind, like Scrivener or Jutoh. But those tools only take you so far. To get from HTML to EPUB or Amazon’s MOBI format, you need a tool that converts your HTML into the ebook format.

Converting HTML to EPUB format isn’t difficult; there are even online converters for that format. But to convert HTML into the Amazon Kindle proprietary MOBI format, you must use Amazon’s Kindlegen, a command-line application. Some book editors—such as Scrivener—integrate with Kindlegen so that the conversion process is seamless.

Kindlegen is a command line program, which means it runs in a command box, a.k.a. “DOS box.” Kindlegen has several arguments that can be included with the file you’re converting. I’m not a fan of command line programs: they’re awkward to use and every time I use one I have to study what the various arguments do all over again. So I decided to write a GUI (graphical user interface) for Kindlegen. I call it “genGUI.”

It looks like this (click for larger image):

The empty rectangle on the right is the “output window” where Kindlegen’s messages appear in the language you have selected. The program works fine. I might use it one day to create a Kindle ebook. But the book I was thinking of publishing had a lot of images, and images make an ebook larger (file size), and file size is money. The project became uneconomical for what I had in mind. So I put it on the back burner for now. One day, one day, maybe.

On the LSE lecture

Written 4/10/2016. Here’s another post I never finished. I’m posting it as-is because it informs and might give someone something to think about. And, I finally get it out of my Drafts folder. (LSE is London School of Economics.)

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I watched a YouTube video which featured, as speaker, BBC journalist Justin Webb. It was hosted by chairperson Kirsty Young and taped at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Justin spent 8 years in America, from 9/11 to the election of Barack Obama, as a journalist. From her remarks, Kirsty seems to have traveled throughout America as well. There was an audience who were there, apparently, to learn more about America. There was a discussion session in which Justin, prompted by questions from Kirsty, remarked on the various differences between America and England, and talked about some things that might surprise Europeans traveling to America. Their observations provide insights into America that we who live here often don’t see.

When Justin first went to America, his young son said to him, “America is rich, right? But it doesn’t look it.”

Kirsty added,

What a brilliant observer he is, because, of course, if you spend any amount of time in America at all, you find your cell phone communications don’t work, your cell goes down, the roads are filled with potholes, the ambulance will not take you away, there are all sorts of things about America that border on the third world just clinging on to the first world, in some respects, with its fingertips.

My comment: I’m sure Munich and Singapore and Beijing have gleaming new airports along with a lot of other shiny new infrastructure. Those things cost a lot of money. Americans could pay more taxes and build our own shiny new infrastructure. Or we could pay less taxes and keep the old infrastructure a while longer. We could put the money we would have paid in taxes into our own pockets.

America is a wealthy country, and I think tourists from other countries have an expectation that American highways, bus stations, train stations, and airports will be at least as modern as those that are in their own country. And there are places in America that are as good as any you’d find outside of America. But America also has plenty of places where people live in poverty.

Justin said,

Infant mortality is bad, especially considering how wealthy the country is. Those Americans who travel discover that their infrastructure is staggeringly bad. Americans are embarrassed when they travel to Munich or Singapore and see how other people have rebuilt and revivified their public spaces. There are pockets of extreme poverty. I just made a road trip through West Virginia. There are people there who live in trailers beside the road, pretty much eating road kill—it doesn’t quite come to that, but it’s a really rough existence—the awfulness of life in America if you’re poor. And the question is, does one lead to the other; does the fear of failure push the nation into being so staggeringly wealthy, and successful, and full of ideas, and buzziness? I think Americans themselves believe very strongly that part of the strength of their society is the poverty. They wouldn’t put it like that, but there is a sense that you can climb very high, and you can fall very low, and if you stop people falling very low, you stop people climbing very high, as well.

My comment: Americans believe in social mobility—the belief that one day things will work out for them and they will be on top, they’ll have the big house and the new car. It’s a great belief to have. Unfortunately, social mobility is becoming more difficult.

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Wikipedia offers more information on social mobility in the US here.

Choices

Written: 7/9/2018. I didn’t think it was good enough to publish (which happens often) so it stayed in limbo in my Drafts folder, along with many other would-be posts. But I’m lazy today, so here it is.

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A fertility clinic in San Francisco had an equipment failure and 2,000 frozen eggs and embryos may have been compromised. Another fertility clinic in Cleveland had a similar failure that same weekend that compromised 4,000 eggs and embryos. Women who wanted a baby in later life may be out of luck. Naturally, lawsuits are pending.

When I saw this on the news, I had an imaginary conversation with an imaginary wannabe future mom.

“If you want to have a baby, better have it now,” I told her.

“But I want a career, too,” she replied. “I shouldn’t have to choose between a baby and a career.”

“That’s what life is: choices. We make little choices and big choices all the time. Do I get pizza or hamburger for lunch? Choose wrong and you may get indigestion. Should I marry or not marry, should I choose this person or that person? Choose wrong and you could live a lifetime of regret. Life is a long series of choices.”

“But it’s not fair,” she said. “Those eggs were supposed to be there when I want a baby. Now they’re gone. I’ve lost my future child. Somebody has to pay.”

“I’m sure they will pay, but it’s only money. That is no substitute for a baby you can hold, a child of your own.”

We make choices and we live with them. All we know for certain is that sometimes our choices will be wrong, and all the lawsuits in the world won’t change that.

I feel bad for that wannabe mom. But all isn’t lost. If she has an instinct to mother a child, she should look into adopting a young child. I know it’s not the same, but she’ll grow to love that kid, and the kid will love her, and isn’t that the important part of having a child?

The Mask

I bought my first face mask today. I don’t really need a mask. The purpose of a face mask is to prevent you from spreading the illness, in the event that you have an illness, and I don’t think I have an illness. I’m self-isolating as per the governor’s mandate. I bought it because I don’t want to be tackled to the ground by an officer of the law for not wearing a mask. Nor do I want to be harangued or attacked by an irate customer at a business. There are some businesses that won’t allow you to enter unless you’re wearing a mask. So I bought the thing. But I don’t plan to open the package unless I have to.

The mask is a miracle of nothingness. It’s literally light as a feather. It’s not cloth; it’s about as hefty as a facial tissue. There are instructions on the back of the package—instructions such as:

Before using this mask, consult an Industrial Hygienist or Occupational Safety Professional to determine the suitability for your intended use.

and

This product does not supply oxygen.

Right.

Anyway, I feel a part of the community now. But it’s not a community I want to belong to. I feel more comfortable being around the minority who don’t wear a mask. Isn’t that strange? But I’ll hang onto my mask for those occasions where I must have a mask. You will wear a mask or you will die! Okay, be cool, I’ll wear a mask. I have one; it’s in my wallet. Let me get it out. Where is that thing? Is it here? No, that’s my driver’s license. Is it here? No, that’s my insurance card. Here it is! I’ll rip open the package and take it out and…nope, that’s my emergency condom. Where is that dang mask?

One day things will be normal again, I hope.